Open Sesame by Tom Holt

the wee small hours, had wasted their labours as far as snaring his attention went; the Earth remained unshattered and the Thames refused to burn. Until, that is, a snippet on Page Five caught his eye, bringing him up as sharply as a whale dropping sideways onto a busy motorway.
    MUSEUM BREAKIN
    He frowned, and the point of his nose twitched. In the office the phone was ringing, but he ignored it.
    Artistic licence and verbal coloratura once pared away, the gist of the story was that in the hours of darkness, some cunning and fearless athlete had managed to break into the Natural History Museum in South Kensington, bypassing the alarms, hoodwinking the electronic eyes, scaling the high walls, squiggling in through a window so tiny that light only managed to squeeze through it one photon at a time, hopscotching a tightrope-thin path through state-of-the-art pressure pads and tripwire beams, all in order to jemmy one dusty cabinet of defunct bird’s eggs and remove one solitary exhibit. True, the scribe admitted, it was a funny old egg, not quite like anything the experts had ever seen before; but somehow nobody had ever got desperately excited about it, and it had sat there gathering dust these twenty years without anyone even bothering to think of a name for it (although the porters used to call it Benedict). And now, it seemed, someone had gone to all this trouble to swipe the wretched thing. Lord, the writer appeared to suggest, what fools these mortals be.
    Mr Barbour let the paper slide to the floor, where its delaminating pages lapped round his feet like the sea. He was sitting there, staring at the wall with his mouth open, when his receptionist arrived.
    ‘What’s the matter?’ she said. ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
    Mr Barbour pulled himself together; you could virtually hear the click. ‘Oh that’s what it was,’ he replied crisply. ‘Patient with his head under his arm, I was beginning to wonder. All right, Sharon, the lions are ready. Bring on the first Christian.’
    But all day he wasn’t, as Sharon observed, quite himself. You had to know him well to realise, of course; but there was something about his manner, as his drill screamed through bone, that hinted that his mind was somewhere far away. Usually, she’d have said if pressed, he’s so full of it, but today he’s only fairly full of it. Sharon, whose husband was an accountant, put it down to a letter from the Inland Revenue and got on with her work. Nobody else seemed to notice.
    ‘Okay,’ his voice trilled through the intercom at a quarter to six, ‘bring us your huddled masses, your aching molars, your inflamed gums, and we will make them worse. Any more for any more?’
    ‘Just Miss Partridge,’ Sharon replied. ‘You did her an upper back left filling on Tuesday last and it’s causing some discomfort.’
    ‘Wheel the poor girl in before I die of shame, then bolt the doors and make a run for it. I’ll lock up.’
    ‘Thanks, Mr B. Goodnight.’ Sharon lifted her head, flipped the switch and smiled at Miss Partridge. ‘He’s ready for you now if you’d like to go through.’
    Michelle nodded, braced herself and went in. Ever since she’d taken the ring off she’d felt much better, except that her damned tooth had started hurting. That was odd, in itself; she’d been going to Mr Barbour since she was a child, and generally a tooth fixed by him was a tooth fixed in perpetuity. Perhaps she was just falling to bits generally, and would have to be sent back to the manufacturers.
    ‘I’m terribly sorry about this,’ Mr Barbour said, after a minute or so with the mirror and a little toothpick. ‘For some reason best known to itself, the little varmint’s not behaving itself at all. You haven’t been chewing iron bars, gnawing through ropes, anything like that?’
    ‘Mmmmh,’ Michelle replied. ‘Mmm mm.’
    ‘Quite so,’ Mr Barbour said. ‘I can see your point. I’m afraid there’s nothing for it but to go back