A smile lit up his face when he saw them enter the shop.

“My dear Miss Sparks! And Mrs. Bainbridge!” he said, coming forwards to shake their hands warmly. “You do my humble establishment honour. Mrs. Bainbridge, how is your young narwhal enthusiast doing? I pray that he continues to show interest in the subject.”

“Oh yes,” said Gwen, laughing. “Your reproduction of that print has been a great inspiration to him. His illustrations of Sir Oswald the Narwhal are much more accurate now, although putting him in a cowboy hat while riding a horse in the American West is biologically unsound, I suspect.”

“Nonsense,” said Jimmy. “A narwhal must go wherever his adventures take him. I would love to see these pictures sometime. Well, ladies, enough pleasantries. I was given to understand by Miss Sparks that you have need of my expertise.”

“We do,” said Iris. “May we go in back?”

“Certainly,” he said, leading them into the storage room. One corner was reserved for a small office. He held their chairs as they sat, then went behind his desk.

“What’s the scheme this time, Sparks?” he asked.

“We’d like your opinion on some letters,” she said. “To see if they’re genuine.”

“Who wrote them?”

“I won’t influence you by telling you,” said Iris.

“How can I know if they’re real if I don’t know more about them?”

“We have others for comparison,” said Gwen, pulling a folder from her bag. “Here are two of the originals.”

Jimmy pulled on a pair of cotton gloves and took them from her. Then he picked up a magnifying glass from his desk and peered at them closely.

“These go back some fifty years,” he said. “You can tell by the onionskin—it was much in vogue here then. Good handwriting, poor spelling. And—Ah! These are actually written to Queen Victoria! One of her granddaughters? No, a great-granddaughter. Where did you get these?”

“We can’t tell you, of course,” said Iris.

“And they have to go back,” said Gwen.

“Pity. I know some collectors who would pay nicely for these.”

“Now, here are the ones we need you to analyse.”

She handed him two of the less incriminating missives from “A.”

He took the first page by the corner, then held it up to the light. Then he sniffed it carefully. “Smells like it’s been kept in oilskin,” he said. “Forgive me, ladies, for the impropriety I am about to commit.”

He brought the paper to his mouth, placed the tip of his tongue against the back, and licked it delicately.

“My goodness!” exclaimed Iris. “What can you glean from that?”

“Texture, chemical treatment,” explained Jimmy. “Every country makes its own paper. Each process uses different proportions of chemicals, different sources of wood, rags, what have you. I haven’t even looked at the writing yet, and I can tell you that this came from Switzerland.”

“You can tell that already? I’m impressed.”

“We faked a lot of Swiss documents during the war,” he said, picking up the magnifying glass again. “Had to get the paper to match. The Nazis paid just as much attention to detail as we did. Let’s take a look at the handwriting.”