The route retraces the hokum of Dan Brown’s best-selling fiction in London, following in the footsteps of Robert Langdon and Sophie Neveu, the heroes played by Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou in the spin-off movie. I had been hoping for rain, for some gothic gloom, a fanfare of thunder, a crack of lightning but, alas, the River Thames glitters gold in the afternoon sun, the wrong kind of alchemy altogether. As if on cue, the church’s organ shatters the silence - something by Bach - like a movie soundtrack, prompting visions of the gripping kidnap scene, the gunfire, Silas the red-eyed albino monk from Opus Dei pressing his knife to Neveu’s throat, Teabing bundled into a getaway car. Hicks’s arms become a flurry, pointing up, to the left and right, then above our heads, to symbols linking the Templars to Freemasonry and across the road to the law courts of the Old Bailey. Then there’s a headlong rush down the stairwell of Temple Tube, where Langdon and Neveu jump the barrier, pacing the platform, keen to race to the nearby sanctum of Westminster Abbey, where the next clue, and its solution, await.

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