TOM KNOX
The Babylon Rite

About the Book

The Babylon Rite is a work of fiction. However I have drawn on many real historical, archaeological and cultural sources for this book. In particular:

The ancient Knights Templar preceptory of Temple Bruer, Lincolnshire, England, has long had a reputation for evil and hauntings. In the nineteenth century, a local antiquarian, Reverend Oliver, discovered medieval skeletons entombed in the walls; he concluded that these victims had been tortured, and then buried alive.

The little church of Nosse Senhora de Guadalupe, in the Algarve, southern Portugal, was the private chapel of Henry the Navigator, one of the first great European explorers. The meaning of the sculpture in the ceiling has never been explained.

The Moche culture (pronounced Mot-Chay), which flourished in the deserts of north Peru in the fifth to ninth centuries AD, is perhaps the most peculiar of all pre-Columbian civilizations. One of the stranger aspects of Moche religion was a complex ritual known as the Sacrifice Ceremony.

This book is dedicated to my brother Ross, for his endless good humour, for his stoicism and his equanimity, and for generously sharing with me his very small cup of masato beer, made from chewed manioc and human spit, in Belen Floating Market, Iquitos.

‘It seems that a new knightly order has recently been born in the Orient. They do not fear death; instead, they long for death.’

Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, in praise of the Knights Templar, AD 1135

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

About the Book

Dedication

Epigraph

1. Trujillo, Peru

2. Rosslyn Chapel, Midlothian

3. Rosslyn Chapel, Midlothian

4. Pan-American Highway, north Peru

5. Braid Hills, Edinburgh

6. The Hinnie Tavern, Edinburgh Old Town

7. The Huacas, Zana, north Peru

8. The Bishops Avenue, London

9. Morningside, Edinburgh

10. East Finchley, north London

11. Tomb 1, Huaca D, Zana, north Peru

12. Morningside, Edinburgh

13. Interview Room D, New Scotland Yard, London

14. Huaca El Brujo, Chicama Valley, north Peru

15. The Inner Circle, Regent’s Park, London

16. Lothian & Borders Police Headquarters, Edinburgh

17. TUMP Lab, Zana, north Peru

18. Rosslyn Chapel, Midlothian

19. TUMP Lab, Zana, north Peru

20. Mornington Terrace, Camden Town, London

21. The Angel Inn, Penhill, Yorkshire

22. The American Christian Hospital, Trujillo, Peru

23. Highgate, London

24. Temple Bruer, Lincoln Heath

25. Outskirts of Chiclayo, north Peru

26. Barbican, City of London

27. Temple, London

28. Mercado de las Brujas, Chiclayo, north Peru

29. Thornhill Crescent, Islington, London

30. Canonbury Square, Islington, London

31. Thornhill Crescent, Islington, London

32. Witches’ Market, Chiclayo

33. Clapham, south London

34. Huaca D, Zana, Peru

35. Clapham Common, London

36. Huaca D, Zana, Peru

37. Domme Castle, France

38. Rodez, France

39. The Museo Larco, Lima, Peru

40. Tomar, Portugal

41. Rua Pablo Dias, Tomar, Portugal

42. The Radisson Hotel, Lima, Peru

43. The Embassy of the United States, Lima, Peru

44. Radisson Hotel, Lima

45. Iquitos, Amazonia, Peru

46. The Amazon, Peru

47. MV Myona cargo ferry, Amazon River, Peru

48. Pankarama Settlement, Ucayali River, Peru

49. Ucayali River, Peru

50. Riverplane, Ucayali, Peru

51. Le Casa de Carlos Chicomeca Monroy

52. Tepito

53. The City Complex of Teotihuacan, Mexico

54. Toloriu, the Catalunyan Pyrenees

Acknowledgements

About the Author

By Tom Knox

Copyright

About the Publisher

1
Trujillo, Peru

It was a very strange place to build a museum. Under a Texaco gas station, where the dismal suburbs of Trujillo met the cold and foggy deserts of north Peru, in a wasteland of concrete warehouses and sleazy cantinas. But somehow this sense of being hidden away, this strange, sequestered location, made the Museo Casinelli feel even more intriguing: as if it really was a secret museum.

Jessica liked coming here, whenever she drove down to Trujillo from Zana. And today she had remembered to bring a camera, to gather crucial evidence.

She opened the door at the rear of the garage and smiled at the old curator, who stood, and bowed, as courteous as ever. ‘Ah, Señorita Silverton! You are here again? You must like the, eh, naughty pottery?’ Her shrug was a little bashful; his smile was gently teasing. ‘But I fear the keys are in the other desk … Un minuto?’

‘Of course.’

Pablo disappeared into a room at the back. As she waited, Jessica checked her cellphone, for the fifth time today: she was expecting an important call, from Steve Venturi, the best forensic anthropologist she knew.

A week ago, she had arrived in Trujillo – taking a break from her studies amongst the pyramids of Zana; she’d brought with her a box full of fifteen-hundred-year-old Moche bones. This package had in turn been despatched to California, to her old tutor in UCLA: Venturi.

Any day now she would get Steve’s answer. Was she right about the neckbones? Was her audacious insight correct? The anxiety of waiting for the verdict was increasingly unbearable. Jess felt like a teenager awaiting exam results.

She looked up from the silent phone. Pablo had returned from his vestibule flourishing two keys, one big, one small. As he offered them, he winked. ‘La sala privada?’

Jessica’s Spanish was still pretty mediocre, and for that reason she and the kindly curator normally conversed in English – but she understood that phrase well enough. The private room.

‘Si!’

She took both keys from Pablo and saw how he noticed her slightly trembling hand. ‘It’s OK. Just need a coca.’

Pablo frowned. ‘La diabetes?’

‘I’m OK. Really.’

The frown softened to a smile. ‘See you later.’

Jess descended the steps to the basement museum. Fumbling in the darkness, she found the larger key, and opened the door.

When she switched on the light it flooded the room with a reassuring glow, revealing an eccentric and exquisite treasure trove of ancient Peruvian ceramics, pottery, textiles and other artefacts – gleaned from the mysterious cultures of pre-Colombian Peru: the Moche, the Chan Chan, the Huari, the Chimu.

The light also shone on a dried monkey foetus, grimacing in a bell jar.

She tried not to look at it. This thing always creeped her out. Maybe it wasn’t even a monkey, maybe it was a dried sloth, or some human mutation preserved as a gruesome curio by Jose Casinelli, forever offering the world its sad little face.

Briskly she walked past the bell jar, and bent to the glass cabinets, the vitrines of pottery and treasures. Here were the stone pestles of the Chavin, and here the exquisite burial cloths of the Nazca in faded violet and purple; to the left was a brief, poignant line of Quingnam writing, the lost language of the Chimu. She took out her new camera and adjusted the tiny dial to compensate for the poor-quality light.

As she worked, Jessica recalled the first time she had come here, six months ago, when she had begun her sabbatical: researching the anthropology of the pre-Columbian Stone Age in north Peru, making a comparative study of religious cultures across ancient America. Back then she had been almost a total ingénue, unprepared for the shock she was about to encounter: the high weirdness of pre-Inca Peru, most especially the Moche. And their infamous ‘naughty pottery’.

It was time to visit the sala privada.

Taking out the smaller key, she opened the creaking side-door. A further, darker, tinier room lay beyond.

Few people came to the tiny Museo Casinelli, fewer still entered la sala privada. Even today a distinct aura of embarrassment surrounded the principal contents: the Moche sex pottery, the ceramicas eroticas. They were certainly too shocking and explicit to be shown to children, and conservative Peruvian Catholics would regard them as obscene works of the devil and be happy to see them smashed. Which was why they were kept in this dark and private antechamber, deep inside the secret museum.

Jess knelt, and squinted, preparing to be shocked all over again.

The first row of pots was asexual, merely distressing: on the left was a finely-crafted pot of a man with no nose and no lips, fired in exquisite black and gold. In the centre was a delicate ceramic representation of human sacrifice, with dismembered bodies at the foot of a mountain. And over here was a man tied to a tree, having his eyes pecked out by a vulture. Carefully, she took a photo of the last example.

Disturbing as these ceramics might be, they were just normal mad Moche pottery. The next shelves held the real deal: the ceramicas eroticas.

Working her way along them, Jess fired off dozens of photos. Why did the Moche go to the trouble of crafting erotic pottery like this? Sex with animals. Sex with the dead. Sex between skeletons. Perhaps it was just a metaphor, maybe even a joke; more likely it was a dreamtime, a mythology. It was certainly repellent, yet also fascinating.

Jessica took some final photos, using the camera flash this time, which reflected off the dusty glass of the vitrines. As she concluded her task, her thoughts whirled. The Museo Casinelli had done its job, as it always did; and the feeling was very satisfying. It really had been a good choice of hers, last year, to come out to north Peru, one of the final frontiers of history, maybe the last great terra incognita of archaeology and anthropology, full of unknown cultures and untouched sites.

Jessica shut off the lights and retreated. Upstairs, Pablo was trying to text something into his phone. He abandoned the effort, and smiled at her. ‘You are finished?’

‘Si! Gracias, Pablo.’

‘Then you must go and have some glucosa. You are my friend and I must look after you. Because you are the only scholar who comes here!’

‘That’s not true.’

‘Well. It is nearly true! I had some visitors last week, they were quite uncouth! Philistines seeking out … thrills. And they were unpleasant. Asking stupid questions. Everyone always asks the same stupid questions. Apart from you, Señorita, apart from you!’

Jess smiled, returned the keys, and stepped out into the polluted grey air of Truijllo.

The city greeted her with all its noise and grime. Guard dogs howled behind fences of corrugated iron; a man was pushing a glass trolley full of quails’ eggs past a dingy tyre shop; a blind beggar sat with a guitar on his lap – it had no strings. And above it all hung that endless grey depressing sky.

It should really all be lovely, Jessica thought, here at the equator. It should be tropical and sunny and full of palm trees, but the strange climate of north Peru dictated otherwise: this was a place of clouds and chilly sea-fog.

Her cellphone rang; immediately she reached into her bag. She’d expected it to be Steve Venturi but the screen said it was her boss at the dig at Zana, Daniel Kossoy, who was also the overall leader of TUMP, the Toronto University Moche Project. And, as of last month, also her lover.

‘Jess, hi. How’s Trujillo?’

‘All good, Dan. All fine!’

‘Where are you now, then?’

‘Museo Casinelli. Just left—’

‘Ah, the sex pots!’

‘The sex pots. Yes.’ She paused, wondering why Danny was ringing. He knew she could handle herself in the big bad city. Her silence invoked his real purpose.

‘Jess, have you heard anything from Venturi? I mean, we’re all on tenterhooks up here. Were you right? About the vertebrae? It’s like being in a cop show – the tension and excitement!’

‘Nothing yet. He did say a week at least, and it’s only been eight days.’

‘OK. Well. OK.’ A brief sigh. ‘OK. Keep us informed? And …’

‘What?’

‘Well …’ The pause implied unspoken feelings. Was he about to say something intimate, something personally revealing? Something like I miss you? She hoped not; it was way too soon in their miniature romance for any such declaration.

Briskly, Jessica interrupted, ‘OK, Dan, I gotta go. I’ll see you in Zana. Bye!’

Pocketing her phone, she walked to a corner to hail a taxi. The traffic was intense: fuming trucks loaded with charcoal growled at the lights; mopeds weaved between dinged Chevrolet taxis and crowded buses. Amongst the urgent chaos, Jessica noticed one particular truck, speeding down the other side of the road.

Going way too fast.

Jess shook her head. Peruvian driving wasn’t the best. It was normal to see trucks and buses tearing down highways as if they were the only vehicles in the world, taunting death. But this was something different.

She stared: perplexed. The truck was speeding up, accelerating, leaping over a kerb, horribly dangerous. Somewhere a woman screamed. It was heading straight for – straight for what, what was it doing? Where was it going? It was surely going to plough into the grimy houses, the tyre shop, the tired glass kiosk of the quails eggs seller—

The Texaco garage.

The truck was heading straight for the garage. Jessica gazed – rapt and paralysed. The driver leapt from his cabin; at the last possible moment someone grabbed hold of Jessica and pulled her to the ground, behind a low wall.

The crash of glass and exploding gasoline was enormous. Greasy fireballs of smoke billowed into the air. Jess heard dire screams, then frightening silence.

‘Pablo,’ Jessica said to herself, lying, shaking, on the cracked Trujillo sidewalk. ‘Pablo …?’

2
Rosslyn Chapel, Midlothian

Everything you could read about in the guide books was here, in Rosslyn chapel, the great and famous fifteenth-century chapel of the Sinclairs, ten miles south of Edinburgh. The bizarre stone cubes in the Lady Chapel, the eerie carvings of exotic vegetation, the Dance of Death in the arches, the inverted Lucifer bound in ropes, the Norse serpents twined around the Prentice Pillar. And all of it was lavished with alluring detail, teasing symbolism and occult hieroglyphs, creating a splendid whirl of conspiratorial intrigue in weathered old stone. Right next to a gift shop, which sold special Sinclair tartan tins of Templar shortcake, baked with special Holy Grail motifs.

Adam Blackwood sighed. His last assignment as a full-time feature writer for the Guardian, and it was on the mighty commerce of nonsense that was Rosslyn Chapel.

‘You OK?’

It was his friend, and long-time colleague, Jason the Photographer. With the usual sarcastic tilt in his south London accent.

Adam sighed.

‘No, I’m not OK. I just lost my job.’

‘Tchuh. We all lose our jobs.’ Jason glanced at his camera, adjusting a lens. ‘And you’re not dead, are you? You’re just thirty-four. Come on, let’s go back inside the chapel, this shop is full of nutters.’

‘The whole town is full of nutters. Especially the chapel.’ Adam pointed through the glass door at the medieval church. ‘Everyone in there is walking around clutching The Da Vinci Code, looking for the Holy Grail under the font.’

‘Then let’s hurry up! Maybe we’ll find it first.’

Adam dawdled. Jason sighed. ‘Go on then, Blackwood. Cough it up. I know you want to share.’

‘It’s just … Well I thought that at least this time, my very last assignment, I might get something serious again, just for the hell of it, a serious news story, as a parting gift.’

‘Because they like you so much? Adam – you got sacked. What did you expect? You punched the fucking features editor at the Guardian Christmas party.’

‘He was hassling that girl. She was crying.’

‘Sure.’ Jason shook his head. ‘The guy’s a wanker of the first water. I agree. So you’re a great Aussie hero, and I’m glad you decked him, but is it really so surprising they snapped? It’s not the first time you’ve lost it.’

‘But—’

‘Stop whingeing! You did a few decent news stories, amongst the dross. And they’re sacking journos all over the world. You’re not unique.’

This was a fair point. ‘Guess not.’

‘And you got a bloody pay-off. Now you can bog off to Afghanistan, get yourself killed. Come on. We still got work to do.’

They walked out of the shop into the forecourt. And stared once more at the squat stone jewel-box that was Rosslyn Chapel. A faint, mean-spirited drizzle was falling out of the cold Midlothian sky. They stepped aside to let a middle-aged lady tourist enter the ancient building. She was carrying a dog-eared copy of The Da Vinci Code.

‘It’s under the font!’ said Adam, loudly. Jason chuckled.

The two men followed the woman into the chapel. The Prentice Pillar loomed exotically at the end. A young couple with short blonde hair – German? – were peering at the pillar as if they expected the Holy Grail to materialize from within its luxuriously carved stone, like a kind of hologram.

Jason got to work. Tutting at his light meter, taking some shots. Adam interviewed a Belgian tourist in his forties, standing by the grave of the Earl of Caithness, asking what had brought him here. The Belgian mentioned the Holy Grail, The Da Vinci Code and the Knights Templar, in that order.

Adam got an initial glimpse of how he might write the piece. A light but sardonic tone, gently mocking all this lucrative naivety, this cottage industry of credulity that had grown up around Rosslyn Chapel. A feature that would explore how the entire town of Roslin, Midlothian, was living off the need of people in a secular age to believe, paradoxically, in deep religious conspiracies. No matter how absurd and embarrassing they might be.

He could start it with that GK Chesterton quote: ‘when people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing – they believe in anything’.

Adam turned as a baritone voice resonated down the nave: one of the more pompous guides, holding a fake plastic sword, was pointing at the ceiling, and reciting some history. Adam listened in to the guide’s well-practised spiel.

‘So who exactly were the Knights Templar? Their origins are simple enough.’ The guide levelled his plastic sword at a small stone carving, apparently of two men on a horse. ‘Sometime around 1119, two French knights, Hugues de Payens and Godfrey de Saint-Omer, veterans of the First Crusade, got together to discuss over a beaker of wine the safety of the many Christian pilgrims flocking to Jerusalem, since its brutal reconquest by the Crusaders of Pope Urban II.’ The guide’s sword wobbled as he continued. ‘The French knights proposed a new monastic order, a sect of chaste but muscular warrior monks, who would defend the pilgrims with their very lives against the depredations of bandits, and robbers, and hostile Muslims. This audacious idea was instantly popular: the new King Baldwin II of Jerusalem agreed to the knights’ request, and gifted them a headquarters on the Temple Mount, in the recently captured Al-Aqsa Mosque. Hence the full name of the Order: the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, or, in Latin, Pauperes Commilitones Christi Templique Solomonici. Ever since then, the question has been asked: was there also an esoteric reason for this significant choice of headquarters?’ He hesitated, with the air of a well-trained actor. ‘Naturally, we can never know. But the Temple Mount very definitely had a mystique: as it was located above what was believed to be the ruins of the first Temple of Solomon. Which,’ the guide smiled at his attentive audience, ‘is thought, in turn, to be a model for the church in which you stand today!’

He let the notion hang in the air like the fading vibrations of a tolling bell, then trotted through the rest of the story: the Templars’ rise and supremacy; the twenty thousand knightly members at the very peak of the Order’s strength; the great, Europe-wide power and wealth of the ‘world’s first multinational’. And then, of course, the dramatic downfall, after two proud centuries, when the French king, coveting the Templars’ money, and envying their lands and status, crushed them with a wave of violent arrests and ferocious torture, beginning on one fateful night.

The guide flashed a florid smile: ‘What was the date of that medieval Götterdämmerung, that Kristallnacht of kingly revenge? Friday the 13th, 1307. Yes, Friday the 13th!’

Adam repressed a laugh. The guide was a walking store of clichés. But entertaining, nonetheless. If he’d been here for the fun of it, he’d have been happy to sit here and listen some more. But he had just seen something pretty interesting.

‘Jason …’ He nudged his friend, who was trying to get a decent shot of the Prentice Pillar.

‘What?’

‘Isn’t that Archibald McLintock?’

‘What?’

‘The old guy, sitting in the pew by the Master Pillar. It’s Archibald McLintock.’

‘And he is?’

‘Maybe the most famous writer on the Knights Templar alive. Wrote a good book about Rosslyn too. Proper sceptic. You never heard of him?’

‘Dude, you do the research, you’re the hack. I have to worry about lenses.’

‘Very true. You lazy bastard. OK, I suggest we go and interview him. He might give me some good quotes, we could get a picture too.’

Advancing on the older man, Adam extended a hand. ‘Adam Blackwood. The Guardian? We’ve actually met before.’

Archibald McLintock had sandy-grey hair and a demeanour of quiet, satisfied knowledge. Remaining seated, he accepted Adam’s handshake with a vague, distracted grasp.

An odd silence intervened. Adam wondered how to begin; but at last the Scotsman said, ‘Afraid I don’t recall our meeting. So sorry.’ His expression melted into a distant smile. ‘Ah. Wait. Yes, yes. You interviewed me, about the Crusades? The Spear of Destiny?’

‘Yes. That’s right, a few years back. It was just a light-hearted article.’

‘Good good. And now you are writing about the Chapel of Rosslyn?’

‘Well, yes,’ Adam shrugged, mildly embarrassed. ‘We’re kind of doing another fun piece about all the … y’know … all the Dan Brown and Freemasons stuff. Templars hiding in the crypt. How Rosslyn has become so famous for its myths.’

‘And you want another quote from me?’

‘Do you mind?’ Adam flushed, painfully aware he was disturbing a serious academic with all this fatuous, astrological absurdity. ‘It’s just that you famously debunked all this rubbish. Didn’t you? What was that thing you said? “The Chapel of Rosslyn bears no more resemblance to the Temple of Solomon than my local farmer’s cowshed is modelled on the stately pleasure dome of Xanadu.”’

Another long silence. The tourists whispered and bustled. Adam waited for McLintock to answer. But he just smiled. And then he said, very quietly. ‘Did I write that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hm! A little piquant. But why not? Yes, I’ll give you a quote.’ Abruptly, Archibald McLintock stood up and Adam recalled with a start that the old man might be ageing but he was notably tall. Fully an inch taller than Adam, who was six foot two.

‘Here’s your quote, young man. I was wrong.’

‘Sorry?’ Adam was distracted: making sure his digicorder was switched on. ‘Wrong about … what?’

The historian smiled. ‘Remember what Umberto Eco said about the Templars?’

Adam struggled to recall. ‘Ah yes! “When a man talks about the Templars you know he is going mad,” You mean that one?’

‘No. Mr Blackwood. The other quote. “The Templars are connected to everything.”’

A pause. ‘You’re saying … you mean …?’

‘I was wrong. Wrong about the whole thing. There really is a connection. The pentagrams. The pillars. The Templar initiations. It’s all here, Mr Blackwood, it’s all true, it’s more strange than you could ever realize. Rosslyn Chapel really is the key.’ McLintock was laughing so loudly now that some tourists were nervously looking over. ‘Can you believe it? The stature of this irony? The key to everything was here all along!’

Adam was perplexed. Was McLintock drunk? ‘But you debunked all this – you said it was crap, you’re famous for it!’

McLintock waved a dismissive hand and began to make his way down the medieval aisle. ‘Just look around and you will see what I didn’t see. Goodbye.’

Adam watched as the historian walked to the door and disappeared into the drizzly light beyond. The journalist gazed for a full minute as the door shut, and the tourists thronged the nave and the aisles. And then he looked up, to the ancient roof of the Collegiate Chapel of St Michael in Roslin, where a hundred Green Men stared back at him, their faces carved by medieval stonemasons, into perpetual and sarcastic grins.

3
Rosslyn Chapel, Midlothian

‘OK, I’m done. Got it all.’ Jason stood and stretched. ‘The upside-down angel thingy, Mary Magdalene by the fire extinguisher. And a cute Swedish girl bending over the tomb of the Earl of Orkney. Short skirt. Plaid. You all right?’

‘Yes …’

Jason theatrically slapped his own head. ‘Sorry. Ah. I didn’t get a shot of your old guy – what was his name?’

‘Archie McLintock. Professor McLintock.’

‘So,’ Jason capped his lens. ‘He give you any good quotes?’

Adam said nothing. He was wrapped in confusion.

The silence between the two men was a stark contrast to the hubbub of tourists coming into the building: yet another tour guide was escorting a dozen Japanese sightseers into the nave and pointing out the Templar sword on the grave of William Sinclair, ‘identical, they say, to the Templar swords inscribed on Templar tombs in the great Templar citadel of Tomar!’

‘Hey?’ said Jason, waving a hand in front of Adam as if testing his friend’s blindness. ‘What is it?’

‘Like I said. Just something … a remark of his.’

‘Okayyy. Tell me in monosyllables?’

Adam stared hard at the carving of the Norse serpents at the foot of the Prentice Pillar, and there, on the architrave joining the pillar the famous inscribed sentence. Forte est vinum fortior est rex fortiores sunt mulieres super omnia vincit veritas: ‘Wine is strong, a king is stronger, women are stronger still, but truth conquers all.’

Truth conquers all.

It was all true?

‘Well …’ Adam exhaled. ‘He admitted, or rather confessed, that he had been wrong all along. That it was all true. The Templar connections. Rosslyn really is the key, the key to everything. The key to history. That’s what he said.’

Zipping up his light meter in one of the many pockets of his jacket, Jason gazed laconically at Adam. ‘Finally gone gaga then. Doollally tap. Too much tainted porridge.’

‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? Yet he sounded sane I … I just don’t know.’

‘Mate. Let’s get a beer. What’s that shit they drink up here? Heavy. A pint of heavy.’

‘Just a half for me.’

Jason smiled. ‘Naturally.’

They walked with a mutual sense of relief out of the overcrowded, overwarmed confines of Rosslyn Chapel into the honestly dreary Scottish weather. For one last second Adam turned and looked at the church, landed in its green lawn, a greystone time machine. The gargoyles and the pinnacles disturbingly leered at him. A chime, an echoic buzz, a painful memory resonating.

Alicia. Of course. Alicia Hagen. His girlfriend. Buried in a Sydney suburb with the kookaburras in the trees and the sun burning down on the fake English Gothic church.

Anxiety pierced him. Now he had lost his job, would he go back to brooding? He needed to work, to take his mind off the past; he had emigrated from Australia to put distance between himself and the tragedy, and that had succeeded – to an extent – but he also needed to occupy himself. Or he would recall the girl he had truly loved, who died so pointlessly, so casually. And then he would feel the sadness, like a g-force, as if he was in a plummeting plane.

Adam paced quickly into the car park. The local pub was just there, on the corner, looking welcoming in the mizzle and cold.

‘Maybe I’ll have an entire pint. And a few chasers.’

‘Good man,’ said Jason. ‘We could—’

‘Watch out!’

Adam grabbed at Jason, and pulled him back. Jason spun, alarmed.

‘Whuh – Jesus!’

A car shot past, inches from them, doing seventy or eighty miles an hour: an insane speed on this suburban road, skidding left and right, but the driver’s intention was disturbingly obvious.

‘Christ—’

They ran after the vehicle, now heading straight for a high brick wall flanking the curve of the road.

‘Fuck—’

‘Jesus—’

‘No!’

The impact was enormous. The car smashed straight into the wall with a rending sound of sheared metal and shattered glass. Even at this distance Adam could tell that the driver must be dead. A head-on crash with a wall, at eighty miles an hour? It was suicidal.

They slowed as they approached the car. The crash was enveloped by an eerie silence. Shocked onlookers stood, seemingly paralysed, hands to their mouths. As he dialled his phone urgently for an ambulance, Adam leaned to see: the windscreen was entirely smashed on the driver side, the glass bent outwards like a massive and obscene exit wound: the driver had indeed gone straight through.

Chunky nuggets of glass lay scattered bloodily on the pavement. Shards of metal littered the kerbstones. The driver was clearly dead, his bloodied body half-in, half-out of the car.

Jason already had his camera out.

Adam didn’t need a camera to record his memories; he would not forget what he had seen. The driver had been smiling as he raced past them: smiling as he drove straight into the wall.

And the dead driver was Archibald McLintock.

4
Pan-American Highway, north Peru

Every second or third time Jess closed her eyes, she experienced it again: the truck slamming into the garage, the dirty black pornographic fireball, the terrible aching crash of glass and silence and screams. She opened her eyes. Enough of this: she had to stay alert: because she was driving, taking the road north out of Trujillo, the Pan-American Highway.

Pan-American Highway was a very grandiose name for what was, in reality, just a dirty, narrow, trash-littered blacktop, slicing through the wastes of the Sechura Desert. The route was long and monotonous, punctuated only by the odd strip of green as a river descended from the Andes, and the odd desultory greasy township, where drivers paused at gas stations to refuel their huge trucks, full of Chinese toys and pungent fishmeal, being ferried south to the factories of Trujillo and Chimbote and Lima.

One such truck was headed her way now: arrogantly dominating the road. She swerved to give it room, catching the ammoniac scent of the fishmeal as it swept past, shaking her pick-up.

Who the hell would drive a truck into a gas station in Trujillo? She winced, once again, at the images: like grainy internet videos projected on a wall. She didn’t want to watch but she had to watch.

Jessica lifted the truck a gear, and replayed in her mind the terrible moment, and her questionable reactions. Should she have done something else? Anything else? What exactly? After the fireball had subsided, she had wrenched herself free from the man holding her down, the man who had saved her life, and sprinted over the road, shouting Pablo’s name.

But the smoke had been so thick, and so hot, and so burning. Unable to get near, she’d choked and stumbled in the violent blackness. Then the police had swept in, sirens shrieking, nightsticks waving. Fearful of further explosions, they had angrily pushed people from the scene, down the road, away from the burning carcass of the building and the truck. So there was nothing she could have done for Pablo, and she had done nothing. But the guilt abided.

And then she’d seen it. Tossed a hundred metres by the wild explosions was an entire Moche pot, miraculously unharmed, lying on a greasy verge next to a burned plastic oil canister from the Texaco garage.

The pot was unusual: a spouted jug in the form of two toads copulating. This was maybe all that was left of the Casinelli collection, yet she couldn’t bear to pick it up.

After that, she’d done her duty: weeping, occasionally, in her hotel room at night; giving her evidence to the police by day. Dan had called many times, very attentively, and she had been grateful to hear a consoling voice. Now, a week later, she was heading back to work. Determined but rattled.

Her hands trembled for a moment on the steering wheel of her long-term rented Hilux. She needed a break, and she definitely needed a cooling drink, a Coke, some water, even an Inca Kola, even if it did taste like bubblegum drool. Anything would do. Slowing down, she drove past a row of shanty slums, houses of reed and plastic, people living in the middle of nowhere.

It was barely more than a hamlet, and a pretty impoverished one at that. Adobe bricks lay drying on the roadside, like hairy ingots of mud. The settlement was surrounded by a cemetery so poor it had hub caps for gravestones, the names daubed thereon in red paint. She knew what to expect in a desert village like this: restaurants where the chicken soup cost twice as much if the chicken was plucked; dire and rancid tamales served on plastic plates.

But she had no choice. This was north Peru. It was always like this, everywhere, a satanic part of the world: no wonder the civilizations that emerged here had been so insane. The landscape was evil, even the sea could not be trusted: one day serving up endless riches of anchovy and sea bass and shark, the next offering El Niño or La Niña, and wiping out entire civilizations with drought or flood, leaving rotten corpses of penguins strewn across the beach.

The image of the burning garage filled her mind once more: she thought of her dead father and she didn’t want to know why.

‘Señorita?’ a dirty barefoot kid looked hopefully at her gringa blonde hair as she climbed out of the Hilux. ‘Una cosita? Señorita?’

‘Ah. Buenas …’ Jessica deliberated whether to give the kid a few soles. You were not meant to. But the poverty gouged at her conscience. She handed over a few pennies and the lad grinned a broken-toothed grin and did a sad barefoot dance and gabbled in Quechua, the ancient language of the Inca: Anchantan ananchayki! Usplay manay yuraq …

Jess had no idea what he was saying. Thank you kindly? Give me more, Yankee dogwoman?

It could be anything. She barely understood Peruvian Spanish, let alone this Stone Age tongue. Braving the boy with a half-hearted smile, she headed for the nearest cantina advertising the inevitable pollos.

Inside it was, of course, dingy: a few plastic tables, the whiff of old cooking oil. Three men in cowboy hats were sharing one dirty glass of maize beer served from an enormous litre bottle. The men glanced at her from under their hats, and turned back to the shared liquor. The first man poured a slug, and guzzled, and tipped a little on the dirt floor, making an offering to Pachamama, the mother bitch of the earth, with her dust that ate cities.

‘Agua, sin gas, por favor?’ Jess said to the tired woman who approached, her hand was scarred with an old burn. The woman nodded, loped off behind a counter, and returned with a bottle of mineral water. And a chipped glass. A chalkboard on the wall advertised ceviche, the national dish: raw fish. Jess shuddered. What might that be like out here in the desert? Rancid, rotten, decomposing: six days of dysentery …

Her cellphone rang. Daniel, again. Click. ‘Jess, you’re OK?’

‘Dan, I’m fine! You don’t have to keep ringing me – I mean, I’m glad you do but I’m fine.’

‘Where are you now?’

Jess squinted out of the little window, at the thundering fishmeal trucks heading Lima-wards. ‘Pan-American, about sixty klicks south of Chiclayo. I’ll be in Zana in an hour.’

‘OK. That’s good. Great. So, uh, do they know any more about the truck? The driver?’

‘No, not really.’ Jess drank a cold gulp of the water, refreshing the memory she would prefer to leave undisturbed. ‘The cops think, now, it may have been just some guy with a grudge. Apparently he was sacked by Texaco a week before, he was working off his notice. No one really knows. But Pablo paid the price.’

A sad brief silence. ‘Jesus F. Poor Pablo. Still can’t get over it, the museum was totally destroyed: all the Moche pottery, the best collection outside Lima!’

‘Yep.’

One of the men in the cowboy hats brushed past Jess, opening the door to the noisy highway. He turned, for a second, and glanced at her from beneath the brim of his hat. The glance was long, and odd, and obscurely hostile. The image of the eerie Moche pot, with the toads copulating, filled her mind. But she shook the stupidity away, and listened to Dan as he went on.

‘Jess, I do have, however, some pretty good news. It might cheer you up. We got results. From your friend the bone guy.’

Her alertness returned, even a hint of excitement. ‘What? Steve Venturi? The necks? He called you?’

‘Yes. He kept trying to reach you, apparently, but you were in the police station. So he called here and I picked up this morning and … well bone analysis confirms it all, Jess. You were right. Cut marks to the neck vertebrae, coincident with death. Made with the tumi.’

‘The cuts were made deliberately?’

‘Yes. No question.’

‘Wow … Just. Wow.’ Jess felt half-bewildered, half-exhilarated. Her theory was expanding, but the concept was still a little sickening. She pushed away her glass of water. ‘So we finally know for sure?’

‘Yep we do, thanks to you …’ Dan’s voice drifted and returned, with the vagaries of the Claro Móvil signal, across the vast Sechura.

‘Wait, Dan – wait a moment! I’ll take it outside.’

Jess stood and left a few soles on the table. She needed the fresh, dirty air of the Pan-American. The two remaining men in cowboy hats watched her depart, their gaze fixed and unblinking. As if they were wax statues.

Outside she breathed deep, watching the traffic: the SUVs of the rich, the trucks of the workers, the three-wheeled motokars of the poor.

‘Go on, Dan.’

‘This is it. The sacrifice ceremony really happened. You were spot on. They really did it, Jess. The Moche. They stripped the prisoners, lined them up, and ritually cut their throats, hence the strange cut marks on the neck bones. And then they probably drank the blood, judging by the ceramics. Extraordinary, eh? So the scenes on the pottery depict a real ceremony! I’m sorry I doubted you, Jessica. You are a credit to UCLA Anthropology. Hah. Steve Venturi actually called you his prize pupil.’

Jessica felt like blushing. She watched as a turkey vulture descended from the sky, and pecked at a fat-smeared piece of plastic, half-wrapped around a lamppost. A dog came running over to investigate; the animals squabbled over it. A shudder ran through her: surely another aftershock, from the explosion.

‘Jess, are you still there?’

‘Sorry, yes, I’m still here.’

‘There’s something else. Something else you need to know. More good news.’ His pause was a little melodramatic.

‘Dan, tell me!’

‘An untouched tomb.’

‘Huaca D?’

‘Yes.’ He paused. ‘And you’ll be there to see it, when we go in tomorrow. If you want, of course!’

Jess smiled at the endless desert. ‘Of course I want to be there! An untouched tomb. Yay!’

Saying her goodbyes, she closed the call, and walked to the truck with renewed vigour. Her moments of fear and self-doubt had passed; she was already dreaming of what lay inside the tomb. An untouched Moche tomb! This was a fine prize; this would be perfect for her thesis. Now perhaps they would get to the heart of the matter: the ultimate Moche deity. The identity of the mysterious god, at the heart of the Moche’s mysterious religion, was one of the great puzzles of north Peruvian archaeology.

And maybe the solution was coming into reach.

Jessica started the truck and pulled away. Above her, unseen, the turkey vulture had won the day; with a flap of grimy wings it swung across the sky, carrying its prize.

5
Braid Hills, Edinburgh

The hotel was overheated, and reeked of beer from last night’s raucous wedding, which had kept him awake until three.

As he packed his bag, Adam wasn’t sad to be leaving. He’d done his job here in dark, wintry and rather depressing Edinburgh. The Guardian had run his Rosslyn Chapel story, with a gratifying double-page spread and some nice quirky photos by Jason. The paper had also taken a small but judicious personal addition, by Adam, to its unsigned obituary of Dr Archibald McLintock, expert and author in medieval history – ‘in his last days I met Professor McLintock once again, and he was as courteous and enlightening as ever …’

Yet even as he stuffed his dirty shirts into his suitcase, Adam felt a nagging sense of unease. Of course the suicide of Archie McLintock had been upsetting, but it was also those last words the professor had used, in the chapel.

It’s all true, Rosslyn is the key.

Adam had, with some reluctance, omitted their brief and eccentric encounter from his article on Rosslyn. The professor had obviously been mentally unbalanced at the end, and Adam had not wanted to trash McLintock’s memory by using those uncharacteristic quotes, which made the man look a fool. Not so close to his death. But the unanswered questions were still out there.

Frowning, Adam gazed through the bay windows of his second-floor bedroom. The hotel was a converted Victorian villa, with creaky corridors, wilting pot plants, a conservatory where old ladies ate scones; and a very decent view across the medieval skyline of Edinburgh Old Town, down towards the docklands of Leith.

That view was already darkening. Two o’clock in the afternoon and the onset of night was palpable, enshrouding the city like a sort of dread. Down there, on the Firth of Forth, vast swathes of winter rain, great theatre curtains of it, were sweeping westwards – past Prestonpans and Musselburgh, past Seafield and Restalrig.

A Nordic doominess prevailed even in the names. Alicia Hagen. Norwegian.

Adam hastened his packing, zipping up the suitcase with a rush of vigour, sealing any morbid thoughts inside, with his dirty washing. Jobless now, he could not waste time. He had done his last article for the Guardian, his pay-off was being wired into his account, now he really should bog off to Afghanistan. Or at least go right back to London, and look for more work.

He turned to the phone on the bedside table, and picked up. The receptionist greeted him cheerily, and gave him the number for a taxi. He re-dialled the cab firm. ‘Yes, Waverley Station. Straight away?’

Straight away turned out to be impossible: he’d have to wait twenty minutes. But that was OK: his train wasn’t leaving until four thirty.

Strolling to the window, he lingered. Edinburgh Castle brooded on the skyline, dour and clichéd and impressive. The dark Scottish streets glistened in the smirr.

Then his own phone rang. Adam took the call, though he didn’t recognize the number. An Edinburgh prefix … ‘Hello.’

The answering voice was young, and female, and rich with Scottish vowels. ‘Hello, is that Adam Blackwood of … the Guardian?’

‘Yes.’

‘You wrote the piece about my father?’

‘Sorry?’

A short, distinctive pause. Then, ‘My name is Nina McLintock. Archibald McLintock was my father. I’m sorry to bother you but …’

‘Go on. Please.’

‘Ach, it’s just …’

She sounded distracted, maybe even distraught. Adam felt a sudden rush of sympathy. He blurted, ‘I’m so sorry for what happened, Miss McLintock, it’s so shocking. I mean I was there, I spoke to your father just moments before, before the suicide, I actually saw the crash …’ Even as he said this Adam chastened himself. It felt like a silly boast, or something presumptuous, and using the word suicide was just graceless. But the girl seemed encouraged by his words, rather than offended.

‘Call me Nina. Please call me Nina. I want to talk with you. You saw it all. The police told me, you spoke to my dad just before.’

‘Yes, but I—’

Nina McLintock was not for pausing. ‘So you know! My father was not in any way depressed. He was happy. These last weeks he was really happy. I know my dad. He wasn’t suicidal. Just wasn’t.’

The first raindrops rattled on the window.

‘I think he was murdered.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Murdered. He was killed. I’m sure of it, but meet me and I’ll tell you why. Tell you everything.’

6
The Hinnie Tavern, Edinburgh Old Town

The Hinnie was one of those Edinburgh pubs that seemed to contain a slightly rancid, off-putting darkness, in the heart of the Old Town, under the louring stone bulwarks of the castle, down a tiny medieval wynd so obscured and sooted by history that only the initiated knew those ancient, uninviting steps led down to an equally ancient, uninviting pub.

Glum drinkers stared into glasses of The Famous Grouse. Old men ignored each other at the bar, drinking pints of 80 Shilling. Another young man gazed aggressively at Adam, with the stare of an antlered male stag on a hillside in the rutting season: fuck you.

Adam raised his glass and toasted him, staring right back, making the boy visibly seethe. Come on then, Adam thought, I am descended from some of the worst English criminals in the history of transportation. My grandfather killed dingoes with his bare hands. You think you’re harder than me?

Adam felt guilty about his temper, but he also had a pleasing confidence in his physical capabilities, which sometimes came in handy. He recalled the day they beat up the Lebanese boys in Cronulla, gave them a hiding for nearly gang-raping his sister’s friend when the police wouldn’t do anything. Too racially sensitive, mate.

His father, of course, was – or at least had been in his prime – exactly the same. A bit of a drinker, a bit of a bruiser. Almost liked a fight; he and Adam used to wrestle and box when Adam was a lad. So the propensity must’ve come from Dad.

Don’t let anyone push you around, son, unless they have a gun. Then go get a gun. That was what his dad used to say. Dad was a real larrikin, a true Aussie, albeit descended from centuries of English cutpurses and highwaymen. Mum had been very different.

‘Hello?’

Startled from his thoughts, he looked up – to see a young woman, standing directly opposite, extending a delicate white hand.

Nina McLintock.

She didn’t look anything like he had expected; she had remarkable pale skin, and lush dark hair. She was also petite and slim and wearing dark clothes and a white shirt or blouse: she looked like a figure in a monochrome photo. The only thing that told him this was sandy-haired Archie McLintock’s daughter was the eyes, they were the same intelligent grey-green. The sad eyes he had seen in Rosslyn Chapel.

‘Recognize you from the paper. I’m sorry I’m so late.’

He lifted hands as if to say no worries.

She hastily explained, ‘We’ve got this Facebook page. For my dad. Seeking info. Look. Ach. Sorry. Do you mind if I get a drink first?’

She was obviously a local: the barman, who had stared at Adam as if he was a large and ugly centipede, smiled at her shouted request and brought her drinks over. An action almost unheard of in a British pub.

Nina smiled, introspectively. There was true sadness there, which made her look quite beautiful – and a little haunting, Adam thought.

‘This is your local?’

She nodded and shot down her Scotch in one gulp. Then she turned to her glass of Tennants, which seemed a bit too big for her very small hands, but she managed to down a quarter of it anyway. Then she said, ‘I’ve got a flat down the road, in the Grassmarket. I like it here, the fact it’s so rough. The fights can be fun. You know in Scottish we have five hundred words for fight: a stramash. A fash. A brulzie. All different.’

He gazed at her pint glass.

‘Yes. And I’m a recovering teetotaller.’ Her eyes twinkled. ‘I tried to be sober. But my God, the boredom. Like Byron said, Man, being reasonable, must get drunk. I like Byron. You?’

‘Uh …’

‘Sorry I talk too much. Drink too much and talk too much. Too quickly.’ She set her pint down. ‘Sorry …’ And for a moment the vivacious energy seemed to leave her.

Adam said, ‘What’s this about a Facebook page, then?’

‘My sister. Hannah. Teaching in London, lecturer. She and I both believe it wasn’t suicide. So we’ve set up a Facebook page, asking for help. ’Cause the police won’t do anything. Muppets. They say the car was fine, not tampered with. And I don’t buy it. Hence the page.’ She turned slightly as if to address the pub. ‘Adam, my father was not mad. Not a nutter. I don’t believe it.’

‘You really want to talk about this?’

‘Yes! I want to know what you think. You spoke to him last.’ Her eyes fixed earnestly on his. ‘What was he like? His mood that day?’

‘OK well …’ Adam hesitated. ‘I suppose you could say he seemed pretty happy when I met him. However, he did say something very odd. Which might imply he was – ah – a little unbalanced. Sorry.’

‘What? Nina leaned close, but not angrily. ‘What did he say?’

Adam felt uncomfortable. ‘I mean, well, all his life he wrote those academic books, very scholarly works, sceptical, rigorous, highly respected. But then, suddenly, in Rosslyn that day he said to me: oh it’s all true, there really is some truth here. Rosslyn, the Templars, the Norse elements. He appeared to reverse everything he believed. I was quite shocked.’

‘You weren’t the only one! He said exactly the same to me. A few weeks ago.’

Her face was flushed. ‘On the phone. He made this strange, passing remark. That his whole life’s work had been pointless, that he had been wrong about the Templars, there really was a deep deep secret. Some mega-conspiracy. Yet he laughed when he said it. I thought he was talking blethers—’

‘Sorry?’

‘Thought he was talking nonsense. Thought maybe he was drunk. ’Cause he was fond of a dram. The McLintock genes.’

‘So what convinced you? And how does that lead to …’

‘My thinking he was murdered? Loads of things – his behaviour over the last year or two, for a start. About eighteen months ago he just disappeared, went off on some crazy walkabout. Spain, France, South America even. We had no idea where, or why, he told me and Hannah nothing. When he came back he was richer, quite a lot richer. I mean he was never poor, but he was never rich either, writing books about how there is no Holy Grail and all your favourite fairy tales are pathetic and gibbering nonsense does not necessarily make you loadsamoney, y’know?’

‘I can see why.’

‘But now suddenly he had some money, he bought a flash new car, he indulged himself in antiques. Bought a TV maybe bigger than Canada. And he gave me some cash, and also Hannah, and I’m told there is more cash coming, in the estate: but where did all that come from? And … another thing. He got so happy by the end, he was a changed man. He’d been depressed for a while but when he got back he was happier, more enthusiastic, like he really had discovered something. And then, right at the very end …’

The dark pub seemed to have become even darker. The atmosphere smokier, though no one was smoking. She leaned close, whispering. ‘Two weeks ago, almost the last time I saw him, he was anxious. Still happy, but anxious. Like he was being menaced, or chased. Or at least watched.’

Nina drank a quick half-pint of Tennants, then said, ‘He didn’t say much, at first. He was jokey. Offhand. But I’d had enough, and finally I confronted him. I said, “Dad, what is going on? You’ve got all this money, you went away, you seem different, moody, happy one minute, weird the next. Now you say there are people watching you.” And I badgered him. I wouldn’t take no for an answer. I insisted, and finally he said, “OK, it’s true, I have discovered a secret, an extraordinary truth, a revelation … but it must remain with me. Don’t go after this secret unless you want to die, unless you want to get yourself killed” …’

‘He was drunk when he said this?’

‘A bit. Maybe. A wee bit, aye. But also quite coherent. He wasn’t rambling. And then soon after that he gets himself killed.’

Adam sat back. Nina finished her beer. She sought his gaze with her own.

‘So. Will you help me? Adam? Will you help me find the truth? The cops are divvies.’

‘How can I help you?’

‘Come with me to his flat. Find all his notes! He was a diligent note-taker. You know. ’Cause he was an author. Then we can see what he had found.’

‘Why do you need me? Surely you are his executors, you and Hannah?’

‘No. His wife is. Second wife. Mum died a decade back. Car accident. He remarried five years ago, some Irish woman. I’ve tried to like her but she’s – she’s just an idiot. Guess she’s got her own issues, but life is too short, I can’t be arsed. Besides, she thinks it’s suicide and she hates all this Facebook stuff. But she’s away tomorrow night: we can break in.’

‘Break in?’

‘And find the notes. You’re an investigative journalist. You must know how to do all this. Find the secret that can get you killed, that got my father killed. What do you think, Adam?’

Adam said nothing. He was trying to reconcile two conflicting thoughts. The first was: that this girl reminded him of Alicia. It was unmistakable: she had the same intelligence and vivacity mixed with the same damaged quality. Even the poetry quoting was similar. And anything that reminded Adam of Alicia was bad news, set off sirens in his mind, red lights strobing danger.

But against this was set another, opposing desire: to learn more, to get the truth, to be a journalist. Everything in his training was telling him: This is it: this is a Real Story. Adam was jobless and directionless, and if he wanted to make a living he could not afford to turn down a cracking story when it was given to him like this.

He sipped the last of his beer. ‘Where did your father live?’

7
The Huacas, Zana, north Peru

‘Are you ready?’

Jess felt a trace of annoyance amidst her professional excitement. ‘Of course!’

They were standing at the entrance of Huaca D, the latest adobe pyramid of the Moche era to be opened by the TUMP team. She had a notebook in her hand. ‘So. Tell me again. How do we know this is an important tomb?’

Dan shrugged. ‘Various indications, such as grave goods in the outlying chamber. And the disarticulated skeletons.’

‘Sorry?’

He explained briskly. ‘The skeletons are slaves, or maybe concubines who were forced, during the funeral rituals, to have their limbs amputated, in a gesture of servility to the noble. Remember, we discussed the funeral sacrifices. They indicate the prominence of the inhabitant of the tomb.’

Jess remembered as she scribbled, the ghastliness of the notion making her sway a little in the burning Sechura sun.

For once the clouds had parted and it was fiercely hot: out there beyond the huacas the villagers of Zana were tilling their fields, bending to cut the reeds of sugar cane, white towels of turbans on their heads to ward off the sun. Otherwise the landscape was empty. Drifting, and empty, and dying.

‘OK?’

She nodded. Dan smiled, and there was a definite but discreet warmth to his smile. The smile of a boyfriend. Jessica welcomed his discretion, and reticence: no one else in TUMP knew she and Dan were having a relationship – not yet. And Jessica wanted to keep it that way. Because she wasn’t sure what she felt yet. Dan very definitely wasn’t her normal type: she usually went for young bohemian guys, unshaven and unreliable, casual and sexy. Musicians and artists. She’d been quite promiscuous at university. But now suddenly she’d gone for the older man. Why? Maybe she was emotionally a late developer, even as she was professionally precocious: maybe she was finally filling the father-shaped hole in her heart. Wasn’t that what daughters who lost a dad at an early age were meant to do? Seek out the missing male security figure?

The wind was stifling, the sun relentless. Dan was sweating in the heat, showing damp sweat patches under the arms of his grubby T-shirt. Yet she still felt a stir of attraction: he was quite rugged in an older and scholarly way. And his expertise itself was attractive: a man doing something well. He was a very gifted archaeologist – quite famous in his field.

As if aware of her scrutiny, he looked up: ‘Do you not have a flashlight? You’ll need it in the tomb, Jess. If you want to see to take notes.’

‘I’ve got it. Don’t worry. I’ve got everything.’ She glanced behind her at the waiting huaca, the ancient pyramid of crumbling dust, and lifted her notebook. ‘Tell me again what we know for sure about the age. When does the tomb date from?’

‘From the very last gasp of Moche civilization. Eighth or ninth century, when they evolved into the Muchika. Essentially they’re the same people, same culture, same bizarre civilization, but with dwindling resources.’

Jess nodded and wrote in her notebook, then said, ‘How do we know there haven’t been any haqueros? Any graverobbers? How do we know the tomb is sealed?’

Dan didn’t answer, he was distractedly patting his pockets, apparently making sure he had some kit on his person. This was typical for Dan – the classic intellectual scientist, always elsewhere.

Jess took the time to gaze around at the strange town that had been her home for six months. In a part of the world singularly blessed with hideous towns, Zana, an hour’s drive south of Chiclayo, and even deeper into the Sechura Desert, was still a shocker.

The streets were mostly paved with mud, or mud and sewage. The houses were concrete or adobe hovels, painted dirty white or a hopelessly sour pastel. Most of the buildings were one storey, but they didn’t have proper roofs, just ugly amputated concrete pillars bristling with steel cables that pointed at the empty air, waiting for the day when the family got rich enough to afford a second storey. These amputated houses gave the city an odd appearance, as if some dreadful god of pre-Columbian Peru – the mysterious Decapitating Demon of the Moche – had come along and swept a chainsaw across the town, levelling the buildings, chopping off anything too ambitious.

Turning back to the huacas, the prospect hardly improved: it seemed impossible that such ugly, if sizeable, heaps of mud, stretching almost to the horizon, could be so archaeologically important. Yet they were. These were the Moche pyramids, great sacred sites brutally eroded by fifteen hundred years of desert wind and El Niño rain. Once they would have been lofty, painted ziggurats dominating the flats and cornfields, full of warriors, priests and bloodthirsty nobles. Now they were muddy lumps, fabulously unexcavated muddy lumps, the precious knolls that had persuaded Toronto University Archaeology to locate its Moche Project in Zana.

In just two seasons of digging, Dan and the guys had opened only three of the many huacas, and already they’d found two senior Moche tombs, both undisturbed, one of which had provided the damaged neck vertebrae which had afforded Jessica her insight.

So it was exciting to wonder what else lay out here in the endless heaps of dry soil and potsherds.

At last, Dan lifted his eyes from his kit. ‘Sorry, Jess? Did you say something?’

Jessica smiled. ‘I said: how we do know the haqueros haven’t been here? The graverobbers.’

‘Well, we don’t, not absolutely,’ he confessed, his long grey hair falling over his dark brown eyes, ‘But we’re extremely optimistic. We’re guessing the reputation of Zana, as a bruja town, a town of sorcerers, has protected these huacas. Most of the people here are emancipated African slaves, thought to possess magical powers – that’s probably why the other tombs were untouched, in which case, why not this one also? And the doors are also intact. Anyway, we can talk later. Shall we do it?’

‘Yes!’

‘Turn on your headtorch.’

Dan was already buckling the chins strap of his helmet, with its halogen headtorch. Jess followed him.

The path around the southwest incline of Huaca D led to a low, excavated entrance. The smell emanating from the dark mudbrick tunnel beyond was earthy, and homely, and yet tanged with something else: something warm and maybe fetid. Something alien.

Stooping, they entered. Nina felt the brush of the mud roof on her helmet, and it was a distinctly satisfying sensation. At last she was inside a huaca: a real-life Moche adobe pyramid! Fifteen hundred years old!

Their uncomfortable crawl through the narrow adobe passage took several minutes: this was one of the biggest huacas in Zana. As they inched their way along, the mudbrick walls narrowed, tapering on either side, and above. A few minutes later, she and Dan were virtually crawling, abject and animal-like, on hands and feet. The darkness was intense.

Jessica hated the dark. It always reminded her of her father, and his last days. Specifically it reminded her of being in his hospital room at night, with the lights low, near to his death, as his cancer conquered him. She had been just seven years old and hadn’t understood what was happening. But she had nonetheless imbibed some emotional association: darkness equals death, equals a terrible nothingness, an inexplicable nullity. Yes, she hated the dark.

The darkness in the huaca was made worse by the claustrophobic conditions. The air was clammy and over-warm, lacking oxygen. Jess sweated. How could Dan be sure the pyramid wouldn’t simply collapse on top of them, smothering them in ancient mud, their mouths filling with suffocating soil, an avalanche of crumbling adobe? And then more darkness.

They moved on. Two more minutes of crawling became three. The passageway zigzagged, perhaps as a deterrent to graverobbers. The darkness was now pure and solid, cut through only by the beam of her headtorch: it illuminated Dan’s white T-shirt, as he led the way, crawling and crouching. The white of the T-shirt was turned a dirty orange: grimed with fifteen-hundred-year-old mud.

‘Here.’

Panting with relief, Jess saw they were entering a taller antechamber. She could stand; though Dan, with his lanky six feet four, still needed to hunch over.

Two other team members were waiting for them, kneeling in the dust. Jay Brennan and Larry Fielding. They said hello, and made poor jokes about the loveliness of their surroundings. Jess smiled as best she could, but she was too distracted by the floor of the antechamber.

‘My God.’

Here were the disarticulated skeletons, half-excavated. These were the sacrificed concubines or servants of the lords buried further within. From her research, she knew what these signified. The Moche believed their aristocrats required servants in the afterlife just as they did in the present life: so when the slaves were sacrificed to accompany their master their feet were chopped off. So that they couldn’t run away in the hereafter.

The idea was absurd, yet also appalling. Jess stared at one long skeleton, probably male, judging by the narrowness of the pelvis. It certainly had no feet. It looked like a pretty tall skeleton for a slave.

Recalling her thorough lessons in forensic anthropology from Steve Venturi at UCLA, she knelt and examined the ankle bone where it had been severed. Something was not quite right about it. Jess steadied her torchlight over the bone, examining the angle of the blow, as a voice echoed above her.

‘Right. This way.’

It seemed she didn’t have time to linger. She was a guest on this trip, conspicuously the anthropologist amongst proper archaeologists, so she was lucky to be here at all, and in no position to ask for a delay.

They moved down the last length of darkened passage to the sealed tomb. The air grew hotter, the coarse mud walls even rougher: they had only recently been excavated. The weight of the great adobe pyramid above them was palpable, and oppressive.

‘There.’

Dan pointed. A slab of rock blocked the passage, illuminated by their collective headtorches; the slab was the height of the passage itself – maybe one and a half metres wide and tall.

Jess asked the obvious and probably stupid question. ‘How do we move that?’

‘Brute force,’ said Dan. ‘The mud is ancient, it gives way. It’s surprisingly simple, you can dislodge the portals by hand. The rocks aren’t thick, they’re more like large slates.’

‘But – the roof?’

‘These adobe pyramids are secure, they won’t collapse. They erode in the sun and rain, but they’ve lasted fifteen hundred years: they don’t collapse from the inside.’

Jess felt her excitement surging. What was beyond this ancient portal? Already they had found a trove of mutilated skeletons. This was an important tomb, from the mysterious end of the Moche Empire, the desperate time of the Muchika. They were headed for the dark heart, the airless core of the pyramid.

Jay was muttering behind, in the depths of the gloom. His colleague joined in, giving voice to his concerns. ‘You know. The air is, ah, pretty bad down here, Dan.’

‘But what can we do? We haven’t got any oxygen tanks at the lab, have we?’

‘Nope. We finished the last on Monday.’

The frustrating debate continued, then Dan lifted a hand. ‘So, either we call a halt and wait a week for a new delivery, or we advance. Guys?’ His headtorch illuminated their white faces one by one.

In turn, everyone nodded. The decision was made.

‘Then let’s do it!’

Reaching up, Dan began tugging at the door. There was just room for his fingers to grasp an edge, and pull. He pulled once. Nothing. He pulled again. No movement.

Jess came up beside him, kneeling in the dust, to help. Still nothing.

‘Another go, come on.’

As one they tugged, and then the door seemed to shift, a few millimetres; then decisively, with a cloud of soil and choking dust. But something was wrong. This dust was red—

It was pouring from somewhere, from some hidden channel, some broken vessel above; draining like a tipped-up load of vermillion sand over Jessica’s face and hair and mouth. She was being smothered in thick red dust with a weird smell. She screamed out loud, in terror.

It was a ghastly childhood dream – of being stifled at night, feeling cold hands that throttled; it was a dream of being her father in his last moments, in hospital, misting the oxygen mask, drowning in pain, staring hapless and terrified at the nurse and the kids and the oncoming darkness – until his own seven-year-old daughter had wanted to thrust a pillow right over his face and end it for him—

And then the scarlet dust filled her mouth, and she could scream no more.

8
The Bishops Avenue, London

There were murders and there were … murders. That was the unspoken agreement between Detective Chief Inspector Ibsen and his detective sergeant, Larkham. A plain old murder was just that: a murder. A robbery gone nasty, or a domestic gone awry.

But a … murder was different. It required a microsecond of hesitation before the word was enunciated, or a subtle drop in voice tone, barely half a note, a third of a note. ‘Sir, we have a … murder.’

This one was, by all accounts, very much a … murder. Ibsen could tell from his DS’s demeanour. DS Larkham had already seen the corpse, which had been discovered six hours previously: his already-pale English face was paler than ever, his voice subdued, his normal cheeriness quite dispelled.

Their large police car was slowly rolling down The Bishops Avenue, one of the richest streets in London. Ibsen gazed out at the enormous houses, the fake Grecian villas looking faintly surreal in the drizzle. One resembled a vast temple from Luxor, inexplicably transported to the wintry north of the capital and fitted with six burglar alarms. The next house appeared to have sentries.

‘Who the fuck lives in houses like this?’ said the driver, giving voice to all their thoughts.

‘Kuwaiti emirs,’ said Ibsen. ‘Billionaire Thai politicians. Nobody in winter.’

‘Sorry, sir?’

‘Look – hardly any cars. A lot of these people have houses all over the world. They come here in summer, it’s dead in December. Makes it a good place to commit a crime. In winter.’

‘Well, our murder victim lived here.’ Larkham grimaced. ‘Even in winter.’

‘What do we know about him?’

‘Nephew of the Russian ambassador.’

‘Ouch.’ Ibsen winced at the complications. ‘This is an official residence?’

‘No, sir. Just a rich family. Father’s into oil and diamonds. Oligarch.’

‘Has someone told the Foreign Office?’

‘Already did it, sir.’

DCI Ibsen gazed, with a brief sense of pleasure, at Larkham’s keen face. Here was an ambitious policeman, a bright young man who had skipped university to go straight into the force, already a DS in his mid-twenties, with a very young family. He’d been Ibsen’s junior for just six months, and he was obviously itching for Ibsen’s job, but in a good way, just so he could move on up. Ibsen preferred to have someone nakedly and brazenly ambitious than a schemer who subtly politicked.

Larkham yawned; Ibsen grinned. ‘Nappies at dawn?’

‘And feeding at four a.m. Feel like I’ve done a shift already.’ He stifled his sleepiness and asked, ‘Does it get better?’

‘It gets better. When they reach the age of reason. About five or so.’

Larkham groaned; Ibsen chuckled. ‘OK. Tell me again. We’ve got statements?’

‘Yes, sir.’

Larkham repeated what information they had gathered so far. The first statement came from a passer-by, who had heard two raised male voices as he walked past the house at eleven p.m., though they didn’t sound violent …’

‘And the other statement?’

‘From a neighbour, an au pair in the house next door, at one a.m., approximately the time of death, according to Pathology’s very rough initial guess, sir. She also heard the raised voices of two men. She says these voices were shouting, aggressive, possibly violent, possibly drunk.’

‘But she did nothing?’

‘Very young lady, sir, Just nineteen. Croatian.’

‘Ah.’ Ibsen understood this. Bishops Avenue was the kind of place where rich important people went to be seriously undisturbed in big houses. A teenage au pair living in a strange big house in a strange new country would be reluctant to cause any bother.

‘Here we go, sir.’

The car parked outside a large building fronted by two-storey-high white Doric pillars. A big car in the driveway was covered with some kind of tailored sheet. Ibsen stared: he had never had a car expensive enough to require special protection from the English winter.

‘The body?’

‘This way.’

They were greeted at the door by the Scene of Crime Officer, wearing a paper suit which zipped up at the front. Other forensic and attending officers came out of the building, carrying evidence bags, and walked to a large steel van, parked behind the sheet-covered car.

‘There’s a lot of blood,’ said the SOCO through his paper mask, with the air of a host at a house party greeting his latest guests.

‘Can we see?’

‘You need to nonce up first, sir.’

Stalling at the doorway, Ibsen and Larkham slipped on their plastic gloves and paper masks and translucent overshoes, like politicians visiting a fish factory. Then they stepped through the enormous pillared hall into an enormous pillared sitting room. Ibsen resisted the urge to swear, as he surveyed the crime scene. Then his resistance crumbled.

‘Fucking hell.’

The victim was young, blond, and handsome: maybe twenty-five or thirty at most. He was lying supine on the floor near a large antique desk. A phone and a notepad sat on the desk, to the left of a laptop, which was lightly smeared with blood.

Opposite the desk stood some speakers, and a vast black television: ultra-expensive kit.

The face of the young Russian was slightly turned towards the desk, as if in his last moments he had tried, but failed, to make a desperate call. He was dressed in a neat blue shirt, probably bespoke, from Jermyn Street; and fashionable jeans – perhaps Armani. The new collection. The jeans were loosened at the top, half-unbuttoned.

Ibsen, who cultivated a sincere interest in clothes, would have liked to give an opinion of the kid’s footwear, but that was impossible, as the cadaver had no feet.

Someone had sliced off his feet. The raw stumps were an obscenity: the victim resembled a casualty of some industrial scythe. The body was also missing his right hand: blood had spurted from the severed wrist all over the rich Turkish carpet, making the rich red of the wool richer and purpler. The angle of the brutal amputations was unusual. Ibsen stopped to have a closer look, squinting, clutching his face mask to his mouth, and found there was even a deep grinning cut mark to the right side of the neck, as if the murderer had tried to slice off the head as well, but had given up. Perhaps the killer had got bored, or maybe the victim died of blood loss before the decapitation could be completed, rendering it pointless.

Crouching by the body, Ibsen went through the PMI calculations. How long had the body been here? Forensics would strip the corpse, and check for livor mortis – pooling of the blood at the bottom of the body – and for rigor mortis, and algor mortis, and get a scientific answer; but Ibsen’s instinct told him Pathology’s first guess was good: this body was pretty fresh. You could smell the new blood. Twelve hours at most. That made the overheard violence, at one a.m., very likely the time of death.

‘He dragged himself in here?’ Ibsen gestured at the long, lurid smears of blood along the parquet floor.

‘Yes,’ said the SOC officer, Jonson. ‘Seems he was chopped up in the kitchen, then the killer dragged the body in here, or he dragged himself, trying to reach the phone.’

‘The feet and hand?’

‘Found ’em on the kitchen floor. Gone to Path.’

Ibsen walked through the hallway into the white-and-steel kitchen. At the far end a set of French windows gave on to the lawn. The doors were open to the cold and the drizzle. Bleak, leafless trees bent over the vast lawns; a tennis court, padlocked shut for the winter, lay at the far end of the grounds.

The streaks of blood stretched from the sitting room through the hallway into the kitchen to a larger pool of blood where the butchery must have been committed.

Larkham came alongside.

‘Prints?’ asked Ibsen. ‘In the mud, the garden?’

‘Nothing yet, sir, but we have found … this. Incredibly.’

Larkham was holding a clear plastic bag, inside which was a very large, viciously serrated Sabatier kitchen knife, smeared and gummed with blood. The murder weapon, without question.

The DCI gazed at it in astonishment. ‘The killer just left this?’

‘Lying on the kitchen floor. By the fridge, sir. And look—’ With a pencil Larkham pointed to the black resin handle of the knife. Perfectly visible was a large red thumb print: a patent print. The lottery win of evidential police work.

For the briefest moment, Ibsen felt like celebrating: this was so easy, a patent print, on the murder weapon, an open door to solving the case. But another second told him this was too easy. Way too easy. The door closed, revealing a darker truth. He regarded the puzzle, gazing at the fridge and the blood and the knife. What did he have? Something. Definitely something. He considered the missing right hand. The cut to the right of the neck. The left-hand thumb print on the handle. The strange oblique angle of the amputations themselves.

Ibsen took out his own pen and pointed at the knife. ‘That’s not the killer’s print. I bet that’s the victim’s print.’

Larkham’s face expressed wide and sincere puzzlement.

‘Don’t you see? The murderer has, so far as we can tell, left no other clues, no boot prints, no blatant trace evidence. A truly professional job, then, despite the torture … despite the butchery.’

‘So?’

The French windows creaked in the cold wet wind, and blustered old dead leaves into the kitchen.

‘Would he just leave behind a murder weapon with a big fat print on it? No. So he discarded or ignored the knife for a reason. Because he must have known the print on the blade belonged to someone else. So it would provide no evidence against him.’

‘Ah …’

‘Now think about the corpse,’ Ibsen continued. ‘The slice to the neck was on the right, like someone left-handed, reaching around, trying to cut his own neck. This is a left-handed thumb print on the knife. Likewise, the cuts to the leg are distinctively angled, as if the severing blade was wielded in a particular direction. By someone crouching, doing it to himself.’

‘Sir?’

‘The kid was living here alone, right?’

‘Uh, yes, sir.’

‘Remember the desk. The notepad and the phone were to the left of the laptop. He’s left-handed. He did the amputations himself. Therefore my guess is … the thumb print is from the victim’s own hand.’

Larkham stared moodily at the garden, at the grey enormous lawn. ‘That means, it means …’

‘Yes. That means the killer forced the victim. To cut off his own feet. And his own hand. And even to slice into his own neck. He kindly left the victim with one hand intact, his best left hand, so he could do this to himself. Check the corpse for prints: I wager the thumb print will match.’

For the faintest second, the coolly ambitious Detective Sergeant Peter Larkham of New Scotland Yard looked as if he was going to be sick.

9
Morningside, Edinburgh

Nina McLintock and Adam Blackwood halted at the corner of Springvalley Terrace. The night had cleared and it was now piercingly cold, with a keening wind off the Firth of Forth, and the street was wholly deserted. Glittery with silent frost.

‘It’s in that block there,’ Nina said. ‘Stepmother’s flat. He moved in with her a coupla years ago.’

Adam followed her anxious steps, looking up at the severe windows as he went. The terrace comprised one of those sandstone tenements which in England would have been considered lower class, if they existed at all; in Scotland these large, sombre blocks of Victorian apartments had a posh ambience, especially here in Morningside, the upmarket inner suburb of Edinburgh.

A burst of noise behind them – drinkers falling out of a shutting pub – hurried the two of them around the curving pavement to the front door of the tenement block.

‘How are we going to—’

‘I know where he kept his spare key. He was a bit of a lush. If you get home drunk a lot, you learn to hide a spare key.’

Adam nodded. He could empathize with that, all right. He remembered his own days of drinking: the fights and the forgetfulness. Locked out of his home in Sydney. After Alicia.

‘Here.’ Nina thrust a hand through some railings, and scrabbled in the soil of a small front garden. ‘Just here, under the rosebush. Second rosebush on the right.’

She rummaged under the dead roseless plant while Adam glanced up and down the street, increasingly fretful. This didn’t look good. Two people loitering on an empty street at one in the morning, digging in a stranger’s garden.

He strove to repress his greater anxiety: the unnerving two-way logic of what he was doing. Either Nina was deluded and he was painfully wasting his time because he was so pathetically desperate for a story; or she was right, and Archie McLintock had been murdered. Which meant a murderer.

‘Quick!’ He could hear footsteps, somewhere. Round the curving corner, coming their way.

‘Got it.’ Nina stood, brandishing two very muddied keys.

The footsteps were louder now, right behind them. It was one of the drinkers from the pub. Tall, shaven-headed, wearing a dark coat. The man abruptly paused, under a streetlamp, to light a cigarette, scratching a match into flame. Adam stared, even as he tried not to stare. There was something odd about the man’s hands, cupped around the cigarette: they were decorated with large tattoos. Tattoos of skulls. Was he really just a drinker? Or a murderer?

The secret that can get you killed.

This was nonsense; Adam calmed himself. Just a drinker …

Flicking the match, exhaling smoke, the man continued, passing by. He gave them a fraction of a glance, and a trace of a boozy smile, as he loped on down the road.

Adam and Nina stared at each other in the cold and frosted lamplight. She shook her head. ‘Come on.’

Wiping the mud from the keys with the sleeve of her big anorak, Nina turned and paced to the front door. The first key slotted in; they stepped inside. The hall was dark and hushed with tragic silence, it felt like the shrouded hallway of someone who had recently died. Adam’s hand reflexively moved to the wall, but Nina shook her head and whispered, ‘No light switch.’ Instead she used the light on her mobile phone to guide them, warily, up four steep flights of stairs.

Faint noises echoed. A soft Edinburgh voice floated up from somewhere; he heard a TV turned off. The muffled noises of posh tenement life.

‘37D.’ The effete beam of her mobile phone just picked out the number on the doorway and she lifted the second key to the Yale lock.

Then a shrill voice from below sent a rush of schoolboy fear through Adam. As if he had been caught, in the most flagrant way, by a headmistress.

‘What is it? Who is it? I’ll call the police!’

Light flooded the stairwell.

‘Crap,’ Nina said, very quietly. ‘It’s the landlady. Sophie Walker. Say nothing.’ She stepped to the banister and stared down. ‘Oh, God. Sophie, hello, I’m so sorry to scare you – we didn’t want to wake anyone – it’s just … you know …’

The woman was briskly climbing the stairs. She was about fifty, with a hint of hippyishness: wearing a Greenpeace T-shirt under a thick purple cardigan, and supermarket jeans and sandals. Her stern face softened as she ascended.

Because Nina had started to cry.

It was probably an act, Adam reckoned, but if so it was a brilliant act. The grieving daughter of the beloved father. How could anyone object to Nina returning to her dead father’s apartment, no matter the unusual circumstances?

‘I know Rosalind is away, and this is a terrible intrusion,’ Nina sniffed. ‘I just wanted a few wee photos. Of my father. Please forgive me.’

Sophie Walker crooned with sympathy as she came over and hugged Nina. ‘Oh please. Nina. Don’t you worry, please sweetheart. I’m so awfully sorry about what happened – and of course I understand.’ The landlady flickered a glance at Adam.

Nina explained, her voice tremulous, ‘This is Adam. He’s … he’s a good friend who’s been helping me. Y’know, deal with this. But I know it’s late and this must appear crazy.’

‘I lost my own father last year, I entirely understand, it’s such a terrible thing – it always hits you more than you expect. The only reason I was so paranoid is because of the break-in. Before. But you know about that.’

Nina lifted her face. And gently detached herself from the hug. ‘Yes. He told me, of course. Were you frightened?’

‘Not me, no! But he was so upset. You know they took all his notebooks, don’t you? His precious notebooks from his trip.’

‘Yes.’

‘But why did he refuse to go the police? Very odd. And then of course that man – the argument – anyway that’s why I’m so paranoid.’

‘Which argument? There were lots, Sophie. His mood swings at the end.’

‘In the flat, a few days later. With the American. I heard the voices.’

Adam watched the two women, bewildered, unable to gain a purchase on the conversation.

Nina sighed. ‘Was he really that upset?’

‘Oh I think so. Oh yes, he was very unsettled. First a break-in, then the arguments. A colleague perhaps? Anyway.’ The woman hugged her arms around herself, her purple cardigan tight around her chest. ‘Look at me, this is not the time for chatter. I’m so sorry for everything Nina. If you ever want to … you know … just call. I’ve been through it. You have to give yourself space, let yourself grieve.’ She gave Adam another glance, this time entirely unsuspicious. ‘It’s such a raw night, I’ll be going, and I’ll let you … get on with things. Goodbye. And call me!’

‘I will Sophie, I will. Thank you.’

The two women hugged again. Then Sophie Walker disappeared down the cold tenement stairs, heading for her ground-floor apartment. Without a word Nina, swivelled, turned the key in the lock, and she and Adam entered the flat.

It was very cold and truly dark inside, the apartment exuding a maudlin scent of beeswax polish. Adam flicked a hallway switch, which engulfed them with sudden light.

‘You never told me any of this. A break-in? An argument? Surely this is relevant?’

Nina’s reply was fierce: she turned and gazed at him with her green eyes wet and wide. ‘Because he never told me. Any of it.’

10
East Finchley, north London

‘Er, dad, what are you doing?’

‘Nothing, son, nothing.’

Mark Ibsen was flat on his back on the living room floor in their small house in East Finchley. His wife was Sunday shopping with his younger daughter Leila. His son was unimpressed with his dad’s answer.

‘Dad. You’re lying on the floor.’

‘Luke. I’m fine. Haven’t you got some Xbox thing you can go and play for seventeen hours on your own, like normal kids?’

‘It’s more fun watching you, Dad.’

DCI Ibsen sighed, and gazed up. He was trying to conceptualize the final hours of Nikolai Kerensky, their murder victim. So here he was, theoretically lying on the kitchen floor of the big house at 113 Bishops Avenue, with no feet. And one hand. Blood gushing everywhere. The killer was – what? – looming over him with a gun, or another knife, some sort of weapon? The blood would have been everywhere.

Why slide from the kitchen into the sitting room? Fully sixty yards? In deep agony? Slowly bleeding to death?

Maybe the killer fled, therefore allowing Kerensky to make a desperate bid to reach a phone.

Ibsen glanced up at the kitchen window of their small terraced house. Weak winter sunlight was shining through the bottle of Tesco’s lemon-scented washing up liquid poised on the kitchen window sill.

He tried to imagine his kitchen as five times the size, with big French windows flung open to a massive garden, windows through which the killer had presumably made his ingress and egress. But how did the murderer do that without leaving any signs whatsoever? It was a true puzzle: they had no trace evidence, no fibre evidence, no hint of forced entry, no shoe marks in the muddy garden, no eye witnesses, nothing.

And why would the murderer flee halfway through his task? No one had disturbed him at his grisly business: it was a cook returning the following morning who had discovered the mutilated corpse of Nik Kerensky. The only ‘witnesses’ to the incident were those passers-by and neighbours who heard unusual noises – and did nothing.

‘Can you shift the cat, Luke, don’t want to squash him.’

‘He’s too fat to pick up! Mum gives him all the leftovers.’

‘Try?’

With a manful effort that made his father proud, Luke picked up their enormous cat Mussolini, and moved him to a nearby stool.

His route cleared, Mark Ibsen slowly dragged himself across the hallway, into their living room, again trying to quadruple the distance in his mind, and conceptualize the pain of having severed feet and a severed hand as he did this. At what point did the killer force Kerensky to try to cut his own neck? Why did he stop doing this? When did he loosen Kerensky’s trousers? Was that the prelude to some hideous castration, or was there a sexual element?

The hint of a glimpse of an idea caught the light of Ibsen’s mind, like a jewel momentarily illuminated. Gay sex. Gay sexual murders were often the most brutal. Was Kerensky gay? All they knew, so far, was that he was a bit of a playboy. They had yet to receive the toxicology and serology reports but friends had spoken of drugs and nightclubs.

Now he had reached his immediate goal. Their IKEA dining table had been laid out exactly as the antique desk in Bishops Avenue had been laid out: notepad and phone to the left, laptop to the right.

‘Have you finished, Dad?’

‘Nearly.’

Ibsen was lying on his back on the living room floor. Their ceiling needed painting. He let his thoughts coalesce to a quietness, then hoisted himself on one theoretically amputated arm – the blood theoretically spurting everywhere – and reached for the phone. But he didn’t make it, of course – they already knew no phone calls had been made from the house that night – so Ibsen fell back, in his mind smearing blood on the laptop. And then he theoretically died. The last blood jolting from his horrible wounds.

‘Dad, open your eyes. It’s scary now.’

‘Sorry, lad.’ Mark stood up, and tousled his son’s hair; then stared at the laptop on his dining table, slightly smeared with marmalade from breakfast.

The laptop.

The laptop.

The laptop.

Grabbing his mobile, Ibsen stepped urgently into the hall, calling Larkham’s mobile. ‘It’s Ibsen.’

‘Sir?’

‘You’re at the Yard?’

‘Yesssir. We don’t all get Sundays off—’

‘Nor do I, I’ve got an idea. Have we checked the laptop yet?’

A telephonic pause.

‘Sir?’

‘Has anyone checked the laptop, seen if it was used?’

‘Ahh, no.’ Another pause. ‘We’re getting round to it eventually, sir. Tomorrow, probs. Course it’s been fumed for prints but all we’ve got is Kerensky’s as he reached for the phone like you said …’

‘But maybe he wasn’t reaching for the phone! Maybe he was reaching for the laptop!’

The next pause was tinged with sarcasm. ‘Visiting Facebook, sir? As he bled to death?’

‘Have you got the laptop there?’

‘It’s in the hard evidence bags, sir. Downstairs.’

‘Grab it and meet me at the house, Bishops Avenue. Now.’

‘But the chain of evidence, sir?’

‘We’ll fix it. Bring it!’

After leaving his son with the neighbours, it took ten minutes for Ibsen to drive his Renault to Bishops Avenue, a brief journey which comprised a vast social ascent.

The murder mansion was now decorated with so much police tape, fluttering in the cold winter wind, it was as if there was a small regatta taking place inside. Two constables guarded the large double front door.

‘DCI?’

‘Morning, constable. Wife OK? Kids?’

Their chat was desultory. Because Ibsen was still working through the logic in his mind. The laptop. The laptop. The sitting room with the big TV and speakers …

‘Ah, Larkham!’

The detective sergeant had arrived, driving himself from New Scotland Yard. As Larkham stepped out of his car he held up a large clear plastic ziplocked bag containing a laptop.

‘Let’s go inside.’

‘Sir.’

Another constable opened the door. Ibsen gazed around a marbled hallway which shone with the polished gleam of wealth.

The victim’s father, the oligarch, was apparently staying in a hotel in town, having flown in from Moscow, shocked and grieving. The man was understandably avoiding all the horrible police work: the house had been gridded and marked and powdered to uninhabitability, and it stank of cyano fumes.

They stepped into the sitting room.

A young forensic photographer was just finishing her UV work on the carpets, seeking hidden blood stains. Nods were exchanged as she quit the room, leaving them alone, though the DCI could hear more forensics officers in the kitchen.

‘All right, put the laptop on the desk, where it was, and boot it up.’

With carefully gloved hands Larkham turned the laptop on, and Ibsen bent close to the screen. He sought Kerensky’s last browsing history, for the night he had died. He searched and scrolled, and scrolled a little more. And stopped. ‘There. Look.’

Larkham leaned, and looked. ‘Jesus. Porn sites! Hundreds of them.’

‘Not just that. Look at the timing. All through the evening, Larkham …’ Ibsen checked the times again. ‘All through the evening in question he did this, surfing porn. Gay porn by the look of it. Justusboys. Hungdaddy. Grindr. Then – look – here – at about eleven p.m. He clicked on—’ Ibsen moved closer to the screen, tapping keys with his gloved fingers. ‘Redtube. And it seems like … He watched a movie. Yes. He watched an online porn vid. This one.’

Another key click.

The two men watched the little video buffer into life on the laptop. An older man was seducing a younger man in a doctor’s room. It was a patient/doctor porn scenario, a young jock being stripped and ‘examined’. The actors proceeded to vigorous sex, laughing and panting.

‘Nice.’ Larkham blushed faintly. ‘So he liked gay porn so much he watched it from about four in the afternoon to eleven p.m. the night he died.’ The young sergeant frowned. ‘He liked it so much that after his killer had forced him to cut off his hand and feet and practically his damn head he dragged himself from the kitchen, to go and watch some more gay porn as he was dying, with the killer standing over him – there. One a.m.! He’s online again. Surfing! What the fuck?’

‘There was no killer.’ Ibsen shook his head. ‘See, here, the computer.’ A click of two keys minimized the porn video, and revealed the tray of icons at the bottom of the screen. ‘There’s a wi-fi connection, surely, with those huge speakers. Turn them on.’

Obediently, Larkham crossed the room and found a remote. With his gloved left hand he pressed a button. A red light at the bottom of the wall-high speakers flicked green, and a wireless symbol turned orange. The faint yet unheard hum of large electrical appliances, switched on and waiting, somehow filled the room.

‘Now,’ said Ibsen, ‘let’s play the video he watched at one a.m., as he was lying on the floor, dying. Here it is … on Boundstuds.com. Big Daddy’s Dungeon Party. I’m guessing this is not Teletubbies.’

The video buffered for two seconds, then burst noisily into life. The sound from the speakers was intensely loud. On the laptop screen a man in a leather coat, a leather mask and a leather jockstrap, was whipping a chained and naked young man, whipping him hard. The boy screamed. The man shouted abuse. The noise filled the entire house – and beyond.

Ibsen turned the video off.

Larkham was staring at the speakers. ‘So that’s it. That’s what our witnesses heard? They heard the first porno video at eleven p.m., and the second, the violent one, at one a.m. They didn’t hear any intruder. Sir, that’s it. That explains it!’

A constable entered the sitting room, breathless and flushed. ‘Is everything OK, sir? We heard – er – strange noises – ah—’

Larkham laughed quietly. ‘No, it’s fine. It’s all good.’

The constable looked between the two officers, bemused. ‘OK then … sir. I’ll leave you to it.’

Ibsen stepped gently over the stained carpet and gazed towards the distant kitchen, speaking quietly. ‘That’s why we have zero evidence for a killer, why we have the victim’s prints on his own murder weapon. Because there was no murderer. There was no murder. It’s autoerotic. It’s a damn suicide. Kerensky watched gay porn all night, for some reason, then for some reason we don’t know this drove him to mutilate himself, so he went into the kitchen – and hacked off his own feet and his right hand.’

Larkham crossed the room and stood beside his boss. ‘Then he even tries to cut his own throat, but realizes you can’t ’cause it’s virtually impossible. Without a chainsaw. But he is dying, anyway, and he wants a final high. Autoerotic as you say, sir.’

Ibsen walked back into the middle of the enormous sitting room. ‘Exactly. He drags himself from the kitchen, because he wants that last amazing thrill. And then he reaches the desk. But he’s lying on the floor weak from blood loss. Desperately he reaches up for the laptop, turns it on, smearing blood on the keys. And he watches …’

‘Big Daddy’s Dungeon Party.’

A throbbing silence filled the room. Ibsen expected to feel a rush of vindication, even triumph, but instead he felt only a tinge of disappointment. So: it was not a murder but a bizarre suicide, a truly bizarre suicide. He’d solved it, and probably deprived himself of a fascinating case.

‘Er, sir?’ Larkham was pointing.

‘What?’

‘Look at the screensaver.’

Ibsen swivelled to look at the computer. As the laptop had been left to its own devices, the screensaver had come on: the entire screen was filled with a single image.

It was a human skull. The skull was adorned with a crown, and the neckbones were festooned with pink pearl necklaces and a red-and-blue Barcelona football scarf. Lodged between the stained brown teeth of the skull was a fat cigar, trailing smoke.

Ibsen frowned. ‘That’s a little weird.’

Larkham shook his head. ‘It’s not just weird, it’s fucked up. This whole thing is totally fu—’

But he was interrupted. A young woman was standing at the sitting room doorway, in gloves and a paper suit, her frizz of blonde hair just visible under a paper bonnet. She was clutching something in another clear plastic bag.

Ibsen just about recognized her. ‘Sergeant … Fincham?’

‘Yes, sir, Forensics. Are you the SIO?’

‘Yep. DCI Ibsen. What’s that?’

‘Something you ought to see, maybe.’

She walked over to him, carefully stepping around the blood stains on the Turkish carpet, and dropped the bag on the desk for him to examine.

Inside the plastic bag was a glass. It was smeared red, on one side in particular. The concept thrown up by this made Ibsen’s stomach churn.

‘Where and when did you find this?’

‘Just now, sir, it had rolled under the cooker.’

Larkham squinted. ‘Christ, is that blood?’

The woman nodded. ‘Almost certainly. Human blood. Congealed. Nearly dried. Maybe two days old …?’

Larkham pointed. ‘Look at the way it’s smeared down one side, like it has been … drunk from. It’s been used.’

Ibsen didn’t need to have this pointed out. Before he died the victim had drunk a cup of his own blood.

11
Tomb 1, Huaca D, Zana, north Peru

She could hear voices in the redness.

‘Jessica. Jessica!’

Someone was pulling her; sideways. She coughed, and coughed again. Spluttering the dust from her mouth, rejecting it, puking it up.

‘Give her the water!’

Another voice. Larry. She opened her eyes but all she could see was the redness. She shut them tight again. A cold sudden splash of water dragged her back to reality.

‘Jessica!’

It was Dan: she could sense his touch, his fingers wiping the dust from her face with a cloth. Washing out her eyes and her mouth. Again she peered, and this time she saw.

She was still in the passage chamber at the entrance to Tomb 1 of Huaca D. Beams of light pierced the floating clouds of red dust, beginning to settle: beams cast by the headtorches of her friends and colleagues, Larry, and Dan and Jay, who were staring at her: dark shapes behind the beams.

‘Jess. Jessica. Are you OK?’

Her voice was a dusty croak. ‘I think so – think so, I …’ Faltering, she choked up some phlegm, and spat it on to the passage floor.

With a shudder, Jess grabbed the cloth from Dan, and started rubbing the dust from her own face, and hands, and her shoulders. Get rid of this filth. She was covered in the stuff, hundreds of pounds of it must have fallen from the vault above, raining down on her head.

‘It’s cinnabar powder,’ said Dan. ‘Just cinnabarite.’

Urgent and repulsed, Jess pared the disgusting powder from under her fingernails. The powder had a definite scent, not quite pungent, but organic, and dirty, and soiling. Like something excreted by insects.

So it was cinnabar? Powdered ore of red mercury, used on corpses as decoration since the early Stone Age.

And then the anxiety came rushing back.

‘Hold on. Cinnabar is mercury,’ she said, ‘it’s a poison—’

Dan spoke, his voice softened by affection. ‘Yes, Jess … That’s why you got a dumping. The Moche put it in some of their tombs as a booby trap to ward off graverobbers. It’s triggered by opening the door.’ His headtorch was bobbing as he nodded. ‘It was lethal millennia ago, but it’s inert after so long: really – there is no risk, Jess. It’s just a shock when it happens.’ The headtorch turned, its beam circling like a lighthouse beam in the sea fog, through the floating red dust. ‘Larry?’

Larry Fielding’s laconic voice emanated from the reddened darkness. ‘Yeah,’ he laughed. ‘It happened to me at Huaca de La Luna in Trujillo. Few years back, when Tronna first sent us here, we were tryin’ to get into Burial 5, you know, the famous one, with the princess.’ A chuckle. ‘Freaked me out. Like being in a little avalanche. But I was fine!’

‘But I passed out?’ Jessica said shakily.

‘Seems so,’ said Dan. ‘Only a few seconds, though – just the shock, I should think.’ A heavy pause. ‘Look. If you wanna go back we totally understand. Larry can help you, you can come back later.’

The idea of scuttling back to the TUMP lab for a shower, then waiting, lamely, to hear what they had found, was surreal. And she definitely didn’t want any indulgent treatment from Dan, just because they were having an affair: secret or otherwise. Her defiance resurged. They were still here. At the door to Tomb 1 of Huaca D. What was beyond that door? She urgently wanted to be here the moment it opened, like Lord Carnarvon in the Valley of the Kings, like every explorer in human history, she wanted to say: I was there.

‘No way!’ Her voice had regained its edge.

‘Go, girl!’ Larry laughed.

‘OK, then.’ Dan was deciding. ‘OK, let’s get this done. A few more minutes and we’ll be in the tomb.’ Slowly, he shifted left, in the fetid confines of the dark passage, and began tugging once again at the rock doors to Tomb 1. The slates shifted as he spoke. ‘You know, this is actually a damn good sign. The Moche only used cinnabar as a deterrent for their most precious graves. That’s right, Larry, right? What did you find in the Huaca de la Luna?’

From down the passage came the reply. ‘Oh, wow. The lot. A main skeleton: the warrior priest, buried with his tumi. Decapitated llamas, that was nice, and tons of grave goods – a headdress made from desert fox bones, this fantastic wooden club …’

Dan was still working at the door. A faint crack of blackness could be seen – beyond. The tension was thick in the air, replacing the crimson powder of lethal cinnabar. Jessica guessed that all of them were feeling it, the rising tide of excitement.

Jay spoke up. ‘Didn’t you find blood on that club?’

The door was definitely opening. Larry replied, ‘Yeah, it was covered in this … like … black stuff. Horrible. We did immunoanalysis. It reacted to human blood antiserum only.’

The door was opening further. Larry added, ‘It had been used so often, to kill people, ritually, that the blood had soaked through the wood. Like jam in a sponge. Yuk.’

They were seconds from entering Tomb 1, Huaca D.

Dan interrupted, his voice strained by exertion. ‘Looking back, ah, you know, with what we know from Jessica and Steve Venturi, I reckon – ah—’ He was pushing at the door now, and it was opening easily. ‘I reckon that, ah … the mace must have been used in the sacrifice ritual. When they were done drinking blood, they just lined victims up, hit them with the club, bludgeoned the brains away – so all we need to do is know why: who they did it for, who they, ah … worshipped. OK … ah … I think I think we’re in. I think we’re in the tomb!’

Even the veteran professional calm of Dan Kossoy was affected by the excitement: he said nothing more. But the beam of his headtorch told the story.

The door was open.

Jessica breathed the ancient air exhaling from Tomb 1. It seemed to be respirating, releasing a long ancient sigh of relief, or submission. This was nonsense, of course. It was just some ventilation, air blowing through the entire huaca, now that the door was fully open, the desert wind whistling through, probably from their entrance to some further concealed exit – air sucking from one end to the other.

The smell was tainted with an old putridity, something ancient, and distant, and incorrigibly dead.

Jess looked around. Was she the only who had noticed this disgusting odour? No. Jay had a sleeve over his mouth. But Dan Kossoy seemed entirely unfazed.

‘It’s an unbroken Moche tomb all right. A big one. I know that singularly lovely perfume. Come on. Let’s go see.’

One by one they crouched and waited to pass through the portal of Tomb 1, Huaca D. Jess felt, for a fraction of a moment, like a Second World War POW in a movie, waiting to use the secret tunnel to escape from the Nazis. The difference was, they were going further into the imprisoning evil.

The first thing she noticed was the size of the tomb: it was huge, big enough to stand in, and it stretched deep into hidden darkness. Mud steps led down. So that was how it worked. The Moche must have dug down, to make this vast tomb, then built the adobe pyramid over the pit.

Her feet crunched on something. What? She shone her headtorch down on the floor.

A thousand glittering corpses sparkled back at her: the desiccated carapaces of beetles, iridescent, still showing their sinisterly gorgeous colours: purples and lurid greens and deep dark blues.

‘Skin beetles! Omorgus suberosus. Flesh-eating Coleoptera. The Moche worshipped them – they worshipped skin beetles and blowflies. We see them on ceramics. Familiars of the unknown god, perhaps? Hmm.’ Dan Kossoy was standing close to Jess as he said this. Very close. The beams of their headtorches crossed like battling swords as they both stared at the floor. She felt his hand reach for her hand and grasp it discreetly, giving a brief, secret, affectionate, reassuring squeeze. Then he pointed. ‘And here, these are fly puparia. Thousands of them. But … my goodness. Look. Here – totally staked out.’

Jessica gazed. The dead beetles formed a kind of stencil or silhouette: and they surrounded a skeleton of a smallish human figure.

Protected by the sealed door, the corpse had rotted slowly, free of any covering. The body must have been totally naked for there were no clothes, no adornments, no headdresses or weapons or grave goods: it was stark naked. And it was, as Dan said, staked out.

Hoops of metal fastened the wrists and ankles to the floor. Worst of all: the skull was screaming, locked in a rasping howl of pain, yellowy teeth grimacing. This person, this adolescent or young woman or man, had died in agony.

‘Dan!’ It was Jay, calling. ‘Dan, come and see!’

They ran over. Another skeleton was staked to the floor along the side of the tomb, near the adobe wall.

‘Another girl, it looks like.’ Jay said. ‘No feet. Chopped off. Must be a human sacrifice, right? And here. Birds? Avian skulls. Vultures – must be vultures.’

Jessica knelt by the skeleton. It was adorned with a necklace of some sort; she shone her flashlight. The necklace was maybe copper, and decorated with small, symbolic commas embossed into the metal. She had seen these before, many times, in Moche art. They were called ulluchus. No one truly knew what they were: stylized drops of blood, maybe; perhaps blood of the primary deity.

But who was the god who demanded these strange rites? What kind of ancient faith demanded this horror?

‘Dan!’ Another shout across the tomb. This time it was Larry.

The finds were coming fast. The tomb was littered with many skeletons, filled with precious grave goods: it was a rich and wonderful prize. Wooden weapons mouldered in the gloom. Broken vessels, in the shape of naked prisoners, squatted in the dust, next to little copper bottles for coca taking, and endless broken potsherds with the strange comma-shaped blood drops, more ulluchus, and then – quite wonderfully – a spray of tiny pink coral cylinders, still pretty after fifteen hundred years, where a glorious headdress had rotted away. This was a high-status tomb, a tomb of nobles surrounded by sacrificial companions.

One especially high-status skeleton, possibly a princess, with a great owl headdress, featured another severed ankle, like the skeletons outside. Why? It was inexplicable. This couldn’t be a sacrificial hobbling to prevent a concubine or a slave from fleeing in the afterlife: this was a noble. Why would she have this bizarre amputation? And how did it fit with the puzzling aspects of the other severed limbs?

The puzzle was too hard. Jess felt the throb of a headache as she walked carefully between the skulls and the ribcages.

In the gloom of the Tomb 1 she could hear the others enthusing over this grand discovery. The worry of the last hour was gone; Larry and Jay and Dan were chattering excitedly.

‘Brilliant, just brilliant, this is excellent …’

‘We need to grid this, today – and we need Kubiena boxes.’

‘I’ll go back and grab the cameras.’

Part of her was pleased for them: Jess could understand the excitement. But she just couldn’t share the elation. Because she couldn’t shake the primary image from her mind: that terrible first skeleton staked out in the mud floor, surrounded by the purple and green shells of a million skin beetles.

The anguished, frozen, terrified howl of the skull told her one thing: the victim had surely been tied to the floor, then fed alive to the insects.

12
Morningside, Edinburgh

‘You’re sure he didn’t tell you any of this?’

‘Absolutely. Nothing. Nada.’ Nina gestured, angrily, chopping the air. ‘A break-in! And he was upset! So that explains why he felt menaced. Or watched.’

Adam gazed down the silent hallway. The McLintocks’ apartment was so very hushed. Several doors gave off the hallway, which was decorated by black-and-white prints of old Edinburgh. Auld Reekie. The medieval city with its Luckenbooths and witch-burnings, the Stinking Style and the royal gibbet.

From somewhere he got the peculiar sense of a clock, somewhere, having stopped. It was a silence comprised of tension, and absence. But maybe it was simply the tension: they were, after all, in someone else’s flat, which they had entered with illicit use of a stolen key.

‘So, what now, Nina? I don’t quite see why we’re here. If the notebooks are gone then we might as well quit. Get out. No?’ He searched for her reaction. He was happy to continue but he didn’t want to take pointless risks.

Her gaze was narrowed by contempt, or something close to it. ‘Ach. Hell with that. We search! There may still be something? Clues!’

She was already unzipping her large blue quilted anorak; as she dropped the hood, her hair loosened, and shimmered. He gazed, unwittingly recording the details: he couldn’t help it, all those years of journalistic training made him do it – this was the stuff that made an article come alive. Details. Description. Details. With her very twenty-first-century anorak now discarded, standing petite and slender in black jumper and grey jeans, she looked like a young and comely widow; yet she also looked as if she was dressed for a break-in. Dark clothes and raven-dark hair. Quite hard to see.

‘Let’s try the sitting room. And his study. Study first.’

He followed her gesture.

‘Here. Dad’s study. They had one each.’

The door opened; they entered the study. The light switch was dimmer style: Nina carefully calibrated the dial – finessing it so they had just enough light to search. Not strange blazing light at the windows, not at two a.m.

The study was definitely the man’s private space in a shared apartment. The decor was austere. Scottish rugby paraphernalia – team photos and faded rosettes – adorned the walls. A medieval globe in a corner. A large photo of Nina stood proudly on the big wooden desk. A slightly smaller photo – Adam guessed it was the older sister, Hannah – was positioned beside it.

Sitting next to the photos was a strange ceramic object, a piece of pottery; it looked old and exotic. Adam had once been to Mexico City, and this item definitely looked Aztec, or at least Mesoamerican.

He picked it up, and turned it in his hand. Deciphering the painted image on the jar. It showed a man with no hands and feet praying at an altar. The image was so disquieting he almost dropped the pot.

‘What the hell?’

She nodded. ‘Yes. It’s odd, isn’t it? He brought it back from South America last year.’

‘After his trip?’

‘Yeah. Creepy, huh? There’s a couple more in the kitchen. Just as sinister.’

Adam replaced the pot on the desk, took out his phone camera and grabbed a couple of shots of the jar.

‘You think it’s relevant?’

‘No. Yes. Who knows? We need to hurry up—’

‘OK, I’ll do the desk.’

Adam felt like a burglar, or an undercover cop. He got the distinct feeling he should have worn gloves. Leave no prints. If anyone caught them doing this it would be ghastly.

He leaned towards a shelf. As he did, a car passed, very slowly, at the rear of the tenements. Was it parking? The blood ran a tiny bit colder in his veins. Adam stared at the far wall of the study: the wall was mainly glass and gave on to a kind of fire escape, and the darkness of chilly Edinburgh beyond. But the car passed on.

Slowly, he sorted along the shelves, turning over books, and peering in a box of cufflinks, fruitlessly.

Leaning down, he pulled at a drawer. For several minutes he rummaged, but there was nothing here. Just files of paperwork. A cancelled mortgage. A cheque book stub. Then floppy disks, and old cassette tapes with handwritten labels. Arwad. Damascus. Aleppo. A brief history of technology in one drawer, and little else. He’d had enough: he didn’t even know what he was looking for. ‘Nina. This is pointless. How about the living room? Let’s look at it laterally, different kinds of clues?’

She stared in the half-light. Then she nodded; together they prowled out of the study, and walked along the hallway. The door to the dark living room creaked, and squealed. Another dimmer switch was turned. But a quick glance around the room gave Adam no hope they would find anything here, either. It was just another nicely furnished, middle-class living room, with feminine touches.

The large windows were single-glazed: the flat was cold. Adam was glad he had kept his coat on. He wondered how Nina could stand the cold without her anorak: maybe all that alcohol was providing insulation.

She walked across the room to bookshelves stacked with volumes, and began pulling down books, one by one, her small, empty rucksack by her side. Adam paused, and cast another glance at the walls, where abstract art was juxtaposed with framed photos.

There was Archibald as a young man, probably receiving his doctorate: he was wearing a scholastic gown and smiling, and clutching a scroll of paper. Next to it, his wife – or so Adam guessed – photographed as a very young woman: attractive and smiling in some sunlit, foreign place. Deserty beige rocks and red sand formed a background. Taken in Morocco, perhaps?

The rest of the decor similarly implied shared yet divergent interests, in history, art, architecture. More prints of medieval Scotland hung above the scoured and unused fireplace. A lurid Victorian penny dreadful engraving of Sawney Beane, the Scottish cannibal, decorated one far corner.

A final photo of Archie and a woman, also framed, stood aslant on a small antique writing table. Adam walked over and examined the photo. The woman was definitely an older version of the young traveller in Morocco.

‘Your stepmother?’

Nina was furiously paging through books and didn’t hear him, or ignored him.

‘Nina.’ His voice was a hiss. ‘Nina!’

She swivelled, eyes narrow and green in the half-light. ‘What?’

‘Is this her? Your stepmum?’ He lifted up the silver-framed photo.

A grimace. Yes, that was her.

Adam returned the photo carefully to its allotted place.

‘Tell me about her.’

‘Why?’

‘Because.’ Adam shrugged. ‘If you want my help, I need to know as much as possible. Context.’

Their hunt resumed. ‘Context?’ Nina flung the word down as if she wanted to stamp on its neck. ‘OK. Sure. Ach. I’ll give you context. But while I’m doing it – help me.’

‘How?’

She indicated the wide shelves, the many hundreds of volumes. ‘He used to write in books, annotate them. He was notorious for it. Scrawling on every page, and he had a real fishwife’s scrawl, like Byron! So, see if you can find …’

‘What?’

‘Somethin’. Anything. Please?’

Adam obeyed. He walked to the shelves and reached and began flicking through the volumes.

‘No.’ Nina hissed, staring at him.

‘Sorry?’

‘Jane Austen? That’ll be hers. He never read fiction, hated it. He used to read novels then throw them down after a chapter and say, It’s all a pack of lies!’

Adam replaced the paperback of Pride and Prejudice.

Nina was wearing a sad, remembering smile. ‘Look for history and biography. Science. Up here. On the higher shelves. Those are his.’

Adam selected a fine, leatherbound edition of Bede’s History of the English People. He flicked through the pages, which were, sure enough, scribbled with spidery marginalia. But the notes were almost illegible: not just faded, but very small – and very badly handwritten, in ancient fountain pen.

He wasn’t remotely convinced of this detective work, but he didn’t want to argue with Nina. Returning Bede to his slot on the high shelf, Adam tried again, with Runciman’s History of the Crusades. And as he flicked and scanned the aromatic, scholarly pages, he asked, in a low, careful, wary voice, ‘Tell me where they met.’

‘Some academic conference, five years ago.’

‘Where?’

‘London. She teaches law there, that’s why she’s away so much. Like now. But she’s back tomorrow for the funeral.’

Adam nodded, absorbing the information, as he scanned the books, reading the little margin notes – see pp 235-237 Geertz; Tyndale/KJV? A thought unsettled him. ‘How do you know she won’t come back tonight? Late tonight?’

Nina shrugged, examining another paperback. The Trial of the Templars.

‘Nina. You don’t actually know, for sure, do you?’

She shrugged again.

Adam spat the words, ‘Christ’s sake. She could be here any minute!’

Nina didn’t reply. But her eyes were locked on Adam, and widened by fear. Because a muffled crash of glass had just sounded from the study.

Adam lifted a finger to his lips. She turned, half-crouched, by the bookcase, and her green eyes stared at the wall as if she could see through it. The uncertain silence returned. Then a doorhandle squealed distinctively.

Her words were quiet and fierce. ‘Jesus. Who is that?’

Adam pressed his ear to the wall: he could hear the mouselike squeak of metal: a metal doorknob in a glass and metal door.

‘Someone’s on the fire escape, back of the study …’

She shook her head. ‘No, Adam. They’re already in.’

She was surely right: he could sense the human presence, another heartbeat in the apartment. And now he strained to hear a footfall. And yes, there it was: the almost inaudible creak of floorboards, of someone stealthily moving around.

Adam grabbed Nina’s hand, which was damp with sweat, and hissed, ‘We have to get out! This could be, this could be anyone – the murderer, anyone!’

In an agony of fear they stepped to the door. As quietly as they could.

The presence – the intruder, the murderer – was moving around the study. Searching for what? The fear mixed with fierce anger somewhere in Adam’s soul: it was the old eagerness for action, maybe even violence, to resolve things. He could hear his father’s drunken boasts: never let a man frighten you, never show your fear. Take him on and beat him.

Maybe Adam could tackle the intruder: he lingered over the thought for a moment. But sanity quickly chased him back to reality. The man could easily have a knife. Even a gun. Any resistance might be suicidal.

No: they needed to flee. Adam pulled Nina to the open door, which gave into the darkened landing; he indicated with an urgent nod what he planned – they should run down the hallway to the front door and escape – before he opened the study door to the hallway and trapped them inside by standing between them and the only exit.

The floorboards creaked again. The intruder was moving across the study, coming their way.

Adam got ready to run, but even as he tensed for action he felt Nina disappear – she wrenched herself free and ran to the door at the other end of the landing. What was down there? A bathroom? A kitchen? What the hell was she doing?

He stared at her, quite desperate. Then he stared at where she had been, at the half-open door through which she had disappeared. What should he do now? Run away and leave her? But of course he couldn’t leave her – what if the man found her and …

She was back, hefting her rucksack: she had something inside it. He turned and pointed at the door and whispered the word now!

Together they ran. Uncaring of the noise, they raced down the hallway, flung open the front door, which creaked on its hinges, and slammed it behind them. The stairwell was dark again, but their indifference was pure and driven. Just get out fast. Just get the fuck out.

Panicking and hectic, they raced down the steps. Adam heard a noise above them, surely the intruder, alerted, sprinting onto the landing.

Just keep running and don’t look back. They had made the last flight. They were at the main door, and now they were outside, in the cold air, still running.

At the end of Springvalley Terrace Adam halted for a second, and turned. He could sense they were being watched and the feeling was so intense he had to turn and see.

Someone was standing at the window of the McLintocks’ flat. It was a very distinct figure, momentarily framed by the light: a thin tall man, wearing dark clothes, with close-shaven hair.

Was it him? The man he had seen, passing by an hour ago, with the tattoos? The figure suddenly shrank from the window, apparently aware he had been spotted.

Nina grabbed his hand.

‘Run!’

13
Interview Room D, New Scotland Yard, London

The girl really was exquisitely beautiful. Detective Sergeant Larkham had told him so on the phone, almost warned him – she’s a real looker, sir – but nothing had quite prepared him for the reality. She was like an artist’s idea of an English beauty. Golden waterfalls of hair, misted blue eyes, a pure and rose-dawn complexion. And she had been crying for about seven minutes.

The girl stared at him. Ibsen snapped himself out of his reverie, and went over his notes. Her name was Amelia Hawthorne. She was twenty-three, an aspiring actress, privately educated, a graduate of RADA. And she had been Kerensky’s girlfriend for the last two years.

He repeated the question. Were you in love with him?

Amelia Hawthorne sniffled, tearfully, in the quietness. ‘I’m sorry. I am. I know. It’s just the way Nik died – I … I still … I still …’

Larkham leaned in. ‘We understand, Amelia. It’s a total shocker. Horrible.’

‘But that’s exactly why we need to know,’ Ibsen repeated the point. ‘Your boyfriend cut off his own feet, and his hand. It’s an appalling suicide. So we need to know all the facts. All of them.’

‘Yes. Yes, I know. I get it.’ Slowly, the girl seemed to source some resolve, she sat a little taller, visibly preparing herself. ‘OK. Go on, then. Ask me.’

‘You say you met him two years ago?’

‘Yes.’

‘At a nightclub.’

‘Yes. Anushka’s.’

Ibsen flicked a glance at his notes. ‘And that is …’

‘A club in Mayfair. It’s down near Nobu. Everyone went there … back then … I mean, you know, two years ago …’

Ibsen had never heard of the place. He had also never heard of several other places the girl had already mentioned. In truth, he felt a little at sea in this world of beautiful young actresses and billionaire Russian playboys.

Larkham interrupted.

‘It’s a nightclub just off Berkeley Square, sir. Well pricey. Two hundred quid for a bottle of bubbly.’

‘Really? Prefer something more upmarket myself.’

The DS smiled; Ibsen turned to the girl. ‘So you met him at this high-class night club – and you started dating?

She scoffed. ‘Dating?’

‘I mean, you started a relationship. You were stepping out?’

‘Please. We started fucking.’

Ibsen leaned nearer. ‘OK, then. You began a sexual relationship.’

‘That first night. Yes.’ She stared at her exquisitely manicured nails. ‘Because I liked him. I liked Nik from the start, liked him a lot … Y’know, everyone said he was probably just another … Eurotrash wanker, like all the Russians, with their hookers in furs, all that awful crap. But he wasn’t.’

‘No?’

‘He was witty and smart. As well as fit.’

‘And extremely rich?’

‘Yeah, sure. He was rich. But, you know, everyone was rich.’

She gazed at Ibsen with those slightly contemptuous blue eyes and he wished, for a second, he had worn his better suit. The one from Hugo Boss.

‘Why else was he different? Explain.’

‘He was clever and really …’ She sighed. ‘Adventurous, really interesting. Not, like, totally desiccated like some of them, all those boring Chelsea boys banging on about their stupid fucking Ferraris. He used to go places, Asia, Africa … He read books, he would read to me, talk to me … and he went to the theatre, he loved London, art, everything, but he also liked fun, partying.’

‘Drugs?’

She halted.

Ibsen pressed the point. ‘Did you do drugs?’

No reply.

DCI Ibsen briskly reached pulled some folders out of his briefcase and laid them on the table. The folders contained the serology and toxicology reports on Kerensky, N, white male, 27. Instinct had told him the latter report would come up trumps, but it hadn’t. The hair tests showed just a trace of cocaine usage, probably from days before the death. Serology showed a small amount of alcohol in Kerensky’s blood, but he hadn’t been blind drunk when he killed himself. How then had he summoned the courage to do his self-mutilations? How had he managed the pain? Gastric examination showed he had eaten nothing more than bar snacks that night: nuts and crisps.

‘We have a hair test, Miss Hawthorne. We know he used cocaine. Did you do drugs with him?’

Total silence.

Larkham was leaning against the window. ‘You’re not under arrest, Amelia. We’re not going to arrest you if you confess to doing a little gak? Some charlie?’

The girl looked at her fingernails again. Then gazed up and said, ‘All right. All right, yes. He liked drugs sometimes. He liked sex too. And vodka. Taittinger. Everything. Caviar. Fucking sevruga. I told you, he was a party animal, and yet it wasn’t, like, frivolous, it wasn’t just for the sake of it …’

‘What—’

‘He knew he was going to take over his father’s business and I reckon he just wanted to get it all out of his system … see the world and do it all, do the lot, have his fun, and then he would sober up.’

‘Tell me more about the drugs.’

‘It wasn’t heavy. Really. No smack. Maybe a little toot. Before dinner. That’s all. You know? Maybe he dropped some E or mcat with his friends. But nothing heroiny, not with me. He was into new shit, new experiences, but not necessarily drugs … ’ She looked straight at Ibsen.

He sensed the direction of her thoughts. ‘Did you know he was bisexual?’

The actress pushed her ringlets from her eyes. ‘Yes.’

‘But you didn’t mind?’

‘He was basically, like, straight. But … but that was another of his … things. Try everything twice, that was Nik’s motto. So. Yeah. I knew. We had a few threesomes. It was funny … just fun. We are young.’

Ibsen waited. Her frown darkened.

‘But then it kinda changed. Towards the end. The last few weeks. He got … out of control.’

The moment intensified. Larkham stared at the girl. Ibsen said, ‘How?’

‘He wanted … things. Y’know, in bed.’

‘Things?’

‘Kinkier sex.’

‘In what way, precisely?’

Her lips were trembling. ‘He wanted anal sex. He wanted it … that way … all the time. I didn’t mind for a while, though it’s not my … not my scene – but then it was bondage. Heavy stuff. Ropes. Candle wax. Jesus. Every night, night after night. And he wanted me to go with other men, groups of men, in front of him. It was too much, it got way too much. That’s why we split, just before …’

‘Were you doing drugs at this point? Together?’

‘No! That was it. There were no drugs, it was like he had changed inside … he’d met new people. It changed him. Like someone converted him. Changed him.’

‘Who?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘But you mentioned new people. Who?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Think.’

‘OK. OK, there was … there was an American, maybe.’

‘Sorry?’

She took a long breath. ‘It was the very last time I went to Soho House, two weeks ago, to meet Nik, talk about our … about the problems. In our relationship. But there was an American there. Older. Thirties. Maybe even forties, this really fucking eerie guy, tattoos, vulgar, aggressive, clever but … aggressive. Not Nik’s style at all. But Nik seemed to be in love with him, worshipping him like he was some … deity. This hero. Yet he was just a fucking villain, as far as I could tell.’

‘You know his name?’

‘No.’

‘Was he Nik’s lover?’

‘Jesus, I hope not.’

‘Did you ever see him again?’

‘Who?’

‘This American.’

She stared straight at Ibsen. ‘I never saw Nik again. That’s what I’m telling you. The last time I saw Nikolai alive was then: Soho House, two weeks ago. That was it. I’m telling the fucking truth.’

Ibsen sat back. He believed her. So they needed to find this American. But how? He felt the irritation inside himself, as something just out of reach.

‘Tatts,’ said Larkham, from the sill where he was perched. ‘You said he had tattoos?’

The girl turned, the light from the window gentle on her face. Ibsen could imagine her on stage. Spotlit.

‘Yeah. Serious tattoos. He had a skull tattooed on his hand. Both hands maybe …’

Larkham and Ibsen immediately swapped glances. Ibsen reached for another document, a print from Kerensky’s laptop. The skull screensaver.

‘Skulls like this?’

The girl took the barest moment to look at the print-out, and she shuddered visibly.

‘Skulls just like that.’

They concluded the interview ten minutes later. Two hours after that, Ibsen was back home, in the chaos of domesticity, talking football with his son, trying to use his wife’s intelligence.

Jenny was good at this stuff. She worked as a nurse, but she had a first-class degree in psychology from Bristol. The nursing was a choice. The psychology was a talent.

Ibsen cooked the dinner – rib-eye steaks and rocket salad – while Jenny stood at the kitchen door, a big glass of Merlot in a cradling hand. And while he cooked he told her about the case.

Her wise grey eyes narrowed as she listened to the details. ‘Jesus. His own hands and feet?’

‘One hand, both feet, yup.’

‘… That’s just ghastly.’

‘Yes. And all the sexual stuff. Any idea? How could anyone do that? What’s the psychology?’

‘Let me think …’

He knew her well enough to see this as a good sign. She was engaged and intrigued. But she needed time to ponder.

They ate the dinner, and Jenny walked the dog because she wanted the fresh air. When they went to bed, Ibsen tried to read an entire page of an Ian McEwan novel, but failed. Yet again.

He was woken at six a.m. He thought in his half-dreaming sleepiness that it was a fire alarm, then realized it was his phone, ringing merrily.

Jenny was breathing in deep sleep, beside him. He picked up, his hushed voice was sodden with tiredness. ‘Hello?’

‘Sorry, sir.’

It was Jonson: the SOC officer from Bishops Avenue.

‘DS. Ffff … What time is it?’

‘Far too early, sir. Sorry to disturb you. But we have another suicide, and we think it may be linked.’

‘Linked?’ Ibsen’s weary brain tried to engage the gears. ‘How can they be linked, I mean, how do you know?’

‘This one also tried to cut his own head off, sir.’

‘What?’

‘And this one succeeded.’

14
Huaca El Brujo, Chicama Valley, north Peru

‘Gracias.’

Jess waved in gratitude to Ruben, the gateman at the temple complex. He waved back, and lifted the wooden barrier for her Hilux. His little motokar, his three-wheeled ride home, was parked by the kiosk. It had Jesus es Amor stencilled in purple letters on the transparent plastic roof.

The day was hot yet clammy: typical muggy Sechura weather this close to the coast. She turned in her seat as she passed the kiosk and the gate. From here, looking west, she could see the Pacific, a line of dull sparkle, where the big dirty waves crashed on the lonely shoreline.

The only interruptions to the desert flatness were the bumps. The sacred huacas.

Changing down a gear, she accelerated towards the pyramids. Another kilometre in her pick-up brought her to Huaca Cao Viejo, known to the locals as El Brujo. The Sorcerer.

It was, like most Moche ruins, an unprepossessing site: a large adobe pyramid, very weathered and eroded – somewhat like a vast, ghastly, and collapsing chocolate sundae – maybe thirty metres high and a hundred metres wide. Beyond and around it were other, smaller pyramids, stretching down to the coast, half a kilometre east, where the waves made a distant thunder, where dead dogs lay on their vile bleaching spines and howled at the sullen sky.

It was a bleak and grisly location, yet the nothingness felt necessary, even soothing. Right now Jess needed the calm grey nullity to salve her anxieties; the events in the huaca last week still jangled uncomfortably in her mind. The cinnabar, the skeletons, the flesh-eating beetles, the unknown god. How did it all fit together?

There was no easy solution. So she needed to focus on the issue at hand.

Swerving sharp and right, she parked the car on the ruins of the old Spanish church. Notebook and camera zipped briskly in her rucksack, she opened the car door and inhaled. The humid air was distinctly flavoured by the sea: salty, and tangy, maybe slightly rancid. Weighing the keys in her hand, she wondered whether to lock the pick-up; then locked it, feeling stupid as she did so. There probably wasn’t another human being, apart from Ruben, for ten kilometres. It was just her and the crying seagulls.

A quick walk brought her to the muddy steps of El Brujo, which she ascended to the First Enclosure. Scraps of burned wood and old paper scribbled with Quechua spells and curses, littered the beaten earth en route. This was not unexpected. Probably some curanderos – some local shamans – had been here, performing their strange ceremonies in the depths of the desert night. The local villagers still revered the spiritual power of these huacas, hence the local name for the huaca – the Sorcerer. The descendants of the Moche still came to this horrible place to partake of whatever power the sacred pyramid possessed.

Jess strode close to the largest wall, and knelt to take photos. Here, in red and gold, and white and blue, were the great treasures of El Brujo: long wall murals showing fish and demons and seahorses and manta rays and dancing skeletons, and the sacrifice ceremony.

As they now knew, beyond doubt, this ceremony really happened. And this mural described it: precisely.

Jess scrutinized, and scribbled her notes. How was it enacted? First, it seemed, the Moche warriors performed some kind of ritualized combat. The main object of this brawl was to grab the opponent’s hair. When a man had his hair seized, he fell to the ground: submissive, and willingly doomed. All of these stylized combats took place within the community. DNA analysis showed this. The fights weren’t with enemies, but between friends and relatives, between brothers and uncles. The sole purpose of the fighting was to produce endless victims: for the sacrifice.

She snapped and clicked. And scribbled again in her notebook.

The ritual proceeded from here, with minor variations. The defeated warriors were stripped naked, and bound by ropes at the neck, like slaves being walked to the African coast. After that, as the next murals showed, the prisoners were taken inside the precincts of the temple. That could be here at El Brujo, or in Zana, or Sipan, or Panamarca, or the Temple of the Moon in Trujillo. At the peak of their empire the Moche had many great temples, stretching for hundreds of miles along the coast.

Jess scrawled, and then paused, thinking about Tomb 1 of Huaca D. She remembered the insect shells shining gaudily, like discarded fairground trash, in her flashlight, gathered grotesquely around a staked-out corpse.

What was the link between that discovery and El Brujo? Maybe there wasn’t one. And yet maybe there was.

They now knew the sacrifice ceremony had really happened. They also now had a sense the Moche really fed people to insects: hence their reverence of insects, depicted on the pottery as flies dancing around prisoners and skeletons. What, then, about the severed ankles and wrists of the skeletons they had also unearthed in Huaca D?

A few days ago Jess had sent another sample of these bones to Steve Venturi. Now she waited for his second verdict. If Venturi confirmed that her hunch was right on the amputations, then the clues began to form a narrative. But what narrative, precisely?

Jess pulled out her cellphone, and squinted at the little screen, in the dusty light, wondering idly when Steve would ring, or maybe Dan. But naturally there was no signal, not out here in the wilderness. She wouldn’t be disturbed by good or bad news, by any news at all, for the next few hours.

This was good, maybe. Fewer distractions meant she could concentrate on the task at hand: recording the murals.

Another scramble, up another flight of mud-brick steps, brought Jess to the Second Enclosure, where another large mural showed the concluding rites of the sacrifice ceremony.

Finding an angle to best catch the light, she took her photos of the row of prisoners, painted in vivid red. But the sea-wind was brisk up here on the higher levels and it kicked at her hair, which fluttered over the lens. Irritatedly she pushed her hair back, and considered what she was seeing.

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