‘In 1610, during the worst persecutions of the Cagots, the King of Navarre ordered that the Cagots be anatomically assessed by his court physicians. To see if the pariahs were really -’ Emma Winyard did air quotes, with her fingers ‘- “different”. The results of these tests were never revealed. But we know that soon after that, the upper hierarchies of the church began to emancipate the Cagots, and to end the persecutions, though it took them centuries to eradicate the bigotry amongst the lesser clergy and peasantry. Same goes for the Basques.’

‘How?’

‘The Basques were also persecuted, as witches. The irony is that the Basque witch burnings were stopped by the Spanish Inquisition. An Inquisitor named Salazar sacked and prosecuted the witchfinders. He had the French witchfinder, De Lancre, who was obsessed with the Curse of Cain, removed from his judicial position.’ Emma smiled, quietly. ‘It rather goes against the image of Rome and the Inquisition, as terrible persecutors of heretics and minorities – the truth is, the Catholic elite were actually a force for good, as regards the Basques and the Cagots, at least.’

‘What happened to the results of the Cagot tests?’

‘That’s precisely what Nairn wanted to know.’ Emma Winyard picked up her handbag, preparing to leave. ‘I told him the Inquisition kept all their files on the Basques quite secret, likewise the records relating to the Cagots.’

‘I’m guessing…the documents were sent to Rome, to the Vatican library?’

‘Yes and no. Recall that the Inquisition was run by the Dominicans – the black friars – or the Dogs of God, as they were called, because of their zealotry and sadism. It’s a medieval pun on their name. Domine Cani. Dogs of God!’

‘Gotta love those medieval puns.’

‘The Dominicans were the great witch burners of the medieval era. Two Dogs of God wrote the Malleus Malleficarum, the “Hammer of Witches” – the witchfinders’ Bible. Gosh, it’s nearly three o’clock.’

The lady was now standing. Simon stood and shook Ms Winyard’s hand, as she apologized, elegantly.

‘I’m sorry to dash. The Guildhall library shuts at four. But I can answer your last questions – you want to know what happened to all these fascinating archives.’

‘I do.’

‘Very well. Some rightwing Dominicans were especially keen on the Curse of Cain. They believe it to this day. They refused to relinquish materials which, they felt, supported their cause. At the same time the Pope didn’t want a schism – Popes never want a schism! – so a compromise was reached.’

‘Go on.’

‘The documents relating to the Cagots and the Basques were stored in great security. They were kept at the Angelicum, the Dominican University in Rome. For centuries they were safe. But then, after the war, after the Nazis, this was not felt to be a safe place, for such…provocative data. You can see the problem.’ She smiled, gently. ‘So what happened? The rumour is that they were spirited away to somewhere even more secure. But that is just a rumour. The answer to your question, the tantalizing truth is: no one knows for sure! Scholars have speculated on this matter for decades. Deducing what happened to the Basque and Cagot materials. It’s quite the theological crossword puzzle.’

‘And what do you think?’

‘Me? I suspect the archives were just destroyed and all this conspiracy stuff is candyfloss. And that’s what I told Angus Nairn, to his disappointment. But there it is. And this is where I must leave you, before my entire day disappears.’

‘OK…thank you so much.’ Simon felt sated: he was still digesting the strange lunch, and the even stranger information. ‘Thanks again. This has been hugely useful. Clarifying things.’

The professor said it was nothing.

Her smiling face disappeared down the spiral metal stairs. Paying the bill and pocketing the receipt, Simon descended the stairs a few moments later.

In the street he hailed a cab, feeling a pleasurable rush of accomplishment as he did so. He’d earned this cab ride home: he’d done some good work. He could sit in the back of the big London taxi and smoke a fat if metaphorical cigar.

But then he remembered. Fazackerly. As the taxi sped past the clock repair shops and glass-walled apartment blocks of Clerkenwell, he took out his mobile and listened to his voicemails.

The first message was long, incoherent and discursive. The professor said he was sitting in his office for the last time and he had some new theories he thought might interest Simon. He waffled about ‘ecclesiastical opponents of my research’. He mentioned a Pope. He apologized for going on so long, and being a ‘garrulous old bachelor rather feeling the pinch of mortality’; the voice message actually went on so long this apology was silenced by the end of the allotted timespan.

Then Simon listened to the second message.

It wasn’t a message. At least, it wasn’t an intentional communication as such. It was obviously a call made by accident, when the redial button on a mobile is pressed by error, by sitting on it, or knocking it in a bag.

Fazackerly had called Simon the second time by mistake. And the second call was the sound of someone in unspeakable pain. Maybe, surely, horribly – someone dying.

It was grotesque. Simon sat in the back of the taxi, the sweat like beads of clinging and frozen dew on his forehead: listening to this terrible recording.

The beginning of the message was a kind of low, groaning sigh. In the background was a buzz. Like a distant buzzsaw heard in a forest. Lumberjacks at work. The moaning was sincere and despairing, a mixture of fear and pain; then it accelerated to ferocious panting. And then came the gurgling, a rasping, choking gurgle, like someone gargling hot vomit, unable to breathe. And all the time in the background was that terrible buzz.

The most piercing aspect of this horrifying message was the one discernible word – ‘Stop’ – between the gargles and the final, terrifying rasps. That word was enough to identify Fazackerly.

‘Stop,’ said Simon, rapping fiercely on the taxi glass.

They were just two hundred yards from the GenoMap offices.

The cabbie braked, abruptly. And turned his puzzled face.

Simon threw a twenty pound note at the taxi driver, then he raced out of the taxi – down the elegant terraces alongside Gordon Square. He found the old battered door, it was half open. He kicked upstairs, and upstairs again, taking the stairs three at a leap. Desperate now.

Inside. He was inside the lab and the GenoMap offices. The machines were cold and unused. The hydroshear and the centrifuge were silent. It all looked normal, or the same as before. The dusty machines. The emptied desks. The place deserted. The doors open. A gonk left on a table by some departed scientist. A grinning gonk.

Where was Fazackerly? Maybe it had all been nothing? Maybe he had misinterpreted that terrible second message?

This panic returned when he heard the buzzing. It was the same buzzing as on the phone. Like a wood-saw heard through endless leafless trees in a snowbound forest. Someone cutting logs away over there, in the black and white distance.

There. It was emanating from the corner of the lab. It was one of the machines Fazackerly had shown Simon on his perfunctory tour of the lab. The industrial-sized microwave, used for sterilization and antigen retrieval and histology and -

He rushed over. The enormous wardrobe-sized machine was whirring away. It was cooking, busily cooking, like a happy and humming housewife. There was something inside the oven.

Simon knew, of course, and of course he didn’t want to know. He averted his face, then he turned around again, fighting the desire to run into the street, to flee in disgust and dreadful panic.

Pressed against the tinted glass pane of the vast microwave oven was a face. A cooked and sweated old face, drooling liquid from the white and crinkled nostrils. Fazackerly was inside the oven. Broiled but unbrowned. His skin was bleached and pink, one poached eye was hanging from the socket.