Page 18 of Method of Revenge (Spencer & Reid Mysteries #2)

Chapter Eighteen

“ L eo!”

The voice reached through the dark, past a persistent chiming in her ears. Jasper . She moved, and a splinter of pain radiated down her torso and along her ribs.

“Leo, goddamn it.” His voice drew closer and became clearer, and then all at once, the darkness dispersed. Leo opened her eyes and pushed up from the floor, where she’d been laying. A hand gripped her shoulder as she slid her feet underneath her.

Debris rolled off her skirt to the floor as Jasper helped pull her up. Plaster from the ceiling had come down in chunks, and dust lingered in the air. She could smell smoke. Something was burning.

He looked her over. “Are you badly injured?”

She shook her head and coughed as dust particles shuttled down her throat. Jasper’s hat was gone, and his hair hung over his brow, the golden strands coated with white. Blood streaked his temple, and he cradled his left arm to his chest. “You’re hurt,” she said.

He winced but shook his head. “I’m fine. We need to get out of here.”

Looking around, her hearing still muffled, she saw that Andrew Carter and his two men were already gone. David Henderson was crawling out from behind his desk, trying to stand; and Lewis was still on the floor, unmoving. Jasper went to his side.

“Lewis?” he said loudly. “Roy, wake up.”

The detective sergeant moaned and twitched. Leo exhaled, relieved he was still alive. Jasper tried to lift him but grunted in pain.

“You are hurt,” she said. Then, at the odd drooping of his left arm, she guessed, “Your shoulder is dislocated?”

“I’ll take care of it later. We need to leave the building. It can’t be stable.”

Leo winced at the ache in her ribs as she helped Lewis to his feet. He swayed, and Jasper shored him up.

David was attempting to pull himself up from the floor while gripping his bloody head. “Good God, what was that?”

“Dynamite,” Leo replied as she moved to help him stand. “Mrs. Nelson was leaving the building late last night, not entering it, when she was attacked. She’d already planted the bomb. She confessed everything in her letter, even her husband’s deeds.”

And then, she’d intended to end her own life. Leo suspected, however, that her husband had beat her to it.

David leaned heavily against her, one of his eyes swollen to a grotesque state, and blood washing over his cheek. “This factory is filled with flammable polymers and chemicals,” he said, stumbling over his words. “There could be another explosion.”

Jasper grunted again in pain as he positioned one of Lewis’s arms over his uninjured shoulder. “Go, Leo,” he commanded, his voice strained.

With David’s considerable weight leaning against her, she staggered out of the debris-strewn office. In the corridor, a wall had collapsed, and parts of the ceiling had come down. The sharp scent of smoke filled the air. Something was on fire within the building—just as Mrs. Nelson had intended.

The destruction of the wallpaper factory had been Evelyn’s sole desire, while her husband had chosen another method of revenge. From her confession letter, Leo learned they’d drifted apart for months while she had worked to acquire dynamite and assemble a timed bomb, and he had planned to hurt Jack Henderson as Terrence had been hurt—with his children’s deaths. But Mrs. Nelson hadn’t intended to kill anyone. She’d joined Henderson pails of water were being drawn up from the nearby Basin and rushed to the factory to douse the fire. She and Jasper trundled Lewis and David into one of the factory’s wagons. Then Jasper took the reins.

“You’ve one good arm, and you’re bleeding,” Leo said, stealing the reins from his hands as she sat on the driver’s bench beside him. “I will drive.”

“But you’re terrible at it,” he grumbled.

She balked. “The Inspector taught me, and he said I was marvelous.”

Jasper chuffed a laugh. “Of course, he did. When did he ever discourage you from anything? Even the things you were bad at?”

Leo tried to think of an example and failed. “It doesn’t matter. I’m still driving.”

He gave in to her demand, cradling his still sore arm as she directed the pair of horses toward the hospital. The drive wasn’t far, just off Whitechapel Road, and along the way, Lewis began to speak and think more clearly.

“We should have Henderson guarded. At least until Nelson is found and arrested,” he said, pressing a hand to the back of his head. His palm came away wet with blood.

“I don’t need a guard,” David said, his words slurred, as though he’d partaken in too many pints of ale at a pub.

“Your sister’s killer still wants you dead,” Leo reminded him. “I should think you’d want a phalanx of guards.”

He didn’t argue, though that might have been because he’d dropped into unconsciousness again.

While she drove, Jasper read the confession Leo had found in Mrs. Nelson’s bodice. Once he finished it, he folded the paper, almost reverently, and put it away in his pocket. His forehead continued to bead with sweat, even though it was cold, and they were in an open wagon. His coloring paled, then flushed, and she worried he was losing too much blood. He wouldn’t want her to fuss though, so she kept her lips sealed until they arrived at the hospital and entered the front doors.

“You need to see a doctor,” she told him as David and Lewis were being collected for treatment.

“I’m fine,” he replied, rolling his shoulder. “See? You set my arm.”

“No, you’re not fine. Your coat is gashed open, and you’re bleeding through your shirt.” She pulled aside his coat collar, revealing the blood-soaked linen.

“Leo—” He took her wrist and held it down. But an eagle-eyed nurse had seen the blood, and she hastened forward with a wheelchair.

“All right, I give up. I’ll go. But I am not sitting in that.” He left the lobby on foot with the nurse.

Leo trailed them at a distance. Her only injury was a few bruised ribs; at worst, they may have been broken, but there was nothing to be done except to bind them tightly, and she could attend to that herself once she was home. The nurse showed Jasper down a wide corridor, with curtains hanging to enclose the individual beds.

As Leo waited, she considered Mrs. Nelson’s confession letter and the frustrated sadness she’d felt while reading it. The bereft mother had intended to bring public attention to the dangers of the toxins used in wallpaper, and yet instead, her husband had taken the settlement to pay off debts, drink, and gamble heavily. By signing the contract of silence, Mr. Nelson had muffled his wife. After that, she’d felt her only option had been to enact a bolder protest.

Leo didn’t know what it was to have a child or to lose one. It would not be the same as losing a brother or sister, or a mother or father. This, she knew instinctively. Her grief over the Inspector’s death was also a different breed than the anguish Mrs. Nelson must have endured with the loss of her children.

Leo’s family had been taken from her, but unlike Evelyn Nelson, she had never learned who’d killed them. A part of her didn’t want to know. What would she do with that information? How could she possibly avenge them? Would she be as single-minded as Evelyn had been in her plans for vengeance? Perhaps. For that reason alone, Leo could not entirely condemn the poor woman. And though he would likely never say as much, she suspected by the careful refolding of Evelyn’s letter that Jasper felt much the same way.

She’d settled into a chair in the corridor, her eyes tracing the checked pattern of black and white floor tiles. She didn’t know what made her glance up. Some intuition, maybe. When she did, a doctor was passing by. He wore a white, smocked coat as he walked briskly past her and down the corridor. His profile was only visible for a split second, but recognition fired through her brain. Leo sat straight up, watching the man as he carried on toward the other end of the long corridor. His doctor’s coat didn’t quite fit his broad shoulders; the material pulled between his expansive shoulder blades.

Her heart hammering, she shot to her feet and reached for the curtain enclosing the space into which Jasper had been shown. Her breathing was ragged as she yanked the curtain aside.

Seated on the bed, his shirt discarded next to him, Jasper leaned forward, elbows on his knees. The nurse was sponging dried blood from a long gash that was drawn across his shoulder and upper back. He sat straight up, twisting to glance at Leo.

“Miss, please wait outside,” the matronly woman said sternly.

Jasper reached for his shirt and stood from the bed simultaneously. “What’s wrong?” he asked, ignoring the nurse’s protests.

Stripped to his waist, Leo received a generous view of his bare chest and abdomen. She blinked, momentarily startled. He gingerly slid his arms into his shirt sleeves and brought the panels together.

“Leo?” he pressed, buttoning as he waited for her tongue to unknot.

“Mr. Nelson,” she blurted. “He’s here.”

He went still, buttons forgotten. “Where?”

Leo stepped back out into the corridor and pointed. “That way. He’s wearing a white doctor’s coat.”

Jasper tore past her and stared in the direction she’d indicated. Mr. Nelson was no longer in sight. “He’s after David Henderson,” he said and, with his shirt still unbuttoned and untucked, began to run along the hall, ripping open curtains as he went. Leo fell into step alongside him, taking the right-hand side of the corridor, while he took the left, both of them flinging open any of the drawn privacy curtains and receiving gasps and startled admonishments as they went.

But then, as Leo swung the next curtain aside, she jolted to a stop.

David Henderson, his head and eyes bandaged with linen, was seated on a hospital cot. A thick-set doctor was helping him to grasp a drinking glass and raise it to his lips.

“Don’t drink that!” Leo shouted.

Terrence Nelson swung toward her, his eyes ablaze with determination.

“The water is poisoned,” she said.

David, blinded by the linen over his eyes, tried to pull the glass from his mouth, but Mr. Nelson fought him, attempting to force it up to his lips. Leo shot forward despite knowing she was utterly unqualified to fight a man as large and burly as Mr. Nelson. She only knew she had to help David somehow.

Thankfully, Jasper rushed into the cordoned-off space just then and barreled past her, straight into Mr. Nelson. The impact was enough to dislodge the glass from his hand. Water spilled as the glass fell to the floor, David frantically wiping his lips and face where the water had touched.

Jasper tackled Mr. Nelson, but the brawny man pushed back, punching Jasper in the abdomen, then the side of the head. Their arms locked, they staggered into the freestanding framed curtain, crashed through it, and tumbled into the neighboring bed space. The frame tipped over, and Jasper and Mr. Nelson fell to the floor with it. Mr. Nelson, however, rolled to his side and leapt up with more agility than he looked to possess. His escape route was clear, and the frightened doctors and nurses gathering in the hall didn’t look to be interested in stopping him.

Next to Leo, a steel cart on wheels held scissors, gauze, and other medical instruments. She grabbed the edge of it and launched it in front of him just as he started running. The cart and its contents went sailing, but after an initial stumble, Mr. Nelson stayed on his feet. The obstacle had provided enough of a delay, however, for Jasper to get to his feet and tackle him again, throwing Mr. Nelson forward and off-balance. He fell to the floor with a thud, and Jasper delivered two blows to the side of the ironmonger’s head before digging his knee into the middle of his back. It wouldn’t matter how large or powerful Mr. Nelson was—with enough acute pressure to his lumbar region, he’d be paralyzed by pain.

“Cuffs, Leo! My coat,” Jasper shouted.

Running back to the curtained space where he’d been receiving treatment felt more like she was wading through a river of honey. But when she picked up Jasper’s coat and holster strap, the Webley still in place, and hurried back to the commotion in the corridor, she found Mr. Nelson still pinned to the floor. She pulled the handcuffs from a coat pocket.

“Terrence Nelson, you’re under arrest for the murders of Regina Morris, Gabriela Carter, and Evelyn Nelson,” Jasper said, gasping for air, his own pain evident. He closed the cuffs around the man’s wrists, then sat back on his haunches, breathing heavily.

“I’m poisoned!” David cried from his bed, still wiping madly at his mouth.

“If you did swallow some water, it was a trace amount, not nearly enough to poison you,” Leo assured him, but then stepped aside as a nurse broke from the hovering hospital staff members, all of whom were wide-eyed with shock, and came forward to calm him.

“Guv,” Sergeant Lewis called as he staggered through the commotion to join them. “Bloody hell. Is that?—”

“Yes.” Jasper got to his feet with a deep groan. Leo’s heart squeezed at the sight of him, his shirt panels still undone, fresh blood dripping from his collarbone. He looked utterly ragged, but triumphant.

Terrence Nelson lay moaning on the tiled floor in shame and defeat, his forehead and nose pressed against it. Jasper peered down at him in disgust as he resumed buttoning his shirt.

“Doctor, is there a side exit we can take this man through?” Jasper asked once Leo had handed him his holster and coat. “I think we’ve caused enough of a scene for your other patients.”

The doctor readily agreed and gave directions to the hospital’s little-used side door. After Jasper and Lewis hoisted Mr. Nelson to his feet, the detective sergeant left to fetch the wagon and horse.

Jasper urged Mr. Nelson forward, but the larger man thrashed his shoulders as if to throw him off.

“Enough, Nelson, it’s over,” he warned.

“He deserves to die. He killed them!” he shouted, directing a hateful glare toward David Henderson, who was now gagging on a spoonful of syrup being administered to him. Ipecac, Leo presumed.

“He did not kill your children, Mr. Nelson,” she said as Jasper kept him moving. “Wallpaper colored with a poisonous green pigment did. Greed and negligence did. Your wife knew that.”

Mr. Nelson swung his head, his face glistening with sweat. “She went soft on me. She gave up.” He bared his teeth in a grimace. “She forgot what they did to our children.”

“No, she didn’t forget. She just knew killing two innocent people wouldn’t bring them back.”

“Innocent!” he roared as Jasper urged him down another corridor. “Do you know how many people, how many babies, their poisoned wallpaper has killed?”

He’d lost his mind to bitter grief, but he spoke honestly. Jack Henderson’s file of complaints and settlements contained proof of that.

“Your wife wanted to destroy the factory, but that wasn’t enough for you,” Leo said as Jasper led him to another turn, then down a flight of steps. “You wanted to inflict pain upon the man you blamed for your children’s deaths. The same pain you felt as a father.”

Recalling the names Mrs. Nelson had written in her letter, she added, “Do you think Timothy and Greta would have wanted their father to become a murderer, Mr. Nelson?”

He grated out an anguished bellow as they came to the exit. His plan, the only thing he’d likely been living for, had been thwarted. And now, he might be seeing clearly for the first time what he had truly done and how far he had truly fallen.

Leo opened the door and stood aside as Jasper pushed Mr. Nelson through and into the alley that ran alongside the hospital. The narrow lane was bordered by a tall brick wall. Lewis had not yet arrived, but Jasper took his prisoner further along the lane to wait.

Leo moved to close the exit door—but stumbled aside as it was punted open again. Alarm blared through her as Andrew Carter snatched her arm and tugged her hard against him. She struggled in his grasp, but only until the cold tip of a blade kissed the delicate skin underneath her eye.

Leo froze. From where he stood in the lane several feet away, Jasper swore.

“Let him go, Inspector,” Mr. Carter ordered, his voice a dead calm. One of his hired men exited the hospital. It was just the two of them, and apparently, they had been following them to this side exit. Leo clenched her back teeth. She and Jasper had been so intent on Mr. Nelson, they’d not even noticed their presence.

“I’m placing him under arrest, Carter. Put that knife down and release her,” Jasper said, still holding Mr. Nelson’s cuffed arms.

“That man murdered my wife. That makes him mine.”

A speeding carriage turned down the slim alley. Leo’s heart sank. It wasn’t their wagon being guided by Lewis, but Mr. Carter’s other hired man driving a covered coach.

Jasper didn’t move. “He’ll be convicted, and he’ll hang; you know he will. I’m not giving him to you. Now lower that knife.”

Mr. Carter’s grip on Leo’s upper arm intensified. A spike of pain pierced her as the blade nicked her skin. She let out a short cry before swallowing it.

“Goddamn it, stop!” Jasper shouted. The carriage rattled to a halt mere feet before it could trample him and Mr. Nelson, but Jasper had not even flinched.

Mr. Carter chuckled. “Somehow, I think you’d like to keep looking into these pretty hazel eyes, Inspector Reid. Now, step aside. You can keep the handcuffs on him, of course.”

Jasper hesitated. He clenched his jaw and met Leo’s eyes. If he did as Mr. Carter wanted, there would be hell to pay at Scotland Yard. He could not allow vigilante justice, and he could not afford to fail in this arrest.

But then, he swore under his breath again and, in a swift motion, released Terrence Nelson. Jasper held up his hands in surrender as Mr. Nelson stumbled forward. He whipped a panicked look between Mr. Carter, Jasper, and finally, the hired thug who closed in to hustle him toward the waiting carriage.

Andrew Carter urged Leo toward the carriage too, while giving Jasper a wide berth.

“Let her go, Carter. That was the deal. Now ,” he growled.

“Not to worry, Inspector. You’ve made the right choice.” Mr. Carter gave Leo a hard shove, and she nearly tripped on her unsteady legs. Jasper rushed forward, taking her arms and pulling her to him. They lurched aside as the carriage bolted forward, wheels hot, and sped away down the alley.

Her heart was racing when Jasper turned her to face him, his hand tipping up her chin. “Damn it, you’re bleeding.”

Leo shook her head, ignoring the prick of pain and a wet drop of blood rolling slowly down her cheek. “I’m fine. I’m sorry. I didn’t see him behind us?—”

“Neither did I. It isn’t your fault.” But then, he closed his eyes and backed away from her. It was as if the magnitude of what had just happened hit him full on. It hit her too. She began to tremble as Jasper raked his hands through his hair. “Christ. What am I to tell Coughlan?”

Lewis appeared at the mouth of the alley. He drove the cart and single horse toward them, oblivious to what had unfolded during his absence. Jasper had meant to take Mr. Nelson to the Yard and charge him with murder. An arrest was what Chief Coughlan had wanted. A success to make the police look good. Now, Mr. Nelson was in the hands of an East Rip.

And he would soon be dead, if he wasn’t already.