The Caves of Périgord: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

closely at Lydia and grinned, and then the janitor rang to say they didn’t have the rock. It had never been sent down again to the strong room after the directors called for it to be brought to them in the boardroom the previous evening.
    “Who signed for it?” Lydia asked, irritated.
    “Mr. Justin did, miss,” came the reply. “He just kept it up there, and it was never checked in here again last night. It must still be with him.”
    She rang off and called Justin, whose line was busy. She went down the corridor to his office, suddenly aware that she was walking into some kind of crisis, and his usually impeccably dressed secretary was looking disheveled as she tried to speak on two phones at once. Lydia looked into the office. No Justin. She went back and stood squarely in front of the secretary, who mouthed at her “boardroom.”
    She took the stairs and found two uniformed policemen standing in the corridor. The boardroom doors were wide open, and she heard the sound of raised and angry voices. It was crowded with several people she did not recognize, two of the auction house directors, and messy with a great deal of paper on the floor. There were champagne glasses on a Regency table, a couple of empty bottles on the priceless carpet, and the smell of a party nobody had bothered to clear up. So there had been a celebration here last night to which she had not been invited. Typical Justin, she thought grimly. Then she saw the firm’s security officer standing over Justin, who was sitting at a disarrayed Georgian desk with his head in his hands. He looked up as she stood hesitantly at the door.
    “It’s your damned rock, Lydia,” he said over the hubbub. “It’s gone. Disappeared overnight. We’ve been burgled.”
    “What do you mean, burgled?” she demanded in the sudden silence. “Why wasn’t the rock put back in the strong room?”
    “The boardroom was locked, somebody forced the door. Your bloody rock is the only thing that has gone,” Justin said.
    “That’s not the half of it. The police are here, with more coming,” said the publicity director. “And we have half of Fleet Street and the BBC on the phone, all wanting to do their own versions on this”—he looked down at a copy of The Times —“this place that you call the Sistine Chapel of prehistoric art.”
    “I didn’t call it that,” Lydia snapped. “That was the phrase used to describe Lascaux by the great French historian the Abbé Breuil. He was a churchman. I suppose we would have called him an abbott.”
    “I don’t give a toss about abbots. I do give a toss about the fact that The Times Arts correspondent is rather cheesed off that he was given only half a story. He only found out this morning that the late Colonel Manners who was the original owner of this chunk of rock was so highly thought of in Paris that the current President of the Republic came over two weeks ago for a private visit, simply to attend his funeral. This is going to be an even bigger story tomorrow. Thanks to you, we’ve got a very nasty scandal on our hands.”
    “In more ways than one,” Lydia snapped back, furious at this attempt to shift blame toward her. “I have a French expert from their national museum sitting in my office waiting to see this piece of prehistoric art. And I have an eminent German expert about to fly in to see what I believe to be the most important and unique work of art that this department has found in living memory. From the signs of celebration in this room, you seem to agree with me. And in the midst of guzzling your champagne, you gentlemen seem to have lost it.”
    “Not lost it,” groaned Justin, his nervous hands smoothing out the storeroom receipt that carried his signature and made him responsible. “Burgled.”

CHAPTER 2
The Vézère Valley, approximately 15,000 b.c.
    T here was always mist in the mornings, hanging damply above the fast-flowing stream and spilling across to the limestone cliffs and the humped