Page 16

With a general nod to all, Gelman added, “There hasn’t been anyone eyeing the place, either. No attention at all.”

“Good,” Stokes said, then he grimaced and glanced at Barnaby, Penelope, and Jordan. “I’m not sure if that means the telltale ledger is already gone, but”—Stokes waved them to the door—“let’s see if we can locate this master list and work out what’s what.”

Penelope led the way inside, and the three men followed.

“The master list.” Penelope went straight to the desk. “The desk drawers are the most likely place for it.”

She started pulling out the drawers on one side of the desk, while Jordan claimed the drawers on the other side.

With Stokes, Barnaby halted facing the desk and waited.

Penelope straightened and held up several sheets pinned together. “Is this it?”

Jordan joined her in scanning the first sheet, then took the collection and flipped through the other pages. His face lit, and he smiled at Penelope. “It is. Good find.”

“So now…” She glanced at the shelves and the many ledgers they held.

“Now,” Jordan said, separating the pages and laying them across the blotter, “we start at one end of the office and work our way around, checking each set of ledgers against this list until we confirm that they’re all here or that one is missing.”

Stokes was the least familiar with ledger-keeping, so they installed him at the desk to, with a pencil, mark off each ledger as the others called out the clients’ names.

Barnaby, Penelope, and Jordan divided the shelves into three sections and started working through them, pulling out the ledgers, checking the name inside the front cover, and calling it out to Stokes before reshelving that ledger and moving on to the next.

As Penelope was so short, she and Barnaby reorganized their allotted area so that Barnaby did the top two shelves over both sections, while she worked through the lower shelves.

As the minutes ticked by, the three worked their way steadily around the office.

Finally, after nearly half an hour, Jordan called out the name of the last set of three ledgers, and Stokes grunted. “That’s it.” He tossed down the pencil and slumped back in the chair. “It appears all the ledgers are still here.”

Penelope dropped into the chair facing the desk. “I suppose it would have been too easy to find that one set of accounts had gone missing.”

Stokes frowned at the list with its column of neat ticks. “Perhaps that means the revealing information Thomas found is not, in fact, in any ledger here.”

“Or”—Barnaby leaned on the back of Penelope’s chair—“that whoever killed Thomas didn’t realize it was something reflected in the business’s accounts that alerted Thomas to the nefarious activities.”

“I still think,” Jordan said, halting at one end of the desk and surveying the shelves, “that the financial ledgers remain the most likely source of information about nefarious activities that would have fallen into Thomas’s lap.”

Stokes pulled a face. “As much as I would like to point to some other source, I can’t.” He cast an uninspired glance at the shelves. “I believe that means we have to hunt through all the ledgers here until we happen upon whatever it was that signaled ‘nefarious activities’ to Thomas.”

Jordan looked at Stokes, then smiled commiseratingly. “I’ll show you a quick way of finding any anomaly in a set of financial accounts.”

Stokes sighed. “I suppose you can try.”

Penelope, Barnaby, and even Stokes listened as Jordan demonstrated which columns were critical and what to look for.

“We only need to look back over the past six months,” Jordan explained, “and if you see any strangely large payments being made or received, bring the ledger to me, and I’ll examine it in more detail.

” He went to the shelves, pulled a ledger at random, and opened it.

“For instance, this business is a bookshop. If we look down their income column, you can see the daily sums coming in are of a level that aligns with purchases of books. If you look at the expenses, you can see regular but much larger payments made to various publishers.” Jordan paused and looked at the others.

“If you came across a large sum, either incoming or outgoing, for say, bakery goods or ironwork or leather work or something that doesn’t fit with running a bookshop, that’s worth further examination. ”

He glanced at the ledger in his hands. “This ledger is boringly straightforward. Nothing nefarious going on at Coulter’s Books.”

“That’s easy enough.” Penelope bustled to the nearest shelf and started at the end of one row.

Jordan returned the Coulter ledger to the shelf and drew out the next.

Barnaby and Stokes shared a look. Neither was all that fond of scanning figures. Nevertheless, after they both grimaced, they walked to the shelves and took up the task.

Within fifteen minutes, it was apparent that Penelope and Jordan between them were checking and eliminating three times as many ledgers as Barnaby and Stokes.

Finally, Stokes put back the ledger he’d ploddingly checked, hesitated, then turned to the others. To Penelope and Jordan, he said, “You two are better suited to examining the ledgers than Barnaby and me.”

“Aside from all else,” Barnaby said, also replacing a ledger, “you’re both confident of what you’re looking for. We”—he met Stokes’s gaze—“aren’t.”

“Exactly,” Stokes said. “A better use of my and Barnaby’s time would be to hunt for further sightings of our unknown man.”

Barnaby nodded. “The likely murderer.” He looked at Penelope. “I’m going to find one of the lads and put out an alert through the network. It’s possible they might have some useful fact to share.”

“An excellent idea,” Penelope said.

Puzzled, Jordan asked, “Network?”

Barnaby smiled and described the web of boys and youths they’d started labeling the Lads’ Network. “All of them are out and about, virtually every day, and they cover most of the City and the surrounding areas, like Mayfair, Euston, the docks and warehouses, and so on.”

“And they’re remarkably observant,” Stokes put in.

Penelope nodded. “They notice everything that’s going on around them far more than adults do.”

“That’s…intriguing.” Jordan’s expression mirrored his words. “A novel idea and one I might well steal.”

Barnaby grinned. “Feel free. For now, however…” He stepped back and waved Stokes to the door. “We’ll leave you two to the ledgers while we search in wider fields.”

“We’ll return in an hour or so.” Stokes saluted Penelope and Jordan and made for the door.

With a smile for Penelope and a tip of his head to Jordan, Barnaby followed.

Together with Penelope, Jordan returned to trawling through the ledgers.

It was a thankless chore, for they all seemed to be businesses running along unexceptionable lines, but Jordan accepted that they had to complete their search even if only to convince themselves that there was no clue to be found among the ledgers.

Five minutes later, Gelman looked into the office.

“I’m delegated to keep watch here. The inspector has commandeered everyone else to help with their search.

” Gelman tipped his head, indicating the other side of the street.

“I’ll be just over there, so no one will see me.

If anyone arrives and comes inside, I’ll be over in a jiffy. ”

Jordan nodded. “Good thinking.”

Penelope inclined her head absentmindedly, and Gelman left.

Silence settled, broken only by the shush as ledgers were pulled out or pushed back onto shelves and the rustle of pages being turned.

Eventually, tired of standing, Jordan collected an armful of account books and settled in the chair behind the desk to go through them. Penelope saw and did the same, stacking a pile of ledgers on the corner of the desk and sinking into the chair facing it.

They worked doggedly on, getting up only to exchange the ledgers they’d checked for a fresh collection.

Jordan had lost all track of time when movement in the front window caught his eye. He looked that way and saw Ruth Cardwell peering into the office. She saw him and hesitated, then her gaze moved on to Penelope, and Ruth froze, then she stepped away from the glass and whisked away.

A minute ticked by, but Ruth didn’t reappear.

Jordan returned his gaze to the ledger he’d been perusing.

Ruth wouldn’t have noticed Gelman, watching from the other side of the street.

After making a mental note to check with his colleague later as to how Ruth’s behavior had appeared to him, Jordan forced his mind back to the task at hand.

Nearly an hour later, Penelope shut the ledger she’d been scanning and heaved a disappointed sigh. “Nothing.” She rose, collected her last stack of ledgers, and returned to the shelves to replace them.

“And absolutely nothing here.” Jordan shut the last ledger in his pile and tossed it onto the desk. “If anything, all that I’ve seen convinces me that Thomas Cardwell was very careful regarding which clients he took on.”

“Hmm.” Penelope came back to the chair and dropped into it as Jordan rose and returned the last of his ledgers to their places. “I got the same impression. The ledgers are also meticulously kept.”

“That’s Ruth’s doing,” Jordan said.

“Indeed. But as you say,” Penelope went on, “the clients all appear to be rigidly above board, and as I understood things, choosing the clients was Thomas’s domain.”

“True.”

As Jordan returned to the desk, Penelope eyed him, then asked, “In your experience, is that normal? That every client is so transparently doing the right thing?”

Jordan slumped into the chair behind the desk, considered the question, then raised a hand and waggled it.

“I would have to say it’s a tad unusual—there’s always some clients who are inclined to test the legal limits—but from all we’ve heard of Thomas, he was a careful and cautious man.

Also, he valued his reputation, and so I’m not that surprised to learn that none of his clients appear even the least bit shady. ”

“Hmm.” Penelope faintly grimaced. “I’m not sure where that leaves us now.”

Jordan didn’t have an answer and was grateful that Barnaby and Stokes chose that moment to walk in.

Immediately, Penelope stated, “Jordan and I found absolutely nothing illuminating in Cardwell’s ledgers. All his clients appear to be intensely law-abiding.”

Taking in Barnaby’s and Stokes’s expressions, Jordan wasn’t surprised when Barnaby confessed that they, too, had learned nothing useful.

“Only one other sighting,” Stokes reported. “Just past the last one Morgan turned up, but again, nothing at all to identify the man.”

“The washerwoman said he was just another gentleman in that newfangled style of coat and a black top hat.” Barnaby smiled rather tiredly at Penelope. “No word from the lads yet, of course, but they’re spreading the word, so we can live in hope that they’ll turn up something more revealing.”

“A distinct and identifying feature would be nice,” Stokes said, “but given all we’ve heard to this point, I’m not holding my breath.

” He looked at the others, who appeared as disappointed as he.

“I vote we close up here, go home for the day, and let all we’ve seen, heard, and learned distill overnight, then meet after breakfast at Albemarle Street and plan our next move. All in favor?”

They all held up their hands.

“Shall we say nine o’clock?” Barnaby asked.

Everyone agreed.

Stokes called Walsh inside and directed him to remain on guard overnight, just in case there was anyone with an interest in the contents of Cardwell’s office. “Unlikely, I admit,” Stokes said, “but better we take precautions rather than realize later that we should have.”

Jordan got to his feet. “Just in case there’s something we’ve missed.”

“Or,” Penelope said as she rose, “something the murderer thinks might still be here.”

Barnaby tipped his head her way. “Good point.”

Leaving Walsh in the office, they headed outside.

Jordan followed the others onto the pavement. When Barnaby and Penelope offered to take him as well as Stokes back to Mayfair in their carriage, Jordan smiled and declined. He nodded across the street. “I’ll pick up Gelman, and then, I believe, we have somewhere else we need to visit.”

Assuming, as he’d intended they would, that the somewhere else had to do with his work for Roscoe, the other three parted from him and climbed into the Adairs’ carriage.

Jordan remained where he was until the carriage rattled off, then he crossed the street to where Gelman was lounging in the mouth of a narrow alley.

Gelman straightened and stepped out to meet Jordan. “Did you see Miss Cardwell peering in the window?”

Jordan nodded. “I thought she was going to come inside.”

“Seemed like,” Gelman agreed. “She looked like she was about to step toward the door, then she froze and, a second later, turned and walked straight back the way she’d come.”

Jordan looked toward the street that would take them to Finsbury Circus. “I’m going to call at the Cardwells’. Miss Cardwell was about to come in and—I assume—speak with me, then she saw Mrs. Adair and scarpered. I’m curious to learn why.”