Raven climbed delicately onto the back of the cart and sat himself on the least filthy part he could find. He pulled his collar up and his hat down and counted his blessings such as they were, a voice inside quelling his haughtier instincts. Was he so far above these people? He was, after all, literally a cut-throat, and by now quite possibly a wanted man.

He wondered again at the identity of the man he slew, the unexpected efforts of the police, and the subsequent disappearance of Gabriela, but these were futile musings upon matters far away.

The cart trundled along, Raven oblivious to the route taken until it pulled up at the rear of a building in Fountainbridge. He knew he had been here before but did not recognise it, as he had been ushered in under rain-lashed darkness. Daylight did not flatter the place. It was a five-storey tenement as teeming and overcrowded as any in the city. Raven had no notion who actually owned it, but he knew who it belonged to in every practical sense.

He was all but marched inside and up the stairs to a small third-floor apartment, two storeys above the larger accommodations he had visited before. The man who occupied those was waiting for him in the hallway.

‘I have an injured man in urgent want of treatment,’ Flint said.

‘I am not the only doctor in this city,’ Raven replied. ‘There are many better, and I would wager many nearer, whose attendance would not have occasioned retrieval from Princes Street.’

‘I don’t doubt it. But let’s just say that I trust you in a way that I would not trust others, Mr Raven.’

‘Dr Raven,’ he corrected, not with much conviction. He wasn’t sure Flint heard, or whether he would care.

He was shown into a cramped, gloomy and foul-smelling room, his nose immediately recognising the odours of blood and faecal matter. Upon the bed was something else he recognised with equal distaste.

The Weasel.

‘Alec here is in a bad way,’ Flint said. ‘He is in dire need of a surgeon.’

It was odd to hear his real name. Raven had never been curious as to what it was, and now that he knew, he struggled to associate it with the man lying before him. He was squirming, sweat-lashed and panting in his pain.

‘He’s been shot,’ Gargantua added.

‘Where?’

Flint and Gargantua looked back and forth between each other. Clearly there was something they did not wish to disclose.

‘What does the location matter?’ Flint asked. ‘Just do something.’

‘I meant, where upon his person?’

Gargantua pulled back the covers, causing the smell to instantly worsen. An improvised dressing, none too clean, had been applied across the Weasel’s abdomen and the material was heavily bloodstained, but this was not Raven’s primary concern. The smell alone told Raven the intestines had been breached.