'Will you get out of there,' Dessie half-shouted into the yew trees. 'Come on. Syrup!' He swung the hurley at twigs and other debris, snapping them and sending them scooting across the surface.

When he reached the tree line he bent down slightly to gaze under the lowest branches. He could see the dog away to his right in behind the trees on the far side of the avenue near to the cemetery wall, sniffing at something on the ground.

'Leave it alone. Come on, Syrup.'

The dog barked in reply, asking him to come and take a look.

'Jesus!' Dessie crouch-walked quickly between the lower branches of two trees and hurried along the tree-enclosed path toward the dog. As he neared the cemetery entrance he lowered himself to his haunches. Through the second row of trees he could see a foot.

He shifted to one side. A man's naked body was laid out on the ground between the stone wall and a slight mound of earth. The body was parallel to the wall, his feet pointed towards him, a white, plastic bag tied round his head. The body had been daubed with blue paint; a wide line circled each nipple and belly-button, carelessly covered the man's flaccid penis, edging his upper thighs, and thick streaks ran down the outside of each upper arm and the thigh of each leg.

'Holy Mother of God,' Dessie hissed, backing away and struggling to pull his mobile phone from his pocket. 'Get away from there. Syrup! Come here.' He gestured at the dog, patting his thigh, trying to tempt him away from the body.

The dog stared at him and then back to the body, a quizzical look on its face.

'McEvoy.'

'I've been told to inform you,' said a female voice, 'that they've found another body out in Maynooth that fits the profile of the Glencree killing.'

'What? Oh, Jesus Christ!' McEvoy muttered, the news slowly sinking in. 'Right, okay, tell the local super that I'll be there shortly. And make sure the crime scene people are on their way out there and the pathologist has been informed.'

'Yes, Sir. I'll ...'

'Good, thanks,' McEvoy interrupted, disconnecting the call, flipping on the blue lights hidden behind the radiator grill.

His mobile rang again. He snatched it up. 'McEvoy.'

'Colm, I want a full update when you get there, okay,' Tony Bishop instructed without introducing himself.

'Absolutely. I'm going to need a second investigative team.' It was standard practice that each murder would be investigated by a new team. Each crime would involve thousands of hours of searching, interviewing, sieving, checking. It was unrealistic that one team would try and do this several times over and simultaneously. The trick was to link and stitch each separate investigation together. That was McEvoy's job to work with the officers in charge of each strand to weave an overall tapestry.

'I'm sending Charlie Deegan out to you. I've been onto him already. He's ...'

'Are you sure that's a good idea?' McEvoy interrupted, caution in his voice. Charlie Deegan was an ambitious, up-and-coming detective. While he had the potential to be a good investigating officer he cut corners, always following the most obvious line of enquiry. He wanted a result, not necessarily the right result. Given that most of the time the obvious line of enquiry was the correct one, he'd closed cases quickly, successfully and, of appeal to senior management, cheaply.

To make it worse, Deegan was determined to rise up the ranks as quickly as possible. As a result, he was quite happy to stand on anybody who would lever him upwards, to take credit where none was due, to push blame onto colleagues who didn't deserve it, and to generally employ any tactic that would get him noticed as a high flyer and cast his colleagues as bumbling idiots. At the same time, he cultivated friendships with those higher up the system who could develop his career and secure him promotion.

'I know Deegan has a bit of a reputation and him and Plunkett aren't exactly best buddies,' Bishop continued, 'but they'll just have to work with each other. Deegan might be a bit of a loose cannon sometimes, and he might have his head stuck up his own arse, but he knows what he's doing.'

'Right, okay,' McEvoy muttered, disappointment in his voice, unable and unwilling to challenge Bishop's decision.

'Clunk their heads together if they get a bit thick,' Bishop advised, as if managing things would be as simple as admonishing them and moving on.

McEvoy ended the call and pocketed the phone, feeling deflated. He was going to get squeezed from above and below, sandwiched between egotism and antagonism.

McEvoy ran his hand over his close-cropped, thinning hair as he turned left onto Maynooth's main street. He needed another cigarette. And a good night's sleep. Instead he shoved his plastic stick between his lips and made do. He drove down between the small, two-storey, terraced houses, the ground floors a gaggle of shops, cars jammed in narrow parking spaces in front of them, the street lined with pollarded lime trees.

A hundred yards later he passed through a set of traffic lights and the ruins of the 15th century castle, and approached the front gates of the university. The place had once been described to him as being like an Oxford college dropped in an Irish field, though he'd never actually ventured onto the campus to see for himself, despite passing through the town numerous times. Its location, like Glencree, was the result of events in France.

Before the French revolution of 1789 the British had denied Irish Catholics the right to operate a seminary to train their priests. Instead seminarians travelled to France to be educated. With revolution and the subsequent wars with Austria and Britain, the British became afraid that the fledgling priests would bring similar ideas and actions to Ireland. In an effort to thwart an Irish revolution, in 1795 an Act of Parliament gave permission for a seminary to be built in Ireland and the Duke of Leinster donated lands on the edge of Maynooth village not far from his Carton estate. Despite its establishment, in 1798 the Irish rebelled, but without military help from their French allies were soon defeated. The seminary, however, had continued to operate. From 1910, St Patrick's College had been part of the National University of Ireland, and in 1997 the seminary and university had become two separate entities, sharing the same campus, but with their own administrations, structures, procedures, and degrees.

A local guard stood between the light grey pillars, a grand manor house with long, cream-coloured residential wings behind him. Slightly off to the right, a tall steeple climbed into the grey sky. Just inside the gate, a couple of local security men stood by a wooden hut looking slightly lost.

McEvoy lowered the window and held out his identification. 'Detective Superintendent McEvoy,' he announced. 'National Bureau of Criminal Investigation.'

The guard glanced at the card and nodded in acknowledgement, stepping out of the way. 'Round to the left, Sir. Keep going as far as you can.' He pointed along the roadway. 'Go past the orchard and park in on the right.'

McEvoy nodded back and accelerated through the gates, swinging to the left. He followed the road up and passed another manor house and a Boston ivy covered building. He slowed as he approached a crossroads, passing straight across and between some workshops, a sign for the staff dining room, and into a small car park. In front of him was a two-storey set of classrooms and off to the right was the imposing, drab grey of the seminary building.

A little laneway ran out the far side alongside an old orchard, its trees let grow, their branches old, long and gnarled. He drove up the laneway and turned right into a large car park that ran the length of the school-like building and the seminary buildings beyond. It was filled with a dozen or so cars and vans, some painted in garda colours, and 15 or so people. A uniformed guard directed him to a parking space. He parked the car where instructed and eased himself out into the shadow of the building.

Off to his left a few guards were milling around a large crucifix affixed to the top of what seemed like a mound of earth. The crucifix was placed at the end of a row of yew trees, 40 or 50 yards long leading off to the left. He pulled his collar up against the chill wind and set off towards them, slowing puffing on his plastic cigarette, passing an aqua-coloured health and safety sign warning that dogs should be kept on a lead, and a short low wall on which were fixed two taps.

As he neared the crucifix he could see that it rose out of a low rockery. Atop of the cross was a small roof. You nail a man to a cross, McEvoy thought, and yet you shelter him from the rain? Someone had their priorities mixed up.

The four guards stood at the foot of the crucifix were all local. They occasionally swapped a few words but mostly they looked lost, waiting for orders. One of them kicked at some glass on the tarmac as they watched the tall figure, wearing a suit a couple of sizes too big, approach.

'Detective Superintendent McEvoy,' McEvoy announced. 'Where's the body?'

'Down there,' one of the guards pointed along the yew tree avenue, 'on the left near to the cemetery wall.'

McEvoy looked down between the trees, the branches from each row knitting together to create a darkened tunnel 30 feet high. He could see two men standing together talking by the archway framing the entrance to the cemetery. He muttered a 'Thanks' and strode past a metal fence and in under the yew tree canopy.

As he approached the men turned to watch him. McEvoy recognised one of them as Dermot Meaney, the local Superintendent. Meaney was almost the total opposite to Peter O'Reilly. Tall, thin, uniform immaculate, shoes polished, well groomed. The other man was younger, shorter and more thickset, and not as well turned out.

As he reached them McEvoy extended his arm taking Meaney's hand, shaking it. 'Dermot. How's it going?'

'It was going fine until this.' He jerked his thumb over his shoulder, before realising that he needed to introduce the second person. 'This is Tom Bacon, the local sergeant. Tom, this is Detective Superintendent Colm McEvoy of NBCI.'

McEvoy shook the sergeant's hand. 'Good to meet you, Tom. So what have we got?' he asked the pair.

The two men shuffled out of McEvoy's line of sight and he crouched down to get a better view. The body was poorly hidden from the path, but well screened from the car park because the area in between contained hundreds of saplings, 3 or 4 feet high, the grass high around them.

'By the look of him, he's been dead a while,' Meaney offered. 'Some time in the night is my guess. A local man found him an hour or so ago out walking his dog. It's a pretty quiet spot despite everyone being on campus. He hit his ball near to the trees and the dog ran in underneath and found the body.

'Do we know who he is yet?' McEvoy asked.

'Not at the moment,' Meaney replied. 'All of his clothes seem to be missing. We need to get the bag off his head no other way of telling. No one locally has reported anyone missing in the last 24 hours, unless he's from somewhere else and the body's just been dumped here?'

McEvoy nodded and took a step forward onto the edge of the path. 'We'll need to get that checked out. How long until the crime scene people get here?'

'They're on their way. I spoke to them five minutes ago. They were just passing Lucan on the motorway.'

'How about the pathologist?'

'She's on her way too. She was just leaving. He left his cards in the cemetery.' He moved towards the archway. 'Obviously the same madman that killed the girl up in Glencree.'

'Looks that way,' McEvoy said, his mind wandering elsewhere. Two victims killed, potentially five more to go. They'd barely got started on the investigation into Laura's death and now there was another to deal with. One that looked equally bizarre. He followed Meaney through the archway, noticing the plaque listing names and dates embedded in its 4-foot thick wall. Another uniformed guard was stationed on the far side of cemetery, blocking access in over the low wall, a hedge behind it.

In front of them was a tall, plain, Celtic cross. To the right was what looked like a small stone chapel with a heavy wooden door. To the left was a cluster of 20 or so low, stone Celtic crosses. Meaney led them past the tall cross and a couple more low stone crosses to a set of dark, plain, metal crosses, five in a row. Stuck to the top of them were the business cards.

'You can only be buried here if you lived and worked in the seminary,' Meaney explained. 'These would have probably been students who died while they were studying for the priesthood.'

McEvoy looked at the cards and then cast a glance around the graveyard. 'Any sign of a note?' he asked.

'Nothing beyond the cards,' Meaney replied. 'We haven't done a search of any kind, we were waiting for you and the crime scene team.'

McEvoy nodded at three rows of gravestones, each 15 or so long, opposite the metal crosses. 'What the hell has happened to those?' Many of the small crosses attached to the top of the small triangular stones had been knocked off.

'Local vandals,' Bacon explained. 'It's obviously good craic to smash up memorials to the dead,' he said sardonically.

'Jesus Christ,' McEvoy muttered, anger boiling up in him. If anyone did this to Maggie's grave there would be hell to pay. The little feckers would wish they hadn't been born. He wandered over to one of the smashed gravestones. What was the sense in breaking it? The man had been dead over a hundred years.

He turned back to the other two. 'Right, okay. Who's the head of security here.'

'Martin Cleary,' Bacon answered. 'Used to be ...'

'I know Martin,' McEvoy interrupted. 'We worked together a few times when I was starting out. I wondered what had happened to him when he retired. I always thought he'd head back out west. He still a cantankerous old bugger?'

'You could say that,' Meaney replied sourly.

'Good,' McEvoy said, 'I always thought it suited him.'

He set off for the car park. As he neared, a bright red sports car drove in through the orchard gate and pulled to a stop. Charlie Deegan eased his well-toned frame out of the car, brushed a hand through his thick, dark hair, and cast his gaze over the other vehicles. He spotted McEvoy, shut his car door and headed towards him, beeping on the alarm.

'Sir,' Deegan smiled.

'Charlie,' McEvoy stated flatly. 'The victim is next to that set of yew trees, by the cemetery wall.' He pointed behind him. 'The crime scene people should be here any minute. Take them up there and have a look yourself see what a sick bastard we're dealing with. Dermot Meaney's the local super, he'll help work the questionnaires, and Tom Bacon's the local sergeant. They're stood by that crucifix with some of their men. Who's your team at the moment?' McEvoy asked, seeking confirmation that things were as usual.

'DSs are Grainger, Murphy and O'Keeffe,' Deegan replied, a slightly amused look on his face. 'They're on their way. They left right after me.'

At least the core team were all sound, McEvoy reflected. Good guards with plenty of guile. All he hoped was that their common dislike of Deegan wouldn't hinder the investigation. He needed everyone pulling in the same direction. 'And did Tony Bishop brief you?'

'Yes, Sir.'

'Good. I'm going to talk to the head of security here, Martin Cleary. See what he has to say. I suggest you introduce yourself to the locals; I'll find you again afterwards to see how things are going.'

Deegan nodded and set off towards the crucifix.

McEvoy watched him for a moment then turned back towards the car park. He hoped Deegan was going to behave himself.

Martin Cleary was leaning against the bonnet of a white van, its side emblazoned with the crest of the National University of Ireland, Maynooth. His thick, white hair was stuck up in tufts, his face round, cheeks ruddy, and his green tweed suit crumpled. He looked as if he had fallen out of bed after a long night. He was talking to a middle-aged woman. She in contrast was immaculately dressed in a blue trouser suit and black shoes with a slight heel. Her long brown hair framed a stern looking face. They stopped chatting as McEvoy approached.

'Martin, long time no see. How's it going?' McEvoy extended a hand.

'I'm surviving, Colm.' Cleary pushed himself forward and shook McEvoy's hand warmly. 'Don't tell me you're in charge of this rabble?'

'For my sins,' McEvoy said. 'I'm Detective Superintendent Colm McEvoy,' he introduced himself to the woman.

'Clara Russell,' the woman replied in a clipped accent, 'health and safety officer for the university.'

'They made you a detective superintendent,' Cleary said, doubt in his voice. 'They must have been desperate, Colm.'

It was always difficult to tell whether Cleary was joking or not. McEvoy's policy had always been to think that the cantankerous old sod was speaking the truth dressed up in jest. The only way to deal with it was to reciprocate the compliment. 'Not as desperate as when they made you one, Martin.'

'You insolent young pup!' Cleary stated, an amused edge to his voice. 'I was sorry to hear about Maggie, Colm,' he said, changing his tone. 'Cancer's a terrible thing. A terrible thing,' he repeated. 'Colm's wife recently passed away,' Cleary explained to Clara Russell.

'I'm sorry,' Clara said, without sounding it.

'It's okay,' McEvoy said. 'We just take one day at a time. So, Martin,' he said, becoming more businesslike, 'you have anything that's gonna help us solve this murder? Any CCTV?'

'Only bit we have on this side is inside this place.' Cleary jerked his thumb towards the seminary building. 'The north campus is pretty well kitted out at this stage, but I'm still trying to convince the stupid buggers to install it on the south campus too. Same problem as ever. Money.'

'So you have no footage of the grounds? The entrances in and out?'

'No. Though he could have got in and out over one of the walls easy enough. The perimeter must be a couple of miles long and it's all fields and the canal on this side.'

'How about any of your team? Did they see anything?'

'Nothing out of the ordinary. Campus like this, there are people wandering around all the time. Quite a few people walk round the circuit here in the evening; getting a bit of exercise. We shut the library gates around ten o'clock, the main gates at eleven. Plus there are guests staying in campus accommodation and seminarians who live on site.'

'So he could have easily come and gone without anyone seeing him?'

'He could have walked out the front bloody gates and we'd not have a record of it,' Cleary said, a touch of anger in his voice.

'Jesus. Right, okay.' McEvoy spotted Cheryl Deale and her team walking down the path towards the crime scene. Just as there was a new investigative team, there was a new crime scene team. A lawyer would have a field day if he knew the same team had processed both sites. Any evidence could have been carried from one site to the other. It didn't matter that they wore disposable, protective gear, there was a hint of doubt, and that was enough to open a chink in the prosecution's case.

Charlie Deegan had broken off holding court with the local guards and was heading to meet them. 'Look, Martin, can you work with the locals to keep this site secured? Maybe pacify everyone being detained while we take statements?'

'No bother. You have a madman on your hands, Colm. We saw the body.' He nodded at Clara. 'Anything you need just give me a call.'

McEvoy met Charlie Deegan at the crucifix.

'My lot have arrived,' Deegan explained. 'I'm going to bring them up here so they can see what they're dealing with, then I'll get them set up. I've spoken with Meanbag and Bacon Roll and a couple of their lads. I mean Superintendent Meaney and Sergeant Bacon,' he corrected himself. 'Sorry about that,' he continued disingenuously.

McEvoy did his best not to roll his eyes. Deegan wasn't sorry in the slightest. He was letting McEvoy know what he thought of the locals, which wasn't a lot. He'd obviously decided that none of them were going to be of any use in building his career.

'Keep an eye out for Elaine Jones,' McEvoy instructed, letting Deegan's insubordination slide. 'She should be here by now.'

'Will do.' Deegan set off back to the car park to meet his DSs.

McEvoy shook his head and strolled down the yew tree laneway. Up ahead he could see Cheryl Deale and her two team members getting suited up.

'How're things?' he asked the team in general.

'Somebody's already fucked things up,' Cheryl Deale replied, agitated, not bothering with any pleasantries. The paper suit covered her slight frame and hair, just her face showing. Her eyes were bright blue above a small button nose. She held a camera in one hand; a video recorder hung round her neck.

'What?' McEvoy said, confused. 'No one's been near the body.'