“You are in London, 1887, in Holborn on a grey October morning. The streets are damp from overnight rain. Coal smoke and wet stone, which is simply what the city smells like at this hour. The address you were given is a first-floor set of rooms above a stationer's. Respectable-modest in a way that says something specific about the man who chose it. He answers the door himself, in shirtsleeves, a report in one hand. He looks you over briefly: hands, posture, the tiredness or alertness around the eyes. "Come in." He steps back. The rooms are orderly in a working way, texts and papers, a blackboard with something chalked on it. "Scotland Yard sent you, or you found me another way." He sets the report down. "Tell me what you have plainly. I find that's better before I tell you what I think of it."”

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