She was dead.
“What is it? What is happening?” a man’s loud voice shouted from outside the circle.
With another burst of commotion, he shoved people aside and lurched forward. He was tall, dark-haired, and handsome. Leo recalled seeing him and the dead woman at the neighboring table when she and Dita had taken their seats earlier. The couple had been seated close together, leaning toward each other to talk and be heard above the music.
The man’s eyes clapped onto the woman with a grimace of horror.
“Gabriela?” He took in the blank stare of her eyes just as Leo had. “No! Gabriela!” The man threw himself to the floor and gathered her into his arms as he grated out a bellow of grief. Leo’s heart clenched, and gooseflesh tightened her skin.
“Someone, call for the police!” a woman in the crowd cried out.
A loud murmur rustled through the room, and several distressed onlookers fled at the mention of the police beingsummoned. Another man pushed his way into the center of the circle. Eddie Bloom removed his hat, a dark purple bowler to match his suit, and stared at the scene. “I won’t have bobbies in my place.”
Mr. Bloom signaled to a few of his waitstaff and pulled them aside, away from the commotion and the man cradling the woman’s limp figure. Leo wriggled free of Dita’s hand, which had been gripping her elbow, and followed the club owner through the crowd. She caught up to him as he began giving instructions to his waiters to clear the club.
“Mr. Bloom,” Leo interrupted. “A woman is dead. You must summon the police.”
He cocked his head. “This is my establishment, Miss Spencer. I give the orders here, not you.”
Leo jerked back an inch.He knew her by name?Though she wondered how, right then, it wasn’t her main concern.
“From the vomitus on the floor and the leaking blood, which is evidence of ruptured capillaries, it looks to have been an acute poisoning. If you refuse to call for the police, they will think you have something to hide, Mr. Bloom.”
The waiters gaped at Leo’s defiance, and Eddie Bloom hitched his chin to peer down his nose at her. Holding the pause a moment longer, he then snapped his fingers toward one of his uniformed waiters. “Go find a sodding constable,” he barked.
Chapter Two
The bell above the lobby door inside the Spring Street Morgue pealed. Jasper’s head throbbed in protest. It had been in a tender state for days, thanks to several late nights at Scotland Yard—and probably more drams of whisky than were strictly necessary. A Jane Doe case had been lingering on his desk for nearly a month, and it had a hold on him.
The young woman had been found in an alley, her skull crushed, and according to Claude Feldman, the city coroner, she had been with child. The murder had precious few leads to begin with, and now, they’d all dried up.
Detective Chief Inspector Coughlan at the C.I.D. had quit pressing him for updates on the investigation last week, commanding Jasper to instead give his full attention to other cases. But he hadn’t been able to let the Jane Doe case go. The last several nights, he’d stayed late to pore through the interviews he’d had with the pair of vagrants who’d found her, the details of catalogued items that had arrived at the morgue with her body, and her postmortem report, searching for some clue he’d missed.
Standing at nearly six feet, Jasper was tall enough to raise his arm and close his fist around the lobby bell, silencing the lingering chime. He did not want to be here. Nor did he want this new case. The chief had cornered him first thing that morning, assigning him the suspicious death at Eddie Bloom’s nightclub. “It’s high-profile and needs to be handled swiftly and with care,” Coughlan had instructed Jasper. Lowering his voice, he’d warned, “And discretion, Reid. Utter discretion.”
When he’d explained who the victim was, Jasper understood his chief’s concern, even as his temples started to pulse with new pain.
The door to the postmortem room opened, and for a bewildering moment, Jasper believed he’d mistakenly stepped into the wrong morgue. An unfamiliar man had entered the lobby. He wore the same type of examination coat and apron Claude always did with a pair of tall rubber boots into which his trouser legs were tucked. He was young, with a small, rodent-like face and disinterested eyes.
“May I help you, sir?” he asked, though with an inflection that hinted it was the last thing he wished to do.
Jasper blinked in confusion. “Who are you?”
“Ah, Inspector Reid.” Claude came into the lobby behind the other man. “I don’t think you’ve had the pleasure of meeting our Mr. Higgins. He’s come to us as an apprentice from the medical college, placed here by his professor, who happens to be a friend of Chief Coroner Giles.” The older man’s overly jovial tone and raised silver brows hinted that this was not, in any way, a pleasure. “Mr. Higgins, may I introduce Detective Inspector Reid of Scotland Yard. You will likely be seeing more of him while you’re with us.”
The young man continued to look peeved, eyeing Jasper’s extended hand a beat too long before grasping it in a listless shake.
“Come in, Inspector,” Claude said.
The city coroner was a kind man, pushing seventy, and unsurprisingly, he was a bit eccentric. One would have to be when one’s work involved the dissection and examination of corpses. The term eccentric applied to Claude’s niece too, considering Leo had, on occasion, assisted her uncle with opening incisions and closing sutures on the bodies when his hands shook uncontrollably—something the two of them had been trying to conceal from the deputy and chief coroners. Having an apprentice observing him at the morgue would not be a welcome thing.
“You must be here for the young woman who was brought in last evening,” Claude said as they entered the postmortem room.
“Yes, Gabriela Carter.” Jasper couldn’t mask his lack of enthusiasm. Anything having to do with the Carter family—the front-runners of the East Rips, a criminal gang out of London’s East End—put him in a foul mood.
Gabriela had been the new wife of Andrew Carter, the youngest of Patrick Carter’s many sons. Patrick had formed the East Rips a few decades ago and had led it until his death three years earlier. Now, the syndicate was headed by his eldest son, Sean.
Claude led them through the vast space that had once been a church vestry. The building, attached to St. Matthew’s Church, had an alcove lined with stained glass windows. When the sun shone through them, as it currently did, colorful light shed over several autopsy tables in the room, a number of which were occupied.
