‘I don’t like the sound of that,’ cried Mrs Ibbott.

Quinn rapped on the door. ‘Miss Dillard? Miss Dillard? Are you quite well?’ The thumping inside the bedroom intensified in speed and volume. Quinn tried the door. It was locked. He turned to the landlady. ‘Do you have a key?’

She produced a large fob from her apron. Her hand shook as she held out a key. ‘I’m all fingers and thumbs.’

Quinn snatched the fob from her and began trying the keys in the lock. It seemed an age before he had the door open.

They were in the same room now as the thumping. It was like a heaving of the darkness. A giant hand pounding a box of springs. The bed: it was coming from the bed. It was the sound of the bed rattling and kicking against the boards. It was not quite rhythmic. There were pauses in it. Then it would come back with renewed force.

‘Give me the light!’

Quinn held the candle out in front of him. Miss Dillard, wracked with convulsions, was throwing contorted forms of herself around on top of her bed. Her body would lie in a backward arch of tension and then spring upwards, clearing the mattress by an inch or so.

‘What’s the matter with her?’ cried Mrs Ibbott.

‘She appears to be having some kind of a fit,’ said Quinn. ‘Is she an epileptic, do you know?’

Mrs Ibbott could not answer. She too was shaking now, uncontrollably. She held her hand out to a small dark bottle on Miss Dillard’s bedside table.

‘What is it? What’s in that bottle? Do you know? What has she taken?’

The answer came from Mrs Ibbott in a shriek: ‘Strychnine!’

That raised any number of questions, which would have to wait for now. ‘We must get her to a hospital!’ Quinn tried to hand the candle back to Mrs Ibbott, who seemed incapable of doing anything other than making a small, helpless whimpering sound. She stared at the candle, as if he was offering her the extracted spleen of her daughter. Eventually he was able to thrust it into her hands.

Quinn then stooped over the convulsing woman, looking for a way to lift her. Her body shifted position constantly, arching and collapsing, closing down his opportunities to get a handhold.

Her eyes were open, more than open, bulging starkly from her head. The pupils were fully dilated; the wonderful, miraculous pewter grey of her irises shrunk almost to a fine circle. For all their dilation, it was clear that she saw nothing.

Her mouth was stretched back into a grimace of helpless agony. Flecks of foam appeared on her yellow and grey teeth, seeping out through the gaps between them. The flecks grew quickly to an abundant froth.

He knew that the longer he hesitated the worse it would be for Miss Dillard.

He touched her quivering frailty, and was repelled. This was a strange, unasked-for intimacy. The effect on Miss Dillard was catastrophic. Her convulsions redoubled in ferocity. It was as if she was trying to throw herself away from herself, to escape the misery of her existence by some final, doomed act of self-discarding.

Her body, her flesh was patently present to his touch, a blazing heat beneath the delicate nightdress. She was on fire, it seemed. His touch wracked her like raging flames. He pulled her to him in a firm embrace, clinging to the muscular writhing of her body. Her convulsions were transmitted to him. He became convulsed too.

At first he carried her like a groom bearing his bride across the threshold, but she was a bride who struggled every inch of the way. So much so that he was forced to swing her over his shoulder into a fireman’s lift.

It shocked him to discover how little weight there was to her. She could have been made out of crumpled foil for all she weighed. No, it was not her weight that made her hard to carry; it was the tensioned kick of her body, every muscle wrought and spasming at once.

A small group of the other residents had been drawn by the commotion, including Messrs Timberley and Appleby. ‘One of you run ahead!’ shouted Quinn. ‘Flag down a cab on the Brompton Road. We have to get her to the infirmary.’

But the two young men seemed incapable of movement, like the specimens they pinned at the Natural History Museum. ‘What’s the matter with her?’ asked Mr Timberley, his face contorted with distaste.

‘She’s dying. She will die, unless we get her to St George’s.’

‘Dying?’ Timberley regarded Miss Dillard with a scientist’s interest, as if he had always wanted to see someone die and this presented a rare opportunity.

‘For God’s sake, will one of you not go for assistance?’

Timberley held a balled fist over his mouth and coughed. If the cough was forced, it soon turned into an uncontrollable hacking fit. He turned reluctantly from the interesting spectacle and began to make his way slowly downstairs, one hand on the wall to steady himself against the crashing waves of his coughing.

‘Hurry, will you! This is a matter of life and death!’

Timberley waved a hand, an impatient gesture that seemed to convey that he was going as fast as he could. Quinn had to accept that he seemed like the wreckage of the man he had once been. He turned to Appleby and directed his gaze meaningfully towards the invalid.

Appleby seemed to take the hint. At any rate, there must have been something in Quinn’s gaze that spurred him on. ‘I say, Timberley, wait for me. I’ll come with you.’

‘I suggest you run ahead,’ wheezed Timberley through his coughing. ‘I cannot run. My doctor will not allow it. Mr Quinn will have two corpses on his hands if I am forced to run.’ He was projecting this back over his shoulder. Clearly it was intended for Quinn’s benefit. ‘I am perfectly serious, you know. Perfectly.’ He pressed himself to the wall and allowed his friend to thunder past.

By the time he got to Brompton Road, Quinn was staggering. Not under her weight. But under the certainty that he was too late. She was hammering against his shoulder, and her breath came in a rasping, strangulated whine. It was not the death rattle. It was something worse than the death rattle. It was the sound a body makes when it rebels against the action of breathing.

Appleby was in the middle of the road, shouting and waving both arms to stop the traffic. At last something of the urgency of the situation seemed to have struck him. Timberley stood at the roadside and hung his head disconsolately. He cast sly, fascinated glances towards the heaving burden over Quinn’s shoulder.

At last Appleby persuaded a motor taxi to stop. He screamed the destination at the driver, who when he saw the intended passenger seemed about to refuse the fare.

‘I am a police inspector,’ said Quinn. ‘If you don’t take us to St George’s I will kill you.’ He had meant to say ‘arrest you’, but the stress of the moment had added a certain bluntness to his words.

‘What’s wrong wiv ’er, guv? She ain’t gonna be sick in me cab?’

‘You had better hope that she does not die in your cab.’ Quinn was bandying death around like loose change, in the hope that it would get things moving.

It was a hard job getting her into the back of the taxi. Her arms were flailing everywhere, her feet kicking out. Quinn received a punch to the eye and a knee in the groin that fair took the wind out of him. The blows landed so expertly that if he hadn’t known better he would have said she had aimed them. At one point, one of her legs locked itself in an acute angle around his thigh. Eventually, he and Appleby together managed to prise it loose. They put her in head first and laid her down on the back seat. Quinn went round the other side and eased himself under her now freakishly juddering length. He nestled her wracked and quivering head against his chest and tried to soothe away her spasms by stroking her hair. Her feet kicked rhythmically and violently against the door. The driver’s anxious glances back weighed his concern for his taxi against his fear for his life. In the event, the latter won out. He said nothing.