After a couple of paces, Manda's footsteps faltered. Walking down the long corridor that led to the interview room felt like wading deeper and deeper into an ocean of feeling. The atmosphere down here was thick with emotion. She could feel it as a kind of pressure building behind her eyes, as though her tears were lining themselves up in readiness to be shed.

She took quieter steps down the rest of the corridor, anxious not to frighten all that heady emotion away. It was some time before she saw the wall of steel bars which looked onto the interview room. And, when she did, she stopped dead, because someone was already standing outside it.

Without thinking, Manda slipped through the nearest door to her right, so as not to be seen. She didn't know why—she had a perfect right to be here, after all. The Inspector had sent for her personally. But there was something about the thick cloud of emotion out there. It was edgy, as though it was afraid of being caught. And the strangest thing was, the emotion was not proceeding from Ellini Syal. It had been emanating—in great, beating waves—from the figure who had been standing outside the bars.

She took a few moments to get her bearings. The room she had dashed into was dark and windowless, and, for a few seconds, she was sure she'd blundered into a closet. But then her eyes found the tiny, bright spyhole in the wall—hardly bigger than a pinprick—and she realized this must have been a room for observing the occupants of the interview room.

Manda didn't know much about police procedures, but she was impressed by this. It was like something you'd find in a gothic novel. She put her eye to the little pinprick of light and peered through it.

The figure who'd been standing outside the bars had entered. In the light of the interview room, Manda could now recognize her as Mrs Hope, the matron who looked after the female prisoners. She was standing in front of the table at which Ellini Syal sat, her bosom quaking with purpose.

Manda knew Mrs Hope—she had been called in to weep with her when her teenage daughter had run away. She was a straight-backed woman with a towering bosom and a blouse buttoned right up to her neck.

Before the loss of her daughter, she had been a Colonel in the Salvation Army, singing her hymns with lungs of brass and a voice of steel. Since little Emma's disappearance, the fire and brimstone had gone out of her speech, and a lot of the ramrod straightness had gone out of her back—but, today, both seemed to have returned with a vengeance.

"My name is Angela," said Mrs Hope. The words came out slightly strangled, because she had a very strong voice, and she obviously wasn't used to toning it down. "I'm Emma's mother."

Ellini stood up so suddenly that her chair toppled backwards. Her air of calm politeness vanished, and she opened her mouth to say something, but then seemed to change her mind, and clamped her lips shut.

"She's fine," Angela went on soothingly. "She got out four days ago."

"And...?" said Ellini. Clearly, it was all she dared to say.

"She doesn't know about the others. She was one of the first to go. She thinks about fifteen girls got out before her."

Ellini shut her eyes. "Oh God. They're behind schedule."

"Is that bad?"

Miss Syal opened her eyes and seemed to remember herself. She crossed over to the bars and peered down the corridor, back the way Angela had come. "Did he see you come in here?"

"No," said Angela, with a certain bitter relish. "He was too busy yelling at Constable Gleeson."

"And does he have another way of watching this room?"

"Yes. There's a kind of vestibule behind that painting." She pointed, and for one horrible moment, Manda saw Ellini's eyes flick straight towards her. "But there's no one in there now. I checked before I came in."

"Still," said Ellini, her black eyes disconcertingly fixed in Manda's direction. "We don't have long. In my experience, men don't take their eyes off me for longer than fifteen minutes together."

"I want to help you," said Angela, as though she had been bursting to say it from the moment she'd come in.

"Thank you," said Ellini. "If you can do it without drawing attention to yourself, please leave the key to my cell somewhere I can reach it before the sun goes down this evening."

"I want to help you in a more... substantial way."

"What?"

"You see, I know how to get the attention of those creatures now," said Angela, in a voice of excited agitation. "Inspector Hastings is confiscating every bottle of sandalwood perfume in the city and bringing it here to the station. He won't notice one bottle more or less, and I'm... well, I'm fitter and faster than I look."

"Oh God," said Ellini, her eyes wide. "You're not serious?"

"Well, why not? How long has it been since you slept? You can't go on like this forever, and you saved my daughter—"

"Mrs Hope," said Ellini, visibly trying to stay calm. "It is Mrs Hope, isn't it? I think that was Emma's last name."

"Yes, it is," said Angela, slightly mollified. "Do you know the last names of all five hundred of those girls?"

"Of course not. We never used our real names if we could help it. Down there, Charlotte Grey was the only name that mattered." Ellini shut her eyes again, as though trying to collect her thoughts. She had arranged her fingers flat on the tabletop. She looked as though she would have liked to sink back into the chair she had vacated so suddenly, except that it was still lying on the floor where it had fallen, its wooden legs splayed stiffly in the air.

"Mrs Hope," she went on, "please listen to me. If the creatures catch you, you will lead them straight to Emma. If they find Emma, they will know that more than one of their prisoners is loose. If they realize that, they will go back home and sure up their defences, and hundreds of girls like Emma will stay down there until they drop from starvation, or exhaustion, or worse."

"Well, what am I supposed to do?" Angela snapped. "You saved my daughter—"

"No," said Ellini, shaking her head earnestly. "Not at all. All I did was get her out—or provide the distraction which enabled her to get out if you want to be technical. You're the one who's going to have to save her, through years of being patient and loving and kind, and holding her when she's had nightmares, and making her feel safe to go outside. No, listen to me," she added because Angela had opened her mouth to interrupt. "Anyone can die for someone. It's over in an instant. But living for someone is like throwing yourself in front of an omnibus every morning."

"And who's going to be patient and loving and all those things with you?" said Angela sulkily. "Who's going to hold you after you've had nightmares?"

"Nobody. Because I won't be going to sleep."

Angela almost smiled. It was an expression Manda recognized, because she was fairly sure it appeared on her own face every time she spoke to Sam. It was the expression of exasperation reaching such a pitch that it toppled over into delirious amusement.

"Look," said Ellini, glancing down at her splayed fingers on the tabletop. "I only have to bear it for another twenty-seven days. Emma has to bear it for the rest of her life. She told you what happens to the women down there. Do you think any of us are going to find it easy to readjust? Do you think I'm envious of the woman who's going to have to tell her, with a straight face, that not all men are out to take advantage of her? I wouldn't switch places with you in a million years, so please do not dream of taking on my burden as well."

She was starting to get anxious now, starting to glance in Manda's direction with more urgency. Clearly, some kind of internal chronometer was telling her that the fifteen minutes were up, and the Inspector would be coming back to gaze at her any moment.

"What happens when the twenty-seven days are over?" said Angela.

Ellini dragged her gaze back to Mrs Hope. "Emma hasn't told you that?"

"Oh yes," said Angela, folding her arms. "She told me. I just wanted to hear it from you. The Almighty doesn't take kindly to self-slaughter."

"It won't be self-slaughter. At least, I don't think so. I'm not sure of all the circumstances, but my death has been foretold in a very reputable book of prophecies. I even saw it illustrated."

Angela sniffed. "It sounds to me like it's only unavoidable because you want it to be. In my book, that's self-slaughter."

Ellini considered this, tilting her head like an inquisitive little bird. "You might be right," she said eventually. "It doesn't matter. I'm tired."

"This is exactly like my Emma!" said Mrs Hope, throwing her hands up in the air. "You think your pain is the only pain there is, don't you? You think nobody else is going to be affected by your death!"

"I've been very lucky in that respect," said Ellini, but she was cut off by the tide of Angela's righteous indignation.

"How can you be so selfish? Do you think your life is yours to take?"

"I do actually, yes."

"You were put here by a higher power," Angela protested. "And it's not your place to decide when He's finished with you!"

Ellini gave her a warm, rueful smile. "Dear Mrs Hope, let's not argue. I promise you, we'll never agree on this. Emma is safe, and between us both, we'll keep her that way. That's the most important thing."

Mrs Hope clearly wanted to argue—she was pursing her lips like a woman biting back a whole Bible's-worth of recriminations. But something was restraining her, perhaps some grudging remembrance of what this woman had done for her daughter.

She didn't back down from the subject gracefully, though. She crossed her arms over her well-buttoned chest, and said, "That's another thing. Don't you think she'd be safer if the Inspector knew what was going on? Why aren't you telling him the truth? He may be pig-headed and arrogant, but he doesn't agree with slavery. He'd support you if he knew what you were trying to do."

Ellini gave her a long, thoughtful look, as though she was trying to make up her mind about something. "How much do you know about the other girls? The ones Emma was imprisoned with?"

"I know they went through exactly what she went through. What else matters?"

"My thoughts exactly," said Ellini, crossing over to the steel bars again, and peering along the corridor. "But not everybody's, I would think. Emma is sort of..." She gave a one-shouldered shrug while she tried to think of the correct word, "—unusual among us. In fact, I very much hope that, when all this is over, Emma will be our ambassador, because she doesn't hate anybody yet. I suppose it's because she was only there for eighteen months. Some of the others are new-breeds who've been in captivity for decades. They're not quite... rational. When they get out, they'll be hungry and frightened. I don't think they would hurt other women, because of what we've been through together, but you could forgive them—at least, I hope you could—for regarding men as their enemies."

Mrs Hope didn't say anything, so Ellini went on. She was cradling her left elbow in her right palm, and this seemed to signal that she was getting agitated, because her sentences were getting shorter, her breaths sharper.

"They'll kill people," she said. "I can't stop them." She flinched, and added, "Even if I could, I won't be alive for long enough to try it. Men will die. And, because it will be new-breeds doing the killing, it will reignite all the tensions that have been brewing since the liberation of the prison colonies. That means many more deaths—many more widows and orphans—all springing from what I'm doing right now."

She blinked hard, and then looked back at Mrs Hope, almost thirstily. It was exactly the expression Manda had seen on Sam's face when he'd been telling her that he had thought Lily's suicide attempts were just a girlish effort to gain attention.

"I'm not going to try and justify myself," she went on, meeting Mrs Hope's gaze with steady determination, as though she was resolved to drink up every last drop of the woman's horror. "It's what you can live with. I could live with causing the deaths of strangers. But leaving the girls there would be worse than death."

Mrs Hope finally found her voice, but it wasn't the voice of ringing brass they were all used to. "If you told the Inspector," she mumbled, "he could help to control them when they got out..."

"He'd lock them up!" Ellini protested. "They'd go from one prison to another! How can he understand what they've been through? He told me, Angela—he told me the first time we met: 'I don't care if I have to arrest the whole bloody city. There will be peace in Oxford.'"

Ellini's anger seemed to fizzle out, because her shoulders drooped, and she looked down at the floor wretchedly. "I was hoping Dr Petrescu would perfect his medication before they got out—then at least they wouldn't be hungry, even if they were still scared. But all I do is make things worse. I've driven him out of his mind just by trying to help. And Jack is—"

She never got a chance to say what Jack was. The mere mention of his name seemed to make her break down. There were no tears, but she crumpled up over her stomach—as though something inside her had burst—and sank to the floor, her face white. Mrs Hope rushed over, hauled her off the floor, sat her back in her chair, and held her.

"You see," said Ellini with a small, shaky smile. "I couldn't make it through more than twenty-seven days, even if I wanted to."

Angela made a kind of anxious, clucking noise, but didn't speak. And that was when Manda, with a sensation like ice being poured down the back of her dress, recognized the sound of footsteps coming down the corridor.

In desperation, she started coughing—just to give the women in the interview room some warning—and then rushed out into the corridor, grabbed Sam by his collar, and hauled him back the way he had come. This was not something she could have achieved without his co-operation, but he seemed to be in a mood to humour her, because he didn't speak until she had dragged him back to the station's ornate stone lobby.

"That book," he said urgently, as though she hadn't done anything out of the ordinary at all. "Where did you get that book? It's everything—I mean, it's gibberish, but it's everything I've been looking for. It's that bloody Book of Woe she's been telling me about!"

Manda closed her eyes, in an effort to gather her thoughts, and then looked back at him. "I bet I can tell you exactly what it says."