It was not consciously intended as a clumsy compliment but he realized that was how it sounded even before her eyebrows arched. He felt himself flushing under that amused gaze and turned to look out of the window at the panorama of valley and hills which was what he had consciously been referring to anyway.

“Yes, it is lovely countryside, beautiful and brutal by turns,” said Frek, as if she valued both qualities equally.

The window was slightly open and he heard voices below. Looking down, he saw directly below him the Range Rover parked outside the front door. Gerald and Sister Angelica were getting into it. A moment later, the engine started and the car pulled away.

“Now that’s interesting,” said Madero.

Where the car had been standing was a mosaic in the form of an eight-pointed star with at its center a circle of gold infilled with white. There were letters printed both in the white and on the gold margin.

“You recognize it, of course?”

A test? He closed his eyes, remembered what Max had told him, ran his mental eye over the possibilities and said, “The Order of Pius IX. Virtuti et Merito.”

“Well done. My grandfather received it years ago, long before I was born. My great-grandfather, the one who insisted on the portrait in uniform, again wanted to mark the distinction with another painting. Grandfather refused, but finally compromised on a permanent reproduction of the award itself. Even here he insisted that the commemorative design should be set at ground level where people would tread on it and only see it if humble enough to lower their gaze. In fact this room gives the best view. It’s a pebble mosaic, using stones from local Irish Sea beaches. You saw the designer briefly when we first met. Thor Winander, down at the Forge.”

“A talented man.”

“Oh yes. Thor has many talents,” she said with her secretive little smile. “Now I’ll leave you to get down to work or admire the view as you please. Till lunch, then.”

She left. It would have been easy to indulge his fantasies a little longer, but at the seminary he’d been famous for his concentration. Before the door closed, he was riffling through the loose sheets. Builder’s plans, household accounts, letters in various hands.

He put them to one side and opened the first of the leather-bound volumes. The page before him was covered in a minuscule scrawl. He took a powerful magnifying glass out of his briefcase and began to read.

Within a very few minutes all residual thought of Frek and her lily-white flesh had vanished from his mind.

Sam stood at the open end of the smithy and removed her Ray-Bans to let her eyes adjust to the change of light.

The scene before her was like an old painting, all heavy shadow and lurid glow. Winander was shoveling coals on to a forge. The air was heavy with the pungent smell of fire and hot metal.

“There you are,” said Winander. “Just as well that wanked-out priest got a lift. He looked fit to collapse.”

He dropped the shovel with a clatter that made Sam start. She tried to conceal the movement but he grinned to let her know he’d noticed, then went to a cool-box on a trestle at the back of the smithy and took out a can of beer.

“Need to keep your liquor level up in here,” he said. “Catch.”

He tossed her the can which she caught with one-handed ease. It was ice cold and the label boasted it was the strongest Australian lager you could buy.

“You trying to stereotype me, Mr. Winander?” she said.

“No. I’m not that subtle. The stuff was on offer last time I got into a supermarket. Never pass up on a bargain, Miss Flood.”

He raised his eyebrows comically as he spoke. His eyes had a distinctly flirtatious twinkle. How did he get it there? she asked herself. With an eyedropper?

“Bit hard on Mr. Madero, aren’t you? Calling him a ‘wanked-out priest?’” she said.

“Did I say wanked-out? I meant dropped-out,” he said. “Decided there were better ways of spending his life than wearing a skirt and pretending he never got horny. Perhaps I did mean wanked-out.”

He ripped the ring-pull off a can, raised it high and let the beer arc into his mouth. Some of it ran down his cheeks and jaw on to his body. He was sucking his belly in, she noticed. Did he really think he was impressing her?

As if sensing a challenge, he set down his can and moved back to the forge where he put his right foot on a set of foot-bellows and began to pump the dull red coals to a white-hot heat.

It was a pretty effective performance, she had to admit. His skin was almost as brown as her own, his torso still slab muscled despite the waistline sag. His plentiful body hair was rejuvenated from gray to ruddy gold by the reflected fire. With each bend of the knee she could see the contours of his huge thigh muscle outlined against his trousers before he drove his foot down in a rhythmic movement which a susceptible woman might find erotically mesmeric.

And where, she wondered, sucking at her lager, did these mesmerized women pay the price of their susceptibilities? Did he take them here in the heat of the forge, creating Thor-like thunder by beating his hammer against the huge anvil as he grappled them close, then mocking their ecstatic cries as he entered by plunging a length of glowing metal into the cooling trough? Or did the great god carry them up to his god-size bed?

Or was he past all that and just enjoying talking the talk even though he could no longer walk the walk? Geriatric sexuality wasn’t an area she had much experience of. Unlike Martie, she hadn’t had to fight the dirty old dons off. Sometimes basilisk eyes came in useful.

She yawned widely, then said, “Is that good for your heart with the extra weight you’re carrying? I’d really like to hear what you can tell me about my namesake before you drop dead.”

He stopped straightaway. To do him justice he didn’t seem out of breath. Also he smiled as if acknowledging a telling stroke and let his belly bulge over his waistband.

“Let’s get to it then,” he said. “You look ready for a refill.”

He tossed her another can. Rather to her surprise she realized he was right and the first one was empty. He led her out of a door at the back of the smithy into a cobbled courtyard. Here she could see the rear of the main house and alongside it what had probably been a barn but which now had wide plate-glass windows to admit light into what looked like an artist’s workshop.

The yard itself was scattered with the materials of his trade, or rather his trades. Lumps of wood, chunks of rock, a tubful of seashells, another of polished stones, some wrought-iron garden tables and chairs, and a small menagerie of delicate and detailed wildlife in various metals. But the thing which caught the eye was a tree stump standing upright on the cobbles and leaning back against the smithy wall.

The barkless and sun-bleached surface of the bole curved and twisted with a kind of monumental muscularity, as if some huge beast were trying to escape from the confining wood, an impression confirmed by the topmost section which was in the process of being carved into a gaping-jawed wolf’s head. It was both repellent and compulsively attractive.

Sam went close and ran her hands over the sinuous undulations, feeling the grain against her skin.

“Irresistible, isn’t it? Not a gender thing either. Men and women both the same,” said Winander close behind her.

“It’s the Wolf-Head Cross, isn’t it? The other one I read about in Peter K.’s Guide.”

“Now why should you think that?”

She peered at the residual branches which formed an irregular stubby crossbar.

“The nail holes are a bit of a giveaway,” she said. “Did you put them there?”

“Nail holes? What an imagination you have! A few beetle holes perhaps. It’s exactly as it was when we dragged it out of the Moss, except a bit drier.”