The Lazarus Vault by Tom Harper Page B

business soured the taste, like an ex-lover.
    It took her ten minutes to walk to Doug’s place, a small mews house provided by the college near the Ashmolean. She still had her key; she let herself in. A pair of muddy rugby boots lay in the hall. From upstairs, she could hear the sound of running water. Books and papers filled the living room, stacked on shelves and sills. After three weeks in the glassy altitudes of high rises and hotels, it felt dim and dingy. Empty screwholes pocked the walls like machine-gun fire. The paint had peeled above the doorframe, and the carpet was threadbare. She’d never noticed it before.
    She climbed the stairs and opened the bathroom doorwithout knocking. Doug stood in the shower, his face flushed from the fresh air and hot water, his dark hair slick against his skin. Ellie was struck, as she had been their first night together, by his long, rangy body and muscular arms.
    He opened his eyes and started. ‘Practice finished late. I was going to come and meet you at the station.’
    ‘I told you not to bother.’
    ‘You know I never listen to you.’ He grinned and held out the soap. ‘Are you going to scrub my back?’
    Afterwards, they walked hand in hand along the towpath towards Abingdon. Oars slapped the water as the new eights crews flashed by; the damp smells of mud and rotting leaves filled the air. For the first time since she’d started at Monsalvat, Ellie felt she could breathe again.
    ‘How’s your research coming along?’ She’d held off asking until now. In the first six months of their relationship, work had been a shared passion. Now it was a faultline.
    ‘It’s good.’ Doug frowned. ‘Really good. I had a letter last week, totally out of the blue. A guy up in Scotland, reclusive millionaire or something. Apparently he’d read one of my papers on early medieval romance and wanted to talk to me.’
    Ellie glanced at him. ‘In Scotland?’
    ‘We met in London. At his
club
.’ An ironic emphasis. ‘Huge place off Pall Mall, lots of Victorian busts and deep leather chairs and not a woman to be seen, except the one taking your coat. Anyway, he was waiting for me. An old man in a wheelchair, strapped in to some sort of respirator. He never said a word. He laid out this leather folder on the table. He had a minder with him, a tall guy in a long black coat. He looked like an undertaker. The first thing he did was make me sign a confidentiality agreement – which I’m breaching, telling youthis, by the way. The minder said that the old man had found something in his attic recently and thought it might be interesting.’
    ‘What was in the folder?’
    ‘A sheet of A4 paper.’ Doug smiled at the anticlimax. ‘But there was a poem on it written in Old French. Twelfth or thirteenth century, you’d think from the style. The minder said it was a transcription of this piece of parchment they’d found in the attic. I read through it – I’d never seen it before.’
    He said it lightly, but Ellie knew what he meant. If Doug didn’t recognise the poem, the chances were it had never been published.
    ‘Obviously I wanted to see the original, but he said it had been put in a bank vault for safekeeping. I asked if anyone else had looked at it. He said not since it came out of the attic. He didn’t know how long it had been there. They gave me the printout to study and asked me to let them know what I thought.’
    They were approaching the weir at Sandford lock. A red sign on pilings in the river warned DANGER AHEAD . Despite the sun and her snug coat, Ellie shivered.
    Doug checked his watch. ‘We should head home. I’ve invited Annabel and Mark for supper.’
    Ellie tried not to look disappointed. She squeezed his hand. ‘I thought we could be on our own tonight.’
    ‘I invited them ages ago. It’ll be fine.’
    Annabel was a wispy woman who always seemed vaguely surprised to find herself in the twenty-first century. Mark was the sort of man who came to Oxford