De Savary was pleased he and Christine could now talk more freely. Because he wanted to talk about something else. ‘So, Christine,’ he said. ‘Tell me about Gobekli. It sounds incroyable.’

For the next hour Christine outlined the whole remarkable story. By the time she had finished the sun was just edging the treetops over by the water meadows. The professor shook his head. They discussed the strange interring of the site. Then they moved on to the Hellfire Club and the Black Book, conversing as they used to do: two engaged and lively minds with similar cultural interests: literature, history, archaeology, painting. De Savary was really enjoying the dialogue. Christine told him, as an aside, that she was trying to teach Rob the daunting delights of James Joyce, the great Irish modernist, and De Savary’s eyes sparkled. This cued him up for one of his latest theories. He decided to tell her. ‘You know, Christine, I was looking at James Joyce again the other day, and something struck me…’

‘Yes?’

‘There’s a passage in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I’ve just wondered if-’

‘What?’

‘Sorry?

‘What was that?!’

Then he heard it. A loud thump behind them. Coming from the cottage. A strange, loud and ominous crash.

De Savary’s immediate thought was for Lizzie. He stood and turned, but Christine was already rushing past him. He dropped his glass of lemonade onto the lawn and ran after her, and as did so he heard something worse: a muffled shriek.

He found Christine inside the house and in the hands of several young men wearing dark jeans and ski masks. Only one man was unmasked. He was black-haired and handsome. De Savary knew him immediately. He’d seen the CCTV image in an email from Forrester.

It was Jamie Cloncurry.

De Savary felt like crying out: at the idiocy of it all. The gang had knives and guns. One of the guns was pointed at him. This was clearly ludicrous. This was Cambridgeshire. On a sweet Maytime afternoon. He had just been to the supermarket to buy some strawberries. On the way home he had whistled some Bach. And now there were armed psychopaths in his cottage!

Christine was trying to cry out and she was wriggling: but then one of the men punched her very hard in the stomach and she stopped writhing. She moaned. Her eyes were wild and wide. She stared at De Savary and he saw her total fear.

The tallest man, Jamie Cloncurry, waved his pistol languidly at De Savary. ‘Tie him to the chair.’

The voice was very educated: chillingly so. De Savary could hear stifled cries from the kitchen. Lizzie was in there, and she was crying. Then the girlish crying ceased.

Two of the gang members strapped De Savary to the chair. They put a sweaty gag around his mouth and tied it ferociously tight, making his lips bleed as the gag pressed his lips against his incisors. But it wasn’t this pain that was most troubling De Savary. It was the way they were tying him to the dining chair. They were tying him so he was sitting on the chair the wrong way round: straddling the seat, his chest pressed against the wooden chair back. Big straps were lashed around him. His ankles were bound, very tightly, under the chair. His wrists were twined viciously together also under the chair; his chin was painfully propped on the chair back. Everything hurt. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t see Christine or Lizzie: his ears detected a faint whimpering, in another room. But then his thoughts were drowned by mental terror when he heard the next words of Jamie Cloncurry, standing somewhere behind him.

‘Have you ever heard of blood eagling, Professor De Savary?’

He gulped-and then he couldn’t help it: he started to cry. The tears ran down his face. He had guessed they were going to kill him. But this? Blood eagling?

Jamie Cloncurry came around and looked close at him, his pale and handsome face very slightly flushed. ‘Of course you have heard of blood eagling, haven’t you? After all, you wrote that book. That rather alarming piece of pop history. The Fury of the Northmen.’ Cloncurry was sneering. ‘All about Viking rites and beliefs. Rather lurid, if you don’t mind my saying so. But I suppose that’s how you accrue sales…’ The young man was holding a book in his hands, quoting from a page: ‘“And now we come to one of the most repellent concepts in the annals of Viking cruelty: the so-called blood eagle. Some scholars dispute that this gruesome rite of sacrifice ever existed, but various references in the sagas and in skaldic poetry can leave an open mind in little doubt: the rite of the blood eagle existed. It was an authentic sacrificial ceremony of the North”.’ Cloncurry smiled in De Savary’s direction, and then went on, ‘“The notorious blood eagle rite was performed, according to Norse accounts, on various eminent personages, including King Ella of Northumbria, Halfdan son of King Harfagri of Norway, and King Edmund of England”.’

De Savary felt his bowels begin to liquefy. He wondered if he was going to soil himself.

Cloncurry turned a page, and read on. ‘“Accounts of blood eagling differ in detail, but essential elements remain the same. The victim first has his back sliced open close to the backbone. Sometimes the skin is peeled away beforehand. Then the exposed ribs are broken at the spine, perhaps with a hammer or mallet; maybe they are cut. The shattered ribs are then splayed out like a spatchcocked chicken, revealing the grey lungs beneath. The victim remains fully conscious as his pulsing lungs are yanked from the chest cavity and flung out across the shoulders, so that the victim resembles an eagle with its wings outspread. Salt is sometimes sprinkled in the enormous wounds. Death must have come sooner or later, perhaps from asphyxiation or blood loss; or a simple heart attack from the sheer terror induced by the cruelty of the act. The Irish poet Seamus Heaney cites the blood eagle in his poem “Viking Dublin”: “With a butcher’s aplomb they spread out your lungs, and made you warm wings for your shoulders”.’

Cloncurry snapped shut the book and laid it on the dining table. De Savary was quivering with fear. The tall young man smiled widely. ‘“Death must have come sooner rather than later”. Shall we see if that is true, Professor De Savary?’

The professor closed his eyes. He could hear the men behind him. His bowels were empty: he had soiled himself in terror. A vile faecal smell offended his own nostrils. There was some murmuring behind him. Then De Savary felt the first crippling pain: as the knife plunged into his back and ripped downwards. The shock made him almost vomit. He rocked back and forth in his chair. A man laughed in the background.

Jamie Cloncurry spoke. ‘I am going to have to cut your ribs with some humble pliers. I’m afraid we don’t have a mallet…’

Another laugh. De Savary heard a cracking noise and felt a hammering pain near his heart as if he had been shot; he realized they were cutting his ribs one by one. He felt them bend, then break. Crack. Like something very taut being snapped. He heard another crack; and then another. He vomited around the gag. He hoped he would choke on his own vomit, and he hoped he would die very soon.

But he wasn’t dead yet: he could actually feel Cloncurry’s hands as they rummaged in his chest cavity. He could feel the surreal sense of someone pulling out his lungs, and then the agonizing rapture of pain as the lungs were exposed to the air. His own lungs came flopping over his own shoulders, greasy and hot. His own lungs…A strange smell filled the air. Half fishy, half metallic: the smell of his own lungs. De Savary nearly blacked out.

But he didn’t black out. The gang had done the job well: keeping him alive and quite conscious. So as to suffer.

De Savary watched in a mirror as the girl and Christine were bundled out of the room. They were being taken away. The gang was packing up: they were going to leave De Savary here, to die alone. With his ribs cracked and bent apart, and his own lungs draped over his shoulders.