“It seems I’ve met someone even less comfortable with the fey stuff than I am myself,” he said. He sounded grimly amused. “How inconvenient it must be for you to possess that gift when you don’t want it.”

“It’s not funny,” Lizzie said crossly. “And anyway, I thought you just said you didn’t believe in it?”

“I didn’t say I didn’t believe in it,” Arthur said, “just that I wasn’t comfortable with it. There’s no point in denying something that is patently obvious even if both of us would prefer it not to exist.”

“Yeah, we’re stuck with it,” Lizzie said. “I promise not to invade your privacy with my mind tricks. It’ll be fine as long as we don’t touch each other.”

“Right,” Arthur said, with a scrupulous courtesy that for some reason made her feel even more hot and bothered.

“Returning to Johnny,” she said frostily. She couldn’t immediately see how Johnny’s gift of telepathic communication with Amelia was relevant to what had happened the previous night. It had certainly given him a greater understanding and acceptance of her own gift of psychometry, and yet Lizzie felt that there had to be more to it than that. She knew there was. She just couldn’t see the connection yet...

“When Johnny left last night, he took with him a stone carving that had originally come from Oakhangar Hall,” she said. She shifted uncomfortably. “You may remember at Amelia and Dudley’s wedding... There was an angel holding a crystal gazing ball. It smashed and cut my hand—the glass ball, I mean. You patched me up.” She tried to sound as casual as she could. “Someone must have slipped the angel into my bag thinking it was mine because I found it much later and never got around to handing it back.” Embarrassed, she avoided Arthur’s gaze. “Anyway, like I said, Johnny took it last night.”

“Sure, I remember,” Arthur said. “Do you mean you gave the carving back to Johnny last night—or he took it?”

“He took it,” Lizzie said bluntly. “Technically, of course, it wasn’t mine in the first place. But I didn’t realise until later that he had stolen it back. I thought I should tell you in case it had any significance.” She waited, hopeful, but after a second Arthur shook his head.

“I don’t know why he would do that,” he said. He met her eyes. “Presumably you didn’t tell the police that bit because...”

“Because I didn’t think it would help the situation to suggest that your brother was a thief,” Lizzie said, “for a number of reasons.”

“I guess that’s true,” Arthur conceded. “Well, there must be a good reason he wanted it, but—” He stopped, frowning.

“He knew where it came from,” Lizzie said, “and he knew I had it. The more I think about it, the more I think the whole evening—the whole ‘I want to talk to Lizzie Kingdom’ thing—was all about getting it back.” She leaned forward, eager to try to explain. “At one point in the conversation Johnny said that the evening wasn’t really how he’d imagined it would be. He said I was being so nice, which made it more difficult. But he didn’t say what was difficult. At the time I assumed it was because he wanted to hate me for monopolising Dudley and upsetting Amelia in the process, but now I wonder... I wonder if all along he was planning to steal the stone angel and he felt bad about it.”