Then he caught sight of a photograph of Anne Dante herself and scooped it up, lovingly, pressing it to his sweating face. ‘They don’t love you like I do, Anne,’ he sighed. ‘They’ll never know of the special bond we have between us, will they? A bond of love so pure, so chaste—’ Then his eyes alighted on something else. ‘Bleedin’ hell! Are those her knickers?’

Just as he was about to retrieve the frilly and thrilling somethings from near to the hat stand, he caught sight of a concealed door. Intrigued, he bent closer and slowly opened it – only to suddenly hear the swooping, mellifluous tones of his beloved’s voice!

Arthur smiled in bliss as he listened, rapt, to Anne, executing another beautiful aria. But the song rose higher and higher in pitch until, suddenly, Arthur began to look a little uncomfortable. Putting his shaking hands to his ears, he trembled as the note reached a terrible, piercing shriek of unearthly power! Blood began to fountain from his hairy ears and he fell back through the door in agony. Gasping and convulsing, he staggered out of the dressing room.

Then the shrieking note abruptly cut off.

Chapter the Third

‘The Siren of Cripplegate’

The next day saw the Doctor turning up in Paternoster Row. His first time, so Madam said.

He came in through the porch, wreathed in smiles, his bony hands knotted together and his eyes darting all around. ‘Ooh, yes. Lovely! Smashing dado. You’ve got this place very nice, I must say.’ He glanced at the various stuffed animal heads that lined the hallway. Relics of the previous owner, a Colonel of Dragoons, who had shot every living thing he could set his rheumy old eyes on. There was an empty space on the wall – above a lioness and adjacent to a warthog – and the Doctor wondered what might go there.

‘Jack the Ripper,’ said Madam, unsmiling. ‘Once I catch him. But to business.’

We took tea in the conservatory and set to, cudgelling our brains as how best to proceed.

The Doctor, to his credit, admitted that he had got next to nothing out of his interview with Mortlock and that he was no nearer fathoming what was going on. He sipped his tea and gazed into space, his long face etched with worry. ‘For a while I’ve been conscious,’ he said at last, ‘of some sort of organising power. A great spider at the centre of a web. Something that joins the dots. These strange decapitations – and a whole lot of other odd stuff – are somehow connected.’

‘You mean one person’s behind it all?’ asked Madam.

‘Or an organisation. A collection of brilliant criminal minds.’

‘With what end?’ said Madam, sounding a little afraid.