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“Yes.”
“A gentleman came to retrieve an urgent document, and upon his providing details to prove the document was his, she gave it to him. We have since discovered he was an imposter.”
Her eyes round, and her gaze shoots to me.
Gray continues, “It was not Miss Mitchell’s fault. My sister was also there, and the young man did provide the name of the client and information from his papers. That leads us to hope you might be able to identify him as a colleague of Mr. Ware’s. Perhaps a fellow solicitor.”
“Oh, I do not know Mr. Ware’s colleagues, sir. My business was the house.”
“May we provide you with his particulars? In hopes Mr. Ware may have entertained him in the house?”
“He did not entertain here,” she says. “Not guests nor friends nor colleagues. It was very much the two of us. He went out, to be sure, but he rarely brought anyone in.”
“Let us hope this was an exception.”
When Gray nods my way, I describe the young man.
“Oh!” Mrs. Hamilton says. “I most certainly do know him, and that makes quite a lot of sense. He would know Mr. Ware’s business quite intimately. It is his clerk, Mr. Fischer.”
I try not to wince. Ware’s clerk. Of course. No one knows my mother’s cases better than her clerks. For a matter like a rental contract, Ware would likely have given that over entirely to the young man. The paperwork had been completed yesterday, and Mr. Fischer knew there was a copy in the file.
“Thank you,” I say. “Where would I find this Mr. Fischer?”
“I wouldn’t know, miss. As I said, I know nothing about Mr. Ware’s business.”
Gray pushes harder. Can she give us anything, be it a street name or a neighborhood or even a public house the two might have frequented after hours? Mrs. Hamilton has only a name: John Fischer.
“He’s only been working for Mr. Ware for a few months now,” she says. “I’ve scarcely met him more than a half-dozen times. He popped in downstairs here now and then to fetch lunch for the master.”
“A few months?” I say.
“Perhaps four or five? His former clerk retired.”
“Might we take another look upstairs in the office?” I ask. “In case Mr. Fischer’s address is there?”
“Certainly.”
“So the clerk pretended to be a client,” Gray says as we enter the office.
“Hmm.”
“If he merely wanted information, he could have introduced himself properly. Which suggests he was after something else and that taking Mr. Morris’s documents was a distraction.”
“Hmm.”
We enter the office proper, and Gray looks about at the stacks of papers.
“Yes,” I say. “It was like this when Fischer entered. You’re being very circumspect, circling around the obvious question of how closely I watched him. Whether he’d have had the opportunity to steal anything. The answer is that I didn’t leave him alone in the room, but I wasn’t exactly keeping an eagle eye on him.”
I walk to the desk. “When I handed him the rental papers, he asked for string to bind them. Taking the string put him at the desk covered in stacks of paper. He ‘accidentally’ knocked a stack off. He tried to clean it up, but I wasn’t about to let a client rifle through the legal papers. However…”
“While you were cleaning them up, he had access to the desk and the pages stacked there.”
“Yes. Isla had moved into the next room. Fischer wouldn’t have had a lot of time, but if he’d already seen what he wanted on the desk, he could have grabbed it and added it to his own papers in his satchel.”
Gray splays a few client files on the desk. “There is a lot of paper here. I do not expect you would know what is missing.”
“Actually, I might. I made a list of the client names and their business as I was going through their files. The list is back at the house.”
