The death of a child is not a particularly rare event. Everyone knows that many tiny souls depart from this world before their fifth birthday, especially down in the slums. But it feels as if time should stop, or that at least the city should go about its business with more gentleness and decorum.

Nobody can quantify what has been lost. Pearl might have influenced many lives as she grew into womanhood, and now they will never know. Generations of possible children and grandchildren all perished with her last breath. There is nothing more tragic to Agnes’s mind than the future that never was.

And where is Pearl now? Not in there, on a slab. She did not have the faith of a Christian, so Heaven is doubtful too. After the child’s sufferings, it would be terrible to think of her wandering the earth, as lost as one of the spirits she so feared.

All Agnes can picture are those dark hands, reaching out.

I see her, Pearl had said. She looked happy. Agnes would like to believe it was the girl’s deceased mother, come to claim her and take her home at last. But to her eyes, the figure had resembled someone else. Someone she last saw in the Dead Room.

A shouted curse shatters her torpor. The bell over the street door jangles wildly, and a chair crashes to the floor. Agnes looks up to see three policemen grappling with a young woman. She is all teeth and hair. Although her wrists have been shackled, she has not given up her attempts to escape. She jerks, feints, tries to bite.

‘Steady,’ one policeman warns the other.

A fourth officer comes forward with a leather truncheon. Clearly he has no compunction about striking a female. He cracks her hard on the shoulder; her head flies back, parting the curtain of her loose hair.

The face beneath belongs to Miss West.

‘It weren’t my knife,’ she spits, ‘I never—’ But the truncheon swings again, and she is hustled into a side room out of view.

Agnes blinks. Were it not for the clergyman’s pursed lips, she would doubt the scene had actually taken place.

What can Miss West stand accused of?

Of course Simon went to the police when he finally arrived and found Agnes with the lifeless body of Pearl. No doubt he told them where to find the child’s next of kin. But she did not expect them to fetch Miss West to the station bound.

She said something about a knife. Agnes remembers the smear of blood she spotted on Pearl’s cheek. She assumed that had rubbed off from her father’s jaw as he lay dying, but perhaps not. Just what horrors was the girl fleeing from?

After another half hour of dismal uncertainty, a door opens at the opposite end of the corridor to the one Miss West was spirited down. The clergyman stands up.