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The officers nodded and immediately raced down the road, barking orders. One headed towards the Hall, the other to the blood trail. Cartwright marched over to inspect the body with the third officer. Peter gave me a nod, clapped me on the back and returned indoors. Just like that, I’d gone from being the chief suspect covered in blood to a free man, and all in less time than it took to soft-boil Miss Decima’s morning egg.

Miss Decima. She was still in the meeting; it had been hours since I last saw her. I ran to the end of the road in the hope that I could get back inside the Hall and find her, but when I got there the police were already blocking every entrance. Women were being ousted from the doors, demanding explanations from the officers.

‘Ah, Stephen.’

I spun around. Miss Decima was being pushed towards me by a haunted-looking steward. He handed me the chair and then practically fell over himself to get away.

‘I’ve been searching for you for the last hour,’ she said, glancing down at my blood-soaked trousers. ‘But I can see that you’ve been busy. Perhaps you can enlighten me as to what is going on?’

I nodded shakily. ‘A police officer had his throat slashed outside our front door, Miss Decima.’

‘Goodness. I take it that’s why the meeting is being shut down?’

Through the glass doors, I could see women being dragged out of the auditorium and shoved to the exits. One fell back through the doors, landing hard on the pavement. The crowd of protesters bellowed with outrage, pushing back against the police.

‘The police think the suffragettes did it,’ I explained. ‘The officer was chasing three of them down our road just before he was found dead.’

‘I see.’

‘There was a suffragette ribbon stuffed into his throat, too.’

‘My, my. You didn’t chance to see any of it happen, did you?’

I swallowed. ‘I’m more or less the sole witness, Miss Decima.’

‘Yes, I had a feeling that you might be.’

An officer swung his truncheon at a woman blocking the doorway and missed, shattering the glass. In the confusion, another officer grabbed the woman by the arm and twisted it behind her, making her scream. Two women tried to pull her free; an officer ran forwards and hit one with his truncheon, and she fell to the ground with her arms over her face. The crowd roared with anger and surged forwards. The police beat them back; they surged forwards again. I watched in silent horror as the Coronation Procession – the costumes, the celebration, the promise of the day – fell apart in front of me.

‘Miss Decima,’ I whispered, ‘this is terrible.’

She gazed at the chaos ahead, her face betraying nothing.

‘Sadly, Stephen,’ she said, ‘I think we can assume that things are about to get much worse.’

10

The riot lasted for two and a half hours.

Police searched the Royal Albert Hall from top to bottom, but there was no sign of Mrs Pankhurst. Someone had warned her about the arrest moments before the police arrived, and she’d slipped out the back of the building. The WSPU headquarters in the Strand were raided, along with her flat, but she was nowhere to be found. The leader of the Women’s Social and Political Union – the most loved and feared and hated woman in all of England – had gone into hiding.

A city-wide manhunt began for the fugitive suffragettes, starting at the apartments which lined the Gore, and then on to every building within a half-mile. One of their own had been slaughtered, and the police spent the night pacing the streets of Kensington, searching for the three women. The alert was sent to every station in the city, from Westminster to Lambeth to Epping and beyond … but it was already too late. Not one person had seen the women; not a trace of them was to be found. It was quite simply as if they had vanished into the night, fading into the darkness that filled the nation’s capital from street to street.

And far across the shadow city, the next stage of the plan was coming together.

SUNDAY, 18 JUNE 1911

11

Sunday, 18 June, 6.01 a.m.

I’d had longer nights. But, to be fair, they weren’t far off this one.

The police forced me and Miss Decima back to the apartment once the riot got worse. But the noise lasted for hours, and, even when it finally ended, I still couldn’t sleep. It was all right, so long as I didn’t close my eyes. The moment I did, the dead policeman’s face was right there in front of me, frozen on my eyelids like a shadowgraph. His pale skin, his gaping throat … I guess part of me should have been relieved that I wasn’t used to seeing dead people. Instead, I stayed up into the early hours, trying to scrub the blood from my livery with saleratus until the fabric was worn right through and my hands were red raw.

By the time my alarm clock went off, I was frankly relieved. I threw open the curtains and polished Nan’s photo-frame like a man possessed. Work. That’s what you need to drive away the shadows when your thoughts are darkest: I’d learnt that doing two years in Borstal. I spent a whole hour dusting the parlour – especially the pelmets, which were my favourite bits – but it was no use. No amount of housework could hide the truth. A man had been brutally killed – slaughtered, even – right outside our own front door. I’d spent the whole night listening to women being attacked by police officers. How could anything feel ordinary, after that?

The doorbell buzzed, jolting me – we weren’t expecting anyone, least of all so early on a Sunday. I opened the door and saw a boy, maybe fourteen years old, blinking up at me. He had snot in his moustache.