With a burst of relief, she finally stumbled across it – a relatively plain marble headstone bearing the inscription:

In Loving Memory of Nelly Power who departed this life January 20th 1887 aged 32 years

followed by a short religious epitaph.

She looked around her. There was no one else here… yet. Glancing at her watch she saw that it was six fifty-eight. Two minutes to go. Two minutes until—

She froze.

The unmistakeable sound of footsteps. A soft rhythmic crunching growing ever closer.

Then, out of the mist ahead, the outline of a figure began to coalesce.

Bailey’s breathing quickened and her heart rate increased. She peered desperately into the fog, and as the person became clearer, she started to make out the distinctive profile of a fedora hat.

‘Mister Snigiss?’ she whispered.

58

Stephen squeezed the trigger on the lock-pick gun. Once. Twice. Three times. Sufficient to automatically align the pins inside the tumbler of the door lock. Twisting on the small torque wrench that he’d also inserted, the door clicked open smoothly and he slipped quietly into Grecken’s apartment.

Standing there in the hallway, he took a moment to savour the thrill of successfully breaking and entering into a stranger’s residence. It brought back that old buzz from his teenage years when burglary had been his primary occupation, his small stature suited perfectly for wriggling in and out of difficult places. That had been before he’d moved up in the world. Before he’d met Nancy Molloy.

He inhaled deeply. He liked to breathe in the smell of whatever place he broke into, as if by imbibing it he somehow made the ground his own, albeit temporarily. He wrinkled his nose. This place smelt… weird. The strong aroma of air freshener didn’t completely succeed in masking a distinctly foetid odour emanating from somewhere in the apartment.

He immediately started to analyse his surroundings, his mind rapidly breaking down and categorising everything he saw. Whenever he broke into someone’s house, he found it best to operate on the assumption that they could return at any minute, so it was his habit to move as fast as possible.

The apartment was spacious, with high ceilings and at least six rooms by the looks of it. The polished wooden floor was covered with expensive Persian rugs and the white walls were decorated with numerous framed photographs of snakes, mostly artful close-ups of cobras in various poses. It was immediately obvious that Grecken was into snakes in a big way.

Stephen moved down the hallway, treading softly with the stealth and grace of a cat. His intention was to methodically go from room to room until he found what he was looking for. He didn’t know exactly what that was, but he’d know when he found it.

The kitchen lay immediately to his right, but he decided to leave that until last. Instead he headed down the hallway and turned into the first room off to the left.

Immediately he recoiled in disgust. On all sides, he was confronted with racks of glass cages full of snakes. The foetid odour was particularly strong in here and Stephen realised that it must be coming from the snakes. Up until now he hadn’t known that snakes smelt of anything, but now that he did, it only increased his dislike of the creatures. He’d never liked them very much in the first place – the way they slithered and hissed, and it just seemed wrong to him that they had no limbs.