His eyes lit. “That sounds reasonable.”

• • •

And that was how Roy Hubert Straitley became a felon. I, who had never even failed to bring back a library book on time, did knowingly and without remorse initiate the theft of a hundred and fifty Honours Boards, removed from the back of the Porter’s Lodge in batches of a dozen or so, and transported in Winter’s car to the basement of my house in Dog Lane, while I treated the Porter, Jimmy Watt, to a few rounds of drinks at the Scholar by way of a diversion.

I’d thought it would be difficult. In fact, it turns out that committing a crime is surprisingly easy. My accomplice did all the heavy work of stacking and unstacking the boards; I paid for Jimmy’s drinks (and two of Bethan’s ploughman’s lunches), and then I paid off Winter in cash and returned to Dog Lane for cocoa and a slice of pie, feeling at the same time victorious and a little uncomfortable.

Yes, I have crossed a line. Strangely, I feel no different. In fact, I feel better than I have felt since the first day of the term, when Johnny Harrington arrived to steal our past and our peace of mind. Those Honours Boards were not his to sell. I stole them from a criminal. And if the necessity arises, I shall steal all of St. Oswald’s, board by board, stone by stone, rather than let the upstart win.

The cocoa was pleasantly warming. I drank it in front of the living room fire, reading Harry’s journals and looking up from time to time at the object which had been his last gift to me, still sitting on my mantelpiece. Then I played his record again, and remembered the look on Devine’s face as he told me about the garden gnome that had haunted him throughout that term, popping up unexpectedly in his locker, on his desk, behind the wheel of his car, even outside his front door at midnight on a Saturday—

That gnome. Poor, hapless Dr. Devine. He had tried every means of exorcism. First he tried throwing the figure away. When that didn’t work, he threw it out of his Bell Tower window (in defiance of all Health and Safety) to smash onto the cobbles far below. But Harry Clarke had access to an unlimited number of duplicates, because the moment one gnome was purged, another emerged to take its place; an army of leering minions, their single weapon ridicule.

Dr. Devine’s annoyance grew—along with his discomfort—as gnome after gnome popped its impudent head out from stock cupboard and locker room; from briefcase, bookshelves, and flower beds, sometimes wearing a House tie, sometimes bearing a label—Peripatetic Gnomad, Gnomic Utterance, or simply Human G-gnome.