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Chapter Fourteen

S eated inside the cab that had been waiting for them, Leo’s thoughts buzzed as she and Jasper started away from the prison.

While she’d hated to leave Mrs. Stewart in that desolate place, at least she was leaving her with a sliver of hope.

The connecting factor that had been eluding them had finally surfaced.

“When I visited the Stewart home yesterday, Mrs. Bates admitted that she wasn’t truly a suffragist,” Leo told Jasper.

“She claimed to attend meetings to support her sister-in-law’s club , as she referred to it, but I can’t ignore the way she has regarded Mr. Stewart the few times I’ve been in her presence. ”

Rain lashed the cab’s glass windows. Gray afternoon light and pockets of fog lowered visibility inside the carriage. Jasper removed his bowler and set it on his thigh.

“How do you mean?”

Leo had tried to disregard her intuition earlier but now gave in to it. “I think Mrs. Bates is fascinated by him. Perhaps even in love with him.”

He drummed his fingers on the crown of his hat. “She wanted his wife out of the way?”

“That could be.” It would be beyond despicable.

However, Mrs. Bates had openly, almost gratuitously, fawned over Porter Stewart, lauding him as an exemplary male, even sighing when she mentioned how fortunate Geraldine was to have married him.

And during Leo’s visit yesterday, Mrs. Bates had been so snug in that sitting room, her satisfaction with settling into Geraldine’s role of mother complete.

Not to mention the rearranged appearance of the foyer.

As if she was already claiming the space as her own.

“Did you get the impression Mr. Stewart might also want to be rid of his wife?” Jasper asked.

“I didn’t,” she answered. “On the contrary, he seemed lost without her. However, Emma Bates isn’t some wizened widow. She’s shapely and pretty, and she and Mr. Stewart aren’t far apart in age.”

“All to say, any comfort she might offer could very well tempt him.” Jasper exhaled as he sat back in his seat.

“And then there is the valise,” Leo said. “Mrs. Bates is likely to have known about it and had easy access to it.”

She would have also known when the home would be empty.

Jasper and Leo rocked side to side as the carriage wheels left the dirt road and mounted a cobble-paved street.

“Even if Mrs. Bates is, in fact, related to Clive Paget, why would he agree to a bombing scheme just to help her end the Stewarts’ marriage?” he asked.

Put that way, it did seem unlikely. Unless Mrs. Bates hadn’t asked for his help and had constructed a bomb on her own.

It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility.

When Leo and Jasper were working to solve the death of Gabriela Carter two months ago, they’d met a woman whose two toddlers were poisoned by gumming arsenic-laced wallpaper in their nursery.

Driven mad with grief after their children’s deaths, Mr. and Mrs. Nelson had wanted to exact revenge on the company that had manufactured the deadly papers, which had already sickened and killed many others.

While Mr. Nelson had wanted to kill the innocent children of the wallpaper company owner as eye-for-an-eye vengeance, Mrs. Nelson had planned to bomb the factory in protest. She’d constructed the device herself.

Who was to say Emma Bates could not have done the same?

But how would Mrs. Bates have convinced John Lloyd to plant it? And Leo remembered the scowling man in the cap, watching the constable approach the Yard. Who was he in all of this?

Jasper pulled at his collar, stretching his neck as if uncomfortable.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Leo preempted. “The valise bombing isn’t your case.”

He looked at her, his dark green eyes sooty in the muted light. “Despite what Mrs. Stewart just revealed to us, I need to concentrate on finding Niles Foster’s murderer.”

“You already know that he and John Lloyd were bound and beaten by the same man,” she argued, her pulse beginning to pump harder. “And that man may be connected to the Spitalfields Angels, who are connected to Mrs. Bates.”

“We don’t yet know that for certain,” he said. “And if I bring any of it to Tomlin, my head will roll for undermining his investigation.”

“You would allow an innocent woman to languish in prison, or even hang, to avoid a reprimand ?”

Instantly, Leo felt regret for the cutting remark, which only angered her more. As did the heat of shame as Jasper leveled her with an incredulous glare.

“Allow an innocent woman to hang,” he echoed her words with a mirthless huff of laughter. “You think so little of me?”

“I don’t know what to think,” she said, her throat cinching. “I thought I knew you. Now, I’m not sure of anything.”

She didn’t want to talk about this. It was easier to focus on the two perplexing cases and how they aligned.

It was easier not to remember that Jasper had lied to her—for years.

That she’d promised herself never to speak to him again.

Now, here they were, sharing a cab and an investigation.

Several seconds of tense quiet ticked by.

“I’m the same person you’ve always known,” he said softly.

“You cannot be serious.” Leo crossed her arms over her middle. “I’ve known you as Jasper Reid, and that isn’t even your real name. You’re James Carter.”

She hated the sound of it. Hated saying it aloud. She couldn’t even think of him as James . He’d hidden so much from her. Another life. A whole different identity.

“I’m not James. Not anymore.” He sounded calm and looked it too. His body swayed in rhythm with the carriage. “Yes, I concealed the truth about that night from you and from the Inspector. I lied to you about where I came from. About the people I came from.”

“To protect yourself,” she said, her voice cracking.

He set his jaw. “Yes. I didn’t want to go back to them. I couldn’t—” He shook his head, his throat working as he tensed. “I couldn’t go back.”

The way he said it, not returning to his family wasn’t just a desire. It sounded like an impossibility. Maybe even a fear. Leo licked her lips, considering why that would be.

“Because you didn’t kill me like you were supposed to?”

Jasper cut his eyes from hers, gazing toward the window. They were starting to enter the urban streets of London, but she thought he might be seeing a long-lost past instead.

“Saying my uncle was disappointed is an understatement,” he replied. “With the news the next morning that you were found alive, hiding in the attic, he was ashamed. Humiliated. And that made him angry.”

Leo recalled the bruises distorting Jasper’s face when she’d first met him at Scotland Yard four days later. “He beat you.”

He turned from the window and met her eyes. “That isn’t why I couldn’t go back. I wasn’t afraid of him or his fists. I was afraid that the next time, I wouldn’t be able to hide the person they wanted me to kill.”

Leo’s stomach dropped. It wasn’t something she’d considered before.

He held her stare. “I’m not a murderer. If I’d stayed James Carter, I would have become one.”

Words failed her. She’d been so angry, grasping for reasons why he would have kept such a secret from her and from the Inspector, that she hadn’t tried to think about that night from his perspective. Or what a life as James Carter would have held in store for him.

Without warning, Leo’s anger dissipated.

In its place came an equally unexpected rush of gratitude.

She didn’t know if she could forgive him completely, but she was at least glad he wasn’t what he would’ve become had he gone back to the Carters.

He wasn’t lawless or corrupt. He was principled and determined, and he devoted himself to hunting down and arresting criminals, when he would have been one himself if not for the choice he made in the attic of her old home all those years ago.

“I’ve thought about that night countless times,” she said, her breathing slightly off-kilter. Her heart thumped hard in her chest for some reason she couldn’t understand. “About the boy I stabbed and how, instead of hurting me back, he helped me.”

Jasper shifted, straightening his posture as he searched her face for any hint of what she might be feeling. He was wary, she presumed.

“I wondered if he’d regretted helping me,” she said. “I wondered if he ever thought of me afterward.”

They’d closed in on Westminster, entering traffic and the bustling streets of the city. But as Jasper held her stare, his own unwavering, Leo felt as if the rest of the world was barely there at all. The tip of her nose began to prickle, as did her eyes.

“I’ve never regretted it. Not once.” His brow tensed, then softened as his gaze drifted to her mouth. It lingered there a half second, if that, before lifting to meeting her eyes again. “And I have thought of you. Every day.”

She held her breath, the functioning of her lungs pausing.

Under his heated stare, her pulse skipped unevenly.

She didn’t know what to say or what he’d meant by those words.

He’d thought of her every day? Even now?

With a start, she suddenly realized how often she’d thought of him .

And how much she didn’t wish for him to know it. Not yet, anyway.

Speechless, she drew in a long breath at last and lowered her attention to her hands, her fingers knitted together in her lap.

For several more minutes, they rode in silence, allowing the noises of the city streets to carry them along.

When Admiral Nelson’s statue in the center of Trafalgar Square appeared, Jasper banged a fist against the top of the cab.

The driver pulled alongside the pavement and stopped.

“I imagine you need to go to the morgue,” Jasper said. She nodded.