2

‘THE police! One imagines they may well be here constantly, with the vast intrusion caused by the Exhibition …’

Hawthorne-Mannering realised at once that ‘intrusion’ was not the word he should have chosen, but he was too proud to change it.

‘If you could step in here, sir, just for a word with the police. Mace is the name — they’ve sent Inspector Mace from the station.’

‘But one’s guests …’

‘I could take them to the staff cafeteria if you think fit, for a glass of wine before the conference.’

This was a handsome offer from Deputy Security, but Hawthorne-Mannering received it with a finely-tuned suggestion of irritation.

‘I have already given them a glass of wine, though not from the staff cafeteria. I don’t know that Untermensch should have any more. He might easily become tipsy.’

Inexorably Deputy Security led the two savants away, while Hawthorne-Mannering was left in a small, almost disused room off the corridor, lined with cases containing some hundreds of Romano-British blue glass tear-bottles. Inspector Mace, more solid than anything else in the room, rose to meet him.

‘Well, Inspector, I hope you won’t regard it as offensive if I say that one is rather in a hurry …’

‘Quite so, sir. I’ve no intention of wasting time, either ours or yours. It is simply that due to increasing our force patrolling the area during the Exhibition it has been reported in passing by one of my men that cannabis indica is being illegally grown on one of the ground-floor window sills of the Museum. This, as you know, is a serious offence.’

‘In what possible way, Inspector, can I be concerned with this?’

‘We have been given to understand, sir, that you’re in charge of the Department of Funerary Art. The cannabis was being grown in what I am given to understand are known as “death pots”, that is, large funerary urns from your department. They were put just inside the window in an empty room to get the benefit of the central heating.’

‘With the Museum full of gold, you bother about two pots! If you mean to say that this is my sole connection with the affair …’

‘Have you noted down two pots as having gone missing, sir?’

‘The Museum has a holding of several thousand urns. Very few are on show at one time. I have not checked them personally for some months …’

‘I see. Meanwhile, perhaps you could inform us as to whether there are any registered addicts among your personnel?’

‘I can only say that I regret I am unable to help you. I recommend you to apply to Establishment, who engage the clerical staff. Meanwhile I recommend you, or implore you, or what you like, not to take any further steps until the Exhibition has been running a few more weeks. One has enough on one’s hands already.’

‘I am afraid we shall have to press the charges, sir,’ said Inspector Mace, but hesitation could be detected beneath his firm exterior. ‘The preliminary steps might, perhaps, be deferred a week or two. Of course, sir, we don’t wish to interrupt the wonderful public service the Museum is doing, in welcoming thousands of ordinary folk and giving them an opportunity to share its treasures …’

Escaping from the Inspector, Hawthorne-Mannering ascended with flying steps to Sir William’s room. The conference had already begun. Dr Rochegrosse-Bergson and Professor Untermensch had understandably declined the opportunity of a visit to the staff cafeteria, and had proceeded direct to the conference. All were seated, and the telephone had just rung, so that Miss Rank could signify that the Director was almost ready to join them. In another minute she rang through again, to say that he was on his way.

The queue, when Sir John glanced at it from the arched window which shed a chilly light into the corridor, looked tranquil enough. Frozen into submission, another fifty schools were marshalled into line, ‘closing up’ at every opportunity to give an illusion of forward motion. Round the WVS tea-stall the ground-frost had now melted, making a dark circular pattern. The whole area had become littered with plastic cups and spoons. Everything was orderly, there was no trouble at all.

The Director was well-known for his astounding power of cutting off his attention from one subject and focussing it on another, as a result of which, by the way, he had made a number of rather unwise decisions. But it enabled him now to forget both the enormous and the petty problems of administration as he entered Sir William’s room and looked round the assembly. The two journalists, exquisites for whom life could hold no further surprises, and removed by their foreign education from crass British prejudices, sat in their Italian silk shirts and deerskin jackets, waiting, in a kind of energetic idleness. Sintram had folded his long legs and placed one well-turned ankle on the opposite knee. Hawthorne-Mannering, pale as alabaster, was evidently dreadfully fussed. Sir William, having risen to greet the French and German scholars, had slumped down low, alarmingly low, in his easy chair and almost disappeared in his cloud of pipesmoke, depriving them of the formal speech of congratulations which both had intended to make. They were opening their briefcases. Rochegrosse-Bergson’s white hands slid over the golden clasp; the Professor’s case was shabby, and fastened with an unyielding zip. He sat altogether in the background, unconsidered and largely unaccounted for. As soon as the Director came in he fixed his sharp little eyes on him and concentrated on nothing else.

With the ease of long practice — evidently he could have lectured from a housetop, or in the middle of a desert — Rochegrosse-Bergson, in fluent English, commenced his discourse. After an entrée en matière, lasting a quarter of an hour exactly, he proceeded to a refutation of his unseen enemies.

‘Let us admit that Man, when he looks round at the world, tries, as his nature demands, to put some order or pattern into the confusing mass of objects he sees. What is this order? It is the error, the childish error of structuralists to believe that we divide all our concepts into twos, and only into twos. Mentally, do we not on the contrary see everything about us in threes?’

‘Some things look better in pairs,’ Sir William said. ‘They’d look odd if there were three of them.’

‘Yes, the universe is trinary,’ Rochegrosse-Bergson continued, courteously ignoring the interruption. ‘Just as the Ancients conceived of Three Graces linked in a circle and the Manxman dreams of three legs, so life is an eternal triad — going out — coming back and going out again. To understand the myth I proclaim to you that we must fold it in three.’

He moved his dapper hands with the gestures of an expert laundryman.

‘Compare the Ball of Golden Twine, for example, which, in my view, is the most important object in your distinguished Exhibition, with the clue of thread given by Ariadne to Theseus — and again with the cat’s cradle, a game, chers auditeurs, which, unlike string itself, has no end. What do we find? We find, gentlemen, that we go into the labyrinth to discover what we once were. Holding firmly the precious thread of golden twine, we ascend to the upper air, but knowing that we shall have once again, one day, to return to the interior of our unacknowledged selves. The journey of humanity is a progression neither forward nor backward, but noward. All our thoughts are, to use my own word, my own chosen signifier, la pensée-stop — the irresistible impulse to stop thinking at all. Our art — for every man, let us admit it, is an artist — is to achieve absolutely nothing!’

Amazingly enough, this arrant nonsense was eagerly taken down by the two journalists. Their cynicism was gone; they appeared hypnotised. A serious résumé would evidently appear in the Times Literary Supplement. Trained in French lycées, they were unable to resist the rounded sentences which now dropped a couple of tones to announce the coming peroration.

‘And thus, my friends, I have endeavoured to make perhaps a little clearer this evening …’

Broad winter daylight shone through the windows. The journalists scribbled on.

Professor Untermensch also knew, from long habit, the falling sound of the peroration. His time was coming; he was drawing nearer to the fabled gold to which, at one remove, he had devoted so much of his life’s work. His eagerness was distinctly embarrassing. As the Director rose he also got up, ready to follow him like a shadow.

Hawthorne-Mannering was in agitation, feeling that things were not being done properly. Nobody had been thanked.

‘If you could just manage a few words,’ he murmured, hovering over Sir William. ‘If you could just make some acknowledgement … if you could recognise the name of Rochegrosse-Bergson …’

‘Why should I?’ asked Sir William. ‘It may be somebody’s name, but it’s not his.’

Waring had received a message from the impeccable Miss Rank. She rang down. The Director required the Golden Doll from the Exhibition, to show it, as he had undertaken to do, to Professor Untermensch.

‘Isn’t that really Hawthorne-Mannering’s business? He’s inclined to be a little touchy if he thinks I’m doing his job.’

‘The exhibit should have been up here with us four and three-quarter minutes ago,’ Miss Rank replied.

‘But I can’t go and open the cases until the public have left and the place is clear. I don’t think you can actually have been down there. They’re packed six abreast. It’s impossible.’

‘The object Sir John requires is not in the cases. I have checked that it has gone to Records. Your friend Len Coker is supposed to be making a scale drawing of it in the Records studio, but he should have finished and sent it up long ago.’

‘He’s not exactly a friend of mine,’ Waring protested feebly.

‘Your quickest way is through the Library. The other route to the studios will mean over half a mile of corridors.’

‘Yes, but —’

‘You are not entitled to a Library key. I am aware of that. I have sent the keys down to you. Returnable, of course.’

At that very moment one of the messengers (Internal), flat-footed in his buff overalls, padded in and laid a glittering bunch of keys in the in-tray.

Waring took them dutifully. He was in trouble all round. There would be Haggie to console when he eventually got home, and he was within something and a quarter minutes of actually keeping the Director waiting.

The Library, as Miss Rank had observed, was for the use of staff of a higher grade than Waring Smith, who did not earn enough to consult the many thousands of costly reference books. Buried deep underground, it adjoined the resource centres, studios and laboratories. There was a lift, but its operations were uncertain; so Waring ran down the circular iron staircase.

‘Hullo, Mr Smith. I didn’t know they gave you access to down here.’

Jones was toiling up towards him with a large volume under his arm. ‘I go to a lot of places that you can’t,’ he added. ‘You’d be surprised.’

But Waring was not surprised. ‘I suppose it’s something for Sir William,’ he said, knowing that Jones wanted to stop and show him the book, whose weight was visibly distressing him. The musty tome was, in fact, the first volume of Professor Untermensch’s study of the Garamantian script, Garamantischengeheimschriftendechiffrierkunst.

‘In German,’ said Jones, ‘something he took a fancy to. There’s not a lot of people would want to read it at his age. He doesn’t come down here, of course.’

‘So he was saying only this morning.’

‘I’d like to tell you something, Mr Smith. I can talk to you, because you’re not a gentleman. Sir William won’t last much longer. They won’t let him.’

‘He’s eighty-five, you know,’ said Waring, touched by Jones’ confidence, but anxious to hurry on, ‘and I’m afraid his heart isn’t too strong.’

‘We’ve a right to every hair on our head and every breath we breathe, Mr Smith. I don’t know whether you’ve ever heard that said. It was the Thought for Today on the radio yesterday. But believe me, they won’t let him.’

They parted, and Waring hurried on through the Library. There was not much temptation to linger there; the dignified, leather-clad reading-room of former days had been moved down here and had been partially transformed by the current safety regulations into a kind of spacious prison cell, with steel sliding shelving, ventilators protected by-wire grilles and a row of regulators prepared to discharge water and chemicals in case of fire. There were two heavy metal doors at the end, one leading to the Director’s private library, the other to the Conservation and Technical Services Departments.

In Conservation and Technical the staff, happily far removed from the manoeuvres, triumphs and jealousies of the Museum itself, worked on apparently undisturbed. They photographed, glued and mended, decided what could not be cleaned, preserved small objects with a coat of polyvinyl acetate, measured the effect of age and damp, and took a careful record of all that the Museum possessed. Their services were highly skilled, and certain people were employed there, because of their expertise, who would not have been tolerated in the upstairs departments. Such a one was Len Coker, whose broad, short, almost square back and wildly curling dark hair Waring could glimpse now through his open studio door.

The door was always open, and Waring had time to reflect that although, as he had told Miss Rank, he was not really a friend, he did like him very much. Len Coker was an odd fish. He had trained as an engineering draughtsman, but had come here as a Museums Association student a year or so ago. Politically he was exceedingly fierce, holding views of the most extreme kind, and attending in the evenings, so he said, a course in Conflict Promotion; yet in personal life he was gentle and frequently embarrassed. As a copyist he was exact and delicate, but once his instruments were put away he was no longer neat-handed, but as blundering a breaker, loser and wrecker as was ever let loose on the helpless world of objects.

At the moment a faint scraping sound (Len liked old-fashioned mapping pens) suggested that all was safe; he was drawing. A number of carefully spaced objects lay on the high tables, from incised pebbles to a large eighteenth dynasty fish-spear. The Golden Doll had pride of place. A strangely smiling little dolly with folded hands, it lay glittering in its fibre-glass case. Two jasper beads, something like tears on its cheeks, had given it the name of the Weeping Doll.

‘Bugger off! You can’t have it!’

Len did not look up from his work, and the remark was made in a kind of muffled roar.

‘Just for an hour or two, Len. Let me have it, there’s a good fellow.’ Waring was conscious that he was speaking rather as though to a large dog. ‘If you’re half-way through, you can have it straight back when the Director’s finished with it. I’ll see to that myself.’

But Len had not even started the drawing. His objections were made on principle alone.

‘It amounts to a conspiracy, that’s obvious enough, to deny the rank and file of the Museum any real chance to observe and comment. That’s admitted between us, I think. The whole Treasure was unpacked and whisked into place. No one could study anything. This is the only scale drawing I’ve been asked to do, and now they’re trying to hustle me. Experiments have been neglected. Priceless opportunities are being lost, or would have been if …’ He paused blankly for a moment, and then went on. ‘There’s been no proper examination. There’s been no analysis.’

‘Surely you don’t want them to perform an inquest on the Golden Child, like poor Tutankhamen,’ said Waring. ‘They’d need all manner of permission. We should never have got the Exhibition mounted at all.’

‘There should be free access for all genuine enquirers. There were traces of wine and ointment and vegetable matter. Bound to have been. Those could have been analysed and tested. The cause of human knowledge could have been served. It’s part of the atmosphere of unease and suppression that’s eroding any kind of dialogue between management and staff. I’m even told the police have been called in on some trumped-up excuse.’

‘I know why the police are here,’ Waring said. ‘Everyone’s talking about it. It’s because they’ve found cannabis growing in pots on one of the ground-floor windowsills.’

‘Very likely they have,’ Len replied calmly. ‘As it happens, I grew it myself.’

‘You did!’ Waring replied, stunned. ‘You!’

‘May I ask what you think you mean by that standard bourgeois reaction? You, one of the few people I was beginning to tolerate. You point the finger of accusation and blame at me?’

‘It’s nothing to do with blame. It was a bit of a shock, because I’d thought of you as a self-contained kind of person. You told me the other day that you wanted to free yourself from all physical desires — nothing too much, nothing you couldn’t do without.’

‘I shall make known to the authorities in my own good time any reason for growing cannabis indica on their premises,’ said Len rather vaguely, ‘and at the same time I shall put back the pots, which I borrowed, without his knowledge, from the Queen of the May and his Funerary pissing Art Department. The vital thing, I repeat, is to make oneself aware of the corruption from top to bottom of the Museum. Do you realise why this Exhibition was ever put on in the first place?’

‘Yes,’ said Waring.

‘How did you find out?’

‘I saw a report about it in Sir William’s office, and I thought I might as well read it.’

Len seemed a trifle disconcerted, but recovered himself.

‘There’ll be nothing in it, by fair means or foul, that I don’t know backwards. They’re fools if they think they can keep secrets from an intelligent artisan, with the Union of Scientific Workers behind him. All I ask for is time, and day by day that is denied me. Now they talk about photographing all these things before the drawings are half done to my satisfaction. Worse still, they’re going to send one of them across to the Museum of Man. Without my knowledge and consent. My fish-spear!’

Lumbering down from his high stool, still locked in his dream, he snatched the unwieldly spear and made a wild pass in the air. He lost balance, the heavy ivory shaft seemed to take over control as he gyrated like a top and lurched forward, and one of the shining prongs fastened on Waring’s left foot, wounding it and pinning it to the ground.

Len stared at it in deep interest.

‘It’s like Patrick! The so-called saint! A classic case for analysis. When he was preaching to the Irish! He leant on his staff and it went right through this fellow’s foot! But this fellow said nothing, thought it was a religious ordeal, endured it without saying a word!’

‘Well, I am saying a word,’ shouted Waring. ‘You clumsy bugger, get this out of my foot.’

Len immediately became sympathetic and even tender. He skilfully extracted the prong, put on a neat bandage, and handed Waring a pair of his hand-knitted socks, which were drying on the radiator. Waring seized the opportunity, while Len was still penitent, to appropriate the Golden Doll and carry it off to the upper floors.

Miss Rank received him coldly.

The Director could be seen at that very moment emerging from his private office, and Waring got a glimpse of Professor Untermensch almost clinging to him. How strange Untermensch looked, small and dark, gripping his briefcase, the sign of the undefeated intellectual, and looking in his eagerness like some bonze of an unknown religion, approaching the source of his devotion! Miss Rank looked with casual disapproval at Waring’s hand-knitted socks, and at his limp.

‘I’ve never seen you limping before, Mr Smith,’ she said.

Waring reflected that Miss Rank and Len Coker, although far apart in every other point of view, were united in their disdain for the way the world was run.

The Museum had extended its opening time with an extra session, from six until eight; and throughout the building, now ablaze with lights, vast quantities of overtime were accumulated by officials, executives and warding staff, servants of the Golden Treasure. At eight o’clock the whole Museum seemed to gather itself together and sigh as melancholy whistles reverberated in its inmost recesses. The queue inward ceased, the outward current dispersed, half dead from fatigue, clutching unintelligible catalogues and trashy reproductions of the Ball of Golden Twine, while the loudspeakers reminded them of how great their privileges had been and urged them in return to be careful to drop no litter.

During the afternoon and evening Waring rang up home several times, but there was no answer; Haggie must be out. It was time to carry out his promise and to collect Dousha, whom he found wide awake and quite ready. Her typewriter was covered up for the night and the office was tidy, but Sir William, more alert and wakeful as the night advanced, was still at his desk. He gave Waring an amiable nod.

‘Just look in here and have a word with me when you’ve seen that young woman home,’ he said.

‘Well, I shall have to be getting home myself …’

‘Just look in and see me. It won’t be as late as that. The difference between night and day is greatly exaggerated. What’s wrong with your foot?’

This was something Waring did not want to discuss. A warm feeling for Len Coker persisted, and the accident with the fish-spear was difficult to explain in his convincing terms. Luckily Sir William, who could be so persistent, said no more.

Dousha, rarely seen either standing or walking, looked enormous, blooming and radiant. She was wearing a flowing garment, apparently patched together from many rags, and over it a number of shawls, and things that buttoned casually together. The effect was that of a princess in disguise.

Waring had drawn out ten pounds with his cash card from the staff bank and had decided, for the next two hours at least, not to worry. The truth was that he was looking forward to having something substantial to eat. He and Haggie had both seriously decided that they should spend as little as possible on food, which, after all, was unimportant — you felt just the same afterwards whatever you ate — and they never went to restaurants. But this evening, after all, was not his responsibility, it was simply to indulge a kindly impulse of Sir William’s. He might as well make the best of it.

There was still plenty of coming and going in the entrance hall: nobody, however, that Waring really knew, except for Len Coker, wearing a Government surplus postman’s raincoat, and presumably on the way to a meeting. For some reason he stopped as they passed him, stood his ground and stared fixedly. Perhaps he thought they were frivolous, or perhaps — Waring hoped — he was worried about the limp.

Since he would have to go back to the Museum afterwards, Waring suggested that they might go to a small place in the next square which he had heard Miss Rank say was quite good. As he walked with Dousha between the damp plane trees and misty street lamps he resolved that as soon as possible he would take Haggie to the same place.

The restaurant, having been formerly called the Bloomsbury Group, Lytton Strachey Slept Here, the Cook Inn, Munchers, and Bistro Solzhenitzyn, now bore the name of the Crisis. It was so small and hot that it was a matter for astonishment that anyone should want to enter it. The day’s menu, although the same as every day’s, was scrawled in an apparently improvised manner in chalk on a blackboard; the writing was so crowded that neither the names nor the enormous prices could be read in the dim light afforded by candles stuck with their own grease on to wooden boards. Ambisexual waiters in white trousers scrimmaged like gondoliers in midstream among the rocking tables and placed on the sacking tablecloths wicker basketfuls of coarse prison bread and tiny carafes containing a few mouthfuls of rosé, compounded of dregs from the glasses of the larger restaurant next door.

Waring and Dousha saw nothing to criticise and were prepared to enjoy themselves. Waring propelled Dousha forward by main force towards a table at the back of the room which was so inconvenient, being jammed under an Edwardian coat-stand, that it was still left empty.

Tacking after Dousha’s ample figure through a trail of cutlery which her drapery swept from the gimcrack tables, he felt reduced to a nonentity. But how different it was when she subsided, with a smile so broad that it might almost have been a laugh. ‘This is nice,’ she said, looking contentedly through the reeking haze. It was not, but Dousha made it seem so.

Waring stared at the blackboard. ‘Let me try and order something for you,’ he said. ‘I promised Sir William I’d look after you properly.’

The menu alternated strangely between French and Old English, Boeuf en daube being followed by the mysterious Dollops.

‘It all looks a bit fattening,’ he said, and then felt annoyed with himself, for he was automatically repeating a remark of Haggie’s without thinking of the vast and already cushiony Dousha.

‘Oh, it will not make any difference,’ said Dousha calmly. ‘Sir William is only worried that I do not have enough proteins. I am pregnant, you see.’

‘Oh, Dousha, are you? I mean, are you all right, are you happy about it?’ He hardly knew her well enough to ask her anything more specific than that.

‘Of course I am all right. I am very well suited in my work. I do not do very much. Sir William met my father on an expedition to Mount Ararat. That was why he befriended me, for my father’s sake, when I did not know what to do or where to go, and now I have a nice job and am pregnant. Maternity is the great happiness of a woman’s life.’

‘Was your father an archaeologist, then?’ said Waring, not knowing what else to ask.

‘No, he was wrestler, and my mother was tumbler.’

Dousha settled back in her creaking chair and ordered snails, tripe allegedly cooked in cream, and suet pudding with treacle.

Whatever faint and unacknowledged expectations Waring might have had from the evening were extinguished by Dousha’s occasional allusions to her coming baby, but faced with her tranquil radiance, he could not help enjoying himself. He delivered her dutifully to the door of her flat above a Cypriot grocer’s shop, and turned back to the Museum, the last duty in a very long day before he could make his explanations with Haggie.

There were still a number of lights burning here and there in the two front wings of the building. The courtyard had been cleared by mechanical sweepers and lay deserted under the freezing moonlight. The crush barriers were ready, at action stations, for the next day’s multitudes. The main doors were shut fast. Waring showed his pass and was admitted through a side entrance into the Assyrian Galleries.

Here the lights were off, perhaps through an administrative error, and it was lucky that Waring knew the way so well. The gallery, with its gigantic human-headed bulls stretched out beside each other, was dark indeed. The moonlight penetrated through an upper clerestory, but only, like a pointing finger, to pick out here a wing, there an eye, and to gleam on the colossal heads which seemed to be rising slowly upwards, as ancient beings were said to do, from the regions below the earth. Waring had an absurd illusion that someone was in fact moving behind the statues. If so, they would be flitting soundlessly in the direction of the Exhibition. Waring thought he would like to call out and ask who it was, but he was afraid of making a fool of himself. The vast scale of the statues might, perhaps, have an effect on the nerves. Almost invisible, the winged and bearded creatures frowned down, neglected for the temporary gold of the Garamantes which had been carted through their domain.

Such fancies are inexcusable in an Exhibition officer. Waring wondered if the food at the Crisis had been altogether wholesome. If not, what about Dousha? The lift was not working and he toiled up the stairs, wondering how on earth Sir William would get down. Doubtless Jones, who seemed to be privy to all the secrets of the Museum, would get the lift working for him. There was no need to worry about Sir William, and yet he could not help it. However absurd Len Coker’s tirades might be, it was true that in every department of the Museum, since the Treasure arrived, there had been the same thrill of faint unease.

Sir William at this late hour was once again showing every one of the eighty-five years of his age. He was sunk in his desk chair like a blanched old fossil in a crevice.

‘Thank you for coming, thank you for remembering to come back. You remind me, you know, of a young fellow who was very helpful to me, at Abalessa, or Tebu, I think …’

‘I don’t know how I can do that,’ said Waring gently. ‘I was brought up in Hayling Island.’

‘Well, well, I’m old, I need reminding of things … Dousha’s all right, is she? I only wanted her to have a treat for once. She’s a good girl, she’ll make an excellent mother …’

Waring hardly knew how to answer this, but the old man went on.

‘I just wanted you to put this back for me. They’re shut downstairs, of course, so it will only take you a moment.’

He held up the red clay tablet which Waring had seen earlier in the day.

‘I shouldn’t have had this. No desire to go and see all the things on show, but I fancied a glimpse — think I told you — of some of the writing, and Jones got hold of this for me. Just slip it back now for me and there’ll be no fuss made, no question of it being missed …’

‘Wouldn’t tomorrow do? I haven’t heard anything about a re-check, and the tablets aren’t catalogued individually. They’re all under Miscellaneous Finds.’

‘At eighty-five I’ve had an unexpected pang of conscience,’ murmured Sir William, ‘and suppose this was the world’s last night, or more probably my last night … only I’m not sure where Jones got it from …’

‘Oh, the tablets are in the second room,’ said Waring reassuringly. ‘All together, with a flooring of desert sand, and blow-ups of the desert caves — atmosphere, you know. There aren’t the same security precautions there as we’ve got in the inner room. They’re not in a high security case at all — just in an old case borrowed from Romano-British. If it’s really on your mind, I’ll see to it now.’

He felt that the spirit of this old man who had befriended him was wandering somewhere between past, present and future. Clearly he was distressed. It wouldn’t take twenty minutes to put the tablet back, and to try to get through to Haggie once again to explain the further delay. Nothing really.

For the second time that day Waring was given a bunch of keys — this time a complete set, quite unused, to the Exhibition — and Sir William once again produced the little tablet. It was about six inches by two, and surprisingly well preserved; its mysterious columns of picture-writing were sharp, as though the reddish clay had been incised only yesterday. There were dozens like it in the Exhibition. Waring put it carefully into an envelope, throwing away the unwelcome statement from the Bank which it had previously contained.

‘Leave it to me. I’ll look after it. No problem. Good night, now.’

‘Good-bye, Waring,’ said Sir William, who had begun to doze off.

Certainly there was no problem. Waring knew the layout of the Exhibition as well as anyone in the building, and felt quite confident that he could explain himself if the night patrol came round while he was opening the case. Jones, in any case, was likely to be on the premises in some capacity, until Sir William left, and could give his comforting explanation that Mr Smith did these things because he wasn’t a gentleman. The job was as good as done, and he allowed Haggie and the question of the mortgage to occupy the conscious part of his mind.

He was already through Room 1 which was devoted to enormously magnified photographs from Sir William’s book of the 1913 expedition mounted on display boards with boldly printed explanations, and arranged like a kind of open maze to lead towards the discovery of the Treasure. Now he was in the Exhibition itself, hushed as though in expectation of tomorrow’s immense procession of curiosity, boredom and wonder. The main lighting was cut off automatically at night, but the illumination of some of the cases was working and threw up a faint blue glow, just good enough to see by.

Without difficulty or disturbance he opened Case VIII, put the tablet back on the artfully scattered heap, and locked the back. I hope Sir William won’t want to borrow anything else, he thought. He had done enough for one day. He would be home in three-quarters of an hour.

A sudden impulse seized him to take another look at the coffin of the Golden Child. At the unpacking and assemblage, at the cataloguing and photography sessions and during day after crowded day, the Child had become nothing but a centre of coming and going. What did he really look like? Without any conscious decision, Waring turned and walked straight through the tablet room into the inner sanctum.

The Golden Child lay in its double coffin of crystallised salt, the top lid open, so that the inner one could be stared at. The likeness of a prince was shown in a ritual painting on the lid of the outer coffin, but the painting on the inner one showed the face of a child, wrinkled like a thing that had never been born and never allowed to die. Every wrinkle, however, was thickly covered with gold. This second lid, in turn, was just ajar, so that you could glimpse the tiny body wrapped in strips of linen cloth. In the case beside it were its collection of golden rattles and comforters, to console it on the long journey. There was an empty space labelled TEMPORARILY REMOVED, for the Weeping Doll which Waring had fetched earlier that morning.

Then he noticed something else. The Ball of Golden Twine, ready to lead the dead child back to earth again, was missing.

A horrible sensation attacked Waring in the nerves of the small of the back, as though the flesh was being sucked from his bones by fear. He heard a faint sound behind him. Well, look round and see what it is. Rather anything than that, he thought. In that instant the hard cutting edge of a string caught him round the neck and was pulled tighter till it hurt, and he felt his tongue reaching out of his mouth by itself for air and lost consciousness.