Yorbridge Police Station always smelt faintly of coal dust and boiled cabbage. After months in the chill incense of the Cathedral, the fug was almost comforting.

Lomas sat at his desk, sleeves rolled, pencil in hand, a stack of routine reports before him. Stolen hens. A publican’s fight. A boy who’d taken a bicycle without asking. Ordinary sins; manageable ones.

The files from Regina v. Bacchus Dyson lay in the bottom drawer, neatly tied. Sturmey’s black book was not there; that sat in a bank vault in London, sealed and labelled. Sometimes, the knowledge of it—those cramped crabbed lines of malice—made his fingers itch. Mostly, he preferred the thought of it under stone and steel, as if they were its own kind of tomb.

A knock sounded on the open office door....

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