‘He found the body?’

‘Poor bastard. He’s still being counselled.’ Forrester eyed the professor. ‘Mr De Savary-’

‘Call me Hugo.’

‘It’s a bloody unpleasant sight. I’m a detecting police officer, I’ve seen a fair few gruesome murders but this one…’

‘Whereas I am just an innocent from the groves of academe?’ De Savary smiled. ‘Please, Mark, I have been studying Satanic cults and psychotic impulses for more than a decade. I am used to handling some quite disturbing materials. And have a fairly strong constitution, I rather hope. I even ate a Southwest Trains prawn sandwich on the way down.’

The policeman didn’t laugh. Or even smile. He just nodded, blankly. Again De Savary noted the harrowed quality of his expression. The detective had seen something awful. For the first time De Savary got an inkling of apprehension.

The policeman cleared his throat:

‘I haven’t told you what you are about to see because I don’t want to nudge you. I want your honest opinion what you think is going on. Without any preconceptions…’

The front door was opened by an obedient constable. Inside it was very much the normal entrance to an English public school: roll calls of honour from the war: lists of boys who gave their lives. There were trophies and noticeboards and some desultory antiques, badly scuffed and damaged by generations of eager schoolboys running past, rugby boots slung over young shoulders. It was nostalgic for De Savary. He remembered his own schooldays at Stowe.

The entrance hall was dominated by a big door at the end. The door was shut, and guarded by another policeman. Forrester looked down at De Savary’s feet. And gave him some plastic overshoes.

‘There’s a lot of blood,’ the DCI said quietly, then he motioned to the constable standing by the large inner doors. The constable gave a sortof salute, and swung open the door, allowing them to step inside.

Beyond was a very baronial space. Wood panelling and heraldic coats of arms: a Victorian pastiche of a medieval nobleman’s grand hall. But it was quite well done, thought De Savary. He could imagine minstrels at one end, on the first floor balcony, serenading the feasting duke, sitting above the high table at the other end. But what was at the other end? The police had erected a big screen.

Forrester led the way across the creaking floor-boards. The nearer they got the more sound their footsteps made: but they weren’t creaking now, but squelching. This, De Savary realized, was because he was walking into patches of splashed blood. The polished wooden floor seemed to be sticky with splashes of blood.

Forrester rolled the movable screen out of the way and De Savary gasped. In front of him was a portable soccer goal. A portable wooden frame, which had been wheeled in from the sports pitches outside. Stretched between the goal post and the bar, tied to the bar and the posts by leather straps, was a man.

Or rather, what was left of a man. The naked victim had been suspended upside down from the frame by the ankles. His arms were stretched and tied to each of the posts by the wrists. The hideous grimace of pain on the face of the man, down there by the bloodied floorboards, showed the torment he had been through.

He had been flayed. Flayed alive, it seemed, very slowly and diligently, the skin peeled, or scraped, strip by strip, flap by anguished flap, from the man’s body. The raw pulsing flesh had been left uncovered at each stage, leaving blobs of yellow fat; though sometimes this fat had been flensed away, exposing the raw red muscles underneath. You could actually see the organs and the bones in certain places.

De Savary put a forefinger to his nose. He could smell the body, smell the muscles and the lustrous fat. He could see the neck muscles taut with agony, the grey-and-white lungs, the curving definition of the ribcage. It was like an illustration of the muscles and tendons of the human body in a biology textbook. The genitals were missing, of course. A dark and scarlet socket was left where the penis and testicles should have been. De Savary guessed they had been forced into the victim’s mouth: he had probably been obliged to eat them.

He stepped around. It looked like the work of more than one person. To do it this carefully, without killing the victim at once, needed care and skill. If you flayed a person correctly they could live for hours, as the muscles and organs slowly dried and crinkled. Sometimes the victim might faint with pain, De Savary imagined, but you could bring them round, before starting again. He didn’t want to reconfigure the scene. But he had to. The terrified caretaker brought in here. Tied upside-down. Hanging by his feet from the bar. Then lashed with his arms to either post. Like an inverted crucifixion.

And then-then De Savary imagined it-the terrible horror that must have overcome the victim as he realized what they were doing: the initial tentative scrape of flesh at the ankle or on his feet. Then the searing pain as the skin was peeled away, leaving the pulp exposed to cold and heat. If anything had touched the raw flesh the pain would have been virtually unendurable. He must have screamed as the gang worked their way down his quivering, agonized body, working like expert butchers, making a pelt of his skin. Perhaps he had screamed too loudly at one point, so they had chopped off his genitals, folded the bloody handful of flesh into the screaming mouth, to shut him up.

Then the major flaying: the chest, the arms. Technically quite difficult. They must have practised beforehand, on sheep, goats or maybe cats. Getting it right.

He turned away, shuddering.

Forrester put an arm around the academic’s shoulder. ‘Yes, I’m sorry.’

‘How old was he? It’s hard to tell when there’s no…skin on the face.’

‘In his forties,’ Forrester said. ‘Shall we go outside?’

‘Please.’

The policeman led the way. As soon as they were outside they made for the garden bench. De Savary was pleased to sit down. ‘Just ghastly,’ he said.

The sun was still warm. Forrester took his overshoes off with a grunt. They sat there in a heavy silence. The sweetness of the early summer air seemed sickly now.

After a while De Savary said, ‘I think I can help.’

‘You can?’

De Savary rephrased. ‘That is to say, I think I understand what their psychology might have been…’

So?’

‘Clearly there are Aztec themes. The Aztecs had…many methods of human sacrifice. The most famous, of course, is live heart excision. The priest would plunge the obsidian knife into the chest, rip open the chest cavity, and yank out the beating heart.’

They both watched as a police car pulled up the driveway. Two officers stepped out, carrying metal suitcases. They nodded briskly at Forrester, and he nodded back.

‘Pathology.’ said Forrester. ‘Go on Hugo, the Aztecs…?’

‘They would feed people to jaguars. They would bleed them to death. They would fire little arrows into warriors until they died. But one of the most elaborate methods was flaying. They even had a special day for it, the Feast of the Flaying of Men.’

‘A special day for flaying?’

‘They would strip the skins of enemy prisoners. And then they would dance through the streets of the city, wearing the flayed skins. Aztec nobles often wore the flayed skins of their victims: they considered it an honour for the victim. Indeed there is a story that they once captured an enemy princess, then a few weeks later they invited her father, an enemy king, to a feast, to make peace. The king presumed they were going to hand back his daughter, alive, as part of that peacemaking. But the Aztec emperor clapped his hands after dinner and a priest walked in, wearing the slain princess’s skin. The Aztecs thought this was a great honour for the enemy king. I think the peace overture was not a great success.’