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the face and hands. Black. That was the worst of it. For if half of what the man who had betrayed his faith and his fathers had said was true – before he died like the swine he had become – then this thing was not just a fetish of foolish unbelievers, an obscene idol that merited little more than disgust or destruction; it represented something far worse. A blasphemy beyond belief. Evidence of a crime against God Himself.
    For all his attempts to control it, the emotion he felt now was real: a deep rolling anger that gnawed at his innards, an anger that was fused with a hatred that was both visceral and intellectual, and focused, clearly and coldly, on the object in the centre of the table.
    He turned on his heel and went over to the metal locker in the corner, took a key from his pocket and opened it. Having found the implement he required, he closed the door again and turned to the table. Briefly he fingered the figure on the table, rubbing his finger and thumb roughly over what appeared to be the face, as if he might rub off some of the vestigial traces of pigment.
    Then, with a sudden violence, his face contorted into an expression of pure and holy hatred, he lifted high above his head a meat cleaver and buried it with a resounding, wood-splitting crash into the face of the Virgin Mary.

8
    Altötting, Bavaria
    It should have been a day like any other in the sleepy little Bavarian town of Altötting: a day full of clerical routine, quiet mediation and the contemplation of miracles.
    As she walked across the expanse of neatly mown green lawns between the great churches towards the tiny chapel in their middle, Sister Galina paused for a while, as was her habit on warm days, in the shade of the ancient grove of linden trees, and felt at peace with the world. Her place in the hierarchy of Mother Church was lowly, but the job was special. Her place of work was the oldest Christian building in Germany and one of the country’s most sacred shrines.
    Compared to the monumental religious buildings from the fifteenth , seventeenth and nineteenth centuries that surrounded it, the tiny Chapel of Grace that gave the vast square its name was almost comically out of scale. Architecturally it tended towards the absurd: the pointy roof sat on the little octagonal chapel like a witch’s hat and the external canopy that ran all the way round looked more in keeping with a bus shelter or some arcade in which bad artists hawked their works to tourists.
    Close up that impression was reinforced: all the way around, fixed to the walls and even inside the canopy roof, were paintings. Almost without exception they were works of no value at all from an artistic point of view, but that was not the point. These paintings were not for sale; they were offerings. Each and every one of them, from the ancient, weathered, oil-painted wooden panels to the childish crayon drawings on A4 paper in a supermarket frame, was a testimony to the miraculous power of prayer and divine intervention. And that in itself was more than enough to make them special.
    Sister Galina felt in the pockets of her habit among the rosary beads and her hand-carved crucifix, for the key to the little chapel,and smiled as she opened the door. It was dark inside, for the tiny windows had mostly been blocked; the light of day was not encouraged to penetrate a place which held such ancient treasures.
    The familiar smell of old incense and doused candles greeted her, rich, pungent and slightly acrid. The nave of the chapel, a later eighteenth-century addition, was, like the canopy outside, adorned with pictures donated by pilgrims. Beyond, behind a dark screen was the tiny octagonal chamber that was the oldest part of the church, first built for the baptism of heathen warlords in the first half of the eighth century, in the days when Charles Martel, grandfather of Charlemagne, the first Holy Roman Emperor, was battling the Saracens in Spain and Christendom was on the verge of