She remembered her first meeting with Siobhan, the story of the ‘bad experience’. Couldn’t have had anything to do with the food, though the bill at the end could sometimes come as a shock. She wondered if she’d treat herself later. The price of a meal went down after ten p.m.; maybe they could squeeze her in. She touched her stomach. Lunch tomorrow … it wouldn’t hurt her to skip dinner tonight. Besides, she wasn’t sure she’d still be here at ten. Her investigation into the life of Kennet Lovell hadn’t thrown up a surfeit of information.

Kennet: she’d first thought the name a misprint, but it kept recurring. Kennet, not Kenneth. Born 1807, in Coylton, Ayrshire, making him just twenty-one at the time of Burke’s execution. His parents were farming folk, his father having employed Robert Burns’s father for a time. Kennet was given an education locally, helped by the local church minister, the Reverend Kirkpatrick …

There was a kettle in the outer office. She got up, walked out of her room. Left the door open, so her shadow stretched across the floor. She didn’t bother with the lights. Switched the kettle on and rinsed a mug under the tap. Tea-bag, powdered milk. She stood in the semi-dark, leaning against the worktop, arms folded. Through the doorway, she could see her desk and the photocopied sheets, all she’d been able to find so far on Dr Kennet Lovell, who’d assisted at a murderer’s autopsy, helped flay William Burke’s skin from his bones. The initial post-mortem examination had been undertaken by Dr Monro, in the presence of a select audience including a phrenologist and a sculptor, as well as the philosopher Sir William Hamilton and the surgeon Robert Liston. This was followed by a public dissection in the university’s packed anatomical theatre, noisy medical students gathered around like so many vultures, hungry for knowledge, while those without tickets hammered at the doors for entry and fought with police.