Though his expressions were not often readable, this one of stunned confusion couldn’t be mistaken. Jasper’s arms dropped to his sides. “Mrs. Hayes?” But then, he cocked his head. “What the devil wereyoudoing there?”
Leo turned away from his forbidding stare and headed for the corner of the small office, where shelves were filled with books, maps, and case files. “I think we are better served concentrating on Mrs. Hayes right now,” she said, adding, “to avoid becoming distracted.”
“Damn it, Leo.” He shoved his chair hard under the desk. “I knew I shouldn’t have asked you to talk to Esther Goodwin.”
The doubt and disbelief she’d felt when he’d asked her the day before reared back up again. “Then why did you?”
He lowered his head and, with his hands hitched on his hips, looked to be taking even breaths. “Fine. For now, we will discuss Mrs. Hayes. But eventually, youwilltell me what in God’s name you were doing there.”
She could only hope his resolve would fade or that more pressing matters would crop up in the meantime.
“How can you be sure it was Mrs. Hayes?” he asked.
“At first, I wasn’t.” She explained how she’d followed the unknown woman, her face well covered by the hood on her cloak, from near Moorgate to Bloomsbury Square.
“I saw her enter a home, not as a guest, but as someone who resided there,” she said. “So, I went to the tradesman’s entrance and applied for a position that didn’t exist so that I might learn the name of the owners.”
He groaned and rubbed his face, massaging his eyes as he did.
“The home belongs to Mr. and Mrs. Hayes,” Leo concluded. “I can only reconcile that the hooded woman was either Mrs. Hayes or Constance.”
At Jasper’s pause and his contemplative brow, Leo began to suspect something. “Did you already know of their connection to Mrs. Seabright?”
The sash of his window had been lifted, letting in the myriad noises of Whitehall Place. Shod horses’ hooves on the cobbles, clattering wagon wheels, whistles, shouts of newsboys hawking papers. It all filled the office as Jasper slowly came out from behind his desk.
“Not of their personal connection, but Mr. and Mrs. Hayes were on the guest list for the benefit dinner. They were supposed to have attended. At the last minute, they canceled.”
“Just like Gavin Seabright,” Leo said.
It couldn’t be a coincidence. It was almost as if they all had known the robbery would take place and wished to avoid it.
“Are the Hayeses regular contributors to the orphanage?” Leo asked.
“Stanley was on the Board of Governors years back, when the orphanage first opened.” Jasper looked out the window, then shut the sash to lock out the noise.
“That was when the Seabright children were there,” Leo said, a small quiver of excitement growing just under her skin. It was entirely plausible that Stanley Hayes had met Martha at that point in time. Had Mrs. Hayes as well?
Earlier, Leo had wondered if the woman wearing the cloak could have been the dark-haired lady Mrs. Beardsley had seen with Gavin. But when she posited this with Jasper, he shook his head right away.
“I’ve never met Constance’s mother, so she might have dark hair, but she is surely too old to match the landlady’s description.”
Leo found she could agree with Jasper on that point. Unfortunately, she also found the stabbing sensation in her lower stomach at the mention of Constance’s name unsettling. Jasper had courted her for several months, and while Leo had never truly liked Constance, she now understood it was due to jealousy more than anything else.
“Maybe something untoward happened between the Hayeses and Martha Seabright back then,” Leo mused. “Though, I can’t imagine why Mrs. Hayes would have snooped around Martha’s home. She didn’t leave with anything in her hands, though she could have put something into one of her pockets.”
Jasper scrubbed a palm down his face and turned a look onto Leo that she knew well. “You shouldn’t have gone anywhere near that house. What were you intending to do there?”
The key in her handbag felt even more criminal now. She couldn’t bear to admit that she’d pilfered it from the dead woman’s possessions with plans to do the same thing Mrs. Hayes had been doing. Without warning, shame doused her head to toe. Sneaking about, breaking into homes wasn’t commendable in the least.
Leo eyed the office door, eager to leave. “I just wanted a look. Call it a hunch. Now, I should be getting back to the morgue.”
Jasper moved, blocking her direct path to the exit. “I’m grateful for this lead, Leo. Truly, I am.” He gritted his teeth, and she knew abutwas on its way. “But I am asking you to stay away from this investigation from this point forward. If any of the other masked assailants learn you’ve been sniffing around their tracks, they might regret letting you go and return for you.”
The worry was oddly reminiscent of the one that had been dogging her for the last month or so, ever since Eddie Bloom, the owner of Striker’s Wharf nightclub and the head of a criminal racket on the Lambeth wharves, had warned her away from asking more questions about the murders of her family. The killers hadn’t forgotten the little girl they’d failed to find that night. If she started looking into the past too deeply, they might suspect she knew more than they were comfortable with.
The warning had chilled her interest in what her father had done to betray the East Rips criminal syndicate. She’d stored her father’s account ledgers and the old letters her aunt had sent to Leo’s mother, detailing Flora’s concerns for the safety of her sister and her family, under her bed, alongside the thick file on the Spencer family murders that she’d been given by the Inspector. Every time Leo entered her room or got into bed, she would think of them. But at the idea of reaching for them and disturbing the detritus of the past, Eddie Bloom’s warning would sound in her ear.
Not only did Leo not want to draw the interest of the East Rips, she also didn’t want them looking any closer at the Scotland Yard detective inspector who had once been a runaway from the Carter family.
