The Nine Lanterns

The stage-door of the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane emptied itself, as it did every night, in a particular order. First the scene-shifters, because they had nowhere to be that did not serve beer, and then the musicians, and then the corps de ballet, who came out in twos and threes with their hair still pinned up under plain woollen bonnets and their street-boots unbuttoned at the ankle. The last to leave were always the principals, and after them the dressers, and after them Mr. Cleaver the doorman, who set the chain across the inner door at twenty-three minutes past eleven and liked the clock to be consulted on the matter.

On the evening of the twenty-ninth of March, 1884, Phoebe Latham had come out of that door at ten minutes past eleven, in the company of two other girls of the corps. This Mr. Cleaver was later able to say with confidence, because Phoebe had stopped on the step to fasten the top button of her glove, and he had remarked to her that the fog was coming up thick from the river and she was to mind her step on the Strand. She had answered him that she meant to take the omnibus as far as Southampton Row and walk the rest, because she could not afford a cab that week. She had said it cheerfully, without self-pity. Mr. Cleaver recalled this because he approved of the cheer and disapproved of the walk.

She had not reached the rooms above the pawnshop in BrunswickStreet where she slept. The landlady, a Mrs. Pell, had gone up at half past seven the next morning to leave the breakfast tray on the landing and had found the door unlocked and the bed not slept in, and the half-drunk cup of cocoa Phoebe had taken up with her before the performance still sitting on the washstand with a skin on it. Mrs. Pell was a woman of small imagination but settled habits, and unslept beds offended her. She sent the boy across the street to the divisional station at noon.

It was in this way that the matter came upon the desk of Inspector Josiah Wren at C Division, two days later, the local officers having done what local officers do, which is to walk the route twice, question the omnibus conductors, lose the better part of the first thread, and send it up with a note.

Wren read the note in the back office at Bow Street, where he habitually took his luncheon of bread and cheese and a glass of small beer, because the chop-house opposite did not keep accounts he approved of. He was a thin, stooping man of forty-three, with the slightly abstracted look of a clerk who has been passed over for promotion and has grown accustomed to the view. His hair was a colourless brown and his moustache was of the kind that a man grows because he has always grown one. His colleagues at the Yard regarded him as a plodder, which, in the lexicon of that institution, was not a term of outright contempt but was certainly not one of praise. Superintendent Meech had once observed of him, in Wren's hearing, that if you wanted a man to walk a case into the ground you sent Wren, and that if you wanted a man to walk out of it with his hat on, you sent someone else. The remark had stung at the time. Wren had since come to see that it was, in part, a description of his method.