How her head aches. It’s hard to think straight. She can’t believe she’s even considering putting her faith in this stranger, rather than her own sister, but she finds herself asking, ‘Your brother-in-law would really do the operation for no money? Just for one séance?’

Agnes removes her arm from Pearl’s shoulders and sits back on her haunches. It looks like it hurts her to kneel down. ‘Perhaps more than one; it all depends on our success. The truth is, I am trying to contact several of my clients. They are … well, I suppose I do not need to mince words with a brave girl like you. They have been killed, Pearl. First Mr Boyle and then the sailor Hargreaves, drowned in the Avon. Last was poor Ned, whose body they found frozen in the snow.’

Mr Boyle. Wasn’t that the very first spirit Pearl reached out to? And what did Agnes say, about the last man? Frozen after her shivers.

‘I need to contact their sad murdered spirits,’ Agnes continues to explain. ‘Oh Pearl, I must. How else can I find the vile wretch who hurt them and put a stop to his crimes?’ She presses one of Pearl’s hands. Her touch is dry. ‘And consider, my dear. Why would Providence bestow such a gift upon you unless it was to help your fellow men? Catching a killer, saving lives – why, I am sure that is the noblest action anyone can perform!’

They’re her own words. Better words, obviously, but they mean the same thing. This is the argument Pearl had with Myrtle. She could use her power to stop the killer.

Everything’s spinning. There’s too much to think about, too much to hold in her head, so she grips on tight to Agnes’s hand.

She wanted to hunt the murderer with Mother, but since she hasn’t appeared … Mightn’t this nice lady do just as well for the time being?

‘I saw water,’ she gabbles. ‘Before the drowned man. Then I was cold. Perishing with cold. Did they really find someone all frozen?’

Agnes nods, mouth slightly ajar.

So she was right. She was right, and Myrtle was wrong. Thank God she’s holding on to Agnes. If she weren’t, the force of that would sweep her away.

‘Do you … feel anything now?’ Agnes probes.

Nothing she can put into language: just pain.

Pain, Pearl believes, should have its own vocabulary, because no one else seems to feel it like she does. Up until now her experience of pain has been mainly bodily hurt: her continual exhaustion and the sense that all her bones are on fire. But now she feels … shattered. Like her mind is cracking apart into jagged fragments.

If Myrtle was wrong …

Myrtle.

Oh, hell.