“They believe that where they work and live is safe. They need to believe it. When something like the two murders happen, they simply want it all to go away wrapped up in a tidy little package so that they can go on with their lives.
“When we come along and ask questions, it’s a reminder that their world is not safe and perhaps they have failed in some way.”
I had never thought of it that way. It was a reminder how very different our two worlds were.
“Why do you do it?” I then asked a question I had never asked before.
He didn’t reply right away, that dark gaze fastened on some distant point beyond the coach window. Then he turned and looked at me through the growing darkness inside the coach.
“A long time ago, no one cared about a young woman left for dead in a rented room with little food or heat,” he eventually replied and I knew it was about his mother.
A ghost of the past, as I’d once heard it called, the things one carries with them.
“And because I can,” he added. “Even in this part of London. I can be a voice for those who canna speak. Why do ye do it, Mikaela Forsythe? For the adventure of it? The excitement? Something for yer next book perhaps?”
There was no criticism in his voice or by his expression, merely a simple question.
My sister had asked that same question more than once. While it was true that I had used some of our cases as the basis for Emma Fortescue’s adventures in my books, I knew that it was more than that.
Certainly being shot, held at knifepoint, and very nearly attacked by a pack of dogs was most dangerous. But it wasn’t the danger, or the adventure of it.
It was the memory of a young woman’s body pulled from the Thames, a young boy from the streets, his body thrown aside like so much garbage, and exposing someone who felt safe and privileged, and committed the most horrible of crimes.
I had not written about any of those. There had been justice for them and it was enough. I hadn’t known the reason until this moment, only that it was there inside me.
“Because I can.” It was a simple as that.
I caught a glimpse of that dark gaze that softened as Brodie looked at me across the interior of the coach.
“Ye’re a rare one, Mikaela Forsythe.”
Eight
It was wellinto the evening when we finally returned to the office on the Strand.
There was only a trace of powder that Mr. Brimley was able to find on Catherine Abbington-Thorpe’s jacket, no doubt from the way the garments were handled before they were given to us. However, that small trace was enough for the chemist to identify it.
It was a residue of ether, the same that had been found on Amelia Mainwaring’s clothes.
But what did it mean? That both young women had been drugged before they were murdered? How was the murderer able to do that without someone seeing something or being aware of it?
I stood before the chalkboard where I had added the information we had in both instances. I had made two columns, one for each murder, and then added the respective clues to each, scant as they were.
I had also taped the photographs that we now had to the board, courtesy of the surgical tape Mr. Brimley had provided.
It really was a most impressive invention, now used in most surgeries, rather than tying one up in layers of bandages. And it was most useful now as I stared at the photographs.
There was something that we were missing, something about those photographs.
The first one I had received some weeks earlier. It showed Amelia Mainwaring in a garden setting, which had seemed somewhat strange at the time I received it considering the time of year.
The second photograph received by Sir John and Lady Mainwaring had been that ghastly death photo with Amelia posed on a park bench. I had thought it almost arrogant at the time, as if someone— the murderer —was boasting about what he’d done.
We now had two more photographs to add to the board. The first photo of Catherine the family had given me was much the same as the first one received by the Mainwarings, very definitely a garden scene. The second one was another death photograph, taken in an empty coach at some point in time after Catherine Abbington-Thorpe had left the dressmaker’s shop.
She had been posed much the same way as Amelia Mainwaring, as if she was merely out and about taking a ride in a coach. The Abbington-Thorpes had received that ghastly photograph only hours before they were contacted by the Metropolitan Police.
She had been found by the hapless driver who had returned for his rig and found her body.
