Chapter 10: Perkins at the Edge of the Network

The fire had gone out.

Watson noticed it the way he noticed most things now — not with surprise but with the flat, cataloguing attention that had become his default mode since Montague Street, since the notebook, since the moment he had decided that grief was a thing to be directed rather than endured. The small grate held nothing but grey ash, and the chill in the office had a quality particular to the small hours: still, almost solid, the kind of cold that enters through the wrists and the back of the neck. He had not noticed it happening. He had been reading.

He had been reading since eleven o'clock, which was to say for — he consulted the clock on the mantelpiece — three hours and forty minutes, and the work spread across his desk was the same work it had been: Adelaide's notation, cross-referenced against two newspaper accounts of dockside incidents he had clipped from the Chronicle in October, and beneath those a fresh-copied section of Holmes's late entries that he had transcribed in his own hand because the act of writing them out forced a different kind of attention. The original notebook was in his breast pocket, as it always was. His own notebook was open before him, and the last thing he had written in it was the clinical observation about Ashworth, which he had not improved upon in the hours since.