“Is zis what you are looking for?”

We are standing in the largest tent. Outside, the wind is still rattling the canvas, but inside it is calm, the tent fabric casting a greenish glow over everything. A long trestle table is covered with boxes, files, electrical leads, devices with dials on them, and trowels and brushes. And lying on a square of folded cloth is the clay box, its coating of tallow, pine resin, and beeswax darkened and cracked with age.

I nod dumbly. “It is my mam’s. Mine, I mean. Ours.” I cannot take my eyes off it. I reach out my hand, but Dr. Heinz steps between me and the table, staring hard at me.

“It is incredible,” she says. “But is it true?” She is tipping her head from side to side, looking at me from every angle. “The vay you spoke that day, in the school. Somesing made me…wonder.”

I say nothing but shiver all over. My teeth are chattering.

“Ach, poor boy, you are cold! Here!” She gives me a blanket from a pile, which I wrap tightly round me.

“Your teachers told me about you, and the dreadful sing zat happened to you. And so…I do a little research, yes? The fire, you know? I am so, so sorry. I looked in vebsites, official records, yes? I discovered you and your mother, God rest her soul, are living in zat house for many, many years, yes?”

I nod, and sink into a nylon camping chair next to the table. I am exhausted. I cannot lie anymore.

“The legend of ze Neverdeads: it has almost been forgotten, no? But there was zat clue, hidden in ze writings of an old Durham bishop.”

I sigh. “Walter.”

“You knew him?”

I shrug, and think back to Old Paul. “Not personally. But I think I know who told him.”

From quite a distance away, outside, comes a shout.

“Alfie! Alfie!”

Dr. Heinz gasps. “There is another person?”

“Shhh!” We fall silent.

“Alfie! I don’t want to harm you! Come out!”

Peering out of the tent through the laced-up entrance, I see Jasper, soaked through, pacing up and down the mouth of the cave and shouting into it. A faint echo comes back from within.

“Alfie! Where are you?”

You…you…

He stops for a moment and looks about, his gaze finally settling on the tents. I pull back from the entrance and turn to Dr. Heinz.

“He’s coming! Hide the pot!”

She moves quietly and confidently, placing the pot beneath a blanket in the corner of the tent, and standing upright at the moment the lace ties on the front flaps are pulled apart and Jasper’s dripping, bearded face thrusts through, his wild eyes glinting in the greenish gloom and his long, too-white teeth bared in a grin as if ready to bite.

“Hello, Alfie!” he says.