At the far end of the warehouse, or cellar, rows of strange whitish objects were lined up against a wall. Some seemed to be covered with shrouds or tarpaulins, others were more clearly visible. Ben realised that they were statues. Old ones, he guessed by the look of them. Some were human figures, others of animals and mythical beasts. Some smaller in size, others so tall and large that they loomed up towards the ceiling of the warehouse. Ben let the playback roll for a few more seconds, then paused it again to catch a clear view of a massive stone creature that appeared to have the head and face of a man, the body of an elephant. Or maybe a bull. Either way it was an enormous piece of sculpture that stood nearly as high as the rafter beams, several metres tall.

It looked oddly familiar to him. Where had he seen something like it before? He thought back, then flashed on a memory of the one time he’d ever visited the Louvre museum, right here in Paris, years ago, and seen similar exhibits on display. Those had dated back several millennia, he remembered. Brought to France within the last couple of centuries, from some ancient part of what was now the Middle East.

Then Ben recalled a more recent memory, of his conversation with Romy’s colleague Jeanne at the Institute, and Jeanne telling him that Romy had recently returned from a field trip overseas. He wished he knew more about where she’d gone. He could only guess that, since her work involved the preservation of ancient works of art like these, her field trips might take her to places where such objects were kept warehoused between being salvaged from their original homes and being relocated to museums in Europe and elsewhere. That much made sense – but what didn’t make sense was why she was filming this so secretively, as though she wasn’t supposed to be there. Who was she hiding from?

Ben unpaused the image and let the video play on. Nearly half a minute into the clip the image shifted again, panning a few degrees to the left. Ben realised that Romy was keeping so carefully hidden behind her pillar that she couldn’t actually see what she was trying to film, and was just taking pot luck at aiming the camera. The picture went wildly jerky for a few moments, then steadied again.