‘Are you always sarcastic when you are uncomfortable?’

‘Can we get latte?’

Christine chuckled. ‘I’ve one more place to show you.’ She led him out of the temple and Rob felt a serious relief as they exited the clammy, fetid darkness. They headed up a slope of scree and hot dust. Turning for a moment to take a breath, Rob saw a child staring at them from one of the humble houses. A small dark face in a broken window.

Christine scrambled up and over a final rise. ’The Temple of Venus.’

Rob climbed the last metres of scree to stand beside her. The wind was brisk up here, yet still burning hot. He could see for miles. It was an extraordinary landscape. Miles and miles of endless, rolling, blanched-out desolation. Dying hills of dead rocks. The mountains were marked with the black empty sockets of caves. These were, Rob presumed, more temples and pagan shrines, each more derelict than the last. He stared at the floor on which they stood, the floor of a temple, open to the sky. ‘And all this was built when?’

‘Possibly by the Assyrians, or the Canaanites. No one knows for certain. It’s very old. The Greeks took it over, then the Romans. It was certainly a place of human sacrifice.’ She pointed out some grooves in the carved rock beneath them, ‘See. That was to let the blood flow out.’

‘OK…’

‘All these early Levantine religions were very keen on sacrifice.’

Rob looked out across the desert hills and down at the little village. The child with the face was gone; the broken window was empty. One of the cars was on the move: taking the valley road out of Sogmatar. The road ran alongside a dried up old river bed. The course of a dead river.

Rob imagined being sacrificed up here. Your legs tied with rough twine, your hands bound behind your back, the foul breath of the priest in your face; and then the thud of pain as the knife plunged into your ribcage…

He breathed deeply and wristed the sweat from his forehead. It was surely time to go. He gestured in the direction of their car. Christine nodded and they walked down the hill to the waiting Land Rover. But halfway down the slope, Rob stopped. He stared at the hill.

Suddenly: he knew. He had worked out what the numbers meant.

The numbers in Breitner’s notebook.

The weather was still grim. The lead-grey sky was as sombre as the green and windswept fields beneath. Boijer, Forrester and Alisdair Harnaby were in a big dark car, speeding south across the Isle of Man. Ahead of them was another long black car: containing DCC Hayden and his colleagues.

Forrester was feeling the anxiety. Time was passing: slipping from his grasp. And every minute they lost brought them all closer to the next horror. The next inevitable murder.

He sighed, heavily. Almost angrily. But at least they were now onto something: following a proper lead. A farmer had spotted something odd in a remote corner of the Isle, way down in the south near Castletown. Forrester had urgently persuaded Alisdair Harnaby to come along for the interview, as he felt the man might be good for some more information. The historical angle. It seemed important.

But first Forrester wanted to know what the CNN woman had said; Boijer was keen to divulge. The Finnish DS explained that Angela Darvill had heard about the Craven Street case ‘from some hack on the Evening Standard’.

‘So she linked them,’ said Forrester. ‘Fair enough.’

‘Yes that’s right, sir. But she said something else. Apparently there was a similar case. New York State and Connecticut. In New England.’

‘How similar?’

‘Same kind of elaborate torture.’

‘Star of David?’

Boijer said no, then added, ‘But carvings in the skin, yes. And flayings. She said it was one of the most horrible cases she’d ever covered.’

Forrester sat back and looked out of the window. Low damp sober green hills stretched away on all sides. Small farms dotted the rural emptiness, and small hunched trees, with their branches shaved brusquely and bizarrely to an angle by the prevailing winds. The scenery reminded him of a holiday he’d once taken in Skye. There was a melancholy beauty to the landscape, a melancholy beauty which edged close to real, haunting sadness. Forrester drove the thought of his daughter from his mind, and asked: ‘Who committed the murders?

‘They never found out. Weird though: the similarity, I mean…’

Ahead of them the road dwindled to little more than a rutted track, which led on through the wind-battered hedgerows to a farm. The two cars parked. The five policemen and the amateur historian walked down the track towards the low-slung white farmhouse. Boijer stared down at his shoes, now soggy with clay, and tutted with a young man’s vanity. ‘Damn. Look at that.’

‘Should have brought your wellies, Boijer.’

‘Didn’t know we were going hiking, sir. Can I claim these on exes?’

Forrester was glad to laugh. ‘See what I can do.’

One of the white helmeted constables accompanying Hayden knocked on the door of the farmhouse, and at last it was opened by a surprisingly young man. Forrester wondered why the word ‘farmer’ always conjured up an image of a middle aged gent brandishing a hoe, or a shotgun. This farmer was handsome and no more than twenty-five.

‘Hello, hello. The Deputy…?’

‘Chief Constable,’ supplied Hayden. ‘Yes. And you must be Gary?’

‘Yep. I’m Gary Spelding. We spoke on the blower. Come in, guys. Horrible day!’

They crowded into the warm, welcoming, and pinewoody farmhouse kitchen. Biscuits were arrayed on a plate: Boijer grabbed one with enthusiasm.

Forrester was suddenly conscious of their numbers. Five was too many. But they all wanted to know about the lead. What Spelding had seen. Over two potfuls of tea, provided by his smiling wife, Spelding told his story. The afternoon of the murder he had been fixing a gate on his farm. He was about to head back home, the job done, when he’d seen ‘something strange’. Forrester let his tea go cold as he listened.

‘It was a big four by four. Chelsea tractor.’

Hayden leaned over the kitchen table keenly. ‘Where exactly?’

‘Road at the end of the farm. Balladoole.’

Harnaby interrupted. ‘I know it.’

‘Course we get a few tourists there now and again. The beach is just beyond. But these guys were different…’ Spelding swivelled his mug of tea, and smiled at Hayden. ‘Five young men. In telecoms overalls.’

‘Sorry?’ said Boijer.

Spelding turned to Forrester’s junior. ‘They were all wearing big green overalls, with Manx telecom insignia. Mobile phone company.’

Forrester took over the questioning. ‘And they were doing what?

‘Just wandering around my fields. And I thought that was odd. Pretty odd. Yep.’ Spelding sipped some tea. ‘Not least because we have no masts down here, no reception. It’s a deadzone for mobiles. So I wondered what they were doing. And they were all young. Young guys. But it was nearly dark and pretty cold so they weren’t surfers.’

‘Did you talk to them?’

Spelding blushed faintly. ‘Well I was gonna. They were walking on my farm, for a start. But the way they looked at me when I went near…’

‘Was?’

‘Nasty. Just…’ The farmer’s blush deepened. ’Kind of nasty. Glaring. So I thought discretion was the better option. Rather cowardly, sorry. And then I saw your press conference on the news and I started to wonder…’

DCC Hayden sank the rest of his tea. He looked at Forrester, then back at Spelding.

Over the next half hour they got the remaining information from Gary Spelding. Detailed descriptions of the men: all tall and young. Descriptions of the car: a black Toyota Landcruiser, though Spelding could remember no numberplate. But at least it was a lead. A break. Forrester knew these were likely to be the men there were looking for. Posing as Telecoms workmen was a good cover. There were phone masts everywhere; everyone wanted mobile coverage, 24/7. You could work late at night without arousing suspicion. ‘We’ve got a network failure.’