Lucy Worsley’s Victorian Murder Club opened with its presenter unexpectedly channelling that gravelly voiced bloke who used to do all those film trailers beginning ‘In a world…’. ‘The London Thames,’ she intoned as gruffly and menacingly as she could, ‘winding silently through the capital. But in Victorian times…’ dramatic pause ‘…it had a sinister side.’

She then introduced ‘a story that has haunted me since I first heard it’ – possibly, you couldn’t help thinking, from a TV producer keen to find her another true-crime project. In the late 1880s, a serial killer dismembered several women while also taunting the police and never being found. Yet, this was not Jack the Ripper, but ‘the Thames torso murderer’: somebody, Lucy convincingly suggested, who most of us know nothing about. Indeed, one of the central mysteries in what followed is why we don’t – because this is quite a tale.

It started in Rainham where that classic Victorian figure, a lighterman, came across a bag in the Thames containing a woman’s lower torso. Over the next few weeks, various other body parts showed up in different parts of the river and the Regent’s canal. Between them, they made up an almost complete corpse, except........

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