9308-3953

frustration. Yes, of course he still felt the ache of each case which was not closed with an arrest… the
muddled regret that came when one felt as much sympathy for the criminal as the victim… the sense
that to be a forensics officer was to always show up just a little too late. Even while he pushed for
more scientific methodology within the Yard, Trevor accepted that forensics would never be an exact
science. The key was to learn from the dead and learn fast. To grieve your errors, but to grieve them
quickly. To indulge your self-recrimination, but only for an instant, and then your eyes must turn
resolutely from the past to the future. For that is the only way a man will ever be able to save what he
can.
Trevor stood gazing down into an evidence box in the office of Hubert Morass. It was
always tricky to study the notes and souvenirs of another lawman and try to recreate exactly the line
of logic the man had been following. Back in Paris in the spring, Trevor had struggled even to
understand the notes of his friend Rayley and, based on the way the man had kept his boarding house
room and his generally disheveled appearance, Trevor suspected that Morass was not the sort to
keep spotless records.
But he was wrong, for Morass had recorded his evidence with true military precision.
There was a file on his studies with the suicide tree, offering estimates of how much poison it would
take to kill a man versus a woman, or to kill slowly in lieu of killing quickly. Benson had evidently
got his own chart straight from the work of Morass. Another file offered a timeline of events
surrounding the murders, showing that Morass had drawn much the same conclusions as the contingent
from Scotland Yard. A final file held photographs. A sad image of Rose Weaver and Pulkit Sang on
the floor of the Byculla Club lobby, their feet all but touching, sprawled as if they were sleeping.
Several shots of the kitchen of the Weaver household, including Sang’s bedroom, the suicide tree in
the garden, and the very drawer in the kitchen where Davy had surmised Rose Weaver’s medication
had been kept. A duplicate of the portrait of Weaver and Everlee in military uniform that they had
found in Benson’s quarters.
Trevor leaned back with a sigh and stretched. He had awakened as bruised and knotted
as he feared, and the mad scramble to leave Mrs. Tucker’s house and set up a base of operations in
the jail had put him in a foul mood. And of course it also stung a little to admit that the drunkard
Morass and the displaced Benson had together managed to create such a logical and compelling
sequence of events. The two men who now lay dead had managed to trump the team from Scotland
Yard at every turn.
There was one final picture in the file. Trevor extracted it and lifted it to the light.
He held in his hand an aged photograph, showing a family. It was not an especially good
example of the art of photography, true, but it a still represented a remarkable indulgence for a middle
class family of the era. In the picture a husband, wife, and four children all stared straight ahead,
awkwardly grouped and ill-at-ease in their Sunday clothing. The woman held a wadded blanket
which presumably contained an infant. From the familiar striped wallpaper and a palm tree placed to
the side, Trevor concluded that this portrait was taken at the same location as the one he had seen of
Anthony Weaver and Roland Everlee – most likely taken the same day, for a watery blue stamp in the
corner declared the month to be December, 1856. When he turned the photograph, he was rewarded
with just what he hoped to find – someone had carefully printed the names of the people photographed
on the back.
He was holding in his hand a picture of the Sloane family, taken merely months before
their deaths. The members were listed, left to right. The pencil marks had faded through the years, but
the names were still legible.