Revelation

'I just have, thanks.'

Romella said, 'Okay, let's go.'

Out to the landing. She pulled the door behind her with a click. Someone was coming up the stairs. Findhorn froze.

'Evening, Mrs Essen.'

An old crone with a plastic bag in each hand; she grunted sourly as they passed. Findhorn exhaled with relief, felt weak at the knees.

The sky was dark grey and a light trickle of sleet was promising heavier stuff to come. 'We're about a mile from Dougie's flat. You don't sound like an Armenian.'

'Not surprising, considering I'm frae Glesca…' she momentarily affected a thick Cowcaddens accent '…I was brought up for some years in California. My folks still live there, in La Jolla. Dad's a lawyer. So your father's a Court of Session judge?'

'Yes. The whole family are lawyers. If you ever see a pink Porsche driving around Edinburgh, that's my younger brother, Dougie. He's with Sutcliffe & McWhirtle.'

'I've heard of them. They're criminal lawyers, aren't they?'

'Dad thinks they're criminals who just happen to be lawyers. They specialise in finding tiny legal loopholes and turning them into gaping chasms. They'll get you off anything — if you can afford them. My sister lives in Virginia Water with a barrister called Bramfield. He's rich, she's miserable and they're both drunk whenever I visit them.'

'But you didn't go in for law. Your card says you do polar research.'

'I've broken with the family legal tradition. Result, poverty.'

'I hope you can afford my fees.'

It was growing dark and car headlights were coming on. The gloom gave Findhorn an illusion of security. They passed Fat Sam's and turned left down Lothian Road. By the time they were crossing Princes Street the rush hour was in full swing and the light sleet had turned into a freezing downpour. They trotted along slushy pavements down to Charlotte Square. Here the grey terraced flats had doors with up-market brass knockers and brass plates proclaiming private medical practices, tax consultants and law firms with bizarre names. Interspersing these were private flats with names ending in Q.C. and enormous lamps in the windows.

Shivering with cold, Findhorn turned up a short flight of broad, granite stairs. He fiddled with some keys, opened a heavy door with a brass plate saying Mrs M. MacGregor, and switched on a light.

They were met by opulence and cold. Pink Venetian chandeliers threw glittering light over a patterned Axminster carpet, a little Queen Anne table with a pseudo-thirties telephone and half a dozen stained-glass doors. Jazz players cavorted amongst spiral galaxies and naked angels on a high vaulted ceiling. Stairs at the end of the corridor curved out of sight; they were guarded by a big wooden lion, and a scantily draped Eve was eating a marble apple on the first landing.

Romella laughed with delight and surprise. 'The Sistine Chapel!'

'Dougie's into surrealism,' said Findhorn. He turned a knob on the wall and there was a faint whump! from a distant central heating boiler. 'He's in Gstaad just now. He skiis there over the winter.'

Into a living room with a hideous black marble fireplace, a floor-to-wall bookcase, and a faded wallpaper effect expensively created with hand-blocked Regency patterns. Light cumulus clouds floated on a sky-blue ceiling.

'Wait till you see the bedrooms,' Findhorn said. He switched on a coal-effect fire and headed for a cocktail cabinet made up to look like a Barbados rum shack.

Romella flopped down on a cream leather settee. 'The bedrooms. A gin and tonic, please, and don't overdo the tonic'

Findhorn poured two glasses and sank into an armchair. Then he pulled the photocopies from his briefcase and put them on a glass table between them. 'There are people after these diaries. And they're looking for me. You ought to know that before you start because if you help me they might come looking for you too.'

Her low, gentle laugh was captivating. 'That must be the weirdest chat-up line ever. Certainly it's the most original I've ever had.'

'You can come and go as you please, but I'm staying here. I don't want to risk the streets more than I have to.'

'Here am I, all alone in a big empty flat with a weirdo. It's like something out of Psycho.' She said it jokingly but Findhorn thought there was a trace of uneasiness in her voice. 'You're kidding about people looking for you, right?'

'No, I'm serious. Maybe you want to pull out.'

'If you're into drugs…'

'Look, if it makes you feel safer why don't you ask your friend Stefi to come over? And Grim Jim and anyone else you want — a boyfriend if you have one. You can all stay here. There's plenty of room.'

'Okay, I'll ask Stefi. A little girl company might be good. The phone people aren't disconnecting us until tomorrow.' Romella waved a hand around. 'She'll love this. Jim's on a field trip over Christmas, he's a geology student.' She sipped at the drink. 'Are you going to tell me the real story on this stuff?'

'I am serious. There's something in the diaries. I have no idea what it is. But there are people very anxious to get their hands on them and I have been threatened. What I need is a translator to help me solve the riddle. And I have to stay out of sight while I'm about it. They're looking for me in Edinburgh and I can't risk railway stations and the like. I know I come out sounding like a mad axeman on the run from Carstairs.'

Romella was sitting unnaturally still. Findhorn waited. He added, 'I need your help. Your fees are secondary.'

'Let me phone Stefi.'

Findhorn headed for the kitchen, G&T in hand. He half-expected to hear the front door banging shut as Romella made her escape. A thirties-style light blue refrigerator held nothing more than a bar of Swiss chocolate, a few out-of-date yoghurts and a wedge of diseased Stilton.

Romella appeared; she had taken off her denim jacket. 'I've given Stefi the story. Wild horses won't keep her away — she's a bit of a romantic. She's Bulgarian and I suspect she has Romany blood from somewhere. She promises to keep out of our hair while we're translating. She's coming over with clothes and food and stuff.'

'Brilliant.' Findhorn saw no point in hiding his relief and he grinned.

'And she loves to cook.' Romella thought of the highest number she dared. 'I think I want to charge a hundred pounds a day for this one.'

'Agreed,' Findhorn said without hesitation. 'And Stefi gets twenty plus expenses for housekeeping.'

'Well now, Fred Findhorn B.Sc, Ph.D., Arctic explorer in a hurry, why don't we get started?'

The big living room was now comfortably warm and Findhorn sank into the settee beside Romella. He passed over the copy of The Times obituary. 'By way of background.' She started to read out loud:

Lev Baruch Petrosian, who is presumed to have died in an Arctic plane crash, began his career by making a number of important contributions to the so-called quantum theory which underlies the modern understanding of matter and radiation. He is better known, however, as a physicist involved in the wartime development of the atomic bomb, and later in the development of the hydrogen bomb during the Cold War period. A cloud hangs over his career in that he has been suspected of espionage, although the charge was never proven. Mystery surrounds the fatal Arctic air crash…

She paused and looked at Findhorn, eyebrows raised.

… in which it is rumoured that he was escaping to the Soviet Union to avoid arrest.

The son of a shepherd, Petrosian was born in a cottage in the Pambak mountains of Armenia on 29 December 1911. His early years were as eventful as his later ones. Orphaned at an early age in the course of a Turkish massacre of Armenian Christians, he escaped as a child with an uncle to Baku on the shores of the Caspian Sea, shortly before that city fell to the Turks, allied to the Germans, in 1918. Smuggled out in a British troop ship, they reached Persia where they stayed until the end of the Great War.