The Orpheus Descent by Tom Harper Read Free Book Online Page B

to a lump in his stomach, disappointed and uncertain. He took out his mobile. Still nothing.
    Richard piloted the car along the dirt track and onto the coastal highway. Jonah stared out the window as they drove half a mile down the road, then turned in at a stonemason’s. Beyond it, along a track, a two-storey farmhouse stood on the edge of a field circled by citrus trees and shiny barbed wire. The drive had taken three minutes.
    He could have walked it in ten, fifteen tops. Instead, he’d wasted almost three-quarters of an hour waiting for Richard. He stamped against the footwell in frustration as Richard opened the gate.
    The house had a porch, where half a dozen volunteers sat cross-legged with buckets of muddy water, scrubbing pink pot fragments with toothbrushes. Clean pieces lay out on mesh racks in the sun: they reminded Jonah of the pictures you saw after air crashes, warehouses where investigators tried to reverse-engineer a catastrophe out of its debris.
    ‘Is Lily here?’
    A muscled boy in a green vest looked up. ‘Haven’t seen her.’
    ‘We just got here a half-hour ago,’ added the girl beside him, in an American accent. ‘She could be upstairs.’
    Jonah took the steps two at a time. The lab was a plain room with a few wooden tables pushed together in the middle that reminded him of a school science lab. There was a dirty sink, a microscope, a computer, and plastic bags filled with pottery. A half-assembled black vase stood on the table, next to a grinning skull.
    Lily wasn’t there.
    ‘She must have gone back to the hotel.’ Richard had come up behind him. ‘She said she’d been feeling the heat.’
    Jonah stared around the room, as if Lily might emerge from under the table, or step out of one of the pictures on the wall. The sweat on his face felt ice cold.
    Richard was in a different world. ‘I’ll run you back to the hotel,’ he offered. ‘She’s probably in the pool.’
    Lily was a waterbaby. That first dig in Greece, she’d paced him stroke for stroke as they swam out to the little islet just off shore, hauling themselves up on the rocks, careful to avoid the sea urchins that could stab your feet like needles. He told her she was a dolphin in a past life; the first present he ever bought her was a dolphin pendant.
    A door opened, an office beyond. A girl popped her head out. She was young, like the rest of them, with long brown hair and minimal clothing. She noticed Jonah, and her eyes seemed to stay on him a moment longer than necessary.
    ‘Can I help?’
    ‘I’m looking for Lily.’
    Unselfconsciously, the girl put a hand to her shoulder and straightened her bra strap. ‘You’re Jonah, right? She said you were coming today.’
    ‘Is she here?’
    ‘Um, I’m not really sure.’ She looked back to Richard. ‘There’s something you need to look at in here.’
    ‘Won’t be a minute.’
    Without apology, Richard went in and closed the door behind him. Jonah almost knocked it down to take his car keys so he could get back to the hotel. After hanging around at the dig, now this, he thought something would explode inside him.
    Richard always was a prick, he thought. He flopped onto one of the battered chairs and closed his eyes. Ever since he woke up he’d been feeling he’d come into a different world, that someone had rearranged the furniture on him while he slept.
    You’re not thinking straight
, he told himself. The heat, the tiredness, the end-of-tour emptiness. Of course Lily was back at the hotel. If he hadn’t stopped for that last coffee at the Autogrill, he’d have caught her at breakfast.
    He opened his eyes. On the table, the incomplete skull stared back at him. It had one eye socket, and a hard ball of earth filling the space where the brain used to be.
    I know how you feel.
    He looked around, trying to find Lily in the lab’s clutter. Minor artefacts covered the table in ziplocked bags, each one with a slip of paper noting where it had been found. Some of the