Plot introduction
Chandler and Miles attend the launch of Buchan’s book on murders in Whitechapel where they are baffled by cryptic remarks made by an eccentric old lady Louise Iver. At the same time elderly vagrant Alexander Zukanov is lured to a house with strange markings on the wall where he is pressed to death, giving the name Dorothy Cade to his killer before he dies. Miles and Chandler visit Zukanov’s doss-house and learn that the other occupants were frightened of him and regarded him as a warlock. Buchan confirms that he was a member of the Bulgarian secret service and Stella Knight from MI6 names him as having been an interrogator of former British spy Crispin Wingfield. Wingfield is questioned but released though he tells the police that the manner of Zukanov’s death was a punishment for witches in the sixteenth century. Meanwhile Dorothy Cade, living with her sister Cecilia, is also murdered, burnt at the stake like a medieval witch.
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