“I am grieved, but the news from Bow Street is uniformly shocking and of the worst kind. The runners have discovered the details of the murder and, what is more appalling, the motive for it: warning to serve as example. The Viscount’s body was found in the squalor of Whitechapel in Rosemary Lane near Tower Hill, which—I doubt you have reason to know—is beyond the regular patrols of the constabulary. The outer garments had all been stript, and it was evident by the attitude of the body that Dunfield had been deceased for some time before being abandoned in the lane. In the course of the investigation, an informer came upon a resident of Tower Hill who claimed to have heard the sound of an heavy carriage early in the morning of the death. The rain had washed away any signs of carriage wheels, but the corpse, the corroborating evidence of the witness, and the lack of any sign of a struggle suggest strongly that the body had been transferred by carriage to the location where it was subsequently discovered. As I had not been acquainted with the Viscount, perforce Colonel Fitzwilliam undertook the sombre task of providing the positive identification to the coroner.”

He paused to let Mr. Darcy recover his breath and to ask any questions; upon hearing none, Mr. Gardiner continued the sad history:

“Dunfield, being a peer and gentleman of fashion, was a well-recognised figure throughout the best gaming clubs of London. In the weeks before his death, Dunfield’s habit had been daily playing at Hazard, often from the evening of the previous day, into the following afternoon. He lost prodigious sums. Logically, the runners’ initial enquiries had begun at the gentlemen’s clubs of which Lord Dunfield might have been a regular member. The detectives consulted the gambling books at White’s, Brooks’s, Boodle’s, and the numerous other gaming establishments frequented by the gentry in Pall Mall, and found the Viscount’s recorded wagers of increasingly desperate amounts. Darcy—again, I am truly distressed at what I must next relate—enquiry into the Jerusalem Room at Brooks’s and other such venues of vice revealed that the Viscount had been in debt to the Jewish money-lenders for no less than one hundred thousand pounds!”

Here, Mr. Darcy gasped, but did not interrupt Mr. Gardiner: “The Viscount had not been seen at any of the better clubs for a little over a week before his death; approximately the date at which the moneylenders began to refuse him additional credit. Most dreadfully for Dunfield, and all of your family, these details—and others of a similarly shocking nature—were corroborated by the clubs’ proprietors, and were generally known at the time of the Viscount’s murder.”