Robin didn't have long to wait. Less than five minutes later her laptop emitted a musical double tone to indicate the receipt of an e-mail. She opened the program and read the message with a smile of satisfaction. William Stevens had simply confirmed that he was happy to accept the stated sum for the entire collection of books, including the book safe. He'd added his bank details, and within another few minutes Robin had logged on to her business account and arranged the transfer.

As far as she was concerned, the moment the bank's computer reported that the transfer had been initiated and was in progress and could no longer be stopped or amended, the deal was done. She sent another very short e-mail to Stevens confirming that the money was on its way, then pushed the laptop to one side and turned her attention again to the mysterious leather-bound object sitting on her desk.

She propped it up with a couple of books so that it sat at an angle, the small hole in the pages directly in front of her, and shone the small LED flashlight directly into the opening. She took the small magnifying glass, the more powerful of the two, and used that to try to peer into the locking mechanism. It wasn't easy to do, because even the tiniest movement of the magnifying glass meant that everything would suddenly become blurred and out of focus, because of the power of the lens, and it took several minutes for her to finally be able to gain a clear idea of what she was looking at.

Strangely enough, it didn't look to her as if the opening in the locking system was designed for a key at all, because she could see no sign of a lock. In fact, as far as she could tell, the lid of the book safe was held in place only by a catch, or possibly by a number of catches, and all that she would need to do in order to release it was to slide something like a slim screwdriver through the hole until it made contact with the mechanism, and then give it a firm push. The thing that gave her pause was that although it certainly looked like a catch, held in place by a short spring, there seemed to be other levers as well that didn't seem to be directly connected to it, and she had no idea what possible purpose they could be serving.

She shrugged, laid the book safe flat on the top of her desk, and positioned its spine against the horizontal pen holder that was an integral part of her old desk, to give herself something to push against because she expected that the mechanism would be stiff through lack of use and the dust of the centuries. And she didn't think that was an exaggeration because her best guess was that the object was most probably medieval. The mechanism might even, she acknowledged, be rusted solid, though if it had been kept in a library for most of the time, she hoped that wouldn't be the case.

She turned her attention to her small tool kit that, frankly, didn't contain very much: four screwdrivers, a couple of pairs of pliers, and a utility knife with a retractable blade, plus a handful of the screws, nails, washers, and other assorted bits of hardware that seemed to migrate into every toolbox over the years. Two of the screwdrivers had Phillips head bits, and so were of no use to her, and one of the others was simply far too big, the blade too thick to enter the slot. But the last screwdriver had a narrow but quite long blade-she thought it was the kind used by electricians-and she guessed that would probably be long enough, because as far as she could tell from her examination of the book safe, the catch was only four or five inches inside.

Robin slid the end of the screwdriver through the hole cut in the false pages of the book safe, doing her best to keep it straight so that it would make contact with the catch on the inside. She heard the very faint sound of metal touching metal, and then the screwdriver blade would go no farther.

"Here goes nothing," she muttered, changed her grip so that the heel of her hand was on the end of the screwdriver, and pushed firmly.

The screwdriver slid perhaps another half inch inside the book safe. There was a faint click and then a sudden loud thud.

Robin Jessop was so shocked she released the screwdriver and flung herself backward away from the desk, the back of her wheeled chair slamming into the wall behind her.

"Jesus Christ," she said, getting to her feet, her eyes still fixed on the book safe.

4.

Helston, Cornwall As well as establishing the identity of his forebears and completing the various parts of his family tree, Mallory was also creating a map that showed the location where each person he'd been able to identify had been born, lived, and then died, marking each spot with, respectively, a green, blue, and red label bearing the name of the man or woman and the appropriate date or dates for each of those events or periods. He'd bought a large-scale map of the United Kingdom especially for this purpose and mounted it on one wall of the bedroom he used as an office. What he was finding particularly interesting, and obviously predictable, was that, although for the last few generations his family had lived in and around Cornwall and the western parts of Devon, the earlier he trod back in time, the more dispersed his ancestors seemed to become.

There appeared, in fact, to be a steady movement eastward the further back he went, toward London and the southeast of England, which really wasn't what he had expected. He had always understood from what his mother had told him that his family had lived in the far southwest of the country for generations, but this was only partially correct. They had lived in that area, but only since about 1875. He had always mentally assumed that his roots lay in the mysterious country of King Arthur and the land of Tintagel, the rugged promontory that jutted out into the Atlantic, the most southwesterly point of England aimed like the tip of a spear toward the far distant shores of America, the rocks endlessly defying the pounding waves.

As a child he had been fascinated not just by tales of Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table and Avalon, but also by the stories he had heard of the legendary land of Lyonesse, which centuries, countless ages, ago had supposedly sunk forever beneath the waves somewhere off the Cornish coast, and he'd even briefly wondered if his ancestors might have been descended from the remnants of the noble families who had apparently perished in that long-forgotten tragedy.

Later in his childhood, he'd been equally enthralled by the tales of the wreckers and smugglers who, only two or three hundred years earlier, had haunted the rocky coves of the Lizard Peninsula-that name alone evocative and intriguing-using lights to lure ships onto the saw-toothed rocks and the unfortunate sailors to their deaths.

And it wasn't as if the stories were all wild flights of fantasy. The sheer number of known wrecks around the coast of Cornwall was a persuasive argument that suggested that at least some of the tales of the wreckers had to be based in fact. There was one cove on the west side of the Lizard where gold coins from some wreck had been found so often that it was known locally as "Dollar Cove" in preference to its real name. And there were other echoes as well, somewhat less substantial than the discovery of an occasional gold coin, locations where shadowy figures had allegedly been seen in the night, apparently reliving some traumatic event from hundreds of years earlier, and still other places, lonely beaches, where the ghosts of long-dead sailors were said to walk the sands when the cold sea mist rolled in from the Atlantic.

These romantic, if somewhat gory, notions had colored his childhood dreams and his outlook, and he'd been secretly proud of the imagined feats of his ancestors, but now it looked as if at least some of his forebears had far more likely been soft city folk, probably scratching out a living as tradesmen somewhere near London, or possibly farmers, rather than the tough and ruthless land-based Cornish pirates he'd conjured up in his imagination. And that was actually rather disappointing.

But the information he'd just read related to another branch of his family, and their origins seemed to lie a long way from London. The genealogical search results he'd just been sent showed a steady migration toward London from some way north of the Scottish border and, even further back than that in the early fifteenth century, the earliest dates Mallory had yet seen, from northern France.

And not only that, but even his family name had been altered and amended along the way, the double L appearing as a permanent feature only in the late eighteenth century. Before that, there were numerous variants, the O and A changing places to give "Molary" and "Malory," and occasionally one letter vanishing altogether, so there were several "Molorys" and "Malarys" among his forebears.

But it was the French arm of his family that he was beginning to find the most interesting, and what was driving his interest there was less the location than the spelling of the surname, and the possible implications if his parallel research into another, and totally unconnected, subject produced the results he was hoping to see.

5.

Dartmouth, Devon Before she did anything else, Robin Jessop picked up her car keys and walked out of the apartment and down the spiral staircase to the parking area at the back of the building. Halfway down, she used the remote control to unlock her car, and when she reached ground level, she opened the vehicle's trunk and took out a pair of heavy gloves that she kept there in case of having to change a tire. Then she locked the car again and climbed back up to her apartment, pulling on the gloves as she did so.

In the study, she sat down and slid the chair close to the desk and looked closely once again at the book safe. Gingerly she stretched out her gloved right hand, picked up the screwdriver she had been using, and, at arm's length, carefully eased the tip of the tool under the lid of the object, trying to lift it. But it remained firmly closed, which was actually what she had expected, bearing in mind what had just happened. She would have to probe the lock again and try to free the mechanism a second time.

She mentally reconstructed the sequence of events, remembering the way the screwdriver had reached a dead end as it touched the latch mechanism, and the faint click she had heard when it freed some part of the catch. That was what she had been expecting.

But what had taken her completely by surprise was the loud thud that had followed as an appallingly effective medieval antitheft device had been activated. In that split second after the catch had been released, powerful springs had obviously been triggered by a mechanism within the book safe and had forced two rows of needle-pointed spikes out of opposite sides of the relic, one set driving through the spine of the "book" and the other set through the false pages on the opposite side.

If she had grasped it by the spine, which she had very nearly done and which would have been the obvious way to hold the object while opening it, when the catch was released, three or four of those spikes would have been driven into, and very possibly even through, her left hand. And if she had used a screwdriver with a shorter blade to free the catch, her right hand could have been punctured as well.

She thanked her lucky stars that she'd used the pen holder instead to brace the object, and doubly so when she bent forward and looked even more closely at the rows of spikes. Despite the fact that the metal had probably been forged well over half a millennium earlier, not only were the points clearly still very sharp, but each also carried a faint discoloration. Robin knew quite a lot about medieval tactics, and guessed that as well as the agonizing pain that the spikes would cause when driven into a person's hand, there was a very good chance that they had also originally been painted with some kind of poison or toxin. Whether or not it would still be viable after such a passage of time was another matter altogether, but she definitely had no wish to find out.

Wearing the heavy gloves as protection for her hands, she pressed down hard on the leather cover, holding the object firmly in place against the pen holder, then slid the point of the slim screwdriver back into the slot, taking care to avoid touching the protruding spikes even with her gloved hand. This time, the end of the tool entered slightly farther than it had done previously before striking metal.

Robin took a deep breath-not that doing so helped in any way, of course-and then pushed the screwdriver gently. Nothing happened, so she increased the pressure steadily, concentrating on keeping the tool straight. For a few seconds she thought the blade must be resting on the wrong piece of the internal mechanism, because nothing seemed to be budging. But then there was a very faint click and the screwdriver slid perhaps a quarter of an inch farther inside the book safe.

Nothing else seemed to happen. No other spikes emerged, and the relic appeared unaltered. But when she removed the tool and carefully slid the point under the front "cover" of the old object, she found that it lifted up quite freely.

She used the screwdriver to open the lid of the book safe all the way so that the interior was completely exposed, but she didn't touch any part of it. She guessed that the spikes were the only protection the object had, because it wasn't very big and there was no sign of any other mechanism inside it still waiting to be triggered, but she wasn't prepared to take any chances. Instead, for several minutes, she just sat at the desk and studied the book safe.

Now that the lid was open, it was quite easy to see the mechanism. Carried on a metal frame that was secured to the bottom of the book safe with a single pillar was the central catch. In fact, there were two separate catches. Releasing the larger of these, the one closer to the opening and which any metal object slid into the hole would touch first, freed two other catches. These held the mechanism controlling the two rows of spikes in place. They looked something like the head of a garden rake, a pair of slim metal base plates on which the sharpened spikes had been positioned. When the catches were released, these two plates had been forced apart by a pair of powerful springs, with the result she had witnessed just a few minutes earlier.

Then there was a second and smaller catch, located perhaps half an inch behind the first one and that controlled the second and fortunately harmless mechanism she'd triggered. Pressure on it did nothing more than release small spring-loaded bolts on the three sides of the "book," at the top, bottom, and side. Once they had been tripped, the cover could be opened.

She studied the interior carefully, but could see no indication of any other devices. As a check, she tapped and prodded all around both the inside and the outside of the book safe using the long screwdriver from her tool kit before she touched any part of it with her gloved hands. Nothing happened. No other mechanisms were triggered, and after a few minutes she was satisfied that the object was safe to handle.

She'd been wrong about one thing in her e-mail to William Stevens. The book safe wasn't empty. Not quite. Underneath the latch mechanism was a length of parchment rolled into the shape of a scroll and lying beside it was a short length of frayed leather, which had presumably originally been tied around it.

She didn't immediately pick it up. Instead she slid the point of the screwdriver into the end of the roll and lifted it an inch or two, just in case it was somehow connected to any other kind of antitheft mechanism built into the book safe. Then she lowered it again and repeated the operation at the other end of the scroll. Finally she took a second screwdriver and used both tools to lift the scroll completely out of the box and deposit it on her desk.

Still wearing the heavy leather gloves she had taken from the trunk of her car, she picked up the book safe, carried it across to the metal filing cabinet that stood against one wall of the room, and placed it carefully on top. Then she took off the gloves, because they were too cumbersome and clumsy to allow her to examine the parchment, and instead opened one of the drawers on her desk, removed a pair of white cotton gloves, and pulled them on. Old books were often delicate and needed special handling, and she almost always wore gloves when she was examining books and manuscripts more than about one hundred years old.

And there was another reason as well. The spikes fitted into the book safe had been a nasty surprise, and it was not beyond the bounds of possibility that the medieval mind that had conjured up that device could also have decided to protect the parchment itself, perhaps by coating it with poison, or mixing a toxin into the ink. The one thing she certainly wasn't going to do was touch any part of it with her bare hands or even with her gloves.

She used the screwdrivers to maneuver the parchment, took a pair of pliers from her toolbox, opened the roll a couple of inches, placed them at the top to hold it in place, and again used the screwdrivers to carefully and gently unroll the remainder of the document, placing a second pair of pliers at the bottom of it. Then Robin put down the tools, picked up her low-power magnifying glass, and bent forward over the parchment scroll.

She read the first few lines carefully. Or, to be absolutely accurate, she looked at the first few lines and tried to make sense of them, without any success. She'd expected whatever was written on the scroll to be in Latin, a language with which she was quite familiar, but although the writing obviously used the Roman alphabet, she didn't recognize any of the words. They certainly weren't Latin, nor did they belong to any other language that she could identify.

Of course, there were any number of ancient languages that the author could have used, including ones like Catalan and Occitan, which were still spoken by communities in Europe-by millions of people, in fact, in the case of Catalan-or a language that had died out since the Middle Ages. But she had seen enough ancient texts to be able to at the very least recognize the probable language employed. She would normally be able to identify the odd word, or even the root of a word, but that wasn't the case with the text in front of her. The more she looked at it, the more convinced she became that it wasn't written in any known language, but was actually enciphered.

If she was right, then this opened up a host of new possibilities and questions, beginning with the obvious one: what kind of cipher had been employed? Cryptology was a subject about which she knew very little, and one obvious problem, even if she had been an expert on the subject, was that ciphers had developed over the centuries, and without knowing exactly when the text on the parchment had been prepared, she had no way of knowing what types of encryption methods would have been employed at that time.

But there was one thing she could try. She removed her cotton gloves, took a sheet of paper from her desk drawer, wrote out the alphabet across the top of it from left to right, and then wrote out the alphabet again directly below it but this time backward, so that the letter Z appeared directly under A, Y under B, and so on. That was a decryption code for one of the oldest-and the simplest-ciphers known to exist, the Atbash.

Originally intended for use with the Hebrew language, Atbash was the most basic possible substitution cipher, encryption being carried out by simply replacing the plaintext letter selected from the conventional alphabet with the cipher letter that corresponded to it. So the plaintext English word FOREST would appear as ULIVHG in Atbash. Although the encrypted text would appear indecipherable, the standard cipher had only one possible key-the reversed alphabet-and was hence extremely weak and easy to crack. Technically, it was a monoalphabetic substitution cipher, and was known to have been used as far back as the time of Julius Caesar, and there were even a couple of examples in the Book of Jeremiah.

Robin wrote down on the paper the first half dozen words of the first line of text written on the scroll, using capital letters. Then, using the alphabet and its mirror image, she replaced the letters in each of those six words with their Atbash equivalents. Then she tossed her pencil down on the desk in frustration. The six words she had copied had appeared to her to be simple gibberish, but the Atbash-deciphered equivalent words that she had just created were equally incomprehensible, words that she was quite certain were not a part of any known language that she had ever encountered. If the text was enciphered, and she was virtually certain that it was, then whatever encryption method had been used was clearly far more complex than conventional Atbash, and that could mean that the document was much more recent than she had first supposed, cryptology getting more and more sophisticated with the passing centuries.

What she needed to do now were two things. First, she should definitely try to find out if the book safe was of any value in itself, though she had her doubts about that. Not everything dating from the medieval period-and that was her best guess as to its likely date-was worth much, and the fact that the object contained the spring-actuated spikes added a further level of complication. What she had was essentially a book-sized antipersonnel device, a sort of clever medieval switchblade, and it was quite possible that selling it could actually be illegal. She might end up having to give it to a museum somewhere, just to get rid of it.

That was the first thing, and she guessed that she could get some results immediately thanks to Google and the Internet. She woke up her laptop again and entered the search term "ipse dixit book safe" and pressed the ENTER key. As usual, the search generated a number of replies-she couldn't ever remember entering any search term that didn't produce at least some results from Google, but none of them on the first two screens she scanned looked hopeful. She tried other variants, adding the words key, medieval, text, parchment, cipher, and encrypted in various combinations as well. But she found nothing, no sites or references that seemed to describe anything like the object she had acquired. She widened the search, just looking for "book safes," but even that didn't produce any useful information.

By the end of her search, she had only really discovered that such objects were unknown in the medieval period, apparently being relatively recent innovations, and she had found no mention at all of any safes that included anything like the antitheft mechanism she had just experienced firsthand. It looked as if what she had was unique, and that could make it an important and potentially expensive object. Or it could simply be an ancient curio, of no value whatsoever, and she had no way of telling which.

That seemed to be a dead end, though obviously she would have to spend longer investigating it, perhaps talking to experts in a museum, or people from an auction house that specialized in early mechanical objects. But that was something for the future. What she needed more urgently was help from someone who knew about ciphers, somebody who could show her how to begin decoding the text on the parchment.

Hopefully her extensive customer database would help her track somebody down. Because she tended to acquire books on a wide variety of subjects, she had a comprehensive mailing list of people who were in the market for specialized volumes. At the last count, that database had contained over three thousand names, and at least two or three of those people, she was quite sure, had put down markers with her for volumes dealing with codes and ciphers, though so far, if her memory served her correctly, she hadn't acquired or purchased any books dealing with this subject.

She closed down her browser window and clicked on her customer database. It included a basic search facility, which she opened. She typed "cipher" in the correct field and pressed the ENTER key. Less than a second later, three results appeared on the screen in front of her.

She looked at the three names but was fairly sure she'd never met any of them in person, though that was unimportant, then accessed each short file in turn. The information she kept on each customer was fairly limited-name, address, telephone number, e-mail address, purchase history, and preferred method of payment, and not all those fields were completed in every case-plus a subject listing, which was where she performed most of her searches when new books arrived in the shop, and a larger section in which she recorded whatever else she knew about her customer. Or rather her customer's wishes with regard to books.

Robin opened the first customer record and flipped straight to this last part. The information she read had most likely been taken verbatim from an e-mail sent to her by the customer, and just stated that the man was looking for any books relating to either the activities of Bletchley Park, the highly secret British code-breaking establishment that operated during the Second World War, some aspects of which were still classified even in the twenty-first century, as well as books written in English about German encryption techniques with particular reference to the Enigma encoding machine. That seemed specific enough. She doubted very much if that man would have the slightest knowledge of or interest in medieval ciphers. She shrugged and opened the second record.

That immediately looked a lot more promising. That customer had told her, again in an e-mail, that he was looking for books dealing with the history of ciphers, and particularly those used in the early days, basically pre-Roman and onward. He was also searching for books on two entirely unrelated subjects and had, Robin noticed, not only bought several books on both topics from her in the past but also had a kind of standing order with her for volumes of one particular kind. Books dealing with that subject were extremely rare, but at the same time of no literary merit whatsoever and little monetary value, and only rarely survived the centuries, but there had been two in the Stevens collection.

Robin copied his e-mail address and then moved on to check the third record that had matched her search criteria. But she immediately rejected that customer as a possible source of help, as his main focus was on the importance of secret communications as they related to government, politics, and international relations in the twentieth century. Things like the Zimmermann Telegram.

She created a new e-mail, pasting in the address she'd just copied, but before she wrote anything except the salutation she stood up and walked over to the box containing the books she was keeping and rooted through it for a couple of minutes before she found what she was looking for. She pulled out two slim volumes and nodded in satisfaction as she read the titles. She hadn't wanted to just ask for the man's help in a cold call, as it were, but these two books exactly matched one of the other two categories in which he had expressed an interest. So she could legitimately contact him to ask if he would be interested in buying them, and then bring up the matter of the enciphered text almost as an aside. That would be far more subtle, she decided.

She quickly composed the e-mail, listing the titles, dates of printing, and condition of the two books now lying on the desk in front of her, and the prices she was asking for each of them. She took a small but sophisticated digital camera out of her desk drawer, placed the first book in a clear area on her cluttered desk, and took a picture of it, then repeated the process with the second volume. She took the data card out of the camera, slid it into the card reader slot on the side of her laptop, and copied the pictures into the e-mail and then added the photographs and details of the books to her database as well.

Then she added the final paragraph to her message, informing the recipient that an ancient manuscript had come into her possession, that the text on it was possibly medieval and appeared to be enciphered, and because of his obvious interest in ancient ciphers, would he have any idea how to decode it? She carefully typed out the first dozen words of the text, then signed the e-mail "Robin Jessop" and pressed the SEND key. Then all she could do was wait for his response, if the man bothered getting back to her at all, of course.

She had two other things she wanted to do before she got back to her regular work. She again put on her cotton gloves, picked up the sheet of parchment and took it across to the small multifunction laser printer that stood on a table beside her desk, and scanned the images of it into her laptop. For good measure she made a couple of copies of the text written on both sides as well, each requiring two sheets of paper because the parchment was both an irregular shape and significantly longer than A4. Then she rolled up the manuscript and slid it back into the book safe, before placing the object inside her safe. She still had no idea if either the object itself or the parchment had any value whatsoever, but she wasn't going to take any chances.

Robin walked downstairs, went in through the back door of the shop, and made sure that Betty was coping, which she was, there having been only five customers through the front door of the shop that day, two of them only buying cakes and coffee. Then she went back up to her study to continue preparing the catalogue that she would send out with her next MailShot to her established customer base, work she had been doing before the cardboard boxes of books had arrived from William Stevens.

Much of her business was done by mail, most of it by people responding to her printed catalogue, sent out once every quarter, or to the electronic listings she posted on her Web site, but her direct approaches to customers when she acquired particular books were also very productive. She believed her buyers felt somehow special when she sent them a personal e-mail with details of new books that matched their search criteria, and in most cases sales quickly resulted from these electronic solicitations.

The books she had acquired from William Stevens would, she was quite sure, be of interest to at least a handful of her regular customers, and as soon as she had taken pictures of the new volumes and prepared accurate descriptions, she would send personal e-mails to all those she thought might be interested in buying them.

With any luck, she might be able to recoup at least half of the money she had spent in buying the collection of books within a couple of weeks, and that would obviously be good news for her cash flow. In the meantime, she put the book safe, its brutal antitheft device, and its curious contents out of her mind.

6.

Helston, Cornwall Because David Mallory was on a number of mailing lists, he picked up between fifty and sixty new e-mail messages every day. The vast majority of these, including the inevitable invitations from people in Nigeria desperate to share a multimillion-dollar fortune they had just stumbled across, and blatantly obvious phishing e-mails urging him to supply his bank account details as quickly as possible to some hopeful cybercriminal who was pretending to work in the security department of a High Street bank he'd never had an account with, he discarded without even opening. Messages sent by members of the various genealogy sites he always looked at, just in case there was anything of interest, and obviously he read anything sent by friends or members of his family, and most of these he replied to.

He'd got into the habit of processing his messages in the evening, when he'd driven home from wherever he had been working-assuming he'd been on-site somewhere that day-or when he logged off from some company intranet if he'd been working on from home. And the other thing he did at about the same time was take a cruise around the genealogy sites and look at some of the latest posts on the various blogs, just in case anybody had come up with some useful information or found any new sources of data.

That evening, when he'd put down his briefcase in the hall, made himself a cup of coffee-he invariably drank instant because he wasn't interested in fannying about with percolators and the like-he walked into the bedroom at the back of his house that he used as a study, put down his laptop, and switched it on. He'd only made the jump from a personal desktop machine to a high-specification laptop when he started his genealogy research, because the advantages of being able to carry not just a few notes but the entire corpus of his work around with him on a single machine were overwhelming. So he'd splashed out and bought the best he could find. The machine had a big screen, two hard drives of one terabyte each, an additional solid-state drive for his operating system and application software, a quad-core processor, and sixteen gigabytes of RAM. It was, in computing terms at that time, about as state-of-the-art as you could get.

He started downloading his e-mails but didn't look at them, and instead went straight to one of the blogs that was on his list of favorites. He scanned quickly through the list of posts, glancing at the subject matter of each one, then clicked on the link to the next blog and repeated the process. Several posts were interesting, but none of them provided any information he didn't already know, just really serving as confirmation of data he'd already established.

His messages had finished downloading a few minutes earlier, so he shifted his attention from his browser to his e-mail client and began weeding out those which were of no interest to him, filing those that he thought he would need to keep and replying to all those that warranted it. About halfway down the list, he came across one that stood out. It wasn't the first time he'd heard from that particular man, and he'd established a cordial business relationship with him, albeit completely one-sided. Mallory was a customer; the man was a supplier.

He read the message with interest, looking at the photographs and the details of the two volumes that the bookseller had supplied. He connected his printer and spat out a copy of the message, then took it over to the bookcase where he kept his research material and scanned the shelves, checking to see if he had already got copies of either volume. He hadn't, he realized, so he would definitely buy the two on offer.

It was only then, as he walked back to his desk, that he looked at the last paragraph of the e-mail message. His steps slowed and he came to a dead stop, his eyes fixed on the sheet of paper he was holding.

"Interesting," he muttered as he sat down again.

One word in the message stood out for him, and that largely determined what he did next. He took a sheet of paper and wrote the letters of the alphabet on it, then wrote the reversed alphabet underneath. Then he glanced back at the information in the e-mail and began writing the sequence of letters printed in it. When he finished, he sat back with a frown, because what he'd expected to achieve simply hadn't happened. He had to be missing something. Either that or his guess was wrong.

Another thought struck him, and he looked back at what he'd done and then jotted down a completely different sequence of letters. That also didn't produce anything that seemed to make sense, so he wrote out a number of other lines of letters, checking his interpretation of each one as he did so. When he read the result of one of them, a smile crossed his face. That actually seemed to work.

He looked back at the e-mail and wrote a short message in reply. Then he smiled again, deleted what he'd written, jotted down a few more letters on the piece of paper, worked out the ciphertext, and sent a five-word reply: "Latin. ZGYZHS OVUG HSRUG VOVEVM." It would be interesting to see what response that produced.

Then he looked again at the e-mail, at the signature block at the bottom. The contact details included both a business and a mobile number, and before he dialed he glanced at his watch. It was almost seven, too late to expect an answer on an office telephone, but not too late to call the mobile.

He decided he would revert to a more old-fashioned form of communication and telephone the man. More personal and much more immediate. So he dialed, and almost immediately a woman answered.

"Can I speak to your husband, please?" Mallory began.

There was a pause that went on a couple of beats too long, and he was just about to speak again when the woman replied.

"I don't seem to have one of them," she said, "so you've probably got the wrong number."

"This is the number that was on an e-mail I was sent today," Mallory insisted. "I'm trying to reach Robin Jessop. He has a couple of books I'd like to buy."

"Ah. Robin is not exclusively a man's name, Mr. Mallory. I'm Robin Jessop, and I was a woman the last time I checked."

This time Mallory paused.

"How'd you know my name?" he asked.

"I'm not psychic and it's not rocket science," Robin replied. "I only sent out one e-mail today, which listed two books for sale so-though we've never spoken before-it more or less had to be you. Normally you just send me an e-mail when I've offered you a book you want, so is there any particular reason why you've called me? After office hours, I mean. I don't think anyone else is going to be queuing to snap up a couple of collections of parish records."

Mallory was slightly nonplussed by the unexpected turn the conversation had taken.

"No, you're probably right there," he said. "I'm doing a lot of genealogical research, and it's amazing what information you can sometimes find in parish records. That's why I've bought every book you've offered me on the subject, and that will include the two you've just told me about, by the way. But no, that wasn't why I was calling you. Have you checked your e-mail this evening?"