Chapter 3: Lestrade's Compromised House

The fog came off the river that morning in long, slow exhalations, as though the Thames were breathing out everything it had swallowed in the night, and Watson walked through it with his coat collar turned up and Holmes's notebook in his breast pocket and the particular set to his jaw that his army surgeon's manner had always worn when approaching something unpleasant but necessary.

Scotland Yard smelled of wet wool and coal smoke and the specific institutional despair of a building designed to project authority that is not entirely confident in its own claims. Watson had been here before, of course — many times, always in Holmes's wake, always the recorder of Holmes's performance, the appreciative if slightly embarrassed witness to whatever devastating thing Holmes was about to demonstrate in front of a man who had asked for his help and would now rather not have it. The memory settled over him like a physical weight as he gave his name to the constable at the desk, and he set it aside in the manner he had been practising since Reichenbach: deliberately, with both hands, as one sets down something that will need to be picked up again later.

Lestrade's office was on the second floor, down a corridor that smelled of pencil shavings and stale tea, and the inspector himself was standing at his window when Watson was shown in, looking down at the courtyard below with an expression Watson would have called watchful had it not contained, beneath the watchfulness, something more strained and less voluntary.