Chapter 13
Chapter Thirteen
J anuary 15 arrived the next morning with a tactless amount of sunlight. The middle of January tended to be bleak and cold, and sometimes rainy, which would have better suited the mood at 23 Charles Street. Jasper’s mood, too. He’d stayed up half the night trying to determine what the wording on the scrap of paper might mean in conjunction with William Carter’s instruction to Hannah Barrett to ‘dig it up’.
The writing itself on the paper had hardly been legible after being underneath Stillman’s tongue for so long. Just so Jasper wouldn’t forget, Leo wrote it down for him again: Strange Nun B17 R4.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she’d asked as she handed him the new paper. He hadn’t realized he was looking at her in any way at all.
“Your mind fascinates me.” He’d been slightly embarrassed by his honesty when she’d blushed.
“It is two words and a short number and letter combination. Easy enough for anyone to recall,” she’d replied.
Leo never flaunted her perfect memory. At least, not since the time he’d been home from boarding school at Cheltenham for the holidays, and Leo had recited an entire scene, word-for-word, from Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol for the Inspector after supper one evening.
“I just gave you that book this morning!” his father had exclaimed, laughing.
That Jasper had brought home gloriously terrible marks in every subject that quarter, her display had only rubbed salt in his wounded pride.
As Jasper dressed at Broadview Place, a former private home on Glasshouse Street that had been turned into bachelor’s rooms, a knot grew in the pit of his stomach. He’d have to find time that day to speak to Constance and smooth things over. They’d parted badly the evening before, after a tense drive back to her rooms. Her annoyance with him, however, had only spurred his anger.
“You were incredibly rude to that man,” she’d said.
“ That man is Eddie Bloom.”
“I don’t know who that is.”
“You work at The Times , Constance. How do you not know Bloom’s name?”
“I type the society pages!”
“You’re telling me you never read the rest of the paper?”
She’d looked at him the same way she had the few times he’d discussed details of cases with her—appalled. “Why would I want to read the rest of the paper?”
He’d been lost for words after that. If he sought Constance out later that day, she’d likely expect an apology. The trouble was, he didn’t agree she was owed one.
Jasper pushed the muddle aside when he arrived at the Inspector’s home. As he reached for the brass knocker, the knowledge that this would be Gregory Reid’s final January 15 gripped him with clarity. Profound sadness brimmed inside his chest, but for months now, Jasper had chosen not to acknowledge it. He wouldn’t acknowledge it today either. Today belonged to the Inspector.
He greeted Mrs. Zhao, who took his coat and hat with a sad smile. “Mr. Reid is with Sir Nathaniel and Miss Vickers in the dining room. They’re expecting you.”
It had slipped Jasper’s mind that the commissioner mentioned the possibility of a visit this morning. Elsie Vickers was bright, lively, and often candid, and she never failed to charm the Inspector. Jasper was glad they’d come, but when he reached the dining room, he saw they were already on their way out. And Elsie wasn’t bright or lively at all.
As he met Sir Nathaniel and his daughter just outside the dining room door, he noticed Elsie’s red-rimmed eyes and her mouth set in a dejected pout.
“Ah, Jasper, I’m glad to catch you.” The commissioner clapped him on the shoulder with a warm familiarity that he never displayed at Scotland Yard. It was only in this house where he addressed him by his given name. Favoritism wasn’t smiled upon inside the Met, and Jasper was grateful Sir Nathaniel was of the same mind.
“How is that strange case of the morgue intruder and the missing necklace coming along?” he asked.
Jasper wished Leo hadn’t said anything about it. With more questions than he had answers, he didn’t feel ready to present anything just yet. And when he did, he would take the information to Chief Inspector Coughlan, not the commissioner.
“Nothing illuminating,” Jasper answered. “Detective Sergeant Lewis sent a message this morning saying he’s found Stillman’s wife, so we’ll at least inform her of his death. She might know something more about his movements the night he died.”
“Very good, keep me informed.”
Jasper nodded, casting another glance toward Elsie. She stared at the carpet.
“Miss Vickers, is something wrong?” he asked, concerned by her sullen silence. This wasn’t like her in the least.
She looked up but only briefly met his eyes. “Wrong? Oh. No, I… I’m sorry, I…”
“Elsie is upset. She didn’t expect Gregory’s decline to be so pronounced,” her father cut in when she stumbled to find words. She nodded and again stared at the floor.
“Jasper.” Sir Nathaniel lowered his voice. “If there is anything you require in the coming days or weeks, I am at your service. I’ve just been through all this with my uncle, so call on me. I’m here.”
A sudden tightness around his Adam’s apple surprised Jasper. Sir Nathaniel gave his shoulder a firm press. The commissioner’s robust health only highlighted his father’s ill health. They were just a year apart, with the commissioner being the elder. The several doctors that had come to evaluate the Inspector since last spring all agreed that his lungs were afflicted with a cancer and that it had weakened the functioning of his heart. They’d also agreed there was nothing to be done for it.
“You’ve been a good friend to him.” Jasper cleared the rasping of his words with a cough. He tried to regain Elsie’s attention. “Both of you have been.”
It didn’t work. She still wouldn’t look at him.
Sir Nathaniel smiled sadly. “And you’ve been a good son.”
As the commissioner and his daughter left for the front hall, Jasper felt the same roiling of his gut whenever someone referred to him as Gregory’s son. An uneasy guilt.
When Jasper had been fourteen, just one year after accepting the invitation to be his ward, the Inspector had decided that it would be in Jasper’s best interest to attend a boy’s school. Though Viscount Cowper had rescinded the dowry that his daughter, Emmaline, had brought to her marriage—a legal, if bitter, act—the Inspector had insisted that he had enough set by and could afford it. Jasper hadn’t wanted to go. The local school would do just fine, he'd insisted. But the Inspector had flatly refused, saying he’d planned to send his late son, Gregory Junior, and there was no reason Jasper deserved any less of an education.
“Things would be easier for you at Cheltenham if you possessed a surname,” he’d told Jasper one evening at dinner.
He hadn’t wanted to attend any starchy school, where he’d be surrounded by milksops who hadn’t known a moment of struggle their whole pampered lives. He’d have nothing in common with them, that was certain. Yet, at the same time, he’d recognized an opportunity.
“I don’t know it, even if I do have one,” Jasper had said. He’d stuck with that fib since day one, and he hadn’t wavered.
“Then may I suggest Reid?”
The weight of the offer, the consequence of it, had settled keenly on his shoulders even then. He’d said no, at first, immediately thinking of little Gregory Junior, who held proper claim to the Reid name. Had he and his sister and mother not gone skating on the sunny day of the ice disaster, the Inspector wouldn’t have been offering to give Jasper his name. He wouldn’t have been in his life at all.
But Gregory Junior was dead. So was the person that Jasper had been before going to live with the Inspector. He’d hoped that by taking the Reid name, he would feel more like a son to him. Instead, he’d felt even more like a fraud. At twenty-nine, he still did at times.
Jasper entered the dining room to find his father at his usual spot at the head of the table. Two additional settings had been laid to his left and his right. One for Jasper, the other for Leo.
“I thought I heard you and Nathaniel conspiring out there,” he said, his fork and knife in hand as he ate his kippers and toast. “I offered, but they wouldn’t stay for breakfast.”
“Good morning, Father,” he said as he went to the sideboard.
“It is a good morning, indeed.”
Jasper halted briefly as he started to fill a plate. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say that on this day before.”
He chuckled. “I like to think I have a few surprises left in me.”
Jasper took his usual seat to his father’s left and spread a napkin over his lap, eyeing the Inspector. “It seems you do.”
He poured himself some coffee from a carafe, then refilled his father’s cup.
“Thank you.” He then puckered his brow. “Nathaniel just announced the most surprising thing. Elsie is to be betrothed.”
Jasper lowered his cup. He’d presumed the young lady’s miserable state had been from seeing the Inspector and realizing he would soon be leaving them. However, that didn’t make much sense now. His father was in unusually high spirits, after all.
“Betrothed to whom?” Jasper asked.
His father arched a stern brow. “Benjamin Munson, if you can believe it.”
The idea of it threatened to sunder Jasper’s appetite. Sir Nathaniel’s deputy assistant was at least twenty years Elsie’s senior.
“I’m not sure what to make of that,” Jasper said honestly. Munson was quiet, respectful, and by all accounts, an effective assistant to Sir Nathaniel. But as a match for Elsie?
“She’s quite young to be betrothed,” his father said, sipping his coffee. “But I suppose Emmaline wasn’t much older than she is when we fell in love and decided to marry.”
A gentle grin touched his lips as he lowered his cup. He sat back and set aside the soft memory. “Anyhow, Nathaniel says the man who broke into the morgue is dead?”
“I don’t want to talk about work,” Jasper replied. “I’d rather know why you’re so cheery.”
“I’d hardly say I’m that.” He grimaced, and Jasper regretted his comment.
“That was insensitive. I’m sorry.”
His father waved it off. “No, you’ve only noticed a change in me. And I must admit, I do feel differently today than I have in the past. I woke up this morning and realized something.” He laid down his fork and knife. “I’m not afraid.”
The statement lingered in the ensuing silence. Jasper wasn’t sure how to respond. That he was glad his father wasn’t afraid of that final breath? That knowing so put him at ease, at least a little bit?
“I had another revelation this morning upon waking,” his father continued. “It had to do with you.”
“With me?”
“There is something I need to tell you before Leonora arrives.” He turned in his chair to face Jasper more fully. “Something I need to confess.”
Jasper’s appetite shriveled in earnest now. “That sounds serious.”
His father hesitated. Then, after a long exhalation, he said, “I know that you lied.”
Jasper didn’t move. He didn’t breathe. He just stared, unblinking, as his pulse began to knock in his neck.
“I’m not angry,” the Inspector added quickly. “I know why you did it.”
“Father—”
He raised a hand to silence him, and Jasper obeyed.
“A few weeks after you were brought to the Yard, and I offered you work as an errand boy,” he began to explain, “a woman came to the detective department. Her nephew was missing, and she wanted us to find him.”
Numbness stole up Jasper’s spine, rendering the rest of his body immobile.
“There’d been a row between her husband and the boy, and after a serious beating, the boy had done a runner. They’d let him be for a week, to cool off, or so she said. Once her husband calmed, they’d looked for the boy, though without luck. Her husband refused to go to the police. So, defying him, she’d made the trip and was asking for our help.”
Shallow breaths were all Jasper’s lungs could accommodate. His father sat back in his chair and drummed the table with his fingers.
“You were shrewd to conceal your name,” he said with a hint of pride. “But you couldn’t conceal your face, could you?”
Jasper closed his eyes. “She brought a photograph.”
The Inspector nodded. “She did.”
Jasper knew the one it would have been. A tintype of him at age ten that his mother had kept on the night table next to her bed. When she’d died, his aunt Myra had placed it among the portraits already lining her own hearth mantel, shuffled in amongst his cousins. Just as he had been. Aunt Myra hadn’t been awful; she’d just been married to a brute—a man she’d always defend.
“Why didn’t you hand me over?” Jasper could hardly look the Inspector in the eye.
His father stopped drumming the table and laid his fingers flat. With an oddly serene tone, he answered, “Because I knew who her husband was.”
Unblinking, Jasper stared at the man adjacent to him. He nearly seemed a stranger. He’d known. All this time, all these years Jasper had buried his secrets, had kept his story straight and consistent, and the Inspector had known . Weightless in his chair, he thought he might be hallucinating. Dreaming. He half-hoped he was.
“What…” His voice cut off, but he tried again. “What did you tell her?”
Before, the Inspector had looked almost impish. Now, a frown turned his lips downward, accentuating the lines bracketing his mouth.
“Do you remember when I took you to the tailor for your new clothing?”
How could Jasper forget? He’d been measured and maneuvered and dressed like a doll while he stood on a small stool, the whole time so certain he was going to hate wearing the clothes of a toff. But he couldn’t be an errand boy for an inspector while wearing his own rags, the hems two inches too short after he’d so recently shot up like a stalk. In the end, the new clothes had fit like a glove. They had been the finest things he’d ever felt against his skin.
“You asked where your old clothes had gone,” his father said.
Jasper recalled, especially the spate of panic when he realized he’d left his grandmother’s rosary in one of his pockets. Losing it had been a blow. It had been one of the last times that he’d felt the sting of tears. “You told me you burned them.”
“I didn’t burn them,” his father whispered. “I took them to the Yard, and I assigned them to a cadaver. A boy with dark blond hair, about your weight and height, had been pulled from the Thames. He’d bloated badly over the week he’d been in the water, so when your aunt came to view the body, she couldn’t recognize you. It was the clothing and the rosary, which she knew to be yours, that convinced her.”
Jasper melted into the chair as shock loosened every muscle. The cunning didn’t stun him; the Inspector was one of the smartest, sharpest men he’d ever met. It was the deception that bowled him over. It wasn’t like Gregory Reid at all, or so he’d thought.
“Why did you never say anything?” Jasper asked.
He lifted a knobby shoulder, decimated by ill health. “I was ashamed. I betrayed my conscience and went against the law. I lied to your aunt and dashed her hopes of finding you. All because…” His guilt practically radiated from him as his spine bowed, as if all his years were stacking on, quick and heavy. “I thought you’d leave if you knew she was looking for you. I am sorry, Jasper. I was selfish?—”
“You were trying to protect me.”
“I told myself that.”
Jasper sat forward, no longer stunned numb. “I ran away for a reason. I wasn’t going back. Even if you hadn’t done what you did, I wasn’t going back.”
The Inspector had to have known that, especially if he’d known who Aunt Myra’s husband was.
“Can you forgive me?” he asked. Jasper shook his head.
“There is nothing to forgive.”
The Inspector’s eyes glistened. “I’m a proud father.” He sniffled but blinked back the tears. “I hope you know that.”
For the first time, Jasper knew, unswervingly, that he wasn’t thinking of Gregory Junior.
The clicking of footfalls on the parquet floor sounded outside the dining room entrance. Jasper and the Inspector had just a few moments to sit straight and clear the emotion from their expressions before Leo entered.
She seemed to sense that she’d walked in on a serious conversation, and she held still. “I’m interrupting.”
The Inspector rose from his chair as rapidly as his frail body would allow. “Not at all. We were starting to wonder where you were. Coffee?”
She came forward. “No, thank you, I’ve already breakfasted.”
Passing on Mrs. Zhao’s cooking was slightly concerning, and Jasper wondered if the morning had been a trying one with her aunt.
“Would you like some company to Kensal Green?” she asked, as if she did not come with them every year as it was.
Jasper set the napkin back onto the table, his breakfast untouched. She was right; it would be best to get underway before the day took its inevitable toll on his father.
“Indeed, I would,” he said, draining the last of his coffee. “Let us be off then, shall we?”