Page 1 of Method of Revenge (Spencer & Reid Mysteries #2)

Chapter One

London

March 1884

S creams of wild laughter filled the dance hall, piercing Leonora Spencer’s ears and grating on her nerves. She winced and knew she’d made a mistake.

The nightlife at Striker’s Wharf had always been lively, but Leo didn’t recall it ever being this boisterous. As the other patrons raised their voices above the fast tempo of the piano, trumpet, and clarinet, all she could dwell on was how quiet the Spring Street Morgue would have been at this time of night. Leo worked there as an assistant to her uncle, a city coroner, and in fact, an evening in the morgue’s office appealed vastly more to her than the popular dance club on the Lambeth wharves.

However, as it wasn’t at all ordinary for a young woman to work at a morgue, let alone prefer the company of dead bodies to living ones, she kept the disquieting thought to herself.

Next to her at their table, Nivedita Brooks swayed in rhythm with the music, her eyes turned toward the busy dance floor with longing.

“Go,” Leo urged her friend. “I can see it’s torturous for you to sit here with me when there’s a polka playing.”

Dita cut her rapt attention away from the dozens of dancers. “It isn’t torture to sit with you,” she said, appearing offended. “Besides, I can’t possibly take to the floor by myself. I’d need a partner.”

Leo gave her arm a gentle shove. “I’m quite certain a number of gentlemen would appear as if out of the ether if you were to take one step toward that dance floor.”

Thanks to a handful of favorable articles in The Illustrated London News , the club was packed with a surfeit of men, many of them from the upper classes. In fact, the surge in popularity was so noticeable, Leo had started to think Eddie Bloom, the proprietor at Striker’s Wharf, must have held some power over the paper’s editorial choices. As the head of a criminal gang operating out of this area, his influence over the newspaper wouldn’t have been out of the realm of possibility.

Despite Mr. Bloom’s questionable business practices and the establishment’s mixed clientele, this was one of Dita’s favorite places to go for music and dancing, and she had decided it was high time Leo threw off the mundane nightly routine she’d been keeping for the last several weeks.

Habits were easy and comfortable, and Leo had fallen into the practice of returning to her home on Duke Street from the morgue, preparing supper for her aging uncle and aunt, and then trundling off to bed with a book. The singular interruption to her schedule had been an evening she’d spent out at a chophouse with a Scotland Yard constable—though she had yet to tell Dita about it. Her friend would have made too much of it, and Leo wasn’t even certain she’d enjoyed herself enough to accept a second invitation… if the constable ever extended one.

“You could have your pick of dance partners,” she told Dita now as she glanced at the tables surrounding theirs. “The gentlemen at the table behind you have been looking your way since we arrived.”

The three men had been taking furtive glances at Dita for the last quarter hour. She was pretty when she wore her blue wool Metropolitan Police matron uniform to her shifts at Scotland Yard, but she was downright stunning when she put up her dark hair and wore one of her brightly hued dresses for an evening out. Sunset-orange silks and deep pink taffetas looked radiant against her darker skin, compliments of her late mother, who’d hailed from Calcutta, India.

Leo, however, with her dark hair and pale, ivory skin, preferred more somber shades. Tonight, she’d consented to wear the deep sapphire-blue satin dress Dita had selected from Leo’s limited wardrobe, the skirt fashionably gored, if unfashionably long-sleeved. She was certain none of the men at the neighboring table would be casting out their nets toward her. And in truth, she didn’t care for any of them to attempt it.

Dita covered Leo’s hand with her own. “Forget dancing. This is your first night out in ages, and I’m not leaving you to sit alone at our table.”

“That never stopped you before,” she replied with a good-natured grin. Dita would usually bring her steady beau, Police Constable John Lloyd, with them to Striker’s. They would spend half of the time on the dance floor, while Leo remained at the table. Dancing was not her forte, nor was she interested enough in it to improve her skills.

“Perhaps not, but you weren’t in mourning before,” Dita reminded her.

Leo sighed. “I’m not in official mourning. I wasn’t family.”

Not exactly, anyway.

It had been two months since Detective Chief Superintendent Gregory Reid had succumbed to a prolonged illness. The Inspector, as Leo had always called him, had taken his last breath one night at the end of January while sleeping. It was just one week after the tumultuous case that concluded with his good friend, Police Commissioner Nathaniel Vickers, being accused of murder.

It had been Leo and Detective Inspector Jasper Reid, the Inspector’s adopted son, who had exposed the police commissioner’s desperate plot to thwart a blackmail operation that had threatened to reveal compromising intimate photographs of his seventeen-year-old daughter, Elsie. The illicit photographs would have ruined both father and daughter publicly and personally, and Sir Nathaniel had decided there was no line he would not cross to prevent that from happening—including lowering himself to murder. He’d even planned to have Jasper and Leo killed once they discovered the truth of his involvement in a series of murders connected to her uncle’s morgue.

The only consolation for Jasper and her had been that Gregory Reid was already unconscious when his longtime friend had been found out. He’d been completely unaware of his friend’s decision to end his own life rather than face the humiliation and consequences of his crimes.

“He thought of you as family,” Dita said, then sneaked a coy glimpse toward the table of men behind her.

Leo shook her head, amused. Her friend simply could not resist flirting. Dita was correct though; the Inspector had thought of Leo as family.

For a short while when she’d been nine years old, he’d taken her in and cared for her after the murder of her family. The Metropolitan Police had been tracking down Leo’s maternal aunt, Flora, who’d been living on the island of Crete at the time with her husband, Claude Feldman. While awaiting their arrival back in London, Leo had stayed with Gregory Reid, who at that time had ranked as Detective Inspector. His home on Charles Street was an affluent address, a residence any other police inspector would never have been able to afford. However, Gregory had married a viscount’s daughter, and the home had been bestowed upon them at their marriage.

When Gregory’s wife, Emmaline, and their two young children died in a horrific accident while ice skating on Regent’s Pond, he’d been distraught. A year later, he’d still been in mourning for them when he’d rescued Leo from the attic of the Red Lion Street home in which her family had been brutally slain. He’d treated her with all the tenderness and care of a father, and even after her aunt and uncle had arrived to claim her, he’d stayed a prominent figure in Leo’s life.

She still felt the swift plunge of her stomach when remembering that early Sunday morning in late January. Heavy knocking on the front door had roused her from sleep just past seven o’clock. Throwing on her dressing gown and hurrying downstairs, she’d had the inkling in the back of her mind that it would be news of the Inspector’s demise. She’d been correct.

There was Jasper, standing on the threshold, his hat crushed in his hands. Even now, months later, her memory drew up the vivid image of the anguish cutting through his green eyes. Grief had seized her too, crumpling her up inside like old newsprint bound for a stove, and it hadn’t relinquished her yet. The detailed memory of that moment would never leave her.

All people could remember things, of course, but Leo’s mind was particularly—and unusually—sharp. It stamped images into her mind as photographic memories for her to draw up and inspect, time and again. They never faded or became hazy. Significant moments, like the one of Jasper telling her the Inspector had died, seared most deeply into her mind and stayed readily available for easy viewing. Other details—from what everyone was wearing at the butcher’s last week while she was standing in line, to the contents of every postmortem report she’d ever typed at her uncle’s morgue, to the names and faces of every officer at Scotland Yard—were stored away permanently, and vividly too.

Once, Dita had likened her memory to magic, but Leo thought it more like a well-organized inventory room: Registers upon registers of memories that she could locate, draw down from an endless number of shelves, and look at again with clarity. However, just as her work at a city morgue tended to make others eye her strangely, so did having a perfect memory. So, she mostly kept that ability to herself.

Dita leaned over the table, set at the edge of the dance floor, and clinked her glass of wine against Leo’s. “For tonight, at least, let’s not discuss anything remotely miserable. We’re here to have fun.”

Leo sipped her drink obligingly, but her rebellious mind thought of the cherry liqueur that she and the Inspector had shared a love for. The last bottle of Grants Morella cherry brandy she’d brought him was likely still half full in his study. Or rather Jasper’s study now.

Though he wasn’t the Inspector’s legal heir, Jasper had been listed as the main recipient of Gregory Reid’s estate in his last will and testament. The home granted to the Honorable Emmaline Cowper’s new husband when they’d married had come from her grandmother, not her father. So, when Emmaline died tragically, the embittered viscount had been able to rescind his daughter’s dowry but not the home.

Leo had always suspected maintaining the residence at 23 Charles Street had cost the Inspector most of his working wages, and now, Jasper had been given the home to keep up. Or sell. She wasn’t certain what he would do with it.

At the will reading, Gregory Reid’s solicitor, Mr. Wilhelm Stockton, had given Jasper a bundle of papers detailing his inheritance, which included the home and some modest savings. For her part, Leo had been bequeathed an exquisite pair of drop pearl earrings and a matching necklace. The set had belonged to the Inspector’s mother, and she’d given them to him with the wish that he might someday pass them along to his daughter.

While preparing for her evening out with Dita, tears had pricked Leo’s eyes when she’d opened the worn, blue velvet case and put on the pieces.

“Thank you,” Leo said to her friend, touching the string of pearls at her throat. “For bringing me out tonight. I did need it.” The cackling blare of a woman’s laughter as she danced close to their table nearly shredded her eardrum. “Though a quiet restaurant might have done just as well.”

Dita pursed her lips. “Careful, Leo, you’re beginning to sound just as starchy as Inspector Reid,” she said, referring to Jasper, who deplored not only Eddie Bloom and his club, but the fact that Leo frequented Striker’s Wharf from time to time. Jasper’s disposition had always leaned toward surly and ill-tempered, though ever since his promotion to the Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard, he’d become even more austere and grumpy.

It had been weeks since she’d last seen him. With the Inspector gone, she had no reason to go to Charles Street anymore; she most certainly couldn’t call on Jasper there alone. He was a bachelor, and she was unmarried. It didn’t matter if the Inspector had tried to bring them together as brother and sister, or at best, distant cousins. The fact of the matter was they were not related, and without the Inspector in their lives, she wasn’t sure what they were to each other at all.

Oddly enough, as fractious as Jasper usually was toward her, their time spent solving the case in January had not been wholly disagreeable. And when he’d arrived at her home on Duke Street last month on the anniversary of her family’s murders with an offering to accompany her to their graves at All Saints Cemetery, just as the Inspector had always done, she’d been touched by his thoughtfulness.

In fact, she was beginning to think that the tight, unrelenting coil in the pit of her stomach stemmed from not having seen Jasper since then. It was a thought she found unacceptable. She did not want to miss Jasper when he probably was not missing her in return.

“Let’s not speak of Inspector Reid or anything else too serious tonight,” she told Dita as she tapped her glass against her friends again. “Here is to a pleasant evening out without a care in the world.”

A scream, one of alarm rather than of gaiety, preceded a loud clatter at Leo’s back. She swiveled in her seat to see a woman who’d been seated at the next table, convulsing on the floor, her chair overturned. Other patrons quickly closed in around her. And yet, Leo observed one person swiftly moving away. A black-cloaked figure hurried past the encroaching crowd and began to slip from Leo’s view.

“Is she choking?” Dita asked as she left their table amidst shouts for help.

Leo kept her eyes on the retreating figure. The hood of the cloak was raised, obscuring the person underneath, but there was a distinct feminine grace to the person’s movements.

“I’ll be right back,” she told Dita.

“Where are you going?” she called as Leo skirted around the influx of people, who were craning their necks for a better view of the commotion. “Leonora!”

She carried on, however, reluctant to let the cloaked figure out of her sight. Instinct told her that this person had something to do with what had happened back at the table, whatever it may be. As Leo had no medical training for the living—her only experience being the handling of dead bodies—she knew she would not be of any use to the afflicted woman. None of the other bystanders seemed to have noticed the retreating cloaked figure. Pursuing the person across the club, Leo got a better look as the crowd thinned out: it was almost certainly a woman. The cloak, embroidered with robin’s-egg blue threading, rippled as she rushed in the direction of the club’s front doors, revealing a lighter green skirt hem. Leo tried to hasten her pace but was caught behind a wall of shoulders suddenly moving into her path.

“Excuse me.” The polka music came to a halt, and her next impatient, “Excuse me!” rang out loudly.

The men moved aside, albeit grudgingly, and Leo darted through the gap. The woman in the hooded cloak was gone. Leo passed the doorman and ran outside, straight into a damp fog rolling off the Thames. The wharf linked to Belvedere Street, but in this brume, she could barely see five feet in front of her. To go any further would be to disappear into the fog alone, and that would be foolhardy.

Leo turned back to the doorman. “Did you see a woman come through here just now? Wearing a dark cloak?”

He frowned, a deep crease furrowing his forehead down to the bridge of his nose. “Sure. She went that way.” He nodded to the right, toward the street.

“What did she look like?” Leo asked. “Did you recognize her?”

“Didn’t see a thing of her. Had her head covered. Why?” He looked back inside. “What’s going on in there?”

The music had not resumed, and the noise of a panicked crowd began to overtake the club.

“A woman is hurt,” she told the doorman as she made her way back inside.

The gawking crowd had erected a blockade as she moved toward her table. Employing her elbows, she physically parted arms and shoulders to force her way through the group of bystanders.

By the time she saw Dita again, standing over the woman on the floor, a few minutes had passed. A grim pall enveloped the circle of patrons surrounding the immobile form. A pool of bloody vomit lay on the floor next to the woman, and blood leaked from her eyes, nose, and lips. Her eyes stared blankly, seeing nothing.

She was dead.

“What is it? What is happening?” a man’s loud voice shouted from outside the circle.

With another burst of commotion, he shoved people aside and lurched forward. He was tall, dark-haired, and handsome. Leo recalled seeing him and the dead woman at the neighboring table when she and Dita had taken their seats earlier. The couple had been seated close together, leaning toward each other to talk and be heard above the music.

The man’s eyes clapped onto the woman with a grimace of horror.

“Gabriela?” He took in the blank stare of her eyes just as Leo had. “No! Gabriela!” The man threw himself to the floor and gathered her into his arms as he grated out a bellow of grief. Leo’s heart clenched, and gooseflesh tightened her skin.

“Someone, call for the police!” a woman in the crowd cried out.

A loud murmur rustled through the room, and several distressed onlookers fled at the mention of the police being summoned. Another man pushed his way into the center of the circle. Eddie Bloom removed his hat, a dark purple bowler to match his suit, and stared at the scene. “I won’t have bobbies in my place.”

Mr. Bloom signaled to a few of his waitstaff and pulled them aside, away from the commotion and the man cradling the woman’s limp figure. Leo wriggled free of Dita’s hand, which had been gripping her elbow, and followed the club owner through the crowd. She caught up to him as he began giving instructions to his waiters to clear the club.

“Mr. Bloom,” Leo interrupted. “A woman is dead. You must summon the police.”

He cocked his head. “This is my establishment, Miss Spencer. I give the orders here, not you.”

Leo jerked back an inch. He knew her by name? Though she wondered how, right then, it wasn’t her main concern.

“From the vomitus on the floor and the leaking blood, which is evidence of ruptured capillaries, it looks to have been an acute poisoning. If you refuse to call for the police, they will think you have something to hide, Mr. Bloom.”

The waiters gaped at Leo’s defiance, and Eddie Bloom hitched his chin to peer down his nose at her. Holding the pause a moment longer, he then snapped his fingers toward one of his uniformed waiters. “Go find a sodding constable,” he barked.