I shivered and curled closer against his warmth.
“Will there be any justice?”
“Go to sleep, lass.”
Epilogue
I had askedBrodie if there would be any justice in the murders of Charlotte Mallory and Elizabeth Cameron.
He knew better than most that the answer to that depended on several things, and in the end, it was difficult to know whether justice would be served at all, with those responsible now dead.
The Metropolitan Police was contacted the morning after we returned from Queen’s Dock, with a full report provided by Brodie on the events of that evening.
The bodies were retrieved, including those of Simon Harris and the man who had carried out his scheme all these years later, Edward Carney.
Lily had recovered from her ordeal, as she had from other things in her young life. Having lived on the streets as a child, she accepted that she had been in the wrong place at the wrong time when she was abducted, and merely a tool for Harris’s revenge scheme.
Taking her had been the means to send Brodie and me a very strong message, that ‘we should not have interfered.’However, we had. If not, Charlotte Mallory and Elizabeth Cameron’smurderer might never have been known. Lily felt that she had done the right thing in ‘hiring’ Brodie and me to find Charlotte’s murderer.
It provided some sort of closure for her. Yet, it was small consolation for the loss of a friend.
The web of lies and deceptions spread wider, all the way back to the murder of Amelia Harris five years earlier.
A lover’s quarrel to be certain, that had ended badly, when she was killed in a fit of rage by Gerald Ormsby, well-placed in society to be certain. He had counted on his family position to escape prison, possibly even a sentence of death.
Sir Mallory most certainly played his part in the lie. He arranged for the sole witness to the murder to conveniently disappear with a very lucrative payment for the man’s silence. Without a witness, Judge Cameron was persuaded to drop the charges against him and Gerald Ormsby escaped the hangman. For a little while.
In the weeks that followed that horrific murder, Simon Harris’s wife passed on from a weak heart, weakened further by the death of their only child.
The loss of both set in motion a plan for Simon Harris’s revenge against those he held responsible for his daughter’s murder, and then the failure of the law to bring Gerald Ormsby to justice.
Only days after he buried his wife, a mysterious fire reduced a good portion of the vast Harris Import warehouse to burnt timbers and ash. The rumor began almost immediately, aided by Mr. Carney, that Simon Harris had perished in the fire.
Whether it was intentional or the result of a man stricken with grief, the story persisted and Simon Harris, badly injured and disfigured in the fire, used it for his own purpose.
The timbers in the warehouse had barely cooled when Gerald Ormsby was killed in what was described at the time as a ridingaccident in Hyde Park. There were rumors that someone might have caused the accident by startling Ormsby’s horse. No one was ever named.
Simon Harris then set up a new enterprise with funds withdrawn from the bank by Carney. The trust had been set up the day after his wife’s death, and made it possible for Carney to make purchases from smugglers, then turn around and sell at a profit from Queen’s Dock with the coastal guard none the wiser.
A very lucrative enterprise indeed.
Yet, Harris had only just begun. It was discovered in papers found in a small flat very near Queen’s Dock, that he had Carney follow both Charlotte Mallory and Elizabeth Cameron for weeks.
He learned their habits, their daily routines, their circle of friends. And then he set his plan in motion—to take from Sir Mallory and Judge Cameron what had been taken from him—their daughters, in an insane need for revenge for death of his daughter.
But that was only the beginning. The wider circle of his web of lies was meant to also include those who had played a direct part in setting Gerald Ormsby free—Sir Mallory, Judge Cameron, and a man who was a young law clerk at the time, Charlotte’s fiancé, Daniel Eddington.
It was impossible to know for certain if Charlotte was aware of Daniel’s part in that earlier scheme. She knew about the payment that had been made to Johnathan Walmsley, but had chosen not to believe it, according to the note intended for Mrs. Walmsley that was found in her handbag.
That was something Daniel Eddington would have to live with, as would her father and Judge Cameron.
As for legal consequences, Brodie admitted that it would be difficult to bring charges against any of them, with the victims and both Harris and Carney now dead.
“Perhaps it is enough that they have to live with the consequences of their actions, knowing that brought about their daughters’ deaths,” he had suggested.
I was most careful in how I explained all of this to Lily. Charlotte had been her friend and she felt that loss deeply, although she tried to pretend otherwise.
With bruises fading, hers and mine, it seemed that we would be able to attend my sister’s wedding without causing too much of a stir.
