“I don’t know,” I said. “Perhaps to give another copy greater value, a little like the plot of Goldfinger. But given the risk involved, it hardly seems worth it. Besides, Jack Schitt is a highlevel operative with a top One Hundred Laddernumber—why would he waste his time on a lost work of Homer’s?”

“And why didn’t he want the defenestrator’s copy when he’d found that it had already been cataloged?”

There was no good answer to this either. But at that moment, Tuesday walked in, and the matter was quickly dropped in lieu of something that I think was more pressing but still didn’t know what it was.

“Okay,” said Landen, “we’re all here, and it’s almost eight o’clock. What’s this all about, hon?”

“I can’t remember.”

Landen raised an eyebrow. “Aornis?”

I said nothing and, after handing the cordless drill to Friday, told him to secure the three doors that led into the kitchen.

“Through the doorframe?” he asked, since the doors were all Regency period doors and had architraves.

“Do it now.”

So he did, and the screws bit deep, splintering the wood and looking shockingly untidy. I could only hope that we weren’t due a visit by English Heritage’s militant wing anytime soon.

“What now?”

I told them all to sit down and explained to Tuesday that Jenny didn’t exist—never had, in fact, that she was just a mindworm created by Aornis Hades in order to mess with our heads.

“That’s crazy,” said Tuesday. “She came into my lab to say hello to Gavin not half an hour ago.”

“No, you only remember seeing her. Like all the other memories you have of her.”

“So I didn’t rescue her when she got into trouble swimming on that holiday on Rùm?”

“None of it happened. Jenny is an implanted memory. A mindworm.”

Tuesday thought for a moment. “Okay, let’s just say that’s real. I can see that. But now that I know she’s a mindworm, I can deal with it.”

“You can’t, because you’ll forget that you have a mindworm. That’s part of the mindworm. In many ways it’s a burden on us, not you. Here,” I said, “write it on the back of your hand.”

I passed across a pen, and she wrote “Jenny is a mindworm” on the back of her hand.

I passed a sheet of paper to Friday. “You’re taking minutes. A rough idea of what’s happened, with the time. All pertinent points listed.”

“Okay,” he said. “So where does screwing the doors closed come into this?”