Jean Burchill had spent much of her day trying to trace the correspondence between Kennet Lovell and the Reverend Kirkpatrick. She’d spoken to people in Alloway and Ayr – the parish minister; a local historian; one of Kirkpatrick’s descendants. She’d spent over an hour on the phone to the Mitchell Library in Glasgow. She’d taken the short walk from the Museum to the National Library, and from there to the Faculty of Advocates. Finally, she’d walked back along Chambers Street and headed for Surgeons’ Hall. In the museum there she’d stared long and hard at the portrait of Kennet Lovell by J. Scott Jauncey. Lovell had been a handsome young man. Often in portraits, the artist left little clues as to the character he was painting: profession, family, hobbies … But this was a simple execution: head and upper body. The background was plain and black, contrasting with the bright yellows and pinks of Lovell’s face. The other portraits in Surgeons’ Hall, they usually showed their subjects with a textbook in front of them, or some paper and a pen. Maybe standing in their library or posed with a few telling props – a skull or femur, an anatomical drawing. The sheer plainness of the Lovell portrait bothered her. Either the painter had had little enthusiasm for the commission, or else the subject had insisted on giving little enough away. She thought of Reverend Kirkpatrick, imagined him paying the artist’s fee and then receiving this bland decoration. She wondered if it perhaps showed some ideal of its subject, or if it was the equivalent of a picture postcard, a mere advertisement for Lovell. This young man, hardly out of his teens, had assisted in the Burke autopsy. According to one report of the time, ‘the quantity of blood that gushed out was enormous, and by the time the lecture was finished the area of the classroom had the appearance of a butcher’s slaughter-house, from its flowing down and being trodden upon’. The description had made her queasy, first time she’d read it. How much more preferable to have died as one of Burke’s victims, made insensible with drink and then smothered. Jean stared into Kennet Lovell’s eyes again. The black pupils seemed luminous, despite the horrors they’d witnessed.

Or, she couldn’t help wondering, because of them?

The curator wasn’t able to help answer her questions, so she’d asked if she might see the bursar. But Major Bruce Cawdor, while affable and willing, wasn’t able to add much to what Jean already knew.