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“Good work, lad. You’ve not told a soul now, have you?”

“No one.” From the big man’s satisfaction, Harry could almost believe the blind man mattered. But Goldsworthy had not seen Adam Pickersgill shouting nonsense and waving his arms.

The big man nodded. “Has he talked?”

“He’s simple-minded, sir. Childlike. He talks about cats and ale and his own daily tasks.”

“You haven’t asked him about the murder, then?” Goldsworthy started shuffling the papers on his desk. Goldsworthy’s paper search tactic was one of the ways the big man kept his spies on their toes and in the dark. The man never parted with information easily.

Harry waited. For once he could bargain for information. He held a card the big man needed. “It would help to know who the victim was.”

The paper shuffling stopped. Goldsworthy’s face wore an expression of a man in the grip of the past. “One of our own.”

“A member of the club? When?” Harry knew as he asked the question that it could not be a recent murder. For old blind Adam to have witnessed the murder, it must have happened years earlier.

Goldsworthy appeared lost in his own recollections. “Never mind, can the blind man talk?”

“I doubt he can tell us directly what he knows, but he has these fits or episodes when he says quite a bit, shouts wildly, as if some scene is being enacted in front of him.”

“You’ve seen these episodes?”

Harry nodded. “One of them.”

“Is the man mad?”

“More like he’s caught up in the past.”

“Where did you see the man’s fit?”

“He occupies a bench in the public room at an inn.” Harry watched the big man’s countenance for any sign of recognition.

“An inn at the start of the Dover road?” Goldsworthy heaved his bulk up from the desk and crossed the room to a large map of London on the wall. He lit a second lamp and with a finger pointed to the inn’s location. “The Tooth and Nail, is it?”

Harry nodded. “Some neighborhood men were talking about a stage coach robbery when something they said set the old man off.”

Goldsworthy frowned. “So these episodes are seen and known in the neighborhood?”

“Common knowledge, sir.”

Goldsworthy looked grave. His eyes shifted back and forth rapidly, a sign that he wanted action. “I don’t like it,” he said. “We have to keep the man safe until we can understand what he’s saying. Take Wilde with you.”

“So, you’ll reopen the operation?”

Goldsworthy shook his head. “Never closed it, lad, but not a word to anyone.”

“And the money?”

“All in good time.” Goldsworthy waved a huge hand. “What do we know about the man? Anything?”

“His name is Adam Pickersgill. He was in service in a country house before he was blinded.”

“Was blinded you say? Not born blind?”

Harry shook his head. The case meant something to Goldsworthy. The big man didn’t want to let it go, even if his superiors at the Foreign Office came down hard. Harry offered another detail. “That’s what the innkeeper’s daughter says. According to her, Adam was blinded in an attack on the road and wandered into the Tooth and Nail, where her father took him in. Who was the target of that attack, sir? Surely, it was not a simple-minded servant.”

Goldsworthy had a faraway look in his eyes. “One of our own, lad, one of our best agents.”

“In what year?”