They found Dora and Karl wandering along the beach. Dora was looking for shells and Karl was carrying them in his Panama hat, which was almost full of purple sea urchin shells which Dora planned to take home, plus various whelks and one that Dora insisted was called an angel’s wing.

‘You two look like an ad for investment in a prosperous retirement,’ teased Nell, until she saw the look of sudden anxiety cross Dora’s face at the very word ‘retirement’. Nell could only suppose it made her think of home and work.

As it turned out, Nell was right about the interest in Willow’s blog. A few days later, she got a call from an English-language newspaper in Athens wanting to hear every detail of the missing statue. Willow had given them her mother’s number, thinking people in Kyri would be delighted at the attention for their tiny island.

‘Well, it’s done now,’ Dora concluded when Nell told her of the call over dinner. ‘And it means if Xan Georgiades has hidden it, and I am pretty bloody certain he has, then he’ll have to get rid of it damn soon, and I doubt now it’s out in the open he’ll be able to sell it for anything like he was hoping. But I don’t trust him as far as I could throw him. I think we should take it in turns to watch him.’

‘Isn’t that a bit impractical?’ Karl asked. ‘Not to mention a tad over the top?’

‘Why? There are five of us, and we’re staying in the same hotel. It should be easy. We’ll just have to have a rota.’ She looked at him piercingly. ‘Do you care about this statue or not? Ariadne risked her life for it – the least you lot can do is share watching Xan Georgiades.’

‘I think the myrtle’s got to her,’ Moira murmured to Karl when Dora left them for a moment.

‘You mean she’s the new priestess to the goddess?’ he grinned.

‘I hope not,’ Moira replied, attempting a saucy look, which had the effect of making her look like a gargoyle. ‘Priestesses have to be celibate.’

‘La, Dr O’Reilly,’ he replied, fluttering his eyelashes, ‘what can you mean?’

The next day Moira decided the fewer people who knew about her planned visit to Santorini the better, so she waited in the supermarket staring at sandwiches till a small crowd of passengers gathered on the dock, and then quietly melted into the queue for the ferry that came every other day.

This time she knew exactly where she was going, and as it was thankfully a long time till the famous Santorini sunset, no one had even thought of bagging their place and the streets were just about manageable. She glanced down at the harbour. One cruise ship was just arriving, with another hot on its tail. She’d better hurry.