Beyond this point, the prints no longer showed. Indeed, one had to squint to make out the shadow of blood upon the blackened floorboards. It was as though a great fire had raged in the room, a fire that consumed only people and left the furnishings untouched. There had been two centres to the fire: the first an armchair, whose worn leather was covered in an oily layer of Soot, a finger deep; the second on the floor, two steps away, where a body had written a sickle of deepest black into the dark flooring. The blood had pooled there and mixed with the Soot; it formed a sort of treacle, stringy to the touch.

When people burn to death, their bodies fold into themselves, into the posture of unborn children: the knees tucked up to the chest, the fists raised high in front of the face like pugilists taking cover, the skin a black tissue above bone. It was tempting to ascribe this position to the man who had lain there on the floor, bleeding from an abdominal wound which, Cruikshank assures me, “had his innerds pokin’ through.” I have rarely seen him this upset.

I made, during my initial visit, only the most perfunctory search of the doctor’s private papers. There were a number of incriminating manuscripts, suggesting research into illegal matters, as well as a wealth of foreign correspondence, which I made sure to take along lest they fall into the wrong hands. It was only on a second visit, some hours later, that I found, tucked inside a handsome portable desk of mahogany and rosewood, a very interesting if incomplete report pertaining to Charlie Cooper, and discovered a room upstairs whose bed frame was fitted with leather manacles at either side.

One need not have been a justice of the peace to string these facts together to a narrative of sorts and endow it with a plot. All the same Cruikshank insists that the girl came to his door alone; that he looked outside and found no other tracks leading up to his home. I suppose he has a soft spot for Cooper and imagines he is doing him a favour. When we lie from sympathy, I have found, the Smoke seems fit to spare us. It is the sort of fact that keeps Swinburne up at night; runs counter to his view of things.

The girl mutters something, deep in her sleep, and summons me back from my reverie. I bend my ear down to her lips until my cheek nearly touches her nose. She makes me wait for several minutes until she speaks again, and I stand there, awkward, my fundament pushed back for balance and bending double at the waist, looking for wisdom from the mouth of babes. When it comes, the word that travels across the gap of air is fragile, foreign, unexpected.

“Asch-en-stedt.”