She turns through alleys plastered with handbills for coach builders, boarding houses, and a lamp depot. Pasted fresh over the last is Ned – or Edward Lewis, as the police appeal for information calls him. There is a lifelike drawing of his face, clearly copied from a photograph. It seems the picture he had taken for his grandmother came in useful in the end.

Agnes averts her eyes from the poster with a fresh spurt of horror. If it were Cedric, in his place …

She has no good likeness of her nephew, nothing beyond a silhouette. She has always resisted daguerreotypes, but now she sees why a relative might pay good money for such a clear record. It is insurance against a failing memory. For if Cedric’s face were not before her every day, she would lose not only his precious features, but those of someone else dear to her heart.

She would lose sight of the resemblance to his father, Montague.

It is mainly uphill to Alfred Street. Her lungs heave for breath. Simon has established himself in a good location, close to the Circus and the Assembly Rooms, where his rich patients recline on chaises longues and sip languidly at the Bath waters. She stumbles up to the black iron railings that surround his house, pausing to blot her brow with a handkerchief and pinch her cheeks so she looks less like a person on the verge of collapse.

The more reasonable and collected she appears, the greater chance she has of persuading Simon.

She knocks. The charwoman answers the door – or, rather, sees Agnes and shuffles away again, uninterested by such a regular visitor. Perhaps she was hoping for a gory injury to brighten her day.

Agnes wipes her feet, takes off her bonnet and gloves and lays them on the console table beside the door. This house always smells of herbs and carbolic soap. Impersonal, sanitised. The silhouettes of the dead Carfax children that line the staircase are the only decorative touch. It is the home of a man without substance, lacking flesh and blood.

Simon could surely afford to hire one or two live-in servants, but he seems to prefer his isolation. The charwoman, Mrs Muckle, comes in for a few hours each day to tackle the worst of the drudgery – everything else, he does himself.

She recalls what Cedric said about Simon’s time in Edinburgh. Maybe it was digging up bodies and anatomising them that changed poor Simon from the eager, ambitious young man that he once was. She always assumed it was his marriage. That was certainly when he started to lose his hair.