Alex nodded. “All the originals. I still have the set of photocopies I made for you to work from to preserve their age. I left nothing out for them—that I know of.”

“How nervous should we be of these people, Alex?”

“I wish I knew.” He hesitated. “You’ve had excellent instincts about all this so far. Do you get the feeling there’s more?”

She took off her rubber gloves and leaned against the sink. “You still haven’t told me about the answer you arrived at from Will’s first sheet. You told me you’d cracked it too—I would guess rather differently from my own take on it?”

Alex took her hand and led her to the bookshelves in the hall. “Can you find a Bible?” They both hunted, and she came up with a slightly worn cover that was inscribed inside for Alex’s Christening, “Palm Sunday, 1970,” from his godparents. “Yes, good—it’s a King James.” She followed him to the sofa and Alex talked her through it.

“Like you, I got the first part as: ‘Will, I am.’ I assumed it meant that it was for Will. Then I started thinking about someone whose alpha and omega were the same day; and I thought straight away of Shakespeare—the period was right, and the given name. So I checked, and I was right to remember he was probably born on April twenty-third, and he died that day too; so it seemed a chance. I thought of the ‘song of equal number in the Old King’s Book’ and decided it might be Psalms, after the Song of Solomon yielded nothing. So I tried the famous Psalm twenty-three, and looked at it, and played with the counting in it: nothing. But look what happens if you double the number twenty-three, to make of the two halves—or ‘birth day’ and ‘death day’—a whole number.”

“Forty-six?” Lucy flicked through to find Psalm 46, and they looked at each other as a folded piece of palm, wrought into the shape of a cross, came free from the fold of the page. “They make these on Palm Sunday. Has it been here since your christening?”

Alex shook his head in disbelief. “Curious…marking that place. Count the same number of paces forward from the start: and tell me what you get.”

Lucy’s nail counted forty-six words from the start, and she looked at him half smiling: “‘Shake’? You’re not going to tell me that if I count the same number from the end…?”

“Omit the exit word, do you remember? It’s ‘Selah’ in this copy; but it’s ‘Amen’ in the one at my flat that Will had packed in his rucksack.”

Lucy followed instructions, trembling as her finger hovered over the forty-sixth word: “spear.” “Alex, you’re a genius. But is this for real?”