Lenox spent the next hour tucking his friend safely away in a spare room above the Queen’s Arms. McConnell, half in stupor from drink and incoherent about his reasons for coming to Stirrington, was nonetheless as clear as crystal about his reasons for being unhappy. Toto had asked him to leave. He had not only obeyed that request but had decided to absent himself from London forever. He talked wildly of returning to his native Scotland and becoming a groundskeeper at his family’s small estate or practicing medicine in the rural parts of the country. Mumbling, he fell into a troubled sleep.

Lenox spent the morning giving speeches. In his spare moments he read the previous day’s London papers. They were still full of the two “Fleet Street murders,” and amid long encomiums to Simon Pierce and Winston Carruthers (journalists, after all, love to eulogize their own; a way of pushing off their own obscurity a little further) were all the details and speculations that papers, high and low alike, could muster about Hiram Smalls, the mysterious man who had been arrested in connection with the murders.

The details were certain, if few. He lived in Bethnal Green with his mother. This picturesque detail the papers dwelt on at great length, and they inquired endlessly about Mrs. Smalls’s feelings. In person Hiram was a short, solid, muscular figure, with (purportedly) cunning eyes and without discernible scars, birth-marks, etc. He had never been in legal trouble, and while he liked the life of rough pubs and gin mills, he had never (at least that anybody would willingly say) associated with any of London’s numerous gangs or thief-taking operations.