Lord Hayes had been delivering her home when he’d seemed to interpret her silence. “You mentioned earlier that George has siblings.”
“Gavin Seabright and Paula Blickson,” she replied.
“Could either of them have found George? Approached him?”
Leo would have said yes straightaway, but she couldn’t imagine how they would have known where to find him. Unless Martha had confessed something to them before she was killed. Or perhaps the former Nurse Radcliff.
“I’m not sure, but it would be beneficial to speak to them. Gavin is lying low right now. Paula Blickson will be easier to locate to question.”
Lord Hayes had nodded. “Reid will be back tomorrow. First thing, I’m sure. I’ll mention it to him.”
Though Leo had nodded, she’d had the distinct feeling of being shuffled to the side. After all, Oliver Hayes had only permitted her involvement because Jasper had been away.
Across the table, Flora accepted the smallest bite of toast before sticking out her tongue. Claude sighed and turned to his own food, which had already cooled.
“Are you helping Inspector Reid with the benefit dinner case?” he asked.
“He wouldn’t like me to say I’m helping, but yes,” she replied.
She had not yet told her uncle about the death of one of the masked men, Harry, and with Flora present, it was better not to talk of murder at all. She was sensitive to the topic. As her aunt had started to live more and more in the past, she often thought of her sister’s murder, and those of her nephew and niece. Any time she did, she would devolve into hysterics.
But there was something Leo did want to discuss with her uncle, which she thought her aunt might not react to.
“The investigation has gone in a new direction,” she said. “There is a young boy who is missing.”
“What boy?”
“It’s a complicated tale,” she said. “He was adopted in a shady dealing thirteen years ago when he was an infant.”
Claude’s white brows furrowed behind the rims of his thick spectacles. “And now someone has taken him?”
Leo believed that was the most likely thing, and so did Constance. As cold and peevish as she had been toward Leo the previous night, she refused to believe her brother would run off. “George just isn’t like that,” she had insisted as Lord Hayes and Leo prepared to leave Bloomsbury Square. “He isn’t temperamental in the least. He is a veritable angel compared to me.”
“If he has discovered he was adopted, he might react in unexpected ways,” the viscount had reasoned.
Leo could not deny that possibility, but what continued to perplex her as they rode toward the river and Scotland Yard was how the masked man who’d shot Martha Seabright might be connected to George. Or rather,Edward. If this masked man had wanted Martha dead, was it because of her deal to sell her youngest child to Stanley Hayes?
“Yes, I think someone has taken him,” Leo answered her uncle, then drained the last sip of her now cooled tea. A vague notion of whom George might have gone off with had stayed in the forefront of her mind all night. It was the framed photograph of the young boy on the occasional table in Stanley Hayes’s sitting room that had turned her mind in an unexpected direction.
“Uncle Claude, do you recall a pair of corpses that came into the morgue three years ago in late December? The two women were delivered at different times that day,” Leo said, remembering them perfectly. One had been younger, wearing a red and black frilly dance hall costume. She had been poisoned shortly before taking to the stage at a bawdy club and had died of acute arsenic poisoning. The other, older woman had beenfished from the Thames. Witnesses told constables they’d seen her jump into the river.
“Three years ago?” Claude said with an indulgent laugh. “My dear, have pity on my average memory.”
“You remember them,” Leo assured him. “They were a mother and daughter. Though at first, we did not know as much.”
Recognition lit Claude’s eyes, and he nodded. “Ah, yes, now I recall. The matching birthmarks.”
It wasn’t until the two women were undressed and lay upon different tables at the morgue that Claude noticed they each bore the same dark, pigmented mark on their left shoulder. Claude had known straightaway that the two women were related.
“You explained that pigmented marks, such as moles and port wine stains, are often passed down from mother to child,” Leo said, as she poured another cup of tea for herself.
“Yes, that has been my observation,” he replied. “And in that case, it proved correct.”
It turned out the mother, furious with her daughter for defying her strict edicts and choosing to dance at a bawdy club, had poisoned her. Then, she’d gone straight to the Vauxhall Bridge and leapt to her death.
“Why do you mention these two women?” Claude asked.
“The young boy who is missing,” Leo began. “He has a large mole on the side of his face.”
