They thought there might be a madman loose but no one else was killed. Then the other rumours started. That the dead men had been in a cult of some sort, that dead girls were found in a secret room in the Cathedral foundation—you remember the young girls who went missing, don’t you?”

Kormak nodded. He remembered finding the girls’ mutilated bodies all too well. He sometimes saw their faces in his darker dreams. He forced the frown from his face.

“There was all sorts of talk, that a dark consecration had been taking place, that the dead men had been making sacrifices to the Shadow. And then suddenly it was all hushed up. It became one of those things that nobody wanted to talk about. The priests all started preaching from the pulpit about tellers of tales and gossips. Somebody, somewhere very high up had decided to sweep the whole thing under the carpet or so it seemed to me.”

He put an arm around her waist. She shivered and leaned back against him. “You’ve obviously given this matter a lot of thought.” He kept his voice very flat.

She gave a bitter laugh. “Am I boring you?”

“I can think of more interesting things than talk.” He tilted her head and kissed her on the mouth. She started to respond then pushed him away. “No,” she said. “No.”

She moved back over to the bed, drew her legs up beneath her. “You want to know something,” she said.

“What?”

“I wondered about it. I wondered about you. When you left town the killings stopped. No more dead girls. No more headless corpses. The city went back to being normal or as normal as it ever is, anyway.”

“You think I killed those girls?” She flinched at the cold anger in his voice and shook her head.

“No,” she said. “I don’t think you killed the girls. You were here with me the night Azara Kendal went missing, and the night Dorothea Spanders was lost as well. And the first of them vanished months before you came to town.”

He moved over, lay down beside her. She rested her head on his shoulder for a moment. Her long hair tickled his flesh. She looked up at him with frank brown eyes. “After you left, I started asking questions.”

He stared at her. She stroked the tattoo on his chest, running her finger along the dragon’s folded wings.