Lord Ravenstone came upon his servants like the wrath of god, demanding to know who had called the doctor. Ned thought it was no wonder the house was understaffed, considering the man’s temper.

He glanced at St Clair, who was scribbling into his notebook again. He still refused to even look at Ned, let alone say a word to him. Visconti looked from one to the other and cleared his throat.

“You seem to be in some sort of disagreement, gentlemen.”

“It is nothing relevant,” Ned said.

St Clair’s pencil pressed so hard against the paper that the tip broke. Ned waited for him to accuse him of protecting a potential suspect, but the words did not come.

Visconti didn’t press the matter, so Ned took a sip of his whiskey and returned to the more urgent topic.

“What do you know about Hargrave’s son, sir?”

The old man tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair and thought about it before he spoke.

“It’s news to me that he has one. His wife died young in a train accident. Helen was her only child.”

“Was it his daughter’s tuberculosis he tried to heal? I assume that is more difficult than mending a broken nose?” Ned asked.

Visconti raised his eyebrows at St Clair, who was noisily sharpening his pencil with a pocket knife.

“Or a cut-off finger,” he said pointedly.

St Clair put the knife aside, and Visconti continued, “Injuries are easy. You restore what is damaged, and it works again. But you can’t do that with a sickness. You can restore the lungs, but whatever is eating you from inside is not gone.”

“So every time he healed her, it began again?” Ned concluded.

“Yes. Her lungs were deteriorating faster than he could restore them. The life energy of plants and animals does not last long in humans. So he started using transfusions from the same species.”

Unnerved by his calmness, Ned set down his glass more sharply than he intended. “He started murdering people, you mean.”

“Yes. He started with people who were terminally ill anyway, but they had too little life energy left to have a great effect. After that, he concentrated on those no one would miss – beggars, street prostitutes and foreign sailors. It went on for over a year and caused twenty-seven deaths.”

“But the police would notice that many corpses,” Ned protested.

“No, you wouldn’t. Your colleagues at the River Police fish out dozens of bodies from the Thames every year. Those who show no obvious marks of violence are always written off as suicides,” St Clair unexpectedly chimed in.

Ned had to admit that was true. Not for the first time, he wished he could go back to the bliss of ignorance. Now he couldn’t stop thinking about all the ways witches could be killing people in his city without anyone noticing.

“How was he caught then?” he asked.

“He wasn’t,” St Clair said curtly.

Seeing he would get no further explanation from him, Ned turned to Visconti, who looked quite pained.

 “When his daughter found out how he was keeping her alive, she took her own life. On the day of her funeral, he called for a council of senior witches in London and handed himself in for execution. They decided on a different sentence and called for me.”

“You … you think he wants revenge because you didn’t kill him?”

“He wanted release from his suffering. His peers didn’t grant that mercy. I did not overrule them.”

Ned swallowed nervously. “And then you sent him to an asylum because you knew they would tie him down and drug him so he couldn’t finish the job himself?”

Visconti just nodded. A heavy silence settled on the room, interrupted only by the scratch of a pencil on paper. Ned was almost relieved when Ravenstone burst back into the room.

“They all swear no one called him. They assumed it was me. I assumed it was them. The audacity of the man to just come to my door!”

“Calm down, Henry. Be grateful you were there to throw him out before he could get to Jas,” Visconti said.

“He didn’t hear a shot,” Ned thought aloud.

Ravenstone whirled around to him. “Excuse me?”

“He must have expected to hear a shot. When he didn’t, he came to check what had gone wrong with his plan,” Ned explained.

Ravenstone was struck speechless with anger, but Visconti nodded thoughtfully.

“We are still stuck, gentlemen. However depraved Charles Hargrave may be by now, he cannot wield magic anymore. Let alone steal it from someone else,” he said.

“But we can reasonably assume that he is an accomplice. If we find him and the boy, they can lead us to the Shadow,” Ned pointed out.

The sound of the pencil on paper finally stopped. St Clair closed his sketchbook with a thud.

“I am going to see Jas,” he announced.

Ned flinched as the heavy sketchbook landed on his lap.

“He’s still asleep,” Ravenstone warned. “But I’ll come with you.”  

Once they’d left, Ned opened the book to the last pages. The first one showed two distinct men, one old, one younger. His heart lurched as he recognised a face he knew better than his own and had once loved more than life itself.

 The drawings continued on the next page, showing eyeless faces with only mouths, jaw structures, and cheekbones. Ned shuddered. It was like St Clair had melted Michael’s and Hargrave’s faces into one. The brat was really losing his mind.