Free Secrets of the Dead by Tom Harper Page B

photograph, though that was pretty horrific: it was the emptiness. Her last passport was eight years old and had visa stamps from half the countries in the world, barely a page unfilled. ‘Your life in bureaucracy,’ Michael had teased her. And now it was gone.
    But the new passport was valid, and that was enough for the bored man at St Pancras Station who waved her through the checkpoint. Six hours and three trains later she was in Trier, wondering if she was mad to have travelled halfway across Europe on a whim. Her shoulder hurt from being squashed on trains all day; she felt as though she’d run a marathon.
    She checked into the Römische Kaiser Hotel, across the road from the Porta Nigra, the Black Gate featured on Michael’s postcard. She couldn’t stop staring at it.
    Did you see it? she asked Michael, carrying on a dialogue she ’d been having all the way from London. Did you stay in this very same hotel? When were you here?
    At least she could guess that. The letter from the museum was dated late July, a month before Michael died. Michael had been unexpectedly away around then, at a conference of EU border agencies in Saarbrücken. She thought she could remember a conversation about it: a sudden change of plan, a colleague who’d dropped out at the last minute, forcing Michael to go. He’d brought her back a sausage and a bottle of Reisling – the only good thing to come out of the conference, he’d said.
    He hadn’t mentioned going to Trier.
    Most towns, Abby supposed, stood on the foundations of the past. In Trier, past and present stood side by side. It seemed everything in the last thousand years was just a threadbare carpet laid down over the Roman town, whose remains poked through the holes at every turn. The Black Gate, four stories high and completely intact. The modern road bridge across the Moselle, supported on piers originally sunk by Roman engineers. The high brick walls of the Roman basilica, dwarfing the pink gingerbread mansion beside it. And beyond it, across a green lawn and a lake, the museum.
    She had an appointment, but the receptionist said Dr Gruber was in a meeting that had run over. Abby bought a ticket and wandered through the museum while she waited. In a long, semi-circular gallery, she found huge pieces of sculpture lined up in rows. When she read the descriptions, they all seemed to be tomb monuments.
    ‘To reach the living, it is necessary first to navigate the dead.’
    She turned. A thin man in a blue suit had come up behind her . His hair had receded, revealing a bulging, glossy forehead. He had a bony face, and a bristling moustache that ought to have gone out of fashion seventy years earlier.
    ‘Mrs Cormac?’
    That caught her out. Even when she was married, she’d never felt like a Mrs . She shook his hand. ‘Dr Gruber?’
    ‘The Romans believed that the dead contaminated the living. They buried them outside the city walls. You could not enter a Roman city without walking past the tombs, sometimes for many kilometres. That is what we try to replicate here.’
    He led her out through an unmarked door and up a flight of stairs to his office. A beige machine stood on a table against the wall. Behind the desk, tall windows overlooked the park and the high brick building across the lake.
    ‘You know what that is?’ Gruber asked.
    ‘Constantine’s basilica.’ She’d read it in a leaflet in the hotel.
    ‘It was the throne room of Constantine’s palace, when he ruled the empire from here in Trier. Der Kaiser Constantine .’ He fiddled with a pen on his desk. ‘Of course, today you ask most people, they say Beckenbauer is Der Kaiser .’
    Abby smiled as if she knew what he meant. ‘What’s the building next to it?’
    ‘The local government.’
    ‘Not quite the same as a Roman emperor.’
    ‘But functionally it is the same, no?’ He scratched at his moustache. ‘There are certain places where power abides. One thousand and seven hundred years ago,