“Turn your hand over,” McConnell said with a smile.

“Oh,” Jenkins said. “I think I see what you mean.”

Lenox had by this time scanned the scene and was ready to take a closer look. In front of the three men was a modest room-altogether unremarkable, if you had seen servants’ quarters before, save the fact that the body of a dead human being lay on the bed.

But first, thought Lenox, the room. He usually left the body for last, because the clues surrounding it were so much more likely to vanish in a short amount of time.

The room measured out as a perfect square, no doubt identical in shape and size to most of the other bedrooms on the hall. On the right, fitted snugly against the wall, was a narrow bed. On the left, barely leaving space to walk through the room, were a desk, a bureau, and a small seamstress’s table. High on the left of the back wall there was a window of middling size.

The room was, if anything, more tidy than the house upstairs, which was strewn with the expensive debris of Barnard’s life. The desk was bare except for four objects, which he would examine in a moment; the bureau was bare, though he would have to look in the drawers; the seamstress’s table had a few bits of thread on it, but even those were tucked together neatly.

What did the room say about the victim? Either that she was most fastidious or that she had few possessions-more likely the latter. She was not without some personal sense of taste, however. A picture of Hyde Park was tacked above her bed, which perhaps she had bought on her half day or received from a beau. And Lenox saw, as he opened the drawers of her bureau with his handkerchief, that she maintained her clothes as well as she could. Beyond personal taste, he thought, perhaps she took some pride in herself.

Thomas and Jenkins were both standing in the doorway, and even when Lenox went to the far left corner of the room, they only peered in slightly more intently.