The Laws of Murder

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A late winter’s night in London: the city hushed; the last revelers half an hour in their beds; a new snow softening every dull shade of gray and brown into angelic whiteness. For a quarter of an hour nobody passed down the narrow street. Such emptiness in this great capital seemed impossible, uncanny, and after a few moments of deep stillness the regular row of houses, covered so evenly by the snowfall, began to lose their shape and identity, to look as if they had nothing at all to do with mankind, but instead belonged to the outer edge of some low, lightless canyon upon a plain, in a distant and lonely and less civilized time.

Watching from the window of his unlit second-story perch across the way, Charles Lenox began to feel like an intruder upon the scene. In his experience there was a ten-minute period like this lying beyond every London midnight, though its actual time was unpredictable — after the last day had ended, before the next day had begun.

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