“He’s got it,” she said.

She heard Storm and Bernard and Sophia all let their breath out at once. She tipped the stem of her pipe at them.

“Tonight, after full dark, Bernard and I will go to Lonsdale Square.”

Storm curled his fingers into a fist, thumped it softly on the tabletop. “What about me?” he said.

Harper turned her head to look first at him, then at Sophia.

“You have another job,” she said. She sighed. “Before we can get to the end of this business, it’s necessary for us to get to the beginning of it. And I have reason to believe that that involves the suicide of Ann Endering.”

“My mother?” Sophia said. “What has she got to do with it?”

“That’s what I don’t know,” Harper told her. “But it’s possible your father does.”

Sophia drew back, drew erect, stared at her.

“My friends,” said Harper slowly, “I’m afraid I must ask you to go out to Belham Grange.”

2

Dr. Mormo hung up the phone. He sat there on the floor, disgruntled. His round, bloated face was pale. His round, bloated belly, under a sweat-stained shirt of shiny gold, was gurling ominously. The trouble with working for the devil, he reflected bitterly, is that you get paid the wages of sin.

He sat cross-legged. His black pentagram banner was spread out on the carpet before him. His black candles were lit, the low flames wavery. A stuffed goat’s head sat to one side of him, its glass eyes flickering with the light.

And between them, in the center of the pentagram, sat the Madonna.

The panel was in a box, the box was standing open. The candlelight played over the features of the virgin, spread into Rhinehart’s tangled brown background and breathed it to tenebrous life. The tubby warlock brooded over the picture gloomily.

Mary was in the winter woods. She was down on one knee, clasping her hands together. She was clothed in drapery of royal blue, which set her off from the stark snarl of lifeless branchwork all around her, and from the great, twisted dead oak that hung over her, like threatening doom. Her face was round, fleshy, Bavarian, a peasant’s face, but with pale eyes mystic and tender. She had a lovely, distant smile.

Looked more like a fairy-tale princess than the Queen of Heaven, Mormo thought. Looked more like Snow White in the Disney movie than anything.

He could hardly wait to get the holy bitch out of here.

He reached up, grabbed hold of the bedstead. Grunting, he hoisted himself off the floor. “Too old for this,” he grumbled miserably. His bare feet white beneath the cuffs of his dirty corduroys, he padded to the bedroom door and out into the hall.