But Ben wasn’t looking at the house, because his attention had become fixed on the strange spectacle taking place by the lakeside. A large crowd of people, fifty or more, had gathered at the foot of the lawn and spread out in orderly fashion near the water’s edge. Every one of the crowd wore a long black hooded robe that shrouded them from head to toe. Their faces were covered by masks. Ben narrowed his eyes. Animal masks. No, bird masks, with beaks. They looked like the eerie seventeenth-century plague doctor figures from a Paul Fürst engraving.

Ben muttered under his breath, ‘What the hell?’

‘Keep watching,’ Wolf said, though he obviously had no desire to watch it himself.

Ben watched, and listened. From the assembled crowd came the sound of chanting. The voices were male. It reminded Ben of the religious plainchant of Gregorian monks, except it wasn’t in Latin but in some other language that he couldn’t identify. He asked, ‘Why are they all looking across at this island?’

‘You’ll see.’

A moment later, the darkness of the island was lit up bright by a pyrotechnic display of fiery explosions, making the screen flare. In the flickering dance of the flames Ben was suddenly able to make out the shape of a huge statue or effigy that stood near the island’s edge. The statue had the head of an ibis-like bird with a long, curved beak resembling the beaks on the masks of the hooded figures watching from the opposite shore.

Ben blinked. He turned to Wolf. ‘This is a joke. It can’t be for real.’

‘Oh, it’s real, all right. But it gets better.’

Now some figures appeared on the island, and the camera shot zoomed closer for a better look at them. The zoom lost some definition, but the image remained clear enough to see. The figures were wearing robes like those of the crowd. With them was a third figure who was dressed very differently. She was young, slender, blond-haired and clad in a flimsy white dress, and from the way they clutched her tightly by her bare arms she was obviously their captive. She looked dopey, as though stupefied by drugs. Ben was wondering if this was some kind of weird fetishistic sex ceremony. He asked, ‘Who is she?’

Wolf replied, ‘You mean, who was she? How the hell do I know?’

Ben went on grimly watching. A cold prickle was spreading down his spine. He felt as though the phone screen was drawing him in, sucking him inside a nightmare. The figures holding the woman pushed her against the base of the statue and tethered her wrists so that her arms were spread wide. More flames erupted over the trees. The chanting of the crowd was intensifying.