What if the final wrapping up of his guardianship meant Sir Michael could remove him from Bow Street? Daniel had some funds laid by, money that would see him through the next little while, but he loved his job. And the men he worked with … for the most part. If he lost his job, he would lose the identity he had built for himself.

He had, by turns, been the son of an unwed servant, the general dogsbody on a country estate performing every task from bootboy to stable groom to gardener’s helper, and an outcast at a posh boarding school where his love of books was ridiculed and his only acceptance was found in his athletic ability. His years at university had been lonely ones, not fitting in with the wealthy sons of influential families who studied alongside him. It wasn’t until he met Edward Beck, a Bow Street Magistrate’s investigator, that he found himself drawn to an occupation that had become more than a job. It had become an avocation. A calling.

Had God called him to be a Bow Street runner? Daniel didn’t know. He didn’t feel the job was any kind of sacrifice, yet it seemed to him that the God preachers talked about mostly called people to do things that were hard, that cost them something in the doing. Certainly not something they enjoyed or might have a talent for. That God seemed as remote and unknowable as Daniel’s erstwhile father or his mysterious patron.

“Are we going in or not?” Owen asked, jarring Daniel out of his thoughts.

He chided himself for woolgathering in the early stages of the case. How long had he been standing in the tiled hallway? “Of course we are. This way.” He strode to the far end, where the coroner’s office was located.

He went through the open doorway into the cluttered room. “Dr. Rosebreen?” He held out his hand to the small man behind the messy desk. “Mr. Swann, from Bow Street. We met last month on the Selby case?”

The doctor, whose head was wreathed in cigar smoke, rose, shaking Daniel’s hand and then shrugging out of his coat. “Yes, of course. And you solved that case quite tidily, as I understand. I can only hope you do the same for the current one. Mr. Foster has prepared the body. Shall we begin?” He rounded the desk, dropping his coat onto a chair piled with papers and books.

Owen stood in the doorway, eyes round as shillings. The walls of the office were covered with shelves, and on the shelves stood specimen jars and preserved biological samples beyond Daniel’s ability—or desire—to identify. Owen seemed particularly fixated on a container holding a fetal pig suspended in clear liquid. The office boy … no, the probationary investigator … swallowed, his face so pale his freckles stood out like pepper flakes.