“Well, quite.” His grandfather waved an exasperated hand. “This is the one from Cambridge University. Lady Holding a Plate is the title. Sums it up, I suppose. By the Dutch artist Godfried Schalcken. So: you’ve got your Rubens, a religious scene by a Flemish painter from 1615-ish; an anonymous painting made around 1880; and this, a painting by a Dutch artist in 1680, of a woman holding, as you so rightly say, a waffle. I’m stumped as to what the connection might be. Don’t suppose there’s anything screaming out at you, is there? I mean, even shapes, colors, anything.”

Alex sat chin in hand, looking from one to the other. “How many did you say they’d stolen, eight?”

The old man nodded.

“Does Harry have pictures of them all?”

With his grandfather’s guidance, Alex found images of all the stolen paintings: a landscape, a seascape, ruined buildings, figures, faces, the saved and the damned, the sky about to rain, a waffle. Eventually, he had to admit defeat. He turned to his grandfather with a helpless shrug.

“No.” The old man sighed. “You know, I even managed to take a quick X-ray of the picture Harry saved. Broke into a dentist’s near your mother’s the other night. I was convinced there must be some other image or message hidden beneath . . . but nothing I could see. Although, it wasn’t the ideal equipment.”

As the old man spoke, Alex flicked through the images again, snapping a picture of each on his phone.

“Okay.” His grandfather nodded. “Now there’s something I want you to listen to.” He dug from his bag a small gray box—it took Alex a moment to identify it as an old Dictaphone-style tape recorder. “Harry left two messages on the machine I keep at my place in Paris,” the old man said. “He knows I check it. One to tell me he’d got on their trail. Then this. I recorded it over the phone.” He clicked PLAY. “Harry’s last message.”

There was the drone of a car, then Harry’s voice, breathless and tense:

“It’s ’Arry. An’ this’d be another good example of one of them times it would be ’andy if you’d agree to carry a bloody phone. I’m still in the forest, but getting out. Uh, road southeast of the Kandel, ’eadin’ for—”

“What does he mean?” Alex asked. “What’s the candle?”

“Kan-del, with a K,” his grandfather replied, pausing the tape. “A mountain in Germany. The Black Forest. That’s another worrying fact.”

“Why?”

“The Black Forest, Alex. Wonderful place. But it’s also a place where things have happened.” He resumed the tape.