Chapter 17 #2
He was panicking. But while Leo considered the current situation risky, she didn’t imagine someone would come in here and strangle them as had happened to Lydia. However, she was beginning to sense that their hasty plan to pose as husband and wife trying to purchase opium might be falling apart.
She was about to suggest to Connor that they leave when a door Leo had not noticed on the back wall, papered over with the same dark floral wallpaper, opened.
A tall woman with greying blonde hair, upswept in a fashionable twist, and wearing a ruffled dark blue skirt and bodice entered.
It was the same woman who had been speaking to Dita the other day, Mrs. Gleason.
She shut the door behind her. “My floor manager advised me that I should come speak with you. It seems there is some concern over our superior stock?” Her blue eyes, edged by fine lines, narrowed on Leo.
They flashed with recognition. “I know you. You were here yesterday. You spoke to Miss Clark in ladies’ fashions. ”
Leo was surprised the woman remembered her. She’d hoped she would be forgettable.
“Yes, I believe I was at the ribbon counter,” she confirmed, thinking it better not to lie. “I was impressed by what I saw of the store and thought I’d bring my darling husband. We have a new home to fill, after all.”
Connor had come back toward her upon Mrs. Gleason’s arrival, but his bearing was tense and protective, as if he suspected the woman of something.
“Is that so?” Mrs. Gleason replied, cutting Connor a suspicious glance, then, settling it back on Leo. There was a shift in the air, and Leo knew their ruse was over.
“Miss Clark is working for a detective agency,” the woman said, her stare now hard and businesslike. “Are you as well?”
Leo wasn’t quite ready to give up and, hoping their cover could be salvaged, laughed. “Detective agency? How amusing. You cannot be serious, though. Can you?”
Mrs. Gleason didn’t so much as blink. “How did you hear of our exclusive stock?”
Now, it was Connor who attempted a laugh. “Is it not on view in every display case?”
If possible, her glare would have cut him in half. “Do not play coy. I will ask you once more, how do you know of it?”
Again, Connor began to deny that he knew about what she was speaking, but Leo rested her hand on his arm. She tried to think what Jasper would do in this situation. Intuitively, she suspected he would stop playing games.
“Lydia Hailson told me,” Leo said. And when the tension around Mrs. Gleason’s eyes smoothed with her astonishment, she continued, “Or rather, her article on the drug smuggling operation you are running here did.”
“That is impossible.” Mrs. Gleason looked ill, and her fingers gathered the sides of her skirt, as if preparing to run. “Miss Hailson can’t have published any article.”
“Why not?” Connor asked, no longer sounding nervous over their subterfuge. “Because she is dead?”
Mrs. Gleason sealed her lips into a thin line at his angry question, the revelation that her employee was dead not startling her in the least.
“You know she was murdered,” Leo said. “What did you have to do with it, Mrs. Gleason?”
“Nothing,” she hissed. “I don’t know of what you speak.” She hastened to the door leading out to the department floor. “I demand that you both leave. Now. Before I send for the police.”
Leo stayed where she was. “Scotland Yard is already on their way.” At least, she hoped that Roy Lewis was.
Mrs. Gleason tripped to a stop, her hand already reaching for the doorknob. She lowered it back to her side and then started for the papered-over one. She moved in a panic, starting slow but then picking up speed.
“You cannot escape, Mrs. Gleason,” Leo said. “The police are aware of your superior stock, so to speak.”
The warning did not convince her to stop. As she tore open the door, Leo shook her head. “Connor, go out to the street and summon a constable. Go!”
“What are you doing?” he asked as Leo rushed after Mrs. Gleason. “Wait! Leonora!”
She entered a narrow hall and found her quarry dashing away. Leo set off after her.
“I have all of Lydia Hailson’s research!” she shouted as she hurried to keep the woman in sight. “She knew what you were doing.”
Mrs. Gleason turned at the bend in the corridor, and Leo picked up her pace.
“You found out, I presume,” she called. “And that was why Lydia had to die.”
As she came around the bend, she nearly collided with a man carrying a mannequin’s torso.
His eyes were wide with alarm, and he was looking after the scurrying Mrs. Gleason, who was several paces ahead.
She’d arrived in a large storage room, packed with crates and racks of clothing, striped boxes stamped with the department store’s logo, and display mannequins, not to mention a handful of men who looked to be laborers.
Mrs. Gleason wove through the storage room, paying no mind to the men, but throwing increasingly agitated looks over her shoulder at Leo.
“But it wasn’t you who strangled Lydia, was it?” she said, knowing somehow to keep needling the woman and not let up. “No, the bruising on her neck wouldn’t match your smaller hands. It was from a man’s grip. Your husband’s?”
Mrs. Gleason had reached another door, this one leading into a delivery yard behind the store. She swung around for a mere second to throw Leo a foul glare. “That fool?” she hissed, spitting the words out.
But then, as though reconsidering her need to keep moving, Mrs. Gleason turned and continued down a set of stone steps into the yard.
Leo recalled Dita’s undercover mission: to lure Mr. Gleason into a compromising situation, so that his wife could successfully challenge him in court for a divorce.
If she despised her husband, Leo questioned if she would have even bothered involving him in this opium scheme.
Leo kept up the pursuit, even though her heart was racing and she had no plan for what to do if she did manage to overtake the woman.
“It was you who was foolish. You left Lydia’s body to be found still dressed in Gleason’s uniform,” Leo said loudly as she skipped down the stone steps and continued following the fleeing woman through the yard.
“I imagine the person who strangled Lydia was the criminal you are procuring the opium from. He wouldn’t have wanted her discovery to make it into the newspapers. ”
Mrs. Gleason threw another panicked glance over her shoulder as she turned into an alleyway and disappeared from view.
Leo raised her voice. “Where do you think you can go, Mrs. Gleason?”
The alley only led out to Oxford Street.
Though tired of the chase, Leo kept onward without pause, entering the alley.
Her feet were beginning to ache in the fashionable shoes she’d put on earlier, and when she nearly stumbled over a pile of loose bricks, she wished she was wearing her more sensible boots.
“There is no point in—” Leo swallowed the rest of her sentence as a hand gripped her wrist and tugged hard.
Mrs. Gleason, having ducked behind some scaffolding in the alley, now shoved Leo hard against the brick wall.
The back of her head struck the surface, and pain fogged her vision for a crucial moment.
When it cleared, Leo forced her senses to sharpen; Mrs. Gleason held a brick, poised high to come down onto her head.
The woman held it steady, her teeth bared in frustration as she pinned Leo in place using her free arm. “You are just as meddlesome as that girl was.”
“You didn’t kill Lydia, and you won’t kill me,” Leo declared, though she wasn’t at all confident in that last bit.
“I’m warning you to leave off, just as I did her.” Mrs. Gleason’s hand trembled as it held the brick high. “But she was relentless. She wouldn’t listen, and once they knew what she was doing, it was out of my control.”
“Who?” Leo asked. “Who found out what she was doing?”
A bead of sweat shone on Mrs. Gleason’s brow. “No one goes up against the Angels. Not me, and especially not young, interfering nobodies like you and Miss Hailson!”
“Stop! Drop the brick and step away!” From the head of the alley at Oxford Street, a pair of men approached: Constable Drake and Detective Sergeant Lewis.
When Mrs. Gleason craned her neck to look down the alley, Leo lifted her foot and kicked the woman’s shin as hard as she could.
Mrs. Gleason staggered back, and her arm swept down at the same time.
The brick glanced off Leo’s shoulder before she could move out of the way, but in the next moment, Mrs. Gleason had dropped the improvised weapon and started running back toward the cobbled yard behind the store.
Connor, however, appeared at the other end of the alleyway and blocked her retreat.
“Mrs. Gleason, stop!” Sergeant Lewis had hastened down the alley, and now his command was met with compliance. The woman closed her eyes with a pained expression of defeat.
“Are you all right, Miss Spencer?” the sergeant asked.
Leo rubbed her smarting shoulder, grateful the brick had hit her there and not on the head.
“I’ll be fine,” she answered. “I’m relieved you got my note.”
“From the looks of how we found you, so am I,” he said with a chastising raise of his eyebrow.
“I don’t know what this woman has told you, but I am innocent,” Mrs. Gleason stated, eyeing Constable Drake with wariness as he stood ready to apprehend her.
“She is selling opium to her customers in marked vases, urns, and other housewares,” Connor explained. “Her former employee, Lydia Hailson, discovered the operation, and when she did, she was killed.”
“Mrs. Gleason knows who killed her—a Spitalfields Angel,” Leo added.