Thief of Time - Splash

She brought it down so hard on the hole that blue-black ink splashed onto the cobbles. Then she raised the desk lid and peeped inside. There was, of course, nothing there. At least, nothing macabre...

... unless you counted the piece of chocolate half gnawed by rat teeth and a note in heavy gothic lettering saying: SEE ME and signed by a very familiar alpha-and-omega symbol and the word Grandfather

Susan picked up the note and screwed it into a ball, aware that she was trembling with rage. How dare he? And to send the rat, too! She tossed the ball into the wastepaper basket. She never missed. Sometimes the basket moved in order to ensure that this was the case.

'And now we'll go and see what the time is in Klatch,' she told the watching children. On the desk, the book had fallen open at a certain page. And, later on, it would be story time. And Miss Susan would wonder, too late, why the book had been on her desk when she had never even seen it before.

And a splash of blue-black ink would stay on the cobbles of the square in Genua, until the evening rainstorm washed it away.

The Thief of Time - p30-31