which had been taken the previous month at a reception for a group of
visiting French tour operators.
It gave her a pang to see the photograph of her husband looking so
handsome and distinguished, with herself on his arm smiling up at him.
She purchased copies of all the papers and took them on board the
British Airways flight.
During the flight she passed the time by writing down in her notebook
everything she could remember from what Duraid had told her of the man
that she was going to find..
She headed the page: 'Sir Nicholas Quenton-Harper (Bart).' Duraid had
told her that Nicholas's great-grand, father had been awarded the title
of baronet for his work as a career officer in the British colonial
service. For three generations the family had maintained the strongest
of ties with Africa, and especially with the British colonies and
spheres of influence in North Africa: Egypt and the Sudan, Uganda and
Kenya.
According to Duraid, Sir Nicholas himself had served in Africa and the
Gulf States with the British army. He was a fluent Arabic and Swahili
speaker and a noted amateur archaeologist and zoologist. Like his
father, grandfather and great-grandfather before him, he had made
numerous expeditions to North Africa to collect specimens and to explore
the more remote regions. He had written a number of articles for various
scientific journals and had even lectured at the Royal Geographical
Society.
When his elder brother died childless, Sir Nicholas had inherited the
title and the family estate at Quenton Park. He had resigned from the
army to run the estate, but more especially to supervise the family
museum that had been started in 1885 by his great-grandfather, the first
baronet. It housed one of the largest collections of African fauna in
private hands, and its ancient Egyptian and Middle Eastern collection of
artefacts was equally famous.
However, from Duraid's accounts she concluded that there must be a wild,
and even lawless, streak in Sir Nicholas's nature. It was obvious that
he was not afraid to take some extraordinary risks to add to the
collection at Quenton Park.
Duraid had first met him a number of years previously, when Sir Nicholas
had recruited him to act as an intelligence officer for an illicit
expedition to 'liberate' a number of Punic bronze castings from
Gadaffi's Libya. Sir Nicholas had sold some of these to defray the
expenses of the expedition, but had kept the best of them for his
private collection.
More recently there had been another expedition, this time involving an
illegal crossing of the Iraqi border to bring out a pair of stone
has-relief friezes from under Saddam Hussein's nose. Duraid had told her
that Sir Nicholas had sold one of the pair for a huge amount of money;
he had mentioned the sum of five million US dollars. Duraid said that he
had used the money for the running of the museum, but that the second
frieze, the finest of the pair, was still in Sir Nicholas's possession.
Both these expeditions had taken place years before Royan had met
Duraid, and she wondered idly at Duraid's readiness to commit himself to
