Then Harper smiled. “In any case,” she said. “Not dead away. He hasn’t got dead away. Not quite. We have some of his men, who won’t all be loyal to him. We have some allies on the police at last. The triptych has been destroyed and, if I’m not mistaken, there is a certain urgency to the business which will draw our quarry out into the open again before too long.”

Bernard raised his eyes to heaven, shook his head.

Harper laughed. “Ha-ha.” She reached up and clapped the young man on the shoulder. “Heart on a hill, lad,” she told him. “The hunt is just beginning.”

With which, she moved away. Walked away to the drive, to the deep shadows beneath the hanging beeches. She tapped her stick against the ground lightly as she walked. The smoke from her pipe trailed back over her shoulder.

After a moment, Bernard followed her.

From the misty churchyard, Richard Storm looked up and saw them go.

He clasped Sophia against him, felt the warmth of her body there, drank the warmth of her body in with his. The wind lifted, and Sophia’s hair stirred, and a trailing patch of mist rolled over the graves around him, rolled on before him. And through the gathering haze of it, Storm watched Harper’s squat silhouette, moving away from him towards the trees. He watched the wedge of her cape and the outline of her hat and the swing of her stick on the earth. He watched Bernard’s tall, willowy silhouette loping along beside her.

He held Sophia tightly, and watched his two friends moving away from him, moving and moving away until the mist closed over them, like a curtain.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This is a work of fiction, and fiction of the most fantastical kind at that. Any mention of real names or places—John Wayne, Jack Nicholson, Sotheby’s, etc.—is strictly for the purposes of verisimilitude. I’ve borrowed them as archetypes; neither they, nor anyone else alive or dead, has ever been involved in these events.

And as this is fiction, I won’t waste the reader’s time with a long list of living or printed sources of research information. But I must express special thanks to Dr. Jennifer Ellis and Dr. Richard Scofield for their medical expertise; to James Cohan for introducing me to the people and places of the art world; to Paul Sieveking of the wonderful Fortean Times for the lowdown on magazine work; and to Simon Brett for vetting my British culture and vocabulary.