Page 2 of Method of Revenge
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 theInspector 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.
