My eyes moved in dazed disbelief from one masterpiece to another. The lovely little statuette of Tetisheri in the British Museum was a fake, all right. The original was here. So was the Nefertiti bust – not the painted bust in Berlin, but the other, even more beautiful, that was – was supposed to be – in the Cairo Museum.

Had I been mistaken about Larry’s ultimate intent after all? The contents of this room represented the greatest art theft in history. Getting them out of the museum and into this room was only half the battle. He was in the process of finishing the job – getting his pieces out of Egypt. Packed in among his household effects, they would pass through customs without a hitch. No one would be boorish enough to inspect the possessions of the great philanthropist, the man who had just presented Egypt with a multimillion-dollar institute. Wasn’t this enough for Larry?

No. My original reasoning still held, tenuous and unsupported though it was. The convenient breakdown of the Queen of the Nile, the violent death of the new director of the institute, only a few hours after he had found a sympathetic and notoriously inquisitive listener in me, the precise timing of Larry’s permanent departure from Egypt, his bizarre obsession . . . The collection I saw before me was a convincing demonstration of that obsession. Almost every object in the room depicted, or had belonged to, a queen or princess.

Many of the cases were empty, their contents already transferred to the wooden packing boxes that spoiled the neatness of the room. But there was lots left. A small head of an Amarna princess, a diadem of twisted golden wire set with tiny turquoise flowers . . .

John heard me gasp. ‘I wondered if you’d spot that,’ he said, dragging Sweet into a corner and turning one of the empty boxes over on top of him.

The diadem bad been buried with a princess of the Middle Kingdom. I’d found a sketch of it in the workshop of the goldsmith who had been producing fake jewels for the gang in Rome. The original had been in the Cairo Museum, not the Metropolitan, as I had ignorantly supposed at the time. Obviously it wasn’t there now.

‘You . . .’ I began. ‘You . . . You started this that long ago?’

‘This sort of collection takes a while to build up,’ John said coolly. He joined me and studied the lovely thing with obvious appreciation. Then he shook his head regretfully. ‘Too large and too fragile. This will do the trick just as well, I expect.’

The object he shoved carelessly into his pocket was a pectoral, its complex design dominated by a huge scab of lapis lazuli. It had belonged to Tutankhamon.

John took my limp hand and led me up the stairs.

‘Time?’ he asked, closing the sliding panel.

‘Uh . . . seven-forty.’

‘We may as well get into position, then.’

‘Do you know what Max has planned?’