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sudden shock of her terror seemed to lock them there. Davies dragged the corpse sideways so that Meier had access to Pia’s head and chest. She recognized Davies. Her voice rasped with fear.
    “Do not hurt me. Please. I have done exactly what you asked. You wanted a photograph. So take as many as you like, but I beg you, do not hit me.” Her long, white arms, already wet with the judge’s blood, stretched out in supplication.
    Meier brought his iron bar straight down on Pia’s temple. She relaxed. The rest was for show: a dozen wicked blows to her silicone-filled breasts and finally—the Manson touch as stipulated by de Villiers—the writing in blood across the judge’s back.
    They stood back and surveyed the scene. The corpses were still entwined. “We have done the poor girl a favor,” Davies muttered. “She had a miserable life and no future.”
    He removed the judge’s wallet, keys and credit-card holder. These and the iron bars he threw into the scrub after pocketing the banknotes and credit cards. A few minutes later they were driving back to Paris to rejoin de Villiers.
    • • •
    The bodies were found by a lorry driver, or, more precisely, by his traveling companion, a wire-haired terrier, the following afternoon.
    Patrol cars from the police districts of the eighth, sixteenth, and seventeenth arrondissements converged on the scene within minutes. The crime was classified as murder by youths in search of money for cocaine or, because of the word COCHONS crudely etched into the skin of the judge, the random work of crazed moralists. Either way an unhappy epitaph for the deceased. A government department blocked all media inquiries, perhaps because of past activities by the judge on their behalf. This was a move welcomed by the police, for the crime coincided with a good deal of criticism of moral laxity. It was yet another disgrace to the good name of France.
    Some months later Minister Poniatowski launched a “clean up the Bois” operation, the effects of which lasted for a few months, and in August 1983 the head of the Paris police, Monsieur Fougère, conducted Operation Salubrité with great élan and amid much publicity. Its effects were initially severe on the
travelos
, but in 1991 their business was still going strong and, like royalty in London, or the girls in Bangkok, was considered no bad thing by the relevant French authorities.

4
    James Mason, an Englishman, was born on June 24, 1824; where and of whom is not well documented. He gained a degree in geology from Paris University and participated in France’s bloody revolution in 1848. He became manager of the Bilbao iron mines and made a fortune from copper extraction in São Domingos, southern Portugal, where he owned vast estates. The King of Portugal, alarmed at Mason’s increasing influence, sent an army to reestablish royal authority. Mason’s private security force defeated the soldiers, so the King, changing tack, ennobled the Briton with the title Conde de Pomarão, a hereditary title, held to this day by his great-grandson.
    Mason sank his fortune into the 4,000-acre estate of Eynsham Park, five miles west of Oxford. His only son had an affair with the King of Portugal’s daughter, married the Earl of Crawford’s daughter, was director of the Great Western Railway and in due course handed Eynsham Park to
his
only son, Michael.
    After Eton and Sandhurst, Michael became Army Boxing Champion in 1918 and traveled to Canada for three years as a prizefighter, bootlegger and hunter. In 1938 he was recruited by the Director of Naval Intelligence and spent much of the Second World War on clandestine assignments in Europe. A great sailor and traveler,he wrote many books and became High Sheriff of Oxfordshire in 1951. He died thirty years later, leaving Eynsham Park to his eldest son, David.
    Perhaps this unusual pedigree explains why David Mason was born without fear.
    On Sunday, October 31, 1976, a week after the killing of Pia and the