My next stop was the Sydney Police museum which, due to Sydney’s perverse practice of changing the names of streets for a while, and then changing them back, was hard to find. I finally located it just off McQuarie street, an old police station, a sandstone cottage among all the sandstone mammoths, with the cut out of a unhappy cartoon convict in one window. I paid my $10 and was handed a small map of the museum, with instructions not to go into a couple of rooms that were being renovated.

There was a room of police uniforms, then and now. A room that seemed devoted to past heroics of the Sydney Police, with some tut-tutting over past excesses involving aborigines. A room where the walls were lined with various horrifying weaponry confiscated from suspects over the past 150 years, everything from makeshift machetes to a tiny, almost jewel-like 19th century revolver. Death masks of various baddies after execution, all looking pretty unhappy. And of course, almost an entire room dedicated to the Pajama Girl, the Jane Doe in Chinese pajamas who went unidentified for a few years and was kept in a formaldehyde bath in one of the police stations until they figured out who she was.

All of this has, naturally enough, a sort of cumulative effect that sneaks up on you. I was in the pajama girl room, reading a hanging sign that included pictures of her in life sitting moodily on a beach alongside a photo of what she looked like after they found her when the hanging sign began to sway. I don’t mean it moved a little. I mean it swayed from side to side for no reason I could discern. I reached up and stopped it, waited a moment, then continued reading. It started swaying again. I stopped it. Then I very calmly moved on to a smaller section of the room dedicated to a grisly kidnapping/murder.

The lobby had a shelf of Australian-based true crime that included books I suspected would be hard to find in the United States. After a long, pleasurable browse, I chose The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House, by Kate Summerscale, which I later discovered was not about an Australian murder at all. It was about the Constance Kent case, one of of the most English of English murders.