She’d never faced anything like this before, in her brief police career.

She’d had some emergency training, at police college and since joining the station, with the council’s emergency planning people. It had all been rather low-key, underfunded and routine. Britain was a small, stable island. Nothing much in the way of disasters ever happened.

Morag had not been trained to handle the unexpected.

“I can’t see this is any kind of criminal matter. And this isn’t yet an emergency.”

“It isn’t? Are you sure? What if it keeps growing?” He eyed the horizon. “You know, cats are smart animals,” he said. “Sensitive. Sometimes they react before the rest of us when something is going wrong.” He hesitated. “I’ve not told Ruth, but I haven’t seen Willis for a couple of days either.”

“Something going wrong? Like what?” There was a sound like subdued thunder. Morag and Ted exchanged a glance. Then they began to hurry back the way they had come, around the shoulder of the crag. The cultists came with them, running over the basalt outcrops in their thin slippers.

They came around the brow of the hill. They stopped perhaps a hundred yards from St Anthony’s Chapel. The old ruin was sinking.

The single large section of upright wall, two storeys high, was tipping sideways, visibly, a ruined Pisa. But even as it did so its base was sinking into the softened ground Its upper structure, never designed for such treatment, was crumbling; great blocks of sandstone were breaking free, and went clattering down the wall’s sloping face, making the dull thunderous noise she had heard. One of the lower wall remnants, she saw, had already all but disappeared, its upper edge sinking below the closing dust as she watched.

It was like watching some immense stone ship, holed, sink beneath the stony waves of this plug of lava.

Around them, the cultists were jumping up and down, whooping and shouting.

Morag shook her head. “What does it mean, Ted?”

“I’ve no idea,” Ted said grimly. “Ask these loonie buggers. I think it’s time you made a report, girlie.”

“Yeah.”

She lifted her lapel radio to her lips.

10

Jane showed up in the lab, a little before noon. Mike actually escorted her into the clean room area. The staff had got the clean room procedures beefed up a little by now, and so Jane was wearing the regulation white bunny suit and cloth trilby, blue plastic overshoes.

“Hi.”

Henry, with his hands inside a glove box, did a double take. “Oh. It’s you.” He fumbled the petrological slide he was handling, and tried to pull his hands out of the arm-length rubber gloves; he fumbled that too.

Her face didn’t crack a smile. “Sorry. I’m disturbing you.”

“No, no. That’s okay. I just didn’t recognize you.” He studied her. “You look—”