“He knows nothing of it,” Wilkie said. “And I would appreciate it if you didn’t mention your meeting with me to him. Not that I don’t trust him, of course. Splendid fellow. Sound as an oak. But in these cases, the fewer people who know the facts, the better. He is searching for Houdini, which is good, but I rather fear that he’ll not find him, or that his body will turn up weeks from now, probably quite unidentifiable.”

“Oh, dear,” I said. “Poor Bess.”

He nodded. “It will be hard for her, I agree. And it’s always harder not knowing, isn’t it? I’m glad you’re returning to her today. You can provide comfort as well helping us.”

I plucked up courage to mention something that had been going through my head, but that I hadn’t dared to ask before. “I don’t want to sound crass, but am I to be paid a fee for my services or am I supposed to be doing this for the good of the country?”

Wilkie threw back his head and laughed. “I do like you, Miss Murphy. You have none of the usual female sensibilities. Find us what we’re looking for and there will be a handsome fee.”

“Do you have any idea at all what you’re looking for?”

He shook his head. “None whatsoever. All we know from Houdini was that he’d discovered something important in Germany and that he wouldn’t share his news with anyone but me. I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful, but I don’t know whether this was information or something of substance like papers or drawings that he wanted to hand over.”

“You’re not giving me much to go on,” I said.

“All I can say is that some of the information may be contained in a magazine article he was writing. It may, of course, have been all in his head, in which case it is lost to us, but I suspect he’ll have wanted to show us some kind of proof. Now, these are the magazines I want you to look for.” And he opened his briefcase.

“Magazines?” I took them with interest. Conjurers’ Monthly. Mahatma magazine. The Dramatic Mirror. “I’ve seen these before. There were piles of them in their bedroom.”

“You have searched their bedroom?” He looked impressed, or was he amazed at my cheek?

“This morning. I wanted to see if there was any clue as to where Houdini might have gone. The police suspect that he was part of the murder plot, you see. And I rather thought that he and his brother might have planned it between them. I suspected it was a way to get rid of someone who was bothering them—threatening or demanding money, maybe. As you can see, we were all barking up the wrong tree.”