She does not want to see any more.

It is only as she reaches to close the lid that she catches sight of a familiar face; or not precisely a face, but its outline, empty inside.

The monochrome shape she recognises as her own art.

Pushing rusty nails aside, she closes her fingers around the edge of the shade and pulls it out.

Ice pricks her skin.

The black foolscap has peeled a little at the corners. The white stock card is scuffed and tiny spatters of a dark liquid mark the chin. None of that matters. She would know this piece anywhere, even without her name emblazoned in the corner.

It is the hollow-cut of Ned.

CHAPTER 39

At dawn, Agnes unlocks the street door and takes down the iron bar. She puts Morpheus in the kitchen, sets out the remains of the ham beside his bowl and shuts him in the room.

Next, she returns to Simon’s consulting room and sweeps everything off the desk. It makes a satisfying crash. In place of the lamp, the inkpots, the pens and Simon’s various paperwork, she lays out four items: the two letters from Tobias Dudfield, Ned’s silhouette and the pair of surgical scissors.

She waits.

There are a thousand conundrums that could be teasing her mind right now, but she finds herself oddly focused. All she thinks about is Pearl.

That little girl was kind of heart, and bright, in her way, but she was kept back; a seed never permitted to rise above the soil. Everything Pearl thought that she knew, her sister had told her, and she believed it. She believed it without question.

The clunk of the street door opening seems to fall right through her. Simon’s voice calls out: ‘Good news, at last! They are both safe. A healthy girl, named for the Queen.’

Morpheus’s paws scrabble in the kitchen, but there is no other reply.

‘Miss Darken?’ A note of alarm. She hears his footsteps clipping across tiles. ‘Agnes, are you there?’

He pounds up the stairs, throws doors open. By the time he returns to the ground floor and bursts into the consulting room, he looks half wild.

His face is drained of colour and shiny, like wax. The clothes he has worn since yesterday morning are crumpled, sweat-stained and smell faintly sour. In his arms he clutches an incongruous gift: a set of travelling paintbrushes and watercolours.

Prominent in the tired death mask of his countenance are his blue eyes. They knock from one object on the desk to another, settling on Ned’s silhouette.

He does not move.

‘Miss West did not kill my clients,’ Agnes announces.

‘No.’

She expected at least some denial. ‘But you are going to let her hang for it. A crime she did not commit.’

He closes his eyes, takes a breath. ‘I would gladly have put myself forward to die for the real culprit.’

And then he starts to cry.