She notices them within ten steps. There is no cover, just the open narrow passage between wall and poolside. They are walking slowly on the wet, uneven ground, sunk and cracked in places, smeared with sewage muck. Thomas sees Lady Naylor squint; sees her hand flicker for something, raise it up before her chest, then drop it to her lap upon recognition. Each step reveals a new detail. Lady Naylor has made herself cozy amongst the dirt; she is sitting in an armchair, a wineglass and a bottle on a coffee table by her side. It’s a wonder she has not brought her slippers. By her other elbow, a worktable, made presentable by means of a starched tablecloth and laden with various instruments. The dark shape of her Soot bottle rises amongst them. At the other end of the table, Grendel stoops over the boy, assiduously wiping his brow. Halfway across the length of the room, Thomas begins to make out Mowgli’s face, sweaty and feverish, and the spasmodic shivers that pit his little body against the restraints. He thinks of Renfrew’s dentist chair; of Renfrew’s niece as described by Charlie; and wonders darkly whether there exists a world in which children are not bent to purpose by a strap. Something — a needle? — grows like a mechanical tumour out of the boy’s naked flank, at the height of the liver. Grendel is fussing with it: solicitous, chin curled into chest, as though bowing to the child.

It’s another ten steps before Livia starts speaking. She has to shout: the spongy walls soak up all sound. It is Grendel she is addressing, not her mother. Thomas, behind her, walks through her anger as through morning mist.

“You lied to me, Grendel!” she shouts and they watch him flinch with a second’s delay. “But what is worse, you lied to Mowgli. He trusted you. Now look at him. Why are you hurting him?”

Grendel stares across the forty, fifty steps still separating them, flaps one hand, unchanged in the mildness of his gestures.

“He has a fever, you see. Lady Naylor says his organs are changing. But not to worry, it will be over soon.”

“She wants to bleed him, Grendel. Bleed him dry. And you are helping her.” Then bitterly, Livia’s Smoke coming thick now and settling in frothy billows on the uneven floor: “They were right about you all along. You are a monster, Grendel. You were supposed to love him.”