A tight grin stretched across Jasper’s face. The bastard had no intention of asking Leo for a dance. He was just playing with him like a cat with a mouse.
Jasper sure as hell wasn’t letting him have this round.
“Ask the lady yourself,” he said as he gave his back to Bloom and walked toward the door. “She can reject you all on her own.”
Chapter Five
Wistfulness and a touch of unease kept Leo from ascending the half-moon step fronting 23 Charles Street. The last time she’d been here, it had been to say goodbye.
The morning Jasper had arrived at her door on Duke Street to tell her the news of the Inspector’s passing, Leo had quickly dressed and accompanied him back to the house. Once there, they’d entered the Inspector’s bedroom to find Mrs. Zhao seated in a chair next to him, her cheeks wet and eyes shimmering. He had merely looked asleep, though Leo had noted his lividity right away; the cessation of blood flow had paled his skin. And when she’d taken his hand in hers, his cooled body temperature had been consistent with the time of death Jasper had reported on their mostly quiet ride over to Charles Street.
Leo had returned his hand to where it had been, folded over his chest, and had looked at the Inspector’s body, seeing him not as he was then—thin and decimated by disease—but how he’d appeared when she first saw him. When he’d opened that steamer trunk in her family’s Red Lion Street attic, and she’d first looked upon his face, she’d known, straightaway, that he was a kind man. That she could trust him. And when he liftedher into his strong arms and promised that no one was going to hurt her ever again, she’d known he’d meant it with all his heart.
Leo had seen countless dead bodies. But looking upon the Inspector’s, she’d understood, perhaps for the first time ever, what one ought to have felt when looking at the dead: the absence of a life force within and a loss so profound that her insides felt as though they were being crushed by some invisible, giant fist.
Now, as her eyes went to the windows of the study on the first-floor, she felt the compression of her lungs again. Taking several deep breaths, she finally went to the door and brought down the worn brass lion’s head knocker. After the sound of a lock bolt turning, Mrs. Zhao opened the door.
“Miss Leo, how good to see you. Come in, come in,” she said with a happy grin.
The older woman had been the Inspector’s housekeeper since just after his marriage to Emmaline Cowper. When Emmaline’s grandmother had gifted her the house as a wedding present, it had not come with a staff. The couple had found it impossible to hire any servants who would lower their standards enough to wait on a common police inspector. Emmaline had tried to make do with just her longtime lady’s maid, but when the Inspector had met the widowed Mrs. Zhao during an investigation, the two had found a good rapport. Aware that she was in need of work, he invited her to try her hand at being a house servant. Mrs. Zhao and Emmaline had immediately struck up the same good rapport. When her lady’s maid soon complained that she could not work alongside a Chinese woman, Emmaline had told her she would not have to. She gave her lady’s maid a letter of character and sent her on her way.
“I know I haven’t been to see you in some time,” Leo said as Mrs. Zhao collected her things to hang up. “How have you been?”
“Nothing is the same without Mr. Reid,” the housekeeper replied softly. “I always thought he was a quiet man, but now, I realize what quiet truly is.”
Jasper was certainly more subdued than the Inspector, and Leo imagined he wasn’t at home half as much for Mrs. Zhao to dote on.
“Have you found more time to spend with your sister and her family?” Leo asked. The trip to Limehouse wasn’t easy to undertake, and when she went, Mrs. Zhao tended to spend the night there.
“Yes, but I miss staying busy.” She paused. “How is your aunt? Perhaps I could check on her from time to time?”
Claude had hired a new nurse, Mrs. Boardman, to look after Flora each day while he was at the morgue, but Leo found she couldn’t bring herself to refuse Mrs. Zhao’s offer.
“Please do. I think Aunt Flora would enjoy that.”
She would prefer it to Leo’s company, that much she knew. While Flora had always been reserved with her feelings toward her younger sister’s child, it was only as her mind started to deteriorate that she’d begun to show open hostility toward Leo.
It seemed every time Flora now looked upon her niece, she was appalled, even terrified, to be in her presence. She would scream of murder and blood, and worse, she would lay the blame squarely on Leo’s shoulders. Absurd, of course, since at the time she had been a little girl. But Leo had survived when no one else in her family had, and Flora was convinced there was a nefarious reason behind it.
Leo explained to Mrs. Zhao that she’d come to collect a folder from the Inspector’s desk, one that he’d wished for her to have after he was gone. The housekeeper asked no questions; more than likely, she knew all about the file. She welcomed her to go about her business and offered to bring tea shortly.
Whether Mrs. Zhao kept a fire in the grate and paraffin lamps burning in the study out of habit or knew Jasper would come there first whenever he arrived home, Leo was grateful for the familiar comfort as she entered the room. Everything looked the same as when she had last been there. The desk in the corner, by the window; the leather Chesterfield perpendicular to the hearth and across from two leather club chairs; the low mahogany table in between them with the three daily newspapers the Inspector had long subscribed to, waiting for Jasper’s perusal; shelves upon shelves of books against two walls; and just as she suspected, the bottle of Grants Morella she’d given the Inspector in January at the sideboard, among decanters of other spirits.
She went to it and poured a small amount into one of the cordial glasses. Though she knew it was absurd, she turned over a second glass, poured, and then tapped hers against it.
The desk—and its bottom right drawer—loomed large in the corner of the room. She sipped the liqueur on her way toward it, deciding to treat the folder inside as she would any dead body delivered to the morgue: with a fair amount of detachment. She brought out the folder, made of thick manila hemp and worn thin over the years by the Inspector’s fingers, and placed it on the blotter. The Inspector had advised her to only open it when she was ready. Back in January, she’d thought she had been. Once opened, her gumption had lasted all of ten minutes. That night, and many more after it, nightmares followed. The same ones as in the past, though she hadn’t experienced them since she was a child.
The police report, typed by Gregory Reid himself, had laid out the crime in stark detail. Reading it had summoned memories she’d worked hard to bury, including the vivid recollection of being carried down from the attic by the Inspector.Close your eyes, now, little love,he’d said to her, andshe had…at first. Oh, how she wished she’d obeyed him. With her chin against the shoulder of his scratchy tweed coat, she’d opened one squeezed-shut eyelid. A blanket, partially covering her brother’s body, had burned into her memory. Jacob’s arm had been visible, the sleeve of his striped pajamas dotted with a spray of blood.
The Inspector’s professional, if dispassionate, reporting had communicated that all four Spencers had been killed with blades. First, stabbed to subdue them. Then, their throats slit. Cleanly done for the most part. Except for her father, who’d received multiple stab wounds—the killing one, to his heart.
In the folder, the edges of a few photographs had stuck out among the papers. Sixteen years ago, crimes scenes weren’t often photographed, but the nearly wholesale slaughter of a family had warranted it. The first photograph she’d flipped to had been of poor quality, whitened at the edges from overexposure. It had been of her father, lying on his side on the sitting room carpet. If not for the dark blood stain on the front of his shirt, he might have looked as if he was sleeping. Black spots had filled Leo’s vision as she’d stared at her slain father. Her head whirled, her lungs emptied of air, and she slammed the folder shut.
Two months later, she still wasn’t ready to open the folder and try again. However, as she sat in the Inspector’s leather swivel chair, which was wide enough for her to tuck her legs up underneath her, she was content to simply look at it.
Absentmindedly, she rubbed her thumb over the scars on her right palm. Tracing them soothed her sometimes when too many thoughts of that night began to creep in. Why that might be perplexed her somewhat, since she’d received the scars the same night as the murders. It should have made her pulse increase, rather than slow, to remember the darkened figure who’d entered the attic in search of her. The one she’d heardcoming closer to her hiding spot, where she clutched a shard of porcelain, which had broken off her doll’s leg when Jacob threw her to the floor earlier in the night. It was why she’d gone into the attic to begin with—to be angry and cry alone.
“Little girl? I know you’re here,”he’d whispered. Downstairs in her home, things had gone horribly silent. The cries and screams had ceased.
