The ferry back to Holyhead felt like sailing into my own past. The Irish Sea churned beneath a sky the color of wet slate, waves like black ink smashing against the hull in relentless fury. I stood on the upper deck despite the biting wind, coat collar turned high, the maid's description folded tightly in my breast pocket alongside the single strand of burning red-orange hair. Every time the ferry rocked, I felt the weight of that hair like a live coal against my chest.
The resemblance refused to leave me. He was the younger, perfected version of myself — the man I might have been if life had never worn me down. Broad shoulders. Strong jaw. That impossible red-orange hair glowing like living embers. I was the older, darker, rougher draft — dull brown hair now streaked with early grey at the temples, tired eyes, edges hardened by years of failure and loss. He was the luminous ideal. I was what time and disappointment had made of that ideal.
Victor and Eleanor had stayed in Brussels to monitor the press. Before we parted, Victor had gripped my shoulder. "Be careful, Crowe. If this phantom really looks like a younger, perfected version of you… they'll come for you next." Eleanor had said nothing, only looked at me with eyes that already carried too much fear.
Cardiff greeted me with the same cold, grey rain that had started everything. The city felt smaller now, heavier, as though the angel's touch had stained the very stones. I went straight to the prison without stopping at my hotel.
The interview room smelled of damp stone and despair. Prosecutor Victor Lang sat shackled to the table, wrists raw from the iron. His once-sharp eyes were sunken, his face gaunt. Yet when I entered and placed the maid's description in front of him, something fierce flickered across his face.
"You're the one who won't let this die," he rasped. "Good. Because they want me to rot here for a murder I didn't commit."
I sat down slowly. "Tell me about the court case. Everything. From the beginning."
What followed was nearly four hours of raw, bitter confession.
The case had been about land and blood. A wealthy landowner named Thomas Griffith had been accused of brutally stabbing his poorer neighbor, Evan Pritchard, seventeen times during a violent dispute over a shared boundary. The evidence was overwhelming — defensive wounds on Pritchard, Griffith's fingerprints on the knife, multiple witnesses who had heard threats in the weeks prior. It should have been a straightforward conviction.
But Reginald Hawthorne, the victim in the first killing, had defended Griffith with ruthless brilliance. He had painted Pritchard as the aggressor — a violent, unstable man obsessed with the land dispute. Hawthorne produced "witnesses" (paid, Lang was certain) who claimed Pritchard had been making threats and carrying weapons. He spun the bloodbath as self-defense. The jury, influenced by Hawthorne's silver tongue and the quiet pressure of money in the right pockets, had acquitted Griffith.
Lang had exploded in open court. "This is not justice!" he had shouted, voice cracking with fury. "This system is rotten to its core! A rich man buys his freedom while a dead man's family receives nothing!"
That single outburst had made him the perfect red herring when Hawthorne himself was later found shot in his study.
I listened without interrupting, taking careful notes. The rain outside the small barred window fell steadily, turning the world beyond the glass into shifting shades of black and grey.
When Lang finally fell silent, exhausted, I asked the question burning in my mind:
"Did you ever see a man with striking red-orange hair around the time of the trial? Tall. Broad shoulders. Charcoal coat with crimson lining? Younger than me… but with my jaw, my shoulders, only… perfected?"
Lang stared at me for a long moment. Then he laughed — a hollow, broken sound.
"No. But I wish I had. Because if such a man exists, he's the only one who could have planned this so perfectly. He chose Hawthorne because he knew my rage would make me the ideal suspect. He's not just killing, Detective. He's conducting. Like a devil wearing the face of a young angel."
I left the prison hours later, my mind reeling. The rain had grown heavier, drumming against my coat like accusing fingers. As I walked back toward my hotel, every puddle reflected my older, darker face — and behind it, I kept imagining that luminous younger version crowned in fire.
He looked like the man I had once been, before time and the world had dulled me.
Refined. Elevated. Worshipped.
The false messiah had chosen his first victim with surgical precision. And now the world was chasing the wrong man while the real conductor — younger, more beautiful, more perfect — moved untouched through the rain.
That night, alone in my hotel room, I spread the maid's description across the desk and stared at it until the words blurred. The resemblance haunted every line. I was the shadow. He was the flame.
And somewhere out there, the angel with the burning red-orange hair was smiling — wearing a younger, perfected face that should have been mine.