Page 5

“Sir, please, this isn’t something loved ones should see,” Claude said, but the man, who was most likely a brother of John’s, was oblivious to their warnings.

He tore back the top portion of the sheet.

Leo had already seen the remains, of course, but now she seemed to look upon them with fresh eyes.

It was truly horrific what the blast had done to his body.

The woman’s scream and the grief-stricken moan that came from the man made the moment even more wretched.

Claude drew the sheet back up as the man staggered away, and Leo attended to the woman, whose legs were going soft.

She placed an arm around her shoulders and led her back into the lobby, depositing her into the nearest chair.

Appearing to be about fifty years of age, Leo presumed she was John’s mother.

The man came into the lobby next, guided by Claude.

The coroner exchanged a quick glance with his niece before retreating and closing the door to the postmortem room behind him.

“Can I fetch you some tea, Mrs. Lloyd?” Leo asked, sitting in the chair next to her. “You are Constable Lloyd’s mother, correct?”

She sniffled, her eyes closed and a stream of tears flowing past her lashes. “I am,” she gasped. Then, she shook her head. “No tea, thank you.”

“I knew he would get into trouble,” the man said as he began to pace the small lobby. The grieving tended to do one of these two things: either sit still in bereft shock or explode with restless energy and fury.

Leo focused on the man. He wasn’t much older than John, and they shared similar physical features. “You are his brother?”

“He should’ve come with me to my shop instead of joining the bloody, no-good police,” he said as though he hadn’t heard her question.

“What is your work, Mr. Lloyd?” Leo asked. At this seemingly offhand question, the man slowed his pacing. He blinked as he looked at her, acknowledging her for the first time.

“I’m a carpenter,” he answered. “Like our father, but Johnny, he wanted to be a bobby. Always wanted to be a bobby.”

John had said something like this to Leo once. However, it was apparent his brother hadn’t supported his decision to join the police force.

“Mr. Lloyd, you said you knew your brother would get into trouble.” Leo’s heart began to sink. “Do you mean to say that you suspected this would happen?”

He slammed to a halt across the room and stared at her, aghast. “You mean with a bomb? No, never. Johnny couldn’t have had anything to do with that.”

She kept quiet. John had been carrying the bomb, so he must have had something to do with it.

“What kind of trouble did you mean then?”

It wasn’t customary to ask the family members any questions about the deceased other than what arrangements they would like to make for the body. But she conceded that this wasn’t a customary situation.

“I meant about the gambling,” the constable’s brother replied readily enough.

“Charlie, don’t speak ill of your brother when he can’t defend himself,” Mrs. Lloyd pleaded, pressing a hankie to her wet cheeks.

Leo recalled the brass token, now in her apron pocket. It might be a gambling marker of some kind.

“You know it’s true, Mum,” Charlie replied. “Either that, or he was on the take.”

“Stop!” Mrs. Lloyd burst into more tears.

“How else do you explain the posh boots, the better threads he kept buying, and the hats. Christ a’mighty, he had a closet full of them,” Charlie went on.

The times Leo, Dita, and John had gone to Striker’s Wharf together, she hadn’t noted the extravagance of his clothing. Perhaps that was simply because she was accustomed to seeing him in police blues.

“How long had your brother been bettering himself?” she asked.

Charlie snorted. “Bettering himself. Ha! He was hanging about with the wrong sort, telling me to stop my worrying and mind my own business. I told him, I said he would trip up, be sorry…” He closed his fist and pounded it against his forehead twice, as if to stop his mind from going back over what had been said between them. “And now look what’s happened.”

Leo tried but failed to make the correlation between a vice of gambling and the decision to carry a bomb in a valise.

However, the token in his pocket could very well indicate that John had been at some gambling casino shortly before his arrival at the Yard.

Had that been where he’d received the bruising on his face?

“Have you spoken with anyone from Scotland Yard yet?” Leo asked. It seemed strange that Inspector Tomlin would not have rounded up the constable’s family for questioning as immediately as he had Dita.

Mrs. Lloyd shook her head. “I was at home when Charlie came to tell me what had happened. We went straight to Scotland Yard, but a constable outside told us the body had already been brought here.”

“And how did you learn of the explosion, Mr. Lloyd?” Leo asked.

He’d quit pacing, his restlessness transforming to melancholy in the blink of an eye. “A friend came to my shop. Drives a hansom, keeps it near Whitehall. Said he saw the whole thing, Johnny walking toward the Yard, the bomb exploding, and…”

Charlie’s explanation fell off as rapidly as his temper had. If he was angry with his brother, Leo suspected it had more to do with misplaced feelings of loss than with anything else. Anger so often preceded despair, and John’s brother seemed to be closing in on the latter.

The bell chimed on the front door as a pair of uniformed police constables entered the morgue lobby.

Leo stood to greet Constables Warnock and Drake, who doffed their helmets.

“We heard you were sent here,” Drake said, speaking to Mrs. Lloyd and her son.

“We’re to bring you to the Yard. The lead inspector has some questions to put to you. ”

Charlie’s ire flared to life again. “I got nothing to say except my brother is innocent. He wouldn’t have done this. He loved his job, respected his mates!”

Mrs. Lloyd, perhaps sensing that the two constables weren’t going to leave without escorting them to Scotland Yard, got to her feet. “Miss,” she said, addressing Leo. “I’ll have my boy collected as soon as I can manage it.”

Her chin wobbled, and then she put her head down and left. Drake went with her, while Warnock waited for Charlie to come along. He did, although with reluctance.

Leo exhaled, tension dissolving from her back and shoulders as she returned to the postmortem room. Claude handed her the clipboard with her notes. “As soon as you’re finished typing, my dear, you’re to go home.”

At twenty-five, Leo didn’t enjoy being told what to do, even if her uncle was only trying to show his care and worry. But she agreed and started for the office and her typewriter. After speaking with John’s family, however, home would not be her first destination.