It wasn’t all good luck and Golden Goats. One night Asmo came back with wet hair, shivering in the early autumn chill, after a drac, in the middle of an otherwise perfectly civil interview, had abruptly pulled her right into the Rhône. The next day she saw the thing in the supermarket in the shape of a man, stocking its shopping cart with jars of anchovies. It winked at her merrily.

Plus somebody was stealing their hubcaps. Asmo thought it must be a local trickster-deity called Reynard the Fox. He was supposed to be some kind of anti-gentry, anti-clerical hero of the peasantry, but she just considered Him a pain in the ass.

One morning Julia saw Failstaff at breakfast looking as grim as she’d ever seen him. Over espresso and muesli he swore to her that he’d seen a black horse with a back as long as a school bus, with thirty crying children mounted on it, match speeds with them last night as they drove home in the van. It paced them for two solid minutes, sometimes trotting on the ground, sometimes galloping along up on power lines or across the treetops. Then it leaped straight into a river, kids and all. They stopped and waited, but it never came back up. Real, or illusion? They searched the papers for stories about missing kids, but they never found anything.

Most days the two groups would debrief at noon, over lunch for Pouncy’s team and breakfast for Asmo’s, who were out all night in the field most nights and got up late. Each side presented its data, and each side would feed what the other side had learned back into the next stage of its investigations. There was a certain amount of healthy competition between the two sides. Also some unhealthy competition.

“For fuck’s sake, Asmo,” Pouncy said one day in September, interrupting her mid-report. The hay fields all around the house were turning a toasted brown. “How is this getting us anywhere? If I have to hear one more word about that Golden fucking Goat I’m going to go mental. Absolutely mental. The Goat knows nothing. This whole region is just chickenshit! I would kill for something Greek. Anything. God, demigod, spirit, monster, I don’t even care what. A cyclops. There’s got to be a few of those things left. We’re practically on the Mediterranean!”

Asmodeus stared at him balefully across a table strewn with baguette crusts and smears of local jam. Her eyes looked hollow. She was wiped out from lack of sleep. A huge wasp, its legs dangling limply, airlifted from one jam smear to the next.

“No cyclops,” she said. “Sirens. I could get you a siren.”

“Sirens?” Pouncy brightened up. He banged the table with the flat of his hand. “Why didn’t you say so! That’s great!”