When Sam and Jack arrived at Girton College, they were ushered into a chapel and pointed down a flight of stone steps into a room which looked very much like a crypt. It had a beautiful fan-vaulted ceiling—which forced itself on Sam's attention by looming barely a foot above his head—and was lit by candles in iron brackets.

The room was so full of motion that it almost made him feel seasick. Shadows were constantly moving over the ceiling, and he got the feeling they couldn't all be accounted for by the flickering candlelight.

There was a desk at one end of the room, on a sort of raised platform which might originally have been designed for laying out the dead. But most of the space was given over to Madame Desault's collection—although the artefacts on show were so disparate that he couldn't immediately decide what it was a collection of.

The shelves were lined with Greek terracotta pots, painted with nymphs and gorgons, and strange, lumpy stone figures, the size of peg-dolls, with swollen breasts and bellies. There were also lots of icons of the Virgin Mary, their golden paint cracked, but sparkling like an open treasure chest in the candlelight.

Madame Desault herself bustled out of the shadows at the far end of the room like a woman with a purpose. She shook Sam's hand vigorously, and then dropped into the chair behind her desk with so much force that he could hear the chair-legs crunching against the floor. Just being in the same room as her bristling energy made Sam feel tired.

Most unusually, Jack lingered at the back of the room when they entered and didn't come forward to introduce himself. He wandered from shelf to shelf, admiring the artefacts and squinting at a collection of chalk symbols on the wall. It wasn't like Jack to pay more attention to objects than humans, but then, Sam supposed, there were breasts on show.

"Well, what can I do for you, Inspector?" said Fabienne Desault breezily. "What kind of crime are you investigating today?"

"At the moment, the mutilation of library books."

"Good heavens! Can you be hanged for it?"

Sam sighed. Jack was so much better at talking to these sorts of people. He decided to be resolutely factual, and hope that it rubbed off on her. "For reasons unknown, Madame, someone in Oxford has been removing chapter seventeen from every copy of your book."

"My book? Oh, well, then they should be hanged." She hesitated, and glanced at Jack, who was picking up and looking over every swollen stone goddess within reach. "Chapter Seventeen, you say? Is that why he's here?"

She raised her voice slightly. "How do you do, Mr Cade? I hear the business of warmongering isn't as profitable as it used to be?"

Jack gave her an absent-minded smile. "Not true, Madame. It'll always be profitable. Just not for me anymore."

"We think Jack's memory has been... tampered with," said Sam, interceding in case there was a fight. "He doesn't remember any acquaintance with Ellini Syal. We have reason to believe he's in Chapter Seventeen of your book, but somebody is going out of their way to prevent us from finding out."

Fabienne raised her eyebrows. "He doesn't remember Ellini Syal? Does he remember Pandemonium?"

Jack looked up from his inspection of a plaster saint, frowning. "Ye—no. I don't know."

Fabienne got up, the better to examine him. "Good heavens, you really have had the bailiffs in, haven't you? Did they leave anything behind in that head of yours?"

"No, wait," said Jack wildly. "It's in Edinburgh, isn't it? That big palace in St. Andrew's Square. I met Robin Crake there."

"But you don't remember Ellini Syal?"

Jack blinked. "Was she there too?"

Fabienne took a deep breath and went back to her chair. "Well, I can't tell you that much about it, I'm afraid. My book mostly concentrates on her origins and her first lover. No offence meant, Mr Cade, but you didn't have the right kind of brooding, gothic intensity to be the main focus of the book."

"You wanted Heathcliff," said Jack, with a rueful smile.

"Personally, I would have been happier with Cathy, but my publishers advised me that a Heathcliff would sell more copies." She put her feet up on the desk and leaned back in her chair. Sam wasn't at all surprised when she picked up a cigarette-holder, lit it, and started puffing away with enthusiasm.

"What's in Chapter Seventeen?" Jack asked.

"Paris," she said, picking up a book from amongst the debris which littered her desk, and flicking through it. "Miss Syal uses you to beat her captors into submission and the two of you escape together. That's the crudest summary I can give you."

"And after that?"

"I don't know," she said flatly, "but I imagine it was boring. My informants tell me she was quite happy with you, and nobody wants to read about that."

She blew smoke at the fitful shadows on the ceiling. "Plus, you weren't... Byronic with her, you know? You didn't lock her away. You seemed to enjoy fighting off her other suitors. Chapter Eighteen follows Robin Crake and leaves you and Miss Syal to dwindle into blissful obscurity. Personal preference, as well as book-sales, dictated that much."

"The blissful obscurity can't have lasted that long," Jack pointed out.

"Well, what do you expect? She's Ellini Syal."

"Did she leave me, or did I leave her?"

"As I say," said Fabienne, taking a long drag on her cigarette, "I wasn't very interested."

There was a short silence. Sam felt as though he ought to break it, even though it was abundantly obvious that neither Fabienne nor Jack were capable of feeling awkward.

"Why didn't you interview Ellini Syal for your book?" he asked. "She was only being held five miles away."

Fabienne shrugged. "Who says she was the best person to ask? I wouldn't get an unbiased account if I asked you to describe your life, Inspector. Besides, I'm interested in how she was perceived, not who she was inside. I study Female Iconography, not Female Psychology."

"So, who did you ask, then?"

Fabienne gave him an appraising look which made him feel distinctly uncomfortable. "I understand that, in Oxford, you have a remarkable woman who breathes into a dead person's mouth and causes them to repeat the last sounds they ever heard? Well, I can get a lot more out of them—and without the unsanitary business of breathing into their mouths."

"That's—not possible."

Fabienne gave a deep, hearty sigh. "Well, at least you didn't say it's not scholarly. That's the accusation I usually get. In fact, the theory comes from Plato, and, as such, could hardly be more scholarly, but there are some people who get very uncomfortable with incantations, even if they are in Ancient Greek."

She picked up another book and flicked through it. "In the Phaedo, Socrates puts forward the argument that people who have lived for physical things have difficulty leaving the physical world when they die. They linger on in the shadows, pining for the treasures they once held firmly in their hands. I simply embellished the theory, by assuming that you could draw these wretches to you by possessing yourself of some physical object they used to love while they were alive."

She threw the book down and leaned back in her chair. "Of course, the disadvantage is that you can only talk to the souls of lecherous, gluttonous, avaricious people—who, by and large, are less reliable, even though there's nothing they could hope to gain by lying now. But you learn to crosscheck what they tell you and corroborate it with other accounts from other sources. Historians invariably have to compromise somewhere."

"Is it safe?" said Sam, glancing uneasily at the shadows on the ceiling.

"Expanding the boundaries of human knowledge seldom is."

"I mean, couldn't they... possess you?"

Fabienne laughed. It was a sharp, hard whip-crack of a sound. "No, Inspector. There's only one woman they want to possess, and she's in your capable custody."

Sam turned to Jack for support and found him still staring at the chalk symbols on the walls. Fabienne had turned to him too. After regarding him for a few moments with sparkling mockery in her eyes, she said, "What do you think, Mr Cade?"

"I think you're in terrible danger, Madame."

"Oh?" said Fabienne, adding some mocking eyebrows to her mocking eyes.

"This symbol—" Jack pointed to a crude chalk drawing of what appeared to be an octopus. "This is the Kraken. Robin Crake's symbol. I've seen him carve it."

Fabienne gave him an innocent smile. "But Robin Crake's dead, Mr Cade."

"Believe me, he wouldn't let that stand in his way," said Jack fervently. "He is a—" He hesitated, as though he couldn't immediately think of a word heinous enough to describe him. "—bad man," he finished lamely.

Nobody would have said this was a fitting cue for thunder, and yet some kind of deep, horrible sound was welling up under the vaulted roof. It seemed to come from everywhere—to ooze like a chill from out of the walls—and it wasn't until he'd gotten over the shock that Sam began to realize it was a human voice, deep but strangely flippant. If it was possible for a voice to have a smile, this one did—a smug, sharp-toothed smile which immediately made Sam's fists itch.

It said, "If you've forgotten our Ellie, Jack, then you've probably forgotten just how bad a man I can be."

Jack shut his eyes. He looked a bit like a child who'd just broken an antique vase and been caught in the act by an extremely stern father figure. Except, his expression seemed to suggest that this father figure was worse than stern, and the punishment he could expect was far worse than a caning. He tried to smile, though it came out as more of a grimace. "How are you, Robin?"

"Not bad," said the voice, "considering. I hear you're a scientist's lapdog these days?"

"It's probably not as boring as being dead."

"You'd be surprised."

"Yeah," said Jack sourly. "I bet." He turned to Fabienne and raised his eyebrows with something less than his usual coolness. In fact, there was a bitter bite to his words that Sam had never heard there before. "This is Heathcliff?"

"Well, why not?" said Fabienne.

"Can you put him away now, please?"

"Golden boy!" the voice protested. "I'm surprised at you! We've got so much catching-up to do."

Jack raised his voice slightly. "Can you put him away now, please?"

Sam had never seen him like this. He was usually so cool and amused, as though the stupidity of other people was a morbidly fascinating exhibition. But now he was biting down as he spoke, curling his hands into fists without even seeming to realize it. Sam—much as he was enjoying the spectacle—decided he'd better step in.

"How did you get him here?" he asked Fabienne. "You said you needed a cherished object to summon them."

Fabienne seemed to have been waiting impatiently for this question. From the wreckage on her desktop, she picked up a battered but quite ordinary-looking knife. It had a long, serrated blade and a stone handle, carved with so many little notches that they looked, at first, like some intricate design. Fabienne was running her fingers over the notches with a withdrawn, calculating look, as though she was adding them up in her head.

A combination of noises accompanied this revelation. There was a sharp intake of breath from the disembodied voice of Robin Crake, and Jack groaned wearily, as though this knife signalled the beginning of a well-worn and boring conversation.

"You know he used to say 'knifey-knifey' when he stabbed people with that thing?" he muttered resentfully. "I bet that isn't in your book. I bet the phrase 'knifey-knifey' doesn't feature in many women's romantic fantasies."

"That sounds like the complaint of someone who has a very small knife to me," said the voice of Robin Crake.

This seemed to be the last straw. Jack leapt forward and snatched the knife from Fabienne's hands. Ignoring her protests, he plunged it into the mortar between two blocks of stone in the wall, and bent the handle back, until the blade was bending and in danger of snapping in two.

"Stop that!" she shouted. "You can't hurt him, you idiot!"

"I'll get there in the end, Madame. When you're fighting a cretin like Robin, the important thing is to use your imagination."

Fabienne strode up to him and gave him an impatient shove. "I'll put it away. Just stop being an iconoclast!"

Jack gave it back to her, handle-first. The brief interval of action—or the shocked silence of Robin Crake—seemed to have made him feel better. When Fabienne shut the knife in a box, and the texture of the shadows seemed to indicate that Robin Crake had been banished back from whence he came, Jack took a slow, steadying breath.

"You know what the notches are for?" he asked.

"Of course," said Fabienne.

"You know he had to have the handle extended twice to make room for more?"

"I'm afraid I'm not very interested," she replied. Her face was pale and grim with shock. She seemed to be having difficulty hitching her mocking smile back in place.

Jack had probably noticed that too because he took a gentler tone with her. "He'll hurt you, Madame."

"What do you think I am? Some kind of naive ingénue?"

"It doesn't matter what you are. He's not choosy."

Fabienne sat back in the chair behind her desk and took some time smoothing out her skirts. When she looked up again, her face was as mocking and sardonic as it had ever been.

"As chivalrous as I'm sure this is, I can take care of myself. I use the dead in my research all the time. For my study of Queen Elizabeth, I interviewed her chief executioner, as well as her wife-murdering father, and, in my local studies on Black Annis and Charlotte Grey, I interviewed people who'd died in ways I'd never even heard o—"

"I'm sorry?" said Sam, jolting back to life. "Local studies on who?"

"They're figures of local folklore, Inspector. Black Annis was a witch who—"

"And who was Charlotte Grey?" said Sam, as though she had already finished speaking.

Fabienne shrugged. "She's a cross between a ghost and a local nature spirit. She haunts—or protects, depending on who you talk to—the limestone caves under the Gogmagog Hills. She and Black Annis are both cave-dwellers. But, where Black Annis is a predator, Charlotte Grey can be a wanderer's doom or his salvation. Apparently, it depends on what kind of mood she's in when she catches you."

"And where are these caves?"

Fabienne gave him a withering smile. "All over the place, Inspector. The Gogmagog Hills extend for twenty miles to the south of the city, and they're hollow for almost the entire way. But I believe the closest opening to the caves is in Cherry Hinton."

"That's funny," said Jack, into the silence that followed. "We've already been there once today."