Jack was in the hall of the Athenaeum that evening. He had been told there was a very costly and magnificent frieze running round the outside of the building – a never-ending procession of men in togas carrying urns, which was incidentally how Jack viewed the whole of Ancient Greek civilization. He hadn't seen it, just as he hadn't even glanced at the smart new morning coat, dress shirt, and Ascot tie he was wearing. Every inch of him was concentrating on the complicated matter of not killing anyone yet. He had no energy to spare for little details.

Brandt had dressed him this morning, while whispering not very hopeful words of caution.

"Remember, the safety of the girls depends upon you inflicting as little damage as possible. Don't hit the servants in livery. Those belong to the club. Lord Elsmere has his own men. They'll be the ones wearing bowler hats, with a pin bearing his crest on their neck-ties. Now be careful. Other members have their own men too. Don't hit anyone who isn't wearing his crest, and don't even hit them when there are other servants around to see it. Oh, and needless to say, don't kill any of them. Asking the club to gloss over one murder is quite enough. The more damage you do, the more tempted they'll be to call in the authorities. For the same reason, keep breakages to a minimum. Most of the club's members would be more upset about a broken statue than a murdered Lord – especially if it's a genuine antiquity – so don't tempt them."

Don't tempt them, Jack thought wearily. When had anybody ever worried about tempting him? When had anybody ever prayed his patience?

He signed the visitor's book, and stood painstakingly still while someone was sent for to collect him. Now there was nothing else to do, he forced himself to pay attention to his surroundings, if only to memorize the route to the Lord Elsmere. 

Classical statues stood in niches and on pedestals, some of them missing limbs, either because they were damaged originals or because the club's proprietors thought that was how Greek statues were supposed to look. Brandt had said that everything here was modelled on the Parthenon – that great symbol of civilization – and it gave Jack a happy tingle in the pit of his stomach to think how uncivilized his night's business was.

A man in a bowler hat, his neck-tie bearing the double-headed eagle crest that Jack had been memorizing all day, came down the marble staircase. This was a special torture for Jack, because it was one of the people he was allowed to hit, but it was too soon to hit him. Still, at least Lord Elsmere hadn't come to collect him personally. Jack was fairly sure he'd forget all words of caution – perhaps even his own name – when he finally beheld that man's face. So, to keep his itching fists under control, he tried to remember what else Brandt had said when he'd been dressing him that evening.

"Fortunately, Lord Elsmere won't meet you in a public area. He thinks Charlotte Grey has spies everywhere, so he generally keeps to his rooms above-stairs. In fact, he's not very well-liked among his fellow members, which is another reason why, if you restrict the damage to Lord Elsmere and his men, they might let the matter go."

Jack had tried to catch hold of all this. But it was like trying to keep an impression in wet sand – angry, angry wet sand. Lord Elsmere had stood and watched while the gargoyles tortured Ellini. He had told them what to do, urged them on when they got tired. He had probably been trembling with sick excitement the whole time.

The bowler-hatted man said "Jack Cade." It didn't seem to be a question, so Jack didn't dignify it with an answer.

"You will follow me please," said the man. He didn't introduce himself. He was nameless and conversationless as he led Jack up the marble staircase, past a statue of Apollo, through the kind of library that would have given Ellini a spontaneous orgasm, and then into a warren of rooms with velvet drapes and leather-upholstered chairs.

All the way, Jack's breathing was slow and measured. He thought carefully about each separate step. He kept his focus narrow, concentrating on the next turning, the next door, memorizing his path through the leathery, velvety, polished sitting rooms, and not thinking about the smug, fat spider at the centre of this web.

He felt like some predator, mad with hunger, lying in wait for his prey. It was excruciatingly difficult to wait. But if he didn't wait, he didn't eat.

Getting through those corridors without smashing anything took such intense concentration that he could only respond with a grunt when he was led into a small smoking-room and told to wait. There was a second valet in here. It was funny how they all had broad noses and cauliflower ears, as though Lord Elsmere selected his men from the prize-fighting circuit.

Jack stood there for a total of eight seconds, telling himself to breathe. Then he grabbed the valet by the throat and brought his head down hard against the polished table. He caught him on the way down and lowered him gently to the floor.

In truth, this was probably unnecessary. The carpet was thick enough to absorb the noise of falling bodies. But Brandt had spent so long lecturing him that he had a childish urge to be ridiculously, pedantically cautious. He even took a handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped away the smear of blood that the man's breaking nose had left on the varnish.

He kicked the unconscious body under the table, where its legs wouldn't trip anyone up, and crept to the door. He waited five seconds for a liveried servant to go past, bearing a pipe-rack on a silver tray, and then stepped out into the corridor.

The other end of this corridor – the one which ended in a grand state bedroom – beckoned to Jack. But he had to find the hostages first, and see that they were safely deposited in the cellar with their angrier sisters. They would only get in the way of his rage if they were around when he confronted the master. And if they got in the way of his rage, he didn't know what would happen to them. 

The prisoners wouldn't be in the same room they'd been in when they had been shown to Brandt – Lord Elsmere wasn't stupid enough for that. But there were only three or four private rooms he could use without running into his fellow club-members, so Jack soon found them.

They were seated at a table in the second room he tried, guarded by – oh heavens – two stocky men without tie-pins. They could hardly be innocent if they were in a room with the captured slave-girls, but Jack was in the habit of curbing his excitement by now, so he waited, while the girls half-rose from the table, to see what their gaolers would do.

The first man stood up and said a sentence that was mainly vowels. "Oi, 'ow'd you get in 'ere?"

But Jack was paying attention to the second one – the one who'd looked past his morning coat and ascot tie and seen the look of murder in his eyes. This one vaulted over the table, scattering playing cards and coins, and came at him with both fists raised. Amateur. 

Jack ducked his punches and slammed his shoulder into the man's ribs, hurling him back onto the table, which collapsed under his weight. The first guard – the one who'd been all vowels – reached into his jacket for a pistol, but was encumbered by Martha and Poppy, who backed, screeching, out of the way of the wreckage, onto his feet.

Jack leapt for him, grabbed the hand holding the gun, and wrenched it upwards, in case it went off accidentally and hurt the girls. He then managed to punch in between their flailing limbs and knocked him out with a crack to the side of the head. Not a scratch on the girls. He was quite proud of that.

This left Martha and Poppy standing, bewildered, in the wreckage of the table, with an unconscious man tangled up in their skirts.

It had to be said that Martha and Poppy were often bewildered. Now they unleashed the full force of their bewilderment on Jack, flocking around him like worried chickens, saying things like, "Jack, what's going on?" and "What are you doing here?", as though it wasn't obvious.

"I am rescuing you," he said carefully, because time was of the essence, and Martha and Poppy could misunderstand anything.

One of the things which annoyed him most about these girls was the fact that they kept saying his name. They did it now, seemingly just to test him.

"Jack, he said Ellini's alive! She's not, is she, Jack?"

"Of course not."

"He said she's alive and we're the bait to catch her. We told him we didn't know anything-"

"No kidding," said Jack, before he could stop himself.

"-but he said it didn't matter. He said she'd come for us anyway, Jack. But how would she know where we are?"

"She wouldn't," he said, eyes closed. "Because she's dead."

"But he says she's been spotted in Lambeth, Jack. And St John's Wood. Always in company with a handsome, well-dressed man. We said she didn't like men – we told her about Matthi – but that just made him even more certain that she was wicked and alive and coming to get us."

It was a while before he could hush them, and even longer before he could shepherd them to the door, because they kept remembering things they'd forgotten, and Jack had to keep saying to himself, 'These are your girls. If they're confused, it's because you left them here for a month while you procrastinated. The master could have been doing anything to them. Admittedly, it's difficult to see why he'd want to, but that's not their fault either. These are your girls, just as much as the clever, pretty ones.'

And, because they were his girls, he let them go from room to room, looking for shawls and bonnets and a crystal decanter that had caught their eye. Not damaging the place was one thing, but nobody in their right mind would have expected him not to rob it.

When he finally got to the cellars, his other girls – the angry ones – gave him a lesson in dealing with Martha and Poppy. They enfolded them in a tender embrace which was nevertheless strong enough to muffle their voices.

Ginniver was among them. Jack hadn't been sure when he'd asked her, and had been extremely surprised when she'd accepted, not least because she was still angry with him for ruining her wedding night. This sort of thing didn't really chime in with her fierce determination to be normal. But he had always suspected that the fierce determination was masking a fierceness of another kind. Perhaps she'd finally come to accept that, after everything she'd been through, normality could no longer be reached by conventional routes.

It was good to get down into the cellars. The upper levels had reminded him of Oxford, where everything was bright and well-scrubbed, stinking of polish and academia, and you couldn't find a shadow anywhere in which to bathe your aching eyes.

But the cellars were something else. If the levels up above were dedicated to Athena, this one was dedicated to Bacchus. Hundreds of wine-racks stood in the vaulted nooks, stuffed with expensive bottles. And here and there, carved into the vaulting, were little satyrs or bunches of grapes. There were no Maenads, but that didn't matter. Jack had brought his own.

And now there was a very tidy hole in the wall, which Brandt and Shikari had knocked through from the neighbouring ale-house, and which could be bricked up again when the girls had come and gone without anyone being any the wiser. You'd have to be looking for it – knowing what you were looking for – in order to notice it, and who was going to bother trawling the cellars when they knew perfectly well how the miscreant had got in? They had seen him come in through the front door. He had signed the visitors' book. 

That was important. He had to keep the blame restricted to himself. If the club-members got a whiff of outside interference – a non-guest trespassing in the Athenaeum – they would call in the peelers for sure, and his girls wouldn't be able to escape punishment. They were on a knife-edge of respectability as it was.

He had told Brandt and Shikari to stay in the cellar of the ale-house, whatever they might hear. This moment was just for Jack and his girls. Technically, Jack himself shouldn't have been intruding on it, but the girls couldn't deny him a few kicks and punches. If suffering was a qualification for being Charlotte Grey, then he had earned his ribbons.

He made sure that Martha and Poppy were taken through the hole to wait with Brandt and Shikari. They were not angry enough for this night's work. He then climbed back up the cellar-stairs into the great hall. The next step was to find Anna Kitty Curlew, and he was horribly aware that the grand state bedroom would be the best place to start looking for her.

He climbed the marble staircase, his muscles screeching with the effort of not running, not smashing, not punching anyone in the face. Once or twice, he passed a few of the club's members, passing from card-room to coffee-room, or vice-versa, and he had to give them the courteous nod that one gentleman was obliged to give another in these places, as if he was just passing the time of day and not fantasizing about violent crimes.

A few bowler-hatted valets spotted him on the way – and he didn't have to lie in wait, scrutinizing their tie-pins this time. Word had obviously got around. They betrayed their affiliation by running at him, shouting things like "Oi!" and "Hey you!"

This, of course, meant that they had to be silenced in the name of concealment, and not at all because he was longing to hit someone. 

He ducked their clumsy punches, broke a jaw and two noses, and then piled them up in a closet, which he wedged closed with the statue of Apollo. As one musician to another, he was sure Apollo would understand.

And now his path to that gilded doorway was completely clear. He approached it slowly, half-expecting it to shimmer and disappear like a desert mirage. He pressed his ear to the panelling, but heard nothing besides his own thumping heart. So he curled his fingers round the handle and went inside.

In here, the gaslights gave way to candlelight. It filled the room with distracting shadows that pooled in the drapes and bed-hangings. It would have been confusing – it would have made his eyes dart into all the mysterious corners – but the bed and its occupant riveted his attention as though nothing else existed in the world.

He had been prepared for this, or something like it. In fact, he had been prepared to find Anna Kitty Curlew willingly sharing the master's bed – which, in some shameful way, felt even worse than her sharing it unwillingly. But this was worse because it cut closer to the bone. It was a recreation of the scene he'd been dwelling on for seven months now.

Chained to the headboard was a pretty, skinny, dark-haired Anglo-Indian woman.

She wasn't Ellini, but she wasn't a bad likeness. Once upon a time, Jack would have given her a special place among the legion of skinny brunettes he collected on his travels. She was dressed as a Charlotte Grey, with black ribbons winding up her arms. She was also bare-breasted and unable to cover herself up because her hands were chained to the headboard.

It was probably a very good recreation of what Ellini had looked like when the master had been interrogating her, even if the chains were flimsy tin things of the sort used on the West End stage.

The woman looked like some haughty Eastern Goddess – Mohini, or one of the Apsaras. And the fact that she was beautiful made Jack sick with himself as well as the world. He felt a prickle of excitement, followed by an overwhelming tidal wave of disgust.

But the extra detail – the one that twisted the knife which was already buried up to the hilt in his stomach – was the fact that she was staring at him quite unabashedly, as though he was interrupting a little show that she had orchestrated, rather than coming to the rescue of a cruelly abused girl.

"I don't know 'im," were the first words out of her mouth. "If 'e owes you money, you can leave me out of it, thank you very much. Only you might leave 'im enough to pay me with."

Jack gaped at her. "You're a – a -?"

"Whore is fine," she said. "I calls a spade a spade. I'll even pencil you in for tomorrow night if you fancy."

This flustered Jack, because she was very pretty and, when you spend your life seeking out a certain type of woman, they never completely lose their hold on you. And then it flustered him because he hated himself.

"I'm sorry, I..." he said, as though he'd turned into John Danvers.

The woman shrugged, which caused her chains to jangle. "Oh well. Suit yerself."

"Has he-?" Jack paused, again not knowing the right word, and not sure he wanted the answer even if he could find it, "-hurt you?"

"That costs extra."

There was another pause, while his horror wrestled with his curiosity. "What has he done?"

The woman just looked at him.

"Client confidentiality?" asked Jack.

"Well, no, not exactly. But I don't know you, do I? And I got a reputation to think of."

He half-smiled, wondering what could possibly tarnish a prostitute's reputation. And then he realized what, and the smile disappeared. There was a far-off roar in his ears, getting louder. He didn't know what it would be when it reached him – nausea, anger, even laughter. He just knew it would be completely in control.

"He hasn't touched you at all, has he? He just likes to watch."

There was another jingling shrug. "I caters for all tastes. So what if the gentleman likes to toss off in the corner while I'm chained up?"

Jack's knees buckled at this point, but he caught the dressing-table on the way down and hauled himself up again. Was that what the bastard had done with Ellini? Or wanted to do?

The woman gave him an indulgent smile. "I know," she murmured. "Shouldn't be worse than 'im 'aving 'is way with me, but somehow it is, aint it? Still, what 'e likes, 'e likes. It aint my business." 

Jack gave a slightly high-pitched laugh. "It literally is your business. But I know what you mean."

"I wouldn't mind if 'e dint spend the 'ole time calling me a filthy harlot."

"Please," said Jack, holding up a hand to ward off any further information. "I know it's my fault for asking, but-"

"Yeah," said the woman. "Fair enough."

"Listen, you have to leave," said Jack, turning his attention to her chains. They came apart in his hands, and he wasn't sure whether this was because they were stage props or because he was tremblingly, tearingly angry.

"I told you, 'e aint paid me yet," said the woman, massaging her wrists. "I'm not leaving till 'e's paid me."

"I'll pay you," said Jack. He took out a sheaf of bank-notes and waved them at her, slightly unsteadily. But she cringed back as though he'd been brandishing a pistol.

"It's too much-"

He caught her hand and closed it around the money. "You can earn it," he said slowly, "by leaving quietly and not calling his guards on your way out. This man rapes and tortures women. He doesn't deserve your sympathy."

"Sympathy?" she said, with another of her dark smiles. "What's that?"

"Good girl," said Jack, giving her a fleeting smile of his own. He hesitated, and then said. "If you ever want another job, or somewhere to stay, I run a sort of school in Oxford." He saw the look in her eyes and added, "I'm not a vicar or a philanthropist-"

The woman's shoulders shook with laughter. "I can see you aint either of those things."

"Think about it, then. I'm Jack Cade. Anyone in Oxford can tell you where to find Jack Cade."

She dressed quickly – which was probably a necessary skill in her line of work. And now that her breasts had been safely put away, Jack had a chance to scan the rest of the room for signs of Lord Elsmere. There was a doorway behind the bed. A crack of light was just visible underneath it, filtering through the lush green carpet as though it was unmown grass. He realized there was a shadow in the crack of light, moving fitfully, as if someone was pacing on the other side of the door.

"It's a dressing-room," said the Anglo-Indian woman, who was standing close behind him, following the direction of his gaze. "'E goes in there after... well, afterwards."

"Thank you."

"It aint money, is it?" she went on. "It's personal. Couldn't be more personal if 'e'd 'ad it away with your mother."

"Hah," said Jack faintly, without taking his eyes off the shadow. "Well, he didn't have it away with my mother, at least."

"D'you need any 'elp?"

Jack couldn't help laughing. "Is that your customer loyalty?"

She gave a contemptuous shrug. "Oh, I don't 'ave none of that, an' if it means I 'ave to be loyal to the likes of him, I'm quite glad on it."

"No, I don't need any help" said Jack, his eyes still on the shadow. "Thank you, though."

She left with a few wistful glances backwards, as though she wanted to see the fun – or as though she was quite sorry she hadn't been able to pencil him in for tomorrow night. 

And then it was just Jack and the moving shadow beneath the dressing-room door.

How long would the bastard be in there, he wondered? The English upper classes were famous for taking an age about their dress, weren't they? Keeping up standards, even in the steam-swaddled African jungles. Would there be a valet too, helping him on with his things and carefully not mentioning the bizarre noises he'd heard emanating from the bedroom earlier?

Jack wasn't sure how long he stood there in the dark, his mouth dry and his heart thumping. He wasn't sure, either, why he didn't just go and open the door. He only knew that he wanted Lord Elsmere to come to him, not the other way round. He wanted him to walk right into his doom and know that he'd done it. It seemed to take years, but that didn't matter, did it? He'd waited an eternity already – what were a few more years now?

With the slow, grinding pace of an ice-age, the door opened. And there he was.

Jack was only half-able to take in the details – only vaguely aware of the fact that the master was holding the door-handle with a handkerchief, as if the whole room carried a risk of infection, or that his moustache was obsessively well-trimmed, as though it had been cut out of a pattern-book. These were background thoughts – no more than whispers in the roar of anger and jubilation that filled Jack's ears.

The man looked at him, recognized him, started to run. And it was at this point that Anna Kitty Curlew leapt on Jack's back with a knife in her hand and tried to saw his head off.