Tom smiled at her candour, thinking he couldn’t have articulated it better. And he was as much, if not more, of an atheist.

Her words had stirred an idea into being.

‘Hmm,’ he said.

‘What are you thinking?’

‘I was wondering, why here? Why not some place where he could have gotten the car that bit closer, even if it was nighttime when he buried them? Maybe the religious resonance of Glendalough is important to him.’

‘There’s a cemetery down at the monastic ruins, isn’t there?’

Tom nodded. He’d been there many times, squinting at the names on the old stones, trying to make out dates, marvelling at the similarities in the inscriptions for those who died in 1750 and those in 1950. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes. Everyone equal in the end.

‘So, he made his own graveyard, nearer the lake,’ Laura remarked, icily. ‘Maybe it was his way of making peace with what he’d done. Bastard.’

Chief Superintendent Joe Kennedy arrived shortly after they returned to the site. Tom had been expecting him sooner, but he’d forgotten his boss had been attending a meeting with his counterpart in Belfast.

‘How the hell did it go unnoticed?’ Kennedy asked, as he rocked on his heels, hands clasped tightly behind his back. ‘Five bloody graves in Glendalough. How come they weren’t disturbed over the years?’

‘It seems like the rumours were true,’ Tom shrugged.

‘What do mean?’

‘That there’s a serial killer operating in Ireland. I suppose nobody wanted to believe it. And now …’

‘And now it transpires that the Garda Síochána have been letting a dangerous individual operate with impunity for all these years, without the first clue of what was happening, who he is, or how to stop him.’

Tom bristled and flashed his boss a sharp look.

‘If any of one of those bodies had been discovered, we would have thrown everything at finding the killer. We can’t launch murder investigations into missing persons.’

Kennedy raised an eyebrow.

‘It’s not what I think, Inspector Reynolds. I’m just saying out loud what the talk-show hosts and op-eds will be spouting for weeks and months to come. We’re facing a media onslaught.’

No shit, Sherlock, Tom retorted silently.

‘I presume you’ll be looking at the ground staff,’ Kennedy continued. ‘People who know the area and have frequent access? We have to say we’re following definite leads.’

The inspector nodded, trying to suppress his growing irritation. Sean McGuinness would have pointed out the obvious course too, but he’d earned the right. Kennedy was a few years short of Tom’s fifty and had gone into the desk-jockey end of policing early. He had very little on-the-ground experience, the sort that mattered.