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Come ten o’clock the next morning, Miss Decima still hadn’t said a single word to me, and I was starting to get concerned. I couldn’t think of the last time we’d had a morning that didn’t involve her shouting like she was on fire. Then all of a sudden she shoved her teeth back in, grabbed her stick and demanded that I take her to the park that very instant. Within ten minutes we were strolling through Kensington Gardens, and I finally had the confidence to broach the question. ‘Miss Decima, why –’

‘Not yet,’ she muttered out of the corner of her mouth. ‘We’re being watched.’

She nodded ahead. I followed her gaze, and saw two policemen on the steps of the Albert Memorial. They were standing at the spot where Peter had told me his secret, just two days before. I kept walking, steering as wide of them as I could while trying to hide the fact that my heart was now going like the absolute clappers.

‘Very good,’ Miss Decima whispered. ‘Don’t draw any attention to yourself. Circle the park, keep to the visible footpaths and don’t go near any horses.’

I sighed. ‘This thing with you and horses …’

‘Finally!’ she said, as we turned a corner and the officers disappeared from view. ‘We may talk at our leisure. I thought it best to wait until we could be absolutely certain of privacy.’

I blinked. ‘Kensington Gardens isn’t exactly private, Miss Decima. Surely your apartment’s better?’

I could almost hear her eyes rolling. ‘Use your brain, Stephen. Yesterday morning, I instructed you to question Peter: mere hours later, he was found dead. What is more, the expression on his face indicated that he died in absolute agony. A fit young man his age … there’s only one explanation for that. Poison. Someone knew about our plans and murdered Peter before you got the chance to talk to him. I believe that there is a high chance that our apartment has been compromised by … what was it that Mr Gussett called them? Detectiphones?’

I turned rigid with horror. ‘You’re not serious.’

‘I am always serious,’ she replied curtly. ‘The place could be riddled with them. For all we know, someone may have been listening in on our discussions for weeks.’

I winced. I’d been singing ‘I’m ’enery the Eighth, I Am’ in the bath just the other day. I was about to ask who on earth would be able to do such a thing, and who would even want to, when I put the pieces together. ‘Chief Constable Cartwright,’ I whispered.

She nodded grimly. ‘His apartment is separated from ours by a single wall, Stephen. The possibility that he killed Peter as a result of our conversation yesterday morning – however outlandish it may seem – cannot be overruled.’

My fear was suddenly replaced by rage. The thought of someone sneaking into the apartment and planting listening devices behind the picture frames that I’d just spent hours dusting fair made my blood boil. ‘I’ll go through every room the second we get back. If I find any one of those Detectiphones –’

‘You will do no such thing,’ Miss Decima snapped. ‘We shall carry on just as were. If Cartwright is spying on us, we must give him no indication that we know. Keep your enemies close, remember?’ She let out a long, deep sigh. ‘Safe to say that this changes our investigation considerably. If Cartwright is indeed responsible for Peter’s death, we can no longer reject the possibility that these murders really do form part of a wider police conspiracy.’

I swallowed. ‘You said that conspiracies were ghost stories.’

‘I did, Stephen. And yet we find ourselves in a situation so strange, so uncanny, that it resembles nothing less than a tale of the supernatural. Poison, vanishing women, eyes in the gutter …’ She shook her head. ‘Perhaps I was wrong to doubt Mrs Pankhurst’s suggestion. Perhaps we really are dealing with a network of corruption so dark, so deep, that it defies all common rationality.’

It came prickling all over me like a fever. Suddenly, every single person in the park – every passer-by, every workman, every child – was a potential killer, listening in to every word that we said. I felt like some sorry creature caught in a snare, watching the hunter slowly close in. ‘Let’s go home, Miss Decima.’

‘That’s the very last place we should go. Stop here, please.’

I looked around. We were in the most overgrown section of Kensington Gardens: the heathland that separated it from Hyde Park. I felt certain, absolutely certain now, that someone was watching us. ‘We shouldn’t be here, Miss Decima. Let’s go back to the main road before –’

The shadow came out of the bushes faster than I’d expected. I attempted to stifle a scream and failed, gripping a tree trunk to stop myself from falling backwards.

‘Wow,’ said a familiar voice.

I looked up, heart racing. The lurker in the bushes was none other than Temperance.

‘Please accept my apologies for the late arrival, my dear,’ said Miss Decima. ‘Stephen took an absolute age getting us here. Though it appears that he’s capable of great speeds when fleeing for his own life.’

I pushed myself upright. ‘I tripped! I’m allowed to trip, aren’t I?’

Temperance handed Miss Decima a paper folder. ‘Here – the police file on Crace, like you asked for.’

‘Magnificent work, as always,’ said Miss Decima. ‘Sadly, my dear, I am already in further need of you. Circumstances have somewhat conspired against us.’

Temperance nodded. ‘The dead servant on your road last night? I heard all about that.’

I swallowed. The dead servant. That was all Peter was now. We had suspected him – at one point, even I had thought he was the killer. But he’d been good to me, all along – he had been trying to protect me from something. And now, because of that, he was dead.

Miss Decima nodded. ‘Precisely. I need you to get your hands on his post-mortem report the moment it’s available, so I can narrow down his cause of death. Though, frankly, that report is likely to hold as much water as a sieve. From now on, we cannot trust anything which the police may have had a hand in.’ She cleared her throat. ‘That is another reason I asked you to meet us here this morning. I wished to have all three of us together again, sharing our thoughts. A meeting of minds, so to speak.’

Temperance and I shared a glance. If Miss Decima was asking us for help solving the case, maybe we were in more trouble than I thought. Then again, I couldn’t help but feel thrilled that we were being asked.