Chapter 8: Sergeant Hooper's Second Income

The money had been moving for eleven weeks.

Watson sat at his desk in the Montague Street office on a Wednesday morning with Adelaide Marsh's notation spread before him — three columns, written in her precise, unsentimental hand on two sheets of paper she had torn from a ledger at the exchange — and worked through the figures with the patient methodical focus that had always served him better than brilliance. Outside, a dray horse stood in the street while its driver argued with a costmonger over the right of passage, and the noise of it, iron wheels and raised voices and the horse's occasional contemptuous stamp, filtered through the single window as a kind of backdrop against which Watson thought.

The figures were not, Adelaide had explained during the last twenty minutes of their meeting, the codes themselves. She could not legally furnish him with decoded transmission content. What she could furnish him with — had furnished him with, with the calm precision of a woman who had made the distinction in her own mind well before he arrived — were the financial anomalies she had identified in the exchange's operational accounts. The routing fees. The confirmation charges. The small, recurring discrepancies between what had been received and what had been logged.