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outside of a coffin. She was young, red-haired, milk-pale, and nude. That final point might have been awkward, but Pimm had long ago learned the trick of looking at the dead clinically—their souls were fled, and their bodies were merely empty vessels, worthy of respect, but no longer in need of the courtesies he would accord them in life. Pimm instinctively took a handkerchief from his pocket to press to his nose, but there was no odor. “How long has she been dead, Mr. Adams?”
    “She was found this morning, on the steps of a house on St. James’s Street.”
    Pimm grunted. “My club is on that street. I had no idea Value kept an establishment there.”
    “I understand the management is most discreet.”
    “It’s quite some distance to transport a dead girl, since she was unlikely to be working in the vicinity. That’s a fair bit of effort—the killer is certainly trying to make some kind of point.” Pimm peered at the victim. “This girl has been dead the best part of a day, yet there is no sign of decomposition. Does that strike you as odd?”
    “Mr. Value’s men brought her in a chest of ice. And for my part, I make use of certain… preservative elements,” Adams admitted. “They slow decay, which makes my work more pleasant. You don’t seem troubled by my occupation, if I may say. Most find it off-putting.”
    “I had a second cousin who went into the medical profession. He was the despair of the family—until I came along, at least. He told me about his studies, bodies rendered down for their skeletons, cadavers dissected. He explained that the study of the dead could help the living, and ease suffering. It seems a noble enough goal to me, if the poor souls being examined have no families to claim their earthly remains. Not that I expect Mr. Value bothers with such niceties.” He glanced at the giant’s blank white mask. “And you, I wager, are no member of the teaching staff at St. Bartholomew’s?”
    “I learned my profession in the old style, as the assistant to a master surgeon, when I was a younger man. I have no formal certificate, nor do I wish for one. I am content to perform my own researches, and my patron finds my work useful enough to fund those studies.”
    “You are the one who tested the efficacy of tissue sympathy in victims of the Constantine Affliction, I suspect?”
    The giant merely inclined his head.
    “Quite clever,” Pimm said. “I do admire such intellectual accomplishment. Do you know what purpose your patron Mr. Value has found for your discovery?” He could not keep an edge of bitterness from his voice.
    “Science is a tool, Lord Pembroke. Sometimes it can be used as a weapon, I know. But its intrinsic moral orientation is entirely neutral. The Steel Raja crushes his enemies with steam-powered automatons in the form of war elephants. Yet the same fundamentals of science power the ships that ply the seas, bringing trade to distant shores, and the digging machines that even now chew at the earth beneath the English Channel to connect this island to the Continent. Steam is not evil. Machines are not evil. But their uses can be.”
    “An interesting perspective, Mr. Adams. While we are on the subject of evil, let us return to the nature of the murder before us. In your medical opinion, what was the cause of death? The poor girl has not a mark on her.”
    “Poisoning, this time. Or perhaps inhalation of ether or some other chemical. Sometimes the killer—assuming it is the same killer—suffocates his victims, but in this case, there are no broken blood vessels in the eyes, as one sees in smotherings, and no marks on the throat, such as one finds in cases of throttling.” He paused. “The victims—there have been five—have all been only lightly marked, each more pristine than the last. When Mr. Value’s men found the first girl, they thought her heart had simply stopped, though no one understood why she’d strayed so far from her preferred neighborhood, to