“Hastings,” Jasper called. The earl had yet to drift back toward the manor with the others. “Help me carry the body to the house.”
“You cannot be serious,” he spluttered.
“Take his ankles,” Jasper ordered. “Or you’ll learn just how serious I am.”
Seven men in all, including Jasper, had stayed the night at the viscount’s soiree, though the ladies had disappeared sometime before dawn. Jasper wasn’t as concerned about them; the footprints around the pond belonged to men, not women. The interviews with Oliver’s remaining guests convinced him that none of the men still present were involved in the man’s drowning; they were far too sloppy from an excess of liquor, and some were still addled from the effects of opium.
It was Oliver’s interview, however, that interested Jasper the most. As he and the viscount sipped on a strong brew of coffee in the dining room, Oliver described his relationship to the victim.
“We never got on well,” he said. “Had our fathers not been friends, I would have cut Niles loose years ago.”
“What was the trouble with him?”
“He’s the perpetually unfortunate sort. Never able to hang on to money, always getting into some twist or another. Depend on him, and you can count yourself a fool.”
Jasper had known men like this before. Incurably unlucky, never able to make a good decision, opportunities slipping through their fingers at every turn.
“However, after his father passed, and then mine, I don’t know…I suppose I felt a certain responsibility toward him,” Oliver said with a shrug.
Jasper bit his tongue. Shortly after Gregory Reid had passed away, Oliver had been the one to tell Jasper that he should no longer feel any responsibility toward Leo. It had been Jasper’s father who’d treated her like family, he’d said; Jasper needn’t do the same. The advice had rubbed him the wrong way. Leo wasn’t a burden he’d been saddled with upon the death of the Inspector.
Perhaps Oliver had merely been thinking about his own burden, Niles Foster, when he’d dispensed his advice back in March.
“You said you argued last week. What about?”
Oliver frowned. “Niles wanted money. He called it a ‘loan’, but as you might suspect, it was never a loan with him.”
“You’d given him money before?”
The viscount nodded and sipped his coffee. “I cut him off after the first few loans were never repaid. That didn’t stop him from asking, though. I tried to help in other ways. I thought if he could get some respectable work… So, I connected him with one of my friends in Parliament. Sir Elliot Payne.”
Jasper didn’t recognize the name. Then again, he didn’t keep up with politics as Oliver did.
“He needed an aide, so I stuck my neck out for Niles.” Oliver had the beleaguered look of someone who’d been disappointed again and again.
“Last week, you told him you wouldn’t give him the loan, and he became upset?” Jasper asked.
Oliver raised a brow. “It wasn’t like him to react the way he did.” He rubbed his cheek, the dark bristle in dire need of a straight razor. “It was damn embarrassing. We were in public. At the bloody Houses of Parliament.”
“What day last week, specifically?”
He took a moment to remember correctly, then said, “Monday. Or Tuesday. I can’t be sure.”
“Did he tell you what he needed the money for?”
“No, and I didn’t want to know. He was a profligate at the gaming tables, so I imagine he’d suffered a loss.”
“What was the requested amount?”
“Fifty pounds.” Oliver laughed. “Can you imagine? The bloody stones on that man.”
Jasper thought of the bruised eye and gashed cheek. “Did your quarrel become physical?”
The viscount slanted him a chastising glance. “If you mean to ask me if I’m the one who gave him that scuffed-up face, the answer is no. I maintained my temper, though only because we were in full view of several MPs of my acquaintance. Otherwise, I might have pummeled him.” He suddenly looked ill. “Forgive me. I shouldn’t have said that, not with him lying dead in my hunting room.”
Shortly after the interview with Oliver ended, three constables arrived from Kensington station. Jasper informed them of the events of the morning and asked for the body to be sent to the Spring Street Morgue. There was a closer deadhouse, of course, but with the ligature marks and facial injuries, Jasper wanted Claude to have a look at the body. It didn’t make sense for Niles Foster and Constable Lloyd to have the same injuries, yet he couldn’t shake the similarities from his mind.
He accepted Oliver’s offer of a driver to take him back to Scotland Yard, riding ahead of the wagon that trundled the body to its destination on Spring Street. It was just shy of nine o’clock when he arrived at the Yard—or as near to the building as he could get. The cleanup was still in progress, with sweating laborers piling what remained of the rubble from the bomb’s blast into wagons to be hauled away. Already, men wereerecting scaffolds to begin patching up the hole in the corner of the building. Inside, Jasper made his way toward the detective department, where sunlight streamed through the gaping hole in the office. Detective Sergeant Lewis saw Jasper approaching and kicked his boots down from where they’d been propped on the desk they would now be sharing.
