Cave 14 was once the most beautiful site in a series of Buddhist cave temples in Shanxi province. When you entered, it looked as if huge blocks of salt had been carted away. The panorama of Bodhisattvas-their twenty-four rebirths-were cut out of the walls with axes and saws, the edges red, suggesting the wound’s incision.

‘Nothing lasts,’ Palipana told them. ‘It is an old dream. Art burns, dissolves. And to be loved with the irony of history-that isn’t much.’ He said this in his first class to his archaeology students. He had been talking about books and art, about the ‘ascendancy of the idea’ being often the only survivor.

This was the place of a complete crime. Heads separated from bodies. Hands broken off. None of the bodies remained-all the statuary had been removed in the few years following its discovery by Japanese archaeologists in 1918, the Bodhisattvas quickly bought up by museums in the West. Three torsos in a museum in California. A head lost in a river south of the Sind desert, adjacent to the pilgrim routes.

The Royal Afterlife.

On her second morning they asked Anil to meet with forensic students in Kynsey Road Hospital. It wasn’t what she was here for, but she agreed to it. She had not yet met Mr. Diyasena, the archaeologist selected by the government to be teamed with her in the Human Rights investigation. There had been a message that he was out of town and that he would contact her as soon as he returned to Colombo.

The first body they brought in was very recently dead, the man killed since she had flown in. When she realized it must have happened during her early-evening walk in the Pettah market, she had to stop her hands from trembling. The two students looked at each other. She never usually translated the time of a death into personal time, but she was still working out what hour it was in London, in San Diego. Five and a half hours. Thirteen and a half hours.