I thought a bit. I saw it in my mind’s eye.

“The Juwes are The men that Will not be Blamed for nothing”

Or was it “The Juwes are not The men that Will be Blamed for nothing,” as some had it?

“Hmm, missing? I suppose, other than sense, grammar, somewhat chaotic capitalization, I don’t see that anything—oh, yes, wait, well, that is being very persnickity.”

“I am a persnickity sort. I am a phoneticist.”

“Then one would say the concluding period. None of the three copyists recorded a period at its conclusion. However, that may be because of an error in transmission. The copyists—”

“All three forgot a period?”

“Hmm,” I said again. “All right, I take your point.”

“Do you? The larger point?”

“The larger point?”

“He was interrupted, who knows by what or whom. Possibly that copper coming down the street. But he realized that although he had really engineered the whole thing to pass on this message, he had the discipline—military, that is—to retreat upon threat of discovery and not drive himself on false pride and end up in the bag. He decided not to compromise the completion of the whole mission for this one component of it. Do you see?”

“So there’s more?”

“Indeed. What could the next few words be, considering what was going on in London then, his character as we have drawn it, his few but admittedly existent virtues, perhaps even, out of his military past, a sense of duty, moral duty. It must also fit on the wall, which limits the space. Limits it to just a few more words, another line at most.”

Was Dare mad? “I have no idea.”

“This,” he said. “ ‘The Juwes are The men that Will not blamed for nothing . . . was done by them.’ ”

I looked at him.

“WAS DONE BY THEM! It’s in the passive voice of so much military report writing, it restores the grammatical integrity of the educated man—Sandhurst, I’m guessing—to the composition, it is succinct, the space on the wall would permit it, and it could be written by the light of a quarter-moon by a fellow with sharp eyes. But its point is to absolve the Jews, because he could see that fear and hate was building, that beatings had taken place, that the newsrags, including yours—”

That damned Harry Dam again!

“—were fanning the flames to sell yet more papers, that the thugees and druids of the slums were building up energy. He saw all that and could not live with the idea of a thousand Jews dying in the flames of hatred because of his mission. So he took it upon himself to formally absolve them, signing his statement with Mrs. Eddowes’s blood and placing it on a police route where it could not be missed.”

I was not convinced, although the man’s argument had logic to it. “And if so, of what import? I see it leading us nowhere.”

“Quite the contrary, it leads us very much somewhere.” Dare smiled.

He was a cat toying with a mouse, and I, the great Jeb, did not care a bit to be made mouse of, to have all my arguments dashed upon the stones so insolently by a fellow who was not only smarter but could afford a better tailor and didn’t live with a horrid mum and a trilling sister.

“What somewhere, pray tell?”

“Where would he get such ideas? Clearly, he believes that the Jews—bogeymen of the popular press, demons of the working-class imagination, devils of the retail exchange, depraved and violent in folk rumor, despised by the capitalist class because they are so much better at capitalism, despised by the revolutionary class because they are so much better at revolution, detested for lacking fairness and physical beauty and portrayed everywhere as hook-nosed, yellow-skinned, shawl-wearing, matzoh-ball-eating vermin—he believes them to be human beings, like all of us. Where on God’s earth could he have gotten such an idea?”

“I see it,” I said.

“Then explain it.”

“Those ideas are hardly held anywhere in the world except in certain liberal reform circles, very small but very passionate. Not at all the place where one would find a soldier or intelligence agent of much battle experience. So your point has to be that he has been exposed, somehow, somewhere, sometime, to those ideas, but more important, to people who espouse them, for it is not the sort of inconvenient passion one would absorb merely from reading. You’d have to live it, feel it heavy in the air, indulge in it at length as an assumption, not an argument. And where would we find people of such ideas? I cannot see him gadding about among the better sort of intellectual circles in Bloomsbury, can you?”

“No, I do not see that.”

“Only one possibility remains. In the church. Possibly in family, given a rector as father or brother, possibly by marriage to a Quaker woman.”

“You have it, sir. Exactly.”

“A soldier—raider, rather—experienced in Afghanistan, highly evolved military skills, dyslexic, Sandhurst, yet the son of a pastor or minister of some sort.”

“Ecce Jack.”

I realized then: He had made his sale.

Against his campaign, my little foray into detectivism seemed trivial.

“All right,” I said, “it’s quite brilliant, so much further along than anything anyone else has said. You have a genius for this sort of analysis, I must admit. I am humbled. Why, it is as if you are Sherlock Holmes himself.”

“Who?”

“The detective Sherlock Holmes. The genius who can decode a crime scene brilliantly, sift through clues with ease, point out the plot, its purpose, and its perpetrator. In Conan Doyle’s book A Study in Scarlet.”

“Never heard of it. As I said, let’s just stop the gutting of the whores. Now I turn to you for practicality.”

“Perhaps I can at last contribute,” I said. For even as I had been listening and recording in Pitman, I had been, in a different part of my mind, seeking utility for these new ideas.

“I await patiently,” he said. “As you know, I am somewhat bereft of practicality. I am an expert on one thing alone, the voice.” So Holmesian!

“My thought,” I said, “is that I am, after all, a journalist. While the Star is not the best of all papers in London, even if it is one of the loudest, my connection to it secures me entry into the journalists’ society. On our paper or on another, there has to be a fellow who has made it his speciality to cover issues of war. He’s been to many, he knows the officers and the civilians who supervise them well, and most of all, he already has cultivated a network of private informants. He is well known at Cumberland House, army headquarters. My idea would be to locate this man and somehow entice him to our aid. We would start with the broadest categorization of what you have said. We are looking for someone recently retired from active duty, with connections to intelligence, who is privately known by those who are privy to such things, as a superb operative in mufti, particularly in Afghanistan, who has a gift for languages and a reputation for that which we will call ‘efficiency,’ it being understood that such a word connotes the willingness to kill if necessary. He has been, further, much exposed to the horrors of battle and mutilation as performed in that hellhole, perhaps his mind subtly addled by it.”

“Excellent,” said Professor Dare.

“If we can get a list of such, some being more closely matched to the criteria than others, we can our own selves identify them and continue to winnow, by which method we can determine if the other markers are present: the dyslexia, the religious childhood, the superb night vision, the physical aspect of slightness, perhaps even the possession of poor Annie’s rings, though that may be too much to be wished. In that way, we can ultimately identify the one man who matches the template with perfection. Police notification would follow, then arrest, and we bathe in glory. I do like the glory part.”

“Then you may have it all, sir.”