Shelton didn’t reply. He tapped and swept the screen to rewind the playback. Did the thing with his fingers to make the image zoom in closer. He peered closely at the phone and screwed up his eyes as though he wanted to see better.

Then he said, ‘I know that girl.’

Chapter 48

‘Absolutely,’ Shelton said. ‘I’m not dreaming. I’ve seen her before, and I know who she is.’

Ben stared at him. ‘Then tell us.’

‘I can do better than that. I can show you who she is. Come with me to the War Room.’

Shelton heaved himself out of his sofa and started making for a doorway, but diverted his path towards the chiller cabinet. ‘First I need another drink. My guts are churning and my heart’s beating so fast I think I’m going to drop dead.’

‘You don’t need another drink,’ Ben said. ‘You need to take us to the War Room.’

‘Whatever the hell that is,’ Wolf added.

Shelton regretfully passed on the beer, wiping sweat from his face. ‘Very well, then, step this way.’

He led them from the room and down another spaceship corridor to another door. The War Room was a conference-room-sized office space with screens everywhere and more computer power than NASA Mission Control. Where the living area had been minimalistic, Shelton’s command centre was hopelessly cluttered and it was clear he spent most of his time there. The room smelled of body odour, stale beer and yesterday’s fried food. Acres of wall space were packed with books, magazines, files, except for a gap where a reproduction of an eighteenth-century oil painting hung in a gilt frame. Digging deep into his memory, Ben recognised it as Satan Summoning His Legions, by Sir Thomas Lawrence. He’d seen the original in the Royal Academy in London, back when his ex-fiancée Brooke Marcel used to insist on dragging him around art exhibitions for his cultural edification.

‘Let’s see if I’m right about this,’ Shelton said, lumbering towards the largest of several desks. The desktop was covered with empty mugs and beer bottles, biscuit crumbs and pork pie wrappers. A bank of monitors above it displayed the images from the hidden cameras that watched Ben and Wolf’s arrival earlier, the church ruins and the empty track winding away into the distance.

Shelton slumped in his well-worn desk swivel chair, reached out a fat hand for a cordless mouse and started clicking away. His desktop screen had about a thousand website tabs crammed along the top of the window. He ran the cursor along them, muttering, ‘Let’s see, now. Here we are.’ He clicked, and a mainstream media news website came up. A couple more clicks, and Shelton had found the article he was looking for.

‘Aha. This is from just two days ago. I take it you fellows haven’t been watching the news too closely.’

‘We’ve been busy,’ Ben said.