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of the acrobats cursing and thrashing about her caravan in a blind rage. Earlier that day, the acrobat had discovered her lover rutting with another of the girls from the troupe. When confronted, he had simply laughed and carried on.
    The girl begged her to help, and together they plotted vengeance through the night. The next day, the acrobat woke to find her lover’s heart on the pillow beside her. The girl never spoke a word about it to anyone.
    The Executioner—a name she had embraced by this time—fled to evade discovery. But still she felt no sense of triumph, of fulfilment. There was nothing but a void in her soul, a deep sense of emptiness at the core of her being.
    She had not sought this strange, nomadic existence, but it found her regardless, drawing her in—out of necessity, perhaps, and as a result of her dispassion. She had fallen into this life because she didn’t care enough not to, and because, in some ways, she was still searching, still hoping to find that glimmer of a reaction in the empty space where her own heart had been.
    She held her breath as the door opened. Her next victim had arrived.

 
    CHAPTER
    5
     
    Sometimes, Veronica caught herself wondering why it was that the majority of her encounters with Sir Charles Bainbridge involved a visit to the morgue.
    Was it that she was simply a glutton for punishment? After all, she might simply choose to abstain from such distasteful pursuits and receive a report detailing all of the necessary findings later. Did she really need to force herself to attend these trips to that detestable place, with its thick stench of blood and carbolic and its grisly occupants, most of whom had died violent or miserable deaths, their remains mangled by weapons or disease?
    Of course, both Newbury and Charles would have accepted her choice to stay away without comment. She was, after all, a woman , and the morgue was certainly no place for one of those . Indeed, she knew that both of them, while perhaps more accepting of her independence than many other men might have been, felt a need to protect her from the more gruesome elements of their shared profession. And that, she concluded, was precisely the reason that she did force herself to go through with it, despite the fact that it turned her stomach and left her feeling quite unwell.
    The current situation was a case in point. There were three corpses in the chamber, each of them laid out on wooden trestles. The attendants hadn’t bothered to cover them with the thin cotton sheets they often used to preserve the dignity of the dead. The bodies had simply been wheeled out and dumped on the trestles like unwanted animal carcasses in a butcher’s shop, spoiled and riddled with decay.
    Veronica couldn’t stop staring at them. She wanted to look away—to focus on anything except the grotesque cadavers—but she felt strangely compelled to look on regardless, unable to tear her eyes away. She supposed it was a form of macabre fascination, a reminder of one’s own tenuous grip on life. She’d come close to ending up like that herself on more than one occasion. She wondered who might have gathered around her butchered corpse to poke and prod at it in an attempt to tease information from its lifeless lips. Who might yet…?
    The nearest of the corpses, a man who had been in his mid-twenties from the look of him, had a terrible fixed grin on his face. Veronica couldn’t help feeling he was laughing at her. It was as if—even dead—he knew some secret that she did not, and was lording it over her from beyond the grave, amused that she was so appalled to find herself in the presence of his battered, bloody corpse. She wondered what he’d been thinking when he died, and whether the bodies of the dead ever did retain the memories of the people who had once inhabited them. The thought gave her a chill.
    Memories or not, a corpse could nevertheless tell a story. She’d seen Newbury examine them before, and was always amazed