Forty-five minutes later, Ben and Wolf were walking back inside the departures terminal at Ronaldsway Airport. Their plane for the return flight was the same purple Flybe twin-prop. Ben spent his time waiting to board and in the air reading Abbott’s book on his phone, making notes. Their long conversation with Shelton had prepared him for what to expect, but all the same he was sickened and infuriated by what he found in its pages. He recognised a lot of the names of those involved – but his main interest was finding out the true identity of the individual he knew as Saunders, and Wolf knew as Curnow. The man who had forced him into this whole thing, and would soon pay the price. Ben carefully scanned the whole four hundred filthy pages but found neither of those names, nor anyone’s description that fitted with the visual memory of the man that was burned deep into his mind.

But though Saunders’ real name kept eluding him, Ben’s reading revealed the identity of another key player Wolf had flagged up. It was the older man who had travelled with Saunders to the spring equinox ritual at Karswell Hall. The man with the bird-headed walking stick.

His name, mentioned several times in Abbott’s account, was Bartholomew Van Brakel. The book provided a little background. The old man’s grandfather, Wilhelm Van Brakel, had been a German-Dutch immigrant who came to England in 1871 and made a vast fortune in tobacco, building a business empire that he passed on to his son Carl. Wilhelm’s grandson Bartholomew had first appeared on this earth in 1933, the same year as Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, and it appeared that he’d outwardly done very little with those eighty-odd years except bask in the family wealth. He’d never run a business, never held a job. His public persona was virtually non-existent.