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'Shoot.' I thought maybe the word 'shoot' wasn't the best, but it had come out.

'Go back to the bit about the secret cycle of Doctor Dee.'

I hadn't expected Zola to drive anything ordinary, and true enough we were in a thirty-year-old classic, a Reliant Scimitar with three litres of engine powering a light, silver fibreglass body, and a dashboard like the cockpit of an aeroplane. There were little hairline cracks on the massive bonnet but the black leather seats showed no sign of sag. Not that the latent power was doing us much good: we were crawling along at a few miles an hour on a roadwork-infested M25. The smell of perfume and leather were light in the air.

I flicked back the pages. 'Okay, there's the rhyme. Something about making the
"civile year with heaven agree".
And something else about
"Three hundred yeres, shall not remove The sun one day from this new match"...'

'Exactly. First clue. It has something to do with calendars.'

'With you so far,' I said.

'But not for much longer. Now here's the second clue. What's the connection between Thomas Harriot and John Dee?'

'They both belonged to the School of the Night.'

We were approaching the end of the roadworks. I sensed Zola scanning the road ahead, judging accelerations, looking for gaps. She said, 'I'm impressed, Harry. I didn't expect a grubby shopkeeper to know something like that.'

I said, ‘I know that some of the best minds of the day used to meet in Walter Raleigh's London pad, Durham House. People like Francis Drake the explorer, Molyneux the globe maker, Christopher Marlowe the playwright, John Dee the Queen's astronomer, Thomas Harriot the mathematician, and a few others. I know that several of these people had a private ear to the Queen. I know they were accused of being a school of atheism and blasphemy, practising strange rites, but in fact they were discussing things like the truth of the Old Testament, the Copernican theory, the new mathematics and navigation. They were dipping their foot into modern science, carving a future for global exploration and turning England into a global power. Apart from that, no, I don't know much about the School of the Night.'

The road was opening out. Zola had spotted a gap, dropped a gear. I felt a hard push on my back, and with a roar we were accelerating clear of a herd of cars. She said, 'There's a magic triangle in there: Raleigh, Harriot, John Dee. Now let me give you clue number three. Look at what Queen Elizabeth scribbled on John Dee's report.'

I read it out:
'Quod defertur non aufertur.
Okay, she's telling Dee that what is deferred will not be abandoned. But it's been scored out and replaced by
lacta est alia:
the die is cast.'

Zola was accelerating smoothly beyond a hundred miles an hour. 'What die, Harry?'

'Something to do with a secret cycle, and a calendar?'

'Good boy, you're coming along. Now let me tell you about John Dee's secret calendar. We have leap years because the year isn't exactly three hundred and sixty-five days long, right? There's about a quarter of a day left over at the end of each year. We count too fast.'

'So every fourth year we add an extra day to stop the drift. We have a leap year.'

'A device which goes back to Julius Caesar. Except that the drift isn't exactly a quarter of a day. The count still isn't quite right and the seasons still have a tiny drift in relation to the calendar. Not a lot, not enough to notice over a human lifetime, but over the thirteen centuries since the Church began to use this Roman calendar, the slippage had amounted to about ten days. Eventually we'd have Santa Claus appearing in the summer.'

'But the Gregorian calendar sorted this, a calendar we still use. I seem to remember it works by missing out some of the leap years.'

'All the century years are excluded unless their date's number can be divided by 400. The year 2000 was a leap year, but 1900 wasn't. The Gregorian calendar repeats on a four hundred year cycle. But there were problems with it, Harry. For a start it was Catholic. It was introduced in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII, alias a drunken womaniser called Ugo Compagni. So the Protestant states had a choice: they could either stick with their calendar, which could only get slowly worse year by year, or they could grit their teeth and adopt the superior Catholic one. These things were life and death. The calendar dates gave your religious festivals, and the Catholic and Protestant ideologies were in a no-holds-barred war.'

'What are you saying? That John Dee had invented another calendar?'

Zola nodded. The needle of the old Smith speedometer had now steadied at a hundred and ten miles an hour. Signs for Southampton were zipping past. She said, 'It was a beauty. For a start, it performed better at achieving a major goal for the civil calendar, which Pope Gregory and Philip of Spain both aimed for. That was to keep the date, March 21st, the starting point for Easter calculations, as close as possible to the vernal equinox. Vernal being Spring, and equinox being equal duration of day and night.'

'Zola, I'll grant you I went to a comprehensive school, but I did know that. But so what? What's the significance?'

'What we're seeing is an underground war fought four centuries ago, and still simmering even now. A secret war. Even today we know almost nothing about it.'

'A war?'

'Between Christ and the Antichrist.'

I looked at her in surprise. She wasn't joking. 'You're serious, right?'

'Deadly so, Harry. It was a battle for the soul, and it involved the calendar. The modern calendar, the Gregorian, works on a four hundred year cycle, a sequence of ninety-seven leap years in four hundred. Boring numbers, meaningless to the toiling peasantry. But Dee had worked out a much better system of leap years, a system which paced the calendar dates smoothly with the seasons. Eight of them repeating in a thirty-three year cycle.'

'Thirty-three years?'

'The lifetime of Jesus. You're getting there, Harry. For the common man in the sixteenth century, a calendar which paced not just the seasons but also the life of Christ would have to be divinely inspired. It would capture his heart and his mind. Pope Gregory's four hundred year one would become mincemeat. If the Protestant nations had adopted the Dee calendar they'd have completely turned the tables on the Catholic Church.'

'And it's all done by leap years?'

'Good boy again. The first Dee cycle is AD 1 to 33. Its leap years are AD 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 28 and 32. The second cycle repeats the first, running from AD 34 to 66 and so on.'

'A four-year gap between leap years? Like the Gregorian system?'

Zola shook her head, put her foot down, accelerated past a convoy and said, 'Not quite. There's a five-year gap between the last leap year of one cycle and the first leap year of the next.'

'Isn't that complicated? How are these leap years worked out?'

'Piece of cake. Take 2004 AD. Split it into 20 and 04 and add to get 24. You can divide 24 by four which makes 2004 a leap year in Dee's system. Is your brain frying yet, Harry?'

'It's not even warm. Is this as fast as you go?'

'With timid passengers, yes. And it had another priceless feature.'

'Uhuh?'

'I said that Dee's calendar is better than the Pope's at matching the spring equinox to the same calendar date each year.'

'Brain's beginning to fry,' I confessed.

'I know, Harry, you're not very bright, but I'm sure we can find a use for you. In the Gregorian calendar there can be gaps of seven ordinary years sandwiched between leap years. During those years the spring equinox slips by almost forty-one hours. It's impossible to hold to a fixed date from one year to the next. But according to the Gospels, Jesus was resurrected on the first Sunday after the first full moon following the spring equinox. Result: because of this slippage, Easter doesn't always take place on the correct biblical Sunday, astronomically speaking. A bad business if you're a devout Christian.'

'And in Dee's secret calendar? The Jesus one?'

'In Dee's calendar there are never more than four ordinary years between leap years, so the equinox drifts by less than six hours for each of these years until the fifth year brings it back with a leap-day. It never drifts by more than twenty-four hours. Now suppose that every thirty-three years, at the beginning of the big five-year gap between leap days, you could get the spring equinox to happen very soon after midnight. In that case it would cycle within the same calendar date forever. Meaning that Easter would hold more closely to the biblical expectation. I'm losing you, right?'

I hated to admit it. 'Brain's sizzling. How can you. arrange for the equinox to happen just after midnight on a particular year? Surely it happens when it happens?'

'But which midnight? Midnight in Honolulu or midnight in Greenwich? The Earth being round, Harry, midnight happens at different times at different places. You have the freedom to measure your universal time from a particular meridian on Earth, some prime meridian which defines zero degrees longitude.'

'Let me guess,' I said. 'You have to fix your prime meridian at seventy-seven degrees west.'

Zola was slipping through the gears, overtaking a lorry on the wrong side, moving swiftly up to a hundred and ten miles an hour again. She nodded. 'Measure longitude from Virginia instead of Greenwich, introduce Dee's secret cycle of leap years, and you've won the game.'

'But Philip of Spain's Catholic empire had a monopoly on God's longitude,' I said. 'The line runs through Cuba, Jamaica, Panama, Peru and so on.'

'You're nearly there, Harry.'

'Okay I get it. The English establish a colony on the seventy-seven degree meridian, operating in secret. Once they've established it, they announce the Dee calendar to the world. A calendar that paces the life of Jesus, that's more true to the Biblical Easter, that holds more closely to the seasons. Irresistible! England's influence with other Protestant nations is increased, and the Antichrist, in the form of the Pope, is stuck with flogging a second-rate ecclesiastical calendar which they'd only just introduced. Game, set and match to the Protestants. Quite a lad was our John Dee.'

'You don't know the half of it. He developed the concept of the British Empire, he was into navigation and map-making, he translated Euclid, he had the greatest library in England, he owned the Voynich manuscript - a cipher which hasn't been broken to this day, he founded the Rosicrucian Order as an antidote to the Jesuits, he advised Queen Elizabeth on matters celestial and he spied for her in Europe, using the codename 007.'

'Double-Oh-Seven? You're kidding!'

'I kid you not, Harry. He was the original James Bond.'

'Okay I'm persuaded. The School of the Night couldn't possibly have missed this. Anyway, how else can we explain Harriot's secret map? Or Ogilvie's instinct that the expedition had a secret purpose?'

Zola was scanning the road ahead, a General on manoeuvres. She moved down a gear. 'It also explains the murders onboard ship. Grenville talks about Mendoza's spies being everywhere. They must have penetrated the expedition. They were trying to destroy it from within.' Three litres of engine growled in complaint as she edged into the slow lane.

'Marmaduke StClair, Anthony Rowse, Abraham Kendall. Traitors and murderers.'

'Or patriots and freedom fighters. Depends where you're coming from.'

She was gurgling us on to a slip road, frowning. 'But it doesn't explain the desperation to get hold of the journal. It doesn't explain Toby Tebbit's murder. It doesn't explain last night. Hell, all this happened four centuries ago.' She shook her head in frustration. 'We still haven't got to the roots.'

I was flicking through the pages of the journal. 'Well. Well, well, well.'

Impatiently: 'Well what?'

I said, 'Nice try, Zola. But there's a lot more to this than calendars.'

'Harry!'

'This would fry your brain if you had one.'

'Talking about murder...'

'Just concentrate on the road, wench. I need to think about this.'

CHAPTER 17

'Any further south and we'll need a boat,' said Zola. She was trickling her Scimitar round a small square towards a narrow, steeply descending lane. I got a glimpse of sea between the houses. Then we were clear of the little village and turning right up a stony track lined with a few whitewashed cottages. She stopped at the last one.

'The key,' she said, and I accompanied her back down the track to a cottage. A door opened and a spaniel came sniffing at my legs, and a middle-aged, dumpy woman said, 'Hello, Zola, how are you? Down for the weekend?'

'That's right, Mrs Murgatroyd. This is a colleague, Harry Blake.'

Mrs Murgatroyd gave me a lightning appraisal and a 'So you're just good friends?' look. 'Do you need eggs or milk?'

In her parents' cottage, Zola went through cupboards and then got busy at an Aga. I dumped Ogilvie's journal on a big farmhouse kitchen table and wandered. The cottage was large, comfortable and old. It looked out at a cultivated garden and a vineyard just beyond it, a bonus of global warming. A grandfather clock was ticking quietly in the hallway. It was just after 9 am and it felt like four o'clock in the morning. I turned back to the kitchen and hunted for instant coffee.

'So,' she said. We'd finished a breakfast of bacon, eggs and soft cornflakes and were on our third coffee of the morning.

'So. Ogilvie went back to Harriot's cabin. He wanted to find what was hidden in Marmaduke's secret panel.'

'What? Did the boy have a deathwish?'

'Do you want to know what he found, or would you prefer to resume your interrupted sleep?'

She yawned. 'Later. We're in a race, remember?'

CHAPTER 18

I know that some day my curiosity will hang me. Even as I leave Mr Harriot's room with my heart pounding in my chest, I know that, at some stage of the voyage, I will have to find the secret lying behind the panel. The Devil is whispering in my ear: 'What is it? What is the sacred thing? Why is it so important?'