My own last rites, he’d told Riley one winter’s night as they looked out on Leicester Square from their booth in an Italian restaurant. The magician had polished off his second jug of bitter red wine and his gentleman’s accent had started to slide off his words like fish from a wet slab.

Every man Jack of us crawled forth from the filth and dust, and unto that stuff we shall return, mark you. I just send ’em back quicker. A few heartbeats early so that we may enjoy life’s comforts. That is the way of our situation and if you have no steel in you for it, Riley, then...

Garrick never completed his threat, but it was clear that the time had come for Riley to earn his place at the table.

Riley felt the cracks between each board through the thin soles of his shoes that had been painstakingly shaved down on the lathe in Garrick’s workshop. He could now see the mark in the bed. An old man with a thatch of grey hair jutting out from under a puff quilt.

I can’t see his face. He was grateful for that much.

Riley approached the bed, feeling Garrick behind him, knowing his time was running out.

Unto dust. Dispatched to dust.

Riley saw the old man’s hand resting on the pillow, the index finger a mere nub due to some old injury, and he knew that he could not do it. He was no murderer.

Riley cast his eyes about while keeping his head still. He had been taught to use his surroundings in times of emergency, but his mentor was behind him, observing Riley’s every move with his eerie, non-blinking intensity. There would be no help from the old man in the bed. What could a grey-hair possibly do against Garrick? What could anyone do?

Four times Riley had run away and four times Garrick had found him.

Death is the only way out for me, Riley had thought. Mine or Garrick’s.

But Garrick could not be killed, for he was death.

Unto dust.

Riley felt suddenly faint and thought he would sink to the cold floor. Perhaps that would be for the best? Lie senseless and let Garrick do his bloody work, but then the old man would die too and that knowledge would weigh on Riley’s soul in the afterlife.

I will fight, decided the boy. He had little hope of survival, but he had to do something.

Plan after plan flitted through his fevered brain, each one more hopeless than the next. All the time, he moved onwards, feeling the frost of Garrick on his neck like a bad omen. The man on the four-poster grew clearer. He could see an ear now, with holes where a row of rings must have once pierced.

A foreigner perhaps? A sailor?