“No,” I said. “That’s not how it was, Jobe. . . .”

But he was already gone, disappeared in a moment, back in the land of the living again.

A door opened to one side, and out of his private office stepped the Drood family’s Sarjeant-at-Arms. The previous Sarjeant, who’d died so very bravely on the Damnation Way, buying the rest of us time to escape. Big and muscular and brutal, exactly as I remembered him, with half his face still a mass of scars from where my girlfriend, Molly Metcalf, wished a plague of rats on him. He’d deserved worse. He stood beside Walker and looked at me coldly, his gaze as inflexible and judgemental as always.

“You were a thug and a bully when you were alive, Sarjeant,” I said. “And it would appear death hasn’t mellowed you.”

“You never did understand duty, Edwin,” said the Sarjeant. “You should never have been allowed to run the family. You took away our torcs. You made us weak.”

“The family had become corrupt,” I said. “Drifted too far from who and what we were supposed to be. I did what I had to do to save the family from itself.”

“By destroying its Heart.”

“The Heart was rotten. It lied to us. I was the only one left who cared about what the family was supposed to stand for. What did you ever care about, except disciplining those weaker than yourself?”

“You never understood duty,” said the Sarjeant-at-Arms. “The family has to be strong to do the things it has to do. I tried to make you strong by beating the weakness and rebellion out of you.”

“Weakness?” I said. “You mean things like compassion, and honour, and doing the right thing?”