“What details did you keep out of the papers?”

“The Belgian housekeeper?”

“Yes?”

“Martha Claes, she’s called. Apparently she had bragged to one or two of her friends that she was coming into a bit of money. We think the murderer paid her enough that she could leave.”

“That tells us something about the criminal, then.”

“What?”

“Well-that he would rather use money than violence. Not many criminals are that way, in my experience. Not many criminals have enough money to send three marginally genteel people out of London, leaving all their possessions behind. No robbery from Carruthers’s rooms, I presume?”

“That’s correct, actually, yes.”

“Probably he knew the household well enough to approach Mrs. Claes as an acquaintance.”

“You think the criminal had visited Carruthers?”

“Wouldn’t he have had to? Simply approaching the man’s housekeeper on the street would have been extremely foolhardy.”

“Yes, of course.”

“It seems more likely that he was visiting upstairs than downstairs, given that he offered Mrs. Claes money.”

“Of course assuming she didn’t actually inherit it.”

“A lone foreigner in this country, without a husband? Then, too, if she had come by the money honestly, why run?”

“Fear?”

Lenox shook his head. “I doubt it. The murderer is either very rich or willing to spend his last farthing to murder these two men. More likely the first than the second, I would wager.”

Jenkins took a note of this. “Yes,” he said. “We hadn’t thought that through.”

“How is Exeter handling the matter?” asked Lenox.

“As he usually does,” said Jenkins without inflection, his loyalty in this instance to the Yard rather than his superior.