‘Here’s a number by a picture, seems to be a dog or a pig…or something.’

‘What’s the number?’

‘Two hundred and nineteen. So, two nineteen?’

Rob found the relevant passage: ‘“And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them…”’

Quietness filled the flat. Rob could still hear the cries of the cucumber seller floating up from the dusty streets below. Christine gazed at him intently. ‘Breitner thought he was digging up-’

‘Yes. The Garden of Eden.’

They stared across the sofa at each other.

Forrester was researching human sacrifice, in his London office. His coffee sat on his desk next to a photo of his son holding a beach ball and a picture of his snowy-blonde daughter, beaming and happy. It was a photo taken just before her death.

Sometimes when the black dog of depression was at his heels, Forrester would lay the photo of his daughter face down on the desk. Because it was just too painful, too piercing. Thinking about his daughter sometimes gave Forrester a kind of sharp chest pain, as if he had a fractured rib digging into his lungs. It was such a physical pain that he would almost vocalize it.

But most of the time it wasn’t quite this bad. Usually, he was able to look past the pain-to other people’s pain. This morning the photo stood on the desk ignored, his daughter’s happy still-alive smile white and bright. Forrester was transfixed by his computer screen, Googling away at ‘human sacrifice’.

He was reading about the Jews: the early Israelites who burned their children. Alive. They did this, Forrester learned, in a valley just south of Jerusalem-Ben-Hinnom. Wikipedia told the DCI that this valley was also known as Gehenna. The valley of Gehenna was Hell to the Canaanite, the ‘valley of the shadow of death’.

Forrester read on. According to historians, in ancient times Israelite mothers and fathers would bring their firstborn children down to the valley, outside the gates of Jerusalem, and there they would place their screaming babies into the hollow brass stomach of a huge statue dedicated to the Canaanite demon god Moloch. The brass bowl in the centre of the enormous statue of Moloch also functioned as a brazier. Once the babies and children were in the brass bowl, fires were lit under the statue, which heated the brass, thereby roasting the children to death. As the children screamed to be saved, priests would pound enormous drums to drown out the shrieks and save the mothers from undue distress, from having to listen to their children burning alive.

Forrester sat back, his heart pounding like the drums of an Israelite ritual. How could anyone do such a thing? How could anyone sacrifice their own children? Unbidden, Forrester thought of his own children, his daughter, his dead daughter. The firstborn of the family.

Rubbing his eyes, he scrolled through some more pages.

The sacrifice of firstborn was a common motif in ancient history, it seemed. All kinds of peoples-Celts, Mayans, Goths, Vikings, Norsemen, Hindus, Sumerians, Scythians, American Indians, Incas, many others-sacrificed humans, and many of them sacrificed the first child. Often this was done as a so-called ‘foundation sacrifice’ when a strategically important or sacred structure was being built: before the main construction took place the community would sacrifice a child, usually a firstborn, and they would bury the corpse under the arch or pillar or door.

Forrester inhaled, and exhaled. He clicked another link. The sky outside was bright, the sunshine of late spring. The DCI was too absorbed in his macabre task to notice or care.

Aztec sacrifices were especially blood-thirsty. Homosexuals would be ritually killed by having their intestines ripped out through their rectums. Enemy warriors would have their living hearts torn from their chest cavities by priests whose heads were daubed with the human offal of their previous victims.

He read on. And on. Supposedly the Great Wall of China was built on thousands of cadavers: yet more foundation sacrifices. The Japanese once venerated a hitobashira-a human pillar-beneath which virgins were buried alive. Enormous cenotes, or water cisterns, were used by the Mayans of Mexico as drowning lakes for maidens and children. And there was more. The pre-Roman Celts would stab a victim in the heart and then divine the future from the death spasms of the thrashing body. The Phoenicians killed literally thousands of babies as atonement and buried them in ‘tophets’-great baby cemeteries.

And on, and on. Forrester sat back feeling a little sick. Yet he also felt he was making progress. The ritual murder in the Isle of Man and the attempted murder in Craven Street had to be connected with sacrifice, not least because the murderers had gathered at the spot of a historically proven sacrifice. But what linked them?

He took a deep breath, like someone about to dive in a very cold pond, and Googled ‘Star of David’.

After forty minutes of searching through Jewish history he found what he needed. It was on some lunatic American website, possibly a Satanist site. But lunacy was just what Forrester was investigating. The mad website told him the Star of David was also known as the Star of Solomon, as the ancient Jewish king had allegedly used it as his magical emblem. The symbol was abjured by some modern rabbinical authorities because of its occult associations. Solomon was reported to have used the Star on the temple he raised to Moloch, the Canaanite demon, where he committed animal and human sacrifice.

Forrester read the webpage again. And again. And for a third time. The Star of David was not what the murderers were etching into their victims. They were cutting the Star of Solomon. A symbol closely associated with human sacrifice.

And the head shaving?

That took only three minutes to Google.

Victims of sacrifice in many cultures were purified in various ways before the ritual. They were bathed, or required to fast, sometimes they would be shaved of all hair. Some would have their tongues cut out.

Forrester’s thesis was confirmed. The murderers were obsessed or engaged with the concept of human sacrifice. But why?

He stood up and massaged his neck muscles. He’d been reading for three hours. His mind was buzzing with the pulse of the computer screen. All this was well and good. But they had no actual leads on the murder gang. All the Manx ports were being watched. The airport was under surveillance. But he had little hope they would catch the gang that way: they would surely have split up and fled the isle at once. Dozens of boats and ferries and airplanes left Man every day at all hours; most likely the gang had left Douglas before the corpse was even discovered. The only real hope was looking for CCTV images of the black Toyota. But it could take weeks for the available footage to be scanned.

Forrester sat down again and tugged his swivel chair nearer to the screen. He had three things left to research.

Jerusalem Whaley was a member of this club of roistering aristocrats: the Irish Hellfire Club. As the Manx historian had told him. But how was that fact linked to sacrifice? To the murders? Was it linked at all?

And the bones in Craven Street, in Benjamin Franklin’s House, what was all that about?

These two queries led to his third question: everywhere they went, the gang dug something up. What were they looking for?

His initial search was simple and immediately successful. Forrester typed in Benjamin Franklin and Hellfire and the very first hit gave him his answer: Benjamin Franklin, the founding father of America, was a good friend of Sir Francis Dashwood, and Sir Francis Dashwood was the founder of the Hellfire Club. Indeed, according to some authorities, Benjamin Franklin was himself a member of the Hellfire Club.