Secrets of the Dead

gets dangerous.

This time, they picked her up the moment she entered the palace. It was the obvious move – seventeen hundred years on, Diocletian’s walls still held good, allowing only five ways in to the old town. She could feel eyes on her as she walked along the arcade. A man in a green anorak who’d been browsing through a rack of art prints peeled off and started walking ahead of her. Just after she’d passed a woman in a red skirt at a coffee stall, she heard a second set of footsteps fall in behind her. She forced herself not to look back.

She climbed the stairs and crossed a courtyard boxed in by high blank walls. The footsteps behind kept pace, following her through a door into a high round chamber that had once been the entrance vestibule of the imperial apartments. A pair of Japanese tourists stood in its centre, aiming their cameras at the doughnut hole of the oculus in the domed roof. Off to the right, another man in a black fleece stared at his guidebook. Was it her imagination, or did he glance up at her as she swerved around the two tourists and crossed to the doorway in the far wall?

Beyond the vestibule was the peristyle – the formal courtyard at the heart of any Roman dwelling. A row of columns soared above it, free-standing and intact; the facing columns were also intact, though now built into the facade of a Venetian palazzo that had become a coffee-house. Behind the arches stood the stone octagon of Diocletian’s mausoleum, now the cathedral. A high belltower rose next to it, overlooking the city; at its foot, a black Egyptian sphinx crouched beside the door and riddled passers-by.

The man in the green anorak diverted to the coffee shop and took a seat in the window. The woman in the red skirt walked briskly past and climbed the steps to the mausoleum. Abby turned, admiring the architecture, and saw the man in the black fleece lounging against the vestibule doorway taking a photograph.

‘Abby?’ Mark wasn’t giving her any time for second thoughts. He’d emerged from behind the sphinx, was hurrying down the well-worn steps. He was wearing a navy blue wool coat, the sort of sensible thing his mother might have bought him, and a striped college scarf. He stuck out his hand, and pumped hers too enthusiastically.

‘Do you want to get a coffee?’

So that’s how he wants to play it. She nodded.

‘Do you know anywhere good?’

Was that a test? She shrugged, noncommittal. ‘This town used to be colonised by the Italians. Pretty much everywhere has good coffee.’

‘Might as well stay here, then.’ He led her across the peristyle courtyard, to the coffee shop opposite the cathedral. He offered her a seat with her back to the door, and seated himself facing her and the window. She tried to see the street in the gilded mirror behind him, but it was too high.

They were the only customers there, except for the green-anoraked man at the table by the window. Presumably that would help with whatever devices Mark had recording the conversation. A white-aproned waiter came and took their order: black coffee for Abby, tea for Mark.

He looked at her face. ‘You look as if you’ve been in the wars.’

‘Where’s the necklace?’

To her surprise, he didn’t stall. He reached in his pocket and pulled out a slim black jewellery box with an Asprey logo on the top. He pressed the catch and flipped open the lid. There was the necklace, laid on a ruffle of black silk. To the waiter, polishing the coffee machine and peering over the bar, she must look like an exceptionally expensive, hard-to-please girlfriend. She shuddered at the thought.

‘Are you going to tell me why you want this?’

‘You wouldn’t believe me.’

Mark snapped the box shut. ‘We took it to a nice man at the British Museum. He said it’s antique – fourth- century Roman. About the same vintage as the tomb in Kosovo where we found Jessop’s body.’

The waiter brought the drinks. Abby looked at her hands. ‘I’m sorry about Jessop.’

‘He was a good man.’ Mark said it stiffly, as though he’d learned the line from a film. ‘He filed a report just before he died, saying he suspected Michael Lascaris had been supplying Dragovic with stolen antiquities looted from this tomb.’

‘That’s what it looked like.’

‘Did Michael tell you differently?’

‘You can ask him yourself.’

Mark looked around, as if he expected Michael to materialise out of the Roman stones. ‘You didn’t bring him here.’

She put her elbows on the table and leaned forward over her coffee. Her heart was racing.

‘Michael’s at the Hotel Marjan on the waterfront. Room 213.’

‘Alone?’

‘When I left him.’

Mark produced a mobile phone and tapped out a text message. She assumed that was for show, that hidden microphones had already radioed the details to whatever accomplices Mark had waiting. They probably had a car. Even on foot, it wouldn’t take more than ten minutes to get there.

She took the necklace out of the jewellery box and clasped it around her neck, cold metal on cold skin. Mark opened his mouth as if he wanted to stop her, but didn’t.

‘What do you want with Michael?’ she asked.

Mark smoothed back his hair. ‘Michael isn’t the target. Dragovic is. All we want Michael for is to lead us to him.’

‘What’s going to happen to Michael?’