Chapter 5: Wiggins of Whitechapel

The address I wanted was not in Holmes's index.

This should not have surprised me. Holmes had kept the Irregulars as an oral institution by design — names never written, locations never filed, the entire network existing only in his memory and in the boys' knowledge of each other. I had watched him deploy them a dozen times without ever thinking to ask where they slept or what their surnames were. They were instruments, in my chronicling, which is a failure of chronicle I recognise now with something close to shame. They appeared when summoned. I had not considered what happened to them when the summoning stopped.

I began with what I had.