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I winced. Miss Decima was pushing her luck. There was no way that the Superintendent was ever going to believe such a steaming pile of – beg pardon – bull’s droppings.

But apparently the smell of gold was enough to cover any number of droppings. Her scowl vanished in an instant. ‘Of course! Come inside, please, right away. My name is Mrs Ripley. It is a pleasure to meet you, Mrs –’

‘Mrs Godwin,’ said Miss Decima, shaking her hand. ‘Do forgive the state of my footman – he was trampled by a dray horse on the way here. Help me up the stairs, please, Boggins.’

Boggins. I could have killed her. I turned her chair around to wheel it backwards up the steps while Mrs Ripley more or less crawled after her, kissing the pavement.

‘I can’t apologize enough for the uncongenial nature of my tone when you arrived,’ she said, almost breathless. ‘We’ve had some … nuisance callers recently, you see, and, as Superintendent, I have a duty to protect the girls. Normally there would have been a porter out front to meet you, but sadly he had to take the day off. He was injured in some kind of football game last night.’

I managed to avoid the look that Miss Decima was giving me as I wheeled her inside.

23

Monday, 19 June, 9.26 a.m.

The hallway was stunning, let me tell you. Resplendent, even. Gleaming tiles and polished wood wherever you looked, with a sweeping central staircase stretching up a good four floors. I pushed the chair after Mrs Ripley, trying to ignore my pounding head and churning stomach.

‘As you can see, your granddaughters will be living in suitable comfort,’ Mrs Ripley explained to Miss Decima. ‘We keep the girls focused on study and practice – no time for frivolities or distractions. There’s an auditorium and a library, too, though we try to keep the books as unstimulating as possible so the girls aren’t tempted to read them.’

‘How heartening,’ said Miss Decima, in a voice that could have stripped varnish.

Mrs Ripley came to an office and held the door open for us. Miss Decima turned back to me. ‘Thank you, Boggins. You may wait here until I am done.’ She gave me a weighted look. ‘Perhaps you might care to … use their facilities.’

‘I’m all right, thanks,’ I said.

Miss Decima gave me a slightly more weighted look. ‘Are you quite sure about that, Boggins? I would encourage you to use the opportunity to inspect those dray horse injuries that we were just discussing outside.’

I finally twigged what she was asking me to do. ‘Did I say no? I meant yes.’

‘End of the corridor,’ Mrs Ripley muttered, barely looking at me, her attention fixed on Miss Decima’s fictional granddaughter goldmine.

I left them to it, closing the door and retracing my footsteps. I knew Miss Decima would be able to string out their discussion for a good long while: I calculated that I’d have about half an hour to search Lavinia Welford’s dorm and get back downstairs before Mrs Ripley began to get suspicious. There was only one problem, which was that I had absolutely no idea where Lavinia Welford’s dorm was.

I concentrated my thoughts. Porter’s office. All the keys would be in there, maybe even a ledger of students. Even better, it’d be empty, seeing as I’d hospitalized the porter. I had a faint memory from last night of slide-tackling someone who said they were a porter just before I shoved them into a spiky bush.

I found the office beside the front door. There was no ledger, but there was a set of pigeon-holes for letters. I sorted through them, one by one: MILLICENT BATES, CONSTANCE CLUTTERBUCK, FLORA GIFFORD … bingo. LAVINIA WELFORD, Room 34. I glanced around – sure enough, there was a panel of numbered hooks at the end of the office, with keys hanging on each one. I took the set labelled 34, and that was it – job done. I was stunned by how easy it was, not to mention grateful. My head was starting to feel like that baked potato I’d sat on earlier.

I made my way up the stairs to the top floor, listening to the far-off scales of an oboe. The house seemed almost empty; the girls must have all been at lectures or something, which thankfully meant I didn’t have to follow Miss Decima’s orders and try to flirt with anyone. The last time she made me do that, with Temperance, I’d got knocked out with a salted ham for my troubles, and I’d tasted ham every time I licked my lips for two days straight. Although, in fairness, I’m not sure all women would respond that way. Temperance had later tried to kill me with a hammer, so maybe it was just how she did things.

I found Room 34 at the end of the top floor. There was a little card tucked into a slot in the door: MISS FLORA GIFFORD & MISS LAVINIA WELFORD. I grimaced. I’d hoped I would be searching an empty room, but it looked like she shared. I knocked gingerly. ‘Hello? Anyone in there?’

No reply. I took a final glance around the corridor, unlocked the door and slipped inside.

I found myself standing in a cosy parlour room: a fireplace, two chairs, a cello case propped up in a corner. There were two doorways, one on either side of the room, both unmarked. I frowned. I had no idea which bedroom was which. I settled on alphabetic order – Gifford first, then Welford – and opened the one on the right.

The room had clearly been turned over by the police. There was a wooden desk against one wall, swept clean of everything; the drawers had been opened and ransacked and the floor was covered in paper. There was a metal music stand on one side and a small wardrobe on the other, containing nothing except an empty hatbox. Last of all, a single bed beneath a window. I glanced out and, sure enough, I could see the statue just a hundred yards away. Lavinia would have had a clear view of it every day.

My eyes fell to the instruments lying on the bed – a cello and a bassoon – and then on to the bed itself with longing. The pillows and mattress had been slashed open, feathers everywhere, but I’d still have happily paid a year’s wages to pull the sheets over my head and sleep until Thursday.

No time for that now – I had to search for clues. I started with the papers on the floor. Most of them were pages of handwritten sheet music, complete with tweaks and corrections. She was a music student, then. I peered at the title and frowned. ‘The … Batch–a?’

No idea. I turned back to the desk drawers, all of which had been emptied, except for the last one. There was a big paper package at the bottom, torn open so the insides had spilt out. I stared it for a while, blinking.

Hatpins. There must have been thousands of them. I had no idea how many hatpins a lady typically required, but this was surely too many. Why would anyone need …

I stopped. There was something else, mixed in with the hatpins – a little metal key. The police must have missed it. It wasn’t big enough for a door or a wardrobe: it was the kind of key that opened a diary. I looked around, hoping one would be helpfully lying on the floor, but my good luck had run out. I gazed around the room, searching for anything that the key might open, like a trunk or a …

I turned to the cello on the bed. Then, leaving the bedroom, I walked back to the cello case leaning against the wall of the parlour. I lifted it; sure enough, it was as light as anything. But it wasn’t empty. I could feel something moving inside when I shook it.