“Oh, Dunny, what a coarsely melodramatic mind you have! Vengeance! If I had been as big an oddity as you are I would have embraced Boy Staunton and thanked him for what he had done for me. The means may have been a little rough, but the result is entirely to my taste. If he hadn’t hit my mother on the head with that snowball—having hidden a rock in it, which was dirty play—I might now be what my father was: a Baptist parson in a small town. I have had my ups and downs, and the downs were very far down indeed, but I am now a celebrity in a limited way, and I am a master of a craft, which is a better thing by far. I am a more complete human being than you are, you old fool. I may not have had a very happy sex-life, but I certainly have love and friendship, and much of the best of that is in bed with me at this moment. I have admiration, which everybody wants and very few people achieve. I get my living by doing what I most enjoy, and that is rare indeed. Who gave me my start? Boy Staunton! Would I murder such a man? It is to his early intervention in my life I owe what Liesl calls the Magian World View.

“Vengeance, you cry. If anybody wanted vengeance, it was you, Dunny. You lived near Staunton all your life, watched him, brooded over him, saw him destroy that silly girl you wanted—or thought you wanted—and ill-wished him a thousand times. You’re the man of vengeance. I never wanted vengeance in my life for anything.”

“Magnus! Remember how you withheld death from Willard when he begged for it! What did you do today to poor Roly Ingestree? Don’t you call that vengeance?”

“I admit I toyed with Roly. He hurt people I loved. But if he hadn’t come back into my life by chance I should never have bothered about him. I didn’t harbour evidence of his guilt for sixty years, as you harboured that stone Staunton put in the snowball.”

“Don’t twist, Magnus! When you and Staunton left my room at the College to go back to your hotel you took that stone, and when next it was seen the police had to pry it out of poor Staunton’s jaws, where it was clenched so tight they had to break his teeth to get at it!”

“I didn’t take the stone, Dunny; Staunton took it himself.”

“Did he?”

“Yes. I saw him. You were putting your box back in the bookshelves. The box that contained my mother’s ashes. Dunny, what on earth made you keep those ashes? It was ghoulish.”

“I couldn’t bear to part with them. Your mother was a very special figure in my life. To me she was a saint. Not just a good woman, but a saint, and the influence she had in my life was miraculous.”

“So you’ve often told me, but I knew her only as a mad-woman. I had stood at the window of our miserable house trying not to cry while Boy Staunton and his gang shouted ‘Hoor!’ as they passed on their way to school.”