It was just very hard to think of any reason why an apparently normal person would set so many demons loose—in central London during peak pub hours! God, in a school!—without arriving quite quickly at Is he some sort of insane evil murderer? And there was a difference, there was a difference, between being a posh dickhead and being a bloodthirsty monster. Surely there was a difference. Walden had spent her whole life in a series of elite educational institutions, circles that overlapped quite closely with the posh dickhead type. She would have noticed.

Or perhaps not. There was a lot she hadn’t noticed. She’d needed a teenager to point out the obvious possibility she was missing. Brilliant, brilliant Nikki, not even done with her A-levels, but able to think in a straight line, which was more apparently than Walden could do—stupid, stupid! She was so stupid! She felt so stupid—

This was the problem, of course, with staking your personal and professional identity entirely on being fantastically clever. It made it much harder to keep control when it turned out you weren’t.

Walden dropped the pieces of the broken umbrella. The Phoenix, simply by snapping it, had undone the luring curse as neatly as the ten minutes of counterspelling that Walden would have gone for. Ten minutes was not time she had. Mark was on the school site and apparently capable of anything. Six hundred children were also on the site. This was a child protection issue, a critical and immediate safeguarding concern. Walden should—

—get help, report to David, phone the police, call the fucking Marshals now, now, now! clamoured a voice in the back of her thoughts.

She barely heard it. Walden had had plenty of practice, these last few months, ignoring little voices in her thoughts.

—should find him, she thought coldly.

And kill him.

And eat him.

She walked along the village road half-dreaming. A white Ford Transit van went speeding past in the direction of Chetwood village, so close behind her on the pedestrian crossing that she felt the wind of it in her hair. It was doing seventy through the twenty-an-hour school zone. Walden glanced after it for a second or two. She heard the bang just over the ridge as the van developed loud, sputtering engine problems.

There were a lot of snowdrops coming up. Every January they came back, little white spikes of defiance against the cold. Though this January had not been as cold as some. It felt wrong, seeing the daffodils start to put up tall green shoots this early.

As she had the thought, the daylight chilled and clarified. Clouds etched black shapes on the white horizon. The air was crisp and hard to breathe. Walden dusted her muddy hands on her warm coat and put them back in her pockets.