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simultaneously - Shapiro received one phonecall and Donovan received another that cast a new and still more disturbing light on the death of the man known as Wicksy.
    Shapiro’s call was from Dr Crowe. The FME had begun a special post mortem; he’d broken off mid-scalpel, as it were, because he’d found something
he believed the superintendent would want to know right away.
    ‘The bullet I took out of him. It’s a rifle bullet, right enough; well, we knew that. But it’s not common-or-garden rifle ammunition. I’m no expert, I’ve passed it on to Ballistics for a full assessment, but the last time I saw anything like that it came out of a South American diplomat who was assassinated on the steps of their London embassy.’
    ‘Assassinated?’ exclaimed Shapiro, startled. ‘You think Wicksy was killed by a hit man? A South American hit man?’
    ‘Well, that’s a fair bit of ground to cover in one stride,’ said Crowe. ‘But it was a professional job. That bullet, the sniper rifle that fired it, and the precise positioning of the wound make it highly professional. A job like that costs serious money.’
    Shapiro didn’t ask how an old-fashioned pathologist with a fancy new title came to know a thing like that. Conversations with Dr Crowe could always turn up surprises: the man was a sponge for arcane bits of information. ‘A sniper rifle?’
    ‘Get the authoritative word from Ballistics,’ said Crowe. ‘But yes, that’s what it was. In the right hands - which it was - a gun like that would be accurate at very long range.’
    ‘Quarter of a mile?’
    ‘Quarter of a mile would be nothing to a gun like that.’
    Which left Shapiro more confused than ever. So now he was supposed to believe that Wicksy saw something in the twenty minutes after Donovan left
Cornmarket that not only meant he had to be killed, but that whoever needed him dead had immediate access to a hired assassin, possibly from South America, who was accurate with a sniper rifle at a range of quarter of a mile or more. He thought he’d go back to believing in the Golem before he’d believe that.
    Then Donovan came in, knocking as an afterthought, and though he didn’t know it he had the answer. ‘I just had the funniest phonecall.’
    Shapiro sniffed. ‘And you think that makes you someone special?’
    Donovan gave his saturnine grin before continuing. ‘Keith Baker. You know, the vet? He stopped me this morning, he had a dead sheep, apparently it had been shot - by kids, he reckoned. Except when he opened it up and recovered the bullets, they didn’t come from any kid’s gun, or any farmer’s gun either.’
    Shapiro felt the creeping unease of déjà vu. ‘Let me guess. It was a sniper rifle? Fired from anything up to quarter of a mile away?’
    Donovan had long suspected Shapiro of having extrasensory perception. It was the only explanation for some of the leaps of intuition he’d made over the years. But even that didn’t explain this. ‘Have you bugged my phone?’ he asked suspiciously.
    Shapiro shook his head. ‘I’ve just heard from Crowe. Wicksy was shot with the same gun.’ He sucked in a deep breath. ‘You know what this means, don’t you?’
    Donovan was good at his job, but as a philosopher
he wasn’t in Shapiro’s class. ‘That the sheep saw the same thing Wicksy did?’
    But Shapiro was too worried to be amused. He shook his head. ‘Wicksy didn’t see anything. The man who killed him didn’t know him, had nothing to gain from his death. But he sure as hell means to shoot someone, and he wants to be sure of a clean kill. It’s going to be a long shot, so he needs to get the gun sighted in - is that what you call it? - adjust the sights so that he hits what he’s aiming at even at long range.
    ‘Donovan, the bastard was practising. First on the sheep; and when he was happy with that, just to make sure, he practised over the same distance with a human being.’

Chapter Six
    ‘The conference,’ said Liz.