The clouds shifted and the sun flared and hit the truck. They squinted at the gleaming steel drums loaded on its back. All empty.

‘You think them people in the chamber were inside those?’ Lynch said. ‘Transported in them?’

Everywhere seemed to stop and fall quiet. A breeze in the downy cotton grass. The helicopter now a far-off murmur high over the distant abbey ruins.

Carlin didn’t answer.

‘Drums lined with Teflon,’ Lynch said. ‘I mean, what are we talking here, acid baths? They were going to dissolve them?’

Carlin palmed flat his thin grey hair and shut his eyes. He still didn’t answer.

66

The Banskin brothers stood waist-deep in the river mouth under a pale dawn sky. Dark hair and beards dripping wet. The smaller of the two stood very still, bloodstained hands at his sides in the cold water, eyes shut. The larger one hulked nearby laving handfuls of brine over his head, light catching in the droplets and in the stones of the pilfered rings he wore on every finger. 13Three blurred tattoos marked their left forearms. Old flogging scars criss-crossed their backs.

A dog barked and the men turned. On the crest of the riverbank stood a man about sixty with a Dobermann. With an expensive leather shoe, he distastefully toed their bundled clothes and canvas kitbags. He wore a wool overcoat and a flat cap and carried an engraved double rifle. A seigneurial air about him. The dog had a docked tail and cropped ears permanently erect and when it barked again, the man stroked its sleek head.

‘When you lads are decent I’d like to talk,’ he called.

While the brothers dressed in filthy clothes, the man, who went by Cyrus ‘Cy’ Green, shouldered his rifle and swatted midges as he looked out across the estuary to a remote hill range that had taken on the same watery blue haze as the brightening sky.

Then he spoke, telling of an ‘unholy fuck-up’ at a moorland shooting box the night before, and they listened and they watched, and when he finished talking, Dolan, the smaller of the brothers, pulled on a dark green oilskin poncho and put up the hood.

‘Why you telling us?’

‘Before any pigs could come snuffling through the truffle patch, I spoke to one of my lads. He was gut-shot but still kicking. Said someone was in there taking photos. A woman. Said he shot at her but doesn’t know if he hit her or not.’

‘So?’

‘So I want you to find her.’

‘Why?’

‘I suspect she has something that belongs to me.’

Dolan knuckled a nostril and blew out a string of snot. ‘What something?’

‘What that something always is.’14

The elder brother, Joseph, finally spoke: ‘Animals piss on things to mark territory, to show submissiveness, to claim ownership.’

Cy squinted between the men. ‘You’re saying I should have… pissed on my money?’

They said nothing.