Page 16

It was a warm, bright day, with hardly a cloud in the sky.

However, a chill settled under his skin when he entered the morgue.

Even the lobby was cool, and in the postmortem room, the old vestry’s natural temperature reminded him of a raw February morning.

It was desirable in a morgue, of course.

In the height of summer, ice blocks would be brought in to help maintain the chill.

But in the end, even ice could not ward off the stink of dead bodies during July and August.

“Inspector, I thought I might be seeing you soon,” Claude said as he covered a body with a sheet.

Several corpses were lined up on autopsy tables.

The springtime influx , the older man had called it before.

People would begin to emerge from winter solitude, and the unlucky would meet with dire circumstances, ending up here.

Jasper listened for the sounds of a typewriter from the back office, but all was silent.

“Is the postmortem on Niles Foster complete?”

“I saw to it straightaway,” Claude replied, moving as swiftly as his shuffling gait would allow toward a draped corpse. He folded back the sheet, exposing Foster’s face and neck.

“Did he drown?”

“I suspect you know that he did not,” Claude replied, glancing mischievously over the rims of his thick spectacles.

“A drowning would cause the lungs to fill with water, and there wasn’t a drop in either of his.

There was, however, evidence of hemopneumothorax in the left pleural cavity—a lethal amount of blood and air eventually leading to cardiovascular collapse.

” He pulled the sheet lower, revealing a freshly closed incision down the center of the body’s pale chest—and two smaller additional slits.

“He was stabbed,” Jasper said, feeling like a fool. Had he been fully sober that morning, he might have seen evidence of it when the man was pulled from the water.

“This one pierced the left lung.” Claude pointed to one wound, his hand shaking slightly. “The other, the right ventricle of the heart. This is your cause of death, Inspector. Not drowning.”

Niles Foster had been put into the pond posthumously then, carried by at least two other men, if the boot prints were an accurate indication. However, more men could have been present, standing away from the edge of the pond.

“What do you make of the ligature marks?” Jasper asked. “The bruising?”

Claude raised up the sheet from the side this time, revealing Niles Foster’s arm.

It appeared stiff and unnaturally rigid at the joints.

“Yes, my niece was quite put out with you for not mentioning these to her this morning. By the way,” he looked up again over the rims of his spectacles.

“Thank you for getting her out of that spot of trouble. When I found her bed hadn’t been slept in, I admit to feeling somewhat panicked. ”

Claude cared for Leo like he would his own daughter, had he and Flora ever had children. While Flora Feldman suffered a shortage of warm feelings for her niece, her husband clearly adored her. Respected her, too, considering the trust he placed in Leo and her abilities here at the morgue.

“My pleasure,” Jasper said, feeling somewhat bashful.

He’d nearly lost his temper when he learned she’d been kept at the Yard all night, while Tomlin had gone home to his warm bed, likely with a smirk on his face.

Had Tomlin been present that morning and tried to stop her release, Jasper wasn’t at all certain he wouldn’t have thrown a fist at him.

“I take it Leo noticed the similarities to the marks on John Lloyd?” he remarked.

“She did. Right down to the gash on the cheek.” Claude indicated the mark on Niles Foster’s left cheek.

“It is a perfect match, according to my niece. Look here.” He touched the top of the gash.

“It is wider here and then narrows considerably as it descends.” He let his finger travel down the gash to the tapered endpoint.

The shape of the whole thing looked much like a comma.

“The gashes were made with the same signet ring, perhaps,” Jasper said, musing over the possibilities. He did not want to connect the two deaths. One a murder, the other a suicide bombing—or at least that was what it appeared to be on the surface.

The ligature marks on Foster’s wrists were thin, like Constable Lloyd’s. “Tied with some sort of rope?”

“I believe so. The gauge is a match,” Claude replied.

Jasper pinched the bridge of his nose. “I have a witness who last saw Foster at one in the afternoon. How long had he been dead when I found him at five o’clock this morning?”

Claude tipped his head back and forth. “Well, it is difficult to say, considering he was found in water, which would alter his body temperature, but considering the state of rigor when I received him this morning, his death occurred somewhere between midnight and four o’clock this morning.”

By midnight, most of Oliver’s guests had been dropping into oblivion.

Jasper had been too. With a twist of guilt in the pit of his stomach, he thought of Azure and the time he’d spent in his cups with her.

Quickly, he pushed her from his mind and focused on a question he wanted answered: Why had someone traveled out to Kensington to dump Niles Foster’s body in Oliver’s duck pond?

There was a purpose behind it. If Jasper could but grasp the answer, he was certain more answers would emerge.

He'd been silent for a few moments, during which the quiet of the morgue began to rub against him like a friction. He looked to the door of the back office. “Where is Leo?”

“It was the strangest thing, really,” Claude said while pulling up the sheet to cover Foster’s face. “I was finishing the examination when she said she needed to see Miss Brooks.”

The sutures closing the postmortem incision looked precise and neat. Jasper wondered if they’d been done by Leo’s steady hand. Claude’s own hands shook often, though he tried to conceal it by clasping them behind his back.

“Why did she wish to see Miss Brooks?”

Claude’s bushy white brows rose in half-moons over his eyes. “She didn’t say, but I know my niece, Inspector. When she first saw this man’s face…” He nodded toward Niles Foster. “She recognized him.”