Oxford, 1881:

Officially, no-one had told Sam anything. While Miss Hope had been pouring her heart out to John Danvers, and Ellini had been confiding in Manda, people had been handing Sam very boring and ordinary pieces of information – and he'd had to shout at them for half an hour before they would give him even that. But he had enough pieces of the puzzle to make out the general shape, even if he was lacking some crucial details.

The hundreds of dead women buried in the caves at Cherry Hinton under the name Charlotte Grey were his biggest clue. They were horribly suggestive, even if they couldn't talk. He knew now that they had been worked to death, and that they'd had their fingernails removed, for some ceremonial or practical purpose. He knew Ellini Syal had been one of them, because she had no fingernails, and she got dressed up as the mythical Charlotte Grey of the Cherry Hinton caves to go scrambling over the rooftops at night.

He knew too that she was a decoy. She was keeping those gargoyles occupied while something very important went on elsewhere. So it didn't seem like too much of a leap of the imagination to suppose that there were other slave-girls – living ones – somewhere, and that Ellini Syal was keeping the gargoyles busy while they escaped.

But if she was doing something like that, why wouldn't she say so? Why would you need to lie about freeing slaves? Anybody would have helped her. Sam would have helped her, if he'd known.

No, there had to be something else. The slave-girls were dangerous, perhaps. Or she intended to do something dangerous with them.

He was quite certain that Manda knew, but Ellini had won her over, somehow. They were embroiled in some mysterious female conspiracy, and Sam was not invited. But he was reluctant to interfere, because he trusted Manda. She had ways of working – strange, persistent, emotional, intuitive ways – which were unfathomable to him, but which nevertheless seemed to work. 

He was starting to believe that something complicated and important was happening, and that the culprits might be lost forever if he went blundering in and tried to arrest them now. Miss Syal's life was hanging by a thread too – she walked jerkily about the streets of Oxford like someone already dead – and, much as she infuriated him, Sam didn't want to see another brilliantly sensitive young woman kill herself.

And, strangely, nobody seemed in too much of a hurry to get these cases solved. New visitors were arriving in the city every day, attracted by the demons and the improperly-dressed young woman who was fleeing from them. They were spending so much money that the city traders were making almost as much profit during the long vacation as they did when the students came back to the city at Michaelmas, determined to drink every tavern dry before they so much as opened a book.

It was annoying, but it suited his purposes for now. If, however, all this patience left him, in the end, with no gargoyles in the cells, he was going to start shouting as he had never shouted before. Even the dreaming spires would be forced to wake up.

Manda came to visit him at the police station every week, and gave him rather vague reports. The men liked having her there. They said a mourner on the premises helped things flow better – and, because they were hardened, ex-military men, who disliked the mention of the word 'emotion', they couldn't be induced to be any more explicit than that. But she got a cup of tea from Constable Gleeson – whose young, wobbly face became even pinker at the sight of her – and, to Sam's annoyance, they let her wait in his office when he wasn't in, as though they thought she was his wife.

Today, she was in a good mood. He could tell because she was cheerfully inspecting every object on his desk – picking up reports and paper-weights and loaded revolvers as though she hadn't seen them in months and wanted to catch up with all their news.

Sam wasn't worried about the reports. He had long since got into the habit of demanding that all his reports be written in code, because Jack was a frequent visitor to the station, and he picked up and read everything.

It occurred to him that, as he trusted Manda, and didn't particularly trust himself, it might be a good idea to give her the black arrow that Jack had sent him all those weeks ago. If it was the only thing that could kill him, it might be best to give it to someone who didn't feel like killing him all the time.

"Well?" said Sam, delicately taking a revolver out of Manda's hands. "Have you found out Miss Syal's third name yet? I suppose it's too much to hope that it's Rumplestiltskin?"

"I've been thinking about that," she said. Her wandering fingers had now found his truncheon, and she was smacking it into her palm, as though eagerly anticipating hitting somebody over the head with it. "I think we're going about it the wrong way. We should be working backwards. You're trying to guess her third name because the Book of Woe says the name will reveal her intentions, but I think we already know her intentions, and we can use them to work out her third name."

Sam rolled his eyes. "Well, if we already know her intentions, why are we bothering to work out her name?"

"Because knowing someone's name gives you power over them," said Manda, as though this was the most obvious thing in the world. "That's fairytale logic."

Sam stared at her. Sometimes he wondered whether she was actively trying to infuriate him. How could you walk into a police-station, with all its procedures and methods and meticulous reports, and use the words 'fairytale logic'?

"Anyway," he said irritably, "do we know her intentions?"

"Of course!" said Manda. "You only have to look at her! She means to die."

Sam thought of the message she had tied to the tree beside Eve's coffin on the very first day he'd met her. Only thirty-one days to go, little mother.

Yes, she had known she was going to die. She'd seen it all in the Book of Woe, hadn't she? It was even illustrated. She knew exactly when it was going to happen, and she had been looking forward to it – maybe even planning to use it.

"All right," he said, rubbing his temples, "so we should be looking for the name of someone who's famous for dying?"

"It'll be from a story. She loves stories."

"A character from a story who commits suicide, or at least plans to die? Do you have any idea how many of those there are?"

Manda looked annoyed – as though he had undermined her great insight – and continued to smack the truncheon into her palm. "Well, all right. Are there any female characters who commit suicide because they've been raped?"

"Yes," said Sam flatly. "All of them." He saw her expression and backtracked a little. "Obviously, I don't mean every female character in canonical literature is raped – I just mean every female character who is raped then goes on to commit suicide. Mostly because of Lucretia."

"Who?"

He sighed irritably. "How can you live in Oxford and not know this?" But even before he'd reached the end of the sentence, he was slowing down, dropping the irritable tone, and turning the word 'Lucretia' over in his mind. It would be a very Oxford name to give yourself. They loved the classical world in Oxford.

Manda gave him an impatient nudge in the ribs, and he went on. "She was the wife of a Roman consul, Collatinus. One day he boasted to the son of the king – back in the days when Ancient Rome had kings – about how chaste and beautiful his wife was, and it sort of... well, it made the young prince obsessed with her. The names are a bit confusing, but I think he was called 'Tarquinius Sextus'. Shakespeare calls him 'Tarquin', so that's the name everyone remembers. Anyway, Tarquin raped Lucretia, and she killed herself because-"

Well, the 'because' was a bit of a grey area, to tell the truth. In Lucretia's mind, it had probably been because a corpse is a far more eloquent argument for revenge than a living woman, complaining about her wrongs. Besides, people could be a bit... unreasonable about rape. If she hadn't killed herself, they might have said she'd been complicit in the act. If she hadn't given such a dramatic proof of her disgust, someone would have been bound to say that she'd wanted it – that she'd led Tarquin on. When you'd been raped, it could seem like killing yourself was the only way of asserting control over your own body again.

"Anyway," said Sam, trying to clear his head of these nasty thoughts, "her death made the Roman people so disgusted with their royal family that there was a revolution, and Rome was re-born as a Republic."

And, even as he said this, the words of The Book of Woe came back to him: 'With her will come liberty and chaos'.

"That's her!" said Manda excitedly. "That's Ellini! She's dying to set people free! And because nobody would say the slave-girls deserved to be locked up if they knew a good woman was willing to die for them!"

Sam took a deep breath. It wasn't exactly a surprise, but it was still infuriating to discover that Manda had known this all along without telling him. "Slave girls?" he said, as calmly as he could manage. "What slave girls? And why would anyone say they deserved to be locked up?"

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