In the purplish glare of the fluorescents, she saw at once the cook’s knife gleaming on the kitchen tiles. There was a small puddle beside it. Harper moved to the puddle. Her knees cracked as she knelt down over it. She sniffed. Wrinkled her nose. Urine. The weight of dread inside her grew heavier still. Poor old Jervis, she thought. He must have been very scared when they came for him. And no doubt, he had good reason.

She went back—through the ransacked sitting room, to the foyer, to the foot of the stairs. She looked up grimly where they rose before her into blackness.

She moved to the foot of them. Started up.

She climbed slowly, step by hesitant step, almost blind, her stick probing before her. She could not help but picture the scene as if she were watching it from the front row of a cinema. Richard Storm himself might have filmed something exactly like it. The apparently deserted house, throbbing with danger. The old woman climbing the steps into a threatening gloom. You idiot, she would be thinking to herself as she munched her popcorn. Don’t go. Get out. Run to a phone. Call the police.

Which was pretty much exactly what she was thinking to herself.

She reached the top, stepped up onto the landing. Shadows and darkness. Blackness, down the hallway to her right. To her left, a low, orange, wavering glow: candlelight. She forced herself to head towards it.

She shuffled unsteadily over the runner, one hand reaching out to guide herself along the wall. She expected the sudden onslaught of Iago’s minions any moment.

But the onslaught didn’t come. She reached the glowing doorway and looked in.

The candle was on the floor at the foot of a four-poster bed. A single black candle, burned nearly down. Its orange glow danced, reflected, in the glass eyes of a stuffed goat’s head. The thing was staring up at her from atop a black silk banner with a silver pentagram in its center.

A box sat on the pentagram. Its lid was open. Harper had to step closer before she could see what was inside.

She stepped closer. She saw. And her whole body went acid with fear.

There was a photograph in the box. A black-and-white snapshot of a woman holding a baby in her arms. Harper could not remember whether she had ever seen the photograph before. But she knew the woman’s face well enough. She recalled the desperate eagerness of her eyes, the tremulous misery of her smile. She recognized the beauty of her youth though she had watched it decay and crumble in the mirror with unnatural speed, almost overnight.

The photograph was scarred and partly covered by a mark drawn over it in black ink. Something like a horseshoe enclosing something like a figure eight.

The mark of Iago.