one o'clock in
the morning
This suggestion was borne out by a further examination of the rooms . In the kitchen there were practically no stores and hardly any arrangements even for simple bachelor cooking ; the bedroom offered the same suggestion ; the soap in the wash-stand was shrivelled and cracked ; there was no cast-off linen , and the shirts in the drawers , though clean , had the peculiar yellowish , faded appearance that linen acquires when long out of use . In short , the rooms had the appearance of not having been lived in at all , but only visited at intervals . `` Against this view , however , was the statement of the night porter that he had often seen a light in Jeffrey 's sitting-room at one o'clock in the morning , with the apparent implication that it was then turned out . Now a light may be left in an empty room , but its extinction implies the presence of some person to extinguish it ; unless some automatic device be adopted for putting it out at a given time . Such a device -- the alarm movement of a clock , for instance , with a suitable attachment -- is a simple enough matter , but my search of the rooms failed to discover anything of the kind . However , when looking over the drawers in the bedroom , I came upon a large box that had held a considerable quantity of hard stearine candles .