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Trevor flipped the photograph back over and considered the faces of the doomed. The
father, looking every inch the career military man, holding a toddler on his knee, the boy echoing his
father’s stiff bearing. The oldest child, also a boy – evidently the brave little lad who had made it all
the way to the edge of his yard before the mutineers overtook him – sat on the floor at his father’s feet,
surrounded by a collection of tin toy soldiers. The mother, clutching the infant while her two
daughters stood flanking her on either side. The photograph was likely her idea, a memento before
her husband joined his unit, quite possibly arranged with the help of his commander, Roland Everlee.
The photograph was speckled with the years and creased in several places. Heaven
knows how either Morass or Benson had come to possess such an item. Trevor flipped again to the
back and read the names. Rebecca Sloane, holding her son Simon. The baby’s face was not visible
in the portrait. Leigh Sloane, a colonel, holding his son Allen. Another son, Arthur, on the floor. A
toddler girl named Kathleen clinging to the edge of their mother’s skirt and then, standing rather
aloofly on the other side…
The eldest daughter of the household. Evidently named after her father. Leigh Anne
Sloane.
***
The Khajuraho Temple
9:45 AM
“Shall we be friends, you and I?” Rayley said, extending a hand toward Adelaide. “Our
conversation was interrupted yesterday, but I hoped we might continue it today.”
“No,” she said. “You lie. You do not come to talk to me. You come to steal…” And
here she looked down at her fingertips, as if unsure of the word.
“I have come to collect your fingerprints, that’s true,” said Rayley. “But it isn’t stealing,
not at all. For that is the thing about fingerprints. I can take them and yet you still have them. They
are like photographs, do you see?”
She looked at him blankly.
“Like photographs taken of the very ends of your fingers,” Rayley continued. Something
about the woman’s stare made him feel guilty. “Have you ever had your photograph taken?”
***
The Office of Hubert Morass
9:50 AM
The baby, Simon, had grown to be the man now known as Michael Everlee. That was
the easy part. On the first night they had all met him, back at the Byculla Club, Everlee had bragged he
was one of the youngest men in Parliament. Thirty-three in September, which was precisely the age
of the faceless infant in the picture. Rebecca and her husband Leigh? Both dead. Their elder sons
and younger daughter? Also gone. But the oldest girl, just like the youngest boy, lived on.
And the orphanage had not changed her given name.
Trevor stood. Walked briskly from the rooms of the police station and across the barren
courtyard to the adjacent jail. He passed Davy, in a cell and pressing the hand of some valet or
carriage boy into the pad of ink, and made his way to the next cell, where Tom was extracting blood
from the half-naked form of Hubert Morass. He looked up as Trevor entered.
“Go to Mrs. Morrow’s home at once and fetch your aunt,” Trevor said. “And then make
sure Weaver is comfortable enough to talk to her. Really talk. We can create an evidence trail if need