It was a mistake; he knew it the second the order flew off his tongue. Leo drew her shoulders back, her eyes glazing over with impenetrable hardness.
“You don’t get to tell me what to do anymore, Inspector Reid.”
She pushed past him and strode away.
He sighed, letting her go. “I never got to tell you what to do to begin with,” he muttered.
Behind him, Lewis let out a low whistle from his desk, where he’d retreated earlier. “I don’t know what you did, guv, but I wouldn’t hold my breath for mercy.”
Jasper raked his fingers through his hair and, without responding to the detective sergeant, returned to his office.
Chapter Three
Leo never would have admitted it to a soul, but halfway through Claude’s examination of Constable Lloyd’s remains, she considered that Jasper might have been correct: She should have sat this one out.
A rash of heat lit her skin, and a swell of nausea gripped her. Leo clutched the clipboard and pencil tighter in her sweaty hands while recording her uncle’s observations as he made them aloud. Her head swam, the words blurring on the paper as she wrote them. The acrid odor of gunpowder clung to the mangled body, and it filled the back of her mouth with every breath.
“I’m sorry, Uncle Claude. What was it you just said?” Leo asked, her hearing still muffled from the blast. It would take weeks for her ruptured eardrum to heal. She could only hope the incessant ringing would be gone much sooner than that.
“Complete separation of the aortic valve.” Her uncle lowered his spectacles, the thick glass heavily magnified, and peered at Leo. “My dear, you are most assuredly concussed. I insist you go home to rest.”
He meant well, but retreating to their terrace house on Duke Street would do little to settle her. Leo didn’t like to be therewithout her uncle, and that was entirely due to her aunt, Flora Feldman. It was cowardly of her to avoid her elderly aunt, but lately, Flora’s outbursts had been more random and hostile—at least, toward Leo. No one else seemed to inspire her eruptions of temper and nonsensical accusations. Thankfully, her aunt had taken well to her newest nurse, Mrs. Boardman, and with Claude, she was as complacent as a cat curled up by a fire. Had Jasper been in her presence over the last two months, Flora would have doted on him too, as she always had. But not Leo. For some illogical reason, Flora blamed her for the Spencer family murders, even though she’d been just a child at the time.
A strange comment Flora had made in March about letters she’d received from her sister, Andromeda—Leo’s mother—and some sort ofbloody, bloody businesshad intrigued Leo. But Claude hadn’t known anything about the letters, and a search of the house hadn’t turned them up either.
“My head feels fine. I’d much rather keep busy,” Leo told her uncle, swiping at her brow before writing down the postmortem finding.
As the aorta was the main vessel for distributing oxygen-rich blood to the body, a complete separation of the valve from the heart would mean Constable Lloyd died almost instantly. The excessive damage to the rest of his torso and limbs from the explosion would have been excruciatingly painful had he lived, even for a short while. There was some comfort in knowing he hadn’t suffered long, if at all.
However, why he’d been carrying a bomb toward Scotland Yard continued to dumbfound her. Leo hadn’t known him well, but she’d never have believed he was mixed up with the militant Irish in London. In fact, shedidn’tbelieve it.
Jasper had told her to keep out of Inspector Tomlin’s way, and she knew she couldn’t interfere directly with the investigation. But that didn’t stop her mind from combing overthe handful of seconds between when she’d first spotted John Lloyd and when the bomb detonated.
“Hmm. This is peculiar,” Claude said, having returned to his examination of the body.
Leo looked up from her notes to see her uncle holding the constable’s left wrist. The right hand—along with much of his forearm—had been severed completely in the blast. Those remains hadn’t been salvageable.
“What have you found?”
“Ligature marks. See here?” Claude pointed to a thin line of bruising on top of the constable’s wrist. Though gunpowder residue coated him, a closer look showed reddened skin, still partially visible. She ran the tip of her finger over the chafed red line, which was a few millimeters wide.
Claude peered at the underside of the wrist, but there weren’t any ligature marks there.
“His wrists were bound together, the undersides pressed together,” Leo said.
Had the right wrist not been blown to pieces, she suspected it would have shown a matching red line.
“It looks to be that way,” her uncle agreed. “And as the bruising is still red, I estimate the marks were inflicted less than twenty-four hours before death.”
Leo quickly scribbled the finding down, her nausea beginning to clear. Claude had already noted the contusions near Constable Lloyd’s left eye, and the gash on his cheek below the bruise. While much of his lower jaw had been decimated, the upper half of his cheek remained intact. Still, it would certainly be a closed-casket funeral.
“You’ve also determined he was struck in the face less than twenty-four hours ago,” she said.
Black eyes weren’t uncommon among police officers. Plenty of them got into scrapes while performing their duties, especiallywith men they were attempting to arrest. But the ligature marks on his wrist couldn’t be misconstrued: John Lloyd had been bound and beaten just hours before he’d approached Scotland Yard with a bomb.
The man she’d seen standing outside the arch, who had scowled fiercely when John turned around and started away from the building, sprang to Leo’s mind.
“It’s not conclusive that the victim received this ligature mark at the same time as he did the injuries to his face,” her uncle said firmly, as if knowing the determination she’d reached.
