There was a noise in the corridor. When the kettle clicked off, she thought no more about it. Poured the water into her mug, dunked the tea-bag a few times, then tipped it into the swing-bin. Took the mug back into her room, leaving the door open.

Kennet Lovell had arrived in Edinburgh in December 1822, aged barely fifteen. She couldn’t know whether he’d taken a coach, or walked. It wasn’t uncommon to walk such distances in those days, especially if money was an issue. One historian, in a book about Burke and Hare, speculated that Reverend Kirkpatrick had provided for Lovell’s journey, and in addition had given him an introduction to a friend, Dr Knox, recently returned from time overseas, during which he had worked as an army surgeon at Waterloo and studied in Africa and Paris. Knox had housed young Lovell for the first year or so of his life in Edinburgh. But when Lovell had started university, the two seemed to have drifted apart, and Lovell moved to lodgings in West Port …

Jean sipped her tea and flipped through the photocopied sheets: no footnotes or index, nothing to indicate the provenance of these apparent ‘facts’. Dealing as she did with beliefs and superstitions, she knew how hard it could be to sift out hard objective truths from the chaff of history. Hearsay and rumour could find their way into print. Mistakes, only occasionally pernicious, crept in. It galled her that she had no way of checking anything, had for the moment to rely on mere commentary. A case like Burke and Hare had thrown up any number of contemporary ‘experts’, who believed their testimony to be the one true and worthwhile account.

It didn’t mean she had to believe it.

More frustrating still, Kennet Lovell was a bit-player in the Burke and Hare story, existing only for that one gruesome scene, while in the history of medicine in Edinburgh his role was more negligible still. Large gaps were left in his biography. By the time she’d finished reading, she knew only that he had completed his studies, moving into the field of teaching as well as practising. He had been present at the Burke autopsy. Yet three years later he seemed to be in Africa, combining much-needed medical skills with Christian missionary work. How long he spent there she couldn’t say. His reappearance in Scotland came in the late 1840s. He set up a medical practice in the New Town, his clients probably reflecting the wealth of that enclave. One historian’s supposition had it that he had been bequeathed the bulk of the Reverend Kirkpatrick’s estate, having ‘kept in good graces with that gentleman by dint of regular correspondence down the years’. Jean would have liked to see those letters, but nobody had quoted from them in any of the books. She made a note to try tracking them down. The parish in Ayrshire might have some record, or someone at Surgeons’ Hall might know. Chances were, they couldn’t be recovered, either because they’d perished – been disposed of with Lovell’s effects when he’d died – or had gone overseas. An awful lot of historical documentation had found its way into collections overseas – mostly Canada and the US … and many of those collections were private, which meant few details of their contents were available.