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Chapter Three

L eo never would have admitted it to a soul, but halfway through Claude’s examination of Constable Lloyd’s remains, she considered that Jasper might have been correct: She should have sat this one out.

A rash of heat lit her skin, and a swell of nausea gripped her.

Leo clutched the clipboard and pencil tighter in her sweaty hands while recording her uncle’s observations as he made them aloud.

Her head swam, the words blurring on the paper as she wrote them.

The acrid odor of gunpowder clung to the mangled body, and it filled the back of her mouth with every breath.

“I’m sorry, Uncle Claude. What was it you just said?” Leo asked, her hearing still muffled from the blast. It would take weeks for her ruptured eardrum to heal. She could only hope the incessant ringing would be gone much sooner than that.

“Complete separation of the aortic valve.” Her uncle lowered his spectacles, the thick glass heavily magnified, and peered at Leo. “My dear, you are most assuredly concussed. I insist you go home to rest.”

He meant well, but retreating to their terrace house on Duke Street would do little to settle her.

Leo didn’t like to be there without her uncle, and that was entirely due to her aunt, Flora Feldman.

It was cowardly of her to avoid her elderly aunt, but lately, Flora’s outbursts had been more random and hostile—at least, toward Leo.

No one else seemed to inspire her eruptions of temper and nonsensical accusations.

Thankfully, her aunt had taken well to her newest nurse, Mrs. Boardman, and with Claude, she was as complacent as a cat curled up by a fire.

Had Jasper been in her presence over the last two months, Flora would have doted on him too, as she always had.

But not Leo. For some illogical reason, Flora blamed her for the Spencer family murders, even though she’d been just a child at the time.

A strange comment Flora had made in March about letters she’d received from her sister, Andromeda—Leo’s mother—and some sort of bloody, bloody business had intrigued Leo. But Claude hadn’t known anything about the letters, and a search of the house hadn’t turned them up either.

“My head feels fine. I’d much rather keep busy,” Leo told her uncle, swiping at her brow before writing down the postmortem finding.

As the aorta was the main vessel for distributing oxygen-rich blood to the body, a complete separation of the valve from the heart would mean Constable Lloyd died almost instantly.

The excessive damage to the rest of his torso and limbs from the explosion would have been excruciatingly painful had he lived, even for a short while.

There was some comfort in knowing he hadn’t suffered long, if at all.

However, why he’d been carrying a bomb toward Scotland Yard continued to dumbfound her. Leo hadn’t known him well, but she’d never have believed he was mixed up with the militant Irish in London. In fact, she didn’t believe it.

Jasper had told her to keep out of Inspector Tomlin’s way, and she knew she couldn’t interfere directly with the investigation. But that didn’t stop her mind from combing over the handful of seconds between when she’d first spotted John Lloyd and when the bomb detonated.

“Hmm. This is peculiar,” Claude said, having returned to his examination of the body.

Leo looked up from her notes to see her uncle holding the constable’s left wrist. The right hand—along with much of his forearm—had been severed completely in the blast. Those remains hadn’t been salvageable.

“What have you found?”

“Ligature marks. See here?” Claude pointed to a thin line of bruising on top of the constable’s wrist. Though gunpowder residue coated him, a closer look showed reddened skin, still partially visible. She ran the tip of her finger over the chafed red line, which was a few millimeters wide.

Claude peered at the underside of the wrist, but there weren’t any ligature marks there.

“His wrists were bound together, the undersides pressed together,” Leo said.

Had the right wrist not been blown to pieces, she suspected it would have shown a matching red line.

“It looks to be that way,” her uncle agreed. “And as the bruising is still red, I estimate the marks were inflicted less than twenty-four hours before death.”

Leo quickly scribbled the finding down, her nausea beginning to clear.

Claude had already noted the contusions near Constable Lloyd’s left eye, and the gash on his cheek below the bruise.

While much of his lower jaw had been decimated, the upper half of his cheek remained intact.

Still, it would certainly be a closed-casket funeral.

“You’ve also determined he was struck in the face less than twenty-four hours ago,” she said.

Black eyes weren’t uncommon among police officers.

Plenty of them got into scrapes while performing their duties, especially with men they were attempting to arrest. But the ligature marks on his wrist couldn’t be misconstrued: John Lloyd had been bound and beaten just hours before he’d approached Scotland Yard with a bomb.

The man she’d seen standing outside the arch, who had scowled fiercely when John turned around and started away from the building, sprang to Leo’s mind.

“It’s not conclusive that the victim received this ligature mark at the same time as he did the injuries to his face,” her uncle said firmly, as if knowing the determination she’d reached.

“But surely, the likelihood is high.”

If he had been held against his will and abused, then there was a story of violence behind John’s actions.

One that might explain why he’d done what he had.

It might account for his distraction and expression of fear when Leo had seen him.

She also wondered if that scowling man had anything to do with the bomb being brought to Scotland Yard.

“The report must only include known medical facts and evidence.”

Claude needn’t have reminded her. She’d been transcribing her uncle’s examinations and typing his postmortem reports for nearly five years. Conjecture was not tolerated, nor should it be.

With every death inquest, Mr. Pritchard, the deputy coroner, presented Claude’s postmortem findings at the coroner’s court. The jurors who were present at these inquests were given the medical findings, and it was paramount they reach a verdict based on facts, not speculation.

“The facts,” Leo began, “are that the victim sustained bruising consistent with a fistfight or beating and a ligature mark on his left wrist consistent with being bound by a thin rope, less than twenty-four hours before his death.”

Claude assented with a nod. “That is correct.”

And that would be what she wrote in the report. But her own mind was hers to fill with as much speculation as she wished.

She tapped the tip of her pencil to the paper, thinking.

Claude had cut the clothing from the body first thing, and Leo had gone through the pockets, noting the contents in the morgue’s possessions register.

Besides his policeman’s warrant card, there was nothing but a single coin in John Lloyd’s pockets.

It was unlike any coin Leo had seen before.

The circle of brass had been stamped with the image of a fox and a crane standing together.

It was a token of some sort, though she didn’t know for what.

Asking Dita would have been the most direct way to find an answer.

But as she was grieving, Leo didn’t wish to bother her friend.

Just then, Tibia, the morgue cat, leaped agilely onto a vacant autopsy table next to the constable’s corpse and began to purr, seeking attention.

Or more likely, her lunch. The gray tabby lived in the morgue, and though she was welcome to wander the postmortem room, she preferred bedding down under the desk in the back office, where Leo kept a small coal brazier stoked to warm her feet in the colder months.

The cat’s paw instantly found the odd token on the table and batted at it, sending the round of brass to the floor.

“Tibby, no,” Leo said, leaning down to retrieve it. Her ruptured eardrum throbbed as she bent, sending a flash of pain through her head. And then, the pealing of a bell joined the ringing in her ears. Someone had arrived through the morgue’s front door and entered the lobby.

Wincing, she put the token into her pocket. “I’ll go see?—”

Raised voices cut her off. There was a sign on the postmortem room door, asking visitors to please wait to be welcomed.

However, the agitated tones of a man’s deep tenor and the pleading one of a woman were worrisome.

There were some who, in their grief and panic, would ignore the sign and barge straight in—only to be traumatized by what they found.

Currently, there were three corpses on tables whose examinations Claude had put on hold to address the police constable’s postmortem.

She set her clipboard down and started for the lobby. But her concern had been warranted as a young man pushed his way into the postmortem room, his eyes red and wild.

“Sir, please wait outside,” Leo said as Claude hurried to lift a sheet over the constable’s remains.

The man paid Leo no attention and stalked forward, ripping his hat from his head. “Is that him? Is it our Johnny?”

Oh no. Constable Lloyd’s family had arrived.

“Family must wait in the lobby,” Leo tried again as a woman entered the room on the man’s heels. Her face crumpled, even though Claude had successfully covered John’s ruined body.

“Where is he?” she asked, voice trembling, her hands clasping her handbag to her chest in trepidation. “They’re saying he had a bomb, that he set it off!”

The man arrived at the table, his eyes riveted to the sheeted body.