No man is a hero to his valet. . Not because the hero is no hero, but because the valet is a valet.

GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH HEGEL, LECTURES ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY (1837)

DEMONS

DEMONS

Please, Mrs. Grendel! You must let us out at once. You have no right. And it is very important that we catch up with them. The little boy is in danger. Please. We insist.”

Livia listens to her own words and frowns.

We are speaking to Mrs. Grendel as though she is stupid.

Mrs. Grendel is not stupid. In fact her account of the situation is remarkably lucid. She tells them that the previous evening, as he returned to his hotel, Sebastian noticed a man in the foyer who, while pretending to read, studied Sebastian’s ascent up the stairs with uncommon interest. When Sebastian returned to the front desk some hours later, under the pretext of asking for his mail, the man was still there, reading the same paper. Sebastian concluded that he had been discovered and placed under surveillance. Indeed he was followed when he left his lodgings early that morning, but, using the sewer as a shortcut, he managed to lose his pursuers. He came, informed Lady Naylor, considered “going into hiding,” but resolved to return to his rooms instead. As long as he was under surveillance, he argued, the authorities’ energies were tied up and they would not dare to make too obvious a search of the sewer system. Lady Naylor was left in charge of what he (playfully, in Mrs. Grendel’s opinion childishly) called “the operation.” The lady, in turn, decided not to delay any further and had left an hour previously, taking Grendel along. All this her husband told Mrs. Grendel that very evening just as she is now relaying it to them. Mr. Grendel did not, it appears, invite Mrs. Grendel’s own thoughts on the matter.

“But where did she take Mowgli?” Charlie mutters. “It’s too early. Lady Naylor said seventy-two hours. It hasn’t been much more than fifty.”

The voice beyond the door is unmoved by his reasoning.

“I don’t know about that. Perhaps she lied. People do.”