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In answer, he drew me into his arms and kissed me so long and hard and tenderly that there was no more room left for misunderstandings.
“There can be no going back now, bouche,” he said at last. But he didn’t need to say it. I already knew he was right.
* * *
Cad left my room early, explaining that he wanted to see how much damage the Montol celebrations had caused. Since the servants were unlikely to be in any fit state to perform their daily tasks, he wanted to do as much as he could to set the house to rights before his parents returned.
“You have to speak to Eddie, bouche,” he said, leaning over the bed to kiss me. “Today.”
“It’s not that simple.” Sandor’s face loomed in my mind’s eye.
“If you want me—and we both know you do—it is that simple,” he replied.
I surprised myself by falling asleep and not waking for several hours. When I descended the stairs, the house seemed restored to peace and normality.
“His lordship would like you to join him in the study, miss,” Porter held the door to that room open and bowed as I walked through it. I paused on the doorstep. Tynan, Eddie and Cad were all waiting for me in the study. I glanced quickly at each of them. All three faces, so alike and yet so different, were grave.
“My solicitor was one of the house guests at the party yesterday. I had asked him to make enquiries for me about the murders that took place when you were in Paris. There are indeed striking similarities between those killings, and the ones that have taken place here,” Tynan said, and I felt my heart plummet. “All of the murdered women were repeatedly stabbed, and the killer seemed driven to frenziedly mutilate their breasts, vaginas and reproductive organs.”
“But this is nonsense,” Eddie blustered weakly. “I could go to any large city in the world and find you a dozen similar stories of violent murder.”
“But Athal is not a large city,” Tynan said. “And the murders in Paris ceased when Dita left, and these began when she arrived here.” He threw me an apologetic glance.
I sat down abruptly, feeling the colour drain from my face. “Do the French police have any idea who might have been responsible?”
Tynan shook his head. “Until I began to make enquiries, no one had linked the two cases,” he explained. “Now, however, I am informed that the police are going to seriously consider the possibility that they are related. Indeed, it appears that there may actually be a link because—”
“The girls all look alike,” Cad interrupted his father before he could finish his sentence.
“How could you possibly know that?” Tynan’s words rang out like rapid gunfire. Eddie remained silent, his face ashen, his endlessly blue eyes fixed painfully on his brother’s face. I closed my own eyes. How could anyone, other than the killer, know that? But there must be a simple explanation. Surely there must. I could not have given my heart to Cad so completely only to find that he was—what? My mind stubbornly refused to say the word.
“It is obvious,” Cad replied. Before he could say anything more, a blood-curdling scream reached our ears. Eddie and Cad dashed together out of the room. I followed with Tynan, whose pace was slower. The noise, now a low, keening wail, was coming from the rose garden, and against my will, I was drawn by the agony it conveyed. One of the maids, a young girl of about fifteen, staggered toward us, a hand over her mouth, her eyes bulging in horror. With a shaking finger, she pointed to the abomination that had once been Miss Victoria Cadwallader.
The snow beneath Vicky’s brutalised body was black with blood. Long, bright tendrils fanned out around her like crimson embroidery on a white petticoat. Her dress had been hauled up to her neck and her naked body was scarcely recognisable as human. The gaping wounds on her sad, white flesh seemed even harsher in the bright winter sunlight. She had, quite simply, been ripped apart. I felt my knees begin to buckle and was grateful for the strong hands that caught me under my arms and hauled me upright.
“Take this serving girl back to the house and get some brandy down both of you,” Cad said to me, turning me resolutely away from the scene. “Keep my mother and Eleanor there and tell Porter to send for the police.” I hesitated. I wanted to go to Vicky, to hide her from the eyes that would pry into the intimate secrets of her body. To say something that might somehow comfort her, even though she was long gone. To be able to tell her mother the last touch on her hand was from someone who cared instead of from a monster. “Go,” Cad insisted, reading my thoughts and giving me a little push toward the house. “There is nothing you can do for her now, bouche.”
