She rose from the table and snatched her bonnet and reticule from the chair by the door. If she left now she might be able to get away without having to explain why she was leaving so early. Perhaps it was something that Spears had said the day before, but Kate had been feeling uneasy ever since. He was not the most cheerful person to have around, but yesterday he had been positively gloomy, and he had gone round muttering about the possibility of a police raid on the premises. Kate had never ventured further than the meeting room upstairs, but she thought it was used too infrequently to attract any interest from the constabulary.

She left the house without being seen and hailed a passing cab to take her to Whitechapel. It was still early but the sun beat down mercilessly from a cloudless sky and the odour from the sewers grew worse as the cab headed towards the river. Flies clustered on mounds of horse dung, and the horse pulling the cab flicked its tail and tossed its mane as the tiny tormentors buzzed around its head. Kate held a silver vinaigrette beneath her nose, but the pungent smell of the aromatic vinegar could not quite eliminate the city stench.

She alighted outside the soup kitchen and paid the cabby, but even before she tried the door she sensed that there was something wrong. A mere touch of her fingers on the handle made the door swing open, and she felt a shiver of anxiety run down her spine.

‘Spears?’ Kate stepped inside. Her voice came back to her in an eerie echo. ‘Spears, are you there?’ She walked slowly to the foot of the stairs where the interior door hung from a single hinge, and the lock was broken. ‘Spears?’

Once again his name came back as if to mock her. She had a vision of him lying on the floor in the meeting place upstairs, battered and bruised after a confrontation with Monks’ gang. Her footsteps reverberated on the bare treads as she ascended the stairs, but the room above was empty apart from the folded trestle tables and the neatly stacked chairs. It took all her courage to explore the rest of the first floor, but there was nothing unremarkable. The second- and third-floor rooms were all dusty and sparsely furnished, but when she reached the attic rooms at the top of the premises she was reassured by their emptiness. There had been signs of a scuffle in the room where Spears slept, but it could be that he was extremely untidy, and maybe he always threw his clothes on the floor. Whatever had occurred during the hours of darkness, there was no one here now to bear witness.