On seeing us lounging against the wall, both men stared for a belligerent moment but clearly saw no threat. It was lucky they could not see into my heart and the rage that roiled within me. By the way Gib pushed the cart across the quadrangle, I knew it no longer held Miss Hollis. In that moment, every part of me wanted to make Reed and Gib suffer for so blithely delivering her to this final desecration. But then again, they were not the true villains. Merely foul adjuncts to the brutal killers at the club.

“Let’s go in,” I said, heading back to the door. “I want to find out what the anatomists have to say about buying a body that has so plainly been murdered.”

•   •   •

The door led into a dingy corridor with scuffed pale walls and a parquetry floor that crunched underfoot with tracked-in gravel and dried leaves. A number of the wall lamps were guttering or already spent, any light left drawing the flutter and buzz of moths and flies. At the other end of the corridor, a man pushed a basket upon a cart, the sound of his squeaky-wheeled progress receding into the distance. A rancid fatty blood smell, not unlike that from the meat market outside, hung in the air, mixed with the stink of alcohol and feces. I closed my eyes for a second, trying to suppress the desire to gag.

“Over there,” Evan said. I heard the same reflex in his voice. “That might be where they went.”

I opened my eyes. A doorway farther along bore the legend Dissection Prep.

We approached, the dead-flesh stink intensifying. I peered around the doorway. A young man in a smock sat at a desk writing in a ledger, a single candle providing light. Behind him, two wooden trestle tables stood with a body upon each, draped in a grubby, stained sheet. Or that is what I presumed was under the cloth by the shapes of what lay beneath. Was one of them Miss Hollis? A number of flies crawled upon the dark stains, occasionally rising into buzzing flight and landing upon another damp patch. A glint of metal upon one set of shelves marked a jumble of instruments—saws, knives, forceps—some rusted, some new, some still coated in dark matter. Another shelf held dozens of ledgers.

The young man, sensing our presence, looked up, quill poised over his entry. “What is it?”

He looked to be about twenty and not in the best of health—no wonder since he sat among death and decay. His movements were nervy quick and his complexion a sickly yellow, with blemishes that stretched his skin in large red lumps upon cheeks and chin.

“Have you brought a body?” he asked as we entered.

“No,” I said, making my voice as gruff and manly as possible.

Behind me, Evan closed the door and lounged against it, the pose both relaxed and threatening at the same time.