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waking up in Ward Three of the Churchill Hospital. He had been brought in the night before by the police and carefully examined by a junior doctor who had been on duty for thirty-six hours, written up careful notes, put them in his briefcase and unwittingly carried them home with him.
    As a result there was no-one with Arne Haraldson when his eyes first opened, and he was able to conceal his return to consciousness from both the patient in the bed next to him and the nursing staff. He woke in a curious state in which he seemed to drift between everyday reality and the mythic world of Ragnarök. He was conscious he was on the track of something deeply important and unable to remember exactly what it was. The faces of Duncan Forrester, the Master, Inspector Barber and David Lyall floated in and out of his mind, and he lay there, trying to fit them together. Forrester in particular puzzled him. Why had he been fighting him? What had he got against him?
    His head hurt abominably, and he sometimes closed his eyes and went back to sleep before a thought had been fully formulated. Beneath the covers, the fingers of his large, powerful hands began to flex; and when he drifted off it was into a sleep perfumed by the metallic smell of blood.
    * * *
    Forrester took the Underground to Russell Square and then walked swiftly to the offices of the ECA in a tall, gloomy house in Bloomsbury, not far from the British Museum. He was twelve minutes late for his appointment but the twelve minutes, as is so often the way, dissolved into a sea of time as he sat waiting with the other supplicants outside the room in which the Advisory Committee were conducting their interviews. Who exactly the Committee was supposed to be advising Forrester did not know and suspected he would never find out.
    He went over his papers again, surreptitiously eyeing his fellow applicants. A thin, weedy man balanced a small cork model of the Acropolis on his knees and stared unseeing into the middle distance. A large, hearty man tore little pieces off his copy of
The Times
, twisted them into tiny cones and thrust them systematically into the pockets of his tweed suit. A scholar bearing an uncanny likeness to the late Dr. Goebbels filled page after page of a cheap notebook with paragraphs of writing in purple ink. One after another they disappeared behind the green baize door that led to the committee room, and did not re-emerge.
    When it was his turn and Forrester passed through the baize door, the suspicion that his quest was in vain turned to certainty. There were three men behind the long table and one woman. The woman glared at him the moment he walked in. She was about fifty, angular and angry. Forrester knew the anger had nothing to do with him; it was just he had been caught in its beam. Her name was Miss Henslowe. Beside her sat a tall man and beside
him
was a personage so old Forrester would not have been surprised to learn he had actually lived among the ancient Greeks. The chairman wore an expression of infinite sadness, which deepened steadily as Forrester described the Gorge of Acharius, the cave, and the hieroglyph-covered stone, which he was certain held the key to the mystery of Linear B.
    Secretly, he had hoped that the dramatic circumstances of his discovery would help his case, but it was clear the committee disapproved of anything that smacked of derring-do, and kidnapping a German general was hardly the sort of thing they expected from a respectable archaeologist.
    Instead he concentrated on the potential significance of the inscriptions, the problems Evans had encountered with Linear B, and what riches deciphering them would uncover, but there was no response. The tall man made copious notes, the old man doodled, the chairman shook his head sadly and Miss Henslowe kept up her unrelenting glare. In the end they told him they’d let him know, but warned him of the “extreme” restraints the Treasury had just put on them, of the “draconian”