Ben looked at Seaward and decided this was the right moment to tell him the truth. He glanced at Wolf. Wolf nodded. Ben said, ‘We’re no longer in a position to tell Mr Abbott anything. He’s dead. That’s why we need to know what he was mixed up in, and with whom. This is extremely urgent and lives are at stake. We have to see the manuscript.’

Andrew Laverack’s mouth dropped open. Roland Seaward’s face turned from purple to white. He regained his composure enough to bluster, ‘He’s dead? When the hell did that happen?’

‘Keep watching the news,’ Ben said. ‘The official version will be that he died in a burglary gone nasty. That’s if you trust official versions. The real story is that he was murdered over what he was writing about. Personally, I think someone should have put a bullet in his head a long time ago. But better late than never, even though the timing was a little inconvenient for us.’

Laverack looked ready to bolt from the room. Wolf motioned for him to remain seated. Seaward gasped, ‘Who are you?’

‘At this moment, we’re your best friends,’ Ben said. ‘Because trust me, once certain people find out that Abbott sent you a copy of the book, your lives are over too. And they will find out, unless someone stops them. Which is what I and Mr Cullen here intend to do. That’s why we need names, information, everything you’ve got.’

Seaward asked, ‘If you haven’t seen the book, then how do you know these people are even real? According to Abbott, their very existence was supposed to be a secret.’

‘We have our own sources,’ Ben said. ‘Hard evidence that Abbott was telling the truth. This isn’t some crazy fantasy he cooked up in his fevered imagination, as you claimed. This is absolutely real.’

‘What kind of hard evidence?’ Laverack asked.

‘How about video footage of a human sacrifice?’ Wolf replied. ‘Hard enough for you?’

Seaward closed his eyes. ‘Oh, my God.’

‘Jesus Christ, I knew we should have never got into this bloody mess,’ Seaward raged. ‘This is all your fault, Andrew.’

‘So what about the book?’ Ben asked.

‘We don’t have it any longer,’ Laverack protested. ‘I mean, technically, we never did, because he only sent us part of it. About a quarter, to be precise.’

‘What bloody good’s quarter of a book?’ Wolf asked, scowling.

‘It’s called a partial submission,’ Laverack said. ‘You know, you can generally tell after just a few pages whether a book proposal has any chance of getting published. For that reason, we requested just a hundred-page sample. In any case, I’ve now deleted the file from our database and disposed of the flash drive it was sent on. So we couldn’t show you it, even if we wanted to.’