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things into the bag, something heavy slipped from the folds of material and thunked onto the soft rug between his knees. He reached down and picked it up, turning it
over and over with his bloody fingers. He thumbed a clasp on one side that opened the item and saw within an image that took him several moments to register.
    An image that was going to allow him to ask for ten times the gentleman’s fee!
    A photograph. This woman, a baby and a man. A very important man with a face he vaguely recognised. Bill felt the first prickle of concern on his scalp. The gentleman who’d approached him
for this job was doing it on behalf of this man – an important man? – in the photograph.
    There’s more to this than just one randy gent cleaning up his own mess.
    To his mind it meant one of two things: opportunity – or danger.
    Or perhaps a bit of both.

CHAPTER 4

    12th September 1888, Whitechapel, London
    M ary’s fingers explored the dark folds of the man’s leather bag. It was like a cross between a sailor’s duffle bag and a school
satchel; an odd bag for a gentleman to be carrying around with him. It looked old, the leather well-worn.
    Outside in the passageway beyond the door to her rented room, she heard the clumping of heavy feet and the muted giggle of a woman. The tenants from upstairs returning from a night’s
drinking. She glanced at the net curtains that hung down in front of her small grimy window. The first pallid grey stripes of dawn were leaking into her room. She reached over and turned out the
wick of her lamp to save on the oil. In the grey gloom of dawn, she picked the satchel up and took it over to the stool by the window.
    Outside in the street, through the broken panel of her window, she heard the clack of boots: men off to work.
    The backstreet reminded her of home. Llangyndeyrn. The rows of terraced houses and cobbled roads. The threads of smoke from breakfast hearths from a thousand chimney pots rising to a horizon of
craggy peaks. Mary smiled wistfully at how far she’d risen and fallen in five short years.
    Eighteen when she left Saint Mary’s convent with ideas in her head far too big for a modest Welsh valley town. No, it was London she wanted. Her parents, long used to dealing with
their stubborn, wilful daughter, could only plead tearfully that she be awful careful and write often as they emptied every last jar of coins they had into her travel bag.
    Eighteen she’d been, travelling alone to London. She remembered that day so well: grinning with excitement with her bag clutched in her hands, staring out of the window as the train pulled
through the suburbs west of London. She saw the tall spires of factory chimney stacks, cranes on the horizon and workmen-like ants crawling along the rafters and scaffold of tall new buildings. She
felt the magnetic pull of the beating heart of the capital. The pull of the most powerful city of the British Empire. The very centre of the civilised world.
    What a place to be. What a place for someone like her: young, energetic, with big ideas. Oh, she had plans, didn’t she? Naïve plans, looking back now. But back then, to that grinning
eighteen-year-old, they’d been plans that were perfectly plausible. She was going to offer her services as a piano teacher. She was going to knock on the doors of the richest houses in London
and present herself confidently and proudly. And soon after establishing herself as a tutor, she was going to find herself teaching some adorable young bachelor, with a bobbing Adam’s apple
and a dry tongue who was going to fall head over heels in love with her coy smile and her gentle, playful teasing.
    Marriage would follow soon after that, of course, and her young husband was going to support her setting up a music school, which, naturally, she was going to run. Their home would become a
place to entertain musicians, composers, poets, writers, painters, even actors. The more sophisticated dailies would be filled with