Will Adams - The Lost Labyrinth

'Hello!' he called out. 'Anyone here?' But he could hardly be heard above the music, so he made his way over to the music centre. A glass coffee table was covered with the debris of an impromptu celebration, two empty champagne bottles, some disposable patisserie trays, an overflowing ashtray and an enamel box of white powder that he hurriedly closed and tried to pretend he hadn't seen. A skirt was lying discarded on the floor, a torn white blouse, white knickers, a blue sport's bra. He found several remote controls, pressed mute buttons until finally there was silence. 'Hello!' he called out again. 'Anyone home?'

A door opened above and a man appeared on the landing, naked except for a saffron towel tucked around his waist. His torso and arms were lean and muscled like a middleweight boxer, and he had a crude prison tattoo on his right biceps. A Nergadze for sure, Edouard knew, partly from his characteristic broad nose and high forehead, partly from the swagger with which he held himself, but mostly from the calm yet purposeful way he was aiming a sawn-off shotgun down at Edouard's face.

'What the hell are you talking about?' demanded Knox angrily. 'There's no way on earth Augustin killed Petitier.'

Nico held up a palm. 'You misunderstand,' he said. 'I'm not suggesting he did. All I'm saying is that the police might be able to establish a motive.' He shifted even further around in his seat, as far as his bulk would allow, squeezed between the door and the hand-brake. 'Do you know why I offered Petitier the chance to give a talk?'

'No.'

'I was originally planning to take that slot myself, but I stood aside for him. I didn't do that lightly, I assure you. I like to talk.' He gave a self-deprecating chuckle. 'It's one of the reasons I organise these conferences, frankly, because no one else ever invites me. But I had a good reason to stand aside this time. You see, Petitier emailed me six weeks or so ago, demanding I let him address the conference. Very abrasive, very arrogant. I hardly even remembered him, though he used to be quite close to one of my colleagues at the university.'

'And?'

'I thanked him for his interest, but told him I'd already filled all the speaking slots. Which was true, of course; these things get finalised months in advance. I said he was welcome to speak at one of our roundtables. He insisted that wasn't good enough and assured me it would be worth my while, that he had something extraordinary to share with the world. I asked him what; he refused to say. I assumed I'd hear no more. You always get these cranks hanging around conferences, convinced they've solved all the riddles of the ancient world. But then a package arrived at my office. A note from Petitier, along with ten Linear A and Linear B seal and seal-stone fragments wrapped in cotton wool. They're not my specialty at all, so I took photos and emailed them around: because if these fragments were already in the public record, one or other of my colleagues would have been bound to recognise them. But none did. So it looked as though Petitier had at the very least found some new seals, and thus very probably an important new site too.'

'Even so,' said Knox. 'That scarcely merits a platform at a conference like this.'

'No,' agreed Nico. 'But there was something else. It slipped past me, because I'm no language expert. But one of my colleagues picked up on it at once. You see, while none of the Linear A seals were decipherable, two of the Linear B seals were. Or, at least, one word on each of them was.'

'And?'

'The first word is "gold" or "golden".'

'And the second?'

A somewhat sheepish look spread across Nico's face. 'It means "fleece",' he said.

Edouard raised his hands numbly as Mikhail Nergadze pointed his shotgun down at his face. 'Please don't shoot,' he begged.

'Give me one good reason.'

'My name's Edouard Zdanevich,' he swallowed. 'I work for your father. He sent me to-'

'The antiquities expert.'

'Yes.'

Mikhail kept his shotgun aimed at Edouard's face a moment longer, perhaps assessing the story, more likely to emphasise who was in control; but then he lowered it and held it down by his side. 'I was expecting Boris and some others.'

'They'll be here soon. They had an errand to-'

A muffled cry came unexpectedly from the room behind Mikhail. A woman, in obvious fear and distress. Edouard looked up in bewilderment. She cried out again, louder and clearer, as though she'd managed to spit out a gag. She sounded young. 'Who's that?' he asked.

'And that's your business because?'

The girl's shouting continued, anxious, beseeching, panicked, her Greek too fast for Edouard's limited grasp, but the gist all too clear. He hesitated. Mikhail smiled down at him, aware what must be going through his mind, curious how he'd respond. He couldn't just stand there, so he climbed the stairs, suppressing his fear as he walked past Mikhail, then stopped in dismay when he saw the girl lying naked on the bare mattress, all the sheets, pillows and duvet having spilled to the ground. She saw him and tried to cover herself with her right arm and by turning onto her side. Her movements were so awkward that they drew attention to her left wrist, handcuffed to the bedpost. From her modest breasts, fat hips and fluffy pubis, he guessed she must be about fifteen years old, the same age as his own twins. There were multiple livid bruises on her upper arms and chest, and what looked like a cigarette burn near her navel, and a livid redness around her throat, as though she'd been nearly asphyxiated. She would have been pretty, except for the accidental mask of hair glued by her own tears and blood to her face. There were spatters of red on the mattress too, along with other motley stains that Edouard had no desire to analyse. He turned appalled to Mikhail. 'What the hell have you been doing to her?' he demanded.

'Nothing she didn't want.'

'How can you say that? Look at her! She's begging you to let her go.'

'What a person says isn't necessarily what they want.'

Edouard shook his head. 'How old is she?'

'How would I know that?'

'Didn't you think about asking?'

Mikhail laughed. 'Look at you! You just want her for yourself, don't you?'

'You're sick.'

'Go ahead. She won't mind, believe me. She'll enjoy it.'

'What kind of man are you?'

'The kind you'd be, if you had any balls.'

'I'm letting her go,' said Edouard. 'Where's the key?'

'I'm not done with her yet.'

'Yes, you are.' He spoke boldly and locked gazes with Mikhail, certain that righteousness would be enough. But Mikhail's ice-blue eyes punctured his confidence, and he realised too late that this was a different kind of man to any he'd ever dealt with before, even to the other Nergadzes. His heart began to race, he felt a dryness in his throat, smelled a faintly rancid odour that he intuitively recognised as his own fear. It triggered an unwelcome memory: waiting to be seated at a Tbilisi restaurant many years before, a drunken man tripping over his own feet and bumping into a second man sitting on a barstool nursing a glass of malt liquor clanking with ice, making him spill a little over his hand. His apology had been too slow, too dismissive. The strangest look had passed over the seated man's face. He'd shattered his crystal tumbler on the marble bar-top, then turned and thrust its splintered base into the drunk's face before giving it a sharp leftwards twist, shredding the man's eyeball and ripping his nose and cheek apart, blood spurting and spattering across the bar and around the restaurant as he'd crashed howling into tables. Over the years since, Edouard had forgotten the victim's ravaged face, but not the chill calculating look on the assailant's face in the half-second before he'd attacked, as though rage was an army within his control, a force to be deployed at will.