Chapter 20
Chapter Twenty
T he sky was the same bruised purple as a blackened eye when they arrived to find the front doors to the morgue locked. Leo tossed a look of trepidation toward Jasper before reaching into her handbag.
“Something must have happened with Flora,” she said as she found the key and let them into the lobby. “Uncle Claude doesn’t usually lock up until six.”
Jasper sighed. He’d held his tongue for long enough. It was a sore subject with her, he knew, but he had to be blunt. “Leo, if he can’t keep up with the work, the chief coroner will have no choice but to replace him.”
He didn’t want to think about what would happen to them if that came to pass. With Claude’s palsy and Flora’s deteriorating mind, Leo would be left to support them. She’d either need to find work…or a husband to provide for them.
Jasper kept on her heels, unreasonably irritated by that latter prospect as they entered the postmortem room.
“You’re worrying for no reason, Jasper. He can keep up with the work,” she said, turning up the overhead gasoliers. Several sheeted bodies came into view. Jasper followed her as she passed them swiftly for the back room. “I’ve just been busy the last few days. Everything will go back to the way it was soon. Especially since I’m positive Mr. Barrett stashed his blackmail portraits in the crypt.”
If her hunch was correct, then they’d soon find them. At last, they’d be looking upon the face of the person with the most motive to silence William Carter, Hannah Barrett, and her brother.
On the ride from Fleet Street, she’d reminded him of the day Mr. Barrett came to view his sister and arrange for her body’s collection. Leo had stumbled over an explanation for why she was having him go through his sister’s personal effects, piece by piece. What she’d intended was to find out if he’d noticed her locket was missing. In the process, she’d brought up the crypt, where unclaimed possessions were stored and accumulating dust. Her comment that hardly anyone ever went down into the crypt had likely given him the notion that it was where the much-coveted photographs might be safe.
If Leo’s hunch was correct.
“Things cannot go back to the way they were,” Jasper said after she’d lit the back office too and went directly for the door leading to the crypt. “You were sewing up cadavers after postmortems, and who knows what else.”
Hell, she had to have a stomach made of steel. He’d seen plenty of bodies during the several years he’d been on the force, but sorting through internal organs and cutting into brains to decipher a cause of death? He didn’t think he’d be able to bear it. And yet it didn’t affect Leo. He wavered between being disapproving of it and being impressed by her.
She placed her handbag on a shelf before lighting a pair of gas lamps with a lucifer match. Then pinned him with a glare. “Would you rather my uncle lost his position?”
“That isn’t a fair question. You know I don’t want that.”
She handed him one of the lamps and then swung the door to the crypt open so fast he felt the breeze.
“Please, Jasper, let me decide how best to help my family.” She disappeared onto the steps, and her voice grew muffled. “Wouldn’t you do anything you needed to, to protect the Inspector? To help him?”
He started after her, ducking his head before entering the dark and musty stairwell. The walls were close, his elbows practically brushing them. He reached the bottom of the steps, their lamps flickering temperamentally and leaving most of the vast space in shadows. Gas had not been run down here, likely because of the lack of ventilation. There weren’t any windows, and boxes and shelving and furniture and church pews had all been crammed between the arches propping up low, vaulted ceilings. An old confessional with its doors flung open leaned against the closest stone wall by the stairs.
“You’re right. I would help the Inspector in any way I could,” Jasper said. “So would you, even though he isn’t your family. You care for him. Believe it or not, I care about Claude and Flora.”
The gas light brightened her face as she held it higher. She met his gaze, and for once, her eyes weren’t filled with remote poise or incisive cleverness. He saw doubt and a glimmer of distress.
“But they aren’t your responsibility. They’re mine. I could acquire another position somewhere, I’m sure, as a secretary or typist, or a switchboard operator, but how am I to take care of them on such meager wages?” She shook her head and closed her eyes. “Forget I said anything. I’m not going to burden you with my concerns.”
She started away, but Jasper reached for her arm. He caught her wrist and brought her back toward him. Her arm went rigid under his palm but quickly relaxed.
“You’re not burdening me. And you aren’t alone.”
Their lanterns flickered, lighting her pensive gaze. He had tugged her close. Too close. He should release her. But though his grip loosened and slipped, his fingers seemed to be ruled by a force other than his brain. He held on, his hand clasping hers. Finally, after a few heartbeats too long, he dragged in a breath and stepped back, letting go.
Haltingly, Leo moved a step in reverse too. “That…that means a great deal. Thank you.” She coughed lightly and turned to face the vaults. “We should start looking.”
Jasper started for the shelves and boxes nearby, and Leo took her lamp into another vaulted space, out of his view. Exhaling, an odd and stirring sensation crawled over his palms. What had possessed him to hold onto her hand for as long as he had?
He drew his mind away from the thought by opening the lid on a rectangular box made of corrugated board. The material was used to store files and evidence at the Yard, and many of these storage boxes looked to have come from the Metropolitan Police itself.
“Look under things, too, if they can be easily lifted,” Leo called. He could see the light from her lamp bobbing through a collection of old church paraphernalia and unclaimed storage.
“This whole place needs to be cleaned out and organized. How do you find anything down here?” he called back.
“We don’t. I was in earnest when I told Mr. Barrett that everything is just collecting dust.”
Jasper shoved boxes back into their places after opening them but seeing no photographs. He was beginning to think Leo’s hunch had been wrong when a box on a low shelf drew his attention. It looked like all the others, except for one thing: there was a smear in the dust on the lid.
“I might have something,” he called, pulling the box from among its neighbors.
A hand had most certainly swept the dust away. Jasper set his lantern at his feet and lifted the lid. Inside was a pair of men’s shoes, a moldering length of ivory neckcloth, and a small, rectangular paper box. He might have overlooked the little box entirely, if not for his having seen plenty of them scattered on the floor inside Mr. Barrett’s ransacked hidden closet.
He brought out the small box, and lifting its lid, exhaled. A stack of photographs mounted on cards were stored within.
“Have you found them?” Leo’s lantern shed light on the top photograph as she approached. It was of a man and a woman, neither of them dressed in even a stitch of clothing.
Jasper stared, unable to grasp what he was seeing. It wasn’t the act that the hidden camera had captured on a glass plate negative that tolled through him and sank his stomach. It wasn’t the nudity either. Those things couldn’t shock him.
“No,” Leo whispered as she stared at the top photograph. “Is that…?”
His pulse increasing, Jasper took the stack out of the box and began to flip through the photographs. There were five in all, each one progressively lewder than the one before it.
“Yes,” he said, angling the photographs away from her line of sight. Leo’s hand holding the lantern quavered. “It is.”
The shutter of the concealed camera had captured Elsie Vickers while she’d been intimate with William Carter, as the top image had shown. Samuel Barrett joined them in three of the other photographs. Utterly nude and positioned in depraved ways, the images of the adolescent girl stoked a nauseating rage within him. God knew how, but Elsie had been lured into that bedroom and used by those two men, all while another young woman photographed the encounter, the opportunity to profit superseding any shred of human decency.
Leo lowered the lantern to the floor next to his own, and Jasper was grateful the images were no longer discernable. “It can’t be. She’s only seventeen, for heaven’s sake. The commissioner…my God, if he knew…”
The wooden steps into the crypt groaned. When Jasper saw a man coming off the bottommost one, he dropped the box and reached for his police-issued Webley revolver underneath his coat.
“Don’t, inspector.” Benjamin Munson, the commissioner’s deputy assistant, already had his own revolver trained on him. “Raise your hands high. Both of you.”
Jasper lifted his hands, palms out, while stepping in front of Leo. “Munson.”
Instantly, all the reasons why the deputy assistant would be here, holding them at gunpoint, unspooled in his mind.
Leo edged out from behind him. “They were blackmailing Elsie,” she said before Jasper could. “How did you become involved, Mr. Munson?”
She sounded far too tranquil for being on the receiving end of a single-barrel revolver.
“There is no point in my explaining that, Miss Spencer.” He took cautious steps closer, his aim firm and confident under pressure, as it should have been for a former military man.
Jasper eyed the Webley. “You shot William Carter and Clarence Stillman.”
Though, why had Samuel Barrett had been stabbed?
“I need those photographs,” Munson replied.
“Did Elsie turn to you?” Jasper asked evasively. His mind spun with possible ways to overpower Sir Nathaniel’s assistant. Munson wasn’t much in the way of muscle or brawn, but at this distance, his revolver’s shot would hit its target. “Did she ask you to help recover the photographs?”
“Cooperate, Inspector Reid, and I will be sure neither of you suffer unnecessarily,” he replied.
Leo produced a strangely belated gasp and huddled behind Jasper. It distracted him for the barest moment. It wasn’t like her at all to cower or play the frightened female.
“If I were to guess,” Jasper went on, choosing not to respond to Munson’s offer, “you agreed to help Elsie for a price: her hand in marriage.”
It was why she’d been so upset when Jasper had last seen her. She didn’t want to marry her father’s assistant, but she wouldn’t want those photographs to be released to the public—or perhaps to her father—even more.
Behind him, Leo had gone quiet. But not still. Jasper barely refrained from jumping when her hand slipped between the notched center of his frock coat. The tails split apart just above the buttocks, and that is where Leo’s fingers now brushed. Jasper’s throat cinched, and his body flashed over with heat, but as her hand moved slowly and smoothly along his left hip, he realized what she was trying to do.
“Enough,” Munson said. “I don’t relish killing a woman, but that is unavoidable now. If only you had kept your nose out of things, Miss Spencer.”
“Let us discuss a different arrangement,” Jasper said, his raised hands coming forward and together to help conceal Leo’s fingers, creeping along his side, toward the black polished handle of his revolver. His temples began to dampen. She was either brilliant or mad.
“Take the photographs. The three of us walk out of here alive. I’ll close the case, and you’ll never hear a word about it again,” Jasper went on. All bollocks, of course, but he needed to buy time.
“Why would you do that?” Munson asked.
“Do you think I want Elsie’s secret exposed? I’ll burn these photographs myself before they go anywhere.”
Should the images make their way into the public eye, it would be a publicity nightmare for Sir Nathaniel and his daughter. He’d be scorned, his reputation tarnished irrevocably. And Elsie would be utterly ruined. Jasper didn’t want that. And yet, he also couldn’t burn the evidence.
Leo’s palm grazed his ribs, and he tightened the muscles of his abdomen. It was the entirely wrong moment for it, but an answering tug came low in his stomach. It infuriated him. She infuriated him. What was she thinking? What did she know about handling a firearm? And yet, Jasper conceded that the Webley was their best chance at stopping Munson.
“Stop prevaricating, Reid. I know exactly what sort of copper you are, and you’d never allow me to go free.”
“I would,” Jasper replied. “If it meant keeping Miss Spencer alive.”
With Leo standing so close that she’d practically adhered herself to his back, he found it wasn’t a lie. If there was no other way out, he’d make the deal. But when the weight of her fingers fell upon the revolver’s grip, he felt the smallest sliver of hope. It came with a surge of uncertainty. The woman had never fired a shot in her life. Hell, she might squeeze the trigger accidentally right now and send a bullet into his leg or hip.
“Unfortunately, I can’t take that risk.” Munson raised his revolver, preparing his shot. “My apologies, Miss Spencer.”
The tinkling of a bell came on the heels of Munson’s insincere apology. The morgue cat appeared at his ankle, rubbing up against his trouser hem. Just as quickly, Tibia swatted at him and hissed. Munson kicked his foot at the cat, his attention diverted.
“ Now , Leo!” Jasper lunged, head and shoulders down like a battering ram. The bulk of his revolver vanished as she plucked it from his holster. Munson’s split-second distraction cost him; when he fired his shot, it was hasty and untrained. Jasper collided with him, unscathed.
Munson barely stayed on his feet. They staggered backward, straight into the old confessional. Jasper pinned his arm against the corky wood and struggled to keep it there and take the revolver out of play. However, he had no control over Munson’s trigger finger, which squeezed off a second, then a third, shot. Jasper jammed his shoulder into Munson’s chest and, hoping to destabilize him, swept one of his ankles out from under him. Munson lurched, giving Jasper an opening to reach for the revolver.
But Munson slammed his forehead against Jasper’s, hard. The blow stunned him, and a knee burrowed into his stomach. Jasper reeled backward but managed to cling on to Munson, and he brought the killer with him onto the stone floor.
A fist cuffed Jasper across the jaw, and then Munson was bowling him over, coming to sit astride him. Grabbing Munson’s collar, he tossed him overhead, freeing himself from being held down—and certainly shot point-blank. Jasper scrabbled to his feet and turned to barrel back into the man. Munson had done the same, but in his haste to scrap with Jasper again, he’d paid no attention to the other person in the crypt.
Leo came up behind Munson and clubbed him on the back of the head with Jasper’s Webley. After a muted thud , the deputy assistant’s knees folded. He collapsed onto the floor, where he moaned incoherently.
Jasper kicked Munson’s dropped weapon, spinning it away and out of reach. The man was writhing, still somewhat conscious. So, Jasper rolled him over and cracked a fist into his jaw. He went limp.
“Nicely done,” Jasper said, his chest heaving as he tried to catch his breath. “Though, I thought you’d try to shoot him.”
He took the patrolman cuffs, which he always carried, from his coat pocket and closed them around Munson’s limp wrists before the man could rise to consciousness again.
Gingerly, Leo held out the revolver, as one might hold a dead rat by its tail. “I decided against discharging it. I was afraid I’d hit you instead.”
He reclaimed his Webley, relieved yet impressed she’d entered the fray. It had been a risk.
He looked her over. “You aren’t hurt?”
“No, and I think we have Tibia to thank,” she said, forcing a half-smile to her lips. Her heart wasn’t in it. She stooped to pick up the photographs Jasper had dropped, taking care to flip them face down. After a quiet moment, she stood again. “What do we do?”
Jasper took the photographs and tucked them into his coat pocket. He raked an unsteady hand through his hair, agitation climbing through him like ants. “I’ll take Munson in and charge him with murder and attempted murder.”
“But Elsie will be charged with accessory to murder.”
“She committed a crime, Leo.” He gritted his teeth. “If she knew what Munson was doing?—”
“What if she didn’t know?” she argued.
“I’ll bring her in and find out.”
Leo settled a hand on his arm. “Is there any way you can keep the photographs out of this?”
He stared at her, taken aback. “You’re asking me to suppress evidence.”
“I am asking you to think about what this will do to Elsie. Jasper, she will never recover.”
“She should have considered that before allowing herself to be seduced by two men.”
Regret curled through him instantly, and the flare of disappointment in Leo’s eyes gave the feeling of thorns. He shouldn’t have said it. He hadn’t meant it. Elsie was young and impressionable, far more so than other young ladies her age. She would have been easily led, and Carter would have recognized that.
With a biting fury under his skin, Jasper grabbed Munson by the back of his coat and cuffed arms and hauled him up onto shaky footing. He needed to bring him in, book him, and then, he could question him.
He pushed the half-conscious man toward the stairs, knowing he should be grateful the killer had been caught. He would have been, too, if everything about it didn’t feel so bloody wrong.