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Chapter Eighteen

N o new bodies arrived at the morgue for the remainder of the afternoon, and for that, Leo was grateful.

Had she needed to, she would have emerged from the crypt to distract Mr. Quinn while her uncle worked.

However, the postmortem room remained quiet above her, allowing her the time to gather her courage and open the old steamer trunk.

As she’d expected, the padded interior walls were covered in green crushed velvet, although they were mostly obscured by the mountain of items Claude had decided to keep from the rooms of her family’s home.

Leo’s hands shook as she went through it all, pulling out ledgers, papers, books, trinkets, hoops of half-finished embroidery, a moth-eaten wedding gown, delicate lacework, and, heartbreakingly, baby swaddling and clothing. Even little leather booties, mildewed from storage.

A box of photographs distracted her from her search for a short while.

Claude and Flora kept a few framed photographs of her lost family in the front sitting room, and Leo had one of the five of them together in her bedroom.

She knew her parents’ faces because of those images.

Jacob’s and Agnes’s too. They were all frozen in time, their expressions always the same.

Finding more photographs, with her family in different clothing, in different poses felt…

otherworldly. Like an unexpected gift, and yet, one that pained her.

Leo had been given the feminine form of her father’s name, and she did resemble him.

More so than she did her mother, Andromeda.

She’d inherited his sable brown hair, rather than her mother’s lighter blonde; his straight and serious nose, rather than her mother’s sweet button nose; and his intense eyes, instead of Andromeda’s warm, inviting gaze.

It was no wonder Aunt Flora looked upon Leo with such wariness; in her addled state of mind, she likely saw Leonard Spencer instead of her niece.

Inside a large, cherrywood jewelry box, Leo found what she’d been looking for. Among some modest brooches, paste rings, and necklaces, a stack of letters had been bound with yellow ribbon. They were in their original envelopes, and a cursory look showed they were from Flora.

At last.

Though it was only one side of the conversation, Leo eagerly read them by the light of the paraffin lamp, while she sat on the crate.

Most of the letters were mundane, asking after the children, the weather, any news from London, and relaying events happening where she and Claude were living.

Their location changed over the course of the letters, from Turkey to Cyprus to Greece, and finally, to the small island of Crete.

Only in these later letters did Flora broach anything interesting regarding Leo’s father.

Your concerns about Leonard are valid, dear sister.

I fear for you and the children if he does not stop taking these risks , Flora wrote in one letter.

In another: You and the children should leave at once.

Come to us in Crete. We haven’t much space, but we will make room.

Claude will purchase tickets and send them to you, if you’ll agree, and you must.

Leo tried to decipher what her aunt was replying to in some letters, such as when she wrote: No, I do not believe that to abide by your marital vow is of the utmost importance.

Your safety is, and that of little Jacob, Leonora, and Agnes.

And then, in the final letter Leo’s mother had received from her sister, Flora wrote another chilling sentiment: What use is integrity or justness if he is caught?

If he is dead? It will all mean nothing in the end.

It was clear that Flora had known the nature of her brother-in-law’s business and that whatever he was doing was putting his family in danger.

Leo’s mother had shared whatever concerns she had about it with her older sister in her letters.

And yet, none of Flora’s replies gave even a sliver of a detail that could help Leo discover what, exactly, her father’s transgression had been.

Jasper said he’d betrayed the East Rips. But how?

She turned to the ledgers and papers she’d first retrieved from the trunk and began to page through those.

Shipping invoices for coffee and tea, cargo lists for ships sailing from Canada and Boston, correspondence with clients, though none of them bore the name Carter.

The reading grew tedious, her father’s handwriting poor.

He at least marked numbers clearly in his account books.

One appeared to be a banking ledger for his own account, and his record-keeping was meticulous. For an accountant, it should have been.

Leo turned to the back of the ledger after a while, looking for dates closer to the time of the murders, and she picked up on a pattern.

Beginning in the early autumn of 1866, Leonard Spencer began to receive monthly payments of five pounds.

The only markings next to the deposits were initials: br.

Though she looked through the ledger again from front to back, she found no one mentioned with those initials.

Leo’s eyes ached. The poor light and lack of sleep from the night before had caught up with her.

Finally, she called it a day. She emerged from the crypt to find Mr. Quinn had gone.

It was four in the afternoon, and Claude was preparing tea on the cottage cast-iron range in the corner of the back office.

“I presume you found the trunk,” he said, lifting the kettle from the hob.

Leo wiped dust from her skirt and cuffs. “Uncle Claude…” She hesitated, uncertain if it was important to ask. But she wanted to know. “Did you know that I hid in that trunk?”

Claude held still. Then the blackened bottom of the kettle met the hob again with a clatter. He turned to her. “That trunk?”

She nodded.

“Oh, my dear.” He forgot the kettle as he came forward. “I didn’t know. I knew you hid, of course, but I didn’t realize... I’m sorry if it has upset you.”

Leo shook her head. Oddly enough, after the initial shock of seeing it again in person rather than just in her memory, she found she wasn’t upset at all.

“It hasn’t.” She took over at the range to finish preparing their tea. “I just wonder how I could have ever been small enough to fit in there.”

Again, the darkened outline of the boy came charging forward in her mind.

Jasper had been taller than her, his voice coming from above her head.

From his whispers, she hadn’t been able to tell how old he was.

But somehow in the dim moonlight, he’d found the steamer trunk and flung back the lid, urging her inside.

Her palm had been bleeding, hot and painful, and she’d been sobbing, her breaths rattling.

You can’t let them hear you. Not a sound.

When he’d closed and latched the trunk’s domed lid, Leo had nearly screamed.

But even in her nine-year-old brain, she’d known that he’d had to latch it.

The men downstairs, who’d come up into the attic no more than a minute later, would never think to check a latched trunk, for how could she have hidden inside and latched it afterward?

It wasn’t until hours later, when she’d heard voices again downstairs, with one man in particular addressing another as ‘constable’ that Leo had started shouting at the top of her lungs.

She’d pounded on the lid of the trunk, kicked against its side panels, and screamed until the Inspector found her.

“I found some letters to my mother from Aunt Flora. Ledgers belonging to my father too. Do you ever recall him mentioning anyone with the initials br?”

At that question, Claude’s brow crinkled. “I’m afraid Leonard and I weren’t close. I hadn’t seen him in years before… Well. Why do you ask?”

She sighed and sipped her tea as she stood next to the range. Her backside ached from sitting for so long. “It doesn’t matter. I’m exhausted. I’m sure I’ll think more clearly tomorrow.”

He nodded. “I’m locking up early tonight and going to check on Jasper before I return home to your aunt. Do you wish to accompany me to Charles Street?”

Leo was curious to know how Jasper was faring and had thought of him several times that day.

With any hope, his concussion hadn’t stopped him from following the lead at the bank—whatever it had been.

While she did wish to see him and discuss any gains he’d made in the case, she had also been turning over another idea.

One neither Jasper nor Claude would approve of.

“I think I’ll stay a little longer. You go. I’ll lock up before leaving,” she assured him. Claude finished his tea and prepared to leave, and although a part of her felt guilty for the deception, it didn’t change her mind.

Shortly after her uncle departed, she extinguished the gasoliers and brackets and locked up for the evening.

She then started on foot for the omnibus stand at Trafalgar Square.

The bus she required didn’t arrive for ten more minutes, and a cold drizzle had started falling.

When it arrived a few minutes early, she boarded the crowded omnibus, glad for the shelter and warmth inside.

The bus slowly made its way across the river toward Lambeth, and though its route didn’t turn down past the wharves, Leo disembarked at the closest stop, walking the rest of the way to Eddie Bloom’s club.

It wasn’t a safe part of London, and Jasper would have had a fit if he knew where she was going, but she arrived at the entrance to the club just past five o’clock, no worse for wear. It was still too early for revelry, but there were some people inside when Leo paid the entry fee.