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Chapter Six

D awn painted the walls of Leo’s bedroom orange and pink.

Since returning from Jasper’s home, she’d lain abed with her mind churning, sleep a distant prospect.

Her father had worked for the East Rips.

Or at least, Jasper believed he had. Was it possible that he was remembering things incorrectly?

He’d been thirteen at the time, after all. Essentially, a child still.

But as night ticked closer toward daylight, Leo couldn’t quite convince herself that he was mistaken. As much as it pained her to admit it, Jasper likely remembered that night just as vividly as she did. It wouldn’t matter that they’d been on opposite sides of the horror.

If the Carter family had decided to punish Leonard Spencer to such an extent, his betrayal must have been extraordinary.

The nature of that betrayal could very well have been described in the letters her mother had written to Aunt Flora.

The bloody, bloody business, her aunt had mumbled one night, although at the time, Leo hadn’t fully understood to what she was referring.

Leo and Claude had looked through Flora’s things for any letters she’d kept from Andromeda Spencer.

They’d searched a cedar chest, the closet, and boxes into which Flora had tucked trinkets she thought special enough to cherish: a baby’s bonnet, yellowed by time; an empty glass atomizer that still smelled faintly of perfume; and a brooch Claude believed to have belonged to Leo’s grandmother.

But there had been nothing at all from Andromeda.

Restless to begin the day, Leo got out of bed and dressed.

Claude joined her in the kitchen shortly after she’d finished cooking the eggs and sausages, both of which emerged from the hob barely charred this time.

As her uncle had been asleep at the time of the three bombings the night before, she informed him after they’d sat down to eat.

Just as Leo had, he thought the different timing of the bombs and the differences in their construction peculiar.

“Might the two explosions at the Yard be unrelated?” he mused as he added a handful of watercress to his eggs, perhaps to make them more palatable. “At any rate, I’m glad Inspector Reid was unharmed. Am I to assume the two of you are no longer quarreling?”

Claude had given her privacy and hadn’t addressed the distance she’d kept from Jasper over the last few months, but he’d surely noticed it.

Especially since whenever Jasper had come to the morgue to discuss postmortem findings with Claude, Leo would close herself in the office or quickly leave on an errand.

“We weren’t quarreling.” To admit they had been would lead her uncle to ask why. The reason wasn’t something she wished to speak of to anyone.

Though Jasper had hurt and betrayed her, and she had moments of wanting to lash out and injure him just as deeply, she couldn’t bring herself to unmask Jasper.

Not only would it destroy his career, but it might also draw the attention of the Carters back to him.

Somehow, Jasper had come face-to-face with Andrew Carter in March, and the East Rip hadn’t recognized him as any kind of relation.

The Carter family tree had roots that were broad and deep in London, with numerous brothers, cousins and uncles.

From what he’d said last night, his own father had been a cousin to Patrick and Robert Carter, with Jasper and his mother only being taken in by the East Rips Carters after his father had died.

Then, when his mother was killed—something he had only recently revealed during their investigation into Gabriela Carter’s murder—he’d been left alone to stay with his aunt and uncle.

What that must have been like for him as a boy was one of the many questions taking up residence in Leo’s mind.

But the answers to the questions she’d asked last night had disillusioned her, and now she wasn’t sure she wanted to ask any more at all.

“Uncle Claude,” she said, piercing her sausage with the tines of her fork. “I’ve been thinking about the letters my mother wrote to Aunt Flora.”

“I do wish we had found them, my dear,” he said.

It wasn’t just the contents of the letters Leo longed to read. She also yearned for the opportunity to see her mother’s handwriting. To hold something that her mother had once touched.

Not long after the murders, Gregory Reid had brought her a few things he’d collected from her family’s home on Red Lion Street: framed photographs, some clothing, her sister Agnes’s rag doll, and Jacob’s pocket watch.

Things the Inspector had thought she might want or would eventually come to cherish.

At the time, as a little girl who had just lost her family, Leo hadn’t cared about the home itself or anything within it.

To her mind, the house was a place of pain, of heartbreak and fear, and she was only grateful to know that she never had to step foot inside it again.

A handful of years passed before she thought to ask Claude what had become of her family’s belongings.

He replied that as soon as he and Flora had arrived in London, he’d relinquished the premises back to the leaseholder, along with most of the furnishings.

Leo hadn’t been upset. What meaning could sofas and chairs, mirrors and bedsteads possibly have compared to the family members she’d lost?

Now, however, after searching through Flora’s things for her mother’s letters without success, a new thought struck her: What had happened to her family’s possessions that the leaseholder wouldn’t have wanted?

Things like mementos, papers, letters, and diaries?

She posed the question to Claude, who lowered his fork and wrinkled his brow.

“I haven’t given those things a thought in years.”

“Did you burn them?” she asked.

“My goodness, no,” he answered swiftly. “I couldn’t decide what to do with them, so after Inspector Reid went through them and then returned them to me, I put them in boxes and set them aside. Forgot about them entirely.”

“Set them aside where?”

“The morgue’s crypt.” He winced as if in apology and lifted a shoulder. “There wasn’t space here.”

She gaped. The crypt was a storage facility of sorts, holding not only old items from the morgue’s previous iteration as a church, but also the unclaimed possessions of the dead.

Families would sometimes leave their loved ones’ things behind, either accidentally or intentionally.

Or when an unidentified and unclaimed body was taken away to be buried in a pauper’s grave, the person’s items were left to be stored in the crypt.

Leo had gone into the vast space countless times over the years.

And now, her uncle was saying her own family’s things were down there too.

“Why have you never told me this?” she asked.

Remorse pulled at the corners of his lips. “As I said, I haven’t thought of those boxes in years. And earlier, well, I couldn’t allow a child to rummage through her parents’ personal things.” He paused, cocking his head. “I hope you’re not too upset with me.”

There was no reason for her to be upset. He was right to have kept them from her when she was younger. She wouldn’t have wanted to see them then. And how could she be vexed that the boxes had slipped his mind after all these years? He was nearly seventy years old, after all.

“Not in the least,” she assured him, reaching to cover his hand on the table with her own. “But I would like to see them now.”

Although Leo and her uncle hadn’t found her mother’s letters to Aunt Flora, it was possible that her mother might have kept letters Flora sent to her and were now stored in the boxes in the crypt.

Within them, there could very well be information about what Leonard Spencer had been doing.

If that proved to be the case, Leo hoped she was ready for whatever she might learn.

Before his death, the Inspector had given her the extensive record he’d compiled on the Spencer family murders and asked that she be ready before opening the file.

She thought she had been. But after viewing a foggy, over-exposed crime scene photograph of her father, lying on his side on the sitting room carpet, a dark blood stain on the front of his shirt, Leo had slammed the folder shut, her stomach convulsing with a surge of nausea.

She hadn’t yet tried opening the file a second time.

At the sounds of his wife stirring from her slumber upstairs, Claude got to his feet and promised Leo that he would look for the boxes later that day.

She left for Scotland Yard before Flora could come down for breakfast. She’d once told her uncle that she wasn’t avoiding her aunt deliberately, but now she wasn’t certain that was true anymore.

With a pinch of guilt, she walked swiftly toward Great Scotland Yard.

Most mornings, Dita would come to Duke Street on her way into work, and she and Leo would walk there together.

However, last evening, before going to Charles Street, Leo stopped by Dita’s home in Covent Garden.

Distraught over John’s death, she’d told Leo she wouldn’t be going in to work for a few days.

“I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to walk into that building again without thinking of him,” she’d said, her eyes swollen from ceaseless tears.

Leo had merely kept her arm around Dita, saying nothing of the precise image she would always have of Constable Lloyd in the moments before that flash of light had blinded her. She was just grateful her friend would not have the same memory imprinted on her brain in perpetuity.