‘Maybe something.’

In the doorway of the green-painted living room, they looked anew on the carnage before them. Several men dead among scattered pistols and rifles and shell casings. Sound suppressors had been fixed to most of the guns. Some had their eyes open and looked as if they were about to talk, mouths frozen in speech. Two wore dark suits and Kevlar-lined leather gloves, white shirts 9blood-soaked. One of these men supine on the chesterfield couch still gripping a pistol, gut-shot, his entire midsection darkly drenched. The other on his stomach across the rosewood coffee table, the back of his head blown out, bits of skull and brain strewn about him. Curled under the table was a man wearing a black Adidas tracksuit who’d taken one in the throat. Two others wearing boilersuits and steel-toe boots had each been shot in the chest. On a sodden rug beside the stone hearth lay a biker in leathers with a spiderweb bullet hole punched through the mirrored visor of his full-face helmet and the helmet was flooded. Blood everywhere.

‘No wallets, no licences,’ Lynch said. ‘No ID at all.’

Carlin looked at the suited man dead on the chesterfield, holding the Ruger pistol. He looked about the doorway he and Lynch were standing in and then behind them at the door across the hallway pelted with bullet holes. He looked at the floor in the hallway and the console table under which the camera and canisters had been found.

‘Get these developed.’ He handed Lynch the plastic bag.

They stepped out of the shooting box and into the gritty light of a vast northern moor. Cold wind. Dawn sun boiled low in the sky yet offered only cold light and long shadows. A helicopter hung nailed to the sky, blades stirring the air, and then it was leaning forward, nosing towards the horizon, and banking sharply.

‘The air smells funny without the fumes,’ Lynch said. ‘Too clean. Never thought I’d miss the city.’

Carlin inhaled and looked around. ‘I could get used to it.’

They milled about the moorland and then turned and headed back, slowly, absorbing the grim acreage about them. Exposed gritrock risen though the dried heather and crowberry shrubs resembled great scabs grown across the back of the land. Small 10dark birds like windblown leaves blew over the burnt-yellow moor grass. Deep drainage grip channels coursed through heath and blanket bog. On the horizon of that spectral garden rose distant scarps and the ruins of an abbey.

The shooting box was a grand double-fronted building of many rooms and a chamber. Stone tile roof. Four chimneys. Floodlight above the front door. Abandoned beside the building sat four vehicles: two Audis, a Ducati superbike with jacked-up suspension and off-road tyres, and a Scania flatbed truck laden with eighteen 55-gallon drums. A tyre stabbed flat on each vehicle had left them slumped in the raked gravel, the superbike fallen on its side.