He glanced at his papers. “Quite so.” He frowned and waited.

When I didn’t give him a recipe for rhubarb pie, he continued.

“When King’s Cross porters unloaded the train last Saturday morning, they found a body, thought to have been put on the train at Ardsley.” He picked up and handed me the only piece of paper on his desk: a watercolour head-and-shoulders artist’s portrait of a middle-aged male.

The man’s features were refined but unremarkable. His hair was a mixture of dark brown and grey. He had a lined forehead neither too high nor too low, the usual number of eyebrows, deep-set pale blue eyes a little on the small side, a rather narrow nose and somewhat full lips. The lips made me guess, irrationally, that here was a man who loved his food. His chin jutted a little and yet his jaws so smoothly blended into his neck that it might have been called a weak chin.

Was he some poor tramp who had stowed away, eaten poisonous rhubarb leaves and died?

“Who is he?”

“That is the question, or one of them. Who is he, and who put him there?”

The commander gave DC Yeats the nod.

The younger man leaned forward. “He is in his middle years, five feet seven inches tall and in possession of his own teeth.” The commander gave another encouraging nod to DC Yeats.

“He was found without –” Yeats hesitated. “He was found without identification. He appears fit, well-nourished, probably a professional man, or a gentleman.”

There was something neither of them wanted to mention. I had not come two hundred miles, rattling for over four hours on a train, to hear part of a story. DC Yeats had been going to say something else before he changed his words to “without identification”.

Had the man been horribly mutilated?

“What other details do you have?”

The commander scratched his ear.

Yeats scratched his nose. Was there a flea in the room?

Yeats said, “The gentleman wore only his underwear. He had been placed in potato sacks, tied with cord.”

For a moment, silence held. The image gave me a shudder. I felt suddenly cold.

The commander spoke first, looking at me with compassion, as if remembering when we first met and I was just a child.

“Perhaps not at all the sort of case for you, m’dear. Though being local to that neck of the woods, and being that we need someone undercover –” He seemed ready to usher me from the room as if his summons to me might have been a foolish whim, a whim he regretted.

I guessed his thoughts. How could that nice girl turn into a woman who does not turn a hair at such a story?

I ignored his unwillingness to believe that even nice girls grow up.

Someone must have thought that the man might be identified by his clothing, a tailor’s label, a bespoke shirt, or handmade shoes. “Was there anything at all to give a hint of his identity?”