Jasper didn’t think he was lying. “Do the children look familiar?”
“I have no idea who these kiddies are, all right?” He pushed the photograph back, as if to get away from it. “If it was in her purse, I can’t begin to tell you why.”
Andrew started for the door, one hired man walking ahead of him and one behind.
Jasper raised his voice. “The waiter at Bloom’s said there was already a drink on the table when he came over to take your orders. You told him not to clear it away. Why?”
Andrew sighed heavily and turned back, his impatience palpable. “Because Gabriela was still sipping it. Listen, I know she was poisoned. The arsenic was in one of her drinks?—”
Jasper came alert. “Who delivered that first drink? It wasn’t Harry, who brought your whisky sour and her Spanish claret.”
A look of concentration slid over Andrew Carter’s sharp features. “I didn’t look closely at the waiter, and I sure as hell don’t know the names of Bloom’s servers. They’re all dressed alike anyhow.”
“It was a man?” Jasper pressed.
“Yes,” he answered tightly.
According to the postmortem report, it would have taken twenty minutes or so for the poison to take effect. Meaning the arsenic had been in Gabriela Carter’s first drink, the one delivered by the mystery waiter. Andrew seemed to come to that conclusion at the same time.
“If you can remember anything about this first waiter?—”
“He was big. Tall.” He thought for a moment. “His hands barely fit into his white gloves. And he said the drink was compliments of Eddie Bloom.”
“I don’t believe Bloom sent that drink,” Jasper said.
“I suppose we’ll find out, won’t we?”
“Mr. Carter, I’m going to find the person who poisoned your wife and bring them to justice within the bounds of the law,” Jasper assured him as Andrew signaled his men that they were leaving. “I need you to not mete out your own brand of vigilante justice.”
“Sure thing, Inspector,” Andrew called over his shoulder, and then he was gone before Jasper could blink.
He let the tension out of his shoulders. Briefly, he considered sending Bloom a message that Andrew Carter might be paying him an unfriendly visit but then let it go. If two criminals came to blows, he wouldn’t get in the middle of it. His focus lay in finding that first waiter and speaking to Miss Regina Morris.
Shortly after Andrew left the department, Lewis returned from Carter’s solicitor in Pimlico. He shook his head as he came into Jasper’s office. “Andrew Carter’s not our man. He took out an insurance policy on himself to benefit Gabriela if anything happened to him. There’s nothing on her though.”
Without a policy in place on his wife, Carter had no motive to kill her for an insurance payout. Andrew claimed to have loved his wife, and it seemed he might have been telling the truth.
Jasper sat back in his chair, ruminating. “All right. But after my conversation with him, I think he knows more than he’s saying.”
He might even have leads that eluded Scotland Yard at the moment.
“We could ask Bridget what she’s hearing,” the detective sergeant suggested.
Bridget O’Mara was the owner of The Jugger, a pub near the St. Katharine Docks, right in the heart of East Rip territory. She was also one of the C.I.D.’s confidential informants. Whenever they wished to speak to her, they would purchase a deboned saddle of mutton, insert a note—giving a day and time—into the rolled-up loin, and send it to her at the pub. The meeting place was always the same: Trinity Square near Tower Hill. The joint of mutton was both a summons and a form of payment for her troubles.
Jasper nodded. “Tomorrow. Dawn. Send it.”
“What do you think, ladies? If we were dead bodies, would Jasper be more interested in us?”
Lord Oliver Hayes received a gasp of amusement from the woman seated to his left, a Miss Helen Derring, and one of disapproval from the woman to his right, his cousin, Miss Constance Hayes.
“It is revolting to mention dead bodies at a dinner table, Oliver,” Constance said with a shiver of disgust.
Apparently, Jasper had been staring into his cut crystal snifter of whisky for too long while the others had been in conversation. He couldn’t recall anything that they’d said. Rouget’s on Leicester Square was a far cry from the chophouses and taverns he’d frequented before he’d become friends with Oliver Hayes. At first, he’d rejected the viscount’s invitations to dine with him at gentlemen’s clubs and fine restaurants in the West End, preferring to eat among his own kind whenever he did go out.
However, when Jasper became acquainted with Constance and started to see her more regularly, he’d known a woman like her did not visit chophouses or dining rooms. So he’d fallen in line, eating at one fine restaurant after another, no matter how out of place he felt or how deeply the cost carved into his pockets. Most of the time, however, Oliver took care of the bill.
“Won’t you try your soup?” Constance asked him. “It’s crème d’asperges.”
