Lizzie took a deep breath. The notebook might be able to tell her something if she was willing to use her gift. It might give a clue to Johnny’s feelings when he wrote in it and that in turn might help work out where he was and what was going on.

She felt a ripple of apprehension at what might happen if she employed the psychometry but Johnny—and Arthur—were more important than her fears. Very deliberately she pressed one palm to the cover of the book, the palm that so long ago had been cut by the shards of glass when the crystal smashed. She kept her mind light and empty; open to images, thoughts and emotions. She felt the cool smoothness of the paper against her fingers, the slight creases and the rough edges of the pages. She waited.

The images, when they came, were overpowering. Lizzie felt Johnny’s emotions like a blow to her stomach. It was such a complicated mixture, his eagerness and determination, desperation and terror, all connected in some way to the notes he had made in the book. She could sense that there was something that Johnny wanted so badly that it literally made him feel sick with longing and fear, and yet the desire for it drove him onward.

The sensations shifted and Lizzie saw her own past then, saw the gazing ball and the carved stone angel in the hall at Oakhangar on the day of the wedding. She saw the moment she touched the angel’s wing and the crystal ball exploded into shards. The images were like a film running through her head on a loop. And then she saw something else: six-year-old Johnny on the staircase at Oakhangar as he peered through the bannisters, watching her.

She came back to herself, and the flat was warm and bright with lamplight yet the shudders still racked her. The notebook had slid unnoticed from her lap and was lying on the bedcover once again, the pages fanned out. Lizzie stared at it, trying to make sense of the images she had witnessed and the feelings she had experienced. It seemed clear that Johnny had seen what had happened that day. He’d seen her touch the stone angel and he’d seen the crystal ball shatter. Perhaps he’d also witnessed someone putting the stone angel in her bag later in the general fuss and confusion, and that was how he had known she had it. He’d asked her about it to get her version of the story and perhaps to see if she would own up to having it.

What she couldn’t understand was how the stone angel connected to the emotions she had experienced in the vision, Johnny’s emotions. The sense of desperation and longing had been so acute. She could not begin to unravel them. Perhaps the clues to that lay in the book itself but she didn’t want to touch it again just yet. She felt completely exhausted, as though the psychometry had drained her of all energy.