“You do a lot of hexercise,” commented Monsieur Valentin. “You seem like a tough boy, no? I wonder what you are doing, then, in a bookshop. Although I see you ’ave already removed all the major volumes that deal with war.”

It was true. Wolf had been digging through Leonard Levar’s extensive collection of books on Napoleon, as well as reading Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, and anything else with the word “war” in the title, and anything with pictures of battles on the front. He’d read the Bhagavad Gita, How to Use Your Enemies and the Tao Te Ching.

“And a lot of philosophy. What a strange boy you must be. I still think there is something hodd about you being ’ere, but I will hoverlook this for now, as long as you don’t mind me taking a few books. You can tell your huncle that I will return them as halways.”

“Okay,” said Wolf.

He wasn’t going to argue. He needed somewhere safe for Natasha to live, once he found her, and since he’d lost the apartment, this would have to do. It was awkward, though, having Monsieur Valentin prowling around. Wolf would have to find some subtle way of stopping it happening. Perhaps using advice from Machiavelli or another great strategist. Leonard Levar’s Antiquarian Bookshop was a very useful resource, and Wolf wasn’t going to give it up in a hurry. It had a connected phone that sometimes worked, and an ancient computer on which Wolf could call up BBS pages, although nowadays these usually crashed after about ten seconds. But he’d found some useful numbers to call about Natasha.

There was also a good supply of paper, envelopes and stamps for writing to Official Records in London. Wolf had also found an extremely ancient microfiche system and various collections of plastic slides, many of which were creepy but fascinating, with titles like “Records of Lost Children” and “Missing Orphans of the North.”

It turned out that lots of children went missing every year, and Leonard Levar had taken an unhealthily detailed interest in many of them. There were examples of children lost at sea, children lost on the moors, children lost in Quirin Forest, children who had been kidnapped by strangers or (more commonly) deranged family members, and a small but significant number of children who’d never returned from the Blessed Bartolo entrance exam.

The one thing all the missing children had in common was that someone had actually gone to the trouble to report their disappearance. No one had reported Natasha missing. But she had definitely gone. Wolf had been in touch with every school in the district, and not one of them had a Natasha Reed. Only one of them even had a Natasha, and she was the wrong age. Wolf’s mother must have taken her a long way away. But why? And where?