Before Owen and Whitely could head out to search for her, the maid who’d accompanied her returned home. Bewildered by her young mistress having dashed out of a shop, disappearing so quickly she couldn’t catch up, Abigail had searched each shop on the main floor and knocked on some of the doors on the second, though they weren’t all open to the public. As time passed, she’d become terrified she would be blamed for losing her mistress. Finally, the girl had made her way home on foot.
Owen’s father, the Earl of Burnley, had headed straight to the police station to declare his daughter missing so the detectives could lend a hand in searching for her. Meanwhile, Owen and Whitely took the maid with them so she could show them precisely where Sophia had vanished—right outside a small shop selling perfumes from abroad along with cheaper toilet water and lavender oil made in England.
Recalling a conversation with his sister about her specific perfume just days earlier, Owen pushed the door open and went inside.
He’d caught her holding a bottle up to the light.
“I’m nearly out of it, brother dear,” Sophia had said.
“Shall I pick you up a replacement when I’m out? If you write the name down, I shall do so.”
But she had shaken her head. “I wandered into M. Lubin’s perfume house when I was living in Paris. And my favorite scent, La Rose d’Amour, is only available in one shop in London that I’ve found so far. While everyone else is going to Floris in Jermyn Street, buying the same spicy musk, I go to Piccadilly. And I will go, myself. It’s fun to sniff the other fragrances.”
“Even if you end up buying the same one,” he had teased her.
“Even so,” she’d agreed.
With the shopgirl’s help, Owen had recalled the correct name of the French perfume, and he and Whitely were taken to the appropriate counter. Very quickly, the assistant recalled the young, fair-haired lady who wanted that particular perfume a few hours earlier. Owen sniffed it to make certain it smelled like Sophia.
“She bought it, my lords,” the shopgirl said, smoothing her apron, “and was about to leave the counter when a boy approached her. Scruffy young’un. He handed her a note.”
“Did she appear to know the lad?” Owen had asked, and that was when he’d felt the first prickle of foreboding.
“No, my lord. I don’t believe so. She read the note and frowned,” the girl recalled. “Then she set it down in order to put the perfume bottle in her reticule. While she was doing so, the boy ran off, and your Lady Sophia hurried after him.”
“This tells us nothing,” George had muttered.
“You said she put the note down. I don’t suppose she left it?” At the time, Owen remembered being convinced the answer would be a resounding no.
He had been wrong. The shopgirl said his sister had, in fact, left it. To his utter amazement, she bent down and retrieved it from the rubbish bin behind the counter.
He’d snatched the small scrap from her outstretched hand. An address and the command to “Come!” were written in a tidy scrawl.
He and Whitely had gone to the unsavory pub on Whitechapel Road immediately. They had been too late.
Now, Owen withdrew the note from his pocket. “I don’t believe I ever showed this to you, detective.” And he handed the piece of paper to the man, although somewhat loath to release it, knowing Sophia had touched it last and that her eyes had gazed upon it.
But it had led to her murder.
“You may keep it,” Owen told him. He had studied the writing until he could reproduce it himself if necessary, for all the good it would do.
Detective Sergeant Garrard nodded.
Owen paced again. “In any case, it tells us nothing. We already knew where she was murdered.”
“Actually, my lord, it tells us a lot.” The detective continued staring at the note. “It tells us she wasn’t killed randomly. It was premeditated murder in an arranged location. It also means I don’t need to focus on the riffraff of Stepping and Aldgate and Wapping any longer. I can rule out the cut-purses and common thieves, the low-life scoundrels who prey on the weak in the poorest streets leading off of Whitechapel Road.”
Owen stilled and looked at him. “I don’t understand.”
“The paper is thick and perfectly uniform, my lord. Better than anything you’d find in the hands of an East End inhabitant. Also, there’s the dark ink. Not watered down to make it last. Thus, it was written by a person of quality, perhaps even in the nobility, one who isn’t worried about using up his supply and buying more.”
Garrard held it up to the light coming in a four-paned window behind his desk. “A watermark—JDand a crown.”
Owen realized he’d never thought about a note or notepaper from the point of view of class.
“If it had been written in pencil,” the detective droned on, but Owen stopped listening.A person of quality?
That brought up the other bit of evidence he had found with his sister. Clutched in her hand was a handkerchief, very white, very clean, scarcely scented with a fragrance that definitely wasn’tLa Rose d’Amour, more like laundry soap. He hadn’t recognized the lace or the pattern, an anvil in one of its corners. He’d removed it before the police had arrived to take his sister’s body to the city morgue.
