Page 10 of Method of Revenge
Reluctantly, she handed the slim folder to the constable. He plucked it away, grinning smugly. He then had the audacity to open it. “This about the Carter murder?”
“I’m quite sure you aren’t authorized to look at that report.”
He scoffed at her reprimand and continued to peer at the papers inside the folder. “Mr. Henderson was in this morning, wanting to know the cause of his daughter’s death. He wasn’t pleased at all that the coroner was taking so long.”
Leo dismissed the jab at her uncle. “Henderson?”
The name sparked a memory. It took a few moments, but her mind brought it forward at last. A newspaper article. A gossip column.
“Gabriela Carter’s maiden name was Henderson?” she asked.
Wiley scowled at her. “What about it?”
Leo smiled sweetly at him; she always enjoyed the moment they could part ways. “Thank you, constable. You’ve been most helpful.”
He looked offended. “I have?”
“Yes, and please, do see a doctor about that blue tinge around your mouth,” she called over her shoulder as she left the department. “I see it all the time at the morgue. A respiratory malfunction, if I recall. Extremely worrisome.”
She resisted the temptation to look back, but she was almost certain Wiley would be seeking out a mirror in a panic to check his mouth. Jasper would have chastised her for teasing the man, but she put the unpalatable Constable Wiley to the back of her mind as she made her way from the Yard.
Leo needed to get to Fleet Street before the newspapers closed their offices for the day. There was an article she needed to find.
Chapter Four
The inside of Eddie Bloom’s club on Striker’s Wharf gave off a different atmosphere during the day than it did at night. Jasper and Detective Sergeant Roy Lewis entered the club after showing their warrant cards to the doorman, a meaty fellow with forearms the circumference of Jasper’s thighs. Without the brume of cigar and cigarette smoke, the riotous hum of voices and music, and the gasoliers casting everything in a hazy golden glow, Striker’s had a dejected, nearly forgotten quality to it.
Chairs had been flipped up and hung on the edges of the tables, but there were several men at the bar, Eddie Bloom among them. Bloom’s boys ran rackets all along the Lambeth wharves, mostly in stolen goods, protection, and of course, women. They weren’t as well known for violence as the East Rips were, but they were still criminals.
Bloom and his men turned their attention toward Jasper and Lewis as they approached the bar. Bloom raked them with an assessing gaze. Although there was no reason for the club owner to recognize him as anyone other than an irksome policeinspector, a part of Jasper always tensed when meeting with someone from London’s underbelly.
Before his death, Gregory Reid confessed that shortly after taking Jasper in off the streets, a woman came to him at Scotland Yard. She was looking for her young nephew, and when she’d shown the Inspector a daguerreotype, he’d recognized the street ruffian living under his own roof. After some consideration, he’d made a choice. One that had weighed heavily on him for the rest of his life. He’d transferred Jasper’s old, ratty clothes, including the rosary his grandmother had given him, to the dead body of a boy roughly the same age that had been fished out of the Thames. The bloated remains had been impossible for Jasper’s aunt, Myra, to identify, but she’d recognized the rosary. Myra had left Scotland Yard believing her nephew to be dead.
The Inspector explained that he’d known who Myra’s husband was—whathe was—and that he hadn’t wanted to send Jasper back to him. He’d asked for Jasper’s forgiveness, but there had been nothing to forgive. Jasper had left his previous life willingly, for damn good reasons—his uncle was only one of them—and Gregory Reid had simply helped him in his endeavor.
Honestly, the Inspector’s confession lifted a weight of worry from his shoulders. After sixteen years spent wondering and worrying that someday, someone might pass him on the street and recognize him, he now knew there was nothing to fear. Everyone from his past believed he was dead.
And yet, there was still a strain of guilt Jasper felt about his former life. The Inspector had not understood everything, as he’d thought he had. There were still secrets Jasper clung to. Secrets that could sink him, even now.
He showed his warrant card to Eddie Bloom. “Detective Inspector Reid, and Detective Sergeant Lewis.”
“I remember you, copper.” Bloom leaned an elbow on the bar as he sat on a tall stool. He looked entirely at ease as his sharpgaze evaluated Lewis in a brief sweep. “Suppose you’re here about last evening’s sorry event.”
The lines around Bloom’s eyes and the barest creases bracketing his mouth put him in his mid- to late forties, but his form was athletic and trim. Without a single gray strand in his boot-black hair, he could have passed for a man in his early thirties. The other men on the stools surrounding him wore cheap suits and unfriendly glowers. The bartender wiping down glasses behind the bar looked on with interest, his expression one of marked incredulity. As if to say,Can you imagine the cheek of these two coppers coming in here?
“The sorry event is now a murder investigation. We have some questions for you and your staff,” Jasper replied, tucking his warrant card away. “Is the waiter who served the Carters here?”
Bloom jerked his chin, and the bartender took it as an order. He went through a door into a back room.
“It’s a real shame,” Bloom said, his tone ingenuine. “I heard they was newlyweds.”
Jasper ignored the commentary. “What was a Carter doing at your club, Mr. Bloom?”
“You’d have to ask him,” he replied blithely.
“I’m asking you.”
Bloom pretended to laugh, but the sound broke apart quickly. “And I’m telling you, you’ll have to ask him. I don’t pry into my patrons’ lives.”
