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Hyrcania Codex had electrified him, and it was this discovery that had driven the non-medical searches that he’d tasked Jesse McLeod with.
    That morning, Donovan arrived early at the building and followed his usual routine. He slid his Porsche 911 into his named slot in the underground car park and took the stairs to his office. He never used the lift because he got little enough exercise during the day, and he had never seen the point of sweating away pointlessly on some machine in a gym. Climbing six flights of stairs non-stop every day would, he hoped, give him a short but regular cardio-vascular workout.
    Anyone looking at him would probably agree that it was working. Donovan was tall, just over six two, and slim, with thick black hair that he kept trimmed close to his scalp – not a crew cut, but not far off. Dark brown, almost black, eyes and a large straight nose dominated his face, and even when he’d just shaved he still seemed to sport a five o’clock shadow. When he smiled, which he didoften, because JJ Donovan was a man with a lot to be happy about, he showed two rows of brilliant white teeth, which he sometimes referred to as his ‘forty-grand smile’, because this was exactly what they’d cost.
    He put his briefcase down on his desk and switched on both of his monitors. On the PC connected to the internet, he pulled up a classical music broadcast and pumped the sound through the desktop’s built-in speaker system. Then he flicked the switch that powered up the wall-mounted monitors and watched CNN for a few seconds. Finally, he looked at his network computer and checked the internal message system.
    The note from Jesse McLeod was the third one he read. He read the text twice, then reached for the internal telephone.

6
    The Mini bounced down the drive, which curved around to the right behind a low hill. As she straightened up the car, Angela could see the hall itself for the first time. She knew from what Roger Halliwell had told her that it dated from the late nineteenth century, a Gothic-revival structure built on the remains of a much older building.
    From a distance, the house looked mellow and comfortable in the landscape. Set on a slight rise and overlooking a small ornamental lake, which was a somewhat bilious green in the mid-afternoon sunlight, it featured spires on the corners and a profusion of arched windows, the whole building constructed of what looked like the same type of grey stone as the pillars at the end of the drive.
    ‘Nice,’ Angela murmured.
    Three cars were parked on the oval gravel area in front of the house, so she assumed the other members of the British Museum team had already arrived. These cars weresome distance from the house, which at first puzzled her, but when she pulled up next to one of them and switched off the engine, she saw why.
    Along the façade of the property was a temporary fence, just a line of steel posts driven into the gravel surface of the drive and linked by plastic-coated wire, and behind that were several quite substantial lumps of masonry. And when she looked up at the old house itself, she realized that it was in a very poor condition indeed, with large gaps in the stonework where pieces had fallen out over the years. Several of the window panes were broken, and what paint there was had flaked badly.
    She left her overnight bag in the boot of the car, but took her laptop case with her, and walked across to the main door of the house which was standing wide open.
    She stepped into a large square wood-panelled hall filled with cardboard boxes and tea chests. On one side stood a mounted suit of armour, that to Angela’s inexpert eyes looked genuinely medieval, and on the other a life-size wooden carving of an erect bear, one paw raised high, the other held out at about waist height, a wooden plate clutched in its claws, possibly intended to be a receptacle for mail or perhaps keys. Avoiding the bear’s glassy eyes, she looked around. At the far end