The young man frowned. “What are you doing?”

“We are asking you why you just accepted the body of a young woman for dissection when she has clearly been murdered,” Evan said pleasantly. “What is your name?”

“I am not going to tell you my name,” the young man said, puffing a little at the outrage of our intrusion.

“Everyone needs a name,” I said. “Like the young woman those two coves just brought in.” I glanced at Evan. “Let’s call him Napoleon.”

Evan considered my suggestion. “It suits him.”

“My name is not Napoleon,” the young man said, outraged. A true patriot. “I am Reginald Drake and I have no recollection of a young woman.”

I walked over to his table. He pushed his chair back, scooting it across the floor in a dull screech of wood upon wood and revealing a pair of reasonably clean stockings and good shoes with silver buckles. A young man of reasonable means. Perhaps a medical student working his way through his studies.

I leaned over to view the ledger. “Ah, this unfinished entry you are writing: unidentified woman, approximate age twenty-five. Marked upon back and neck.”

He eyed me. “You can read?”

“It would seem so,” I said. “Allow me to ask again: why are you taking the body of a woman who has so plainly been murdered? Is that her under one of those sheets?”

“Yes,” Reginald muttered, his eyes darting to the left table. “I don’t know what you want from me. I just do what I am told. The doctors say take whatever bodies come in. It does not matter where they are from.”

“It does to their people,” I said as mildly as I could. I glanced at the patently female figure beneath the stained cloth, struggling for a moment to contain my fury. I would write to her family as I had vowed, but could I tell them what had truly happened to their daughter and sister? How she had died and what was about to happen to her body in this terrible place? Surely it would just compound their grief and add the ongoing misery of imagined torture and lonely death. A decision to face when I had pen and paper.

I resolutely turned back a page of the ledger. It detailed the bodies and dissections from the previous week. Another page, another week. Rather like the hideous wager book…which presented a rather interesting idea. “How far back do these ledgers go, Reginald?”

He glanced at the shelf of ledgers beside us. “Fifty years or so.”

I looked across at Evan, eyebrows raised.

He nodded: Interesting.

With menacing grace he levered himself away from the door and walked over to the shelves, running his finger along the spines of the bound ledgers. “Here we are, 1792.”

“I wasn’t here then,” Reginald said quickly.

“We rather gathered that,” Evan said dryly. He started to flip through the pages.