‘Her doing so knocked me out of my trance, broke the connection. There would have been that silver stuff that only you can see all over the place. I felt angry at her, though I was careful not to show it, because right before she’d arrived I’d realized that I could control the power I’d encountered. It was ancient and confused and, above all, asleep, in some way which went beyond all our definitions of sleep. It was terrifying, but also completely vulnerable.’ Quill remembered his vision of the stone being slammed shut, of the once-powerful wise woman now locked away. ‘Later that night I contacted it again. I dominated it, learned how to shape the power that flooded into me, to the point where I could afford to give it limited freedom, like a horse I’d broken. I let it make a body for itself in front of me, an energy form that was spun together out of this golden thread in mid-air, deliberately a body I could see, that others would only see when I wanted them to. I thought then that it was going to be like Caliban out of The Tempest, that I’d send it flying around doing invisible errands. I tried a bit of that, actually, but it wasn’t very satisfying.’

‘But then someone started getting angry at the influence you were exerting over Members of Parliament. Someone started making plans.’

‘And I knew that my servant could help with that, yes.’ Vincent looked almost irritated, as if he was being misunderstood. ‘But, listen, you have to believe me: Spatley really went out of his way to get himself killed. I’d been observing his dreaming mind for months, hoping his plan to come after me would stay in the realm of Lib Dem daydreams. But he started to put real work into it, to make a mental map of what I was up to. I had to do something.’

‘And you didn’t go straight for the fatal option, I’ll give you that. This is where Mary Arthur comes in, isn’t it?’

Vincent smiled, seeming to appreciate Quill’s insight into his cleverness. ‘I took a look at his sexual fantasies and set up a honey trap catering to them – a prostitute who did the full schoolgirl thing, who was, as you say, Mary Arthur. What I didn’t expect was that he’d end up telling her everything he’d found out about me. And that then she’d be sensible enough to go into hiding immediately.’

‘And you can only read people’s sleeping minds when you know where they are. Given that you make use of the same device, I assume that you also need to know where they are to send the Ripper after them?’

‘Exactly!’ Vincent pointed excitedly at Quill. ‘Spatley, in the wake of the honey trap, was going to move against me immediately. So he simply had to die.’