“Go slow,” Crow hissed at me.
“Do I have a choice?” I muttered back, but I kept my pace slower even than was necessary. I had not the first idea why Crow wanted to linger in front of the house, but it was almost always easier to give in than to argue with him, and this was not one of the places, such as the W.C., where I had drawn the line.
“There was a cab here,” he said, just barely audible. “Not Lestrade’s—that’s still there, half a block down. Four-wheeler. Horse had one new shoe, on the off-fore. Nothing else to be made out of the general puddle.”
The path from the sidewalk to the front door was a mix of gravel and mud and water standing in deep footprints. Crow made an agonized little noise which I recognized as a cri de coeur. I’d heard him discoursing on the astonishing number of things one could learn from footprints; I knew what he’d say the instant he’d closed the front door behind us, and I was not wrong.
“Why didn’t you just call for a herd of buffalo?” he said to Lestrade, who was waiting in the tiny front hall.
“Not my doing,” Lestrade said. “They’d had five constables in and out of here before anyone thought to send for the C.I.D. Every constable on the beat wants to prove himself by solving a murder—they all think they’re in the penny bloods.”
“Well, it’s a simple matter in the bloods,” Crow said more cheerfully. He was as passionate a devotee of the penny dreadfuls as he was of the penny press; I had yet to be brave enough—or foolhardy enough—to ask him how on Earth an angel benefited from that kind of reading material. “You look at the body, you see a clue no one else has seen, it points you straight at the murderer.”
“And Bob’s your uncle,” Lestrade agreed. “None of them had that kind of luck with this fellow, and frankly we haven’t had any luck, either.” He waved us ahead of him into the room. “About all we’ve found out is his name, which is—”
It was a dreadful little room, even without the corpse, bare of all furnishings and the wallpaper—a petit bourgeois and utterly hideous pattern of cherries and ribbons—peeling in long, ragged strips. It felt desolate, like a place where no one had ever been happy.
And then there was the corpse, whom I recognized at once. “Enoch J. Drebber,” I said. “Oh dear God.”
“You know him?” Crow and Lestrade said in unintentional chorus.
“I encountered him,” I said, “on the airship from Paris to London.”
“Well, that’s a real piece of luck,” said Lestrade. “Are you sure it’s him?”
“Vividly,” I said.
“What do you know about him?” Lestrade said.
“American,” I said. “A drunken boor. He was traveling with another man, a fellow named Stangerson, who seemed to be the brains of whatever their operation was.”
“Do you know where they went when you reached London?”
“Not a clue,” I said. “To be perfectly honest with you, Inspector, I was simply glad to see their backs.”
“Which ship?”
“The Sophy Anderson. Barnhart line from Istanbul to London. They only joined the ship in Paris.”
“And the date?”
“The eleventh of March.”
“Huh,” said Lestrade. “Well, I admit, Dr. Doyle, I wasn’t expecting you to be able to tell me anything about this fellow’s life. But do you think you can tell me anything about his death?”
I looked at the body and wondered how I would make it off the floor again. But there was no help for it. I knelt down, slowly and awkwardly, hiding my wince as best I could.
His limbs were violently contorted, as was his face. “My guess,” I said, “would be some sort of convulsant poison—strychnine is the most common. But if he didn’t take it by his own choice, and I can’t imagine that he did, the murderer either tricked him or forced him. There are no bruises on his face and”—I looked at his clawed, straining hands—“no bruises or other defensive wounds on his hands, so he must have been tricked.”
“It must have been someone he knew and trusted,” Lestrade said. “Can you imagine swallowing a pill because a stranger told you to?”
“People do strange things,” I said. “But I agree, it seems more likely it was a friend or at least a colleague of some sort, whatever Mr. Drebber’s business might have been.”
“I guess this Stangerson is the one we want to talk to,” said Lestrade.
Crow had been drifting about the room, apparently paying no attention to us, although I knew that wasn’t true. He’d inspected the fireplace and the stump of red wax on the mantelpiece that had been a candle; he’d inspected the bloodstains on the floor (odd, since there was no sign that Drebber had been wounded), the baseboards, the hideous gas lamps. And he’d been peering at the walls, the peeling wallpaper and the plaster behind it. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him startle—the twitch of his wings gave him away every time—and bring his head closer. “Hello,” he said. “What’s this?”
Lestrade joined him. I stayed where I was, to conserve my limited energy and the number of times I’d have to ask for help in getting up.
“RACHE,” Lestrade said, “and is that … did the lunatic write it in blood?”
“I believe so,” said Crow. “And if you look closely, that smudge might be the start of a sixth letter. Or he might just have been startled.”
“Constable Rance found the body still almost living temperature,” Lestrade said. “Probably he scared the murderer away.”
“Quite possible,” said Crow. “The question is, what word did the murderer mean to write? RACHE is German for ‘revenge,’ but it looks like a downstroke…”
“Rachel,” I said.
They both turned sharply to look at me. “Rachel?” said Crow.
“A common woman’s name,” I said and shrugged. “Plus, my encounter with Drebber makes it all too plausible to me that he would have been killed for his treatment of someone’s wife or sister or daughter.”
“It’s certainly a possibility,” Crow said.
“But what if it’s not another letter,” said Lestrade. “The East End is full of German Jews and Socialists, and heaven knows what kinds of secret societies and cabals those people have.”
“Oh really, Lestrade,” Crow said crossly. “Don’t talk nonsense. This man came here with one other person, not a cabal.”
“How … how do you make that out, Mr. Crow?” Lestrade said, doing a poor job of appearing nonchalant.
“Well, aside from the mud wallow left by your constables, I make out the tracks of two men. One is our friend there with his fashionable patent-leather boots. The other was a man something over six feet in height who wore rough square-toed boots. His tracks are distinctive, for he has quite small feet for a man his size.”
“Go on,” said Lestrade, a sharp look gleaming in his pouched eyes, and I understood why he had asked Crow to come.
“They arrived together,” Crow said, “sometime after that largest puddle formed on the walk. Mr. Drebber’s patent-leather boots went carefully around—so that he cannot at that point have been in fear of his life—while square-toes stepped across. They came straight to this room, where patent-leather stood still for some time while square-toes paced up and down. He got steadily more excited, as his stride got longer and harder. The blood must have been his, if the corpse has no wounds?”