They went straight into the house, through the main doors. Two younger men wearing antiputrefaction masks glanced at Forrester. One of them was holding a tin of aluminium powder. They stepped into another room. Forrester went to follow the forensic officers but Hayden touched him on the arm. ‘No,’ he said, ‘the garden.’

The house was enormous, yet characterless inside. It had been brutally converted into offices: someone had ripped out the previous interiors and installed strip lighting and grey partitions, filing cabinets and computers. There were models of boats and ferries on some of the desks. A couple of nautical charts hung on a wall; the offices presumably belonged to a shipping corporation or marine design company.

Following the Deputy Chief, Forrester stepped into a hallway from which big glass doors opened on to a wide rear garden, closed in on all sides by high hedges, and a wooded rise right at the back. The garden had been rudely dug up in various places; in the middle of these chewed-up green lawns was a large, yellow, crime scene tent, the flap zipped shut, concealing whatever was inside.

Hayden opened the glass doors and they walked the few yards to the yellow tent. He turned to the two London officers. ‘Are you ready?’

Forrester felt impatient. ‘Yes, of course.’

Hayden pulled back the flap.

‘Fuck,’ said Forrester.

The corpse was of a man in his thirties, he guessed. It had its back to them; and it was stark naked. But it wasn’t that which caused him to swear. The man’s head had been buried headdown in the lawn-with the rest of his body sticking out. The position was at once comical and deeply unsettling. Forrester immediately guessed the victim must have asphyxiated. The murderers must have dug a hole, forced the man’s head in, then packed the soil around, suffocating him. A nasty, weird, cold way to die. Why the hell would you do that?

Boijer was walking around the corpse, looking appalled. Even though the tent seemed to be colder than the windswept garden outside, a distinct smell came off the body. Forrester wished he had one of the SIRCHIE masks to block out the odour of decomposition.

‘There’s the Star,’ said Boijer.

He was right. Forrester walked around and looked at the front of the corpse. A Star of David had been gouged into the man’s chest; the wound looked even deeper and nastier than the torture inflicted on the janitor.

‘Fuck,’ Forrester said, again.

Standing next to him, Hayden smiled, for the first time this morning. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m glad you feel the same way. I thought it was just us.’

Three hours later Forrester and Boijer were sharing plastic cups of coffee in the big tent at the front of the mansion. The local cops were arranging a press conference, in the ‘fort’. The two Met officers were alone. The corpse had finally been moved, after thirty-six hours, to the coroner’s lab in town.

Boijer looked at Forrester. ‘Not sure the natives are very friendly.’

Forrester chuckled. ‘I think they had their own language until…last year.’

‘And cats.’ said Boijer, blowing cool air across his coffee. ‘Isn’t this the place where they have those cats without tails?’

‘Manx cats. Yep.’

Boijer stared out through the flapping open doorway of the police tent, at the big white building. ‘What would our gang be doing out here?’

‘Christ knows. And why the same symbol?’ Forrester knocked back some more coffee. ‘What more do we know about the victim? You spoke to the scene of crime guy?’

‘Yacht designer. Working upstairs.’

‘On a Sunday?’

Boijer nodded. ‘Yep. Usually the place is deserted, at weekends. But he was working his day off.’

‘So he just got unlucky?’

Boijer swept his blonde Finnish hair back from his blue Finnish eyes. ‘Like the guy in Craven Street. Probably heard a noise.’

‘Then came downstairs. And our lovely killers decided to cut him up, then stick his head in the ground like a croquet hoop. Till he died.’

‘Not very nice.’

‘What about the CCTV?’

‘Nothing.’ Boijer shrugged. ‘The woodentop told me they’d drawn a blank on the cameras, all of them. Zip.’

‘Of course. And the prints and footwear marks. They’ll get nothing. These guys are insane, but not stupid. They are the opposite of stupid.’

Forrester stepped outside the tent and gazed up at the house, blinking away the soft drizzle that was now falling. The building was dazzling white. Newly painted. Quite a landmark for local sailors. High and white and castellated, right above the jetty and the port. He scanned the battlements and scrutinized the sash windows. He was trying to work out what linked an eighteenth century house in London with what looked like an eighteenth century house in the Isle of Man. But then something struck him. Maybe it wasn’t. He squinted. There was just something wrong with this building. It wasn’t the real deal-Forrester knew enough about architecture to surmise that. The brickwork was too neat, the windows all recent-no more than ten or twenty years old. The building was evidently a pastiche, and not an especially good one. And, he decided, it was possible the killers knew this. The modern interior of the modern house was entirely undisturbed. Only the gardens had been dug up. The gang had obviously been looking for something, again. But they weren’t looking in the house. Only the garden. Apparently, they knew where to look. Apparently, they knew where not to look.

Apparently, they knew quite a lot.

Forrester turned his collar up against the chilly drizzle.

It was just getting dark by the time they climbed into Christine’s Land Rover. Rush hour. Within a few hundred metres the car had come to complete stop. Stuck in gridlock.

Christine leaned back, and sighed. She turned the radio on, and then off. Then looked at Rob. ’Tell me more about Robert Luttrell.’

‘Such as?’

‘Job. Life. You know…’

‘It’s not that interesting.’

‘Try me.’

He gave her a brief résumé of the last decade. The way he and Sally had rushed into marriage and parenthood; the discovery she was having an affair; the ensuing and inevitable divorce.

Christine listened, keenly. ‘Are you still angry about it?’

‘No. It was me, as well. I mean-it was partly my fault. I was always away. And she got lonely…And I still admire her, kind of.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Sally,’ he said. ‘She’s training to be a lawyer. That takes guts. As well as brains. To change your career in your thirties. I admire that. So it’s not like I hate her or anything…’ He shrugged. ‘We just…diverged. And married too young.’

Christine nodded, then asked about his American family. He sketched in his Scots-Irish background, the emigration to Utah in the 1880s. The Mormonism.

The Land Rover at last moved forward. Rob looked across at her. ‘And you?’

The traffic was really thinning out. She floored the pedal, accelerated. ‘Jewish French.’

Rob had guessed this by the name. Meyer.

‘Half my family died in the Holocaust. But half didn’t. French Jews did OK, in the war, comparatively.’

‘And your mum and dad?’

Christine explained that her mother was an academic in Paris, her dad a piano tuner. He had died fifteen years back. ‘In fact,’ she added, ‘I’m not sure he did much piano tuning even when he was alive. He just sat around the flat in Paris. Arguing.’

‘Sounds like my dad. Except my dad was a bastard, too.’

Christine glanced over at him. The sky behind her, framed by the car window, was purple and sapphire. A spectacular desert twilight. They were well outside Sanliurfa now. ‘You said your father was a Mormon?’

‘He is.’

‘I went to Salt Lake City once.’

‘Yeah?’

‘When I was in Mexico, working at Teotihuacan, I took a holiday in the States.’