Five minutes. I was late, almost certainly. The sign outside said the exhibition was unsuitable for children under twelve and pregnant women, and Michael was four. But I had come here on the promise of the Chamber of Horrors. I had put up with a lot of dull wax for the Chamber of Horrors, with every expectation I’d be swaggering out at the end and declaring it dull too. To be fair, the Trafalgar exhibit hadn’t been bad – Nelson, pale and small, his shirt off and stumps on show, looking like a fledgling bird fallen from its nest as the cannons crashed all around. That exhibit had been the exception so far.

The exit sign was low-wattage and some distance away, beyond the French Revolution. Marat, dead in his bath, knife in his chest, his ink and pens and paper in front of him on a board covered with green cloth. I knew the scene already from a picture, a painting. Beyond him was a row of guillotined heads on poles – Robespierre, Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and others, all modelled by Madame Tussaud herself, some from their actual severed heads, held still while she smeared wax on their eyebrows and lashes and pressed her damp plaster of Paris dressings against their cooling cheeks.

There was blood on their neck stumps and spattered on their faces and their eyes were closed, with the exception of one man who gazed dreamily up into the dark. They were freshly dead, life emptied out of them, their last breaths just gone, still adrift in the room. Death was all about, on the march in here.

Five minutes. I made a move for the exit sign, focused on it, bumping, apologising, those dying French breaths after me every step of the way, cold on my neck.