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couldn’t have known about it.”
    “Known about what? Is this related to the message you found at the church and you wouldn’t tell me about?”
    “There’s no time,” Ryan told him. “We need to search the rest of the house.”
    “Stop being evasive. What does the name Edward Oxford mean? Tell me what was in the note at the church,” Becker demanded.
    “I can’t.”
    “It’s that difficult to talk about?”
    “I’m not allowed to. Only Commissioner Mayne has the authority to do that.”
    “The look on your face. Is this going to get worse?”
    “It did fifteen years ago. Please stop asking questions that I can’t answer. We need to search the house. Where are the other servants?”
    The odor of spoiling food—and worse—directed them downstairs toward the kitchen.
    Becker paused on the stairs.
    “Are you all right?” Ryan asked.
    “How long will it take before I can be like you?”
    “Like me? ”
    “This doesn’t bother you,” Becker said.
    “It always bothers me,” Ryan told him.
    “But you don’t show any emotion.”
    “Because I distract myself. Concentrate on the details. Commissioner Mayne taught me that. Focus on finding evidence and on making certain that the killer never has a chance to do it again.”
    Becker nodded and forced himself to descend.
    At the bottom, he concealed his reaction when he saw the corpses of a cook and a scullery maid on the kitchen floor. Like the servants upstairs, each had been killed by a blow to the head. Dried blood stained their aprons.
    Struggling to follow Ryan’s advice, Becker mastered his emotions by noting details. The ashes in the stove were cold. Soup congealed in bowls. Meat pies sagged in baking dishes, next to flat meringue desserts.
    They mounted the gloomy servants’ staircase, passed the entrance level, and reached a higher floor that was dominated by an immense dining area capable of seating forty people.
    “When I patrolled the East End, I never dreamed that people could enjoy such luxury,” Becker said.
    They climbed to the third level, where they found three open doors and one that was closed.
    An odor seeped from beneath the closed one.
    Ryan shoved it all the way open with such force that it banged loudly.
    “Any trouble up there, Inspector?” the constable yelled from downstairs.
    “We’ll let you know!” Ryan answered.
    Ready with their knives, he and Becker entered. The room was dark. They made their way toward curtains, pulling them open.
    When Becker saw what was under his boots and all over the bed and in fact everywhere, he stumbled back.
    The walls, the dressing table, the curtains, the rug, everything was covered with dried blood.
    “What in the name of hell happened here?”
      
    T he revenger never forgot the last happy moment in his life. He and his sisters, Emma and Ruth, were boiling potatoes in a pot hanging over the fireplace. The potatoes were all that their family could afford for supper. The wood that they burned would have been hard to come by also, if it hadn’t consisted of worthless scraps their father salvaged from his carpentry work. They had little, but they loved one another. They laughed often.
    Not that day, however. Near sunset, when their father returned home, he set down his tool belt and looked puzzled.
    “Colin, where’s your mother?” he asked. Sawdust flecked his canvas apron.
    Emma answered for him. “Mama didn’t come back from her errand yet.” Emma was thirteen. Her eyes were blue, and each day since then, Colin had never failed to recall how they illuminated a room.
    “But she’s been gone all day.” Rubbing a calloused hand against the back of his sunburned neck, their father crossed the kitchen to the front door of their tiny cottage.
    Colin, Emma, and Ruth followed. Ruth was the little one. Somehow, the gap where one of her front teeth had fallen out brightened her smile. They watched their father step outside and peer down the dusty lane in the direction that their