“Agreed,” he said at last, all anger gone from his voice. “Valkyrie, would you be able to arrange that?”

She nodded slowly. These abrupt changes of mood were becoming unsettling.

“Excellent. If we’re lucky, one of those three possibilities will lead to Scarab. Call if you find anything out. Valkyrie?”

She led the way out of the shop. The night was cold, but at least it hadn’t started to rain yet. They walked to the Bentley.

“I could have said something,” Skulduggery told her.

“What?”

“You said I could have said something, once I realised Scarab had been framed. I was agreeing with you.”

“So why didn’t you?”

They reached the car. He unlocked it, but they didn’t get in.

“When the war started,” he said, “I was flesh and blood. I was a father and a husband first, and a soldier second. When Serpine killed my family, killed me, that changed. I came back a soldier. The war was all I had.

“I didn’t like Esryn Vanguard and I didn’t agree with him. I saw him as a weakening influence that we couldn’t afford to tolerate. If he continued to make his speeches, to try to negotiate with Mevolent, I truly felt we would have lost the war.

“I found out, a few years later, that Meritorious’s suspicions had been correct. Mevolent planned to accept the peace that Vanguard was preaching then move his people into position and strike against his enemies in one bloody night. I happen to take some comfort from that – the knowledge that what Meritorious did was, essentially, the right thing to do.”

“So you approved of him ordering the murder of an innocent man?”

“We were fighting a war,” Skulduggery said. “Harsh decisions had to be made every day. This was one of them.”

The first raindrops of the night fell. Valkyrie didn’t move.

“I have done terrible things in my life, Valkyrie. Things that haunt me. Some of those things I had to do. Some…I didn’t. But I did them anyway. For my sins I should have stayed on the other side of that portal, where I belonged. I should have been hunted and tortured until my bones turned to dust. But you came into hell and you brought me back. I may disappoint you, but you have never disappointed me. And you never will.”

He got in the car. A few seconds later she did too. They drove.

She slept in the Bentley, seat back and using her coat as a blanket. When she woke, just after dawn, her dream slipped away from her and she sat up.

“Bad dream?” Skulduggery asked.

“Was it? I can’t remember.”

“Sounded like a nightmare from all that muttering. Not that you could be blamed for having nightmares.”