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going to have on your forehead,’ he said. ‘Best tell your parents you fell out a tree.’
    â€˜I will,’ said Delphine, ‘on one condition.’
    â€˜Condition?’ said Mr Garforth. He tried to hide his smile by rubbing his chin. ‘Go on, then. What’s this condition?’
    She folded her arms.
    â€˜Teach me to shoot.’

    * The story went that, as two privates tried to break down the door, they could hear him haranguing each of the skulls in turn for ‘bad advice’.

CHAPTER 4
    ORDEAL BY FIRE
    March 1935
    D elphine hurried through the corridor. She was hungry. She thought about the Siege of Antioch where the crusaders were starving to death and plundering villages for food and deserting, and some of them began hallucinating from hunger and having visions of God, and as she rounded the corner she crashed into Mr Propp.
    â€˜Oh!’ Delphine dropped her Mars bar.
    Propp took a step back, rubbing his paunch. In the empty corridor, they stared at one another. His big grey eyes did not blink. His mouth was half-disguised behind his drooping white moustache.
    â€˜Sorry,’ said Delphine.
    With a grunt, he began to sink. His smooth scalp tilted towards her and one pinstriped leg bent until his knee was almost touching the floor.
    â€˜Ivan?’ Dr Lansley was coming up the corridor. He wore a checked cravat tucked haphazardly into his jacket. ‘What on earth are you bowing for?’
    Propp rose. He looked at his palm. The Mars bar sat in his thick tanned fingers. He turned the black wrapper so the name faced up, red letters on a white stripe.
    Lansley appeared at his shoulder. Side by side, the two men were stark opposites: Dr Lansley a tall, skinny wraith of middling yearswith pale cheeks, oily black hair, black deaf aid and a coal-smudge moustache above a thin frowning mouth, Mr Propp a plump, short figure, old but hearty, round-faced with a shaven head, a brownish complexion and a lush, bone-coloured moustache that framed a full-lipped smile.
    In Lansley’s severe, haughty demeanour Delphine saw an unbroken lineage all the way back to the Norman conquerors, but Propp contained a little of everything – Egyptian skin, a broad Siberian nose, and eyes tinged with dry, Asiatic glamour. In his patient, canny composure he could have been Jew or Norseman or ancient Tibetan hermit. Lansley was old England, but Propp was the world.
    Propp uncurled his fingers. He held out the Mars bar.
    She reached for it, half-expecting his hand to snap shut.
    â€˜God of war,’ he said. The creases around his eyes deepened. He watched her hand withdraw with the chocolate.
    Delphine tried not to flinch. The Mars bar felt hot in her trembling grip.
    Lansley cleared his throat. ‘Well, what do you say?’
    â€˜Oh,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’
    â€˜I should think so, too. Now, you are between me and my lunch – move.’ He shoved past, wiping his glove on his lapel after he had touched her.
    Propp brushed imaginary dust off his knee. He followed at a plod.
    She watched him go. What had he meant by that comment? Did he know she was onto him? Was he threatening her?
    As she turned away, she spotted something on the floor where he had bent down. It must have fallen from his pocket.
    She crouched and picked it up.
    It was dull and tarnished, attached to a triangular fob of cracked brown leather.
    It was a room key.

    Propp’s study lay at the end of a gloomy corridor lined with artwork on the east wing’s ground floor.
    Delphine crept towards a huge panelled door. The walls were lined with increasingly weird and ugly paintings: a drab landscapeof scrub, rubble and skulls, a distorted watercolour parody of what she guessed was meant to be a dodo, and several inferior studies of the young blond lady whose portrait hung in the Great Hall, identified by brass nameplates as Lady Anwen Stokeham. In each portrait she towered in a black silk mourning