Page 35 of Method of Revenge
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’sIllustrated 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 thingsfor 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 theIllustrated 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. HadJasperseen 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 & Son Manufacturing that she’d read earlier. The stories were disturbing and heartbreaking. Everything from laborers who became ill after touching the wallpapers and then using their unwashed hands to eat, to multiple factory employees who suffered rashes, other skin lesions, and respiratory illnesses after handling the pigments and wallpapers daily. One customer, an older woman, hadbecome so ill after installing the papers in her home herself, she’d been admitted to a hospital where she’d died.
However, it was the account of two tots—a brother and a sister—who, while unsupervised, ripped down the new wallpaper in their nursery and gummed it, that had most affected Leo. The wallpaper pattern had been one of fruit, green grapes and green apples specifically, and they’d apparently wanted to taste them. Their small bodies had not been able to fight off the poisoning from the arsenic. Both children had died.
Mr. and Mrs. Terrence Nelson were the grieving parents, and their file showed Mr. Nelson accepted a lump sum payment from Henderson & Son Manufacturing to cease any further legal action. In fact, almost all the claimants were offered, and had accepted, lump sums to settle out of court.
Leo was thinking about the death portrait of the two young children propped on a rocking horse, when a knock echoed through the postmortem room.
She came to attention while drying the equipment with a linen towel and realized the late hour. Another few knocks sounded, and she traced them to the lobby door. Removing her canvas apron and hanging it on a peg, Leo checked to be sure all was in order before going to answer it. An officer in blue uniform stood on the step. He doffed his hat.
“Constable Murray,” she said, her voice high with obvious surprise at seeing the officer from thePolice Gazette.
“Miss Spencer, I didn’t know if I might find you here this late, but I thought I’d take the chance.”
She held still, confused as to why he’d come. For a moment, she worried she’d forgotten an appointment she’d made with him. But then she recalled at their last meeting that he’d asked if they might dine again sometime.Oh, gracious.Her stomach flipped.
