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what the pig had to do with the whistle, Lady Lucy? No, it’s not that. Landlord came from Castlebar in County Mayo, I seem to remember, name of Cassidy and he had wooden legs. Slug and Lettuce? Three Horseshoes? Memory’s going, you know, definitely going.’
    ‘Spread Eagle? Red Lion? Green Dragon? Blue Boar?’ Powerscourt tried his hand through the colours.
    ‘No, no, you’re confusing me now.’
    Johnny Fitzgerald walked slowly over to the window. Nothing moved in Markham Square. Even the local birds seemed to have gone quiet. Johnny tapped quite loudly on the window.
    ‘The Black Swan! The Black bloody Swan! That’s what the pub was called! Thank God I’ve remembered it. I was beginning to feel quite flustered.’
    There was a hesitant, almost an inquisitive knock at the door. Rhys, the Powerscourt butler, coughed apologetically and handed Powerscourt a letter.
    ‘Just arrived, my lord. From the British Museum, my lord. Said to be very urgent. The porter person is below, my lord, waiting for a reply.’
    Powerscourt opened the envelope and whistled quietly to himself.
    ‘What is it, Francis?’ asked Lady Lucy. ‘Have the centaurs gone missing from the Parthenon frieze? The charioteers picked up their reins and walked?’
    ‘Much worse than that,’ her husband replied. ‘That dry old stick, as Johnny referred to him, Deputy Director Ragg has had a blackmail letter, asking for one hundred to two hundred thousand pounds. And he and his family have been threatened. That bloody Caryatid may have been dead over two thousand years but she’s still causing a lot of mischief.’
    As Powerscourt and Johnny Fitzgerald clattered down the stairs, one to the British Museum, the other to the Black Swan, Powerscourt thought Johnny Fitzgerald was saying his prayers.
    ‘Scopoli’s shearwaters,’ the murmur came, ‘stone curlews, Heuglin’s gulls, rock partridges, steppe grey shrikes . . .’
    The birds of Sicily were making a reverse migration to Markham Square and the fleshly delights of the King’s Road, Chelsea.
    Leisure time at the Hellenic College near Amersham was always busy. The college was the only boarding school for Greek boys and girls in Britain, founded for the parents of Greek merchants in London and the Home Counties who might have to relocate abroad for years at a time. The Greek Orthodox Church, well used to running schools attached to its places of worship, was the principal mover in the school, and the chairman of the governors and a third of its membership were priests or archimandrites of the Orthodox faith. There was even a small Greek Orthodox church on the site with the most ornate iconostasis in the south of England.
    The large estate had been built by one of the great devotees of Antiquity of the eighteenth century. He had filled his grounds with replica temples of every sort. There was a temple of Vesta by one of the three lakes, a temple of Apollo hidden in the woodland. A miniature Parthenon stood on top of a Chiltern hill and a tiny Pantheon by the side of the water. The house and the estate were a tribute to the eighteenth-century conceit that the classical world was superior to the present and the study of ancient Greece and Rome was the only path to a proper education. Stourhead and Stowe and Chiswick House outside London with their fabulous gardens were the templates for the Hellenic College.
    Boys and girls studied all the usual subjects taught in the English public schools with special emphasis on ancient Greek language and culture. The eighteen girls, who lived in Penelope House, were taught weaving and dressmaking in the Greek style, the boys in Patroclus House learned carpentry and model-making. Every year Penelope House had to produce a new
peplos
, a garment originally designed for the goddess Athena. The boys had to make a working chariot and four of their number had to learn to drive it.
    Powerscourt found Inspector Christopher Kingsley waiting for him on the steps of the