"Whoever that someone was, they had a hell of a lot of firepower," said Suzie, moving cautiously forward after me. "You couldn't do this much damage with handguns. We're talking heavy-duty weaponry. Given the fire patterns, at least a dozen automatic weapons, maybe more. If the Nazis had any weapons, it doesn't look like they got the chance to use them. I don't see anyone dead not wearing a uniform." She knelt beside one corpse and checked for a pulse in the neck. She shook her head briefly and stood up. "Still warm, though. This all happened fairly recently."

I looked around me, estimating the numbers. "We're looking at... at least a hundred dead people here. Most of their organisation. Maybe all of it."

Suzie sniggered suddenly. "Hey, Taylor, what do you call a hundred dead Nazis? A good start."

"Cheap, Suzie, even for you. You'll be doing knock-knock jokes next." I stopped and looked at a huge poster of Adolf Hitler on the wall beside me. Blood had splashed across half his face. Some symbols are just too obvious, even for me. "They say he owned the Holy Grail."

"Didn't do the silly bugger a lot of good in the long ran, did it?'

"Good point." I looked back at the dead Nazis, trying to summon up some sympathy, and failing. Given a chance, they would have done this to the whole world, and laughed while they did it. To hell with them. A thought struck me. "Men with guns did this, Suzie. Not angels."

Suzie nodded. "Hard to visualise an angel with an Uzi. What do we do now?"

"We search the place thoroughly. Just in case whoever did this missed something. Something that might tell us where to go next. I'm a private detective, remember? Find me some nice juicy clues, so I can smile enigmatically over them."

It took us the best part of an hour, but eventually we found our clue. He was kneeling behind a piano at the far end of the hall, next to a half-open fire exit door. A white statue of a man, dressed in a smart black suit. He was crouched down right next to the piano, as though trying to hide from something. And given the horrified scream still fixed on his gleaming white face, a pretty damned awful something at that. Suzie and I studied him carefully.

"Just when you think you've seen everything," Suzie said finally. "Marble?"

"I don't think so." I touched a fingertip to the contorted white face, brought the fingertip to my mouth, and tasted it.

"Well?" said Suzie.

"Salt," I said. "It's salt."

"A statue made of salt?"

"This isn't a statue. I've seen this work before, at St. Jude's. Someone, or more properly something, turned a living human being into salt, just like this."

Suzie curled her upper lip. "Kinky. Why salt?"

"Lot's wife looked back to see the Lord's angels at work. And was turned to salt."

"Creepy," said Suzie. "Big-time creepy. But why just this man, and not any of the others?"