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to go.’
    ‘Hi, Helga.’ I studied the ice-blue eyes as Niamh pulled her into the room by an arm. The Nordic-type beauty was dressed in a charcoal bodysuit that was fetchingly snug, and seemed to have locked on to her fellow worker to the exclusion of all else. I bowed out with a thank you to my host, catching sight as I did of the zip of the garment coming down. It was time to leave the youngsters to it. But the glimpse of breast and crotch I caught suggested one layer was the rule at the AOC, and as I closed the door on them I resolved to call back soon.
     
    When I got out of the cab security was on the prowl. It was a twenty-something guy I’d not seen before, and as he checked my ID I thought of asking him in to look at my dirty books. If he wasn’t a reader, there were plenty of pictures to tickle a young man’s fancy. But I had things to do, so I suppressed the urge and headed up the stairs at the back of the building. Courtesy of the Library I was installed in a flat carved out of three top floor rooms; it was tiny but had all the essentials like a kitchen, a shower and a king-sized bed. The lounging about that passed for work – as well as that with no such pretence – was mostly done in the den off the main office, and I went straight down to it.
    The symposium referred to in Niamh’s printout rejoiced in the title of Sexual Herstory: New Explorations , and was an easy one to crack with an online search. It had been held in Chicago at the very beginning of March, so that put the interchange on the web page at two months or more back from the mid-May we had reached. So far so good. The next step was to identify the author of the post. It had already occurred to me that research for the (unnamed) book would almost certainly have called upon some of our own resources at the BL and those, of course, were on record. But where to start? Applications for access to the collections came in at quite a rate, and if work on the project could have begun five years ago or more that would make a long list. And in any case, what would I be looking for? No, it would make better sense to jump in at the other end: if the lady had been to us at all, the Organum Venereum would have been one of the titles requested. So what I needed was the log of its consultation.
    I keyed in the two words with the date of 1787, clicked on ‘accessed’ followed by ‘sort by date’, and there it was: ten entries that stretched back over the five-year period I’d chosen. The most recent could be set aside, being mine, for the volume still lay with the others on the corner of the desk. The next most recent was on the 12th of the 2nd and credited to ‘573D’, that my master-list revealed to be one Jonathan Squires DD, The Old Rectory, Wythingford. I wondered briefly what he might have made of our domini puella , but I couldn’t see a Doctor of Divinity in the Shires having much truck with ‘herstory’ so I passed on. Two more from December were English academics, also male, and anyway I had it in my head that I was looking for an American.
    With number five that is exactly what I found. The October before Belle Torman PhD, Assistant Professor of History and Women’s Studies, spent three days with the learned tome and it was hardly credible that its one female author could have gone unnoticed. The clincher for me was the fact that her appointment was with the University of Chicago, explaining her familiarity with the conference arrangements. But even assuming I had found the poster, it was her interest in the Ardingley stash that singled her out for attention and a degree of alarm. Had she managed to give it the once-over or was she still trying? And what was I going to do about it?
    All these questions called for an inspirational dram so I opened the implements cupboard and took out the bottle of Laphraoig that was nestling amongst coils of braided leather. The scald of smoky peat at the back of the throat jerked me awake. I didn’t need