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the candle closer – no, a tattoo. It had a definite shape, a letter perhaps. If so, it was one Ezra couldn’t decipher. Possibly Arabic, he thought. Maybe a sea captain, an independent trader?
    Ezra fetched a bucket of water to wash the body down carefully, the way, he told himself, he would like to be washed if he and the cadaver happened to swap places.
    There were no more clues, save a lighter band on several fingers where there must have been rings. He turned the body over, and he could see the wound went all the way through to the back. The candle fizzed and guttered, and the room went dark. Ezra sighed. There was a stub on the shelf by the door, so he lit that and propped the cadaver on its side. Now he could see that the bullet wound on the back must be the entry wound. Of course! The flesh pushed in, the skin forced downward…
    Ezra laid the body on its back again. The wound on the front was where the shot had left the body; when he looked closer he could make out tiny fragments of white bone among the pulverized flesh. This could not be a duel. This man had been shot running away. One shot from close distance – there were no other wounds. Whoever shot this man had either been close or had a good aim. Ezra thought how much more information he could have gleaned if he’d been able to see the man’s clothes.
    The body’s mouth had fallen open as he rolled it over, and he was about to close it when he realized something. Or rather, a lack of something. In death the tongue sometimes swelled, he often had to tuck it in. But this time there was no tongue. He looked again. This man, when he had been a man and not a cadaver, had had his tongue cut out, and the wound had healed completely. It had been cut out many years ago.
    Here was a puzzle, Ezra thought. How could a man run a ship, give orders, buy and sell, without a tongue? It was possible; Ezra had seen folk with no speech talk with their hands. The tattoo pointed to the cadaver being a foreigner, but even that was not certain. Whoever he had been, Ezra reckoned, a man like this would be missed. He would have to tell Mr McAdam. The decision would be the master’s.
    Suddenly there was a three-beat knock on the yard door that set the glass roof rattling, as if the rain had turned from water to rock. Ezra, deep in thought only a moment before, nearly jumped out of his skin and almost dropped the candle.
    It was Mr Allen, and he was alone, which was odd. It usually took two of them to bring the thing in off the pony cart. But Allen already had a sack hefted over his shoulder.
    “Tell Mr McAdam it’ll be the usual plus a half, will you, lad.”
    Ezra nodded.
    The sack was small. It must be a child.
    Ezra sighed. He would have to harden his heart some more.

Chapter Two
    Mr William McAdam’s Anatomy School and Museum of Curiosities

Great Windmill Street

Soho

London

November 1792
    I t was still dark when Ezra woke. He could hear the city waking up down below in the street, the iron-wheeled carts trundling towards Piccadilly or the Haymarket, Mrs Perino’s chickens cackling across the street. The church bells of St Anne’s called the hour and were answered by those at St James’s and, in a duller echo, by St Martin-in-the-Fields’. Ezra dressed quickly; there was much to do and he wanted to get a letter to Anna before Mr McAdam’s students turned up for the lecture.
    He dashed off the note by candlelight at his writing desk under the window. He told Anna that he could see her at lunchtime; they could meet in the porch at St Anne’s if it was very cold. He sealed it with a bit of wax and pulled on his jacket as he made his way downstairs. Then he was out of the back door, past Mrs Boscaven arguing with the milkmaid, and back to Lisle Street. The whole city was sparkling with frost, everything glittered and shone and Ezra had to watch his step, as the cobbles and the new stone paving sets were treacherous.
    The newspaper boys were shouting about wars in