The weight finally reached her, for the sake of their child. A child in whom she was seeing Quill’s face. She had to make herself not cry. She stopped dressing her, she had to tell her first. There would be no nursery today. There would just be the two of them.

She didn’t want to scare her. She took Jessica’s hands and looked into her face, forcing herself to smile. ‘No,’ she said, and found that she was going to tell the same lie that so many children had been told. Because she was such a coward. Because she didn’t want to hurt her with something she would herself have to take on first. ‘Daddy’s gone … on a long journey.’

THE PREVIOUS NIGHT

Gaiman heaved Quill’s corpse up against the parapet on the side of Westminster Bridge. Around him, the night-time traffic was absolutely still, as if in freeze frame. There was no sound except his own breathing and the scraping of the dead body being moved across the stones. Had whatever was doing this brought time around him to a halt, or was he moving very fast? He looked down the river; without movement it looked as unreal as a movie backdrop, the lights somehow no longer alive.

He looked back to Quill, and put out of his head, as he had so many times, the knowledge that this man had a family. They would suffer for a while, but everything would end the same way for everyone. That was the excuse he allowed himself. That justification had let him do all this. He had found Quill, he had anonymously texted the person who controlled the Ripper, telling them where his victim was going to be. He was doing this for the greater good. But that was what everyone who did terrible things told themselves. To take comfort in that would be wrong. Instead, he accepted his guilt. He was an accessory to murder.

He took everything out of Quill’s pockets and found the detective’s notebook. He had to follow specific instructions in disposing of that.

He took a last look into the man’s empty face, to make sure he wasn’t sparing himself anything. He grabbed Quill by the legs, heaved him up the parapet like a sack and used his shoulders to push him over. The body fell into the river. He watched it hit the water and could still see it for a moment as the current carried it away. Then it went under and was gone.