He was jarred by the sight of who held the reins, a wretched creature who looked more fit for a hearse than a carriage, and for riding horizontal in the back rather than driving the thing. More disturbing still, Raven recognised him, and with it the implications. The man’s skeletal visage and grim pallor hauled Raven’s mind back to a black night he would never forget, and two terrifying rides in a stolen brougham. He wondered whether the owner of this contraption was currently questioning its whereabouts.

‘Mr Raven, it appears we are rightly informed that you are back in town.’

His voice was a rasp, but it carried a weight nonetheless, albeit borrowed from the man he worked for.

‘If you were rightly informed you would know it is Dr Raven.’

‘Either way, get in. Your presence is sought.’

‘And politely declined. I have a prior engagement. I am expected imminently at the Maternity Hospital.’

Raven heard a heavy thump of feet hitting the ground, a figure having jumped from the other side of the coach. A shadow loomed across the cobbles, stretched not merely by the low angle of the sun, and a moment later Raven was reacquainted with another grotesquery. It was the fellow he had christened ‘Gargantua’. He was by some distance the tallest and largest man in Edinburgh, but not proportionately so: it was as though he had been stricken by some abnormality that caused only certain parts of him to keep growing. His huge, stretched head accommodated features that were not in keeping with one another, a vast nose below two seemingly tiny eyes.

Raven to this day felt the reverberation of the man’s hammer-like fist, driven into his head unseen in an ambush. Nor would he ever forget the crushing weight of him as he pinned Raven to the sodden ground in that alley where his nightmare premonitions of death were born. But mostly what he recalled was the inescapable grip of his massive hands, which had held him down while another of Flint’s men, the one he called the Weasel, had taken a knife to Raven’s face.

‘It was not a request,’ said the deathly coachman.

Raven clung on to his seat as the carriage resumed its breakneck progress, though the coachman’s reckless driving was not the primary source of his discomfort. Sheer weight alone seemed enough to anchor the monster sitting opposite, who sat all the while eyeing Raven with undisguised malevolence.

Raven understood his resentment but still found it difficult to be quite as sympathetic as he ought, given Gargantua’s role in that alley. His enmity towards the giant, however, was as nothing compared to his hatred for the man who had wielded the blade.