amplifying his voice.
‘Not really,’ she answered, coughing.
‘Where are your hands?’
Feeling for her wrists, he carefully picked away at the knot, the rope resisting at first, until little by little he was able to loosen it and then undo it completely. Sitting up, Allegra returned the favour. As soon as he was free they felt for each other in the darkness and hugged with relief – relative strangers brought unexpectedly close by the intimacy of fear.
‘Which way’s the entrance?’ Tom asked as he broke away and ripped the remainder of the plastic hood from his neck.
‘We should be able to find it if we feel our way along the walls,’ she replied. ‘Perhaps if we…what’s this?’
A light clicked on, forcing Tom to shield his eyes as it was pointed at him. Allegra snatched it away with an apology. Unless it had fallen from Contarelli’s pocket, it appeared that he had left them a torch. Perhaps he had anticipated that they might free themselves? Perhaps he was trying to help them escape? The thought filled Tom with hope.
He glanced around excitedly, noting the low domed roof above them and the earthen floor littered with pottery fragments. Lying discarded in the corner was a bundle of rags that Tom suspected marked what was left of the tomb’s original occupant.
‘That way -’ Allegra pointed towards the low tunnel that led to the entrance.
He crawled hopefully down it, but soon found his path blocked. As the shovelling sound earlier had suggested, the entrance had been filled in. And not just with earth, but with a massive stone plug that they must have brought there with this single purpose in mind.
‘We should have left the bags on,’ Allegra said in a shaky voice. ‘I’d rather suffocate quickly than starve down here.’
‘I wouldn’t worry about starving,’ Tom said with a grim smile. ‘I’d say we have six hours of air, eight max.’
‘That’s reassuring.’ She gave a short laugh, then frowned as her torch picked out a dull metal object lying near the entrance.
It was a Glock 17. Tom picked it up and checked the magazine. It contained two bullets.
Contarelli, it seemed, was offering them a way out after all.
FIFTY-FOUR
Avenue Krieg, Geneva, Switzerland 20th March – 12.02 a.m.
‘This can’t be it,’ Dominique whispered.
Normally Archie would have agreed with her – a half-empty building with a broken lift, shabbycommunal areas, half the light bulbs blown and the name plate hanging loose, certainly didn’t seem to fit with what he’d seen of Faulks. But the porter he’d bribed in the Sotheby’s loading bay had been adamant that this was the right address, floor and suite number for the company who’d sold the Artemis. In fact, he’d proved it.
‘He showed me the bloody receipt,’ Archie grunted as he tried to force the final locking pin out of the way. ‘Galleries Dassin is registered here.’
‘It just doesn’t feel right,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘We should have spoken to Tom first.’
‘I’ve been trying to get him on the blower all day,’ Archie reminded her sharply, his tone reflecting both his irritation at being secondguessed and his concern. It wasn’t like Tom to be out of touch this long. Not deliberately. ‘Besides…’ With a final effort, the pin fell into place and the lock clicked open. ‘…We’re in now. We might as well have a butcher’s.’
Pulling their masks down over their faces, they slipped inside and gently closed the door behind them. The suite consisted of a large open-plan space with perhaps four desks in it, a small kitchen, a meeting room, and what Archie guessed was the owner or manager’s personal office.
‘Still sure this is the right place?’ Dominique whispered as her torch picked out bookcases overflowing with legal and tax reference books, stacks of paperwork secured by treasury tags, filing cabinets, printers and shredders, and a series of insipid paintings of a yacht sailing across the lake. Archie sighed. He hated to admit it, but it looked as though she might be right after all.
‘I’ll have a quick shifty in there,’ Archie suggested, nodding towards the manager’s office. ‘You have a look through this lot.’
The office was dominated by a vast, monolithic desk whose primary purpose could only have been to intimidate anyone standing on the other side of it. Behind this ran thick-set, mahogany shelves loaded with books, photo frames and various stress-busting executive toys. Archie couldn’t help himself but set off the Newton’s Cradle, his eyes dancing to the metronomic click-click-click of the balls as they swung back and forth. Glancing up with a smile, he absent-mindedly picked up one of the photo frames, then frowned. Rather than be confronted by Faulks’s patrician scowl as he had expected, he instead found himself staring at a heavily overweight man in swimming trunks trying to pour himself into a wetsuit.
Replacing it with a shudder, Archie turned his attention to the two filing cabinets lurking in the corner. Opening the drawers in turn, he walked his fingers along the tabs until he found one marked Galleries Dassin.
‘I’ve got something,’ he called in a low voice, carrying it to the entrance. Dominique looked up from where she had been leafing through the papers arranged on one of the desks. ‘
‘What’s a fiduciary owner?’ Dominique asked.
‘Someone who deals with all the administrative bollocks, as opposed to the beneficial owner, who calls the shots and makes the serious wonga and who in this particular instance is…’ He’d found a shareholder contract and flipped to the signature page, then looked up with a grim smile. ‘Earl Faulks. Carvel’s a front.’
‘Why bother?’
‘Fuck knows. But if I had to guess, to hide…’ Archie paused, struck by a thought. ‘Who bought the Artemis again?’
Dominique had approached the auctioneer after the sale and expressed an interest in buying the statue from its new owner. Sensing the opportunity to make another fee, the auctioneer had volunteered their name and offered to broker the deal.
‘It was a commission bid for Xenephon Trading.’
Archie vanished back inside the office, returning a few moments later clutching another file.
‘
‘He bought it from himself?’ Dominique exclaimed. ‘That makes no sense. Even if he’d negotiated special rates, he’d still be paying six to ten per cent commission on both sides of the deal.’
‘Are those the invoices?’ Archie nodded at the sheaf of papers she’d been sorting through.
‘Last month’s auction.’ She nodded.
‘Any where Xenephon is the buyer?’ Archie went to stand next to her.
Gripping her torch in one hand and flipping the pages over quickly with the other, she quickly counted them up. ‘There’s one here. Two…three…four…five. And look who’s on the other side of the deal here and here: Galleries Dassin.’
‘Who’s Melfi Export?’ Archie tapped his finger on the page with a frown. ‘They show up a lot too.’
Without waiting for an answer, he disappeared back into the office, returning a few moments later with a third file and a solemn expression.
‘
‘He must be getting something out it,’ she pointed out.
‘Well, I don’t see what, apart from a shit-load of paperwork.’ He slapped the pile of invoices with a shrug.
