Shadow at the Morgue (Spencer & Reid Mysteries #1)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

London

January 1884

T he dead bodies in the room didn’t bother Leonora Spencer.

She’d grown accustomed to corpses over the years. The unending rotation of them being carted in and then out of her uncle’s morgue had become a predictable, almost natural routine. They weren’t a bother, and rationally, there was nothing to fear from them. It was the living who could be unpredictable and thus, dangerous.

That was never more apparent to Leo than when a man burst through the doors to the Spring Street Morgue’s postmortem room and brandished a pocketknife.

Alone for the last half hour and left to the unenviable task of closing the incision on the final examination of the day, she had heard the bell signaling someone’s arrival in the front lobby and thought of two things: she’d overlooked locking up the morgue when her uncle, Claude, retired home for the evening; and she was about to be discovered working on one of the corpses.

Leo froze with the curved needle, threaded with black catgut, in her hand. “Sir, you must leave. We are closed for the day.” She wasn’t sure how to address the fact that he held a knife, so she chose to ignore it.

“Give over his bag,” he ordered.

A stained, gray kerchief covered the bottom half of the man’s face, presumably to protect his identity. However, his eyes were a startling cloudy blue, nearly the color of well-established cataracts. A sharp widow’s peak speared the center of his high forehead. He really ought to have worn a hat to conceal those distinguishable features, though Leo didn’t think it wise to point that out.

“You’d like this gentleman’s bag?” She gestured toward the naked corpse on the autopsy table. “I’m afraid that isn’t possible. As he was found in curious circumstances, an official death inquest was ordered, and for the time being, his possessions are the property of the Metropolitan Police.”

Remaining calm was the only way to handle distraught and unruly family members, gripped by grief—and sometimes an excess of liquor. This wasn’t the first time one had stumbled into the morgue in such a state, but they didn’t usually brandish weapons or cover their faces like housebreakers. Leo returned to her task, piercing the ashen skin of the corpse’s chest with her needle. She hoped it would put off the intruder and convince him to leave.

“I don’t give a damn about that. Give it over. Now. ”

His shout bounced around the high, beamed ceilings of the room. Once a vestry for St. Matthew’s Church, it had been transformed into one of the city’s rising number of morgues. The stone floors and walls kept the vestry cool during the summer months and even more appropriately chilled during the autumn and winter. The only renovations to the building had been to erect walls to create a back room, some storage closets, and a receiving lobby, the latter of which this kerchiefed man had stormed through on his way into the postmortem room.

The leather bag in question was on a table next to Leo, as was the dead man’s folded clothes, his shoes, and a worn, felt bowler. Nothing among the contents of the bag, which she had already thoroughly documented, pointed to the corpse’s identity. As with all unidentified bodies, he’d been tagged as John Doe. And since the middle-aged man had been found sprawled in a street with no obvious wounds, a postmortem had been ordered to determine how he’d died. Her uncle had found evidence of a pulmonary embolism. Tragic, but nothing criminal.

“Are you family? The police would like to know his name,” she said as she pulled the catgut through the skin.

Claude had made the customary opening incision earlier, cutting from throat to pubic bone, and he had performed the postmortem, as he had countless times during his career as an assistant city coroner. Lately, however, handling the curved needle and making neat stitches had become a challenge for him. More and more, Leo had started to take over the suturing required at the end of the postmortem. When his tremors acted up, it could be difficult for him to make clean incisions too. But while she preferred closing to opening, especially when it came to making the coronal incision at the scalp, Leo would assist however Claude needed her. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t learned the essentials of the procedure over the last several years she’d been allowed into the postmortem room. In fact, she’d become quite good at it.

“Shut your mouth and step away,” the intruder ordered as he took a few advancing steps.

Leo rested the needle on the dead man’s chest and did as she was told, though she was more annoyed than afraid. If he had wanted to hurt her, he would have done so by now.

“Very well, take it then,” she said.

In truth, it didn’t matter. While Claude had been removing and examining the man’s organs, she’d gone through the bag and detailed every item in the possessions register. Officially, that was her job. That, and typing up death inquest reports for Mr. Pritchard, the deputy coroner, to bring to inquests at the coroner’s court. She also greeted those who arrived to identify the bodies and oversaw their collection, either by family members or a funeral service.

Even if she hadn’t already written down the contents of the bag, Leo would have been able to do so now, in meticulous detail. Her memory was such that she could view something once and then flawlessly recall it again, even years later. Her perfect memory came in quite handy at the morgue. She could accurately recall everything from the pattern of a dress on a body that came in months back, to the exact amount of money in a coin purse written into the possessions register, to the finer details of a death inquest she had typed last summer. It wasn’t as though she could memorize whole books, word for word, but short passages were simple. She could recite details of newspaper articles she’d read long ago, memorize numbers effortlessly, and right then, she could easily picture the several mundane items within the bag the intruder had demanded. She couldn’t comprehend what he might want with them. They certainly weren’t worth all this trouble.

The kerchiefed man plucked the bag from the table, then looked around the postmortem room at the half dozen tables within it. Two were occupied by white-sheeted bodies. One was a man killed during a mugging, whose multiple knife wounds had been sufficient evidence for cause of death. The other was a young woman in her twenties, crushed beneath the wheels of an omnibus. Neither required postmortems.

The intruder pointed with his knife toward the open door of a supply closet. “In there,” he said gruffly, and Leo’s stomach dropped.

“I really must object. Take the bag and leave. I won’t try to stop you.”

“Get in!” He advanced again, the slip joint knife pointed toward her abdomen.

She gritted her teeth, her chest growing tight, but again, conceded. Arguing with a desperate man holding a weapon would be unwise, even if being shut into a darkened space made her skin crawl and pulse race. The door slammed behind her, and the snap of the padlock sealed her fate. Expensive chemicals and tools were stored upon the shelves, so Claude had Leo lock them up each night. The key for the padlock was in her skirt pocket. A lot of good it would do her now.

“This is unnecessary!” she shouted as the man’s boots scuffed across the stone floor. He didn’t sound to be leaving, as she thought he would. Surely, he’d penned her up in here to prevent her from running out into the street and calling for help. As the morgue was but a stone’s throw from Great Scotland Yard, the headquarters for the London Metropolitan Police, a constable or two would have certainly heard her shouts and investigated.

Come to think of it, this man had quite a lot of impudence to be robbing a place so close to so many officers of the law.

She pressed her ear to the wooden door. He was lingering about the postmortem room. But after a few protracted moments, his footsteps carried back toward the lobby and then disappeared entirely. He was gone.

And she was still locked in a closet.

Leo tried to breathe evenly and focus on the strip of light coming in at the base of the door. She didn’t like confined, dark spaces, and for good reason. Though to think of those reasons now would only hasten the panic already threatening to paralyze her. Instead, she thought of her larger problem: the body of the John Doe, still lying half-closed on the table. It would be a disaster if anyone were to come into the morgue and find him like that, for it wouldn’t take much to conclude that the young woman locked in the supply closet, wearing a canvas apron, was the very person who’d been in the middle of a postmortem closure.

Should Mr. Pritchard or his superiors, or anyone at the Yard, learn that she’d been helping with such tasks, her uncle would lose his position as assistant coroner in a blink. It wouldn’t matter that Claude had the favor of the illustrious Chief Superintendent Gregory Reid—or rather former Chief Superintendent Gregory Reid. Allowing a woman to perform any kind of surgical operation on a body, living or dead, would be beyond the pale and grounds for immediate dismissal. If that were to happen, Leo wasn’t sure what she or her uncle would do, especially now that Aunt Flora was unwell.

Like the tremors diminishing Claude’s skillful hands, Flora’s mental fitness had also been deteriorating for some time. She’d always been a bit off-kilter, ever since Leo had gone to live with them when she’d been nine years old. But now, nearly sixteen years later, Flora had reached a point where conversation was next to impossible and comprehension, even more obscure.

With Flora becoming increasingly erratic and emotional, the only people who were able to soothe her were Claude and Mrs. Shaw, the nurse that Claude’s position at the city morgue allowed him to afford. In fact, it had been Mrs. Shaw who’d sent a message to the morgue earlier, saying Flora was in an especially bad way and that Claude was needed. He’d gone at once, leaving the John Doe in Leo’s capable hands.

Now, however, a locked door stood between her and her task.

Had the lock been built into the door, she might have reached into the knot of hair at the nape of her neck and pulled out a few pins. She had no idea how to pick a lock, but it wouldn’t hurt to try. However, as this was a padlock, she could do nothing but hope her uncle would notice her absence soon and come looking for her. Then again, he wouldn’t want to leave Flora alone to walk the ten minutes to the morgue. Goodness, if he didn’t come, Leo might actually have to sleep inside this cramped closet reeking sharply of chemicals.

She turned her back to the door and sank down to the stone floor, bringing her knees up to her chest. You’re perfectly fine, she told herself. It’s not ideal, but you are fine. This wasn’t the attic from her nightmarish memories. It was a perfectly safe closet. There was no one out there looking to harm her, and she wasn’t hiding from anyone.

With her sweaty hands clasped together, she began to rub circles into the center of her right palm. It was something she’d done for many years to calm herself. Her thumb would go over the old, raised scars there again and again until her pulse began to even out. Still, she couldn’t quite escape the panic that small, tight spaces had inspired ever since that night, all those years ago. She often wondered if that night was still so vivid because of her curious memory, or if the horror of it had been strong enough to leave an indelible impression on her brain. Perhaps one simply aided the other.

Claude would find her eventually. She could depend on him, and she had, ever since she’d been a little girl and newly alone in the world. While Flora was her blood relation, her mother’s much older sister had left the parenting to her even older husband. In all probability, had Claude not insisted they take Leo in, Flora would have been content to leave her orphaned niece with Gregory Reid, then a detective inspector with Scotland Yard. The Inspector had been the one to find Leo in that attic, and she’d spent the next two months in his care while he’d hunted down her only remaining family, Flora and Claude Feldman.

Sounds of a commotion came from the front lobby. Leo stiffened her back. She got to her feet, her heart beginning to pound when she heard the muffled voices of men.

The postmortem room door opened.

“Leo? Claude?”

She squeezed her eyes shut. Curse her bad luck!

“Leonora! Claude? Are either of you here?”

The resonant baritone of Detective Inspector Jasper Reid’s voice shivered through her, and briefly, she contemplated staying quiet. It was tempting. Jasper might have been Gregory Reid’s adopted son, but he’d never shared his father’s indulgent sentiments regarding Leo. If anything, Jasper viewed her as an annoyance, a proverbial thorn in his side.

The trouble was, if she pretended not to be here, Jasper would only go to her home on Duke Street and report her as missing. Her uncle would worry needlessly, and then of course, Claude would need to explain the unfinished postmortem on the table.

With mounting embarrassment and great reluctance, Leo lifted her hand and rapped her knuckles against the door.

“In here.” Humiliation weighted the words. No doubt the newly minted detective inspector heard it too.

Jasper’s footfalls approached the door. “Leo? Are you in the bloody closet?”

“Only until you open the padlock and get me out.” She crouched to slide the key through the small gap under the door.

He grumbled as he took it up. Leo stood, pushing back her shoulders and preparing herself. Jasper would have seen the John Doe by now. She needed an excuse to explain her uncle’s absence. Belatedly remembering her canvas apron, she hurriedly untied the strings and tossed the apron onto the floor behind her just as the padlock clicked. The door swung wide on creaking hinges. Light from the hanging gasoliers flooded in, and she winced.

Jasper stood directly in front of her, his tawny eyebrows pinched together, and chin tucked. Ever since she’d known him, he’d worn some version of this scowl, though now it was amplified to a new degree. A full head taller than Leo, he’d long perfected looking down his nose at her with censure, as he did right then.

“Leonora Spencer, just what kind of trouble have you gotten yourself into now?”