Samuel took a moment to get his bearings. They were in the games department, and it didn’t look like any of the board games, tennis rackets, or cricket bats were about to come to murderous life. The walls, he saw, were decorated with life-size cardboard models of characters from nursery rhymes. He recognized Miss Muffet sitting on her tuffet, Humpty Dumpty on his wall, and Little Bo Peep along with assorted sheep. At the very rear of the floor was another flight of stairs. A thin figure watched them from halfway up it.

“Look!” said Samuel. “It’s that Mr. St. John-Cholmondeley.”

“He doesn’t look very happy,” said Constable Peel. “Then again, half of his doll department is in pieces on the ground floor.”

Sergeant Rowan stood up. He unbuttoned the top left-hand pocket of his jacket and from it removed his notebook.

“Oh, he’s in trouble now,” said Constable Peel to Samuel. “Once that notebook comes out it’s not going back in the pocket without someone’s name being written down.”

Sergeant Rowan coughed and licked his pencil. It hung poised over the notebook like the Sword of Damocles.⁴²

“Right you are, Mr. St. John-Cholmondley,” said Sergeant Rowan. “I’d appreciate it if you’d join me here for a moment and explain just what’s going on.”

“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” said Mr. St. John-Cholmondeley. “The answer you seek can only be found by moving higher into the store. The truth lies on the top floor.”

“Well, sir, we don’t have time to be running around chasing answers and truth. We’re policemen, not philosophers. I think you should come down with us to the station and we’ll have a chat about it all over a nice cup of tea in one of the cells. Why don’t you just open the doors and stop all of this nonsense, there’s a good gentleman. In the meantime, I’m going to write your name in my notebook as a ‘person of interest.’ ”

Sergeant Rowan was just about to do that when he noticed that his pencil was gone.

“Here, who’s made off with my pencil?” he asked as his notebook was yanked from his hand and disappeared into the shadows on the ceiling, leaving only a sticky residue on Sergeant Rowan’s fingers. He pulled at it, and saw that it was spiderweb. He looked again at the ceiling, and noticed that the shadows on it appeared to be moving.

“Ah,” he said. “Right.”

Mr. St. John-Cholmondeley smiled at them from the stairs, then skipped up to the next floor. Samuel barely noticed him go because another figure was moving toward them. It was coming from where the cardboard model of Miss Muffet used to be, except the model was no longer on the wall.

What appeared before them was not Miss Muffet, the beloved figure of nursery-rhyme fame.⁴³ Either this one loved spiders an awful lot or she hadn’t run away fast enough when the first one appeared, and it had brought lots of friends along with it for company. She was dressed entirely in black, and wore a veil over her face, a veil that, as she drew closer, was revealed to be made, not from fabric, but from spider silk. The little black spiders that crawled across it, and the dead flies trapped in it, gave the game away on that front. More spiders poured from her sleeves and from beneath her skirts: brown ones, black ones, red ones, yellow ones. There were webs between her fingers, and webs under her arms. Beneath her veil of black spider silk her features were almost entirely concealed by sticky white strands, with only the vaguest of holes torn in them for her eyes and her mouth.