‘The same,’ grunted Dunne. He turned away in disgust. Yet I kept looking. Where he saw confirmation of our failure, I saw a spark of hope. They were the same. The same erratic script, the same malformed letters and drunken lines, the same place on the third sentence where miserere was misspelt misere. In their manifest imperfections, at least, they were perfect copies.

‘The process is fine,’ Drach declared. He thrived on perversity. ‘All we need is to improve it.’

Paris

A freezing wind whistled down the Seine. On an embankment above the river, four L-shaped towers jutted towards the grey sky. The architect had meant them to look like open books stood on end, but to Emily they looked more like the corners of a vast glass castle. Except there was no castle to be seen. The space between the towers – a slab of ground the size of several football fields – was empty. It was only when you looked down that you saw the inside-out heart of the complex: a glass pit, a deep rectangle dug sixty feet into the earth, with the different floors of the library looking out over a sunken courtyard. And instead of a castle in the forest, a forest in the castle, for the courtyard was filled with trees, so deep that their uppermost branches only just reached to ground level. It was like no other library Emily had ever seen.

The trees began to rise above her as she rode an outside escalator into the pit. It brought her halfway down, to a mezzanine level where a bored guard gave her bag a perfunctory search. It was warm inside: a plush atmosphere of red carpets and polished wood, like a theatre foyer. Even the computers were housed in wooden cabinets. Emily crossed to one and laid Gillian’s card on a flat metal scanner. An onscreen message in French welcomed Gillian Lockhart. Emily looked at the trail of cables snaking out of the computer into a duct in the floor, and wondered how far those tentacles stretched, which corners of the electronic world had just been alerted to the fact that Gillian Lockhart had apparently reappeared at the Bibliothèque Nationale.

Emily tapped a fingernail on the touchscreen. A list appeared:

Lost Books of the Bible

Studies on the Physiologus in the Middle Ages

Physiologus (Anonyme, XVème Siècle)

She frowned. A physiologus was a bestiary, a collection of fables masquerading as zoology. She’d studied plenty for her work on medieval animal motifs. Why had Gillian consulted them? Had she found something to do with the animals on the playing cards?

She tapped the screen again to order the books down from the towers where they were kept.

Merci, Gillian Lockhart

A twinge of discomfort ran up Emily’s back. She didn’t like being Gillian Lockhart. They’d never met, but Gillian had lurked in the Cloisters like a ghost brought over with the medieval stones, a name guaranteed to change the subject. All museums have their mysteries, and Emily – fresh from her doctorate, eager to please, her own secrets to hide – had let it lie. She wondered if Nick knew. There was something desperately innocent about the way he’d plunged headlong into the search for Gillian, a knight errant come to rescue his damsel. Emily had read enough medieval romances to know that women who drew knights onto quests weren’t always what they seemed.

The books would come to the reading room on the court yard level. She checked her bag into the cloakroom, then walked to the row of turnstiles and pressed the card against another reader. The barrier opened and she stepped through, trying not to shiver at the bar’s cold touch through her stockings.

GILLIAN LOCKHART

is in mortal peril

(last updated 02 January 11:54:56)

In an Internet café on the rue St Georges, Nick sighed. There had always been aspects of Gillian that remained a mystery to him. The way she would spread peanut butter on hamburgers. The way she sometimes turned off her phone and didn’t come home at night. When he’d dared to ask if she was seeing someone else, she’d accused him of having no imagination and locked herself in the bedroom.

Why had she written ‘mortal peril’? If she’d been in real danger she’d have called the police, or run, not logged on to the Web to update her profile. Unless it was a last gesture of defiance, a joke to belittle what was coming. That would fit.

Next to her name was a thumbnail photograph – different to the one on the library card. This was an older picture, Gillian with long black hair combed in a straight fringe, with panda-bear eyes like an art student.

He tried exploring the site. There was the billboard, where other users could post the usual banalities, rants and badly spelled insults that passed for wit on the Web. It was blank. He flipped to another part of the site, a photo album. There were a few pictures: Gillian swigging beer at a party wearing an enormous sombrero; Gillian sprawled over a rock in Central Park pretending to hug it while she smiled coyly at the camera; Gillian standing outside a boulangerie with baguette tucked under her arm. She’d gone blonde by then, the same face as on the library card. He wondered who’d taken the picture. Atheldene?

There were none of Gillian with Nick. He told himself he hadn’t expected any, and wondered who he was really looking for.

Before he left he checked the news sites for anything about himself. He’d assumed it would have made headlines somewhere: SUSPECTED MURDERER FLEES COUNTRY. He found a

couple of stories about Bret’s murder, but nothing in the last forty-eight hours. Didn’t they know he’d fled? Had they come to their senses and realised he was innocent? He thought of Detective Royce and decided it was unlikely.

It reminded him of something Gillian had said. He’d caught her one day looking out of the apartment window, peering between the blinds at the empty street. He’d pointed out there was nobody there; she’d answered in a fake-deep voice: ‘Just because you can’t see them, doesn’t mean they can’t see you.’

He’d thought it was a joke, a line from a movie, one of the personas she shrugged on and off all the time. He’d gone to fix a sandwich. But when he looked back through the kitchen door she’d still been on the windowsill, watching.

Once, the alarm had been a black Bakelite telephone connected to a switchboard, with black cables hanging off it like chains on a dungeon wall. Later, it had become a pager; later still, a succession of ever smaller and smarter cellphones. Through all those incarnations one thing had remained constant: it almost never rang. Months would pass in silence, sometimes whole years.

Now it was ringing for the second time in three weeks. Father Michel Renais, latest in a long line of men who had held that phone, stared at the screen. The last time it had rung he had broken out into a sweat and almost dropped it; this time he was ready.

‘Oui?’

‘One of our flags has come up. Bibliothèque Nationale, garden level, seat N48.’

‘Bien.’

Technology made it too easy, Father Michel thought. Once they’d have had to sift through paper request slips, cross-reference university records, scramble to make even the most basic enquiries. Now they knew even before the readers found their seats.

He dialled the number the cardinal had given him. ‘At the Bibliothèque Nationale. The same book as before. And the same name. Gillian Lockhart.’

He heard a dry laugh on the other end of the phone. ‘I very much doubt it is Gillian Lockhart.’

It was like entering a spaceship, or a medieval dungeon reimagined by a future civilisation. Emily rode a long escalator down through the cavernous hall that formed the outer shell of the complex. An underground moat surrounding the underground castle. The outside walls were solid concrete, while the inside was protected by huge curtains of steel rings like sheets of chain mail. At the bottom, another machine checked her card before admitting her through the final pair of doors. Here, she was back inside the castle: desks, carpets, polished wood.