The Ninth Lantern
Phoebe Latham was found alive.
She was brought out of the cellar of the house at the corner of Brunswick Square, not that Sunday night but the next, in the company of three other young women whose names — two of them being Miss Eliza Kemp and Miss Grace Ancrum, the third being unknown to any of them and proving, afterwards, to be a girl taken off a Brighton train four months earlier — Wren entered in his black notebook with a steadiness of hand that the sergeant holding the lantern for him thought remarkable in a man who had not slept.
She was thinner than she had been. Her hair had been shorn close to her head. She did not speak in the cab that took her to the Middlesex Hospital, except to ask, twice, whether her mother had been told. Wren assured her, twice, that her mother had been told and was on her way. When the second assurance seemed to reach her, she closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the cushion of the cab, and she slept, in the way of an exhausted child, all the way to Marylebone. Wren sat opposite her the whole journey and looked at her only once, to satisfy himself that she was breathing.
The cellar had been reached through the coal-chute of the area that adjoined lantern 121.
Mr. Ballard made, in the course of the following week, a confession — a real one this time, of his own hand — which Wren read with the distaste of a man reading at last the