He lifted his chin, covered in dark stubble and a smear of dirt. “I had my reasons.”
“It is suspected that you knew the robbery was going to take place.”
“That isn’t true! I didn’t go because…” He grimaced. “Because Paula said I’d be a traitor if I did.”
Leo stepped out of the shade. “Your sister?”
Esther Goodwin had said the two siblings had been estranged for years. So, when had Gavin and Paula seen each other? The answer came to Leo in a rush.
“Your landlady saw you with a dark-haired young woman recently. She picked you up and dropped you off again in a hansom cab.” Paula Blickson was pretty and young, with dark hair, as Leo had seen earlier at Scotland Yard.
The muscles along his jaw tensed. He nodded.
“She’d rejected the invitation extended to her,” Leo deduced. “Then she sought you out and implored you to do the same. Why would she have called you a traitor for attending?”
He clenched his mouth shut and hitched his chin, his expression turning chary. “What does it matter?’
“Every detail matters when nothing is known for certain,” she replied.
He backed up a few steps, his heels dragging through the gravel. “Because of Edward. Our little brother. He was a baby when he died at the orphanage.”
She nodded. “Yes, I know about that. What then? She blamed the orphanage for his death?”
His heavy brow furrowed as he pulled down the brim of his hat in a nervous gesture. “Paula never believed he died. She thought we were lied to.”
It was an extraordinary claim. Leo drew in a breath and wondered why Esther Goodwin had not thought to mention it.
“Lied to by whom?”
He shook his head and shrugged. “Everyone. All the adults. They were all the same, treating us like troublesome pests.”
Leo couldn’t imagine what it had been like to grow up in an orphanage. She’d often considered that, if not for the Inspector and then Claude and Flora, she would have been turned over to one. Either that, or to a workhouse. She’d been enormously lucky.
“What did your sister believe happened to Edward?”
Gavin again looked over his shoulder. He’d tarried too long, and evidently, he was agitated by it. “That he was taken. Said she knew it in her gut.”
Leo gazed at him, appalled and confounded. To give away the infant, then lie to Martha Seabright and tell her the baby had died… It was too cruel and diabolical. Leo had trouble believing it.
“She had a point,” he said, as if seeing her doubt play out in her expression. “We’d seen Edward the day before at Sunday sermon. He seemed perfectly fine, babbling like always. And then, Tuesday morning, we were told he died the night before of a fever. Came up out of nowhere, though none of the other little ones were ill. They’d already buried him, just to be safe, they said. But we never saw him. His body, I mean.”
It was irregular that none of the other small children had been ill, as fevers were known to spread. There should have been at least a few others afflicted. And to not allow Edward’s siblings the chance to say goodbye to their infant brother was also strangely callous.
“Paula never got over it,” Gavin said, his frown pinching his brow. “Losing him haunted her.”
“Did she share her suspicion with your mother?” Leo asked.
Gavin bounced on his toes, then started to retreat. “What does any of this have to do with the dead man in my room? I’ve explained why I didn’t go to the dinner. Now, will you speak to the detective? Will you tell him I’m innocent?”
Her annoyance with Gavin increased. “You must speak to him yourself, Mr. Seabright. You must tell him everything you’ve told me?—”
“No. This was a mistake,” he growled and then, before Leo could plead with him not to run, disappeared down the dirt laneand into the street, leaving nothing but a cloud of dust in his wake.
Chapter Thirteen
As Jasper approached 10 Bloomsbury Square, he eyed the recessed steps to the servant’s entrance, tucked underneath the main entrance. He would not descend and knock upon that door, even if the residents within the home would have preferred it.
On his way to Bloomsbury from Westminster, Jasper had been struck with conflicting moments of buoyancy and dread. Buoyancy, because asking Leo to dinner, and the smile she’d tried to hide when she accepted, had given him an unexpected sense of victory. Dread, because the notion of calling upon Stanley Hayes weighed on him like lead ballast.
