Chapter 58: 427,500 Missing
The sky is dark. It’s partly because it’s late, but more than anything, the storm clouds hang thick and heavy. It will rain tonight, or if not, the heavens have surely made a mistake.
I had parted from Alice and returned to my residence.
I hadn’t noticed it before retiring, but on the windowsill, a dead rat was slowly decomposing. Unfortunately, there was no one here to clean it up. I could have removed it myself, but I felt utterly unmotivated and merely sat there instead.
Young Wilson, on the other hand, was far more energetic. I had hoped he might discover the dead rat and dispose of it, but he was too preoccupied for such tasks.
Wilson was stacking newspapers neatly on the desk.
“I’ve brought as many as I could find.”
The printed text blurred together. Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, Illustrated London News, The Sketch, The Times…
Essentially, all of London’s prominent newspapers had been gathered. Though I referred to them collectively as newspapers, in reality, they shared little camaraderie. They were merely different arrangements of the same letters, yet even now they seemed to awkwardly push against one another.
Perhaps The Sketch was the aristocrat among them? The money-obsessed Financial Times would stand behind it, leaving the Daily Mail with nowhere to position itself.