“And you walk free on mine,” she said. The dog was growing sleepy, was making a bed of her cape collar, settling in with its chin. Readjusting her Borsalino, blinking behind her smeared spectacles, Harper paced thoughtfully from the fireside towards one of the standing stones. The old man, meanwhile, was jamming his spindly gray legs into the baggy pants. “Imagine my surprise, Jervis, when a charming boy at the Art Loss Register mentioned the name of a mysterious Dr. Mormo, who had been a major figure in the smuggling of wartime plunder. Until then, I had always thought you a harmless conjurer of evil spirits and murderer of children’s pets. By the same token, the ladies and gentlemen at Scotland Yard’s Bureau of Arts and Antiques have not got my interest in the arcane, and so they have thus far failed to connect you with your alias. But I have done so, haven’t I?”

He buckled his belt, battled with his zipper. “Haven’t you had enough, you old cow? How many warnings do you think you’re going to get?”

Harper moved out of the stone’s shadow into the dying firelight. One hand holding the pup at her shoulder, the other the dragon on her stick, her hat half crushed, her glasses lopsided, she was still formidable.

“Why did he want The Magi, Jervis?”

“Do you think I’m barmy? You’ll get nothing from me.”

But Harper smiled thinly. She knew her man. He was half mad, but he was all coward. “Look around you, Jervis,” she said. “Your coven’s blown. Gone without warning, without even a whispered word. How fast they forsook you when they knew I was coming. Why? I’ll hazard a guess. Perhaps it’s because daring the powers of Hell is one thing, but facing the inside of Her Majesty’s prisons is another and worse. You are old, father Jervis. A word from me, and you’ll die on the inside. Let us, therefore, hold high converse with one another. Why did he want The Magi!”

She waited, tense. The thrill of the hunt was in her. She had no doubt of it anymore: she was onto her beast. At last. She had him by only a tentacle perhaps, only the tip of a tentacle held between her fingernails, but after all this time it was a true beginning, and she wasn’t going to let it go. “It was him, wasn’t it?” she couldn’t help asking. “At the auction. It was him.”

He made no direct answer, but her breath hitched at his reaction. A fearful glance around him; the sign of the cross, the transverse down around his navel, the vertical up to about his chest.