Iris Kenneth, then. With no connection to Father James . . .

After a visit to the morgue to look at the body and the woman’s clothing, Rutledge went with Sergeant Wilkerson to the small boardinghouse on a run-down street where Londoners with thin pockets often took rooms. It was just off Eustace Road, where industry had crowded out anyone who could afford to move on. Mrs. Rollings was plump, with tightly curled black hair, a pinched mouth, and an air of long-suffering. When Wilkerson introduced Rutledge to her, she looked him up and down, then said, bristling, “It doesn’t do my establishment any good to have a policeman at the door every other day! This is a respectable house.”

Rutledge smiled. “I’m sure it is.” She thawed visibly as the smile touched his eyes. “We’ve come to ask if you still have Iris Kenneth’s belongings.”

“Lord love you, why should I have kept them? Didn’t bring in much, I can tell you, not near enough to pay what I was owed. And I needed the room.”

She looked up and down the street with the same suspicious air with which she’d regarded Rutledge, and then stepped back from the door. “Do come inside, before I have to explain to half the neighborhood why I’m entertaining the police again!”

They followed her into a musty entry, where a flight of worn stairs ran up into darkness. The windowless entry itself was nearly as dark, for the glass panes in the door didn’t cast light beyond the first step, and the lamp was turned so low that it had long since given up trying to illuminate anything but the small circle of brightness on the gray ceiling and the first landing. Mrs. Rollings opened a door on her left, and led them into her sitting room.

It was surprisingly comfortable, if shabby. There were odds and ends of porcelain on the mantelpiece, including a demure shepherdess with a leering satyr at her shoulder. The juxtaposition of the pieces was nearly lewd. Rutledge wondered if it exemplified Mrs. Rollings’s sense of humor or the tastes of her guests. Prints on the other two walls were of theatrical productions, one Sarah Bernhardt’s Hamlet and the other a popular act in the music halls some twenty years ago. Mrs. Rollings herself wore rouge that stood out like two fever spots under the powder, and her hair was dyed. The jeweled rings on her plump fingers were cheap paste, one of them large enough to have poison secreted in it. Rutledge’s opinion was that it might have once been a prop in an Italian play.