Page 9 of Method of Revenge (Spencer & Reid Mysteries #2)

Chapter Nine

L eo had counted on the day not ending without a visit and a verbal thrashing from Jasper. However, as the clock at the front of the house downstairs chimed the ten o’clock hour, she couldn’t deny her surprise.

He hadn’t come.

Not to the morgue after she’d left the detective department, nor to the house on Duke Street that evening. He was busy, to be sure. And she should have been relieved to have been spared one of his infuriatingly high-handed rebukes. But the truth was, she would have gritted her teeth and stomached it if it meant being able to hear what Jasper had learned from Mr. Wilkes at the Polytechnic and from Mr. Carter too.

Warm under the blanket on her bed, Leo still felt uneasy about her encounter with Gabriela’s husband earlier that day. She’d never met one of the infamous Carters in person, though she could recall how Gregory Reid had once likened the East Rips family to cockroaches. There is never just one , he’d said with a roll of his eyes. The Carter family tree ran broad and deep, with tangled roots throughout London.

Andrew, the youngest brother of the gang’s current leader, Sean, was undoubtedly a dangerous man. And yet, there had also been something slightly mesmerizing about him. Leo thought she might understand what had attracted Gabriela to him. Andrew Carter radiated power and confidence, and paired with his good looks, she imagined it could be an undeniable trifecta. Leo had been both repulsed and compelled by the man in the few minutes before Jasper had entered his office and summarily tossed her out.

She’d been so out of sorts from her encounter with him that she’d been halfway back to the morgue when she realized she’d entirely forgotten to bring the description of the John Doe to Elias Murray at the Police Gazette office. Strangely uninterested in returning to the Yard, she’d flagged a messenger boy and given him a penny to deliver it for her.

She couldn’t sleep, so she picked up one of the books on her bedside table, a volume of travel memoirs penned by the wife of an archaeologist. The trouble was, Leo was vastly more interested in what the husband might have been excavating from the ancient layers of earth than the author’s insipid descriptions of the Egyptian landscape and architecture.

A rapping on a door downstairs cut through the quiet house. Lowering the book, she slid out of bed and into her nightrobe and slippers. Halfway down the stairs, another round of knocking came, sounding more impatient this time. The visitor was at the back door, not the front. Immediately, she knew who it was. She groaned, wishing she hadn’t put her hair up in curling wrappers, which made her appear all of twelve years old instead of twenty-five.

She hurried into the kitchen before another rapping on the door woke her aunt. Flora and Claude had turned in some time ago, but by routine, Leo left a paraffin lamp lit downstairs in the kitchen. Claude never rested easily and by midnight, he’d come downstairs for some warm milk and a biscuit before returning to bed.

Leo unlatched the chain, turned the bolt on the lock, and peeled the back door open a half inch. Her stomach somehow managed to lift and dive at the same time.

“Oh, so now you decide to show up,” she said as she pulled the door open all the way. Jasper stood on the back step, his hands in his pockets, his frock coat unbuttoned.

He pressed down one brow, taking in the state of her. “Did I neglect an appointment we had tonight?”

Leo gestured for him to come inside. He carried with him a light scent of perfume and smoking tobacco. Paired with the black hat in his hand, the fine black, worsted wool suit he wore, and the silk tie speared with a silver stick pin in the center, it was obvious he’d been out that evening with either Constance Hayes or Lord Hayes, or both. She bit her tongue against asking; it wasn’t her business.

Leo closed and locked the door again, but before she could make a reply, she felt a tug on one of her curling wrappers. She slapped Jasper’s hand away and was startled when he cracked a rare, playful grin.

“Don’t tease me,” she said. “And don’t wake Flora. She’s had a difficult day.”

It seemed all her days were difficult as of late. She’d called Mrs. Boardman, her new nurse, by Leo’s mother’s name, Andromeda, for most of the day and raged incoherently as if in a one-sided argument.

She placed the kettle on the hob. “I suppose you’re here to chastise me.”

Jasper set his hat on the small wooden table, which she and Claude used for preparing meals and most nights, to sit around while eating. They rarely used the small dining room at the front of the house, preferring instead the simplicity of the kitchen.

Jasper kept his coat on and lowered himself into a chair, stretching his back into an arch as he sat. “I didn’t like finding you in my office with Andrew Carter.”

His voice was unexpectedly docile. Leo looked over her shoulder at him. “Is that all?”

“Isn’t it enough? You asked him questions about the case. That is my job, not yours. You work in a morgue. You type reports. You do not question suspects in a murder investigation.”

Now, that sounded more like his usual exasperation. She returned to scooping tight, folded leaves into the teapot and poured in hot water to steep.

“Yes, well, I’m not certain how much longer Claude and I will be at the morgue,” she said as she pulled out a chair adjacent to his. She folded her arms on the table. “I believe Mr. Pritchard has placed this apprentice under my uncle’s training for a reason: to replace him.”

And once Claude was ejected from the morgue, Leo would no longer be welcome there either.

“Have you interacted much with him? Higgins, I mean,” Jasper asked.

“Why do you ask that?”

He shook his head. “Just curious. When I saw him, he seemed uninterested in working at a morgue.”

She watched him for a moment, skeptical. Jasper wasn’t ever just curious. There was always some larger purpose for any inquiry he made. “I think Mr. Higgins is uninterested in working anywhere. Not that the chief coroner will care. The man is young and a family friend.”

Mr. Pritchard, who oversaw several of the city’s mortuaries, would support Chief Coroner Giles’s appointment of Higgins in a heartbeat.

“What will you do if he takes over?” Jasper asked. She appreciated that he didn’t try to tell her all would be well or that she was worrying for no reason.

“I’m not sure. I suppose I could apply to a funeral service like Hogarth and Tipson.” Not being squeamish with the dead was a prerequisite she could meet, though she worried she might lack the necessary compassion and care for family members of the newly deceased. And then there would be the scent of white lilies to contend with. Funeral services were often overrun with them, and their sickly-sweet fragrance never failed to bring her back to the day her family had been interred at All Saints.

Jasper leaned forward, his elbows resting on the table. “You could be a matron at the Yard like Miss Brooks— if you could keep your nose out of the detective department.”

She sent him a withering look. Becoming a matron was something she’d considered before, but it wouldn’t work. “I’ve no interest in guarding women. And I’ve no ability with children. Dita tells me about her days, and I can’t blame her for looking forward to giving up her post.”

Jasper spun the empty teacup on its saucer before him. “She is leaving?”

“Not right away. But soon. She wants to marry and start a family.”

Leo kept her lips sealed that Dita’s prospective husband was PC Lloyd. Jasper wouldn’t intend to say anything, but one slip, and Dita would be mortified.

Jasper kept spinning his teacup absentmindedly. Leo picked up the teapot; the leaves had brewed long enough, and besides, he was driving her mad with his fiddling.

“You could do that too,” he said.

Leo placed a mesh strainer over his cup and poured. “Do what?”

“Marry.”

Her wrist jerked involuntarily, and she nearly spilled the tea. She pulled the teapot back and stared at him. “I told you not to tease me.”

“I’m not teasing.”

She sighed and poured her cup next. “It’s not in the cards for me.”

He lifted his cup but didn’t sip. “Why not?”

“Because I’m odd. You already know that,” she replied, perhaps a touch more aggressively than was warranted. Leo lowered her voice. “I’m more comfortable around the dead than the living, and men don’t like that in a lady, or so I’m told.”

Jasper made no comment. Likely because he knew it was true.

“You’re supposed to be shouting at me,” she said, wanting to change the subject.

“I can’t shout at someone wearing her hair the way you are.”

She lowered her teacup to glare at him and found him smiling again. Two grins in one night? She wondered what was going on with him.

“They are curling wrappers, and most women wear them to bed. Now, tell me what Mr. Carter said after you threw me out.”

He leaned back in his chair and sipped his tea. “I shouldn’t say.”

“But you’re going to anyway?”

Jasper shook his head, but it was in defeat, not defiance. “He said the waiter who delivered the first drink to Gabriela—the one that had the arsenic in it—announced that it was compliments of Eddie Bloom.”

“But you don’t think Mr. Bloom sent it over,” she guessed.

“No. Killing the wife of someone in an opposing gang would be reckless. Bloom is scum, but he isn’t stupid. We questioned all of Bloom’s waiters, but none of them knew who this man was.”

“He was posing as a waiter in uniform?” Leo asked.

Jasper canted his head as if to say yes, probably.

“You don’t suspect Mr. Carter, do you?” Leo hadn’t. Not really. But she was suspicious of the meeting that had called him away from the table. Then again, if the arsenic was in Gabriela’s first drink, the woman who came to sit with her arrived after she’d been poisoned.

“No.” Jasper set his cup on its saucer. His hand looked too big for the delicate bone china. “I can’t think of what he’d stand to gain by it. Not money, as she didn’t have a life insurance policy attached to her. Plus, he’s taken it upon himself to hunt the killer.”

“I suspected that,” Leo said. “He’s quite intimidating, isn’t he?”

It was the wrong thing to say. Jasper’s expression darkened. “He’ll do whatever it takes to get what he wants. I don’t want him believing you know more than you do.”

She adjusted her position in the chair, her legs beginning to feel a bit tingly.

“And Mr. Wilkes? Do you suspect him at all?” she asked, again to change the topic and erase his baleful expression.

“I don’t.” He then explained how Lawrence Wilkes had met Gabriela and how he’d lost her to Andrew Carter. As she listened to the sorry tale, Leo reached for the top hat Jasper had set on the table between them. She picked it up, running her fingers along the brushed midnight-black felt of the brim.

“It’s odd, don’t you think,” Leo said, tracing the edges of his hat, “that Mr. Wilkes said arsenic was a contested chemical being used in Mr. Henderson’s wallpaper pigments, and yet that is also how Gabriela died?”

“It might not be odd at all,” Jasper replied. “Regina Morris made the mistake of introducing Gabriela to her beau. He threw over Regina, and she was upset enough to seek out Wilkes, wanting to commiserate. She was distraught. And working at the factory, she would’ve had access to the chemical.”

Leo pictured the poor young woman, tossed aside like she was nothing. She felt sorry for her. But she knew why Jasper had now focused on her.

“You think she was the woman in the hooded cloak at Striker’s Wharf.”

He nodded, then sat forward, leaning his elbows on the table again. “Don’t let this go to your head, Leo, but I think it would be permissible for you to come with me to Henderson & Son Manufacturing tomorrow when I speak to Miss Morris. I want to know if you recognize her from the club.”

Even with his plea not to let it go to her head, elation lit through her at the invitation. She then deflated a little. “I didn’t see her face. Dita saw her more fully than I did.”

“Miss Brooks can come with us,” he replied.

Above their heads, a floorboard creaked in Flora and Claude’s room. At the sound, Jasper stood. He eyed his hat, still in Leo’s hands.

She stood and handed it over. “It’s quite a nice hat.”

“Thank you,” he said, without putting it on.

“Were you out dining with Miss Hayes?”

Jasper took a long breath, seeming uncomfortable with the question.

“Forgive me, I shouldn’t have asked.” Leo started away from the table, wishing she’d held her tongue. He always grumbled when she brought up Constance.

Jasper caught her wrist as she passed him. The surprising touch brought her to a stop, though more than just her feet went still. Everything inside her went quiet too.

“I’m not upset you asked.” His fingers flexed lightly around her wrist. They were warm and unexpectedly coarse. “It just wasn’t an enjoyable dinner.”

“Oh?” Leo’s interest in what had happened piqued as Jasper frowned. She grew increasingly aware of his hand on her wrist as he continued to hold it.

“It’s nothing,” he said after a moment. His grip lightened, then let go. As her arm fell back to her side, the pads of his fingertips brushed past her palm. A bewildering shiver raced along her spine.

Jasper held her gaze, and she wondered if he’d witnessed the shudder. But then, he moved past her. “I’ll go out through the back.”

It would, after all, be unseemly for a gentleman to enter or leave through the front door at so late an hour and with Leo in her nightrobe too. She suddenly felt discomfited at having had tea with Jasper while wearing her night things. And her hair in wrappers, for heaven’s sake!

“I’ll come around tomorrow at nine o’clock,” he said as he opened the kitchen door, which emptied into a narrow lane used for deliveries.

“Goodnight,” she said, but he’d already closed the door behind him.