At the center of the room was a row of high marble tables where the bodies of the deceased were laid out for examination. Here Amos Gladstone and Basil Pounceby had been brought to be examined, Cordelia thought, and Filomena as well. Only one table was occupied now. Cordelia told herself that lying there, draped in lengths of pristine white fabric, was what was left of her father, but she could not quite make herself believe it.

Shall we begin? asked Enoch, approaching the table.

“Yes,” said Sona. She stood close to Alastair, his arm around her for support, her hand on her rounded belly. Her eyes were wide and haunted, but when she spoke, her voice was clear. She kept her chin level as Enoch slowly drew back the long white sheets to reveal Elias’s body. He wore his old brown coat, the lapels peeled back to show a shabby white shirt beneath, stained heavily with blood. His skin was ashen, as if drained of blood: his hair and stubble looked dirty gray, like an old man’s.

“How did he die?” said Alastair, his gaze fixed on his father’s body. “Like the others?”

Yes. He was stabbed repeatedly with a sharp knife. His wounds are identical to those we discovered on the bodies of Filomena di Angelo and Basil Pounceby.

Alastair stared stonily at Elias. Cordelia said, “Was it a fight? A battle between him and his attacker?”

His attacker approached from the front, as deduced from a study of his wounds. There is no sign that a fight took place. There were no weapons at the scene, and there is no evidence on the body to suggest that Elias Carstairs drew a weapon.

“He was probably too drunk,” Alastair muttered.

Perhaps. There was no kindness in Enoch’s voice, and also no cruelty. There was no emotion at all. Or perhaps he knew the person who attacked him. We see from wounds on his hands that he raised them to protect himself, but by then it was too late, as he had already received a mortal wound.

“I don’t understand,” Sona said in a hoarse whisper.

“He means,” Cordelia said, “that Father waited until the last moment to defend himself.”

“But why?” Sona’s voice rose in anguish. She caught at the material of Elias’s coat, fisting it in her hand. “Why did you not fight, Elias? You, who slew a Greater Demon—”

“Mother, don’t,” Alastair said. “He isn’t worth it—”

Cordelia could bear it no longer. Wrenching her hand free of James’s, she hurried out of the Ossuarium: away from the gray wax figure of her dead father, away from her sobbing mother.

Just past the stone square outside the Ossuarium was a narrow corridor. Cordelia turned down it, only to find herself confronted by the sight of a long, thin passage, twisting away into utter blackness. It was foreboding enough to stop her in her tracks. She slumped against one of the walls, the cold from the stone seeping through the wool of her coat.