Bernard wouldn’t stop. “Have you ever seen that first picture of his? Spectre? Have you ever watched it?” he asked.

“A long time ago,” Harper murmured.

“Well, then, come on. He just happens to come five thousand miles to work with you. He just happens to read that story on the night she just happens to be there. It just happens to be her …”

“Coincidences do happen, lad.”

“Yes, I know,” he said, stretching one long leg out before him, rocking one trainer back and forth on its heel. “But they happen more frequently, more profoundly, whenever we get close, whenever the trail gets warm again. Recurring numbers, accidental meetings, unlikely chains of events. They’re the spoor of our quarry.” Bernard leaned forward, towards her. “There’s no way out of it, darling. He’s the one we’ve been waiting for. He has set the thing into motion. And you know it.”

“Even if that were true, it wouldn’t matter. I don’t want him to be hurt. It’s not his hunt. It’s mine.”

“It’s ours,” said Bernard shirtily. “And you would think, after more than a quarter of a century, you would be a little bit more eager to see it on again. We can’t protect poor Richard from his own destiny.”

“Don’t talk nonsense,” Harper said. “Destiny!” She brought the pipe away from her mouth. Stretched out a hand to the window, stretched out a finger to the glass. Droplets rolled from her fingertip as she slowly sketched a figure in the mist.

“You didn’t tell him,” her assistant went on behind her, “that before Sophia’s mother hanged herself, she opened a vein—”

“Mere rumor. A confused constable’s testimony.”

“She opened a vein—”

“Never confirmed. The family will not speak of it. We’ve had a hundred leads far better than that, a thousand—”

“She opened a vein,” Bernard insisted, “and made, in blood, upon the wall …”

Harper lowered her hand to her side. On the window now, already dissolving in fresh mist and running water, was a symbol something like a horseshoe surrounding something like a figure eight.

“Exactly,” said Bernard, lazily triumphant. “She made the mark of Iago.”

6

Sometimes the world seemed to come with subtitles, like a foreign film. So help her, sometimes people’s hidden motives, their lies, their rationalizations, were so pitifully apparent that Sophia felt she could just sit and read them. Every word they spoke, every gesture they made, revealed them as clearly as words spelled out beneath the scene.

She was at Belham Grange for the weekend. She was having coffee in the morning room with her older brother and sister. It was a small, rich, soft, well-lighted room. Windows floor to ceiling which let in the fleeting hour of winter sun. A warm sheen on satinwood dish cupboard and side tables. Paintings of Arcadian dancers amidst Roman ruins on the cream walls.