The doctor grimaced, ‘That’s horrible.’

Forrester nodded, ‘Not surprisingly, the writing is barely legible.’

‘OK…’

‘But the word seems to be “Undish”.’

‘Undish?’

‘Undish.’

‘I have absolutely no idea what that means.’

The DCI sighed, ‘I did a search on it, and there is a Polish death metal band called Undish.’

‘Right. Well…there’s your answer no? Aren’t these satanic cults often influenced by this awful music? Goth metal or whatever?’

‘Yes,’ Forrester agreed. Janice was heading for the exit, past ancient dark planks, smeared with dissected veins. He followed, adding, ‘But why would someone like De Savary know about a death metal band? And why tell us about them anyway? If he had one last word to write, when he was in massive pain, why write that?’

Dr Edwards checked her watch ‘Sorry, I have to go. We have another meeting.’ She smiled. ‘If you like we can have a proper session next week: call my secretary.’

Forrester made his farewells and walked down the stairs, past its plinths and pedestals, and the sombre unsmiling busts of famous medical men. Then he strode, with a certain relief, into the sunny streets of Bloomsbury. His conversation with Janice had given him some intriguing ideas. He wanted to sort through them. Right now. The phrase his doctor had used: honouring their ancestors, had set him thinking. Hard. It chimed with something in Rob Luttrell’s report in The Times. Something about ancestors. And where you chose to live.

He strode to Holborn station, hummed impatiently on the Tube train, barrelled his way through the crowded shopping streets of Victoria. When he reached Scotland Yard he sprinted up the stairs and slammed into his office. He would have knocked over the photo of his dead daughter if it hadn’t already have been laid face down on the desk.

Straight away he booted up his computer and Googled ‘ancestors buried house’.

He found it. Bang to rights. His prize. What he wanted; what he remembered being mentioned in The Times article.

Cayonu and Catalhoyuk. Two ancient Turkish sites, near the temple of Gobekli Tepe.

The crucial aspect of these sites, for Forrester, was what had happened beneath the houses and buildings. Because the inhabitants had buried the human bones of their sacrificial victims in the floors beneath their homes. Consequently, these people lived and worked and slept and fucked and ate and talked right above their own victims. And this, it seemed, would go on for centuries: new layers of human bones and corpses, then another floor, then more bones. Living above the sacrificial victims of your ancestors. In the Skull Chamber.

He took a victorious glug of water from an Evian bottle. Why would you want to live near or even above your own victims? Why did so many killers want to do this? He stared out of the window at the sunny London sky and considered the curious echo in so many modern murder cases. Like Fred West in England, burying his murdered daughters in the backyard. Or John Wayne Gacy in Indiana, who buried dozens of the boys he killed, right under his own house. Whenever you got a mass murder the first place you looked for bodies was in the murderer’s house or under his floorboards. It was standard police procedure. Because murderers so often hid their victims nearby.

Forrester had never properly considered this phenomenon in the round before: but now that he did he was struck by the strangeness of it. There was obviously a deep, maybe subconscious urge-to live near or above your dead victims, an urge that had been arguably present in humanity ten thousand years back. And maybe that was what the Cloncurrys were doing. Living above the bodies of their own victims: all those soldiers killed by the Butcher of Albert.

Yes.

He swallowed another mouthful of lukewarm Evian. What about the death-pit? Maybe the Cloncurry family fancied some affinity with those victims, too: after all, the victims in the Ribemont death-pit were Celtic. Gaulish warriors…

Forrester sat straight. Something was tugging at his thoughts like a loose nail pulling a thread. Unravelling a pullover. Celtic. Celts. Celts? Where did the Cloncurrys come from originally? He decided to search under ‘Cloncurry ancestors’.

Within barely two minutes he found it. The Cloncurry family were descended, by marriage, from an old Irish family. But not just any old Irish family. Their forefathers were…the Whaleys.

The Cloncurrys were descended from Buck and Burnchapel Whaley, from the founders of the Irish Hellfire Club!

He beamed at the screen. He was on a roll, on a high. He felt he could crack the whole thing. He was hitting the sweet spot. Knocking every ball for six. He could solve the damn thing now. Here and now. Right here-at his desk.

So where could the gang be? Where could they be hiding? For a long time he and Boijer and the rest of the squad had presumed the gang was slipping in and out of Britain, going to Italy, or France. On a private plane, or maybe by boat. But maybe he and Boijer were looking in the wrong place. Just because certain gang members were Italian or French didn’t mean they were going to France or Italy. They might be in another country: but they could be in the one country you didn’t need a passport to get to when you left Britain. Forrester looked up. Boijer was coming through the door.

‘My Finnish friend!’

‘Sir?’

‘I think I know.’

‘What?’

‘Where they are hiding, Boijer. I think I know where they are hiding.’

40

Rob sat in his flat and watched the video obsessively. Cloncurry had sent it three days before, in an email.

The video showed his daughter and Christine in a nondescript little room. Lizzie’s mouth was gagged, as was Christine’s. They were tied, firmly and lavishly, to wooden chairs.

And that’s all it showed of them. They were in clean clothes. They didn’t look injured. But the tight leather gags around their mouths and the terror welling in their eyes made the video almost unwatchable, for Rob.

So he watched it every ten or fifteen minutes. He watched it and watched it, and then he wandered around his flat, in his underwear, unshaven, unshowered, in a daze of despair. He felt like a deranged old saint in the Desert of Anguish. He tried to eat some toast and then gave up. He hadn’t eaten a proper meal in a long time. Apart from the breakfast his ex-wife had cooked him a few days back.

He’d been over to Sally’s to discuss their daughter’s fate and Sally had, in her generous way, made him bacon and eggs, and for the first time in ages Rob had felt hungry and he had got halfway through the meal but then Sally had started crying. So Rob had stood up and comforted her with a hug: but that just made it worse: she had shoved him away and said it was all his fault and she yelled and cried and slapped him. And Rob had just stood there as she slapped him and then thumped him in the stomach, flailing. He took the blows, placidly, because he felt she was right. She was right to be angry. He had brought this terrible situation upon them. His ceaseless pursuit of the story, his selfish desire for journalistic fame, his mindless denial of the increasing danger. The mere fact he wasn’t in the country to protect Lizzie. All of it.

The drenching guilt and the self-hatred Rob felt at that moment felt almost good. A least it was real: a genuine, searing emotion. Something to pierce the oddly numb despair he felt so much of the time.

His only other lifeline to sanity was the phone. Rob spent hours gazing morosely at it, willing it to ring. And the phone did ring, many times. Sometimes he got calls from friends, sometimes from colleagues at work, sometimes from Isobel in Turkey. The callers were all trying to help, but Rob was impatient-for the one communication he wanted: the call from the police.