The Sphinx Scrolls

Book 0: The Ballashiels Mysteries

by Stewart Ferris

Genres: Amateur Sleuth; Historical Mysteries; Thrillers

Synopsis

An ancient Mayan prophecy? A dangerous Nazi descendant? A passionate archaeologist? And an aristocrat desperate for cash. Mayan legends tell of a location where the secret to surviving the end of the world may be found. One part of that legend is recorded on a stone tablet in the dusty attic of Lord `Ratty? Ballashiels? crumbling manor. The other twin part disappeared from a Berlin museum when the Nazis took power. When Ratty seems about to sell his tablet to the adopted son of Josef Mengele, his friend, the archaeologist Ruby Towers, is appalled. Soon it is clear that more than archaeology is at stake. The quest to rescue historic Central American artifacts becomes a race to prevent an apocalyptic threat when Ruby discovers that the ancients have set in motion something that will threaten the world today.

Release date: July 16, 2016

Publisher: Accent Press

Print pages: 384

Sample

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Abrasive dust filled the rough-hewn tunnel. Dr Ruby Towers called for a vacuum hose and held a protective mask to her mouth. Now she knew why her team members had complained so vehemently about cutting into limestone in that confined space. After each ten minute shift they would come out of the passage shaking and coughing. So she had taken her turn, enduring the same deafening roar, the same choking heat as the rest of them. And she had been the one to break through.

She dropped the drill and wiped the grit from her goggles. Her pulse raced. After months of planning and overcoming bureaucratic hurdles, after weeks of scanning, measuring and arguing, and after days of gruelling tunnelling, this was her moment.

She poked her scuffed aluminium Maglite into the opening. Her eyes struggled to focus beyond the whirling particles picked out by the torch. It was frustrating, but the mere presence of airborne dust thrilled her. It signified an end to the section of rock. She ripped off the mask and goggles and waited for the cloud to dissipate. Now she could see her prize.

A chamber.

The space was cramped, smaller in dimension than some of the individual blocks used on the nearby pyramids. Objects were stacked in the centre of this timeless cavity. She counted them. Ten. They were clay tubes, just a few inches in diameter and no more than two feet in length. All were greyed by immense antiquity.

Was this the fabled Hall of Records? Was this the repository of the knowledge of a lost civilisation? Would this discovery finally unravel the mystery of the age and purpose of the Great Sphinx of Giza?

‘Can we get the camera in here?’ she shouted over her shoulder.

The documentary cameraman and the presenter squeezed alongside her in the narrow shaft. The cameraman pointed the lens at the presenter, former soldier Matt Mountebank.

‘So tell us what you’ve found,’ he said, with calm authority in his Manhattan accent.

The camera swung round to Ruby’s face, almost pressing against her nose.

‘We’re directly beneath the flank of the Sphinx,’ she announced, her voice excited and high pitched. ‘This tunnel was begun a century ago by tomb robbers using explosives. Our scanners revealed a chamber just ahead, so we applied for permission to extend the tunnel to join up with that chamber. That way there will be no external damage to the monument. And now –’

She paused. Matt was pulling faces at her from behind the camera. As usual. She kicked him in the leg with her heavy Altberg boot.

He stopped.

‘And now we’re through,’ she continued. ‘This peephole is enough to prove that the Sphinx houses an archaeological treasure. The clay tubes will almost certainly contain scrolls. If they are intact and readable, the ancient riddle of the Sphinx could be solved. We might be about to find out who built it, when they did so, and why.’

‘Turn off the camera. Everyone out.’

Ruby turned around. The Head of Antiquities was silhouetted in the tunnel entrance, flanked by two police officers. Dr Shepsit Ibrahim did not appear to share Ruby’s enthusiasm for the discovery.

‘Keep rolling,’ whispered Matt. ‘This could be good.’

‘Your licence has been revoked,’ shouted Dr Ibrahim. ‘This dig is finished.’

‘You’ve got to be kidding, Shepsit!’ protested Ruby. ‘We’ve been working towards this for months. I’ve found the chamber. I can see there are clay tubes in there. I can probably pull them out without even widening the hole. We can’t stop now!’

‘I’m sorry, Ruby,’ Ibrahim replied, her tone softening.

‘But you’re in charge, Shepsit. You can overrule this and get our licence back.’

‘I’m the one stopping it, Ruby. It’s over.’

Ruby felt as if she had been punched in the stomach.

‘What about Cambridge? All those nights we stayed up, solving the problems of the world, dreaming of making discoveries like this. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?’

Passionate tears began carving their way through the dust on Ruby’s cheeks. Ibrahim’s head bowed and she said nothing.

Ruby resisted the overpowering urge to slap her former college roommate as she stepped outside, police escort or not. In the unforgiving daylight, the two policemen seemed odd. Their uniforms didn’t fit, and neither did their features: more Central American than Middle Eastern. She grudgingly acknowledged them in her limited Arabic and received no response. They remained curiously clamped to Ibrahim’s side.

‘What’s got into you, Shepsit?’ Ruby pleaded. ‘And why are the police involved? This doesn’t make any sense.’

Dr Ibrahim rolled her eyes sideways, left and right. Ruby followed her gaze and looked at the police officers again. They seemed edgy. As they turned she noticed one of them was pressing something firmly into Ibrahim’s back beneath a small rag.

A pistol.

Ruby glanced at Matt, fearing that his special forces training might tempt him to play the hero. His Gulf War memoirs were legendary. He was not a man to mess with.

‘Don’t try anything stupid,’ she grunted. ‘I don’t want Shepsit hurt.’

‘Sure,’ he replied, surprising her with his willingness to concede defeat. The ex-warrior began to walk away from the site with the rest of her despondent team.

‘Is that it, Matt? You’re not going to do anything?’

‘You just told me not to.’

‘I know, but you must have some trick you can use to overpower them?’

‘Rubes, those guys have guns. I got a damn microphone.’

Ruby stomped after him. More blatantly fake policemen had gathered at the perimeter, ushering people from the scene and clearing the way for their forthcoming escape. She stopped and glanced back at the Sphinx. It had survived Napoleon’s soldiers using it for target practice. It had foiled tomb robbers for millennia. Now, dwarfed by the grandeur of the Pyramid of Khafre behind it, the Sphinx stared forward with serene nobility while thieves dressed in police uniforms plundered priceless secrets from its heart.

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The turret room. Dark and disorderly. A sanctum of clutter. Nowhere could be better suited to the task of concealment.

The pace at which he scaled the tower’s dizzying steps was out of proportion to his paltry level of fitness, all the more so considering the additional effort required to lug the artefact. He stumbled into the room and steadied himself against a cluster of broken Hepplewhite chairs, gulping stale air, scanning his surroundings: above, an ornate ceiling stained by his failure to repair the turret roof; right, Grinling Gibbons wall carvings, home to a colony of unappreciative woodworm; ahead, Regency chests of drawers stacked haphazardly; left, a sofa that reputedly once supported the grateful behind of Edward VII; everywhere else, tea chests, piles of books, papers and paintings, all illuminated by the muddy glow of windows caked with seven centuries of grime. This was the ideal place in which to lose the relic.

He opened a drawer. Too obvious. He looked behind a stack of portraits. Not enough space. Suddenly the suitability of the room was less apparent. Wherever he stashed it, she would stick her nose there sooner or later. He danced in panic, hugging the ancient piece of carved stone to his palpitating ribs. The door at the base of the spiral staircase slammed, sending a sinister echo up the steps to announce her impending arrival. He could now hear her clunky Altberg boots clomping closer to him. It was too much for him to process. The future of his home, his life, and his family tree depended on his ability to hide the stone stele.

The footsteps grew closer. The door handle twisted. The stele was still in his hands, decidedly unhidden. He glanced at the sofa.

‘Why didn’t you wait for me?’ puffed Ruby Towers.

‘Wanted to get a head start,’ he replied, stretching out his legs and settling into the seat, wondering how he could get rid of his unexpected and unwanted guest. ‘Can’t find the confounded thing anywhere, though.’

‘So rummage. I’m dying to see it. So is everyone at the museum.’

‘Bit of trouble in the leg department,’ he lied, knowing he needed to come up with something far more convincing. ‘You go ahead.’

She sensed an awkward tone in his voice. Almost as if he didn’t want her here today. Almost as if there was something more important in his life. There had never been anything in his life, important or otherwise. He was just Ratty being Ratty, she guessed.

‘How could you lose it?’ she asked him.

He braced himself as the horse-hair cushion beneath him sank lower in the frame under the combined weight of the stele and his backside.

‘You said it could be worth a few spondoolies, so I placed it somewhere safe.’

‘A few, but not a lot. The museum doesn’t have very deep pockets, Ratty. They were thinking more of a token payment to you, that’s all. So where did you put it?’

Here was a chance for him to tell her to mind her own business.

‘Not sure, my little duck-billed platypus. The old neurons don’t seem to want to talk to each other.’ He cursed silently at his inability to stem the flow of mindless platitudes.

‘You’ve forgotten? It was only a week ago that you said I could take it to London. I thought you were keen to find out what they would offer.’

‘Well it’s here somewhere,’ he told her in a tone that he considered to be cutting, but which went unnoticed. ‘I know it looks a tad harum-scarum, but it has all been organised and cleaned.’

‘Organised and cleaned?’ questioned Ruby, running a line through a layer of pearly dust with her finger.

‘Absolutely. Yes. By the sixth Earl.’

‘And which one are you?’

‘Eighth.’

‘Are we even in the right turret?’ Ruby sighed.

‘Certes, old coco plum,’ he babbled, utterly at a loss as to how to extricate his life from her. Rudeness to a house guest was, in his eyes, a crime akin to treason. Telling her to leave and reneging on his offer to let the museum assess the stele was like unravelling a millennium of social breeding. He reverted to his safety net of banality. ‘Had to close the other turret. Surveyor said it could fall down. Utter tommyrot, of course. They said that about the gamekeeper’s cottage.’

‘Part of the gamekeeper’s cottage did fall down. You told me at Cambridge.’

‘Quite, quite. Always wondered where he’d gone.’

Ruby began the task of sorting through the junk, tackling the job slowly and systematically as if it were an archaeological dig. But the joy that she normally experienced in excavating the past was absent today. Ratty was odd. His behaviour was noticeably weirder than usual.

‘Awfully sorry about that Sphinx business, by the way,’ he added.

‘Shepsit thinks the thieves had Spanish accents. But that’s all we have to go on. They disappeared before the real police could get there. At least no one was hurt.’

‘I always thought they were such good eggs.’

‘Eggs?’

‘The Spanish.’

‘Oh. Tell me more about what I’m looking for,’ she said, trying to get him to focus on the immediate problem.

‘A queer Mayan wotsit,’ he mumbled. ‘Part of two doodahs that could be fitted together to reveal some kind of thingummy.’

‘And in English, please?’

‘One of those intriguing johnnies that look like tombstones but aren’t. Mayan stone tablets. Like portable stelae. Half of a pair. But circular, like a giant ha’penny.’

The relic upon which he was so painfully seated was about eighteen inches in diameter, dark greenish-brown, inscribed around its edges with symbols and images. The flat side showed a pattern of seven dots. The other side of the stone – the side upon which he was unwisely perched – featured a fist-sized round protrusion in its centre, plainly intended to slot into something. All such details had been eagerly relayed to Ruby in last week’s telephone conversation.

So much had changed in that week.

‘I know what it looks like. I want to know its story. How it came into your possession.’

‘Great-great Uncle Bilbo –’ he began, shifting his position slightly and trying to prevent his eyes from watering.

‘Great-great Uncle who?’

‘Bilbo. Another Lord Ballashiels. Victorian explorer. Source of the Nile and all that. Pockets full of essentials. Quinine. For malaria, you know. It’s in tonic water. Good excuse to dilute it with gin. Worked. Didn’t get malaria once. Come to think of it, though, dropped dead of cirrhosis.’ He was talking drivel. He needed to focus. He needed her out of there.

Ruby sighed again. Ratty was hard work.

‘But he did last for a year or so somewhere around Belize, I think,’ continued Ratty. ‘Maybe Guatemala. Isn’t that where you’re tootling off to?’

‘You mean the UNESCO job? Haven’t decided whether to accept it yet.’

‘Be careful, old chum. They say there’s a civil war brewing.’

‘That’s why we need to help them protect their heritage. After what happened in Egypt this is more urgent than ever. Emergency archaeology. High-resolution three dimensional scans of every pyramid, statue and stele so we know what’s been lost in case the worst happens. Anyway, what did your great-great uncle get up to?’

‘Went a bit loopy by all accounts. Some savages ... is that what you call them these days, “savages”? It’s awfully confusing remembering which words cause offence. Anyway, these savages looked after him in the jungle. Or is it a rainforest? And he wrote about it in his diary, which is in that heap over there.’

Ruby picked up a tattered diary. Scrawled across the front in faded mauve ink were the words: ‘Bilbo de St Clair, his Diary. Private. KEEP OUT’.

‘How old was he, fourteen?’ she asked, flicking through it.

‘In some respects, yes. Younger as he got older, if you see what I mean? Quite potty at the end.’

‘And he was out there searching for the pair of stelae?’

‘The local savages told him not to. Sort of cursed. Something to do with the end of the world. Sounds fun, he thought. Who cares about the end of the world with a liver nine parts hobnail boot?’

‘Quite the adventurer, wasn’t he? You sure you’re descended from him?’

Ratty grinned and ran his bony, freckly hands through his oily hair. He was fully aware of the contrast between this exciting and dynamic ancestor and the pathetic specimen he had become. A trip to the further reaches of his own garden was a major expedition for Ratty – he couldn’t even contemplate what it must be like to set off into a real jungle equipped only with a hip flask, a stiff hat and an even stiffer upper lip. It humbled him to think that Bilbo had actually done something with his life.

‘Quite, quite. Anyway, he only found the one part of it. When he showed the stone to the natives they covered their faces and chucked him out of their village. A bit inconvenient, actually, as he’d just married one of the ladies and hadn’t got round to the interesting bit.’

Her eyes rolled. He sensed her frustration. He had been wittering on in his characteristic style, side-stepping the need to cause offence and send her home. He longed to give her something to make her journey worthwhile; Stiperstones Manor was over a hundred miles from London, and he couldn’t bear to be on the receiving end of the acerbic tongue that would inevitably lash in his direction when she realised he had behaved in a fashion unbefitting their long friendship. And yet he was powerless. She could not be permitted to take the stele. He would have to insult her and take the forthcoming verbal abuse on his diminutive chin.

‘Bilbo wore many quills down to their stumps in recounting the legends of the indigenous – no, that’s the offensive one, isn’t it – savages,’ he continued, attempting to focus her attention on the diary, still incapable of unleashing any perceptible malevolence. ‘The Mayan long count predicts the date the world will end, or be reborn, or wotnot, but it doesn’t say how or why or whether you need to hide in the cupboard under the stairs to survive. Bilbo writes about the legends of the stelae, and their power to counteract the doomsday stuff.’

‘You don’t look very comfy on that sofa.’

Had she said that with a hint of suspicion? He couldn’t tell.

‘You have no idea,’ he replied, wondering if the cold stone beneath him would give him the type of complaint about which he preferred not to complain. ‘Listen, old wombat, let’s retire to the library for a glass of something civilised. Take the diary to the museum instead.’

‘Ratty, I came for the stele, not the diary. Why invite me to take it if you don’t know where it is?’

‘To be fair, it wasn’t a formal solicitation.’ A knot tied itself in his stomach.

‘Can’t a girl surprise an old friend?’ She sounded hurt. His ungallant attack was working, although it pained him more than she.

‘Like the way you surprised me by running off when we went on that date at uni?’ he asked her.

The coldness with which he was compelled to treat her was tearing at his soul, more wounding to him than the limestone protrusion beneath his posterior. Ruby was the only person in the world capable of putting a smile on his gaunt face just by showing up in his life. She did not deserve this.

‘Tell me about the inscriptions on the stele,’ she said after a pause in the officious tone she normally reserved for addressing unruly students at a dig. ‘Are they Mayan glyphs?’

‘Yes. Such a limited canon,’ said Ratty, permitting himself a few moments of amiability. ‘One can’t develop much of a library when every syllable needs to be engraved laboriously in obsidian.’

‘Was the other part of the stele ever found?’

‘Goodness, look at the time,’ he spluttered, looking at the part of his arm where his watch would be had he not been forced by his new-found poverty to trade it for a hamper of food. Ruby’s stern expression made him fidget. ‘How is that charming American gentleman caller of yours?’ he squeaked. ‘Had an apostle’s name, as I recall. Luke? No, Matthew. Matthew Mountebank. Yes, it was Matthew, wasn’t it? Not exactly Saint Matthew, as far as one can tell from his broadcasts. Pity your soldier boy couldn’t stop those brigands from pilfering those Sphinx scrolls.’

‘His name’s Matt. And never mind him. You’re hiding something, Ratty. I know you too well.’

‘Fiddle-faddle and twaddle,’ he replied, vainly hoping such a robust rebuttal would be the end of the matter. ‘Let’s go downstairs. You first. And do take Bilbo’s diary.’

‘Why are you doing this?’ She thrust the diary at his face like an apoplectic lover who had just discovered an affair described within the pages. Then her tone softened, to Ratty’s enormous relief, to one of raw disappointment. ‘I was really shaken up by what happened in Egypt, Ratty, and I was looking forward to seeing you. I was thinking about how your eyes have shone so brightly whenever I’ve surprised you over the years. I expected your face to light up as you opened the door, but you’re treating me like a stranger. You’ve wasted my time. I just hope you’re not planning to do anything with that stele that I might make you regret.’

The smile with which he attempted to contradict her accusation was unconvincing, merely serving to display his very aristocratic teeth – uneven and slightly yellow. She pocketed the diary and headed for the door with body language that made no secret of her foul mood.

Finally able to relieve himself of the discomfort of sitting on the stele, Ratty stood up and self-consciously peeked inside his blazer wherein sat the letter from Guatemala that was simultaneously the solution to his problems and their inception.

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The airport terminal felt like a refuge from the fighting and destruction in the city – which had sometimes skirted close enough to Ruby’s hotel for staccato gunfire to be audible from her room. The consequences of the battle were visible everywhere today: closed shops, cabs not running, empty streets.

She collected the ticket left for her at the airline desk by her new UNESCO boss – a curiously annoying and frequently absent man called Paulo Souza, who in Ruby’s opinion had so far displayed remarkably little competence for his role heading up the protection of Guatemala’s heritage. The agent at the ticket desk informed her that her flight was delayed by three hours. She slumped onto a steel bench, pulled out a map of her destination and spread it over her knees, noting the positions of many unexcavated Mayan pyramids that could be at risk of looting if the country’s political instability deepened. With the meagre resources of her department – Paulo Souza hadn’t yet allocated her an office and none of the vital scanning equipment had so far arrived – the treasures of the Mayan world faced a desperate future. She bowed her head in frustration.

It was then that a shadow fell over the map. She looked up.

He was a slender man of indeterminate age: thinning white hair, safari jacket, beige slacks. He held a panama hat while mopping his brow. His pale, colourless eyes looked at her shrewdly.

‘The map looks old,’ he remarked.

‘Um, er, hello,’ said Ruby, thinking how odd it was that a stranger should engage her in her own language. ‘Do I look so English, or have we met before?’

‘You have a slight look of Marks and Spencer’s about you,’ her new companion murmured. ‘But perhaps the superior Marble Arch branch, not some provincial outlet.’ He spoke perfect English, but with a very slight foreign inflection that owed little, or nothing, to Central America. For the moment, Ruby couldn’t place it.

Don’t speak to strangers, Ruby told herself. Especially strange men. And yet there was something about him that had already won her confidence. Perhaps it stemmed from the simple context of a friendly approach against the background of a locked-down city at war with itself.

She stood up.

‘And you are?’

‘My name is Otto,’ he stated. ‘Doctor Otto.’ He straightened his jacket, then pulled out his sleeves, and then straightened his jacket again.

‘I’m Ruby. Ruby Towers,’ she said, holding out her hand. ‘Doctor Ruby Towers.’ She added, ‘Of archaeology, that is. Nothing useful like medicine.’ She waited for him to shake her hand, but his was not forthcoming. She retracted hers. Dr Otto laughed briefly, a tiny, rusty sound as if it was a rare occurrence.

‘You would be surprised how useful archaeology can be, right now, even here,’ he said. ‘Doctor Towers –’

‘Ruby, please. I always think it’s best to be informal when one’s been dodging bullets all morning.’

‘Quite. Ruby, then. Actually, I have been waiting for you. I hope you will not be offended if I comment that you are younger than I expected.’

‘Younger? I’m the wrong side of, ahem, thirty. How did you know I was here?’

‘Señor Souza told me you would be here this morning.’

‘Paulo Souza? From the UN?’

Otto appeared thrown by the second part of her question. He adjusted his sleeves again.

‘Er, yes, Paulo Souza.’

‘Are you with the UN too?’

‘I have an, er, affiliation. Listen, your flight is delayed considerably. Perhaps that is to our mutual advantage as there is someone I wish you to meet concerning Mayan antiquities. Would you mind coming with me for an hour?’

She didn’t need to think about it. If she could make one small contribution towards the conservation of Mayan relics rather than sitting uselessly in an airport, she had to do it.

He held out his hand, but when he recoiled as she moved hers towards him, she realised that he was only pointing the way. He seemed asexual, a dry academic, perhaps more comfortable with a book than with a companion. Without wasting breath on more words, he led her at a brisk trot out of the airport entrance directly to the parking lot.

The grey S-class Mercedes was too wide for the faded markings that defined its parking space, and the proximity of the adjacent cars made impossible the kind of elegant ingress that such a vehicle deserved. Ruby hugged the door as she squeezed clumsily around it to get in. As she did so she noticed that the window glass was at least an inch thick.

‘It is the S Guard model,’ explained Otto as he slid himself into the driving seat. ‘Bullet-proof glass, armoured body panels. I have no reason to fear guns, grenades or bombs.’

‘Any other day I’d have said you’re paranoid. Today it makes perfect sense.’

She closed the door and felt secure, cocooned from the turbulent city. From within the protective shell of this car, the towers of smoke that indicated ongoing skirmishes between the army and the guerrilla fighters seemed unreal. With little traffic on the streets Otto reached his destination in minutes. He stopped the car, pulling backwards and forwards several times until it was parked perfectly parallel to the kerb. He climbed out and walked round to open Ruby’s door. As she stood up he held out his hand once again, but she knew by now that it was not for her to hold.

‘Follow me.’ He tipped his head towards the grand entrance of a detached colonial building. Two short, bulky men in black suits leaned against the pillars on either side of the door, one fiddling with his headset like a bouncer outside a nightclub, the other impatiently looking at his watch. Ruby was not disturbed by the presence of these men, but she was terrified by what was adjacent to the house. Or, rather, what was no longer adjacent. The almost perfectly circular sinkhole was eerily tubular with vertical sides. The neighbouring colonial villa had simply vanished, sucked deep into the earth, but miraculously most of Otto’s property was unaffected. A section of his garden wall protruded over the edge, suspended on air. A length of concrete sidewalk also appeared to have nothing supporting it. Severed cables dangled downwards, and water dribbled from a snapped pipe. There was no sign of the bottom of this pit; the sun’s angle was not yet high enough to illuminate its nadir.

‘Sorry, Otto,’ she said, clinging to the car. ‘I don’t think it’s safe to go near a sinkhole.’

The air above them whistled, ripped apart by a high velocity round. The two men in black winced, and then tried to pretend they hadn’t. A window on a distant office building disintegrated, glass tinkling to the street.

‘Please, Ruby, it is perfectly safe,’ explained Otto, staring at her with unblinking eyes. ‘This city is built upon soft volcanic soils. Sometimes underground rivers create chambers that collapse and cause sinkholes. This one appeared yesterday. No one was hurt.’ He put his hand over his mouth as he continued, ‘A structural engineer has already surveyed my home. There is nothing to worry about.’ He returned his hand to his side and led the way into the tenebrous cool of the building, nodding respectfully to the two men as they opened the door for him.

There was a jug of iced water. There were cakes. There was an electric fan whirring above them. Hardback volumes lined three of the walls from floor to ceiling, extensive collections arranged by genre: History, Cultural Arts, Modern and Ancient Languages, Medicine, Science and – most significantly – an entire wall dedicated to the writings of humanity’s greatest philosophers. Here, Aristotle and Plato dominated the shelf space over lesser thinkers. There were also deep luxurious cushions, tapestries, and ornate but clearly tasteful furniture. And there, in the middle of this room, was a man, sitting rather melodramatically in deep shadow behind a weighty Victorian desk on which an object the size of a small bicycle wheel sat beneath a loose shroud.

Otto poured a glass of water and handed it to Ruby, then straightened the jug so that its handle lined up with the edge of the table. While she downed the water in one great grateful gulp, the man in the olive green leather captain’s chair on the other side of the desk wriggled out of the shadows into the light, an expression of utter terror upon his face.

‘Ruby? What on earth are you doing here, old fruit bat?’

‘I’d ask the same, but something tells me I already know the answer, Ratty.’

Otto raised an exceptionally pale eyebrow. Ratty, indeed. These Brits were sometimes unfathomable. He dragged a chair over for her, aligning it carefully with the desk. Ruby sat down, unconsciously nudging the chair away from its perpendicular alignment. Otto grimaced as if hearing fingernails on a blackboard. He slid the cakes into neat rows as if to compensate for the chair. Ruby was momentarily distracted by his little habits, but her mind swiftly returned to this unexpected encounter with an old friend.

‘It seems you’re making a habit of visiting me unannounced,’ declared Ratty with a voice from which all confidence had been stripped.

‘Don’t you start that,’ she countered firmly. ‘I had no idea you’d be here. Doctor Otto invited me on an archaeological matter.’

‘You said you’d bring your government’s top scientific expert chappy to carry out the verification, Otto,’ whispered Ratty, even though the Doctor was further away than Ruby. ‘You never mentioned it was a chap-ess.’

‘Verification?’ she echoed.

Ratty slowly pulled the shroud away from the object it had been covering on the desk, watching her eyes as he did so for any warning signs of an imminen