Relic

by Tom Egeland, Tara Chace

Genres: General Fiction; Action & Adventure

Synopsis

A thriller packed full of mythical intrigue, about a ground-breaking biblical secret. A golden relic, containing an ancient manuscript that could change the course of history, has been hidden in a monastery. But nobody knows where. One determined man sets out to find this sensational artefact and to trace its origins. His quest takes him via a scientific intelligence organization in London, a Middle Eastern outpost and a Crusaders' castle, as layer by layer he reveals the religous mysteries inside the Shrine of Sacred Secrets.

Release date: October 14, 2010

Publisher: John Murray

Print pages: 418

Sample

The rain started in the afternoon the day Grethe died.

I can just make out a bit of the fjord, glistening and cold like a river, through the beads of water and naked branches. For hours at a time I sit here watching the droplets trickle down the windowpane, thinking and writing. The squalls form a sinuous lattice over the fogged-up windowpane.

I have pushed my desk right up to the window; this way I can write and look out at the same time. Clumps of rotten kelp throb in the low tide. The waves lap idly against the smooth, rocky shoreline. A tern screeches half-heartedly, weary of life.

I can see the gnarled branches of the oak out in the yard, wet and black with a few leaves still clinging to them as if they haven’t quite realised that autumn will be coming for them soon.

It was summer when my father passed away. He was thirty-one years, four months, two weeks and three days old. I heard the scream.

Most people think it was an accident.

For a while after his death, my mother sealed herself in a silent cocoon of grief. Then, in a metamorphosis that still stings to this day, she started drinking and neglecting me. People talked. Our little side street had eyes and ears. People gave me sympathetic looks at the grocery store. The neighbourhood kids made up awful songs about her; they would draw pictures of her naked in chalk on the asphalt playground at school.

Some memories stick with you.

Why am I not surprised that they were here while I was away? They searched room by room and removed any trace of her. It’s as if she had never existed.

But they weren’t infallible. They forgot to take the four silk ropes dangling limply from the bedposts.

I’m going to write in my journal about everything that happened to me this summer.

If it weren’t for the scabs and burning itch, I might have thought this past summer had been one great, lucid delusion – that I had spent it in my room at the clinic, in a straitjacket, doped up on Valium. Maybe I’ll never understand any of what happened. It doesn’t matter. What little I have understood, or not understood, will do me for a long time.

My journal is a thick, leather-bound book with my name printed in gold at the bottom right-hand corner of the front cover: Bjørn Beltø.

There are two kinds of archaeology: historical and psychological – excavations of the mind.

My pen scratches against the paper as I calmly weave the gossamer of my memories.

1

I’m squatting in the middle of a checkerboard pattern made of large squares of earth, all exactly the same size, searching for the past. The sun is beating down on the back of my neck. My palms are covered with blisters that sting like crazy. I’m dirty and sweaty. I stink. My T-shirt is clinging to my back like a sticky, old bandage.

The wind and digging have stirred up fine grains of sand that are lingering over the field as a greyish-brown dome of dust. The sand is stinging my eyes. The cloud of dust has parched my mouth and powdered my face. My skin feels dry and cracked. I groan to myself. I cannot believe I used to dream of a life like this. I mean, sure, we all need to make a living . . .

I sneeze.

‘Bless you!’ a voice calls out. Startled, I look around, but everyone is absorbed in their work.

It turns out the past isn’t that easy to find. Several shovel-depths below the topsoil, I’m using my fingers to sift through the raw earth in the dustpan between my grimy shoes. We’ve excavated our way down to a culture layer that is eight hundred years old. The loamy soil is giving off a rich scent. In one of my old textbooks, Archaeological Analysis of the Ancient, Professor Graham Llyleworth writes, ‘The dark humus of the earth teems with silent messages from the past.’ Will you get a load of that? Professor Llyleworth is one of the world’s foremost archaeologists, but he’s a little full of his own poetic abilities. His idiosyncrasies require a little forbearance.

At the moment the professor is sitting in the shade under a sheet that’s been stretched between four poles. He’s reading and sucking on a cigar that he hasn’t lit. He looks like an insufferable intellectual, full of a sort of grey-haired, pompous decorum that he hasn’t done a thing to deserve. He’s probably dreaming about one of the girls digging near by with her rear end sticking up in the air. Now and then he glances down at us with eyes that say, Ah, yes, I was once the one squatting down there sweating, but that was long ago.

I scowl up at him through the thick lenses of my glasses and my clip-on shades. Our eyes meet and he looks at me for a second or two and then yawns. A breeze makes the sheet flap. It’s been many years since anyone with dirt under his, or her, fingernails has dared to disagree with the professor on anything.

‘Mr Beltoooh?’ he says with exaggerated politeness. I have yet to meet anyone who wasn’t Norwegian who could actually pronounce my name; that ‘ø’ on the end gets them every time. He beckons me over to him the way slave-drivers beckoned their slaves in previous centuries. I pull myself up out of the metre-deep pit and brush the dirt off my jeans.

The professor clears his throat. ‘Nothing yet?’ he asks in English.

I indicate with a gesture that I haven’t found anything yet and then snap to mock-attention, which he completely misses, unfortunately.

‘Nothing, sir!’ I bark out.

With an expression that only just conceals his disdain, he glances at me and says, ‘Everything OK? You look pale today.’ Then he chuckles to himself, waiting for a response that I don’t have the least intention of giving him.

Lots of people consider Professor Llyleworth malevolent and domineering, but he is neither. He is merely condescending by nature. The professor’s view of the surrounding world as one populated by pathetic wretches clutching at his trouser turn-ups was formed early in his life and is now a permanent fixture, sealed in hardened, steel-reinforced concrete. When he smiles, it is with an aloof and patronising indifference. When he listens, it is out of forced politeness (which his mother must have beaten into him with canings and threats). When he says something, you can have faith that he is speaking on behalf of Our Lord.

Llyleworth flicks away a dandelion seed the breeze had deposited upon his grey tailored suit. He sets his cigar down on the field table under the awning where he is keeping track in indelible ink of each pit that has been excavated and emptied. Impassively, he takes the cap off his pen and writes an X through square 003/157 on the site plan.

Then he waves me away with a tired gesture.

At university archaeology students learn that each of us can move up to one cubic metre of dirt a day, and the back dirt pile by the large screen proves that we’ve had a productive morning. Ina, the student who is doing the water screening on all the dirt we haul over there in dustpans and wheelbarrows, hasn’t found anything other than a couple of loom weights and a comb that the excavation teams overlooked. She’s standing in a mud puddle wearing tight shorts, a white T-shirt and rubber boots that are way too big for her, holding a green garden hose with a leaky nozzle.

She’s pretty sexy. I glance over at her for the two hundred and twelfth time this morning, but she never looks my way.

My muscles are aching. I collapse into my camping chair, which, thanks to a bird cherry, is sheltered from the August sun. This is my corner, my safe spot. I can keep an eye on the excavation site from here. I like to keep an eye on things. When you keep an eye on things, you’re in control.

Every evening after the sorting and cataloguing, I sign the bottom of the inventory sheet. Professor Llyleworth thinks I’m overly suspicious because I insist on cross-checking the artefacts in the cardboard boxes with his list. So far I haven’t caught him in a single inaccuracy, but I don’t trust him. I’m here to inspect things, and we both know that.

The professor turns around, as if by chance, to check up on me. I give him a cheerful Boy Scout salute: two fingers to my forehead. He doesn’t return the gesture.

I’m happiest in the shade. Because of a defect in my irises, bright light shatters into a burst of splinters in the back of my head. The sun is a disc of concentrated pain for me, so I squint a lot. Some kid once told me, ‘Whoa, you’ve got permanent red-eye, like someone took your picture with a flash.’

With my back to the tool shed, I gaze out over the excavation site. The coordinate system’s white strings form a grid of the squares that are being excavated, one by one. Ian and Uri are standing over by the dumpy level and theodolite debating something, looking out over the grid and gesturing with their arms along the axes of the coordinate system. I smile for a second, wondering whether we’re digging in the wrong place. If we were, the professor would blow his stupid whistle and yell, ‘Stop! This isn’t right.’ But I can tell from their facial expressions that they’re just being impatient.

There are thirty-seven of us archaeologists working on this project. The professor’s field supervisors (Ian, Theodore and Pete from Oxford University; Moshe and David from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem; and Uri from the Schimmer Institute) are each leading their own excavation team of Norwegian graduate students.

Ian, Theo and Pete developed a sophisticated software program for archaeological excavations based on infrared satellite imaging and ground-penetrating sonar.

Moshe has doctorates in theology and physics and was part of the team of scientists who examined the Shroud of Turin in 1995.

David is an expert in interpreting New Testament manuscripts.

Uri is a specialist in the history of the Knights Hospitaller.

And I’m here to keep an eye on things.

2

I used to spend every summer at my grandmother’s country house south-east of Oslo on the fjord. A Swiss chalet-style house from the mid-1800s surrounded by fruit trees, berries and flowers. Sun-warmed slate flagstones and overgrown bushes. Flies, carefree bumblebees and butterflies. The scent of tar and seaweed in the air. The boats gliding along, mid-fjord. At the mouth of the fjord, between the village of Larkollen and Bolærne Island – which were both so far away they looked as if they were floating – I could just make out a sliver of open ocean, and over the horizon I pictured America.

About a kilometre from the summer house, along the old highway between Fuglevik and Moss, was Værne Monastery, with its six acres of woods and fields and its history stretching right back to Snorri Sturluson’s sagas of the old Norse kings. King Sverre Sigurdsson gave Værne Monastery to the Knights Hospitaller at the end of the twelfth century. The Knights Hospitaller brought our remote corner of civilisation a touch of world history, the Crusades and Christian military orders. The monks’ time at Værne Monastery didn’t end until 1532.

A lifetime is made up of a series of coincidences. Case in point: Professor Llyleworth’s excavation is taking place in one of Værne Monastery’s fields.

The professor claims that our objective is to find a Viking-era ring fortress, perhaps two hundred metres in diameter, surrounded by a circular rampart and wooden palisades. Apparently he had come across a map in a Viking grave in York. It’s unbelievable, and I don’t believe him.

Professor Llyleworth is looking for something. I don’t know what. Treasure is way too mundane. A grave with a Viking ship? Remnants of St Olav’s Reliquary? Maybe coins from Khwarezm, the empire east of the Aral Sea? Rolls of calfskin rejected by Snorri Sturluson’s medieval publisher? A sacrificial vessel made of silver? A magical rune stone? I can only guess. And dedicate myself wholeheartedly to my duties as guard dog.

The professor is going to write yet another textbook based on this dig. Some foundation in England is paying for the whole thing. The landowner received a small fortune for letting us turn his field upside down.

This is going to be some textbook.

I still haven’t figured out how, or why, Professor Llyleworth was allowed to release his archaeological storm troopers on Norwegian soil. I’m sure it’s the same old story: he must have friends in high places.

It’s usually hard for foreigners to get permission to conduct archaeological digs in Norway, but Professor Llyleworth encountered no opposition. Quite the contrary – the Royal Norwegian Office of Cultural Heritage couldn’t wait to issue his permit. The University of Oslo eagerly helped select its most qualified graduate students for his excavation teams and arranged work permits for his foreign assistants. They gently cajoled any local officials who might have had qualms. They crossed all their t’s and dotted their i’s. I was asked to serve as the ‘inspector’, the Norwegian government’s on-site representative, purely a formality. It was almost as if they regretted having me here, but rules are rules. You know how it is. I’m not sure why they selected me, a near-sighted assistant professor of archaeology they found in the office of the Oslo Historical Museum’s Antiquities Collection on Frederik Street. I suppose because I could be spared for a few months.

There’s a grandfather clock ticking away in the sitting room at my grandmother’s country house. I’ve loved that clock ever since I was little. It’s never worked right. It’ll start chiming at the oddest hours. Eight minutes to noon! Nine-o-three in the afternoon! Three twenty-eight! Then the gears and springs in its inner workings will smugly click and whir and the clock will shout, ‘It doesn’t matter to me!’

I mean, who’s to say all those other clocks in the world are right or that you can capture time with precision mechanics and hands? I’m a person who tends to mull things over. I suppose it comes with my job. When you dig up a five-hundred-year-old female skeleton that won’t let go of the child she’s embracing, that moment sticks with you.

The breeze brings in the salty scent of the sea. The sun has cooled. I detest the sun. Very few of us think of the sun as a continual thermonuclear fusion reaction, but I do. And I can’t tell you how glad I am that it will all be over in ten million years.

3

The shout sounds both excited and astonished. Professor Llyleworth stands up under his awning, vigilant but motionless, like a lethargic old guard dog who’s thinking about barking.

Archaeologists rarely cry out when they find something. We find things all the time. Every cry strips away a bit of our dignity. Most of the coin fragments and loom weights we unearth ultimately wind up in a light brown box in a dark warehouse, properly conserved, catalogued and prepared for posterity. You are lucky if just once in your career you find something that can be displayed in a glass case. Most archaeologists in Norway, if they look deep enough within themselves, will admit that the last truly amazing archaeological find in the country was the Viking ship found at Oseberg in 1904.

The cry had come from Irene, a graduate student in the Department of Classical Archaeology, a gifted, soft-spoken girl. I could easily have fallen in love with her.

Irene is on Moshe’s excavation team. Yesterday morning she uncovered the remnants of a foundation wall, an octagon. The sight of it filled me with a vague, distant memory that I couldn’t quite place.

I’ve never seen Professor Llyleworth so worked up. Every few minutes he’s over there, peeking down into her pit.

Irene stands up and climbs up on to the edge. Enthusiastically she waves the professor over.

Several of us have already started running towards her.

The professor blows his whistle: Pfff-rrr-eeet!

A magic flute – everyone jerks to a stop, as when an old eight-millimetre movie gets stuck in the projector.

Then obediently they all stand still.

But his magic flute has no effect on me. I approach Irene’s pit at a jog. The professor is coming from the opposite direction. He attempts to stop me with a glare and another whistle blow: Pfff-rrr-eeet!!! But he can’t. I get there first.

It’s a reliquary.

An oblong shrine, thirty or forty centimetres long. The outer layer of reddish brown wood has decomposed.

The professor stops so close to the edge that for a second I hope he will tumble into the pit in his grey suit, the ultimate humiliation. But I’m not that lucky.

The short run has left him out of breath. He smiles, his mouth open, his eyes wide. He looks as if he’s having an orgasm.

I follow his eyes, down to the reliquary.

In one long, fluid motion, the professor squats, supports himself on his left hand and hops down into the pit.

A murmur spreads through the crowd.

With his fingertips – those soft fingertips that were created for delicately balancing canapés, holding champagne flutes and cigars, and stroking the silky breasts of shy ladies from Kensington – he starts scooping the dirt away from the reliquary.

In the textbook he authored, Methods of Modern Archaeology, Professor Llyleworth writes that exhaustively recording each find is the key to correct interpretation and understanding. ‘Patience and thoroughness are an archaeologist’s most important virtues,’ he states in Virtues of Archaeology, an archaeology student’s professional bible. So he ought to know he’s being too eager now. We’re in no hurry here. When something’s been lying in the ground for hundreds or thousands of years, we should take a few extra hours to be accurate and careful. We should sketch the reliquary in situ, from both a bird’s-eye perspective and a lateral view, and photograph it. We need to measure the length, height and width of the find. Only after every conceivable detail has been recorded can we painstakingly coax it out using a pointed trowel and teaspoon, brush away the dirt and sand, and conserve the wood. If there’s anything made of metal, it needs to be treated with sesquicarbonate. The professor knows all this.

But he doesn’t seem to care.

I leap down next to him. Everyone else is staring at us as if the professor had just announced that he was planning to dig all the way through the Earth’s crust to the mantle.

With his bare hands.

Before lunch.

I clear my throat solemnly, with exaggerated clarity, and tell him that he’s moving too fast. He ignores me. He has erected a shield between himself and the rest of the world. Even when I assume an official, authoritative tone and order him to stop in the name of the government of the Kingdom of Norway he continues frenetically clawing at the dirt. To him I might as well be representing the Wizard of Oz.

Once he has exposed most of the reliquary, he grabs it in both hands and tugs it free. A bit of the wood falls off.

Several of us cry out in anger, bafflement – this simply is not done! I tell him as much. Each and every archaeological find must be treated with the utmost care.

My words make no impression on him.

He’s holding the reliquary in front of him. He stands there agog, staring, breathing hard.

‘Shouldn’t we,’ I suggest icily, my arms folded across my chest, ‘record the find?’

His royal highness gazes at the reliquary in awe. He smiles incredulously. Then in his most stiff-upper-lipped Oxford English he absent-mindedly says, ‘This. Is. Fucking. Unbelievable.’

‘Please give me the reliquary,’ I say.

He looks at me blankly.

I clear my throat. ‘Professor Llyleworth! Surely you realise that I’m going to have to report this incident to the Institute.’ My voice has assumed a cool, formal tone that I don’t really recognise. ‘The Antiquities Collection and the Royal Norwegian Office of Cultural Heritage will hardly look kindly on your methods.’

Without a word he scrambles up out of the pit and hurries over to the field tent. A cloud of dust swirls, surrounding his suit. The rest of us have ceased to exist.

I don’t give up that easily. I run after him.

From inside the tent, behind the taut canvas wall, I hear Professor Llyleworth’s overexcited voice. I lift the tent flap aside. I can’t see because of the dim light and my clip-on sunglasses, but I can gradually make out the professor’s broad back. He’s still breathing heavily. ‘Yes, yes, yes!’ he shouts into his mobile phone. ‘Michael, listen to me, it’s the shrine!’

More than anything, I’m astonished that he’s lit his cigar. He knows full well that tobacco smoke can interfere with the carbon 14 dating.

His voice is tinged with hysterical laughter: ‘Good old Charles was right, Michael. It’s unbelievable! It’s fucking unbelievable.’

The reliquary is on the folding card table next to him. I step into the tent. Just then Ian materialises from the darkness, like an evil spirit guarding a pharaoh’s tomb. He grabs me by the upper arms and pushes me heavy-handedly backwards out of the tent.

‘For crying out loud . . .’ I stammer, my voice quavering with anger and indignation.

Ian glares at me and goes back in. If he could have slammed a door, he would have. But the tent flap just flops loosely shut behind him.

And then the professor emerges. He has wrapped the reliquary in a piece of cloth. His smoking cigar juts out of the corner of his mouth.

‘Please give me the shrine,’ I say, just to have said it, but they neither hear nor care.

Professor Llyleworth’s car is a lithe, gleaming thoroughbred. A burgundy-red Jaguar XJ6. Two hundred horsepower. Zero to sixty in nine seconds. Leather upholstery. Wood steering wheel. Air conditioning. It may possibly even have a trace of a soul and some nascent self-awareness deep within its engine block, under all the chrome and the metallic finish.

Ian slides in behind the wheel, leans across to open the door for the professor, who climbs in and lays the shrine in his lap.

We stand there staring in our grimy T-shirts and jeans, leaning on our shovels and measuring rods, our mouths hanging open, with sand in our hair and streaks of dirt under our eyes, but they don’t see us. We’ve done our part. We no longer exist.

The Jaguar rolls down the gravel road. As it bumps its way on to the main road, it emits a purr that envelops it in a cloud of dust.

And then it’s gone.

In the quiet that falls over us, disturbed only by the wind in the trees and the hushed murmurs of the students, I appreciate two things. One is that I’ve been tricked. I don’t really know how or why, but the certainty of it makes me clench my teeth so hard that my eyes fill with tears. The other is a realisation: I’ve always been the dutiful, conscientious one – the indispensable, hidden cog that never fails the machine. The Norwegian government’s antiquities officials entrusted me with the job of inspector, and I failed.

But I’ll be damned if I’m going to let Professor Graham Llyleworth run off with the find. This isn’t just between Llyleworth and the Antiquities Collection or the Royal Norwegian Office of Cultural Heritage or the prosecutor’s office.

This is between Llyleworth and me.

I don’t have a Jaguar. My car is more like an inflatable beach toy that a child played with and then forgot at the beach. It’s pink, a Citroën 2CV. In the summer I roll open the soft top. I call her Bolla. To the extent that a person and a machine can be, we’re on the same wavelength.

The seat groans as I fling myself behind the wheel. I have to lift the door a little to get it to latch. The gearshift looks like an umbrella handle that some hysterical old woman accidentally stuck through the dashboard. I put Bolla into first gear, press down on the accelerator and trundle off after the professor.

As car chases go, this one is ludicrous. Bolla goes from zero to sixty in a generation, but I’ll get there sooner or later, probably just a little later. I’m in no hurry. First I’m going to pop into the Antiquities Collection and report this to Professor Arntzen. Then I’ll go to the police. And then I’ll alert customs at the airport and tell them what happened. And the ferry terminals – a Jaguar XJ6 can’t get lost in the crowd.

One of the reasons I roll the roof open in the summer is that I love to feel the wind rushing through my crew cut. It makes me dream of a carefree life, driving a roadster up the Pacific Coast Highway, a life as a tanned surfer dude surrounded by bikini-clad girls, Coca-Cola, and pop music.

At school they used to call me Polar Bear. Maybe that’s because my first name, Bjørn, means ‘bear’ in Norwegian. But probably it’s because I’m an albino.

4

When Professor Trygve Arntzen asked me in May whether I wanted to serve as the inspector for the Værne Monastery dig later in the summer, I looked at the offer a little bit as a challenge, but mostly as a welcome opportunity to get out of the office. You don’t need to be psychotic to occasionally get the sense that four walls, a floor and a ceiling have closed in an inch or two.

Professor Arntzen is my mother’s husband. I prefer not to use the word stepfather.

The endless parade of students over the years has rendered the professor blind to the uniqueness of the individual. His students have all merged into a faceless crowd, and the professor has developed an impatient irritation towards this sea of academic uniformity. An inheritance from his father left him quite well off and a tad arrogant. Very few of his students like him. His subordinates talk about him behind his back. I don’t have any trouble understanding where they’re coming from, actually. I’ve never liked him. We all have our reasons.

I reach Oslo in the middle of the afternoon rush. Summer is on the wane, but the air is still oppressive and humid.

I drum my fingers against the steering wheel. I wonder where all the other drivers are going and who they are and why they need to be here. Damn them. I look at my watch and wipe the sweat off my forehead. I want the road to myself. We all want that. Each of us contributes to the collective madness of traffic; we just won’t admit it to ourselves. Admitting you have a problem is the first step towards recovery.

Professor Arntzen’s door is closed. Someone has prised six of the letters off the sign on his door, and with childish fascination I’m standing here reading PRO ES OR YGV AR ZEN. It looks like some kind of Tibetan mantra.

I’m about to knock on the door when I hear voices inside his office, so I wait. I shuffle over to the hallway window, whose sill is covered with a fine layer of dust. Down on the street below cars are queuing up at the traffic lights. Pedestrians are moving slowly in the heat. The employees’ car park behind the museum is practically empty.

I can’t have been paying attention when I parked Bolla, which isn’t like me. But from up here I see it. This is what it must be like for God: able to keep an eye on everything, all the time. Between the professor’s charcoal-grey Mercedes 190 and a little Saab 900 Turbo there’s a burgundy Jaguar XJ6.

Cautiously I place my ear against the door.

‘. . . precautions,’ says a voice. Professor Arntzen.

He’s speaking English instead of Norwegian. His voice is deferential. It takes a powerful person to make the professor deferential.

I think I know who it is.

A voice mumbles something I don’t catch. It’s Ian.

‘When’s he coming?’ Arntzen says.

‘Early tomorrow,’ a deep voice answers. Professor Llyleworth.

I knew it!

Arntzen: ‘He’s coming in person?’

Llyleworth: ‘Of course. But he’s at home. The plane’s in Toulouse for repairs. Otherwise he’d be here tonight.’

Ian (chuckling): ‘He’s pretty excited, and impatient, too.’

Llyleworth: ‘Certainly understandable.’

Arntzen: ‘Is he planning on taking it out of the country himself?’

Llyleworth: ‘Obviously. Via London. Tomorrow.’

Ian: ‘I still think we ought to bring it with us to the hotel, just until he arrives. I don’t like the thought of leaving it here.’

Llyleworth: ‘No, no, no, think strategically. We’re the ones the police are going to search if that albino causes any trouble.’

Arntzen: ‘Bjørn? . . . (laughter) . . . Relax! I’ll handle Bjørn.’

Ian: ‘But shouldn’t we . . .’

Llyleworth: ‘The shrine will be safest here with the professor. After all.’

Arntzen: ‘No one will think to look here. I guarantee it.’

Llyleworth: ‘Yes, it’s best this way.’

Ian: ‘If you insist.’

Llyleworth: ‘Definitely.’

(Pause.)

Arntzen: ‘So he was right all along. He was right.’

Llyleworth: ‘Who was?’

Arntzen: ‘DeWitt.’

Llyleworth (pauses before responding): ‘Good old Charles.’

Arntzen: ‘He was right all along. How ironic, huh?’

Llyleworth: ‘If only he were here now. Ah well, we finally found it.’

There’s something final in Llyleworth’s tone, as if he’s done with the conversation.

I pull away from the door. I quickly tiptoe down the corridor.

On the blue background on my office door sign, white plastic letters spell out the words ASSISTANT PROFESSOR BJØRN BELTØ. The letters are all slightly crooked, like teeth in need of orthodontia.

I let myself in and drag the rickety, green desk chair over to the window. I can keep an eye on the Jaguar from here.

Not much is happening. Traffic is creeping along in a slow stream. An ambulance is winding and blaring its way down the congested street.

A few minutes later I spot Ian and Professor Llyleworth down in the car park.

Ian has a bouncy gait. Gravity doesn’t seem to have the same effect on him as on the rest of us.