With these concerns, he had wandered into the cinema. He had sat and watched Spectre. And as the climax sent shivers of recognition through him … a spilled soda. Yes. Someone nearby him had dropped her drink in agitation and surprise. Oh yes, yes, it would have been the same. Exactly the same as at the Christmas party. The ghost story. The spilled drink. And Iago, looking up—as Storm had looked up—saw, for the first time, the beautiful Ann Endering, Sophia’s mother.

She loved the cinema, loved American movies, and she had been there. And, startled by the film, she had spilled her soda, and Iago had looked up. Then, moved by the beauty of the mother as Storm had been moved by the daughter’s beauty, he approached her.

Harper could imagine it. She knew Iago’s mesmerizing attractions. Ann Endering—a kind, charitable, liberal woman—would have been his perfect target. If Sir Michael was any indication, she had a penchant for bold, energetic and somewhat dodgy men. And perhaps her idealism—her belief that the world could be made a better place—had softened her, as it did so many, to the beguiling logic of a powerful personality who saw himself as chosen for some great enterprise. In any case, she became his lover. Soon, he would have found out exactly why the film had disturbed her. She loved her house, her family history. She would have seen at once the connections between Spectre and the legend of the Belham Abbey Ghost. Perhaps she even recognized the debt the film owed to “Black Annie.” Perhaps—knowing her history as well as she did—she knew more than that, much more.

As much as she knew, it was enough, finally, to fuel Iago’s interest, to start him down the story trail. After that, the coincidences in the stories—the murdered children, the dream of immortality, the elixir of life in “The Alchemist’s Castle,” and finally the legends accruing round the Rhinehart triptych—would have led him on—on until, at last, “The Monk’s Confession” fell into his hands and he understood everything. And he began his first abortive hunt for the triptych itself.

But by then—by then, Ann Endering understood as well. Too late, she realized who her lover was, and what he was doing to her. She would have been desperate then to keep the triptych out of Iago’s hands. And, against all her social instincts, she would have seized on the final coincidence—the one coincidence that perhaps Iago didn’t know: that one of the men most likely to be able to recover the Rhinehart panels was Sir Michael, was her own husband.