‘Yes – they fit together.’ Nina returned to the block and slotted the statues together, arms interlocking. This time, there was a change: the two lines merged into one, much brighter, still pointing in the direction of the fainter bands she had seen moments before.
She turned the linked figures. The glow remained stationary, the band of light rippling over the crude carved features as she rotated them. It was a pointer. One that led to the missing third of the triptych.
But what was the statues’ purpose, and who had created them?
Nina let go, the illumination instantly vanishing. Macy tapped at the figurines, but nothing happened. Barley warily followed suit, with the same lack of result. ‘It’s only you, Dr Wilde,’ he said.
‘Must be my electrifying personality.’ Silence. ‘Oh come on, that was funny.’
‘Mm,’ said Macy, not quite a ringing endorsement. ‘Touch it again – I want to check something.’ Nina brought her hand back to the statues and the strange light returned. Macy held the compass above the glowing figures, taking a bearing. ‘So it’s pointing . . . just about exactly southwest. If there really is a third statue, it’s somewhere that way.’
‘Southwest . . . ’ Nina echoed. She turned to Barley. ‘Do you have a globe?’
The Tor’s Arthurian archaeological team did not in fact have a globe of the world to hand, but they had the next best thing; a virtual equivalent on Barley’s computer. ‘Are you sure you want to rule out any potential sites in the UK?’ he asked in response to Nina’s request for him to zoom out. ‘Dartmoor alone has over eight hundred Neolithic and Bronze Age sites, and that’s southwest of here.’
‘I have a hunch that we’re looking for something more far-flung,’ she said. ‘The first statue was found on another continent - in a chamber that was sealed centuries before the start of the European Bronze Age.’
The image on the screen pulled back more and more, until the Earth’s curvature appeared at the edges of the screen. Nina followed a line running diagonally down and to the left from Glastonbury, at the map’s centre. Though it passed close to the Azores, out in the Atlantic, it didn’t touch land until it reached South America, visible only as a line of green along the very edge of the visible hemisphere. ‘Can you switch it to a cartographic view?’
Barley fussed with the controls. The image changed, continents distorting as they morphed from a three-dimensional representation to a flat one. The line now made landfall near the great delta of the Orinoco river, on the continent’s northern coast. ‘Venezuela?’ said Macy.
‘And Colombia. And Brazil, and Peru,’ Nina added, following the line southwest through more countries until it reached the Pacific.
‘Rather a lot of ground to cover,’ said Barley. ‘And I think you’ll find Dartmoor a lot easier to reach!’
‘The best sites are always in the worst places . . . ’ She regarded the map. South America: home to numerous ancient civilisations. Could one have possessed the third statue? It was possible. But which – and why?
She thanked Barley, gently reminding him of the need for discretion, and headed back to the Range Rover with Macy. ‘So what now?’ Macy asked.
‘I don’t know. Like Dr Barley said, there’s a lot of ground to cover. And we don’t have a distance, only a direction.’
There was one thing she was sure of, though. Ancient artefacts that could conduct earth energy definitely fell within the IHA’s remit. If there was a third statue somewhere in South America, it was up to her to find it.
Before anyone else did.
Eddie put a pint of beer and a whisky on the table. ‘There you go.’
‘Thanks,’ said Mac, leaning forward to pick up his glass. His left leg creaked faintly, metal and plastic rather than flesh and bone; he had lost the limb from the knee down in Afghanistan. He took a sip of whisky, then looked round the sunlit beer garden. ‘Nice afternoon for a trip to the seaside. I’m glad you called – it was looking to be a rather boring day otherwise.’
‘Any excuse to get out of work, right?’ said Eddie, grinning.
‘Hmph. I wish. The jobs from Vauxhall Cross seem to be drying up of late.’
Vauxhall Cross in London was the location of the headquarters of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service, better known as MI6. Since his retirement from the military, Mac had