He read the note twice. He read, in particular, the two lines Sergeant Kirk had added at the foot of it, to the effect that the Latham girl was the granddaughter of a baronet, by a daughter who had married below her station and been sent to live in reduced circumstances in Camberwell, and that the baronet had written to the Commissioner, and that the Commissioner had written to Superintendent Meech, and that Superintendent Meech had chosen, after some thought, to write to Wren. The sergeant had underlined the name Meech with unnecessary vigour.
Wren folded the note along its existing creases and laid it beside his plate.
The baronet, he understood at once, was the kind of connexion that would guarantee he was given the case and no help. If the old man had any real influence, the Yard would have sent a superintendent. If he had none, the Yard would have sent no one. He had just enough to compel a gesture. Wren had been chosen for the gesture.
He finished his bread and cheese with his usual method, which was to take the cheese in very small pieces so that it lasted to the last of the crust. Then he put on his coat, which was black and shiny at the elbows, and his hat, which was older than his coat, and he walked out into the afternoon.
The fog had lifted enough to permit a pale, exhausted sunlight to fall on the wet flagstones of Bow Street, and a cab-horse on the rank was blowing steam into the air like an engine at rest. Wren paused to mark the time — twenty-seven minutes past one — in the small black notebook he carried in his breast pocket, and noted the weather under it, and the address of the pawnshop in Brunswick Street where he proposed to begin. He had learned, from a long apprenticeship in cases no one wished solved, that a man who recorded the weather
🤖 The author declared this story as written with the help of AI.