Segal gave a bitter laugh at the looks on their faces. ‘Oh, the deception is nothing particularly new. In 2015, when ISIL revealed their infamous video footage of the destruction of the artifacts in the Mosul Museum, archaeologists and historians the world over reacted in shock and dismay. What few people knew at the time, and only emerged later, was that about three-quarters of the pieces that the terrorists shattered with their hammers were modern plaster fakes.’

‘So what happened to the real ones?’ Ben asked.

‘Some had already been relocated to Baghdad years earlier, after the Iraq War. In fact the authorities tried to claim that not one original piece had been left in the Mosul Museum by the time the jihadis took the city. That was untrue, and a cover-up of the fact that their attempt to protect the treasures was slipshod at best. Many genuine artifacts were still in place when the ISIL forces arrived. The majority of which were whisked off for sale on the black market, but not before they were used to mould plaster substitutes to destroy for the cameras.’ Segal gave a dark smile. ‘A fact to which I can testify, as it was me who fenced a large number of the genuine stolen items. As for the fakes, they only had to be good enough to look convincing on low-resolution video footage, fooling viewers into believing that they were seeing the demolition of the genuine item.’

‘There’s no business like show business,’ Roth said. ‘Those devious sons of bitches.’

‘Not all the genuine pieces survived, however,’ Segal went on. ‘Among the priceless treasures they really did destroy in Mosul were the Lamassu winged bulls that were the museum’s prize exhibits. It was their sheer size that doomed them. They were too big and heavy for the authorities to move to safety in time, and for the same reason couldn’t be easily replicated, nor the real items sold off to rogue dealers. So the footage of their destruction was all too tragically real.’

‘And yet, the ones on the ship are copies,’ Ben said.

‘When I said that Nazim al-Kassar was a serious businessman, I meant it. He’s also far from stupid. The system for creating one-to-one scale plaster copies of such enormous statues was his idea. It was done by moulding separate plates which are then cemented together over a strong, light wooden frame and the joins plastered over to give the appearance of a single piece sculpted from a stone block.’

Margot Segal looked confused. ‘I don’t understand. You risked everything and put our lives in danger to help these maniacs make millions selling smuggled antiquities in Europe. But those were always the real thing up until now, weren’t they?’

‘Yes, Chérie, I’m sorry to say they were.’