‘Of what?’

‘Of anything, in principle. Everything in our universe is fundamentally made of the same stuff. I think that what the alchemists were ultimately looking for was a universal element within nature that could be extracted, or harnessed, and used to maintain or restore perfection to matter-any kind of matter, not just metals.’

‘I get you,’ he said, making a note in his pad.

‘OK? Now, if you could find a technology like that, and get it to work, its potential would be boundless. It would be like the atomic bomb in reverse-using nature’s energy to create instead of destroy. For me personally, as a biologist, I’m interested in the potential effects on living organisms, especially humans. What if we could slow down the deterioration of living tissues, perhaps even restore healthy functioning to diseased ones?’

He didn’t have to think about it for long. ‘You’d have the ultimate medical technology.’

She nodded. ‘You certainly would. It would be incredible.’

‘You really think they were on the right track? I mean, is it possible they could have created something like that?’

She smiled. ‘I know what you’re thinking. It’s true, most alchemists probably were nutty, shot-away old guys with a lot of crazy ideas about magic-maybe some even thought of it as witchcraft, just like the Internet or even a telephone would seem like the dark arts to someone teleported here from a couple of centuries ago. But there were also alchemists who were serious scientists.’

‘Examples?’

‘Isaac Newton? The father of classical physics was also a closet alchemist-some of his major discoveries, that scientists still use today, might have been based on his alchemical research.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Absolutely. And another guy heavily involved in alchemy you might have heard of was Leonardo da Vinci.’

‘The artist?’

Also the brilliant engineer, designer and inventor,’ she replied. And then there was the mathematician Giordano Bruno-that is, until the Catholic Inquisition burned him at the stake in 1600.’ She grimaced. ‘Those were the kind of alchemists I’m interested in, the ones who were laying the foundation for a whole new modern science that’s going to change everything. That’s what I believe, and that’s basically what my work is about.’ She paused. ‘Tell you what, instead of me just talking at you, why don’t I show you something? How d’you feel about bugs?’

‘Bugs?’

‘Insects. Some people are freaked out by them.’

‘No, I’m OK.’

Roberta opened a double door leading to what must originally have been a walk-in cupboard or wardrobe. It had been adapted, with fitted wooden shelving, to hold glass tanks. Not full of fish. Full of flies. Thousands of them. Black, hairy swarms massing on the surface of the glass.

‘Jesus,’ he muttered, recoiling.

‘Pretty gross, huh?’ Roberta said cheerfully. ‘Welcome to my experiment.’

The two tanks were labelled A and B. ‘Tank B is the control group,’ she explained. ‘Meaning that those flies are just ordinary flies, well cared for but untreated. Tank A are the experimental flies.’

‘OK…so what happens to those?’ he asked warily.

‘They get treated with a formula.’

‘And what is the formula?’

‘I don’t have a name for it. I invented it-or copied it, I ought to say, from old alchemical writings. It’s really just water that’s been through some special processes.’

‘What kind of processes?’

She smiled slyly. ‘Special ones.’

‘And what happens to the flies that are treated with it?’

‘Ah, now that’s the interesting part. The lifespan of a normal adult housefly, well fed, is six weeks. That’s more or less how long my B flies are living. But the flies in tank A, which receive tiny amounts of the formula in their food, are consistently living thirty to thirty-five per cent longer, around eight weeks.’

Ben narrowed his eyes. ‘You’re sure about that?’

She nodded. ‘We’re into our third generation, and the results are holding.’

‘This is just a recent breakthrough, then?’

‘Yeah, we’re really at the first stage. I still don’t know why it’s working, how to explain the effect. I know I can get better results, and I will…And when I do, it’s going to fire a chilli pepper up the asses of the scientific community.’

He was about to reply when his phone rang. ‘Shit. Sorry about this.’ He’d forgotten to turn it off for the interview. He took the phone out of his pocket.

‘Well? Aren’t you going to answer it?’ she asked, raising one eyebrow.

He pressed REPLY and said, ‘Hello?’

‘Loriot here. I received your message.’

‘Thanks for calling back, Monsieur Loriot,’ Ben said, glancing apologetically at Roberta and raising a finger as if to say ‘this’ll just take a minute’. She shrugged and took a sip of her coffee, then snatched a piece of paper from her desk and started reading it.

‘I would be interested in meeting you. Would you like to come out to my home this evening for a drink and a talk?

‘That would be great. Where do you live, Monsieur Loriot?’

Roberta threw down the sheet, sighed and exaggeratedly checked her watch.

‘My home is the Villa Margaux, near the village of Brignancourt, on the other side of Pontoise. It is not far from Paris ’

Ben noted down the details. ‘Brignancourt,’ he repeated quickly, trying to get the conversation over without being impolite to Loriot. The man might be an important contact. But if you’re going to play the journalist, at least try to do it with a bit of professional fucking style, he thought, irritated with himself.

‘I will send my car to pick you up’, said Loriot.

‘OK,’ Ben said, writing on his pad. ‘Eight forty-five tonight…Yes…Looking forward to that…Well, thanks again for calling back…Goodbye.’ He switched off the phone and dropped it back in his pocket. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said to Roberta. ‘It’s off now.’

‘Oh, don’t worry about it.’ She let him hear the edge of sarcasm in her voice. ‘Not like I have a job to go to, is it?’

He cleared his throat. ‘Anyway, this formula of yours…’

‘Yup?’

‘Have you tried it out on other species? What about humans?’

She shook her head. ‘Not yet. That’d really be something, wouldn’t it? If the results matched the fly experiment, the life expectancy of a healthy human could increase from, say, eighty years to about a hundred and eight years. And I think we could do even better.’

‘If one of your flies was sick or dying, would this thing have the power to cure whatever was wrong with it, keep it alive?’ he asked tentatively.

‘You mean, does it have medicinal properties?’ she replied. She clicked her tongue and sighed. ‘I wish I could say yes. We’ve tried giving it to dying flies in group B to see what would happen, but they still died. So far it only seems to work preventatively.’ She shrugged. ‘But who knows? We’re only getting started here. With time, we might be able to develop something that won’t just extend life in healthy specimens, but will cure illnesses in sick ones, maybe even stop one from dying indefinitely. If we could replicate that effect in humans, ultimately…’

‘Sounds like you might have discovered some kind of elixir of life?’

‘Well, let’s not pop the cork just yet,’ she said with a chuckle. ‘But I think I’m onto something, yeah. Problem is lack of funding. To really get it out there and verified you’d have to launch some serious clinical trials. Those can take years.’

‘Why can’t you get funding from medical com panies?’

She laughed. ‘Boy, you are really naïve. This is alchemy we’re talking about. Witchcraft, voodoo, hokum. Why do you think I’m running this operation out of a spare bedroom? Nobody takes me seriously since I wrote about this stuff.’

‘I heard you’d had some trouble over it.’ ‘Trouble?’ She snorted. ‘Yeah, you might say that. First I was plastered all over the cover of Scientific American- some wiseguy editor put a witch’s hat on me and a sign round my neck saying “Unscientific American”. Next thing, those assholes at the university gave me the boot, left me hanging out to dry. Hasn’t exactly helped my career. They even fired poor old Michel from his lab-tech post. Said he was wasting university time and money on my hocus-pocus project. He’s the only one who’s stood by me through all this. I pay him what I can, but it’s been tough for both of us.’ She sighed and shook her head. ‘Bastards. But I’ll show them.’