“I’m afraid so.” Morley nodded.
Cole’s heart, already accelerated with arousal and anger, now kicked against his chest with the strength of a mule at this new bit of information. “How is that possible?”
“Once I realized that two of the victims had been acquainted with her, the other associations were easy to track down. Lady Broadmore, of course, was found in her garden, as you’re aware. And then there was Molly Crane, the nurse who was employed at St. Margaret’s with her before she became the countess. Following that thread, I investigated into Lady Anstruther’s past as Imogen Pritchard.”
Morley paused, glancing over at Cole as though to ascertain whether he really wanted to receive the information he was about to impart.
“And?” Cole pressed impatiently.
“I’ve uncovered several more victims who fit the profile. Which is to say, they are comparable to Lady Anstruther in looks, age, weight, and coloring. Working chronologically backward, I found a Miss Jane Raleigh, a spinster who lived a block over from both you and the Anstruthers some six months past. Her parents thought she’d run away with a lover, but it is my impression that she’s been killed. She left with no money, none of her belongings, and I found evidence of a struggle in her garden.
“Around the time you were recovering from your ordeal in the hospital, Miss Pritchard and her family were housed for a month in downtown London near the courthouse while the Earl of Anstruther obtained a marriage license. During that month, a young and fair nanny by the name of Ann Keaton was found strangled and assaulted a mere three doors down from their apartments. Prior to that, Imogen Pritchard had worked to keep her family in rather dismal rooms near Wapping High Street. A charwoman in her building, Rose Tarlly, suffered the selfsame fate as Lady Broadmore, Miss Crane, Miss Keaton, and Miss Raleigh. Surely you see the pattern.”
“I do.” Cole nodded, releasing a troubled breath. “What I don’t see, is a connection to the Bare Kitten, or to Ginny.”
“I was getting to that,” Morley muttered, shifting uncomfortably. “I can’t say that the connection is strong, but I’ve already told you of the earliest victim, a Miss Flora Latimer, who was murdered exactly like the others.”
“Yes, you mentioned that in your note.”
“From what I could glean from former neighbors of the Pritchards’, Mr. Pritchard, the pater of the household, was a consistent patron of the Bare Kitten. In fact, he’d run up a significant debt to the former proprietor, Ezio del Toro.”
At this, Cole pushed himself away from the desk, letting his arms fall to his sides. “Did this Pritchard, Lady Anstruther’s father, did he have anything to do with Ginny? Where is he now?”
“Also dead,” Morley stated. “And this is where the connection becomes rather opaque. Pritchard died long before Miss Latimer or the others and, as far as I can tell, the rest of the family had no further dealings with the Bare Kitten.”
“Where did you get this information?”
“The current owner of said establishment, a Mr. Jeremy Carson. He revealed the timeline to me, and it all checks out. Lady Anstruther’s father died even before this Ginny began her employment there. So, like I said, the connection seems to be indistinct, if there even is one.”
Agitated, Cole paced the room, something scratching at that place inside him, at the locked door in his head. A memory. A link. Something big. Something recent …
“Wait.” He froze mid-step and whirled to face Morley. “What did you say was the name of the owner of the Bare Kitten?”
“Mr. Carson,” Morley answered.
“No.” Cole made a wild gesture, advancing on the inspector. “No, no, no,” he said in rapid percussion, in time to the frantic pounding in his chest. “His first name, you said it was Jeremy?”
“Yes,” Morley answered slowly, regarding him with some hesitation. “But you said, yourself, that you’ve spoken to the man.”
“So I have,” Cole confirmed. “But he never gave me his first name.”
“I’m afraid I don’t follow.” Morley tugged at his white tie and high collar. “What significance does the man’s first name have to do with the case?”
“It has everything to do with it.” Cole could no longer stand still, no longer could he be in this house, this room. He needed to act. He needed to follow this mystery through to its end, and he had a good idea where that would be. “When I was in Lady Anstruther’s garden earlier the same night that Lady Broadmore was killed, she mistook me for someone else in the darkness. She called me by his name, his first name.”
“Oh?” Morley’s light brows crawled up his forehead. “And that name was…”
Cole had a distinct notion that the clever detective already knew, but he wanted verbal confirmation, and so he gave it to him with all the gravity of the giant stone of dread sinking into his gut.
“She called me Jeremy.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
If Cole had learned anything from his time as a spy, it was this: A secret always wanted to be discovered.
He didn’t know how long he stood in Imogen’s garden lifting his face to the sky. Long enough for Argent and Millie to help her into bed and stand vigil for a while. He listened to them consult with O’Mara and Rathbone before returning to their own home.
He evaded their patrol, waiting for his thoughts to coalesce into some semblance of a plan, and then scatter to the cosmos, as random as the placement of the stars.
As he let a chilly summer breeze tousle his hair, he took deep, centering breaths and thought about how odd he found it that people had always attempted to find meaning in the night sky. To connect the position of the celestial bodies and turn them into what they wanted—what they needed to find when they looked to the stars. A fallen hero. A delineative creature. In many cases, a god or goddess.
Cole knew the constellations. He could name and identify many of them from several parts of the world. But, in truth, he’d never found what the astronomers and philosophers had. Could never truly identify the huntsman, Orion, in his handful of anemic stars, nor did he see Castor or Pollux in the twin belts of Gemini. They’d been men, legends at best. Perhaps only myths created by ancient bards. Not lines drawn by primeval theologists, immortalized in the eternal beyond. If those mythical men ever lived, then they’d surely died, and they’d gone the way of all creatures.
From the time he was young, Cole realized he’d not possessed the capacity for romantic fancy. He could not draw the lines he needed to find the miraculous divine in the everyday. He understood truths that many rejected. That perspective most often designated righteousness. That most of the constructs of society were imaginary, invisible, especially to those in Orion’s position. Past the sky, above the moon. If the hunter was real, were he immortalized there in the night sky as his mythology dictated, he could look down and see nothing of what men fought and killed each other over.
For country borders were merely lines on a map, not on the earth. And currency was little more than an agreed-upon idea, a value assigned to pretty minerals. An economy represented an intricate web of interests, of production and consumption, and seemed to always be destined to eventually collapse.