And it was all empty. The huge kitchen could have housed a dozen cooks comfortably, but there was not so much as a pot-boy in sight, and no sign that anyone had been there. Alice let the door swing back into place and turned round, shaking her head.

The platters were gone. Her plate was gone, and the pitchers. Someone had wiped up the table where she’d let a bit of the ham juice drip. The whole thing gleamed, polished and perfect, as if it had never been used at all.

All right, Alice thought. She felt a fluttery, nervous feeling in the pit of her stomach, and that in turn made her feel irritated. Something very strange is going on here. She squared her shoulders and went to find out what.

Over the next several days, Alice explored the mansion from top to bottom, except for the parts that were behind locked doors. The dining room and kitchens, she discovered, were typical. The house was enormous, scrupulously clean, and empty.

There were rows of guest rooms on the second floor, all dusted and turned out as though visitors were expected at any moment. The corridor near her own room had quarters for an army of servants, none of which gave any sign of being lived in. Drawing rooms, sewing rooms, laundry rooms, rooms full of armchairs and small rickety tables of no obvious purpose, all as neat and uninhabited as an after-hours movie set.

Geryon lived in a suite of his own on the ground floor, and came out only rarely. Periodic awful stinks emerged from under his door, sometimes sick-sweet like something rotten, sometimes a vicious, bitter vapour that stung Alice’s eyes and made her nose run. When the old man did show himself, it was usually to speak to Mr Black, and he spared only a few, curt words for Alice.

Mr Black’s domain was the basement, which was reached via a passage from the kitchen. He spent nearly all his time down there, where he had something to do with maintaining the house’s gas and heating. More than that, Alice didn’t know, because he refused to answer any of her questions. If Geryon was curt, the huge man was downright rude, glowering at Alice whenever he spotted her as though she’d done something to offend him. Of course, his face seemed made for glowering, with its shaggy ruff of hair and huge bushy eyebrows.

Emma, by contrast, seemed to have no secrets, but Alice found her the hardest to understand. All her attempts to engage the girl in conversation had gone the way of their talk the day she’d arrived, tailing off quickly into uncomfortable silence. At first Alice had thought Emma was having her on. After a few days, she dismissed the idea, and decided the girl was just simple, but that didn’t quite fit either.