‘I thought they used virgins,’ Sergeant Wendy Gladstone said. She thought she had seen it all, but a naked man spreadeagled on a bare floor in a suburban house in London was a first for her.

Dead bodies, even if mutilated, no longer fazed her, but the man, in his thirties or early forties, had. He was surrounded by candles that had since burnt out, and on the cellar floor, crudely painted in red, was an inverted pentagram, the Sigil of Baphomet, the official insignia of the Church of Satan.

Wendy surmised middle-class affluence, pagan worship, and human sacrifice. She had read fiction and watched the occasional late-night horror movie, but to be confronted by reality made her feel uneasy.

‘He might have been,’ Inspector Larry Hill said, responding to Wendy’s initial comment on seeing the body. Hill, in his forties, was an alcoholic, one month since his last drink. He had twenty-two years as a police officer and was highly regarded in Homicide for his investigative skills and commitment to policing. However, one more drunken bender and his days in Homicide would be numbered.

He had seen more of man’s depravity than his sergeant, but she thought his remark was flippant. Although Wendy knew, as any police officer did, especially in Homicide, that flippancy often defused the situation. It was for them to be dispassionately professional, not to be melancholy or disheartened by humanity's ability to inflict terrible actions against another.

Detective Chief Inspector Isaac Cook, the senior officer in Homicide at Challis Street Police Station, arrived within the hour. He took one look at the body and walked outside the house. ‘It’s murder,’ he said. The crime scene investigators, Forensics, and Pathology would provide the details.