“We … you know, my family. They’d be horrified if they knew I was telling you. An outsider.” She smiled, as if at a fond memory. “Once I even ran my father’s car off the hard shoulder of the M4 at about ninety miles an hour. There was a dreadful row. The police came … Daddy was browned off something chronic. We never talk about that!”

Distracted, Storm took a quick, secret swipe at his nostril. He didn’t want her to see him streaming. He wanted to be perfect in her sight. “Is that all it was? You got depressed?”

“No,” she said, after a moment. “There was something else.” She studied the water again and he studied her, surprised at how hard it was for her simply to speak to him, to tell, wondering at it. “There are these people. They call themselves resurrectionists. Most of them are just professors and dealers and so on. But some of them operate more like … like spies and suchlike, in secret. Basically, they try to find the artworks that were plundered during the war. They try to recover them, get them back to their rightful owners. There are still thousands of them, masterpieces, missing, lost. It can be dangerous getting at them, you know, because the people who deal in them tend to be … unsavory, of course. Fascists, neo-Nazis. Or just thieves.” She looked at him directly, forcefully. As if it were an effort for her to do that too. And Storm kept wondering at it, thinking about it, how hard it was for her. “That night, after the party where you read that … that ghost story. One of them approached me. Outside. A man named Jon Bremer. He said that people had been killed because someone was trying to get The Magi—the Rhinehart panel, the one—”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“And that he had arranged to have it auctioned, here, in England, with the idea that it might draw the murderer out into the open.”

Jacob Hope, Storm thought. The Iago guy. The resurrectionist had obviously been right. But he waited to hear what she would say.

“And then he was killed, Bremer, that same night. They found his body in the river.” She inclined her head towards the water below. “And then my father told me we should buy the painting and I was in one of my black patches and I thought maybe he was responsible … for Bremer … for something. I don’t know what I thought now.”

Storm, pressing his arms close to himself against the cold, dug his hands deep in his pockets. Found, to his great relief, a crumpled Kleenex. Wiped his nose.

“Poor thing, you’re freezing,” said Sophia.

Shivering, he waved this off. “But did you know this guy, this Bremer?”

“No. I’d never met him before.”

“And he just came to you? Out of nowhere like that? Because you’re, like, a Rhinehart expert? What.”