Ashton-Kirk, Investigator

Ashton Kirk

Kirk moves through the city with an athlete's ease and a scholar's appetite, collecting dialects, disguises, and out-of-the-way knowledge while politely ignoring the society that would claim him. Where others see a locked room and a missing portrait, he sees probabilities to be tested, and he questions a reluctant cabby with the patience of a man who already knows the answer. His methods — part logic, part theater — set the book's cool, methodical tone and make him the still center around which every nervous witness and lying suspect revolves.

Pendleton

Pendleton is the warm, excitable counterweight to Kirk's composure: he teases his cousin Edyth about her punctuality, fetches her to the investigator's book-cluttered rooms, and takes his dismissal with wounded dignity and good humor. Yet his face goes white when the cab driver describes a woman entering Hume's door, and his loyalty to Edyth keeps pulling him toward the case's most painful possibilities. He matters because his affections and his amateur enthusiasm drag the reader's own sympathies into a mystery Kirk would otherwise solve at arm's length.

Miss Edyth Vale

Edyth arrives at Kirk's rooms with a trouble she will not name in front of her cousin Jimmie, and her nervous hands betray what her steady manner will not. She has heard Kirk praised as brilliant, wealthy, and eccentric, and she studies his laboratory and his face as if deciding how much of herself to risk. Her secret errand sets the plot in motion, and her divided loyalties — to the man she is protecting and to the truth she is hiding — make her the emotional knot Kirk must eventually untie.

David Purtell Hume

Hume settled in the city in 1899 as an art dealer, but the steamship records and customs portraits tell a different story: a man who slipped through the nets of Holland, Spain, and France, and who drank his way into a fatal intimacy with the elder Morris. His specialty was contraband, and his specialty was escape — until a revolver shot and a parrot-like scream ended both. His hidden past is the buried foundation on which every suspect's motive rests, and the investigators' patient reconstruction of his double life gives the mystery its historical depth.

Allan Morris

Morris is the absent presence at the center of the investigation: his father's friendship with Hume links him to the dead man, and his disappearance makes him the obvious suspect even as Edyth's evasions suggest she is protecting him. Kirk reasons that she has seen him, that he has told her part of the truth, and that she is once more trying to shield him from a net she does not fully understand. His unseen movements give the middle of the book its pressure, turning every new clue into a question about what Morris knows and whom he has told.

Professor Locke

Locke works in silence, communicating through heavy characters written on discarded plans, and his composure when Kirk appears is a marked change from the trepidation he has shown before. He gestures Kirk to a chair half a room away, as if measuring the distance between them, and admits in writing that he expected a visitor and that what has occurred is most unfortunate. His mute testimony is a hinge of the case: Edyth's secret visit to him, and his refusal to be rattled, force Kirk to reason backward from behavior to motive.