This was not like that. This was something a good deal more earthy. You could still see the pores of whatever animal it was, the places where hair had grown. This was not so much leather as skin.

Inside, the first sheet of paper said, ‘There is no doubt that this is the first register of Criminal Petitions in the Home Office.’ Then a signature and the date: 1894.

I liked that tone. As I turned the page I had a fleeting picture: there they were in 1894, a whole lot of dusty clerks in some high-ceilinged room in the Home Office, slanting sunlight coming in from high windows, the rods of light floating with dust. The head clerk had a box on the table in front of him—no, a tin trunk. He’d blown an inch of old dust off the lid and prised it open. Inside was a jumble of documents, higgledy-piggledy, some torn, some speckled with damp, some in bundles tied with pink tape.

‘Now then,’ he said, or words to that effect. ‘We’re going to sort this lot out. You, Wiggins, put them in date order. The first hundred will be the first volume. Here, this will be the first page.’ Drawing a piece of paper towards him and dipping his long nib into the inkwell, he wrote, ‘There is no doubt that this is the first register of Criminal Petitions in the Home Office.’ As all the clerks watched, their long pale unhealthy faces expressionless, he signed it and added the date: 1894.

As I turned through the pages I realised that these were petitions all right, but not for clemency. I wanted to stop and read them, but I had to get on.

Yet another box. Who last undid this string? Inside, a big book with a hard white cover like plastic, scored and deeply scratched as if bricks had been grated across the surface. Perhaps this book went through the Blitz. Even the folder of historical documents had a history.

These were petitions for clemency. I could feel my heart thudding.

I turned through the documents scanning the impossible old spidery writing for dates and names. Some were in beautiful clerk’s copperplate, every word a minor calligraphic masterpiece. In some, the salient words were written in red ink, with summaries in the margin, the whole finished with a blob of sealing wax. Others were in unreadable scrawls like a doctor’s prescription: you could spend a week deciphering it. These came as a shock, they seemed so modern. On some, the ink was still black and emphatic; others had faded to the palest brown. Some were written on flimsy paper, sometimes only a half-sheet with a few lines scrawled in the middle. Others were on thicker material: could this be parchment, one of those words I’d spent my life reading without ever coming across the object? A few were written on some stiff and glassy-surfaced substance that I guessed might have been vellum.

All were bound together in whatever way they fitted, right way up or sideways, and folded where necessary to fit within the cover. They were in very approximate date order.