Peabody was fleetingly fascinated, regarding the horrible totem as if it had been left there specifically for him.

Lucy pondered their next move. It was much hotter here than it was back in town, and the air was harder to breathe as well. Fires burned nearby, veils of brackish smoke drifting across the heaps of ruin. The chances of finding anyone in the middle of this blight had to be zero. That was assuming the story about the so-called ‘services’ was even true, which Lucy increasingly doubted. Perhaps, if she hadn’t been so preoccupied with everything else, she’d have sensed that Kyle Newton was pulling a fast one.

‘Hey!’ Peabody suddenly said. ‘You hear that?’

Lucy turned, but wasn’t sure what she was supposed to be listening to.

The rumble of a tractor was somewhere close at hand. As they stood there, it swung into view over a hilltop some fifty yards off, but was headed away from them, the grinding of its engine gradually fading as it rolled out of sight again.

Then Lucy heard it too.

A wavering, semi-ethereal sound. A voice, she realised, holding a tune – rather sweetly. Someone was singing. A religious song, by the sound of it, though she couldn’t make out the words. She looked back at Peabody.

‘Where’s it coming from?’ she asked.

He shook his head. Lucy ventured along the right-hand path. The words became clearer, though they were being sung in Latin.

‘… Et Jesum, benedictum fructum ventris tui,

Nobis post hoc exsilium ostende.

O clemens! O pia!

O dulcis Virgo Maria!’

‘Sounds like something a nun would sing, don’t you think?’ Peabody said.

Lucy didn’t wait to hear more. She ran up the path, Peabody following.

It took them along a gully, which clove through a virtual mountain of cardboard boxes squashed on top of each other. The singing ceased but was replaced by a female voice – almost certainly the same female voice – speaking aloud.

‘I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die …’

There was a mumbled response from several other voices.

‘We must remember, brothers and sisters, that we come not here to commend the soul of a mortal man, one made in the Lord’s own image…’

‘That’s her,’ Lucy said haring ahead.

‘… but we can still offer prayers for the lives here extinguished, for the souls, if souls they have, of these innocent creatures of God …’