Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
L eo entered the north gate to All Saints just as dawn crested the trees. She’d left an hour ago, waking before Claude or Flora and leaving a note to say that she was visiting her family’s graves. It wasn’t an absolute lie. She would indeed go to their headstones, something she did at least once every year. But first, she would meander past block 17 to see if the exhumation was underway.
Jasper had said his hands were tied, and she could understand that—to a point. But this cemetery wasn’t private property. Anyone could come here and spend the day, and if she just happened to be strolling past Mr. Strange’s gravesite, well then, where was the harm in it?
She wasn’t needed at home this morning anyhow. Their neighbor, Mrs. Gareth, had gotten on well with Flora the day before, and she’d offered to stay again while Claude spoke with the nurse who had responded to the listing in the Telegraph . She hoped this nurse accepted the position as Claude was desperately behind in his duties at Spring Street, and the deputy coroner, Mr. Pritchard, would soon be hearing about it—if he hadn’t already.
As Leo walked up the wide, flat lane to the four-spired stone church which stood like a sentinel to the graves beyond, her stomach grumbled. She’d wrapped some slices of bread and cheese taken from the larder for her breakfast, which she’d eaten on the nearly hour-long cab ride to Nunhead. The cost of the hansom to the outer reaches of the city was quite dear, but the less expensive omnibuses wouldn’t begin operating for another few hours. She hoped the splurge would be worth it.
Her uncle paid her a wage every Friday, though he took it from his own earnings. The chief coroner could not agree to paying a woman for her services at the morgue, but she was welcome to assist on a voluntary basis. At first, Leo wouldn’t accept Claude’s offering, but he’d insisted, saying that unless she took it, he would not allow her to work with him. She mostly spent it at the market to keep the household running, as Claude took care of the yearly lease, the gas, the coal orders, and paying the nurse, whenever one was employed.
At the church, she turned down the path to the right, seeing again in her mind the plot map, which she’d scrutinized meticulously the afternoon before. It rose before her eyes again in sharp detail, each curving path and cleanly drawn, numbered block. Every block could hold anywhere between one to a dozen graves, all depending on the family’s desire for either simplicity or extravagance. Barnabas Strange’s purchased plot was in the southeastern corner of the cemetery. Leo’s family’s headstones were on the opposite side of the grounds, their simple granite markers in sharp contrast to some of the more ornate monuments topping the graves.
The Spencer family plot was slightly raised and surrounded by a square of curbing. Long ago, the Inspector had arranged for a bench to be placed inside the square, and that was where Leo usually sat whenever she visited. She never stayed very long, for she wasn’t entirely sure what she should be thinking, saying, or doing. Not to mention, each time she sat there, looking at their headstones, she would feel undeservedly lucky that there was not a fifth headstone with her name chiseled upon it.
More so, she’d feel grateful to the faceless, nameless boy who had helped hide her. It made her sick to feel such disloyalty to her family.
Leo pulled her cloak tighter around herself as her breath fogged the air. Dawn’s light broke meekly through the overcast sky, and without the sun’s direct glare, everything still had a bluish tinge. The grass glistened with frost, and in the morning quiet, the chatter of birds was a near cacophony. A blackbird swooped from the branch of a nearby oak and, with a grating caw, flapped past her head. Leo jumped and let out a yelp, though she felt silly for it. Thankfully, as she closed in on block 17, there were no sounds of men digging or talking, so no one would have seen or heard her.
The groundskeeper must not have arrived yet to begin the task of reopening the grave. Neither had Jasper and his detective sergeant. However, stopping along the path, Leo cocked her head at an unusual sight—mounds of dirt were heaped around one of the graves ahead. A shovel had been speared into one of the piles. As she approached, her stomach dropped toward her knees. The grave, marked with a new, polished, black granite stone, belonged to Barnabas Strange.
The loose soil glittered with ice crystals, but with this year’s temperate winter, the ground was only frosty, not frozen. Gravediggers were still digging several feet down, according to a few of the funeral services collecting bodies at Spring Street, though with more effort than they’d give in the warmer months. With hundreds of people dying every week in the city, milder winters were a blessing. So were the crematoriums that had started to become the answer to overcrowded burial grounds.
Leo smelled the freshly turned soil—and something more pungent.
As she stepped closer to the yawning pit, her attention landed on a metal stake driven into the ground. A length of rope had been tied around it and fed down into the pit. With a streak of alarm, she knew this was no professional exhumation. Someone had opened Barnabas Strange’s grave during the night.
Leo crouched at the edge of the pit and peered into the hollow. It hadn’t been a clean dig; the sides had been roughly scraped, leaving dirt scattered all over. Only the top of a tapered wooden coffin had been exposed. The lid was on, but it wasn’t sealed. It lay askew, leaving small gaps at the top and bottom and revealing the silk-cushioned interior. Blast it all! Someone had gotten to whatever Mr. Carter had hidden in the coffin, and only hours before the scheduled disinterment.
A shiver along the back of Leo’s neck announced a presence behind her. A person who hadn’t yet announced themselves. She started to turn and stand, but a hard shove between her shoulder blades stopped her. With a short scream, she lost her balance and fell forward into the open grave. Her shoulder and hip struck the coffin lid as she landed on her side, the air driven from her lungs. Shock wiped out any pain for several moments, but soon, she felt it blooming in the back of her skull and throbbing through her arm and knee. Leo dragged in a shallow breath, choking on some dirt that came in with it. The world spun. She didn’t know for how long she lay there—five seconds, ten, a full minute—before sense barreled back into her.
Pushing herself up, she grimaced from pain and a dash of horror. The knotted rope was gone. It had been drawn up, leaving her with no way to climb out. The tang of dirt and the sickly-sweet odor of a decomposing body filled the back of her throat. Taking her lacy handkerchief from her skirt pocket, she held it to her nose and mouth as she slowly stood. She reached, but her fingertips fell short of the pit’s ledge.
No! She could not be found here, stuck in the open grave, by Jasper and his men when they arrived for the exhumation. It would be utterly humiliating! Desperate to climb free, she dug the toes of her boots into the wall of the grave to gain a foothold. But the soil gave way as soon as she pushed her weight into it, and she slipped back down again. With a frustrated grunt, she stamped her foot. Then instantly felt guilty. Surely, it was disrespectful to stomp on a dead man’s coffin.
With the hankie still pressed to her nose, Leo looked at the sliver of an opening at the top of the coffin. The grave thief had left the crowbar he’d used to pry the lid up, as it would have been securely sealed before interment. The top of Barnabas Strange’s head was visible. She didn’t quail. A body was a body. Having been buried for over a week now, he would not be pleasant to look at. He’d be bloated, as his internal organs began to putrefy and produce noxious gases. Those gases were natural, of course, but were a wretched plague, especially years back when cemeteries were so overrun with bodies that four or more poorly sealed coffins would share a single pit. Gravediggers began to fall ill, and a few even died, when they reopened the graves to add another casket, exposing themselves to the gases.
The grave thief had dug a small notch into the wall of the pit on which to stand while he pried the lid off. The earth there had been tamped down, but there weren’t any clearly defined boot prints. Nothing that might help identify a certain type of shoe the man had been wearing. So, she stepped there and then crouched to grip the casket lid herself. It was heavier than she’d thought it would be; the ornate brass fittings and the engraved breastplate added to the weight of it. As expected, Mr. Strange was a ghastly sight and smell, but even more upsetting was the lack of any object around him. It was just him in his burial suit.
Male voices drifted through the cemetery, and Leo squeezed her eyes shut. Drat! She lowered the lid and stood. There wasn’t anything to do now but wait to be found. It was all too reminiscent of how she’d been discovered locked inside the morgue closet. Oddly enough, she much preferred being stuck down a grave than inside a dark, enclosed space.
The voices neared. Jasper’s deep tenor, barking orders for Lewis to search the area, raked down her spine. He must have seen the piles of dirt and the shovel, just as she had. A few moments later, Jasper appeared above her, looming over the edge of the grave. His eyes sharpened on her as his mouth parted in shock.
“Leo? What the devil are you doing down there?” Anger flashed over his expression as he undoubtedly suspected what it looked like: that she had been the one to open the grave.
“This is not my handiwork, if that is what you’re thinking, Inspector Reid,” she snapped. “If it were, don’t you think I would have brought a method to extract myself from this pit?” She raised a hand. “Would you please help me out?”
Muttering under his breath, he lowered himself, chest to the dirt. Leo gripped his extended arms, and though she expected a struggle to pull her up, Jasper hauled her free with astonishing swiftness. Once her knees were on the ground again, he helped her to stand. She pushed back her hat, the pins having loosened in her fall. Jasper wasn’t alone. A man who must have been the groundskeeper gawped at her, and Sergeant Lewis was also returning from his search. His jaw dropped as Leo brushed off her skirt and tried to fix her hat again.
“What happened?” Jasper demanded. “Are you injured?”
She shook her head. “Not terribly. I was pushed from behind as I was crouching at the edge.”
Saying it aloud made her feel exceedingly silly, and her face heated. Jasper’s usual contemplative frown deepened into something closer to fury.
“Did you see who it was?” he asked, his voice rough and raspy.
“I think that is why I was pushed,” she said. “To stop me from seeing him. He must have seen me coming and hid. Then, when the opportunity presented itself…” She shrugged.
Jasper glanced at Lewis, then lowered his voice as he turned back to her. “I told you to stay away. Why did you not heed my order?”
Heed his order ! She barely refrained from pushing him into the open grave. Taking a deep breath, she gave him an overly benign grin. “I was visiting my family’s plot.”
“No, you were not.”
“It doesn’t matter now,” she said, gesturing to the grave. “Mr. Strange’s coffin has been breached, and if there was anything within it, it’s gone. Except for the body, of course.”
Lewis glanced into the grave and wrinkled his nose against the odor. “That’s a lot of digging for one man.”
“Not so much if the lad was spry,” the groundskeeper offered. “The dirt hadn’t settled just yet, so it’d be loose under the frosty crust. Easy enough to move, if you’ve an hour or two.”
“He was cutting it fine, if he was still here past dawn,” Leo said. Why not come at midnight and be gone well before the sun rose?
“Who else knew Coughlan had agreed to the disinterment?” Lewis asked.
Jasper whisked his hat from his head and stared out across the cemetery grounds. “Everyone at the central office, I imagine.”
She kept to herself that she’d also been obvious at Hogarth and Tipson with wanting to know about Barnabas Strange and his plot number. Though, she didn’t think Mr. Tipson had any reason to seek out the grave and open it. He hadn’t even known Mr. Carter’s studio had been ransacked. Besides, he was the furthest thing from spry.
The groundskeeper nimbly lowered himself into the pit and opened the coffin lid without hesitation. From this angle, Leo could see streaks of dirt on the snowy-white silk cushions around the body, as though a dirt-covered hand had reached here and there, lifting the body aside in a search.
“Want me to move him?” the man asked, as though the task of doing so would not trouble him in the least. Leo imagined he was quite inured to dead bodies, as was she.
Wanting to be sure there was nothing underneath Barnabas Strange, Jasper agreed to roll him onto his side. There was nothing there, however, and the groundskeeper got to work replacing the lid, then shoveling dirt back into the open pit.
“Well, that’s that,” Lewis said.
“Not necessarily. If he left in a rush, he might have left something behind. Or dropped something. Canvass the area from here to the west exit, through the trees in that direction,” Jasper said, pointing toward the corner of the cemetery and a more secluded entrance path. “Miss Spencer and I will go toward the north gate and meet you on the street.”
Her stomach flipped. If he wanted to be alone with her, it was certainly to chastise her without his detective sergeant overhearing. As they parted company with Lewis, Leo held up her hand.
“All right, I didn’t come to visit my family’s plot. I wanted to be here when the coffin was opened.”
“Even though I told you in no uncertain terms that you weren’t to be? This is my work, Leo, and I have orders to follow. If it looks like I’m letting you in on an investigation, do you think the superintendent is going to think twice about tossing me back to E Division?”
She cringed as they walked, their eyes scanning the ground for any evidence the grave robber might have accidentally left behind. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“No, you hadn’t.” He groaned and slapped his hat back on. “Not that it matters now. I’ll explain to Coughlan that the grave was already open, the body disturbed. Maybe… maybe …I won’t be a laughingstock.”
“Of course, you won’t be a laughingstock,” she said, getting angry herself now. “If anything, it proves that there was something valuable in that coffin. You were right to ask to have it exhumed.”
He scowled at the grass, the frost glistening as it melted under the coming sunshine. “It doesn’t matter. I was too late.”
They walked quietly toward the church, Leo’s mind’s leaping toward everything they’d learned so far. There was one thing she kept coming back to.
“The hole in Miss Barrett’s wall,” she began to say.
“I’ve been thinking of it too.”
She glimpsed sideways at him. “And the box camera?”
He nodded. “My guess is that either Miss Barrett or William Carter was taking photographs.”
“Of someone in the guest room?”
“Or…of two people,” he said, his eyes straight ahead.
Leo may not have been worldly or experienced, but she didn’t misunderstand him. “Lewd photographs?”
Jasper tugged at his collar. “Possibly.”
The ground seemed to suck at her bootheels, dragging her to a stop. “For blackmail purposes.”
Jasper stopped too. He squinted against the rising sunlight, bright and unhindered by clouds. “William might have been a fringe member of the East Rips, but he was still a Carter. That family thrives on exploitation and blackmail.”
For the first time in days, Leo began to feel as though she’d stepped onto the right path. “So, they take a secret photograph of someone in a…compromising position and then threaten to show it to others if they don’t pay?”
“A wife, a husband, an employer,” Jasper said, walking on toward the church and the front lane, though slowly, his eyes still peeled on the ground. “They might even have threatened to share it with the public.”
“But the person didn’t want to pay and instead threatened Mr. Carter.”
Jasper continued with the theory. “William hid the photographs, as they were his only leverage. He then told his accomplice, Miss Barrett, where to find them if he was harmed.”
“Why would he want her to dig them up?” Leo asked. “Why not leave them be?”
“Because they’re valuable.” He slowed his gait. “Or because they’re evidence of some crime or could be connected to one.”
Leo had to admit, the theory taking shape felt strong. But there were still gaps.
“Mr. Stillman knew about the locket. Why would Mr. Carter point his attacker toward Hannah, when he could have simply told Mr. Stillman where to find the photographs?”
Jasper shook his head and sighed as they passed the church. “I don’t know. And we don’t even know if there are photographs. For all we know, Miss Barrett had an obsession with a regular houseguest and spied on them.”
Leo didn’t believe that. Jasper didn’t either, she was sure of it.
“We need to speak to Mr. Barrett again and ask him about the guest room.” As soon as she said it, she knew what Jasper’s response would be.
“We are going back to Westminster, where you will leave off this case. Leo—” He took a wide step and came to stand in front of her, forcing her to a stop. Jasper held her gaze, unwavering. “If the Carters are involved, then you are lucky you were only shoved into a grave and not killed.”
“I’m not some helpless female, Jasper. Nor am I useless.”
“I never said you were.” His jaw tensed. “But it was a bit brainless to come all the way out here alone, before daybreak, just to spite an order I gave you.”
Brainless! The insult plunged into her chest like a knife. “I am not brainless, and I don’t take orders from you, Inspector Reid.” She tried to step around him, but he held out an arm to bar her way.
“Can you not understand that I don’t want to see any harm come to you?”
Leo drew back, surprised. She’d expected another order, another insult. The fire in her belly tempered, and her pulse slowed. It kicked back up a notch when Jasper’s raised arm came forward. His thumb, encased in soft leather, swept along her cheekbone. Leo held her breath, stunned at his touch. His dark green eyes flared, and then quickly, as though he’d felt her frisson of shock, he dropped his hand.
“There was some dirt on your face,” Jasper offered, touching his own cheek and then clasping his hands behind his back again. Leo rubbed the spot, realizing how disheveled she must have appeared after being pulled from a hole in the ground.
“Nothing is going to happen to me,” she said, a strange tingling on her cheek.
“You’re right, nothing is, because you’re going to stay safely in the morgue.” Jasper cocked his head. “You know what I mean.”
At the head of the lane, flanked by two stone pillars, Lewis came into view. Jasper and Leo started walking again, increasing their speed to meet the detective sergeant and perhaps leave the awkward moment behind them. Lewis shook his head. He hadn’t found anything in his search.
Needing to return to the Yard, Jasper invited Leo to share the police carriage. It felt strange to leave All Saints without seeing her family’s graves, but she would have rather gone alone, and that was something Jasper would not have allowed, had she insisted on staying. So, Leo returned with them, and they parted ways at Whitehall.
“You’re going straight to Spring Street?” Jasper asked her, as Lewis walked ahead toward the Yard’s entrance.
He asked as if assuming she was going to run off and land herself in more trouble. She smiled tightly. “I have a stop to make first.”
On the mostly silent ride to Westminster, Leo had contemplated the notion of indecent photography. Had Lewis not been with them, she might have shared her idea with Jasper. Then again, he might have become upset knowing that she hadn’t ceased all thoughts about the case, as he so desperately wanted.
Jasper hesitated now, as though reluctant to leave her to her own devices. So, she moved past him; she wanted to reach Dita’s home before her friend left for work. But then, Leo remembered her manners.
“Oh, and thank you,” she said, turning back toward him briefly. “For pulling me out of that grave.”
She said it just as two constables were passing by; they both slowed and stared in alarm. Jasper shook his head and smirked. “Let’s try not to make a habit of it.”