Within five minutes, they spotted something ahead. The shrill call of the leader went up through the tunnel. Something turned and stared, its eyes glinting in the dark. They followed it deeper into the tunnels.

They came to a narrow channel thick with rats, hundreds and hundreds of rats - small mountains of them, crawling across and over each other, writhing and twisting. Their tiny eyes stared, their whiskers twitching in the torch light. The stream was a glossy surface of matt wet fur, rodent snouts held high above.

The team began to follow. Santana, Bodie, Jessel, Warnock. They moved through the pool of rats, slowly now, the rats investigating, swimming all around them.

The whole team were a hundred yards into the rat tunnel when they came to a dead end. Baines stared into the darkness. The men shone their torches ahead. No go. Baines looked back up towards the cell. The tunnel was a mistake. Sebastian wasn’t there.

Chapter One Hundred and Nineteen

The Lair

December 4, 2.04 p.m.

Harper clasped Denise in his arms as they walked through the corridor back to the main atrium. They heard the distant calls from the HRT team echoing throughout the sewers but they didn’t seem any closer. Sebastian had disappeared. Harper waited for a shot. Nothing but shouting. He held Denise closer. Sebastian had always managed to escape capture. How?

Suddenly, Harper stopped and pointed his torch up the wall. They’d reached the main atrium. Harper’s torch picked out the clothes belonging to the dead girls. They both stared. Then the light spun sideways and they saw the glass vitrine. Shrunken green objects floated in the tank. Then the big sodium lights came on. Harper and Levene looked around. ‘Who’s there?’ shouted Harper.

Then he appeared. Sebastian. He was standing behind his sculpture of body parts.

‘Welcome to my museum, Detective Harper. Welcome. You like what you see? This is my masterwork - The Progression of Love. Seven women. I love them all.’

Harper levelled the shotgun. ‘Nicholas Dresden, you’re under arrest. Now put your hands where I can see them and come out front. One wrong move and you’re dead.’

Sebastian moved out to the side of the tank, pointing a gun. ‘Don’t shoot. He’s gone,’ he said.

‘What are you talking about?’

‘He’s gone,’ he shouted. Suddenly, he had changed. His whole frame seemed to have shrunk a few inches. His voice wasn’t so deep. His tears started. ‘I’m Nick. Don’t shoot me. Tell him, Denise. I don’t know what he’s done.’ Nick looked down at the gun. ‘Don’t shoot me.’

‘Put the gun on the floor,’ Harper shouted.

‘What have I done?’

‘Put the gun down!’

Nick turned the gun on himself and jammed the muzzle into his ear. ‘I gotta stop him, Denise. I really got to stop him.’

He walked towards them, the gun against his head. He looked shocked and confused. Harper released a shot into the ceiling. ‘Last chance, whoever you are.’

Nick was shaking now. He knew he had to kill himself. He had to shoot the glass cage in his head.

That was all.

Alone in his own mind, surrounded by darkness, Nick watched the girl banging and hitting the glass. He wanted to let her free. Bethany. His sister. She was screaming something. He was up close to the glass. So close his mouth was against the glass.

Harper watched. Nick was concentrating intensely, alternately pointing the gun at Harper and turning it back to his own head. ‘Put the gun down,’ Tom shouted.

‘Don’t come near me. I’m going to kill myself,’ Nick shouted back.

Six ounces of pressure was all he needed. The rest was pure physics, like the rest of the universe, a moral vacuum in a world of physical laws. Then the endless darkness.

Harper moved in close. ‘Are you going to set yourself free, Nick?’

Nick closed his eyes. Denise watched him. She couldn’t tell if he meant it or not.

‘The sculpture!’ she said suddenly. ‘Sebastian loves his sculpture.’

Harper understood. He turned the shotgun on to the large glass vitrine and pulled the trigger. The tank burst and shattered in front of them, the formaldehyde flooding out and spraying body parts across the ground. Then he turned to Nick, who wasn’t Nick at all.

‘No!’ screamed Sebastian. ‘My life’s work!’ He aimed his gun at Harper.

Harper got his shot off first. The shotgun boomed in the high brick room and Sebastian’s body was flung into the altar to Chloe Mestella. Harper moved across. Sebastian’s stomach was ripped to shreds. Blood was pouring from his mouth.

Harper leaned forward.

‘She loved me,’ said Sebastian.

Denise moved over and stared into the face of her captor. ‘I just want to see his face. The pathetic look they all have.’ Sebastian turned his head away. ‘Look at me!’ she shouted. She had been his victim for too long. She wanted to tear out his eyes, but she stopped herself.

‘I was never afraid of you,’ she said. ‘Not for a moment. You understand? You never had me. Not for one second.’ Her father would’ve done the same thing. It was a little thing, but she knew it would help in the days to come, when the nightmares would drift back to haunt her.

‘I was hurt,’ she shouted as Sebastian’s life ebbed away, ‘but I was never afraid.’

Harper followed Denise’s stretcher up into the light. The old lift strained under the weight of the paramedics and the gurney. They got out into the cold winter breeze. Denise breathed fresh New York air into her lungs and grabbed hard on to Tom’s hand.

The grey sky was lit up with blue, white and red lights, flashing across the whole compound. It was all about clearing up now, and crowds of slow-moving cops sauntered around retelling the story of the last few weeks. Sebastian was dead in a cavern underground. Denise was alive. Harper was exhausted, but elated at the end result.

Onlookers, unaware of the horror or the danger, stared with grotesque interest from the wire fences surrounding the plant. They knew something big was going down. Harper was feeling the aftershock of receiving a year’s load of adrenalin in half an hour. Post-traumatic stress, Denise would call it. He’d go with that. But it was something else entirely he was feeling. What was it? Yeah, there it was, big and central. Faith and hope. Without it, you’re just a misguided boy with a devil’s mask.

A paramedic was tending to Harper’s wounds as they walked across the ground. Harper wouldn’t leave Denise’s side. She was conscious but drifting off, her eyes picking out clouds above and loving every one of them. She and Harper hadn’t even had the chance to speak properly but perhaps they didn’t need to say the words. He’d come through. She knew he would.

Harper looked down at Denise. He didn’t know what the future held. He’d survived everything that life had thrown at him in the last year but he knew that the events of the last two weeks would strain Denise’s belief in the world. Her mind and body had been punished. Harper wondered how she would cope and what deep indelible scars would be left on her heart in the future. Harper insisted on getting in the ambulance with her. He held her hand and watched the paramedics tend to her.

Daniel appeared in his car and pushed his way through the police towards the ambulance. He saw Denise and stopped, unable to take in her survival, his face full of pain. Harper moved himself out of the way. He put his arm out and pulled Daniel into the ambulance.

‘She’s okay, but she’s going to need a lot of time and patience. You okay?’

Daniel nodded. He couldn’t get a word out. He climbed into the ambulance. His hand touched Denise’s cheek and she smiled.

Harper stared across at Denise. He saw her smile against the flashing lights, her skin darkened with bruises, her eyes unfathomable. He had nothing to add. She was the hero. Beauty constant under torture.