down, apparently flattened. Jack gestured quickly to Jeremy. ‘I knew this would happen. I knew it. Quick. Take the other leg.’ He passed the torch to Rebecca and grabbed Hiebermeyer’s left leg, pulling hard. ‘Maurice! Are you all right?’ he shouted. ‘Can you hear me?’
A sound of coughing and cursing came from the hole. ‘I’m fine. Let me have another go. I was nearly there.’
‘Not a chance.’ They heaved, and Jack grimaced. ‘Now, where have I done this before? At Stonehenge, on a school trip. Maurice got stuck head-first down a hole, just like this. He thought he’d seen an Egyptian mummified cat. Actually it was a very old dead rabbit. Everything,’ Jack heaved again, panting, ‘ everything was Egyptian with Maurice.’ They heaved one last time and Hiebermeyer’s head appeared, covered in dust. They dragged him clear, and he rolled over and coughed hard, then got up on his knees, shaking and patting himself. He took off his glasses and peered at Jack, his eyes burning with fervour. ‘In there.’ He coughed again, pointing. ‘ In there.’
‘What?’
‘A carved stone inscription. I only saw a few centimetres of it, but I’m absolutely sure of it. Sure of it.’
‘You’ve already said,’ Jack replied. ‘Sure of it. An inscription.’ He stared at Hiebermeyer. ‘What do you mean? Sure of what?’
‘Hieroglyphics. Hieroglyphics, Jack. An ankh symbol. Egyptian.’
‘No way,’ Rebecca exclaimed. ‘ Egyptian. You should hear what we found.’
Jack put his hand up, staring at Hiebermeyer. ‘In a moment.’ Hiebermeyer staggered to his feet, patted the dust off his shorts and hitched them up, then gave Jack a triumphant look. He coughed violently again, and the stone over the hole he had been in suddenly collapsed. He turned and looked at it, swore under his breath, then raised his hands as if appealing to the gods. He let them fall again. ‘This is going to take days to excavate. Days. We’ve only got a week until the end of the permit.’
Jack patted him on the back, releasing another cloud of dust. ‘You’d better get cracking, then.’ He paused. ‘ Hieroglyphs? You sure? This isn’t, you know, another mummified rabbit?’
Hiebermeyer glared at him, his nostrils flared. Jack put up a hand. ‘Okay. Okay.’ He stared back at the rubble. His mind was racing. Hieroglyphics? Maurice had given him a quick rundown of the excavation after he and Costas had arrived by helicopter half an hour before, straight from a mercifully brief stint in the recompression chamber after their dive. Jack had been astonished to see the walls of the passageway now revealed for some fifteen metres of their length, increasing in height as the passageway cut into the centre of the citadel mound. The walls were of typical late Bronze Age Trojan form, slanting inwards towards the top. That was exciting enough. But it was the design of the passageway that was so extraordinary. It was remarkably similar to the entranceway to the great tomb outside the citadel of Mycenae, the so-called Treasury of Atreus. Was that what Maurice had found? Would there be a cavernous domed burial chamber at the end? A great royal burial chamber beneath Troy? But it didn’t make sense. If this was a tomb, how could a Trojan king, a Trojan dynasty, be buried with Egyptian inscriptions?
Hiebermeyer peered at him. ‘I know what you’re thinking,’ he said.
‘I’m thinking,’ Jack replied, ‘that I’ve got a shipwreck to excavate, and you’ve got something fantastic here as well.’
‘Paydirt,’ Jeremy said. ‘That’s what Costas calls it. We’ve hit paydirt.’
‘I know what you’re really thinking,’ Hiebermeyer persisted.
‘I just wonder whether Schliemann got here first. How he could have missed something like this.’
Hiebermeyer nodded pensively. He stared at the rubble, wiping the grime from his face. ‘With all this collapsed earth and masonry, it’s very difficult to tell. It seems to be one massive destruction layer. Late Bronze Age, no doubt about that. Very soon after the fall of Troy. As if somebody had this deliberately done, perhaps to create a platform for a building above.’
‘Or to hide whatever lies at the end of this passageway,’ Rebecca said.
Hiebermeyer narrowed his eyes, then sneezed. ‘There could have been a nineteenth-century excavation. If this were a layer cake of stratigraphy, we could easily tell. But because of the single destruction deposit, it’s hard to see evidence of disturbance. It’s odd, though. If it was disturbed, it was deliberately concealed again.’
‘Maybe it was,’ Rebecca added. ‘Maybe to conceal what Schliemann had found.’
‘I did find this.’ Hiebermeyer turned away and blew his nose noisily between his fingers, flicking off the drip from the end of his nose, then reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a handful of dust. Nestled in the middle was a ring. He extracted a half-crumpled water bottle from his pocket, screwed off the top with his teeth and trickled water on the ring, rubbing it, then passed it over to Jack. Rebecca and Jeremy moved over to look, and Rebecca gasped as she saw it. ‘It’s gold.’
‘I found it close to the wall with the inscription.’
‘It’s modern, of course,’ Jack murmured, staring at it.
Hiebermeyer nodded. ‘A signet ring, maybe late nineteenth century. My grandfather used to wear one. My American grandfather, my mother’s father. It was the fashion then, for men of means.’
‘How on earth does a Victorian signet ring get down here?’ Rebecca murmured.
Hiebermeyer stared at the rubble. ‘Wealthy people came to Troy after Schliemann discovered it, his supporters, invited by him. Maybe one of them lost the ring on the mound. You’ve seen how that rubble and earth can shift. The ring could have worked its way underground through the spaces between the stones, reaching the base of the passageway.’
Rebecca looked at him doubtfully. ‘Or someone has been in this passageway before.’
Hiebermeyer pursed his lips. ‘Someone could have dug their way in, then carefully refilled the passageway to make it look as if it was undisturbed. Only an archaeologist could do that. Someone intimately familiar with this site, who would know how to make it look convincing. I wouldn’t put it past Schliemann and Sophia. But how? How could Schliemann, showman par excellence, find something like this passageway and not tell the world? He’d have been telegramming his friends, the British Prime Minister Gladstone, or Bismarck in Germany, the other great and the good he courted. Schliemann could never keep his discoveries secret.’
‘Maybe the showmanship was an act, carefully calculated,’ Jack murmured. ‘You know my feelings about Schliemann. A lot more there than meets the eye.’
‘You mean to persuade people that he’d told them everything he’d found, when really he hadn’t?’ Rebecca said slowly.
‘We know for sure he hid away some of that gold he and Sophia found at Troy, the so-called Treasure of Priam,’ Jeremy said. ‘Sent it secretly back to Germany. That gives a lot of weight to what Jack says.’
Jack peered at the ring. ‘There’s a design on it, a family crest. It’s a double-headed griffin, in a shield. Very German-looking.’ He paused, thinking hard. ‘I’m sure I’ve seen this somewhere before.’
‘Schliemann’s crest?’ Jeremy suggested.
‘No.’ Jack shook his head. ‘Not Schliemann. It was when I was a student. A long time ago. Something I saw in a library. I’ll have to think.’
Hiebermeyer turned and stared defiantly at the rubble face, his hands on his hips. ‘We need to dig, dig, dig. That’s the only way to solve this. It’s about time Troy gave us some answers.’
‘And you’re the man for the job.’ Jack slapped Hiebermeyer’s shoulder, and a shroud of dust erupted over them. They both sneezed explosively, then caught each other’s eye and suddenly convulsed with laughter, shaking uncontrollably, holding on to each other. Jack knew it had to happen. The pent-up excitement needed a release. Rebecca and Jeremy and Dillen watched, smiling broadly. Jack looked at Hiebermeyer, the shrouded form of his schoolboy friend, glasses askew and all steamed up. It couldn’t get much better than this. He pushed away, composing himself, wiping his eyes. ‘And now,’ he said, clearing his throat, glancing at his watch. ‘ Now it’s time for supper. Costas is waiting for us at the excavation house. Having a well-earned gin and tonic, I hope. Our excellent Turkish foreman and his wife have laid on a feast fit for King Priam.’
Jeremy coughed quietly. ‘Speaking of which. Priam, I mean.’
‘Yes?’
‘It might be,’ Rebecca cautioned Jeremy. ‘Only might be.’
‘Yes?’ Jack said.
‘Something we found.’
‘Yes, of course,’ Jack said, looking at them intently. ‘ Of course . I hadn’t forgotten. Not a chance. Maurice, they’ve found something. Where you set them digging. On our way out.’ He carefully lifted his khaki bag with the
