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her left hand. She used them to gently tap Bosch's arm:
    'I'd say there isn't that much blood in the photos. Do you agree?'
    'I was thinking the same.’
    'It's true,' the policeman said. 'He didn't kill her in the wood. Perhaps he cut her up in the van. Maybe he used some sort of sedative, because the body showed no signs of a struggle or of having been bound. Afterwards, he dragged her to the clearing and left her on the grass.'
    'Then spent his time tearing off her clothes in the open air,' Miss Wood chimed in, 'ignoring the risk that those amateur birdwatchers might have decided to study their owls a night earlier.'
    'Yes, that's odd, isn't it? But as I already said, these people behave—'
    ‘I understand,' said the woman, interrupting him as she put her glasses back on. They were dark Ray-Bans with gold frames. The policeman thought it must be impossible for Miss Wood to see anything in the red-tinged gloom of this office. Reflected in the glasses, the red curve of the desk formed two pools of blood. 'Could we hear the recording now?'
    'Of course.'
    The detective bent over to reach into a leather briefcase. When he straightened up, he was holding a portable cassette recorder. He placed it on the desk next to the photos, as if it were just another souvenir of a tourist trip.
    'We found it at the feet of the corpse. A two-hour chrome-coloured cassette with no writing or marks on it. It seems to have been recorded on a good machine.'
    He jabbed at the start button. The sudden roar led Bosch to raise his eyebrows. The policeman quickly lowered the volume.
    'Sorry, it's very loud,' he said.
    A pause. A whirring sound. Then it started.
    At first there was heavy breathing, Then the crackling sound of a fire. Like a bird enveloped in flames. Then a hesitant breath, and the first word. It sounded like a complaint, or a moan. Then it came again, and this time it was audible: Art. More anxious breathing, then the first tentative phrase. The voice was nasal, interrupted by panting, the sound of paper, microphone hiss. It was an adolescent's voice, speaking in English:
     
    'Art is also destruc ... destruction ... in the past that's all it ... was. In the caves they painted what . .. what they wanted to sa ... sacri ... sacri...'
     
    Whirring sounds. A brief silence. The policeman pressed the pause button.
    'He stopped recording here, probably to make her repeat the phrase.'
    The next part was clearer. Each word was pronounced slowly and clearly. What came over from this new declaration was a desperate attempt by the speake r not to get it wrong. But some thing else, that could well have been terror, broke through the icy pauses:
     
    the caves they painted only what they wanted to sacrifice . . . Egyptian art was funerary art ... Everything was dedicated to death ... The artist is saying: I have created you to hunt and destroy you, and the meaning of your creation is your final sacrifice ... The artist is saying: I have created you to honour death ... Because the art that survives is the art that has died ... where beings die, w orks endure...
     

    The policeman switched off the recorder.
     
    'That's all there is. We're analysing it in the laboratory, of course. We think he did it in the van with the windows closed, because there's not much background noise. It was probably a written text they forced her to read.'
    An intense silence followed these words. It's as if by hearing her, hearing her voice, we've finally understood the horror of it all, thought Bosch. He was not surprised at this reaction. The photos had impressed him, of course, but to some extent it was easy to keep your distance from a photo. In his days as a member of the Dutch police, Lothar Bosch had developed an unexpected coldness when confronted with the ghastly red phantoms that appeared in the darkroom. But hearing a voice is very different. Behind the words lay a human being who had died a horrible death. The figure of the violin player appears more clearly