Max felt a bit winded. Somehow she had not quite believed, until her great-aunt spoke, that the sugary old lady had done this on purpose. She had been willing it to be some terrible mistake. But now that Great-Aunt Elodie had dropped the small smile, and clenched her gloved paws in her lap, Max suddenly found it all too easy to believe.

“So this was all you! You’re behind the Phantoms?” Max didn’t think she had ever loathed anybody this much. “Where’s Marguerite?”

For the benefit of Le Goff’s retreating ears, Great-Aunt Elodie said loudly, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, my dear. Do calm down.” Then her voice dropped back to its silky murmur – like shadows humming, like snails sharing secrets. “I have no idea, my dear, and I don’t care. Suzanne took care of her, I presume. She is very efficient at handling people who get in the way.”

Suzanne! So she was in league with Max’s great-aunt! It must have been her, then, who had been “efficient” with Rupert, when he wouldn’t leave her alone. Max struggled to hold everything straight in her head. “So she is Suzanne?” she said. “Not Celeste Le Blanc?”

Great-Aunt Elodie’s eyes fixed on Max for a full half-second before darting off again. “I don’t know why you know that name, Maximilienne. You seem to be a meddler. I wrote letters to Celeste Le Blanc, but she doesn’t exist. The letters were addressed to an abandoned house. That way, even if anyone suspected that Suzanne was one of us, they still wouldn’t find our letters. I prefer letters to phone calls after the fiasco with the tiara, but we still have to be very careful.”

“Then how did Suzanne get…” Max began – and then she suddenly remembered Klaus’s voice: Suzanne Leroy, works at the post office… Of course! If Suzanne worked at the post office, then she didn’t need to wait for the letters to arrive. She had been able to take them before they were even delivered.

Great-Aunt Elodie ignored the half question. She seemed to be speaking to herself now, as much as Max. “Celeste is quite a new creation. We had to switch addresses and names when we found our old route was being tampered with,” she said, pouting, as if this had been very unfair. “I suppose that was your precious Marguerite. Anyway, after we discovered that, we could hardly risk Suzanne smuggling the diamond herself. Even if she changed trains, the snoop might follow her – we didn’t know how much they knew about us. We needed to change our plan invisibly, so that they wouldn’t even realize we had changed it.”