A curious figure stood in the vicarage orchard, from afar it appeared a badly painted splash of enflamed red topped with a charcoal smudge of a wide brimmed hat. It stood tall and broad, gnarly and resolute as a ship's captain, feet apart in the heavy snow, watching the febrile light emanating from the attic room window that blinked out from the mossed tiles on top of the house. It seemed in the semi –darkness to take the aspect of a far off lighthouse illuminating a storm swept headland.

The effect of the moonlight was singularly picturesque, the thick blanket snowfall robbing the landscape of any features. For a moment Loki felt he could have been transported away, as far as the far off rugged wilds of Skaana Aua where the bone chilling winds blew all day and night, and the bent trees clung remorselessly to the barren earth under a sky that ebbed with the bivrost, the great red fire bridge where warriors crossed from Earth to Heaven.

Pulling at a golden chain he drew a handsomely engraved fob watch from his pocket and checked the time. The skeleton timepiece displayed its innards, a vibrating mass of springs, cogs and movements. The mysteries contained within its graceful metal case entranced Loki. For Loki had thus told the time by the movement of the celestial heavens and the arc of the hoary rimmed moon across the star bitten sky. Those earthly things told him how long it would be until he would hear the first chattering of the birds and see the sun rise and send its tentative fingers crawling across the landscape. They told him when the darkness would fall across the land and the temperatures plummet in the vicious Siberian wind.

How the miraculous treasure worked confounded him. He nested it to his ear to listen the tick-tock of its mechanical heart and beamed with the pleasure of the thing. Holding it in awe, between the tips of his fingers like a stolen eagle's egg for a full ten minutes he watched the gilt minute hand nudge its assured way to the hour to mark eleven pm.

As if on the mechanical marvel's signalling the hour, the tower St Stephens omitted a great blast of air into the night like the foul exhalation of a kraken emerging from the fathomless deep. A few seconds of stillness followed, then a thin willowing wail emanated from church and suddenly from the tower arose a crawling, biting, tumbling throng. Like a blast furnace chimney spewing out its obnoxious fumes, a raging cloud leapt from the belfry and crawled across the face of the heavens, a thousand disquieting shapes momentarily blotting out the night sky.

The flapping fury of ragged blackness tore across the garden and churned its way through the orchard. Then the multi-fanged, bloodsucking monster, a conflagration of the blackest fire, engulfed Loki, a solitary victim standing alone in the snow.

As they leapt upon him Loki turned his face to the moon and shut his eyes, arms outreached, as if rejoicing the coming of the first rains of the season. Suspended in the whirling mass of bats he bent his head up and laughed wildly, his white teeth glittering in the moonlight, his jaw sprung wide open as if to swallow the moon whole. He stood unmoved, feeling the beating of giant wing tips and scrape of sharpened teeth tear at his skin.

Loki swung his head around and snapped his teeth. Out of the toxic air he snared one of the vampires. Caught like an unsuspecting albatross trapped in teeth of a shark the vile creature screamed piteously, its leathery wings thrashing about Loki cheeks. Loki's tongue extruded itself from his mouth, wrapped around the bats head and with a great gulp and mashing of flesh and bone he gobbled it up and swallowed it whole, still kicking feebly as it passed down his gullet.

Panicked by the loss of one of their host, the multitude of speckled rags broke away and flew chaotically off into the woods. Loki, face still flushed with exhilaration, wiped a trickle of putrefying blood from his lips, checked his fob watch, flexed his arms to displace the cold induced stiffness and with one last glance up at house, turned and stalked into the night.

Up in the attic room hung a vast gilt mirror littered with a hundred waxen lights. Driven by the hot vapours emanating from the myriad of candles, a miniature glass chandler rotated steady this way and that, the droplets of cut glass sending a canticle of refracted light spinning around the rough pine panelled room.

Martin huddled on his bed like frozen Napoleonic fusilier on the open plains of the Russia steppes. He sat with his woollen hat drawn down deep over his forehead almost covering his eyes. His bed was piled so high with blankets it looked in danger at any moment of capsizing on to the emaciated rug that covered the wooden floor. Across from the iron bedstead, behind a skinny grate, an apple wood fire simmered and popped pickling the room in the heady scents of late autumn.

The room was rather shambolic, littered with a collection of cheap books, pamphlets and yellowing newspaper cuttings. Piles of penny bloods, yellow backs, tales from Boz and graphically illustrated covers of Punch stood like drunken dwarfs in the semi darkness, uneasily leaning this way or that, ready to topple to the floor at the lightest touch. Lurid tale of ghost ships, pirates, highwaymen, footpads and murders shared column inches with anatomical papers, histories and various sales catalogues extolling the likes of Whelptons vegetable purification pills and Carter's Thrixaline moustache trainer fluid.

In the corner a fluted legged dresser strewn with discarded clothes, pressed itself against the frost crackled window. It contained, as its centrepiece a china water bowl and washbasin, both of which had frozen to the table, which they gripped like clams and refused to come unstuck despite Martins most ardent efforts to shift them.

Martin had found, under an article incongruously titled, Operations for restoring a lose nose from the integument's of the forehead, a pamphlet glorifying the coming of winter and telling tales of the countryside and the inconveniences it caused ; A Treatise on the Weather of the North Isles. It now rested on his knees. He huddled over it, shrouded like an old lady, bedecked with shawls and a pile of multitudinous woollen coverings.

He blew on his fingers, wiped a solidifying icicle from his freckled nose and rested his toes toastily on the stone flask Mrs Thistlewaite had prepared earlier from a steaming kettle that had been bought to a clattering boil on the kitchen range.

The lightness of snow, he read, is owing to the excess of its surface in comparison to the matter contained within it. Thus gold, like snow, despite being the most ponderous of all bodies, will ride upon the lightest of airs when beaten into leaves. Martin studied the book and considered the many caprices of snow and ice and despite himself his thoughts turned to the girl in the basement and the sable cloaked caller.

He read for a further fifteen minutes then dosed. His eyes fluttered, his head slipped slowly forward. He dreamed of the girl, cast solid in the ice. He dreamed of an angry River Thames, oblivious to her crystalline form under him, stamping his brawny bare feet up and down on the ice in impatience to move the winter on, to be unlocked from the shackles of ice that bound him to the shore. He stumped along the ice and stamped and stamped followed by a raven in a red suit that squawked raucously and skipped around his livid feet

Awk, awk, the red suited raven called waark, waark...Master Warr. Master Warr!' a voice croaked through the far reaches of the dream.

Startled, Martin sat bolt upright in bed and pulled his blankets up close under his chin.

The fire had died, the room glowed like the innards of a dying dragon and the embers wheezed and gasped their last. The walls, purged of light now ran with shadows and slippery shapes that clung to the corners and skulked behind the piles of dusty books.

The apparition standing at the bottom of the bedstead was wrapped in a stained butcher's apron. A thick pair of vulcanized rubber gloves ran right up over his elbows, held tight by two pieces of string on his upper arms. In the loaming light the spectre's head appeared as a diseased potato, upon which two broccoli ears supported a pair of thin wire glasses through which two eyes, pink as bloodied diamonds, glittered judiciously out into the darkness. Under a pugnacious nose sprouted a pair of thin carrot lips that opened and closed wordlessly like a harpooned blowfish.

Martin rubbed his eyes and settled his gaze on the agitated spectre. In the darkness the spirit appeared to be cradling a thickset animal in his arms. A corpulent fox or possibly an emaciated badger.

He sat up in bed sending the great heap of woollen blankets avalanching onto the floor into an unkempt heap of patchwork colours. 'What is it, Doctor Craw?' he asked, warily.

'The girl downstairs, I think she was murdered. You should tell the police.' The apparition waved the animal at him. It gurgled and hissed angrily at being disturbed.

'What time is it?' Martin looked, from the brown beast, to the embers of the feeble fire which threw its ruby light into the room, to the mantle where a Georgian clock with a cracked glass did its best to keep up with the passing of the hours. Twelve pm, the bent arms gestured to him across the shadows.

A yellow sulphurous face of pockmarked pumice, beset with a pair of crooked wire glasses, suddenly appeared in the ruddy firelight above him causing him to jump in surprise. 'She was barely wearing anything,' Craw stammered as if his life depended upon it, 'what mother allows her young daughter to go out wearing just a thin lace dress in this weather, it's not natural. Come, come, Master Warr.' Craw urged, jumping impatiently from foot to foot, 'you must be up and get yourself down there sprightly or there will be a miscarriage of justice.'

Martin started. A miscarriage of justice! That Doctor Craw would have the gall to lecture him on such things! Doctor Craw who had three times avoided the hangman's noose before succumbing to justice at the end of a short rope in front of a venomous crowd of Londoners outside Newgate Prison, his corrupt life finally eclipsed in a savage snap of his upper vertebra. Thence, unimaginably he returned here to his homestead, Snowfield's vicarage, his pallid spirit locked to the house where he had lived and perpetrated his heinous crimes.

In the light, the suspicious creature Craw held in his arms had turned into something more alarming. A thick smoked glass flagon, in which a sea of fuming liquid rolled to and fro in a turgid tidal wave at Craws every expression of urgency. The bottle bore the legend Hydrochloric Acid etched in red across a faded label and an indistinct black printed skull and crossbones pulled its ugly face at Martin.

Martin's stomach churned at the possible reasons Craw was transporting such a viperous liquid around the house. The skull reminded him of the ghostly corpse of the tarred, mad, babbling Captain Kidd hanging in the cage down at Execution Dock who yelled obscenities at him every time he passed him in the street.

'A suspicious death? I didn't notice anything in particular, Doctor Craw. She drowned, it said so on the hospital notes.' Martin bit his lip, he was not prepared to say anything about the girl or the red suited visitor to the apparition. The Doctor was a querulous figure who Martin had the misfortune to live with and an air of reserved civility was what he felt was most suitable in his dealings with him.

'Ticket in her pocket, strange pouch round her neck. In her hair, hops, berries and sawdust. I saw you and Mrs Thistlewaite prepare the body.' Craw held up a rubber octopus hand and allowed it to caress his grey stubbled chin. 'Yes I know, somewhat indecorous of me to be watching you both dress her, but if you did not see the obvious then surely I should be there to capture it for you.'

'I'm sorry, Doctor. I think you are imagining things. Why don't you go back to...to whatever you were doing?' Martin looked questioningly at the jar in the hope of prising an explanation from the flighty Craw.

'You saw nothing because you were captured by her beauty were you not, Master Warr?' Craw leered before performing an odd dance around the bed and back again, until his belt buckle flashed in front of Martin and the base of the ethereal bottle hung, once again, precariously over his head.

'Think, Master Warr, think of what you observed. Your profession has made you a numbskull if you did not see what I did!' Craws fingers raced up and down his leather apron, seeking solace in the many holes of the leprous hide. 'Dressed like a May Queen in the middle of the coldest winter we've had for two hundred years. Think of the ignominy of the parents, Master Warr, no mother and father would put their child through that.'

Martin slumped back on the headboard and reflected. Mrs Thistlewaite and he had prepared the girl earlier. Lifted her frail body up, gently undressed it and wrapped it in a sheet of warming cotton and laid her head back in the coffin while Mrs Thistlewaite tut-tutted over his use of the expensive pillow he'd insisted they slip behind her gold laced head. 'She's a wastrel Martin, lost to this world without anyone caring. Hers will be a pauper's funeral, her death will be barely recorded, like her life. With all this attention you give her, we will not make our fee. Soppy boy.' Yet oddly she had not told him to remove it and seemed to slip quietly back into her own thoughts.

Like the May Queen.....in winter. Somehow Craws words twisted in his head. The death in the ice, the flowers in her hair, the red suited stranger at the door, the whole affair was too troubling to be ignored.

In the dimness his feet found his slippers, his arms flailed and flapped until they found the holes inside his dressing gown. With a quick tug he pulled the chord tight around his waist.

'Okay Doctor, for some peace I'll come down,' he sighed. Silently rejoicing in Craws interest he tried to keep his voice flat and tired. 'Let's go.'

Martin's room was in a lofty perch on the top floor of the house, connected to the rest of the house by the tight circular staircase. Martin ducked through half door and bound down the twisting stairs two at a time to the basement, drawn on by the ghostly whispering voice of Doctor Craw crawling up the stairs to speed him on his way.... 'Master Warr, are you there...?'

Doctor Craw was downstairs in the basement waiting for him, cradling his acid bottle in his arms like a grubby new-born baby. Gently placing his charge on the table he scurried across to the table in the corner. 'Her effects Master Warr, on the table here. Find them, quickly now.'

The Ice Maidens possessions lay in a wooden box, with the others, those the police or hospital had failed to find when they checked the bodies. A toothless comb belonging to the tramp, a broken bar of soap crumbled like cheese in the pockets of the midwife.

Martin rummaged through the box and shook it out. A green slip of paper floated onto the table followed by a thud of the leather pouch they'd found around the girls neck. He looked at Craw and shrugged his shoulders.

Craw nodded his pock marked onion head enthusiastically at him.

Taking the cue, Martin picked up the slip of paper and scrutinised it. 'It's a ticket,' he said, testing the serrated edges with the tips of his numb fingers. 'It's for the Ice Fair –she must have been going to the Ice Fair, Mr Craw.'

'Look closely Master Warr, Ice Fair? Does it really say that?'

'No, you're right,' Martins eyes dilated in puzzlement. 'It actually says Frost Fair.'

'Frost Fair, exactly!' Craw slapped his hands together in delight at this revelation. 'The detail my boy, you missed an important detail. And the date, can you see the date? Always remember...' The light threw his grotesque features into sharp relief, 'the devils always in the detail.'

'January 3rd, 1664.'

'1664. Exactly!' cried Craw ecstatically, 'Two hundred years ago and what does that tell us?'

'She bought the dress from an antique shop and it was in the pockets at the time of her death.'

The Doctor's mouth opened wide in surprise and closed with snap of Waterloo teeth. 'Actually I hadn't thought of that.' He pulled a face. 'By all Creation, it's a good point, Master Warr but the pouch, the pouch.' He breathed urgently. 'Open it.'

Martin pulled the drawstring open and looked inside the bag. In it was a glittering grey powder, fine as ground almonds. Rubbing a little on his fingers he held it up to the lamplight inspected it. It glistened like salt in the light. Cautiously he dabbed some on his tongue, the taste burst with bitter lemons and dark cinnamons. 'I'm not sure what it is Doctor, it tastes of the something peculiar I can't place.'

'A good luck charm, most likely ground up ambergris.'

'Ambergris?' Martin could hear the doubt in his own voice.

'The excretion from the intestine of sperm whale. Popular once for charms.'

'I know what Ambergris is, Doctor.' Martin inspected the dust on his fingers. It glinted oddly like pyrite powder had been infused with it. He placed the bag on the table, stuck out his tongue and wiped it along his sleeve to remove the taste.

'Sometimes I wonder about you Master Warr,' the Doctor folded his arms and shook his head in despair at Martins screwed up face. 'You sit up there in your crow's nest, cut off from the ocean of life, navigating your intellect through your piles of books. I wonder if you ever learnt anything from them. You seem to lack any practicalities to guide you through the maze of life. You are like an insect waiting to be squashed and not understand why.' For a moment the Doctors face affected a saddened look which swiftly moved into something more quizzical.

'Look, look Martin, there!' The Doctor yelped. With a whoosh that set the lights in the room fluttering, Craw disappeared and reappeared, eyes level with the leather bag. 'There, it takes the form of a serpent!'

'What?' Martin looked at the bag but could see nothing but a thin curl of powder circling the bag like smoke from a vaporised snake's skin.

Inexorably it emerged from the dust, like a ghost ship from a heavy mist, a thin spectre of dancing light. At first Martin was not sure but then he saw it. In the pebble lenses of Doctor Craw's glasses, the bizarre vision was multiplied threefold, three dancing apparitions twirling in the dust.

A creature, winged, light as a butterfly, floated before them, its tail trailing as if a kite caught in the breeze, tiny scales glinting in the radiance of the gaslight like the emerald waters of the sun-drenched tropics.

Martin's jaw dropped, he tried to grab the Doctors arm but his hand flailed at thin air, far off he caught the sound of the rhythmic pattern of the blacksmiths hammer. 'Listen! I can hear the scales of its armour clinking.'

'Just so Master Warr,' the Doctor whispered, 'look at it the intricacy of the creature, I've not seen the likes of it ever before. It's majic, bought about by Ambergris imbibed with some strange enchantment. And it belonged to the girl. Stranger and stranger this business seems.'

'Majic! Come on Doctor surely you don't believe...' As if the apparition had heard Martins words, it abruptly faded and died. As if Martins disbelief had killed it.

Seeing Craws suppurating face reddening with anger Martin stepped back from the table.

'Martin, I find it reprehensible to the extreme, that you of all people should find this so, so...... unbelievable.' Sensing the unease in the young man, the Doctor calmed himself, turned to the coffin and sought to lower his voice. 'We must check the body again, have you missed anything?'

'Doctor, we've done all we should have when we prepared her. There are some marks on her hands conducive with falling under the ice and trying to scrabble to the surface. Apart from that she is healthy, almost radiantly so.'

'You speak if she WERE alive, Master Warr. Wake up and smell the cloying stench of formaldehyde that saturates this place. You CANNOT bring her back but you can find out how she got here.'

With a trembling fingers Martin took the pouch in his hand and weighed it meditatively. To find something about the girl, her parents, a brother or a sister perhaps might be something. 'I suppose I could,' he said hesitantly without catching the doctor's eye.

Craws red rimmed eyes darted nervously this way and that. 'Why don't you take them, the ticket and the pouch and go and ask Gideon. Does he see her there standing in the ranks of the deceased, can he tell us a little snippet that would help us relieve her certain suffering?'

Gideon! The mere mention of his name left a hole in the bottom of Martin's stomach through which he could feel his bodily fluids draining. Gideon, both the saint and terror of the church of All Hallows. 'I don't want to go and see Gideon.' He said, his voice wavering at the thought.

'But you must Martin, you owe it to her....'

'Don't foist this upon me, Doctor, your little secrets. Even now how you sulk about the house doing god knows what!' Martin's anger welled up inside him. The girl he would have helped, but to think of Craw urging him to see Gideon was too much, he spun round on his toes and snapped.

'You told me you seek redemption. Look at yourself, Craw. Butchers apron, rubber gloves, bottle of acid, what am I to think! And Gideon, I'm not visiting him again at your bequest to find out where you stand in the long line of those seeking redemption.'

'Oh, Martin.' Craws face dropped. He pulled his hand free of its glove, picked up the bottle and tapped his grubby fingernails on the neck of the flask summoning up a melodic tune from it innards, 'I'm just cleaning up. I'm reformed, be assured of that. I'm over my little foibles. I must make myself ready to meet my maker. And if you were to see Gideon, just to ask him. Would that be so much trouble?'

He hung his head and slid silently into the shadows.

'I'm not going, Doctor,' Martin called into thin air.

Craws reedy words, 'Go to Gideon,' drifted back to him.

Suddenly aware of the skin grating cold, Martin pulled his dressing gown close and flapped his arms to keep warm. He covered the girl, turned and plodded back up the spiral staircase to his room.

Checking the spectre of Craw was absent he hurriedly ran his finger along the spines of the books set on the shelves in the crumbling rafters and pulled out The Complete History of London (unabridged). Resting the red skinned volume on his knees he flicked through the parchment pages and settled on Heinous Crimes of the Old City, London 1754-1850. Running his shaking hand down the text he read Doctor Craw, the Southwark Strangler's entry. He knew it by heart but he needed to check.

It was with a feeling of relief he read that Craw never drowned any of his seven victims but never-the less putting book aside he found it difficult to fall asleep under he heard Mrs Thistlewaite moving around downstairs and the rasp of the coal scuttle and the slamming of the back door.

He kicked off the covers, dressed quickly and stole down in the early morning sunlight to get a cup of tepid tea before he set off down the lane, white as freshly whipped cream, for the milk and bread.