I laid the knife on the table. "Please show me where he was found."

Pomeroy raised thick yellow brows. "Don't know what good that is. It's just a room."

"All the same."

Pomeroy gave me the look he'd always reserved for my more questionable orders, but he lumbered away.

Before I left I looked down at Turner once more. A young man, his life abruptly ended. Did he have a father and mother, brothers, a wife, an affianced? His face told me nothing. He'd been a dandy and a well-to-do young man-his clothes and the emerald stickpin attested to that.

Lucius Grenville would know all about him. Grenville would know the young man's crowd, his intimates, his family. Grenville would also be able to tell me where Mr. Turner went to school, what wagers he liked to place at White's, and what kind of horses he drove. The Polite World knew everything about everyone, and this was definitely a crime of the Polite World.

I followed Pomeroy down the staircase. This house was opulent, with no expense spared to impress the invited guest. The staircase lifted three stories from a wide hall paved with marble, and paintings of Gillis ancestors marched up the walls to the domed ceiling at the top. The stair railing was wrought iron, shaped in fantastic curlicues.

Pomeroy's boots clumped swiftly as we descended. I followed more slowly, my footsteps punctuated by the sharp tap of my walking stick. At forty-one, I already walked like an old man, courtesy of a painful wound in my left leg-a wound for which Colonel Brandon was directly responsible.

Lord Gillis had remodeled his abode with modern conveniences-large windows, airy rooms, and hidden halls and staircases through which servants could pass without being seen by the inhabitants or their guests. But the house did not want us there. The cream-colored walls and marble floor were cold, and the ancestors by Reynolds and Holbein frowned upon us. The house did its best to shut out all that was not beautiful and glittering, and so was disdainful of a former sergeant and a captain of limited means tramping through its halls.