“Were you here alone with him?”
“I was perfectly safe,” she said, goading him with a crafty glance over her shoulder. “He isn’t a murderer.”
“Are you sure of that?”
“Yes. He didn’t do it.” She wiped her hands on her apron as she explained, “The John Doe’s given name is Harry, surname unknown, and he was a stranger to Gavin.”
Leo removed her apron and hung it on a hook, then smoothed her skirt from her hips down. Jasper followed the motion, and his pulse kicked into a rapid tattoo.
He cleared his throat, which suddenly felt like a cord had cinched it tight. “What did he say to you?”
“That Harry promised to confess the name of the man who killed Gavin’s mother in exchange for money and a way out of London,” she replied. “Gavin doubted his mother was dead, so he came here to see for himself.”
“He knew her body had been sent to Spring Street?” Jasper asked, wondering how. But then thought of Philip Green. He’d disappeared in the commotion after the shooting, but he might have stayed long enough to have heard where Martha’s body was to be taken and conveyed the information to the other members of the group, including Harry.
“Yes, somehow,” Leo said. “But what is important is that Gavin was going to agree to Harry’s demands. Unfortunately, hewas killed while Gavin was at the morgue. Gavin ran, knowing how bad everything looked for him.”
With one party dead, there was only Gavin’s word for it. “You believe him?” Jasper asked.
She nodded firmly. “I do. It aligns with how Harry acted in the carriage with the other masked intruders. He was upset and nervous about Martha being killed that night.”
Jasper grimaced at the reminder that Leo had been abducted that night as well, if only for a short while. He wondered if the memory would ever fail to affect him this way.
The fetid odors of rotting flesh had seeped through the weave of his handkerchief. “Do you mind if we go to the office?”
She nodded, her own kerchief still in place. Once they had left the postmortem room, closing the door behind them, they lowered their linens and drew in breaths. The air was only marginally better here.
“Where is Gavin now? He should have come to Scotland Yard and pled his case to me, not you.”
Leo moved toward the desk, where the gray tabby morgue cat had draped itself across the blotter. “I suggested Gavin do just that, but he became spooked and ran off.”
Tibia mewed when Leo scratched her fingers into its neck fur.
“What spooked him?” Jasper asked.
She scratched the cat’s neck another moment, then answered, “I think it was the mention of his sister, Paula Blickson. It turns out she was the dark-haired woman Mrs. Beardsley saw.”
That caught his interest and his suspicion. He took a step toward the desk but stopped when Tibia hissed at his approach. “When I interviewed Mrs. Blickson this morning, she claimed she hadn’t spoken to either her mother or Gavin for a long time.”
“And yet, she was the one who asked him not to attend the benefit dinner. She said he would be a traitor if he did go.”
Paula had mentioned nothing about this earlier. Though he hadn’t been able to say why, there had been something disingenuous to her wearing mourning black, her dramatic black lace veil, and the trembling of her hand when she touched the handkerchief to her nose. Her red, glassy eyes had been real, however, and so Jasper had left his suspicions alone for the time being.
“Why would he be a traitor?” he asked Leo.
She pressed her lips together, as she did whenever she was about to say something he might not like. “That is why I sent for you. It couldn’t wait. I think I’ve figured out how Mrs. Hayes is connected to Martha Seabright.”
He braced himself.
“It’s Edward,” she went on. “The baby.”
“I remember. What about him?”
“According to Gavin, Paula never believed that he died of a fever. She was convinced that her infant brother was instead taken.”
A large morass seemed to grow inside Jasper. The death of the baby brother had prickled through him with some sense of significance when he learned of it, but he hadn’t understood why or if he’d been reacting out of pure pity.
“Taken by whom?” he asked, even though an instinctive answer was already there, waiting to be pulled forward. Leo did just that.
