It was plastered with the bills of various agents, and Langholm noted down the nearest of these, whose office was in King's Road.

He would get an order to view the house, and would explore every inch of it that very night.

But his bath and his tea had made away with the greater part of an hour; it was six o'clock before Langholm reached the house-agent's, and the office was already shut.
He dined quietly at his hotel, feeling none the less that he had made a beginning, and spent the evening looking up Chelsea friends, who were likely to be more conversant than himself with all the circumstances of Mr.Minchin's murder and his wife's arrest; but who, as might have been expected, were one and all from home.
In the morning the order of his plans were somewhat altered.

It was essential that he should have those circumstances at his fingers' ends, at least so far as they had transpired in open court.

Langholm had read the trial at the time with the inquisitive but impersonal interest which such a case inspires in the average man.