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But after a minute or two I realised that he’d retreated back into his own head and wasn’t coming out again without coaxing.

‘When was this, Doug?’ I asked. ‘When you were working at the site?’

He blinked – once, twice, three times. ‘They gave me – glass of water,’ he said. ‘Called an ambulance. Told me to wait. Too late by then. That was when she came, you see? That was what it was for. Something in the water. I think so. Something in the water.’

Hunter’s eyes seemed to clear abruptly and opened so wide it looked like it had to hurt: he stared at me suddenly with intense, unreadable emotion.

I kept waiting for him to blink again but he didn’t.

‘You don’t know,’ he said, with aching bitterness in his voice.

‘No,’ I agreed, feeling more and more uneasy about how this was going. ‘I don’t. But I’m trying to find out. I’m an exorcist. Your wife hired me to try to find out whether there’s any possibility that Myriam Kale – the ghost of Myriam Kale R sKaltry11; was involved in Alastair Barnard’s death.

She believes that if we can find evidence Kale’s ghost was in the room at the time of the murder we might be able to raise a reasonable doubt about your guilt. Is that something you have an opinion on?’

I was assuming that most of this would wash over Hunter but to my surprise he responded with something coherent. His blue-eyed unsettling stare still locked on my face, but his eyes narrowed now, which I’ll admit was something of a relief.

‘I think that’d be a good one,’ he said, ‘if anyone could do it.

Not in the room, though. Not when he was lying there. If you’d seen what it was like when she was working on him, you wouldn’t ask. You wouldn’t want to know. She’s not a ghost. She’s never been a ghost.’

‘What is she, then?’ I asked, fighting the urge to push my chair back and get some distance from that tortured, unblinking gaze.

To my surprise, Hunter laughed. It wasn’t a pretty sound. ‘She says she’s the one thing they never wanted to happen. Because it’s not a game for her.

It’s not a job. She can’t stop. They want to make her stop but they don’t know how. And she doesn’t know either. So she works and works and works at it, one man at a time, and – she used a hammer. I’m pretty sure it was one of mine. But there aren’t enough hammers in the whole damn world for—’

He frowned suddenly, and it was like a light going off behind his face. ‘An exorcist?’ he demanded, and I realised that he was echoing what I’d said a minute or so before.