stay at Thornfield would give Kate the time she needed to consider a way forward for the column. Perhaps that would mean not focusing on specific cases. Or maybe they would take questions from the public about how women might better protect themselves from the myriad of dangers that made them feel unsafe. Clearly she would need to discuss with Caro, but she wanted more time to think before she broached the subject.
The breeze had begun to pick up a bit, and as she followed the winding trail, she saw that just ahead was a flatter bit of ground—almost like a staircase landing. The trail was actually called The Staircase, she remembered belatedly. Val had told them about it last night at dinner when he described the local landmarks.
Grateful for a place where she could sit for a moment and catch her breath, she finally reached the top of the ridge and was startled to see someone there before her.
“I hadn’t realized…” she began, then stopped short when she realized what she was seeing.
Propped against a large rock sat a man. Or rather, a man’s body, for a second glance revealed to Kate the blood seeping from the corner of his mouth. And his head was tilted at an improbable angle.
It was the estate manager of Thornfield Hall, Mr. Fenwick Jones. Kate had only spoken with him briefly during her stay, but he’d seemed to be a decent sort.
And now he was dead. Her mind wanted to find some other, less horrific explanation for the sight before her. But she knew the body before her was no life-sized wax figure like the ones at Madame Tussaud’s Chamber of Horrors. This was a man she’d spoken with. A man who was no longer alive.
As she stepped closer, she saw the message. I bore false witness, the note proclaimed, the words scrawled across a large piece of pasteboard in what could only be blood.
Dear God. Either someone in the Lake District was using his methods or the Commandments Killer himself was here. And she was very much afraid the latter was the truth.
And when she realized that, self-possessed, even stoic Lady Katherine Bascomb began to scream.
* * *
Scotland Yard, London
If he had to file one more bloody document, he was going to do someone—preferably Inspector Adolphus Wargrove—an injury.
Eversham had never counted Wargrove as a friend, but he couldn’t have guessed the other detective would be willing to put an innocent man in jail merely to further his career.
He’d lost respect not only for his colleague, but also for his commanding officer, Superintendent Darrow, who had bowed to pressure from the Home Office and Parliament to approve the arrest. He’d always heard complaints from outsiders that the police were corrupt, but he had prided himself on working with men who weren’t of that ilk. There were those in the institution who behaved badly—what large group was perfect?—but his own colleagues and immediate superiors were decent. He’d been sure of it.
The Commandments Killer case—and Wargrove and Darrow’s handling of it—had changed the way he viewed his profession, and that shook him to the core.
Against the advice of his family—who had wanted him to enter a more respectable profession like the law, or the church like his father—he’d gone into policing to make a difference. And he was good at it, damn it.
However, if he was going to remain with the Met, at the very least he should be doing the work that relied on his strengths. Not trapped here in the basement filing documents and evidence cards. He might have borne the demotion with more grace if he was convinced the man Wargrove had locked up was, in fact, the actual Commandments Killer. But there were too many reasons to doubt that John Clark had been the one to perpetrate the crimes.
Though Clark bore a faint resemblance to the description Lizzie Grainger had given of the man she’d seen the final victim with, he was the wrong height. He also walked with a limp, thanks to an accident at the factory where he worked, and which Lizzie had said in a later interview was not present in the man she saw. And, as a factory worker, it was highly unlikely that John Clark owned the sort of expensive clothes Lizzie had seen the killer wearing.
If that weren’t enough, there was no evidence whatsoever linking Clark to the other three murders. If Eversham had still been in charge, he’d have spent the following week searching