Page 11 of Method of Revenge (Spencer & Reid Mysteries #2)
Chapter Eleven
L eo placed the small, green enamel cup in front of Miss Geary. The black tea inside sent up a cloud of steam. The secretary had been pulling a thick folder from one of Mr. Henderson’s office shelves when Jasper announced Miss Morris had been killed. The folder had slapped onto the floor, papers spilling free, as the secretary, already frazzled by her employer’s curt demands, lost her grip. Her palms had flown to her cheeks, her shock unchecked. Such a strong reaction could only mean one thing—she’d been close to Regina Morris. Perhaps even a friend.
Jasper had quickly explained about the young woman found dead, killed by a severe blow to the skull, roughly four weeks ago. They’d been unable to identify her and thus, unable to arrest a suspect, but thanks to the photograph in the frame, he could now reopen the case. “I’m going to need to speak to your son,” he’d told Mr. Henderson.
Even more inflamed than before, the man stormed from his office. Dita had immediately gone to help Miss Geary, who was crouching to pick up the contents of the dropped folder. Pausing next to Leo’s shoulder, Jasper had leaned close, lowering his mouth to her ear. “The secretary,” he’d whispered. With a prickling down her back and along her scalp, she’d nodded in understanding.
As Jasper followed Mr. Henderson from the office, Leo asked Miss Geary if the factory had a canteen where she might be able to sit and have a cup of tea to calm her. With trembling hands, the woman gave the recovered folder to Dita and led them deeper into the building. The workers had a lunchroom near the production floor, where the drone of machines could be heard printing wallpaper. The tangy, mixed odors of oil, smoke, and paint threatened to make Leo’s head dizzy as they took seats at one of the four long wooden tables in the room. A hatch in the wall opened to a small kitchen, where Leo purchased a pot of tea for the three of them from an unsmiling older woman in a headscarf.
Now, Miss Geary held the cup between her palms and breathed evenly. “Yes, I knew Regina. Not very well, but we were friendly,” she said, answering the first of Leo’s questions.
Her inquiries were lined up, ready to fly, and yet Leo knew she was in a precarious spot. Jasper expected her to come away with helpful information from Miss Geary; if she succeeded, perhaps he would be less inclined to complain and stonewall her whenever she offered to lend a hand. That meant she needed to proceed with patience and care.
“You worked with her for two years?” Leo asked, recalling the length of time Mr. Henderson said Miss Morris had been employed.
“No, just these last six months that I’ve been here.”
Dita crossed her arms over the complaints folder and listened intently, her dark brown eyes meeting Leo’s with awareness. She knew what Leo was doing.
“She left her position rather abruptly,” Dita commented. “It must have surprised you.”
“It surprised everyone,” Miss Geary replied. “Mr. Henderson, especially. The younger, I mean. David.”
“Do you think it had to do with Gabriela winning Mr. Carter’s affections?” Leo asked, thinking of the element in the Jane Doe case that had most affected Jasper: she’d been with child. Leo hadn’t understood why he’d been so disturbed by this finding; they’d both seen their share of dead children. Including babies. It was always heartbreaking, and yet this Jane Doe had shaken him more deeply when he’d come to view the body and discuss the autopsy findings.
Miss Geary nodded. “It must have. I didn’t realize Regina had been seeing one of the Carters, but when rumors struck up that Gabriela had ended her engagement and was marrying Andrew Carter instead…well, Regina was inconsolable.”
Taking into consideration the approximate gestation of the unborn baby—between thirteen and fifteen weeks at postmortem—it was possible Andrew Carter had been the father. Had Regina only discovered she was expecting after he’d become engaged to another woman? It would be a strong motive for wanting to be rid of Gabriela—but as she had been dead for over a month now, Regina could not have poisoned her, nor could she have been the woman in the hooded cloak at Striker’s.
“I should tell you that he was here,” Miss Geary sighed resignedly. “Yesterday, in fact.”
Leo blinked. “Mr. Carter was here?”
At her nod, a spate of cold dread spiraled from Leo’s chest down into her stomach. Just the thought of Andrew Carter seemed to affect her with an uneasy chill.
“He asked to see Regina,” Miss Geary said. “I told him she quit a month ago, but he didn’t believe me. I finally had to ask Mr. Henderson—David, that is—to come confirm it. Only then did he leave.”
Leo bit the inside of her cheek. As she and Jasper had, Mr. Carter must have believed Regina was the woman who’d sat with his wife at Striker’s. If he was searching for her, he didn’t yet know she was dead.
“Miss Geary,” Leo said, inching forward with a question, afraid of revealing too much, but also of holding back. “Regina was…in the family way,” she said softly, aware that there were other factory workers seated at the tables around them: a few men in greasy coveralls, and three women in utilitarian dresses and patterned kerchiefs tied up in their hair to keep the strands safely tucked away from spinning machine parts.
Miss Geary’s expression of astonishment, then another one of sadness, were genuine. She hadn’t known. “Oh, no. Oh, how awful.” She covered her mouth with quivering fingers, her nails trimmed short, her knuckles chapped.
Dita turned to Leo. “You said she wasn’t very visibly pregnant?”
She’d mentioned the Jane Doe to Dita in passing after the corpse first arrived in the morgue, but as usual, her friend couldn’t stand to hear about dead people—she found it almost as nauseating as seeing them in person. So, it was a bit surprising to know Dita had remembered this detail.
“Yes, why?”
“I just wonder…what if Miss Morris left her position so swiftly because she’d started to notice herself increasing and feared she couldn’t hide it for much longer? She might have gone to stay with family until after the baby was born.” The suggestion made sense. Her family might not have taken the news well.
“Did she have any relatives that you know of?” Leo asked Miss Geary. “Anyone she could have turned to?”
The woman hadn’t yet sipped her tea; she just continued to hold it, letting it warm her hands. They no longer shook, at least. “She never mentioned anyone.”
“Did she ever mention a beau of any sort?” Leo asked. Miss Geary had only said she didn’t know Regina had been courting a Carter, not that she hadn’t been courting at all.
When the secretary hesitated, Leo and Dita exchanged a glance. Dita, whom Leo could admit was much warmer and reassuring than she herself, put a gentle hand on Miss Geary’s shoulder.
“Anything you tell us will be in confidence,” she said. “We only want to help Inspector Reid solve Regina’s murder.”
“Are you quite positive it was murder?” Miss Geary lowered her voice with a surreptitious look over her shoulder. “People can fall, crack their skulls…”
“She was bludgeoned with a heavy object,” Leo said. “A mallet, most likely.”
The secretary’s coloring leeched entirely from her face, and Leo realized too late that she had been too blunt. Though Miss Geary already had dark circles under her eyes and lines bracketing her mouth, she appeared more aged as she took in this revelation. She nodded jerkily.
“I…I could have been imagining it, but I noticed Mr. Henderson—David—had become more…solicitous toward Regina since the autumn.”
Leo sat up, alert. “Before or after Gabriela announced her engagement to Mr. Carter?”
Miss Geary twisted her lips, as though trying to recall the exact timing. “Before. Shortly before.”
“Solicitous in what way?” Dita asked.
Miss Geary waited to reply until a pair of women in canvas pinafores streaked with colorful paint had passed behind them. “A vase on her desk was filled with a new bouquet twice a week, sometimes more often. It was David. I saw him one morning refreshing the vase with new flowers. He’d blushed, as though I’d caught him out. And then there were the looks they shared. Smiles.” She shrugged. “I didn’t ask Regina because I didn’t want to know the truth. He’s a married man, you see.”
Leo did see. If David Henderson had come to suspect Regina was carrying his child, he might have wanted to eliminate the inconvenient problem. She supposed his wife might have felt the same way, if she’d found out about the affair. Right then, Jasper was questioning the man. Leo trusted he would come to the same suspicion.
As if her thoughts had summoned him, the detective inspector appeared in the canteen entrance. Aggravation tensed the corners of his mouth. Leo thanked Miss Geary for her time, and when they rejoined Jasper, he wasted no time leaving the factory.
“The interview with the younger Mr. Henderson didn’t go well, I assume?” Leo asked as they walked along the street toward a cab stand.
Jasper whisked off his bowler and ran a hand through his golden hair. “He seemed genuinely upset, and when I informed him about the baby, his legs went out from underneath him. The man all but toppled into his chair.”
“They were having an affair,” Leo said.
“Miss Geary suspected it,” Dita added. She’d brought the complaints folder upon their exit and now handed it to Jasper.
He nodded. “I figured as much and pressed him, but he wouldn’t admit to anything.”
“Well, now we know Regina Morris couldn’t have been the woman in the hooded cloak I followed at Striker’s,” Leo said. No other theories of who it could have been came to mind either.
What a tangle this case had become. Had the Inspector still been alive, Leo would have brought all the pieces to him to sort through with her. Frustration had been an emotion that always eluded Gregory Reid, even in the most perplexing of cases, or ones that never gave answers or resolutions. He would remove all emotion completely, it seemed, instead treating the elements like an arithmetic equation that had been disarranged and in need of reordering. She could hear his voice now, musing to himself, “Are these two separate cases, or are they one?”
“Did you show David Henderson that awful photograph?” Dita asked Jasper. He nodded.
“Like everyone else, he couldn’t imagine why his sister had it with her or why anyone would have given it to her.”
They arrived at the cab stand, where two hansoms waited for hire. Jasper opened the door to one and handed up Dita. He paused before extending his hand to Leo.
“I won’t be traveling back with you. Since both victims were connected to the wallpaper factory and to Andrew Carter, I need to speak to him again.” His brow crinkled in distaste. “I’ll take another cab to his address.”
He rolled his shoulders and neck as though trying to stretch out a knotted muscle. Unlike the Inspector, Jasper often experienced the emotion of frustration. However, it usually seemed to spur him on rather than defeat him.
She gestured toward the folder in his hand. “May I read the complaints file? I don’t know if it will help, but I can memorize them and then summarize the findings.”
He peered at the folder for a long moment, deliberating. Then, he handed it to her. “I suppose there’s no harm in it.”
Leo held the complaints file to her chest, somewhat stunned that Jasper had agreed to her request, as he helped her into the cab. He told the driver to take them to Scotland Yard, then nodded in parting as they merged into traffic.
“Oh, good, he isn’t coming with us,” Dita said.
Leo gaped at her. “I know he can be disagreeable, but I didn’t think his behavior was overly terrible today.”
“That’s not what I meant,” she replied while reaching into her cloak pocket. “I wanted the chance to speak to you alone.” She withdrew a folded-up newspaper. “My father brought it home last night. He wasn’t sure if you’d seen it yet.”
Intrigued, Leo took the newspaper when Dita extended it. It was this week’s Illustrated Police News . She had read the tabloid more devotedly when the Inspector had been alive, as it was delivered every week on subscription. Lately, however, she hadn’t paid it much attention.
“Page three,” Dita advised, and Leo, now concerned, turned to it.
Her fingers tightened, clamping the edges of the paper when she saw her own face, drawn in black ink, staring out at her. She inhaled the caption and the headline, and then the two small columns of text describing who she was, what had happened to her family, and how she was now working in a city morgue. Even that she had assisted in an investigation at Scotland Yard.
“Who wrote this?” Leo asked, out of breath even though she sat perfectly still.
“It doesn’t say,” Dita said. “But whoever wrote it knows you worked with Inspector Reid on a case.”
The article didn’t name Jasper, and thankfully, it also did not name the city morgue where she worked. There were at least a dozen in London.
Leo folded the newspaper, her mind reeling. “I suppose there are many people who know about me, and police officers accept bribes from newspapers all the time to provide secrets and details about cases, but…who would do this?”
Someone had observed her closely enough to draw her likeness and that made her uneasy. Not to mention they’d also dragged her most profound tragedy back into the limelight. And for what purpose?
She tried to hand the paper back to Dita, but her friend indicated for her to keep it. Leo would, if only to burn it.
She reassessed the sutures she’d placed in Mr. Howard Barnston’s chest and nodded in approval. Leo had been careful to duplicate her uncle’s usual stitching with the black catgut, each suture placed a half inch apart. It was the first time since Mr. Higgins’s arrival that she’d been able to assist Claude, and as she closed the postmortem incision, she found she’d missed the quiet focus the procedure required.
Claude had determined none of the four stab wounds inflicted upon Mr. Barnston’s abdomen and chest had been the cause of death. They’d all missed vital organs and arteries, though they would have most likely been fatal if left untreated. Rather, the blow to the top of the victim’s cranium, which had crushed his skull, had been what killed him. The perpetrator had already been taken into custody, as he’d gone into a pub afterward and bragged about the deed to the bartender loud enough for several people to hear and become concerned.
If only Regina Morris’s bludgeoning could have been so easily solved.
Satisfied with her work, Leo re-covered the dead man with a sheet. Mr. Higgins had taken his sullen self from the morgue an hour earlier than usual, claiming indigestion, and once he’d gone, Claude had sunk into a chair in the back room, exhausted. He’d rubbed his hands and wrists.
“They’re worse than usual today,” he commented, his disappointment in his palsy more bitter than usual. It was on the tip of her tongue to bring up her idea of applying to Hogarth and Tipson and to suggest they consider telling the deputy coroner that the time had come for Claude to retire. But when she parted her lips, she wound up saying that she would take care of things for the rest of the day, if he wished to rest. He stood and, with a sad nod, prepared to return home.
To make sure no one entered the morgue while she was at work on Mr. Barnston, as had happened back in January when a criminal broke into the morgue and found Leo suturing a cadaver, she locked the front and back doors. They were still locked at six o’clock when she was at the sink, washing and sterilizing the basins Claude used earlier to hold Mr. Barnston’s internal organs. Unlike when she was suturing, Leo could let her mind wander as she sterilized the equipment with phenol, the sweet, rotten-fruit odor something she’d become accustomed to.
Immediately, her thoughts turned to the article Dita had shown her that morning. Just as she’d intended, upon her return to the morgue, Leo fed the weekly to the cottage range in the corner of the back office. Her uncle didn’t read the Illustrated Police News , and she didn’t want him to see it. The humiliation of being exposed as an oddity on the pages of one of the city’s most popular publications wasn’t something she wished to discuss with anyone. It had to be why she’d fielded even more curious glances at the Yard over the last few days. Had Jasper seen it?
She scrubbed harder at a white enamel-glazed basin as heat filled her cheeks and lit the tips of her ears. There wasn’t anything she could do about it now, she supposed, and dwelling on it would only tie her up in knots.
Leo forced it from her mind and turned instead to the file of complaints against Henderson any opportunity to see her aunt happy was reassuring, especially these days.
“Inspector Reid has invited us to dine with him tonight,” Claude explained to his wife.
“Oh, dear me,” Flora said, her faded blue eyes glittering. “How lovely.”
“I have a cab waiting,” Jasper said, taking down Leo’s coat from the stand. He held it up, indicating that he meant to help her into it. She inserted her arms, the assistance peculiar yet comforting.
“This isn’t necessary,” she whispered while Claude helped Flora into her coat and hat. “I’m not totally inept in the kitchen.”
“Am I to believe you would prefer your own cooking to Mrs. Zhao’s?”
Leo relented. “Very well, no.”
He opened the door. “Besides, you can tell me over dinner what you found in that complaints file.”
“That is hardly appropriate dinner conversation.” Especially the story about the Nelsons’ poor children.
“All right then, we’ll wait until after dinner, over a cherry cordial,” he said. She peered at him, now utterly confounded. A mischievous smile tucked the corner of his mouth. “Don’t worry, I still can’t stand the stuff. I’ll be drinking whisky.”
Leo exited the house after Claude and Flora, smothering a grin. “You know, you can be rather charming when you aren’t being such a scowling bear.”