Sam paced restlessly through the crowded streets, his hands shoved deep in his pockets. Everyone was in his way, and everyone was annoying.

They didn't care about Helen Thorne or Sergeant Hawthorne—and they certainly didn't care about Ellini Syal. Oh, they might cheer her on if she passed by, but only because they appreciated a show. They had come out tonight for the same reason they used to take the train up to Tyburn to watch the hangings. They wanted to see something horrible happen.

He kept moving, because it helped him refrain from strangling people, and waited for updates from his Constables. They were under orders to cycle around the city keeping an eye on the gargoyles, but not to climb to rooftop levels, not to attempt any arrests, and not to fire on the beasts until their lives depended on it.

This was the kind of prudence that would probably be mistaken for cowardice by the inhabitants of Oxford, but Sam pretended not to care. He didn't know how to frighten, harm, talk to, or kill the creatures. They seemed to take bullets in their stride, and according to his only source of information—a bloody medieval manuscript—only this mythical but unnamed descendant of Doctor Faustus could do them any harm.

He wasn't going to risk the lives of his Officers until he had a definite plan, and Ellini Syal seemed only too willing to keep the creatures busy. He wasn't too happy about letting her go, but he supposed it made sense. At least she could prevent them from running amok.

On the High Street, he spotted a familiar face, bustling through the crowds to reach him. The Bone Inspector was always bustling. He had a lot of energy for a man who'd dedicated his life to the study of long-dead corpses.

He was quite a young man, for an Oxford expert. He was probably in his early thirties, with black hair and the kind of wild blue eyes and sudden expressions that hinted at violently high spirits. He was also Scottish and spoke in an accent that could be difficult to decipher—especially if, like Sam, you had very little patience with what he actually had to say.

He stopped in front of Sam and grinned broadly, as though he had just done an excellent trick and was expecting a pat on the back.

"Well?" said Sam. "Did you go to Cambridge and dig up those graves?"

"Oh, aye," said the Bone Inspector, standing mockingly to attention. "Six hundred dead women, all present and correct, sir. No idea who buried them, or why they were all called Charlotte Grey, but that's your department, isn't it?"

Sam decided to ignore this. It was too early in the conversation to be glaring, although he knew he couldn't hold it off forever. "Are they all the skeletons of new-breed women?"

"No, it's about half-and-half, new-breed, human. Very cosmopolitan."

"Well, what did they have in common, apart from being women? Whose bones are we looking at here?"

The Bone Inspector clutched his lapels importantly. "In my professional opinion, they're the bones of slaves."

"Slaves?"

He nodded. "Unmistakable signs of malnutrition and hard labour. Most of them must've died of starvation or exhaustion. There are a few cracked skulls—a few places where I can make out the scraping of blades, and even teeth, against the bone—but mostly, I think it was the job that killed 'em. Somebody worked 'em to death."

He beamed again, but Sam was beginning to recognize the bitter edges around his smile. It was difficult to tell, but he suspected that even the Bone Inspector had been saddened by this job.

"How long have they been there?" he asked.

"It varies. The oldest, probably about two hundred years. The youngest, no more'n two weeks. That means about three of 'em died every year, if you're interested. This youngest was hardly decomposed at all." He gave Sam a reproachful look, as though to suggest that a Bone Inspector shouldn't have had to deal with that, but he didn't say anything. Instead, he fumbled in his case—a cruel parody of a doctor's bag, with a femur sticking out of it, and glints of other bones in the dark, satin-lined recesses. He drew out a sheet of paper, to which had been pinned one of those old-fashioned carte-de-visite photographs in sepia tones. It showed a girl of about sixteen, with a round, friendly face and masses of dark brown curls. It reminded Sam of Manda.

"She matches a missing person's report filed four months ago in Ipswich," the Bone Inspector went on. "Amanita Jones. The parents' address is on there." He licked his lips, and added, "Somewhere for you to start, maybe?"

"I have started."

"Somewhere for you to continue starting?"

Sam snatched the paper from him.

"It's a funny thing," said the Bone Inspector conversationally. "She has dark hair in that photograph, but now it's a kind of white-blonde. The shock, maybe?"

"This one that's only been dead two weeks..." said Sam uncomfortably.

"The last gasp lass says don't even think about callin' her in. Two weeks may not be much to an Osteologist, but it's more than enough to make things messy, you ken?"

"Yes," said Sam darkly. "I ken."

He turned back to the photograph, if only because it was something to glare at other than the Bone Inspector. It never worked, glaring at the Bone Inspector. The harder you glared, the broader his smile became. It was like trying to out-stare the sun.

There was a bit of a tussle going on behind them, as Constable Gleeson attempted to wheel his bicycle through the tightly knit crowds.

"Here's your bright little boy in blue," said the Bone Inspector cheerfully. "I'll leave you to get on with it." He hesitated, then said, "I'd like you to tell me when you find these people. The slave masters, I mean. I'm not saying I want to turn vigilante and string the bastards up—they'll be bones soon enough anyway—but I would like to know they're not still doing it. If you don't mind."

Sam didn't say anything, but the Bone Inspector didn't seem to have been expecting a response. He turned and disappeared into the crowds, leaving Sam alone with Constable Gleeson, whose coat had been buttoned up incorrectly, and whose face was shining with sweat.

"Sir," he said, proffering a sheaf of papers, "the translator says he's been through the whole manuscript, and written down every passage that relates to Charlotte Grey or Doctor Faustus's last descendant. And he says can he go home now, please, because it's his little boy's birthday tomorrow?"

Sam grunted and snatched the papers, annoyed by the implication that a child's birthday was more important than solving murders.

"Tell him to go home and get some rest, because I'll be looking for him the day after tomorrow, and I'll be extremely unforgiving with any mistakes." He grabbed Gleeson by the sleeve before he could get away, and added, "What about the squad down in the caves at Cherry Hinton? What have they found?"

Constable Gleeson swallowed. It looked as though he'd been hoping to avoid this topic. "Sergeant Littlemore says there's nothing down there except the graves, sir. Just caves for twenty miles. He says there's no sign of anyone or anything but rock."

Sam shook his head firmly. "Tell him to keep looking. There's got to be a secret passageway or a hidden door or something. Ellini Syal disappeared into those caves for five years. Charlotte Grey—the original Charlotte Grey, from 1641—never came out at all."

"Maybe they just came out somewhere else, sir. Sergeant Littlemore says there are plenty of ways out of the caves. Miss Syal could have gone down there, come out twenty miles away, and spent five years in Ely, or Ipswich."

"No. We would have heard about it if she'd been anywhere else. There's no way for her to be inconspicuous."

Constable Gleeson hovered, looking wretched. Sam wished he would take that look of permanent terror off his face. He was finding Constable Gleeson a lot harder to yell at than Sergeant Hawthorne.

"Tell Sergeant Littlemore to do one more pass of the caves and then come home."

Sam left Constable Gleeson to fight his way back through the crowds, while he turned into Cornmarket Street. This, too, was lined with idiots in respectable hats and bonnets, craning their heads upward and cradling hot cups of cocoa between their palms.

He decided to head over to Holywell Street to see if anyone was still up. At the very least, Jack was a familiar face, and could be relied upon to bear with his bad temper cheerfully.

So, what did he know? Women like Miss Syal were being worked to death somewhere—perhaps in those caves—and something about the place or the experience turned their hair white. Were the slave masters the same gargoyle creatures who were chasing Ellini Syal over the rooftops? It seemed probable, if Ellini had been one of these women, and they were trying to get her back. But Ellini's hair hadn't turned white, unless she was dyeing it.

Charlotte Grey—the blacksmith's daughter, who'd disappeared in 1641—had been the first of these slave women, maybe? And, since her time, every one of them had been called Charlotte Grey?

Why, though?

Ah, but the slave masters themselves were easy to fool, weren't they? They couldn't see. You could be Charlotte Grey as long as you smelled like Charlotte Grey, and, apparently, all you needed for that was some sandalwood perfume. Would the gargoyles be suspicious that the woman who smelled of sandalwood appeared to have lived for hundreds of years? Maybe not. They didn't seem like the cleverest creatures.

Of course, the local villagers who wandered into the caves through the years would have thought they were seeing the same woman, but what they were really identifying was the uniform: white-blonde hair and black ribbons twisted around the arms. Every woman would look essentially the same after being enslaved in those caves for a few years: bony with starvation and bent with toil. Old before her time.

Stop it, he thought sharply. Stop sympathizing. This was no time to get angry. Nor was it a time to feel sorry for Ellini Syal. She was hiding things from him. She was making him play guessing-games while people were dying.

But why had all the slave women wanted to pretend to be Charlotte Grey? The gargoyles didn't seem to like her. Anyone wearing sandalwood perfume was hunted and mauled by them, as poor Helen Thorne had discovered to her cost. It only seemed to focus their horrible attention on you.

To the exclusion of everything else, thought Sam suddenly—and then stood stock-still in case the idea took flight before he'd had time to analyse it.

That was it. Charlotte Grey was a scapegoat. They took turns to be her so that no single one of them would have to bear too much punishment. It was how they kept themselves alive—or kept the death toll as low as three a year, anyway.

He became aware that he was absent-mindedly screwing up the translator's notes and stopped by the nearest lamppost to smooth them out and check that they were still legible.

As he had expected, they didn't make much sense. You could probably make them mean anything if you tried hard enough. The only thing he could say with any certainty was that the author of the Book of Woe really liked Faustus's last descendant. He couldn't shut up about him.

The Doctor's last descendant ends dreams and dispels illusions, and commands the obedience of human, demon and new-breed... The Doctor's last descendant wields truth, and as a result, is pitiless and terrible... The Doctor's last descendant lives in a holy place, but thinks nothing holy, and worlds shall awaken under her eyes.

Sam stopped and held the papers up to the light, half-thinking he'd misread them. Her eyes? Faustus's last descendant was a woman? He looked back at the translator's notes, searching in vain for another pronoun. But no, it had always been 'the Doctor's last descendant', as though the author had been trying not to mention this descendant's gender. But now he'd slipped up. Worlds shall awaken under her eyes.

Sam skimmed through the notes again. This time, certain phrases loomed out at him with horrible significance. Commands the obedience of human, demon, and new-breed... Lives in a holy place but thinks nothing holy.

He glanced uneasily at the street sign he'd just passed. Holywell Street.

Oh god. Was he going to have to rely on Alice Darwin to save his city?