The Limehouse Text by Will Thomas Page A

constabulary had just narrowly missed being burned to the ground. Bainbridge’s files, the ones we had come to see, had been reduced to ash.
    “Burned, you say?” the Guv rasped to the solid-looking police sergeant in charge of the desk. “All of them?”
    “Aye, sir. A little after midnight, it was. P. C. Threadgill, he does the overnight duty, you see, he smelled smoke and saw it coming from under the inspector’s door. The dustbin had been set in the middle of the floor and some files set alight in it. A regular blaze it was, according to Threadgill, and he was afeared it’d burn down the building. He poured water and sand from the fire bucket on it and then opened windows down the hall to kill the smoke. It was burnt to cinders, all them files Bainy—I mean Detective Inspector Bainbridge—had recorded so metic’lously. A crying shame, I says, and the place all reeking of smoke now. The back windows is open and all of us with our teeth chattering.”
    “May I see his office?” Barker asked.
    The constable hesitated a moment. We were unofficial, after all, but then, anything of interest had already been burned. He finally nodded. “A quick look wouldn’t hurt nothing, I ’spect.”
    “You have no suspects?” my employer asked as we were led back to the office.
    “Not a one that we can pin down,” the constable admitted. “And before you ask, no, not so much as a scrap of paper could be saved. Between the fire, the sand, and the water, there was nothing but moldering ash.”
    “Murder,” the Guv muttered to me as we walked, “of a police officer and now arson in a London constabulary. This killer would appear to have no fear of Scotland Yard at all.”
    The constable set his key in the lock and turned it. The smell of smoke was far stronger in here, though nothing had been burned save the files. A gray discoloration marked the center of the ceiling over the spot where the bin stood.
    “Was this open last night?” my employer asked, pointing toward the open window.
    “Aye, sir, but it’s a sheer wall. It would take a monkey to climb it.”
    Barker grunted and moved to the desk on which was a common blotter of green paper, a map of the city, and pencils standing in a cup. A wooden chair on casters was pulled up to the desk, a chair which had been worn down by the seat of Bainbridge’s trousers for years but would be worn down no farther. A few prints of the early days of the station and the Bow Street Runners hung on the wall. There was not much left behind after so many years on duty, I thought.
    “Took the top blotter sheet, too,” the constable noted.
    “Why?” Barker queried.
    “Old Bainy was a sketcher, sir. It was how he worked out his cases. Helped him think, he said. Wasn’t a bad artist, neither. Could have had him a job as an illustrator for the newspapers if he weren’t a copper down to his boots.”
    “Interesting,” Barker declared, pouring the pencils from the cup onto the blotter. Taking a pencil in his hand, he started in the upper right-hand corner and began to move the lead back and forth across the blotting paper. What child in Britain had not taken a piece of paper to an old gravestone and rubbed an etching of an old knight or dame?
    “We shall look this over, and if it bears fruit, you shall give it to Inspector Poole when he comes in.”
    It took close to a half hour of rubbing and several pencils before the two of us finished the blotter. As imperfect as the images were, they gave us a very good look into the mind of the late Inspector Nevil Bainbridge. The constable was correct: the inspector had been quite an artist.
    “Lad, get out your notebook,” the Guv ordered.
    I retrieved it from my pocket, set it down on a cabinet, and prepared to write in my best Pitman shorthand, despite not being able to hold the pad with one arm in a cast.
    “In the upper left-hand corner we have the letters H and P enclosed in a diamond. There is nothing along that same latitude