Chapter 11: The Ghost's Testimony and the Broken Alibi

The Grey Lady was not in the library.

Holmes had expected the library — it was where the portraits had directed him, with the small authoritative confidence of people who believe their local knowledge complete. He had learned, in the past four days, that portrait intelligence networks were comprehensive but not infallible; they observed the routes they could see and inferred the rest from sound and rumour, like an exceptionally well-connected neighbourhood of curtain-twitchers. The Grey Lady, apparently, did not frequent routes that portraits could see.

He found her in the end by the simple method of walking the castle's upper corridors with his lamp turned low and his footsteps deliberately audible. She appeared at the far end of the fifth-floor passage that ran above the North Tower stairwell, hovering an inch from the flagstones with the specific quality of stillness that Holmes had begun to associate with the castle's spectral population — not the stillness of something waiting, but of something that had been waiting so long it had forgotten what waiting felt like.