And now, there was just Sam. Well, in fact, there was Sam and Alice, but he'd almost given up on Alice. There was no way to get at her. She didn't have any weaknesses – she had never done anything of which she was even remotely ashamed.

Ever since he'd seen Sam in the pews at the service of mourning, Jack had known that the key to having power over him lay in that freckly chief mourner – what she represented, and what she knew. But he didn't approach her right away. A lead like that had to be treated cautiously. It wouldn't do to go blundering in too soon and ruin everything. Instead, he found out everything he could from other sources – Sergei Petrescu Senior being one of his most useful informants.

The next morning, while trying to assemble demon bones into a complete skeleton on the floor of the jigsaw room, he elaborated on Sam's past.

"The story goes that, in his last year at university, he ruined a shop-girl, and she killed herself."

Jack, who had picked up a femur, and was smacking it absent-mindedly into the palm of his hand, said, "But that happens all the time, doesn't it?"

"Regrettably, yes," said Sergei. "What made this particular girl so different – at least, to Constable Hastings – was that she was subsequently revealed to be a genius."

"Subsequent to her death?"

"It seems so." Sergei gently took the femur from his hands, and laid it out on the floor. Apparently, it wasn't a femur at all, but some kind of arm-bone. There was a skull the size of a bucket too, and Jack couldn't help being glad that this particular ancestor was long-dead.

"Apparently, after she died, he recovered her letters from Miss Manda." Sergei glanced up from his work. "Have you met her? She usually gets called in to mourn when there's a death in the college, but I don't think there has been one since you arrived. In fact, the porter says we're long overdue."

Jack had never heard the name, but he knew instantly who this woman must be, and felt quite smug at having spotted her importance from a single look across a crowded church.

"She's the plump, freckly one, yes? Stands at the front during the services?"

"That's her," said Sergei. "She knew the unfortunate shop-girl. In fact, I think she was a shop-girl herself at the time. In any case, as soon as Constable Hastings read the young girl's letters and found out she was a genius, he fell in love with her, and repented of her death."

Jack winced. "That's pretty appalling."

"Ah," said Sergei, getting up from the floor and dusting off his hands. "Welcome to stage two of the Constable's problems. He knows it's appalling. He hates himself for it. Now, hating oneself is a relatively common Oxford problem, but what makes it unusual in the case of Constable Hastings is that what he hates about himself is the Oxford in him. In Oxford, you are only considered to be worthwhile if you're a genius, and, in true Oxford fashion, he only fell in love with this poor girl when it became apparent that her mind was extraordinary."

"Oh," said Jack, squinting down at the bones. There was something about their great, lumbering size that reminded him of Sam, now he came to think about it. "So that's why he hates Oxford. Why doesn't he leave?"

"Well, that would be no good. As far as he's concerned, he's the only one who sees what's wrong with the place – the only one who appreciates how dangerous all this emphasis on cleverness can be. Who's going to protect the not-so-clever people if he goes?"

"Are there any?" asked Jack.

Sergei tilted his head while he considered this. "Well, not many who are aware of the fact," he conceded. "But certainly, there are foolish people in this city. The problem is, Constable Hastings hates them too."

***

The chief mourner, as it turned out, was a delight. Jack was so used to dealing with oblivious academics that it made a wonderful change to sit down with someone who watched and listened. As soon as they shook hands, she asked him whether he had any little, personal tragedies that he'd like her to cry about.

"No, thank you, Miss," said Jack cordially. He did not say: 'My friends are dead – my occupation's gone – I'm trapped in a city that regards everything I am as a quaint curiosity – I'm in love with a horrible, masochistic woman who can only love people who've tortured her – and I could, Miss Manda – I even want to – I'm so angry with her. But there's something else too – something I only ever saw when I was eight-years-old, and I'm not even sure it exists anymore – something to do with comfort and tenderness and a curtain of dark hair. It's just an impression, and I don't even understand it, but it's keeping me prisoner here.'

"Very well," said Manda, perhaps sensing the torrent of words behind the silence. "I'll just cry for you in a general way. I'm good at that."

But the best thing about Manda was that she loved talking about her dead friend. After one conversation with her, Jack felt as though he was an expert on Lily Hamilton. The more he found out about her, the more he felt that she resembled his little cricket – except, with Lily, most of the tragic events had happened in her head.

The only thing he couldn't quite understand about her was the business of the suicide note. Manda thought it was perfectly ordinary that she hadn't left one. She said that Lily's fits of despair, at their most intense, left her bereft of words.

"She wasn't--" Manda shrugged irritably. "She wasn't making a statement or trying to teach anyone a lesson. She couldn't go on anymore. There was nothing left to say – and, even if there was, she wouldn't have been able to say it. She was very ill."

"But you said pain helped her write," Jack protested.

"Only up to a point. Surely you know that from the battlefield – whether it's a pen or a sword, there comes a point where you can't do anything but drop it and scream."

But something about that hadn't seemed right to Jack. People who knew they were going to die usually tried to make a statement. He had been in the same position himself. It hadn't worked out but, if he really had died while lashed to that pillar at the Delhi Cantonment, it would have captured the public imagination. Perhaps it would have even made Ellini cry when she'd read about it in the papers. That had been the height of his ambition at the time.

The next day, he found the room where Lily had hanged herself, and poked about between the floorboards, to see whether a piece of paper could have dropped down and out of sight. But there was nothing. She'd been found hanging beside the window – unusual for a girl who apparently didn't care about making a scene – but anything that had dropped down into the street below would have been trampled or swept up years ago. The trail was eight years old, and something told him Sam had covered it pretty thoroughly already.

The landlady said that twelve people had rented the room since. They never stayed long because of the rumours that the place was haunted.

"She owed me fourteen shillings in rent when she died too. The family couldn't pay me – it was all they could do to afford to bury 'er. They said I could keep 'er books, but nobody wants to buy something that belonged to a suicide. They think it's catching."

"I'll buy them," said Jack, looking up from his inspection of the skirting-board. He hesitated for a moment, realizing – for the first time – that money wasn't as abundant as it had been in India. "It might take me a while to pay you. I get an allowance of three shillings a week from the University."

The landlady stared at him, obviously surprised that the great new-breed General received a weekly wage that would have been a slap in the face for a boot-blacker. "Well," she said eventually. "I suppose it's better than being in prison."

"No. It's pretty much the same."

***

Jack spent a whole afternoon with Lily's books, sifting carefully through the pages for hidden letters or scrawled notes in the margins. But the girl had clearly been a very well-behaved reader. There were no notes, no bent-back pages, no forgotten book-marks eating their way into the spines. He imagined her reading her beloved books at arm's-length, hardly daring to breathe over them in case she contaminated them in some way.

Still, immaculate as they had been kept, they were the kind of books that might have rung alarm bells in the head of anyone who suspected her of contemplating suicide. Besides Keats and Shelley – who extolled the virtues of dying before you got old and ugly, and who had followed their own advice – there was The Sorrows of Young Werther.

She also seemed to have a taste for sensation fiction and detective novels, because he found beautifully-bound copies of Lady Audley's Secret, The Woman in White, and The Moonstone. This suggested that she was a young woman who loved puzzles, and she didn't disappoint him in that respect, because he finally found what he'd been looking for rolled up in the spine of a volume of Shelley's poetry.

It was the perfect hiding place. You couldn't get at it without damaging a book, and who in Oxford would do that? Even Jack had to unlock his door to make sure Alice wasn't lingering out in the hallway, before he had the nerve to crack open Shelley's spine.

And what he found was a rolled-up envelope – about the size and shape of a cigarette – sealed, and with Sam's name written on the front.

The biggest question was, why would you hide a suicide note where nobody would find it? Had Sam been supposed to find it? Had she left him clues that were now – eight years later – long gone? Or was it something she'd had to write, but had never wanted anyone to read?

It couldn't be good, he was sure of it. She had been about to die – people weren't at their best when they were about to die. She wouldn't have been thinking clearly. She wouldn't have been feeling magnanimous. Probably the most magnanimous thing she could do was hide the letter where he would never find it.

Jack felt as if he'd just dragged something very troubling and poisonous into the light – as if he'd just exhumed a rotting corpse.

Sam should never see it. But, at the same time, what wouldn't Sam do for it? This was even better leverage than Sergei's long-lost son – because Sergei, to the best of Jack's knowledge, had never wanted a son, but what did Sam want more than one last letter from his loved one?

Of course, he could have assuaged his doubts by just opening the letter. He wasn't sure what was stopping him from doing that. Maybe it was because it seemed like something Robin would have done. In fact, it was something Robin had done – opening a letter from a trapped, desperate young woman to the man she loved – but, oh god, it hurt to think about that now.

Was it wrong, he wondered, that he hadn't instantly handed Sam the letter, or told Sergei about his son? Part of him thought that he was sparing both of them a world of pain, but that wasn't why he was doing it. He was doing it so that he could have power over them, when and if he needed it.

He liked them both – they were the only things that made life in Oxford endurable. But he still wanted to have power over them. Just in case.

So he kept the letter, unopened and elaborately hidden, in his room at the Faculty. 

He told himself he would never really use it. But he couldn't have guessed – in his worst nightmares – how far he was going to be provoked.

***

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