On either side of Farringdon Street, imposing concrete-and-glass buildings rose high into the sky; as I’d feared, most of the area around Bear Alley looked to be taken up by mega corporations, and it seemed unlikely that anything existing two hundred years ago would remain today. With my destination only half a block ahead, I resigned myself to the fact that Bear Alley might be little more than a driveway.

At last, I came upon a small white-and-black placard marking an alleyway hidden between high-rise buildings: Bear Alley, EC4. The alley did indeed appear to be a service route for delivery trucks. Overfilled garbage cans cluttered one side of the alley while a mess of cigarette butts and fast-food containers littered the blackened pavement. Disappointment settled heavy on my chest; though I didn’t expect a sign reading Apothecary Killer Was Here, I’d hoped there would be a bit more intrigue than this.

As I walked deeper into the alley, the street noise fading quickly behind me, I realized that behind the street-front concrete-and-steel buildings were older brick structures. Ahead of me, the alley stretched on for a couple hundred meters. I scanned the area to see a man leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette and checking his phone—but other than him, the lane was empty. Despite this, I felt no fear; my adrenaline was high in anticipation of James’s arrival.

I walked slowly between the brick buildings, searching for anything interesting as I made my way to the end of the alley, but I only found more trash. I asked myself what I was searching for. It wasn’t as though I needed proof that the vial, or the unnamed apothecary, had a connection to this alley. After all, I wasn’t even convinced she existed; the hospital note could have been written by a deranged, hallucinating woman in the hours before her death.

But the possibility of the apothecary’s existence, the mystery of it, drew me deeper. The youthful, adventurous Caroline had begun to come alive again. I thought of my unused history degree, my diploma shoved away in a desk drawer. As a student, I’d been fascinated by the lives of ordinary people, those whose names weren’t acknowledged and recorded in textbooks. And now, I’d stumbled on the mystery of one of those nameless, forgotten people—and a woman, no less.

If I was honest with myself, this adventure drew me in for another reason: I sought distraction from the message sitting in my inbox. Like the final day of a vacation, I longed for something, anything, to delay the inevitable confrontation to come. Placing my hand over my belly, I sighed. I also sought a distraction from the fact that my period still hadn’t shown.