‘It’s about the estate,’ he said.

Löwenthal sighed. ‘Bad news, then,’ he said. ‘I might have guessed it.’

Frost gave a brief summary of what had transpired in Chinatown that afternoon, describing Mannering’s former grievances with Ah Quee in some detail.

‘Where’s the bad news?’ Löwenthal said, when he was done.

‘I’m afraid your name came up,’ said Frost, speaking delicately.

‘In what context?’

‘It was suggested’—even more delicately—‘that perhaps this fellow Lauderback used you as a pawn, on the night of the fourteenth. In coming straight to you, I mean, on the night of the hermit’s death, and telling you all about it. Maybe—just possibly—he came to you by some sort of design.’

‘That’s absurd,’ Löwenthal said. ‘How was Lauderback to know that I’d go straight to Edgar Clinch? I certainly never mentioned Edgar’s name to him … and he said nothing out of the ordinary to me.’

Frost spread his hands. ‘Well, we’re making a list of suspects, that’s all, and Mr. Lauderback is on that list.’

‘Who else is on your list?’

‘A man named Francis Carver.’

‘Ah,’ said Löwenthal. ‘Who else?’

‘The widow Wells, of course.’

‘Of course. Who else?’

‘Miss Wetherell,’ said Frost, ‘and Mr. Staines.’

Löwenthal’s face was inscrutable. ‘A broad taxonomy,’ he said. ‘Continue.’

Frost explained that a small group of men were meeting at the Crown Hotel after nightfall, in order to pool their information, and discuss the matter at length. The group was to include every man who had been present in Quee Long’s hut that afternoon, Edgar Clinch, the purchaser of Wells’s estate, and Joseph Pritchard, whose laudanum had been found in the hermit’s cottage following the event of Wells’s death. Harald Nilssen had vouched for Pritchard’s character; he, Frost, had vouched for Clinch.

‘You vouched for Clinch?’ said Löwenthal.

Frost confirmed this, and added that he would be happy to vouch for Löwenthal, too, if Löwenthal was desirous to attend.

Löwenthal pushed his chair back from the table. ‘I will attend,’ he said, standing, and moving to fetch a box of matches from the shelf beside the door. ‘But there’s someone else I think ought to be present also.’

Frost looked alarmed. ‘Who is that?’

Löwenthal selected a match, and struck it against the doorjamb. ‘Thomas Balfour,’ he said, tilting the match, and watching the small flame climb along the shaft. ‘I believe that his information may be of considerable value to the project of our discussion—if he is willing to share it, of course.’ He lowered the match, carefully, into the sconce above the table.

‘Thomas Balfour,’ Frost repeated.

‘Thomas Balfour, the shipping agent,’ Löwenthal said. He turned the dial to widen the aperture: there was a hiss, and the globe flared orange-red. ‘He came to you this morning, did he not? I think he mentioned that he had seen you at the bank.’

Frost was frowning. ‘Yes, he did,’ he said. ‘But he asked some mighty strange questions, and I wasn’t altogether sure of his purpose, to tell you the truth.’

‘That’s just it,’ Löwenthal said, shaking out the match. ‘There’s another dimension to this whole business, and Tom knows about it. He told me this afternoon that Alistair Lauderback is sitting on a secret—something big. He might be unwilling to break Lauderback’s confidence, of course (he kept his peace with me) but if I put the matter to him in the context of this assembly … well, he can be the master of his own choice. He can make up his own mind. Perhaps, once everyone else has shared his own piece, he might be moved to speak.’

‘To speak,’ Frost repeated. ‘All right. But can he be trusted—to listen?’

Löwenthal paused, pinching the charred match between his finger and his thumb. ‘Please correct me if I am mistaken,’ he said coldly, ‘but I understood from your invitation that this is to be an assembly of innocent men—not of schemers, or conspirators, or felons of any kind.’

‘That’s right,’ said Frost. ‘But even so—’

‘And yet you ask whether Tom can be trusted to listen,’ Löwenthal went on. ‘Surely you are not in possession of any information that might indict you? Surely you know nothing that you would not want to share aloud, and freely, with a company of innocents united by a common cause?’

‘Of course not,’ said Frost, blushing. ‘But we still need to be cautious—’

‘Cautious?’ Löwenthal said. He dropped the match into the woodpile, and rubbed his fingertips together. ‘I am beginning to doubt your better interests, Mr. Frost. I am beginning to wonder whether this is not a kind of conspiracy after all.’

They looked at each other for a long moment, but Frost’s will was not equal to Löwenthal’s; he ducked his head, his cheeks flaming, and nodded once.

‘You should invite Mr. Balfour—certainly,’ he said. ‘Certainly you should.’

Löwenthal clucked his tongue. His manner could be very schoolmasterly when his code of ethics was aggrieved: his reprimands were always stern, and always effective. He gazed at the younger man now with a very sorrowful expression, causing Frost to blush still more furiously, like a schoolboy who has been caught doing violence to a book.

Wishing to redeem himself, Frost said, somewhat wildly, ‘And yet there are things about the sale of the cottage that are not yet public knowledge—that Mr. Clinch would not like to be made public, I mean.’

Löwenthal’s look was almost smouldering. ‘Let me make this very clear,’ he said. ‘I trust in your discretion, just as you trust in mine, and just as we both trust in the discretion of Mr. Clinch. But discretion is a far cry from secrecy, Mr. Frost. I do not consider that any of us is withholding information in the legal sense. Do you?’

In a voice that pretended to be casual Frost said, ‘Well, I suppose we can only hope that Mr. Clinch is of your mind’—meaning, somewhat foolishly, to curry Löwenthal’s favour by applauding his rationale. But Löwenthal shook his head.

‘Mr. Frost,’ he said. ‘You are indiscreet. I do not advise it.’

Benjamin Löwenthal hailed from Hanover, a city that, since his departure from Europe, had fallen under Prussian rule. (With his walrus moustache and severely receded hairline Löwenthal was not unlike Otto von Bismarck, but the correlation was not an imitative one: imitation was not a form of self-styling that Löwenthal had ever thought to adopt.) He was the elder son of a textiles merchant, a man whose life’s ambition had centred wholly upon giving both his sons an education. This aspiration, to the old man’s immeasurable gratification, he achieved. Soon after the boys’ studies were completed, however, both parents contracted influenza. They died, as Löwenthal was later informed, upon the very day that the Jewish people were granted formal emancipation by the Hanoverian state.

This event was young Löwenthal’s watershed. Although he was not superstitious, and so attached no real value to the fact that these events happened contemporaneously, they were nevertheless linked in his mind: he felt a profound sense of detachment from either circumstance, by virtue of their happening on the very same day. At that time he had just been offered a newspaperman’s apprenticeship at Die Henne in Ilmenau, an opportunity that both his parents would surely have encouraged him to seize—but because the state of Thuringia had not yet formally emancipated its Jewish citizens, he felt that it would be disrespectful to his parents’ memory to accept. He was torn. Löwenthal cherished an outsized fear of catastrophe, and was prone to over-analysis in self-contemplation; his reasons for his actions were always many, and rationalised in the extreme. We shall pass over these reasons why, and remark only that Löwenthal chose neither to move to Ilmenau nor to remain in Hanover. Immediately following his parents’ deaths, he left Europe altogether, never to return. His brother Heinrich took over their father’s business in Hanover, and Benjamin Löwenthal, degree in hand, sailed across the Atlantic, to America—where, for the months and years and decades after that, he recounted this very history to himself, in exactly these words, in exactly this way.