The journalist took his time, which was exactly what Theodore wanted. The first picture that seemed to interest him was entitled Hudson River. It showed a New York street, and had a grainy, dusty feel to it. A couple of blocks away the street ended and beyond was a great emptiness which was clearly the Hudson, although you couldn’t actually see the water.

“Draft riots?”

“That’s right. The third day. Wednesday.”

“Why call it Hudson River? The river’s hardly visible.”

“Because that’s the name of the man you see.”

There was only one man in the picture. A blackened bundle hanging from a tree. Blackened because he had been burned after he was lynched. Burned almost to a cinder.

“He was called Hudson River?”

“Yes. He worked in a saloon, for Sean O’Donnell.”

“I know him.”

“O’Donnell had hidden him in the cellar. Didn’t even know he’d got out. Reckons he could have been drinking down there, or maybe he just couldn’t stand the boredom any more—he’d been down there three days. Whatever the reason, young Hudson River sneaked outside. Must have wandered round Battery Park and started up the West Side. That’s where they caught him. They were catching a lot of black men that day. Strung him up on that tree and set fire to him.”

Horace Slim said nothing, and moved on.

“That’s a strange one,” he remarked by another photograph. “What is it?”

“An experiment, technically,” Theodore said. “I was with General Grant’s army at the time. The camera is looking through a magnifying lens that has been placed in front of the object, and you can actually see the magnified image of the object.”

“I see. But what is it?”

“It’s a lead slug. A bullet. But I have cut the slug open, so that you can see its internal construction better. You’ll notice that instead of being of a consistency throughout, the slug has a cavity at its base. Invention of a Frenchman named Minié originally—that’s why they call it a Minié ball. As you’ll know, the old smooth-bore musket was never accurate except at short range. But the rifle, with its spiral grooves inside the barrel, causes the bullet to spin, so that it becomes far more deadly over longer ranges.”

“And the cavity in the slug?”

“Under the pressure of firing, the open bottom of the slug expands outward, pushes it against the walls of the barrel so that it takes the rifling. That little cavity has brought death to thousands.”

“Ingenious. The photograph, I mean.” He moved on. “And this pair of broken-down shoes?”

“General Grant himself showed them to me—in disgust. They came from New York, too. You’d think they were years old, to disintegrate like that, but they’re not a week old.”

“I see. Shoddy goods.”