Once again the smoker laughed. A harsh, brutal sound. He stubbed out his cigarette, and the two men went back inside. After a minute or two the light was switched off and the courtyard once more fell into darkness and silence. James waited, straining his ears, and eventually heard what he thought was the sound of the front door slamming in the street.

He was now faced with a dilemma: to go back up and risk the rooftops again, or to climb down and try to escape through the building?

Either way posed a risk.

As he was wondering what to do, the decision was taken for him as, with a ripping sound, the ivy began to peel from the wall. Quick as he could he let himself down and managed to reach the ground without falling.

He could make out more details of the courtyard now. Half of it was paved, and the other half was made up of ancient, tumbled-down masonry. There was a round construction that might have been a well, the remains of some stone pillars, a sunken pit and a section of wall that had damaged carvings on it. It was all so broken and covered in ivy that it was hard to tell just what had once been here, but James’s feeling that he might be in a temple of some sort might not have been that far wrong.

He tried the doors and windows. They were all locked. He was considering whether to try climbing back up when he spotted another window by his feet, half hidden by ivy. It was open a crack and appeared to lead into a cellar. He crouched down and jiggled it with his knife and found that it was so decrepit he could quite easily force it up and squeeze through.

He closed the window behind him and switched on his torch. He was indeed in a cellar. Propped against one wall were two or three large dark oil paintings and there were a couple of packing crates in the centre of the room, which somebody had been using as a makeshift table. In the gloom James could just make out a map of Italy and a pile of books laid out on top of them.

Stencilled on the side of one of the crates were two large red letters, a double M, and James noticed that one of the books had the same double-M motif on the cover. He picked it up and opened it, but it was full of dense Latin text.

He didn’t have time to be reading books. He had to get out of there.

He put the book down, turned to leave and then jumped back in fright, swallowing the urge to cry out.

There was a pale, ghostly figure standing in the darkness by the door, beckoning to him.

A man, white as death. Staring and unmoving.

It only took James a second to realise, however, that it was just another painting.