‘I am going somewhere, My Lord.’ You turn back to the doctor. ‘Did you make any enquiries about Madame Benham? Her habits? How often she took opium, for example?’

The judge taps a hand on his bench. ‘Mr Pettigrew. At some point if a man hasn’t got anything on his hook, he might assume the problem is his bait.’

‘My Lord, I’ve been led to wonder whether Dr Wilkes overlooked the presence of opium in the stomach contents. I’m instructed that Mrs Benham was a laudanum addict ‒’

The doctor juts out his chin. ‘I’d been informed that Mrs Benham had been taking laudanum for some months, on advice of a physician. I can’t now remember his name. Folke? Falk?’

You glance at your paper. ‘Fawkes?’

‘Fawkes. Yes. I think that was it. The presence of the drug would have been entirely consistent with that medical history. Mrs Benham had attended her soirée earlier that evening, and appeared in perfectly good spirits. Testing for opium, even if such a thing could be done, would have been nothing but a wild-goose chase.’

‘Did you perform any tests?’

‘Mr Pettigrew,’ interrupts the judge. ‘Set yourself down a different path.’

‘My Lord.’ You take a step back. ‘Something else is troubling me, Doctor. Do you see here the clothes worn that evening by the victims?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, then, look. His clothes are soaked. Bow to stern, as they say. Do you see? As if he bled and bled again. Like the old superstition which held that a corpse’s wounds would bleed when the killer approached ‒ “open their congealed mouths and bleed afresh”, as Shakespeare wrote. Yet hers are stained only lightly.’ The lavender-grey silk clings as you hold it up, a woman holding fast her lover’s ankles. Splashes of dark dried blood on the bodice. ‘How would you account for it?’

He pauses, folds his arms. ‘Simple, Mr Pettigrew. He had numerous wounds. Stabbed over and over, and stabbed deep. On the other hand, hers were not so deep.’

‘Not so deep?’

‘No.’ His voice blunt as granite. But he hesitates. A heartbeat. Or is that only the spinning in my head?

‘Yet you still swear positively that exsanguination was the cause of her death?’

I can’t look at Dr Wilkes. I can’t look anywhere. Velvet, brass and polished wood are all stripped away, until all I can see is her. The whole dread scene. The meat-slab of her laid out on a cold table. The black blood puddling through her lungs and heart. Her body nothing more than a sack for organs, a pop of eyes and tongue. I stumble forward. I cry out. Heads turn. One of the turnkeys takes a step towards me and I shake my head, to show them I’ll be good. I must try to compose myself. But now I can’t un-see it. What a mess they would have made of her! And I’d done the same. To so many. So many! I sway on my feet, close my eyes, fall into the darkness inside.