There were shifty glances to and fro, the focus of which seemed to be a pair of young chambermaids. He smiled reassuringly at them, beckoning them to one side. They looked at him wide-eyed, like a pair of young deer confronted by a hunter, but a glance at von Namtzen, emerging from the morning room behind him, hastily decided them that Lord John was the lesser of the evils on offer, and they followed close on his heels back into the room, leaving von Namtzen to deal with the crowd in the entry hall.

Their names, the girls admitted, with much stammering and blushing, were Annie and Tab. They were both from Cheapside, bosom friends, and had been in the employ of Herr Mayrhofer for the last three months.

“I gather that Herr Mayrhofer is not, in fact, at home today,” Grey said, still smiling. “When did he go out?”

The girls glanced at each other in confusion.

“Yesterday?” Grey suggested. “This morning?”

“Oh, no, sir,” Annie said. She seemed a trifle the braver of the two, though she could not bring herself to meet his eyes for more than a fraction of a second. “The master’s been g-gone since Tuesday.”

And Magruder’s men had discovered the corpse on Wednesday morning.

“Ah, I see. Do you know where he went?”

Naturally, they did not. They did, however, say—after much shuffling and contradicting of each other—that Herr Mayrhofer was often given to short journeys, leaving home for several days at a time, two or three times a month.

“Indeed,” Grey said. “And what is Herr Mayrhofer’s business, pray?”

Baffled looks, followed by shrugs. Herr Mayrhofer had money, plainly; where it came from was no concern of theirs. Grey felt a growing metallic taste at the back of his tongue, and swallowed, trying to force it down.

“Well, then. When he left the house this time, did he go out in the morning? Or later in the day?”

The girls frowned and conferred with each other in murmurs, before deciding that, well, in fact, they had neither of them actually seen Herr Reinhardt leave the house, and no, they had not heard the carriage draw up, but—

“He must have done, though, Annie,” Tab said, sufficiently engrossed in the argument as to lose some of her timidity. “’Coz he wasn’t in his bedroom in the afternoon, was he? Herr Reinhardt likes to have a bit of a sleep in the afternoon,” she explained, turning to Grey. “I turns down the bed right after lunch, and I did it that day—but it wasn’t mussed when I went up after teatime. So he must have gone in the morning, then, mustn’t he?”

The questioning proceeded in this tedious fashion for some time, but Grey succeeded in eliciting only a few helpful pieces of information, most of these negative in nature.