My first stop that morning was at the Save the Soul Prison Reform group, to look at their list of would-be reformed criminals. The police had not been there yet, which made my job easier, even as it convinced me that they were interested only in Damian Adler. The group's director was a thin, pale man with trembling hands and a wide clerical collar; I gave him a description of the black-haired man with the scar.

“Oh yes,” he fluttered. “Reverend Smythe, I remember him well, he was so eager to help, made a most generous contribution, and met with a number of our former prisoners with an eye to employing one of them.”

“And did he?”

“I believe so. Yes, I recall, it was Gunderson. Not the first time we've seen that poor man through here,” he confided sadly, then brightened. “But then I haven't seen him since then, so perhaps he has found his way at last into the light of reason, pray God.”

I didn't have the heart to tell him.

Nor did I let him know that there was no record of a Reverend Smythe on the books of any British church body.

Friday afternoon, a positive storm of information battered the door of Mycroft's flat.

Albert Seaforth, subject of Holmes' telegram, turned out to be an unemployed schoolteacher from York, fired in late May when one of his students told her parents that her Latin teacher had made advances. He had been found the previous Thursday morning, sitting upright against a standing stone, looking out over a desolate portion of the Yorkshire moors. His wrists had been slit; the knife was still in his hand.

“When did he die?” I asked Mycroft, who rang me from his office with the information.

“Approximately a day before.”

“He'd been there for a day and no-one noticed?”

“The only neighbours are sheep.”

I looked at the notes I had made while on the telephone: Seaforth. Fired 19 May. Knife in hand. If this man was another victim, it confirmed a pattern of marginally employed individuals.

An hour later, Mycroft rang again to say that his pet laboratory had analysed the mixture that the Circle had been drinking: mead, spices, Chartreuse (hence the colour), hashish (which I had expected), and mushrooms (which I had not).

“Mushrooms. As in toadstools?”

“As you know, the distinction is imprecise, and the samples deteriorated. The mycologist is continuing to work on it.”

When I had rung off, I scratched my head for a bit and then gathered my things to leave, nearly overlooking, in my distraction, the danger of going out of the front door. I caught myself and changed direction, emerging five minutes later in St James's Square. This time I aimed my research enquiries at the Reading Room of the British Museum. I had a moment's qualm as I handed my ticket to the guard at the door, but either Lestrade hadn't thought to notify them, or they were above the fray, because the man waved me in without hesitation.

I found what I needed before closing time, although I nearly walked into the arms of one of Lestrade's men on Jermyn Street as I made my way to the Angel Court entrance. Fortunately, I saw him first, and made haste to evade him.

Mycroft was walking down his hallway, just returned from his walk, when I emerged from the odour of burning honey.

“Ah, Mary,” he said, unsurprised at my appearance. “I have something for you.”

“And I you.”

We met in the sitting room over drinks, and exchanged our papers: I sat and read the results of the agricultural colleague's report, giving minute details of six months of dead livestock, while he frowned over my scribbled notes on the meal eaten by the dead warriors of Valhalla, preparatory to working themselves into their Berserker frenzy: mead and toadstools.

I set his report aside, all thirty pages of it, until I had pencil in hand and the other list of full-moon events beside it.

“Sherlock came through on the telephone this afternoon,” he said. “Shockingly bad connexion, from Newcastle upon Tyne, but I managed to convey the need to keep his head down around the police.”

“What is he doing?”

“He'd only got as far as telling me that he was headed to the Yorkshire Moors when we were cut off.”

“Well, at least there's a chance you won't have to stand bail for him in Newcastle or some equally remote place.”

“There is that.”

After we ate, I took over the dining table and began to make my way laboriously through the livestock report.

As I had anticipated, there were dozens of animal deaths, from one end of the country to the next, and not one of them an obvious ritual sacrifice. Perhaps our man had a purpose other than bloody religion, I speculated with the half of my mind not taken up by dead cows. (Three had died in Cornwall during April, fallen one after another into an abandoned tin mine.) Maybe it was personal: He had a grudge against women-and this suicide in Yorkshire was unrelated. (An entire flock of laying hens had vanished in a night-but no, they were later found in a neighbour's henhouse.) Or perhaps Fiona Cartwright and Albert Seaforth were the two who were related, linked by an affair, or inheritance, or a place of employment. (A bull had been struck by a lorry, which fled the scene, although it didn't make it far since a bull is large enough to reduce an engine block to dead weight.) Or if “Smythe” had actually wanted a secretary and found Fiona lacking, then tried a male secretary at his next stop-but don't be ridiculous, Russell (A pig was killed by a Wiltshire farmer in June after it broke into his house and wouldn't leave.), there is no Smythe, your brain is fatigued, go to bed.

I looked up. But there were jobs. And Seaforth was out of work just as Fiona Cartwright had been-and Marcus Gunderson. I dropped my pencil. “I'm going to York,” I announced. “Now. I'll telephone when I know where I'm staying-see if you can talk someone there into letting me read the police file on Seaforth's death. And maybe not arrest me, either.”

“Take a room at the Station Hotel, I'll leave any message for you there.”

I managed to catch a good train, and reached York while there was still life in the Station Hotel. They had a room, and a message:

Inspector Kursall, central station, 11 a.m.

I slept very little, ate early, and at nine o'clock stepped into the first on my list of York employment agencies. The question I had come here for was, if Cartwright, Seaforth, Gunderson, and Dunworthy were all jobless when he found them, did Brothers habitually use employment agencies?

At half past ten, I found the right one: small, run-down, and specialising, apparently, in the chronically unemployable.

“Yais, I dew recall him.” The thin, pallid, buck-toothed man adjusted a pair of worn steel spectacles on his narrow nose. “Mr Seaforth encountered some difficulties at his last place of employment.”

“He was fired for making unwelcome advances,” I said bluntly.

“Well, yais. I suggested that his expectations of finding another school willing to take him on might be overly optimistic. Unless he were to leave York, of course. The last possibility I sent him out on was the tutoring of a fourteen-year-old boy who had been expelled for setting fire to his rooms at school.”

In other words, Seaforth had been scraping the bottom of his profession's barrel.

“You're not surprised he killed himself, then.”

“Not ectually, no.”

“Did you meet this boy?”

“Oh no. Just the father.”

“Can you tell me what he looked like?”

“Why should you-”

“Please, I'll go away and stop bothering you if you just tell me.”

Why that should convince him to talk to me, I don't know, but I thought it might, and so it did.

“A pleasant man in his early forties, dark hair and eyes, a good suit. Seemed quite fond of his son, truly puzzled by the lad's behaviour.”