“My goodness, no,” he answered swiftly. “I couldn’t decide what to do with them, so after Inspector Reid went through them and then returned them to me, I put them in boxes and set them aside. Forgot about them entirely.”
“Set them aside where?”
“The morgue’s crypt.” He winced as if in apology and lifted a shoulder. “There wasn’t space here.”
She gaped. The crypt was a storage facility of sorts, holding not only old items from the morgue’s previous iteration as a church, but also the unclaimed possessions of the dead. Families would sometimes leave their loved ones’ things behind, either accidentally or intentionally. Or when an unidentified and unclaimed body was taken away to be buried in a pauper’s grave, the person’s items were left to be stored in the crypt. Leo had gone into the vast space countless times over the years.
And now, her uncle was saying her own family’s things were down there too.
“Why have you never told me this?” she asked.
Remorse pulled at the corners of his lips. “As I said, I haven’t thought of those boxes in years. And earlier, well, I couldn’t allow a child to rummage through her parents’ personal things.” He paused, cocking his head. “I hope you’re not too upset with me.”
There was no reason for her to be upset. He was right to have kept them from her when she was younger. She wouldn’t have wanted to see them then. And how could she be vexed that the boxes had slipped his mind after all these years? He was nearly seventy years old, after all.
“Not in the least,” she assured him, reaching to cover his hand on the table with her own. “But I would like to see them now.”
Although Leo and her uncle hadn’t found her mother’s letters to Aunt Flora, it was possible that her mother might have kept letters Flora sent to her and were now stored in the boxes in the crypt. Within them, there could very well be information about what Leonard Spencer had been doing. If that proved to be the case, Leo hoped she was ready for whatever she might learn.
Before his death, the Inspector had given her the extensive record he’d compiled on the Spencer family murders and asked that she be ready before opening the file. She thought she had been. But after viewing a foggy, over-exposed crime scene photograph of her father, lying on his side on the sitting room carpet, a dark blood stain on the front of his shirt, Leo had slammed the folder shut, her stomach convulsing with a surge of nausea. She hadn’t yet tried opening the file a second time.
At the sounds of his wife stirring from her slumber upstairs, Claude got to his feet and promised Leo that he would look for the boxes later that day. She left for Scotland Yard before Flora could come down for breakfast. She’d once told her uncle that she wasn’t avoiding her aunt deliberately, but now she wasn’t certain that was true anymore.
With a pinch of guilt, she walked swiftly toward Great Scotland Yard. Most mornings, Dita would come to Duke Street on her way into work, and she and Leo would walk there together. However, last evening, before going to Charles Street, Leo stopped by Dita’s home in Covent Garden. Distraught over John’s death, she’d told Leo she wouldn’t be going in to work for a few days.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to walk into that building again without thinking of him,” she’d said, her eyes swollen from ceaseless tears.
Leo had merely kept her arm around Dita, saying nothing of the precise image she would always have of Constable Lloyd in the moments before that flash of light had blinded her. She was just grateful her friend would not have the same memory imprinted on her brain in perpetuity.
Activity swarmed the Metropolitan Police’s central offices as Leo walked through Great Scotland Yard. Rubble from the brick exterior of the building still cluttered the street. The remains of a carriage sat outside the Rising Sun, the latter of which had born the blast relatively well, beyond its shattered windows. Leo thought of Jasper. He’d been inside the public house when the bomb detonated. What if he’d been outside? Standing near that carriage?
The leaden drop of her stomach angered her. Why couldn’t she despise him enough not to care?
Officers in uniform and in plain clothes, as well as citizens and reporters, were standing about, gazing upon the damage. As Jasper had jested, he did indeed have a new door to his office—an enormous hole in the front corner of the building. She could see straight inside the CID and partially into the offices on the floor above it. Had the bomb detonated during the day, any number of people might have been killed. But if the bomb had been set to explode using a timer, as the morning newspaperswere saying, then the intent had not been to kill but rather to terrorize, as Clan na Gael and the Irish Republican Brotherhood tended to do.
It’s what made the suitcase bomb John Lloyd had been carrying earlier yesterday so strange. It had been constructed using gunpowder, while the others, as Jasper had revealed, had employed dynamite. Why would they have used two different types of explosives?
Leo continued toward Spring Street. While she was curious what Inspector Tomlin had thought of John Lloyd’s postmortem report delivered via messenger the previous evening, she knew better than to think he might discuss it with her. At the morgue, a curious influx of bodies kept Claude and Leo occupied, and when it came time for tea, she told her uncle to sit and rest rather than descend into the crypt to search for the boxes of Spencer family belongings, as he’d promised to do. It had been sixteen years. It could wait another day.
At last, evening rolled in, and Claude began his nightly cleaning of the postmortem room. Leo was seated at the desk, typing notes when her uncle called, “You’ll be late for your meeting if you don’t leave soon.”
Her fingers stalled, and her eyes rolled toward the ceiling. She had completely forgotten. On the first and third Wednesdays of every month, Mrs. Geraldine Stewart hosted the Women’s Equality Alliance at her home on Carlisle Street. Leo and Dita had gone to the last several meetings together, and the previous night, Dita had implored Leo to still attend, even if she would not be able to join her. The truth was she’d have much rather skipped the meeting, but as it was important to Dita, she resolved to go.
Leo set aside the postmortem report and gathered her coat and hat.
“Thank you for remembering,” she said to her uncle as he was scrubbing down an autopsy table. She stopped to kiss his cheek, and he chuckled as if the affectionate display equally delighted and embarrassed him.
Leo went to the nearest cabstand on Trafalgar Square and rode an omnibus toward Piccadilly Circus, a route beleaguered by traffic and several more cabstand stops. It was nearly a half hour later when she arrived at the Stewarts’ fine home. Through the front windows, a crush of people could be seen, and when a maid opened the door to allow her entry, a low thrum of voices flowed out into the night.
The maid took Leo’s coat and gloves and indicated that she was to join the others in the large front sitting room. At least a dozen more people than usual filled the space, with chairs lined up in rows facing the far end of the room, where a grand marble fireplace dominated the wall. It was then that she remembered: They were to have a guest speaker that evening, a member of Parliament sympathetic to the vote for women.
Some ladies stood and mingled, while others had already taken the seats positioned closest to the front. A few women, whom Leo recognized from past meetings, cast her assessing looks. Without greeting her, they continued with their conversations. The women here were a mix of classes, though most were wealthy and dressed in the finest fashions of the day—certainly far better than what Leo wore. Her dark, blue-and-black pin-striped skirt and matching short coat hadn’t a single frill or flare. As she wended her way toward one of the middle rows, nodding hello here and there to those who acknowledged her, she noticed their strained expressions. The hushed conversations too.
She lowered herself into a cane back chair, curious as to the mood of the room.
A woman seated two chairs over peered at her. “You are Miss Brooks’s friend.”
“Yes, I’m Leonora Spencer,” she said, reminding the woman of her name. They had already been introduced twice before, but while she recalled Mrs. Emma Bates well, the widowed sister-in-law of Mrs. Stewart, their hostess, apparently could not say the same for Leo.
