Sam stood in the doorway of the interview room and watched her.

He couldn't have taken her to the cells. Surrounding Ellini Syal with a group of paranoid men—even if they were all locked securely in separate rooms—would have been the fastest way to start a riot in the city.

As it was, he wasn't too happy about having her in the station, surrounded by his pink-faced Constables. There was something about her. She didn't just excite fascination; she excited the will to dominate. He understood now why Hawthorne had put her in handcuffs the first time he'd seen her. She acted like a courteous little mouse, and yet you couldn't help wondering where her mind was, what she was planning, who she was looking at.

At the moment, she was looking at the tabletop, with every indication of absorption. Her head was bowed, and her hands lay submissively in her lap, as though she was prepared to endure everything with the patience of a martyr.

Somebody—probably the soft-hearted Mrs Hope—had brought her a cup of tea, but she wasn't sipping it, even though she wasn't hampered by a pair of handcuffs this time. She appeared to be inspecting the forget-me-not patterns on the china.

The interview room was separated from the corridor by a wall of bars that stretched from floor to ceiling, but it was still more comfortable than the cells. There was a rug underneath the interview table, and a few paraffin lamps, still burning from the night before.

The small, square window behind the table was letting in sunlight the colour of egg yolk. It was so bright and cheerful that it felt to Sam like a slap in the face. He'd lost one of his men last night—a man he hadn't even liked, but now couldn't hate, because he had died in the line of duty, trying to pull a monster off Sam's chest.

And it wasn't just the way he had died, but the simple fact that he was dead. Somehow, the dead seemed more worthy of respect than the living, as though they'd done something extraordinary—as though dying was hard.

As an undergraduate at Oxford, everyone around him had thought like that. It was some kind of requirement for studying English literature that you had to be half in love with death. The artists who had died young—like Keats, Shelley, and Byron—were always more respected. And the ones who'd committed suicide were the most respected of all. People thought your pain and suffering was just meaningless noise unless you were willing to kill yourself for it. Otherwise, you were just a desperate attention-seeker.

Sam stopped, feeling the panic rise in his throat like vomit. It felt as though everything inside him was trying to escape before he reached the end of these reminiscences. Lily was at the end, swinging from the light fittings. And it was his fault.

Ellini Syal, who had been gazing quietly at the tabletop all this time, now looked up and met his eyes, as though she was signalling her readiness to be questioned. Sam dragged up a chair and sat down opposite her. His head was still swimming with bitterness and bile, his organs still felt as though they were trying to climb out via his mouth, but he was damned if he was going to give her more time to come up with alibis and excuses.

"What can you tell me about Charlotte Grey?" he said brusquely, flipping open his notebook.

"She's a Cambridgeshire folktale."

Sam waited. But apparently, she was finished.

"A Cambridgeshire folktale who just happens to haunt the caves underneath your old cell?" he prompted. "A folktale who wears black ribbons twisted up her arms like you did last night? Please try harder, Miss Syal. This is Oxford."

Ellini drummed her fingers on the tabletop for a few seconds, and then gave him an apologetic flinch. "It's sort of... personal."

"No. It's public. Two people are dead. You are now withholding information in a double murder case, and you can be hanged for that."

"Yes, I expect I can."

Sam leaned forward. "That thing on the rooftops thinks you're Charlotte Grey. It thought Helen Thorne was Charlotte Grey too, until it found her perfume bottle. What does it want with her? What is she?"

Ellini remained silent.

"I'll find out eventually," he insisted. "I've got my best men searching those caves."

She gave an unwilling smile, as though there was something about the phrasing of that sentence which pleased her. "Good. Then it won't matter if I don't answer your questions now."

Sam decided to talk anyway. Maybe she would be disconcerted by how much he knew. Or unable to suppress the urge to correct him if he was mistaken.

"Charlotte Grey's supposed to have white-blonde hair," he said, leaning back in his chair. "Every witness agrees on that. If you were going to disguise yourself as her, why not go all the way, and bleach your hair white? Come to that, why disguise yourself at all if the creature that's chasing you can't see?"

"It's for my benefit," said Ellini.

"You mean it comforts you?"

"Ye-es. I suppose you could say that."

"That thing on the rooftops followed you here from Cambridge?"

"There's more than one."

This was sufficiently unexpected to throw him offtrack. "There's—what?"

"There's more than one," she repeated. "At the moment, there are two, but I expect there will be more."

Sam leaned forward again. "What are they? Where do they come from? How do we stop them?"

Ellini gave him a one-shouldered shrug. "I can't tell you much about that either, I'm afraid. They're demons who, for one reason or another, didn't disappear when Eve died. They live in the Halfway Houses now—have you heard of them? They're sort of underground hostels on the road to hell."

"Why don't we ever see them?"

"They're too afraid to come out."

"Why aren't these ones too afraid to come out?"

"Oh, they are. But they're even more afraid of something else."

Sam waited. But this seemed to be one of those points on which she wasn't prepared to be specific.

"How do we kill them?" he said, because this seemed like a more practical line of enquiry.

"We don't. According to prophecy, there's only one person who can. Faustus's last living descendant."

Ellini leaned towards him. It seemed they had reached a topic on which she was not only able, but willing, to give information.

"You'll want to find a text called the Book of Woe," she said, with something like enthusiasm in her voice. "It's a book of prophecies written in the Middle Ages. It foretold Faustus's Chancellorship, and the coming of Eve—although, mostly, it predicts deaths. Hence the title. I had a copy in India, but I had to leave it behind. Still, if I know Oxford, there'll be a copy here somewhere. Probably in the Bodleian."

She gave him a triumphant look, as though to say, 'See how cooperative I can be when you're not asking about Charlotte Grey?'

Sam sighed and tried to make the best of it. "A book that predicts deaths?"

She nodded eagerly. "Lots of them—including the death of Charlotte Grey if you're interested. But, most importantly, it explains exactly how these deaths will come about. The 'living gargoyles', if that's what you want to call them, are in there. The book explains who can kill them and how. It's written in Latin, but I imagine you'll be able to lay your hands on a translator in this city."

"Sorry," said Sam, passing a weary hand across his forehead. "You mean to tell me Charlotte Grey isn't already dead?"

Ellini smiled patiently. "She's dead and alive, Inspector. It's complicated."

"You know, you're not going anywhere until you tell me."

"That's your prerogative, of course. And I don't suppose the progress of Dr Petrescu's research matters that much to you. But you have to let me out at night. I need to keep those creatures occupied. If I don't do that, more innocent people will die."

She was speaking quite rationally—without a hint of a plea in her voice. But Sam had been a policeman for too long not to recognize desperation when he saw it.

"Oh, I don't know about that," he said airily. "They're only here because you led them here. Maybe, if you don't go back out there, they'll give up and go home."

He saw her eyes widen, and he leaned forward, feeling as though he was teetering on the brink of an epiphany, but unable to topple into it.

"That's worse, isn't it? Why is it worse? What were they doing before they followed you here?"

Ellini Syal didn't say anything, but she didn't need to. She couldn't stop the avalanche. One conclusion followed the others so inevitably that he was amazed he hadn't seen it before.

"You're a decoy, aren't you? That's why you have to go out every night and keep them occupied. That's why they can never catch you. What are you distracting them from?"

Ellini sat up and planted her elbows on the table. It was a kind of aggressive motion he'd never seen from her before.

"The same thing I'm distracting you from," she said silkily. "I'm good at distracting people. I can even tell them I'm a decoy—I can tell them there's a man with an axe creeping up behind them—and they still won't take their eyes off me. They just can't help themselves. My advice to you, Inspector, is to get yourself a female investigator, because no man is capable of learning the truth about me. I didn't mean for those people to die, but I am not nice. I am not on your side."

She leaned back, allowing the polite frown to take the place of all her aggression, as though it had never been there at all. "And I'm not talking to you anymore. Lock me up, or don't. It doesn't matter. I'll find a way to do my job. Nastier things than you have tried to stop me."

There was a tentative cough from the doorway behind him, and Sam spun round, ready to hurl lungfuls of abuse at the intruder. When he recognized Constable Gleeson—with his pink face and bobbing Adam's apple—he knew that, somehow, things were about to get worse.

"Well?" he said, keeping back the shouts for a later date.

"There's a telegram from Sergeant Littlemore in Cambridge, sir. I thought I'd better bring it to you straight away."

Sam noticed that he was holding a strip of paper. It was fluttering in his apprehensive fingers.

"What does it say?" he asked woodenly.

"Um." Constable Gleeson's face turned pinker. "'Hundreds of graves stop. Two miles west Cherry Hinton stop. Name on every one Charlotte Grey stop. Advise.'"

He left it hanging and lowered his head miserably. This prompted Sam—irate as he was—to add the final 'stop' out of some mad desire for closure.

There was a telling silence from the interview room behind him. He knew—he just knew—that Ellini Syal was gazing calmly and inoffensively at the tabletop, judging no one, saying nothing, hoarding up all the answers in her breast. The image was enough to burn a hole in his throat.

"Fresh graves?" he asked Constable Gleeson, even though it was clear the poor man knew no more than he did.

"Don't know, sir." The Constable fidgeted with his cuffs. "What shall I tell them to do, sir?"

Sam hesitated. But, if Ellini Syal wasn't going to help, there was only one way to know more.

"Dig them up," he said.

Behind him, he heard the sound of a chair scraping back, and turned to see her on her feet. She was white and shaking. It looked as though some sudden emotion had jolted her to her feet, and then evaporated just as suddenly, leaving her quivering on the brink of speech.

"You have something to say to me?" Sam snapped.

She shook her head silently but didn't sit down.

Sam turned back to Constable Gleeson, spitefully happy to have got some kind of a reaction from her.

"Tell them to liaise with the mayor and the Reverend of the local parish first. If nobody knows whose graves they are, I want them dug up. We'll need the bodies identified. Go through the archive of missing persons from Cambridgeshire for the last—oh, ten years." Sam stopped and grimaced. An unpleasant necessity had just occurred to him. "I suppose we'll need the Bone Inspector. He's usually on the corner of Turl Street at this time of day. Pick him up and get him on the train to Cambridge before noon."

Sam turned round and met Miss Syal's gaze. It was quite steady—a little red around the edges, maybe—but there were no tears.

"Are they your friends?" he said, a little more softly. "The dead people in that cave?"

Again, she didn't say anything. But Sam was comfortable with the idea of hurling unanswered questions at her now.

"Is Charlotte Grey some kind of title?" he said, leaning down and placing his hands flat on the table, the better to glare at her. "You get the name, the ribbons, and the perfume, you go out and get chased by those gargoyles, you die, and then you get buried in that cave? Why? What's it all for?"

She didn't answer him—but, this time, she seemed to be not answering him in a way which indicated that things weren't quite going to plan. It was enough for Sam. When you were the only sane person in a city full of whimsical, academic idiots, you learned to cherish small victories.

"You can think about it, all right?" he said, straightening up. "Think about how you're going to keep those gargoyles occupied when you're locked up in this station. And then you can think about whether it would be a complete disaster if you gave me some little hints about what's going on here. There's only one conclusion you could possibly reach, but I don't mind how long it takes you to get there."