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From The Scrutiny of Secrets by Mortimer Dee

The diary of Alicia Harcourt Symmes:

After the strange demise of my dear papa, and now that I am truly his heiress, I think it would be a suitable tribute for me to continue his diary. His name was John Harcourt Symmes, and he was a Victorian gentleman of science, in those distant days when the study of the occult could still be scholarly, and respectable. Unlike now, where I am called a foolish woman and people smirk at me behind my back.

I knew hardly anything about him until the day the letter came.

I was a young girl of 19, living a quiet life with my aunt and uncle in the rectory at Charlecote Thorpe in the county of Yorkshire. It was a remote, windy hamlet on the moors, the nearest town ten long miles away. I had lived in that dingy and depressing house since I was eight, the year when my dear mama passed over to the Other Side. She had separated from Papa very early in her marriage, and no one ever told me why. I was kept in complete ignorance. It was never even spoken of by my aunt and uncle. I could only suppose there had been some terrible scandal, some wonderfully thrilling disgrace. Mama had even reverted to her maiden name of Faversham, though in secret I practiced my true forbidden name over and over in my books in childish handwriting.

Alicia Harcourt Symmes.

It had a refined sound to me, even then. It made me feel like a different person, as if I had some hidden dark mirror image of myself.

I was an isolated child. Not ill-treated but certainly unloved. It was clear to me my aunt had only taken me in out of duty to my dead mother. I had only my dolls to play with, as the village children were thought too rough and uncouth to come to the house. Sometimes I used to peep at them from between the heavy velvet curtains, as they ran on the moor and small scruffy dogs chased after them. I envied them their wild fights, their screeching arguments, their real families. Because, though I seemed outwardly a quiet and reserved child, respectful and silent in company, the truth was that I was seething with rebellion.

I loathed my life!

Maybe that was why I was fascinated to learn more of my father. Once, coming very quietly into the room, I heard my aunt in conversation with one of her cronies, the curate’s wife, and she was saying: “. . . My dear, he experimented in the occult, in fiendish, terrible things Of course, he was a most depraved and villainous creature. How my sister came to fall under his spell remains the sorrow of my life. Do you know, they say at one time he even kept a girl from the streets and she actually became . . .”

Then they saw me, and fell silent.

How I pondered those words in the curled cave of my bedclothes! How in secret I would imagine and dream of my father! Depraved and villainous! I shuddered with delight. I pictured him tall and devilishly handsome, with a curled mustache, and I prayed that one day he would come in a great carriage and whisk me away from the tedium of the dull dark house, to Paris, to Rome, to London!

But he never came.

Instead, on my twenty-first birthday, the letter arrived.

Sarah spread the photocopies of the Dee manuscript on the kitchen table. Piers had enlarged them, so that the page of scribbled drawings, the tangles of coded words, could be seen more easily.

Venn picked one up and examined it.

“Total and utter gibberish.” Wharton turned a copy, not even sure which way up it should go. “I mean look at this. A tower, a bird-mask, some sort of crane? Then an equation. Then a scratchy picture of what might be, well . . . a man on a horse?”

“A centaur,” Venn muttered.

“Well, maybe. But what does it all mean? How can this help us get Jake back?”

Venn flicked a glance at Piers. “Any idea?”

The little man looked at the page almost hungrily. “Not yet, Excellency. But I’d love to have a go. Puzzles! I love puzzles.”

Venn frowned. “Be quick. We need the information.”

He turned to Sarah and she faced him. That sharp blue gaze they both had, Wharton thought. How hadn’t he seen before how similar they were?

Venn said, “So. My great-granddaughter.”

Sarah knew there was one question that had burned in him since their last meeting; he asked it at once, unflinching. “Is it true that Leah comes back?”

She looked away. “In my history, she didn’t die in a car crash. But I don’t know details. All our family documents were lost in the fire, or Janus took them. But that painting of her—the one you have in her room? We still had that.”

“So I’ll succeed.” He seemed numb with relief, dizzy with disbelief. He glanced at Wharton, then back at her. “If only I knew how. As for what happened with Summer . . . I’m trusting you, Sarah. You have to help me. When Leah is back, I don’t care about the mirror. You can blow it to smithereens if you like.”

He turned and went to the door.

“What about David?” she said.

He stood stock-still, as if he had forgotten the name. “Yes, David. David too. Of course.” He went out. A moment later they heard the front door slam.

“He’s not going to the Wood, is he?” Wharton said anxiously.

Piers shrugged. “The estate has many footpaths. He’ll roam up on the moors for hours.”

“That Summer creature gives me the creeps.” Wharton turned to Sarah. “Come on. We need to check the mirror.”

On her way out, she looked back. Piers had seated himself at the table. He had poised a lamp over the papers and was making hasty notes with a long red pen. From nowhere he seemed to have found a green visor to shade his eyes.

“Looks like a newspaper hack,” Wharton said.

She smiled. As she closed the door, three of the cats jumped up and sprawled on the table, mewing for food.

“Get lost,” Piers said absently.

The house was silent and musty. As they walked its corridors, they passed through slants of pale light from the windows, watery with tiny running raindrops.

“It seems so empty without Jake,” Wharton said.

“Yes.”

To her it seemed as if an air of hopelessness, of damp decline, had invaded the place. She paused beneath a pale square of paneling. “There was a painting there Christmastime. Surely?”

“Venn sold it last week. Piers boxed it up and I took it to the station. It’s being auctioned in Christie’s.”

“So he’s short of money.”

“Sarah, he’s out of money.”

She shook her head. As Wharton led the way up the wide, curving staircase, she thought of how the Time-wolf had once slunk up here, its eyes sapphire fragments. On the landing, the ancient floorboards creaked.

The Long Gallery stretched before them.

They walked down it, but Wharton stopped abruptly before a bedroom door. “Reminds me. There’s something you might be able to help me with, because the damned beast won’t even look at me.”

He led her inside.

Jake’s bedroom.

It had been his father’s, and he had moved in there. His clothes lay on chairs, on a heap on the floor. His laptop sat on the mahogany dressing table.

Wharton pointed up. “Horatio. Quite lost without his master.”

She saw the marmoset. It was huddled in a heap of misery on the very top of the great curtain rail. It spared her a miserable glance, its tiny face screwed up.

“Horatio!” She reached up, her voice soft. “Come on. Come down.”

The creature turned its face away.

“Just won’t eat,” Wharton said gloomily. “If Jake gets back and finds him dead, there’ll be hell to pay.”