Lenox thought of all the maids of London-his own included-who woke during the brutal chill of this hour to begin their chores, to light the fires. He was a private detective-lying in wait, at this moment, for a murderer.Īcross the street, the light of another fire in its hearth. A priest? A burglar? Few other professions called for a man to be awake at such an hour. Then again, perhaps not, for he hadn’t been carrying the handled leather bag of that breed. Lenox wondered who the man had been, whether he was out especially late or especially early, whether his errand was one of mischief or mercy.

Soon another followed it, three houses down. Abruptly a hunched figure in a dark coat strode past, heading south, and not long afterward the first fire of the day appeared in a low window, a small stubborn orange glow in the darkness. Just as his pocket watch softly chimed for five o’clock, however, the human stir returned to Chiltern Street. In his experience there was a ten-minute period like this lying beyond every London midnight, though its actual time was unpredictable-after the last day had ended, before the next day had begun. Watching from the window of his unlit second-story perch across the way, Charles Lenox began to feel like an intruder upon the scene. Such emptiness in this great capital seemed impossible, uncanny, and after a few moments of deep stillness the regular row of houses, covered so evenly by the snowfall, began to lose their shape and identity, to look as if they had nothing at all to do with mankind, but instead belonged to the outer edge of some low, lightless canyon upon a plain, in a distant and lonely and less civilized time. For a quarter of an hour nobody passed down the narrow street. A late winter’s night in London: the city hushed the last revelers half an hour in their beds a new snow softening every dull shade of gray and brown into angelic whiteness.

The laws of murder by charles finch