The Nine Lanterns

About this Story

London, the spring of 1884. Between the seventh and eighth gas-lanterns of a quiet Bloomsbury square, a young corps-de-ballet dancer named Phoebe Latham walks out of the world. Inspector Josiah Wren of Scotland Yard is handed the case because the Latham family is too well-connected to refuse and too poorly-connected to help him close it. Wren is a plodder, the Yard says; in fact he is a meticulous reader of small columns of print, of ledger entries, of the things men forget to enter into their accounts. He finds an unlikely ally in Miss Carrow, a telegraph clerk who has learned to notice not the messages sent but those curiously withdrawn. Together they work backward through pawnshop sublets, dance-masters' ledgers, lamplighters' routes and coachmen with bought memories, toward a pattern written in the order the lanterns are lit. A fair-play mystery in the old manner, built of fog, gaslight, and the small print that convicts.

Chapters

1. 1 A Dancer In Gloves
2. 2 The Rooms Above The Pawnshop
3. 3 The Witness Of The Telegraph Clerk
4. 4 How A Dance Master Keeps Accounts
5. 5 A Second Dancer Missing
6. 6 The Pattern In The Lantern Lighting
7. 7 A Coachman Who Does Not Remember
8. 8 What The Wardrobe Contained
9. 9 The Confession Nobody Signed
10. 10 At The Cabstand In The Rain
11. 11 The Ninth Lantern

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