Dr. Wilson ordered a meal brought up from the hospital cafeteria – spaghetti and meatballs. It took Sir Stephen a few tries to get the hang of using a fork, but once he had, he devoured three helpings and at six pieces of soggy garlic bread, which astonished everybody even further.

"Pray tell," Sir Stephen said as he ate. "You said this was a hospital?"

"Yes," said Nat. She knew what was supposed to be going on here, of course – being as he was from the middle ages, he would ask where the monks were. They would then have to tell him that it wasn't that kind of hospital, and finish by astonishing him with the knowledge that he was in the twenty-first century. She was not going to play that game.

"Raigmore Hospital, in Scotland," said Dr. Wilson.

"It's not a religious institution," Nat added. "It's just a place to care for the sick and injured."

"Scotland looked such a wild place in the parts I passed through in my pursuit of the Red Death," Sir Stephen said. "I had no idea other regions were so civilized."

"Yeah, we're full of surprises," said Nat.

DI Carter wasn't having any of the situation's script, either. She pulled a chair up next to Sir Stephen's bed, and showed him her badge. "I know you're not feeling very well," she said, "but I was hoping I could talk to you for a moment. I'm Detective Inspector Carter, and I'm looking for a missing person." She turned on her phone and found a picture of Mr. Pierce – the same one that had appeared in the Courier's article that morning. "Do you recognize this man?"

Sir Stephen was still chewing on a mouthful of garlic bread as he examined it. "No, I do not," he decided.

"He didn't hire you to pose for a statue?" asked Nat. She had to hang on to her theory that this man was an artist's model, because to believe anything else would have been ridiculous. Pierce must have promised those statues to somebody. They would have been a remarkable find if they'd been Saxon, forcing historians to re-assess whether any number of old tales might be true. Maybe Pierce and Zola had planned to pull off the archaeological hoax of the century, a modern-day version of Piltdown Man. Calling Natasha had been a test, to see if they could fool an expert – they'd failed because Pierce was an idiot who'd gone to great trouble to get the armor and weaponry right but hadn't bothered to look up what kind of commemorative art was being made in the eleventh century.

"I've never laid eyes on him," Sir Stephen said, another forkful of spaghetti already halfway to his mouth. "Unless it's a poor likeness."

"The likeness is fine," said Carter, and put her phone away.

"Why were you at the warehouse, if Mr. Pierce didn't invite you?" Natasha asked.

"I cannot say," said Sir Stephen. "My last memory is of fighting the Red Death for the Grail map, and then…"

"Grail map?" Nat interrupted. "You mean the Holy Grail from the King Arthur stories? Sir Galahad and everything?" Maybe it was Zola, rather than Pierce, who'd hired this guy – but hired him for what?

"The very same," Sir Stephen said. "I'd not have believed it myself, had I not seen it with my own eyes."

Nat pulled her half-finished sketch of Zola out of her purse. "How about this guy?" she asked.

Even before he spoke, she could see in Sir Stephen's face that he recognized the image. "That is Zola," he said. "He is not a man, but a kobold. The Red Death tricked him into a contract, and now he is bound to serve him."

"Kobold?" asked Dr. Wilson with a frown. "Isn't that supposed to be something like a German fairy?"

Nat didn't know, and didn't care. "Did he hire you?" she asked Sir Stephen.

"I serve King Harold," the man replied, offended. "I do not draw my blade for foreigners, or for goblins!"

Nat gave up and offered the drawing to Carter, instead. "Anyway, this is the man from the pub," she said. "I can polish it up if you want."

"He looks like a goblin," Carter observed. "Yeah, finish that and we'll see if we can find him – and the man who made those statues you mentioned for Mr. Pierce."

Nat pulled her chair over to a little table to get to work. "You believe me now," she noted. Carter hadn't been sure earlier. Now she seemed happy enough to accept Natasha's version of events, if only because they made more sense than anything else that had happened today.

"I told you – I don't believe things," Carter corrected, and sighed. "We're not going to be able to get any useful testimony out of Sir Steve. Even if he eventually remembers something, it'll be like that scene in True Believer where they'll be completely discredited if it ever comes up that the witness thinks Kennedy was murdered by the phone company." She took out her phone again and began checking for text messages. "The ten o'clock news tonight is going to be weird."


And Carter was right – but not in the way she thought. The anchorman did mention the miraculous survivor of the unidentified man from the river, but only as a sort of footnote to the ongoing inquiry into the distance of Alexander Pierce. Mrs. Pierce made a tearful plea for his safe return, and then the broadcast skipped on ahead to something entirely unexpected.

"And now for the most sensational news of the day," the anchorman, a balding South Asian man with a bushy mustache, announced. "An Irish cryptozoologist – did I say that right?" He looked at his co-anchor, a blonde woman in large glasses. She just shrugged. "An Irish cryptozoologist," the anchorman went on, "claims to have done nothing less than capture the Loch Ness Monster! We go now to Lochend, with Yvonne Kirkland."

The shot cut to a car park with a little row of houses on the edge of the lake beyond it, where a man was proudly showing off a creature he was keeping in a cage in the back of his pickup truck. For something that was supposed to be a monster it was disappointingly small, no bigger than a retriever. It had the body of a seal, and it barked like one as it banged around inside the cage, trying to escape from all the humans staring at it, but its neck was about twice as long as the head perched atop it, as if the animal were trying to evolve into a dinosaur.

"Darren O'Herlihy first came to Scotland from his native Belfast in 2011 to hunt for the legendary creature," a female reporter said. "Now he may just have found it. Experts are loathe to assign an identity to the creature until they've had a chance to examine it for themselves, but first guesses are that it is a previously unknown species of long-necked pinniped."

"That doesn't make sense," Carter complained, through a mouthful of the pizza they'd ordered. "Seals come out of the water to rest and breed – we used to hear them in the spring, when we'd visit my Gran in the Orkneys. If there were seals living in the Loch we'd have known about it forever."

"I think we can write off the idea of today making any sense," Natasha observed.

"I think we can write off this week making any sense," Carter agreed. The two women exchanged a glance and a nod, acknowledging that they were now friends. There was nothing to bring women together like having to put up with men's bullshit, and there'd been a lot of bullshit today.

On the other side of the room, Dr. Wilson asked Sir Stephen, "so then what happened?"

Despite having already eaten the equivalent of several meals that day, Sir Stephen had also devoured half the pizza and, now that the initial novelty of the television had worn off, was telling Dr. Wilson a story about his quest for the Holy Grail. It was a convoluted tale, with side characters like Sir James Buckeye and Lady Margaret of Cartaster. Dr. Wilson had started off trying to take notes for whatever poor soul was assigned to be Sir Stephen's psychologist, but now he was simply sitting by the bedside, listening raptly.

"The Prioress then told me a great secret," Sir Stephen said gravely. "She said that the Red Death's wicked soul was no object to his finding the Grail, because he already knew that the true Grail was not the cup of Christ at all. That was naught but a lie, to dissuade those wicked enough to want divine power. She said Sir Galahad had discovered this, and was so horrified to think this was his true destiny that he chose to die, and sent Sir Percival home to invent some other story about his fate. A beautiful lie, the Prioress said, was better than an ugly truth."

"So what was it?" Dr. Wilson asked. "What was the grail, if it wasn't the cup?"

"None knew," said Sir Stephen. "Sir Galahad took the truth to his grave. Some said it was the eye the god Wodan traded to the fates in order to see the future. Others that it was the point of the Morrigan's spear. Still others that it was a stone that fell from the sky. The Prioress said that whatever its origin, it was a tool of the demons of hell, and could be used only for evil."

"Better not let this Red Death get his hands on it, then," said Wilson, with only a slight smile on his lips.

"Indeed," said Sir Stephen. "Buckeye and I decided we must retrieve it ourselves, and cast it back into the abyss from whence it came! The Prioress gave us a silver cup the sisters used to celebrate mass, so that we might put that in its place for any who came after us. They could believe they had found a sacred relic, and not be able to wield the true Grail's evil power."

"Another beautiful lie," Wilson observed. "Was Lady Margaret still with you by now?"

"Oh, no, she was still in Cartaster, raising her own army against the Normans," said Sir Stephen. "I neglected to mention that, didn't I? With most of my men in camp there, we hoped it would look as if we had stayed to help her in fortifying the town. The Red Death was no fool, though. He did not fall for such tricks, and we learned later that Zola had been among the sisters, having taken one's shape, in order to overhear our plans."

"Why are you listening to this?" asked DI Carter.

"Aw, some on, this is great," said Dr. Wilson. "This is the stuff little kids grow up on, knights and castles and quests! I'd watch this movie." He reached to grab the last slice of pizza before Sir Stephen could get it. "When I was six years old, my grandparents gave me a book of 'chivalric stories' for Christmas, and by the time I finished it I'd decided I was going to be a knight when I grew up."

"What led you to become a physician instead?" Sir Stephen asked him.

"Not a lot of call for knights these days," Dr. Wilson replied. "I did join the army, though, so I guess that's kind of close. My favourite story was the one about Sir Sigmund, the guy who could talk to birds."

"After he tasted the blood of the dragon," Sir Stephen agreed. "I have heard the tale."

Nat shook her head and turned back to Carter, who had spent most of the afternoon and evening obsessively checking and re-checking her email. "Anything yet on who made the statues?" she asked.

"Not yet," said Carter. "They've confirmed it wasn't anybody local, so we're casting the net further afield."

Sir Stephen and Dr. Wilson had also returned to their own conversation. "As well as the cup," Sir Stephen continued, "the Prioress offered us two teeth of Saint Wilfred for protection against evil – and we would soon have cause to be grateful for them! We set off into the night, dressed all in white so that we could go unseen against the snow. Before we had gone so much as a mile, a terrible blizzard descended, so that we did not know which way was which and risked walking in circles. Sir Francis swore it could only be an act of sorcery…"

Dr. Wilson interrupted. "Didn't you say Sir Francis thought everything was an act of sorcery, including bad cheese?" he asked – but before Sir Stephen could answer, the doctor's phone rang. "Just a sec, Sir Steve," he said, and pulled the device out of his pocket to take the call. "Wilson," he said.

Sir Stephen fell silent to let Dr. Wilson talk, which Natasha thought was odd behaviour from a guy who supposedly thought it was the eleventh century. Maybe that, like his English, was another hint of reality poking through the layers of delusion. "What about that?" she asked, pointing at Dr. Wilson. "He's talking to somebody who might be miles away. Is that an act of sorcery?"

"Not at all," Sir Stephen replied at once. "There is no sacrifice required. To perform magic requires that something be given in return. That is merely a machine. I did not know the Scots made such wonderful machines," he added, sitting up a bit straighter so he could look out the window – his injuries had continued to heal over the course of the day, and he now seemed to be able to move without pain. "I can see the carts with no horses on the roads below. The city must be very wealthy, that there are so many."

"If only it were that simple," DI Carter observed dryly.

"What?" Dr. Wilson demanded of his caller. "What do you… where did you get this number?"

The other three looked up, all of them startled. Dr. Wilson had so far seemed like a very laid-back person, the only one who was intrigued rather than annoyed by Sir Stephen's condition. This was the first time they'd heard him sound angry about something.

"I don't know, and I wouldn't tell you if I did!" Dr. Wilson said to the caller. "You've already said you're not a friend or relative, so you don't have anything to offer him, and he's got enough people bothering him while he's trying to get well. You have a very good day," he finished shortly, and tapped the screen to hang up.

"Who was that?" asked DI Carter.

"That reporter." Dr. Wilson put his phone back in his pocket. "Kirkwell or whoever she was. She wants an interview with Sir Steve, and she's not gonna get it." He shook his head, then took a deep breath. "Well, ladies, it's been a long day, and I think we all need some rest. I'm sure you two have work you need to get back to…"

He was throwing them out, Nat thought. That was fair enough – they didn't have much to gain by being here. Sir Stephen didn't know anything that would be useful to DI Carter, and Natasha had told them everything she knew. It was still slightly annoying, though, because this situation was so weird that Nat would really have liked to know how it worked out.

"Did you feel that?" asked DI Carter.

"What?" Nat looked up at her. "What did you feel?"

"It's like… like a very faint vibration," the detective replied. "There it is again."

Nat could feel it, she realized – a slight tremor in the soles of her feet. She looked at a glass of water sitting on the bedside table next to Sir Stephen. The surface was shivering in standing rings, and as she watched, the ripples grew deeper and her scalp began to prickle as the shaking intensified.

"Where's it coming from?" asked Dr. Wilson. "It doesn't feel like an earthquake."

Natasha had to agree. The Great Glen was a geological fault line, but she'd been in earthquakes and they weren't like this. Earth tremors were random and sudden, and began with a sharp jolt that died away in rolling waves of vibration. This was doing the opposite, starting soft and getting steadily more and more intense.

Somewhere in the hospital, an alarm started to blare. There was a ping as the glass in the window cracked. On the road outside, car horns honked as traffic came to a puzzled halt, and Nat decided that no matter what was happening, there was one thing for absolute certain.

"We've gotta get out of here," she said.

"Yeah. Yeah, I'll go for that." Dr. Wilson grabbed Sir Stephen's charts off the bedside table. "Follow me."

Natasha and DI Carter helped Sir Stephen out of bed and into the hallway, where other doctors and patients were doing the same. Some were already heading for the emergency exit routes, while others were just milling around, hoping somebody else knew more about what was going on than they did. Everybody was frightened and confused.

May I have your attention, please, a man's voice said over the PA. We are currently experiencing an earth tremor. For your own safety, we must ask you to evacuate the building immediately. If you cannot do so on your own, call for help and hospital staff will assist you. Do not use the elevators unless you have no choice.

Two nurses were already at the nearest elevator, waiting with a patient on a wheeled stretcher. They looked up at the speaker, then at each other, shifting nervously from foot to foot. The patient was holding on to the stretcher rails, as if terrified that she would be shaken right off.

"Stairs are there." Dr. Wilson pointed to a set of doors. This was not the same stairwell Sir Stephen had attempted to escape up earlier, as they were in a different block of the hospital now, but when they went inside it looked similar, with linoleum steps and whitewashed walls. A large number six stencilled on the wall told Natasha that it was a long way down.

The building was now shaking so violently that they were jostled against the door frame, and dust was falling from the roof. Dr. Wilson was already a few steps down, and Sir Stephen and the women were about to follow, when they heard a tremendous creaking roar. A cloud of dust began to billow up from the lower floors.

"We cannot go down! We must go up!" Sir Stephen decided. He pulled his arms free of Nat and Carter, and began climbing the steps.

"We can't go up!" Dr. Wilson protested. "There's no way back down again!"

Below them there was a groan of bending metal, followed by a chilling human scream that was suddenly cut off.

They went up. Natasha didn't bother to count the flights, though she was sure there were fewer than there would have been to the bottom. The dust cloud rose around them, making it difficult to breathe and leaving them feeling their way along the walls and railings – but a couple of flights up, it also began to show a beam of light. The door to the roof was open. They scrambled up the last few steps and emerged onto the roof, right next to the elevator doors that opened to access the helipad. The helicopter itself, yellow, green, and blue with the words Scotland Charity Air Ambulance painted on the side, was sitting there as if waiting for them.

"Yes!" squealed Natasha. There was a way down after all.

"Everybody, inside!" Dr. Wilson ordered. He forced the door open and climbed into the cockpit.

"You can fly a helicopter?" Natasha asked, both surprised and relieved. She'd assumed she would have to come up with an excuse why she knew how.

"I hope so! I haven't done it since I was in the army!" Dr. Wilson put his headphones on and started the engines.

Nat helped Carter get Sir Stephen into the back, then pulled the doors shut. "We're in!" she shouted over the thumping rotors.

"Then hold on!" said Wilson.

Although the interior of the helicopter had seats for the paramedics and a place for a patient to lie down, Natasha, Carter, and Sir Stephen were all on their feet with their faces glued to the windows as they lifted off the roof. The helipad seemed to drop out from under them as they rose slowly into the air – and then, with a thunderous roar that could be heard even over the thumping of the blades, it literally dropped away as the roof collapsed. Within seconds, the entire building had fallen into its own footprint, like a skyscraper being demolished. Dust rose like the ash from an erupting volcano, obscuring the view.

Nat closed her eyes, trying not to imagine that she could hear the people inside screaming.

When she opened them again, the helicopter was circling the site at a distance, watching the dust blow away on the wind. As it cleared, it was possible to see a heap of rebar and rubble where the building had been. Police, fire, and rescue were already arriving, as other vehicles sped away.

"What the hell was that?" Carter asked, probably rhetorically.

Sir Stephen answered her anyway. "That, my lady," he said, "was an act of sorcery."

She turned to stare at him. "Sorcery?" she asked. "That was an act of terrorism, that's what it was!"

"I have seen such things before," Sir Stephen insisted. "It's a particularly powerful form of magic, because you must persuade the demons to perform a task before you give them their reward."

"Oh, shut up," said Carter.

Sir Stephen was undeterred. "Normally a devil performs no service until blood has been spilled for it," he explained. "To bring down a building and kill all those inside requires it to take its master's word that there will be people within, and the blood will be enough to pay for its efforts. And if the devil is disappointed in the results…"

"Shut up!" Carter repeated, rounding on him with ice in her eyes. "Are you listening to yourself? Do you have any idea how many people just died? There must have been a hundred or more, who came there to be cured, and now they're dying in the rubble and you're blaming magic?"

"Terrible magic," Sir Stephen said gravely. "I know there are dead. I was meant to be one of them!" He moved up towards the cockpit, to talk to Dr. Wilson. "I did not yet come to the next part of the tale. The snow, I think, was meant to keep us from leaving the priory, and indeed, after less than an hour we tried to return. When we did, though, we found the buildings had collapsed just the same way, with the blood of the sisters staining the snow."

"Yeah, good for you," said Dr. Wilson, who was no longer so enamoured of the story. "More important issue right now: it looks like hey hadn't refuelled yet after their last trip. We've got twenty minutes in the air according to the gauge here. Where do we want to go?"

He'd turned to the southwest, following the line of the Great Glen as they left the hospital area. The cloud of dust from the collapsed hospital was lit brightly behind them by the setting sun, as if it were glowing from within.

"Away from here," said Natasha. That was all that mattered. If somebody were trying to kill Sir Stephen, she had to take him to a place where that person couldn't find him.

"Burnett Road," said Carter. "I need to talk to my colleagues. If that were an attempt on Sir Steve's life, it might be connected to the disappearance of Mr. Pierce."

"Lochend," said Sir Stephen, "and I shall prove to you that it was."

"Lochend?" asked DI Carter. "There's nothing there but an Irish nutter with a deformed seal!"

"The woman who spoke to Dr. Wilson on his 'mobile' was there to tell of the beast, was she not?" Sir Stephen asked. "If we can find her, I think she will tell you that she did not request an interview at all. I think you will learn it was Zola you spoke to, hiding behind her voice as he hid behind the face of one of the sisters. And if it were he who wanted to be sure I was in the hospital, it will have been the Red Death's sorcery that brought the building down."

Nat thought about it. "All right," she said. "Lochend." It wasn't that far away, maybe ten kilometres down the A82. Easy to find, easy to get back from.

"You must be joking," Carter said.

"No," said Nat. "You're assuming Sir Steve's making this all u, but what if he's not? What if it's a twisted version of things that really happened?" If the last thing he'd done was compare himself in costume to the statue of Sir Stephen of Rogsey, that might explain why he now believed he was Sir Stephen of Rogsey. Maybe this was her spy brain intervening again, but Nat didn't want to leave the possibility unexplored. "Maybe the reporter called Dr. Wilson because somebody paid her to, and once they knew he was there, then they bombed the place." That almost made sense, except that what had happened at the hospital hadn't felt like a bomb any more than it had felt like an earthquake.

"I think you're reaching," said Carter.

"It's not a terrible idea," Dr. Wilson said. "We'll be in somebody's way if we land in the city, because they'll be dispatching rescue workers from everywhere they can, especially the airfield, but that little car park we saw on the news had space to put a helicopter. And it's not so far away that it'll be a big hassle for them to drive a fuel truck out there to get it back."

Carter sighed. "Okay, Lochend. I'll have to make a telephone call when we arrive."

"As long as it's unanimous," Dr. Wilson said, and grabbed the radio. "Um, hello? INV air traffic control? My name is Dr. Sam Wilson. I just escaped the Raigmore Hospital collapse in the air ambulance. I've got a patient, a cop, and a guest on board. We've decided to fly up the river to land at Lochend, but it's been about six years since I last flew a helicopter."

Somebody at the airport gave Wilson some guidelines for the flight, and they made their cautious way down the Great Glen. Days were long in the Highlands in June, but by now it was twilight and rapidly getting darker. Lights were burning in the towns and tourist hotels along the river and the shores of Loch Dochfour. The water itself was very dark, reflecting the last light of the sunset and a bright half moon.

"Did you ever hear about a monster here?" Nat asked Sir Stephen, out of idle curiosity. She was pretty sure she'd read somewhere that there were medieval legends about 'great fish' in the Loch, but had no idea what their content was or how old they were.

"The first time I ventured this far north was in pursuit of the Red Death," said Sir Stephen. "Nobody warned me of a monster."

"The BBC went through the whole Loch in 2003 with sonar, and they didn't find a thing," said Carter. "You'd think that would have been the end of it. My guess is that guy caught a seal somewhere else and brought it here himself so he could 'discover' it."

"Are you so skeptical about everything?" Sir Stephen asked.

"Yes," said Carter. "Like I told Dr. Jones, I don't believe in things. I follow leads. When I see where they take me, that's reality. It's not about what I believe."

"Trust is truth, whether you believe in it or not," said Sir Stephen.

He thought he was arguing with her, but Carter treated it as an agreement. "Exactly," she said. "If I start off believing things, I'll be looking for evidence that confirms my belief, rather than for the truth. Finding the truth is my job."

"Mine, too," Natasha said thoughtfully. Archaeology and detective work were very similar, really – both involved looking for evidence of past events and trying to reconstruct what had actually happened. The only difference was that Nat's cases were very much colder than Carter's. It was a strange thing to realize only after she'd been doing this as a cover for several years now, especially when she contrasted it with the career she'd been raised for, which had often been about obscuring or even destroying the truth and the traces it left.

She wondered what a psychologist would think of that. Was Natasha trying to somehow redeem the years she'd spent hiding the truth by helping to reveal it instead? Or was she still just a child who wanted to be Indiana Jones?

"I can see the Bona Lighthouse,' said Dr. Wilson. "Air Traffic told them we were coming, and it looks like they've lit up the car park for us. Hopefully somebody moved the monster."

He turned on the helicopter's landing lights, and managed to make a nice soft landing in the car park outside the Kimcraigan Bed and Breakfast. More than a dozen people were gathered there waiting for them, including a news van and an ambulance, but rather than climb out, Dr. Wilson just turned off the engines and slumped back in the pilot's seat with a massive sigh of relief.

"Never thought I'd have to do that again," he said. "Maybe I should take some lessons and renew my license. Can't hurt."

It was Natasha who opened the rear door, and the first person she saw was the woman from the ten o'clock news, the one who'd reported on the monster capture. She was taller than Nat but shorter than Carter, with bottle-blonde hair in a pixie cut and multiple earrings in each ear. The helicopter's arrival had apparently caught her in her off time, since she was now wearing a sweater and jeans instead of a blouse and jacket, but her cameraman was right behind her.

"Good evening," she said, coming up to meet Nat. "I'm Yvonne Kirkland from Channel Four Scotland. May I have a word about the events at Raigmore? I understand you were witnesses."

"I'd rather not, thanks," said Natasha, trying to be polite. Reporters always showed up at the worst possible moment, and she tried to avoid having her face on TV where people from her past might see it.

DI Carter climbed down next, and the two of them reached to help Sir Stephen again – but this time he gently refused, preferring to demonstrate that he was able to stand and walk on his own. "I am quite healed," he said. "Or nearly so." In the glaring lights set up in the car park the wound to his face looked deep and furrowed, but it also looked months old. Nat wondered if there would be a scar, or if it would have vanished entirely by the morning.

"Would either of you mind telling our viewers what you saw when the hospital collapsed?" the reporter asked Carter and Sir Stephen.

"Yes, we would mind," said DI Carter. "We mind very much."

"I…" Sir Stephen began.

"He would definitely mind," Carter said, putting a hand in the middle of Sir Stephen's chest to stop him from approaching the news people. Nat could almost see what Carter was thinking – she must be imagining Sir Stephen telling the entire United Kingdom that a wizard had brought down the hospital. It was a horrible thought.

Dr. Wilson was now finally climbing out, and Kirkland decided to give it one more try. "Excuse me, Sir," she said, "I'm Yvonne Kirkland from…"

"I know who you are," snarled Dr. Wilson, causing Kirland to take an involuntary step back. He took Sir Stephen's arm to escort him over to the waiting ambulance. "Come on, Sir Steve, let's get you looked at."

"Maybe get him something to wear," Natasha agreed. Sir Stephen was still dressed only in a paper hospital gown, and it was sagging open at the rear. He had a very shapely backside, but that didn't mean the whole world needed to see it.

"Wait," said Sir Stephen. "I told you to ask the lady from the ten o'clock news whether she spoke to Dr. Wilson!"

DI Carter hesitated, then turned to face the reporter. "Inverness Police Department," she said, showing her badge. "Did you ring Dr. Wilson's mobile about an hour ago?"

"Did I… no," said Kirkland, visibly puzzled by the question and evidently shocked by Wilson's rude dismissal of her.

"You didn't ask for an interview with the River Ness John Doe?" DI Carter insisted.

"The Riv… oh, from the Pierce disappearance?" asked Kirkland. "I'm not even on that story."

"Would you swear to it in court?" Carter insisted.

"Absolutely," Kirkland said. "On a stack of Bibles."

Sir Stephen gave a satisfied nod. "As I told you," he said, "it was sorcery."

"Sorcery?" asked Kirkland. "What do you…"

"He has a head injury," Carter cut her off. "We're taking him to the doctor now." She grabbed the arm Dr. Wilson wasn't already holding, and the two of them dragged Sir Stephen over towards the waiting ambulance.