“You’re actually invested in this, aren’t you?” This was a real treat for my cousin, I could tell. “Which of your friends has gone off the deep? Is it Wellbelove? Because I could find religion with Wellbelove. I could bleed from the palms, if you catch my meaning.”

I pretended that I didn’t. Once Dev starts on Agatha, he never stops. “Will you send me the name of your grandmother’s guy?” I asked. “And Máire’s, too. Could you find out?”

“Yeah, yeah. Will you come out to the pub with us? Before term starts? You can even bring Snow. I heard he’s slowly turning into a dragon; can he still have a drink? Can he still take it up the—”

I cut him off. “Who told you that, the dragon thing?”

“My grandmother. She saw it on Facebook. Is it true?”

At the moment, Simon was sitting across from me, eating toast. There was melted butter running down his wrist. I held out a napkin.

“He can still have a drink,” I said.

Simon took the napkin, then licked the butter off his arm.

“Excellent,” Dev said. “I’ll call you next week. Cheers.”

“Cheers,” I said, hanging up.

“Who was that?” Simon asked, sucking on his thumb.

“One of my cousins,” I said, taking a piece of his toast. “Dev.”

“Dev from school? Your little minion?”

“If you like.”

Simon hadn’t made any tea. I got up to start it.

“So Dev is your cousin…” he asked. “Huh. He doesn’t look Egyptian.”

“Because he’s not.”

“Aren’t you?”

I was standing at the sink, filling the kettle, but I glanced Snow’s way. “You understand how cousins work, right?”

I turned off the tap, careful not to drop my toast. “I think our great-grandparents were siblings … Mine became headmaster at Watford—Tyrannus Pitch, I’m named after him. Tyrannus grew up in Hampshire and married a woman from Egypt—Karima Pitch—famously powerful. Like, legendary.”

I flipped on the kettle, and reached for two mugs, setting them on the counter. “They had a few kids. Two of them of them moved to Egypt. One stayed and became another Watford headmaster—you’ve seen his picture in the Weeping Tower, Balthazar. My grandmother was his second wife. She moved here from Sicily. Adolorata, another staggering witch. I can sort of remember her, she died the year before my mother was killed—”

I stopped myself. This was probably too much information. Literally no one is as interested in Pitch family history as I am.

But when I looked back at Simon, he was rapt.

“Anyway,” I said, winding it up. “Dev’s line goes off in the other direction. They’re mostly from Cornwall, I think. My ancestors married for power. His were all about dosh.” I took another bite of my toast.

Simon looked like I’d just given him huge news. “Baz … I didn’t know you were Italian.”