Chapter 16: The Ghost in the Logical Notation

The paper was thin and the handwriting was not Calloway's.

Watson had noticed this during the interview itself — three days ago now, in the grey anteroom off Lestrade's corridor — and had filed the observation without yet understanding what to do with it. Calloway's hands were a clerk's hands, careful and cramped from decades of small columns, and the ink had trembled in the upper margins of every document Watson had seen him produce. But the four lines Calloway had read aloud, then refused to read again, then finally written out at Lestrade's patient insistence — those lines had been transcribed with a rigidity that belonged to a man copying something he was frightened to misrepresent. Not composing. Copying. The hand was controlled by the material rather than the other way round.

Watson had the transcription in front of him now, on the cleared corner of his desk, next to his own open notebook and Adelaide's most recent sheet.