A silver medal.

A tube of lipstick.

A threepenny bit.

A brooch.

This was the final image.

The Spell Makers was a short film, perhaps half an hour long, probably unfinished. No end titles, no final credits, actors and crew members unnamed.

Hobbes changed the spools, rethreaded the film, and watched it again, or at least the first ten minutes. There was one image he wanted to examine in detail, now that he knew the story, or the lack of it, overall.

It was a kiss.

A kiss that took place in a darkened room, in a niche in the wall, hidden away: a kiss between brother and sister that went far beyond sibling kindness.

The Devil Himself

It was a kind of rage, a feeling that couldn’t be explained. It came to him on the train journey back towards London. Hobbes was reading his copy of A Spell of Darkness. He’d started it last night in bed, and read a good chunk of it on the outward journey. Now he read the book in a different light, comparing it to the film he’d just seen. The two were related, but not in any obvious way. Taken on their own, neither would have caused much concern, but together, the fact that they had connecting points made Hobbes think that some hidden event or series of events had led to them both, novel and film. Mary Estelle and her son Nicholas had reacted to this event each in their own particular way.

One question: what was this central event?

A second question: why did its true nature have to be kept hidden?

He started to skip through the pages, seeking keywords that would give him a deeper insight. The Parnell family were as damaged as the Graveses, perhaps more so, exaggerated into a Gothic expression of tangled vines and dripping wounds and illicit meetings in moonlit gardens, and dreams of monstrous beings and femmes fatales and stunted passions. Everything in the novel – the house, the belongings, the food, the flesh – was ruined, broken, rotten to the core. And as Hobbes read the words on page 164 – the room was too warm, the air too languid, nothing could be done, no movement made, and the night birds sang without melody on the branches of the birch trees – it all became too much. He thought of Jack Collingworth and how he’d ended up, through mistakes of his own, of course, but still. There had to be a better way to end a life on the force.

And he sat there, his eyes half closed to the landscape flashing by the train window, in speckles of sunlight. He was fighting the anger, as he could. Jack, Glenda, Martin, the Graveses and their madness. But another feeling waited its turn, in the shadows. Layers of desire. He peeled them back, without meaning to. The memories of last night came to him, of standing in that room at Bridlemere, holding the dress to his face … and he was ashamed, ashamed of his own behaviour.