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Mr Ragg,’ it began, ‘I am writing in connection with the missing Caryatid. I have the statue in my care. Today is Monday, 9 October. You have two days to follow my orders or the consequences will be severe. If you send us £100,000 by Wednesday, 11 October, you will receive instructions about where to collect the statue. Details of where and how to effect the payment will be sent to you once you have accepted this very generous offer. For every day you do not comply with these requests after that date, the payment will increase by £10,000. By Saturday, 21 October the figure will have risen to £200,000 and
The Times
and the
Morning Post
will have been informed about the theft. The news, and the details of your own role in the affair, will be all over the papers.’
    The author paused and ran his fingers over his bald patch. The hair had not returned. When he started the next paragraph he was chuckling once again.
    ‘We know where you live,’ the letter went on, ‘we know where your wife buys her clothes. We know where your children go to school.
    ‘Any attempt to inform the authorities or to organize a payment supervised by the police will result in immediate action. That action will be violent.
    ‘I look forward to hearing from you at the address below.
    Friends of the British Museum. c/o The Ritz Hotel, Piccadilly W1.’
    The man read the letter three times. He put it into a plain envelope and addressed it to Theophilus Ragg, Deputy Director, British Museum, Great Russell Street WC. As he popped it into the letter box in the crowded street outside his hotel, attentive passers-by might have heard a faint sound of mocking laughter.
    ‘Atlas flycatchers! Black-winged stilts! Bar-tailed desert larks! Bonelli’s eagles!’
    There was a note of reverence, almost of worship, in the speaker’s tone as he mentioned the birds he had seen on his latest trip, and he began circling round the furniture in the Markham Square drawing room as if he were a rare gull on some Mediterranean cliff high above the sea.
    ‘Sicily, Lady Lucy, upon my word, Sicily, I’ve never seen a place like it for the wildlife. Fantastic, that’s what it is!’
    Johnny Fitzgerald, Powerscourt’s companion in arms across India and in all his investigations since, had just come home from a research trip for his next book on birds of the Mediterranean. His mind was still on some hot Sicilian mountainside, his binoculars searching the skies. But the case of the vanishing Caryatid in the British Museum soon had all his attention.
    ‘Tall female creature, rather snooty looking, holding a temple on her head, that the one?’
    ‘Exactly so, Johnny.’
    ‘And you are telling me, Francis, that the dry old stick in charge isn’t letting the police interview anybody at all? The whole thing has to be hushed up?’
    ‘Right again, Johnny,’ said Powerscourt, ‘we have to approach the thing from the side and the edges, as it were.’
    Johnny Fitzgerald looked down at the carpet for a moment and then looked up at his friend with hooded eyes as if he were a bird of prey measuring the distance to its victim.
    ‘I see, Francis, I see. Now I know why all those messages have been left for me to get in touch at once. Most immediate, they said. It’s those auction house porters and the ones at the British Museum, isn’t it? You’re like some bloody elephant, Francis, you never forget. You’ve been thinking about that case years ago with Orlando the forger and that beautiful girl of his and the fake paintings up in Norfolk and me conducting negotiations with the art gallery porters all through the night in the Rat and Parrot at the back of New Bond Street.’
    Powerscourt tried hard not to smile.
    ‘Come to think of it,’ Johnny went on, ‘it wasn’t the Rat and Parrot, was it? What was that bloody pub called? It had a name to do with animals, I’m sure of that.’
    ‘Fox and Hounds?’ offered Lady Lucy. ‘Pig and Whistle?’
    ‘Did you ever work out