by Tom Knox
Christine was silent. Rob tried again: ‘What does it matter?’
She turned to face him. ‘It matters a lot to some people. In Israel for instance.’
‘Go on.’
‘Pulsa Dinura has been used a few times in recent years, by Jews.’
‘Right…’
‘Some ultra orthodox rabbis, for instance. They summoned the angel of death against Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli leader, in October 1995.’ She paused. Rob was working out the significance of the date. Christine got there before him: ‘And Rabin was assassinated within the month.’
‘K. An interesting coincidence.’
‘Some more rabbis used Pulsa Dinura against Ariel Sharon, the next prime minister, in 2005. A few months later he fell into a coma, after a brain haemorrhage.’
‘Sharon was 77. And he was fat.’
She looked directly into Rob’s eyes. ‘Sure. It’s just…coincidence.’
‘Yep. It is.’
They were at the lobby of his hotel. They were nearly arguing. Rob regretted this. He liked Christine. A lot. He didn’t want to offend her. He offered-keenly-to walk the further half a kilometre with her to her apartment block, but she-gently-declined. They looked at each other. Then they hugged briefly. Before she left she said, ‘As you say Robert, it’s just coincidence. But the Kurds believe it works. Lots of people in the Middle East think Pulsa Dinura works. It is infamous. Check it on Google. So if they are using it…what that means is that some people really want Franz Breitner dead.’
With that she turned and walked away.
Rob watched her for a few minutes. Her disappearing figure. Then he shivered again. The night was getting colder as the wind blew in off the desert.
10
DCI Forrester sat back on the sofa. He was in a cosy sitting room just off Muswell Hill, in suburban north London. He was seeing his therapist.
It was kind of clichéd, he supposed. The policeman with the neuroses, the fucked-up cop. But he didn’t mind. The sessions helped.
‘So how was your week?’ His therapist was sixty-something, Dr Janice Edwards. Posh in a nice way. Forrester liked the fact she was quite old. It meant he could just spill the beans, achieve catharsis, talk without any emotional distraction. And he needed to talk. Even if it cost fifty pounds an hour. Sometimes he talked about his job, sometimes about his wife, and sometimes about other stuff. Darker stuff. Serious stuff. Yet he never really got to the heart of it. His daughter. Maybe one day he would.
‘So,’ Dr Edwards said again, somewhere behind Forrester’s head. ‘Tell me your week…’
Staring at the window, blankly, his hands resting on his stomach, Forrester started telling his therapist about the Craven Street case. The caretaker, the mutilation, the weirdness. ‘We’ve got no witnesses. They got out clean. They used leather gloves but Forensics can’t find any DNA. The knife wound is useless. A standard blade. We didn’t lift a single print.’ He rubbed his head. The therapist murmured interest. He carried on. ‘I did get excited when I found out the cellar they dug up was once…well they found some old bones there years back…but it wasn’t really a lead, it was just a coincidence, I think. But I still have no idea what they were looking for. Maybe it was a prank, just a student prank that went wrong, maybe they were high on drugs…’ Forrester realized he was meandering, but he didn’t especially care. ‘And that’s where I am. I’ve got a guy with no tongue in hospital and the trail has gone cold and…well anyway that’s been my week, a pretty shit week, and that’s all really…you know…’ He tailed off.
Sometimes in therapy this was what happened. You didn’t say much of importance, and then you dried up. But then Forrester felt a surge of grief and anger-from nowhere. Maybe it was the darkness falling outside, maybe it was the quietness in the room. Maybe it was the thought of that poor man beaten and abused. But now he really did want to talk about something much deeper, something much darker. The real stuff. It was time. Maybe it was time to talk about Sarah.
But silence filled the room. Forrester thought about his daughter. He closed his eyes. He lay back. And he thought about Sarah. The trusting blue eyes. Her giddy laughter. Her first words. Apple. App-ull. Their first child. A beautiful daughter. And then…
And then. Sarah. Oh, Sarah.
He rubbed his eyes. He couldn’t talk about it. Not yet. He could think about it: he thought about it all the time. But he couldn’t talk about it. Yet.
She had been seven years old. She’d just gone wandering off in the dark, one winter night. She’d just gone wandering off, out of the door, no one was watching. And then they’d searched and they searched, and the police and the neighbours and everyone searched…
And they’d found her. In the middle of the road, under the motorway bridge. And no one knew if it was murder or if she had just fallen off the bridge. Because the body was so mashed. Run over by so many cars in the dark. The lorries and cars probably thought they were driving over a tyre.
Forrester was sweating. He hadn’t thought about Sarah this deeply in months, maybe years. He knew he needed to release this. To get it out. But he couldn’t. He half turned and said, ‘I’m sorry, Doctor. I just can’t. I still think about it every hour of every day, you know? But…’ He gulped. The words wouldn’t come. But the thoughts were racing. Every day he wondered, even now: did someone find her and rape her and then drop her off the bridge or did she just fall-but if she just fell how did it happen? Sometimes he thought he knew. Sometimes in his heart of hearts he suspected she must have been murdered. He was a cop. He knew this stuff. But there were no witnesses, no evidence. Maybe they would never know. He sighed and looked across at the therapist. She was serene. Serene and sixty-five years old and grey-haired and smiling quietly.
‘It doesn’t matter.’ She said. ‘One day…’
Forrester nodded. He smiled at their catchphrase. Maybe one day. ‘I just find it hard sometimes. My wife gets depressed and she turns away at night. We never have sex from one month to the next, but at least we are alive.’
‘And you have your son.’
‘Yes. Yes we have him. I guess sometimes you have to be grateful for what is, rather than what isn’t. I mean. What do alcoholics say in AA? You got to fake it to make it. All that bullshit. I guess that’s what I’ve got to do. Just do that. Pretend I’m OK sometimes.’ He stopped again and the silence echoed around the warm sitting room. At last he sat up. His hour was up. All he could hear was traffic, muffled by the windows and the curtains.
‘Thanks, Dr Edwards.’
‘Please. As I said, call me Janice. You’ve been coming here six months.’
‘Thanks, Janice.’
She smiled. ‘I’ll see you next week?’
He stood. They shook hands, politely. Forrester felt cleansed and slightly lighter in spirit.
He drove back to Hendon in a calm and pleasantly pensive mood. Another day. He’d got through another day. Without drinking or shouting.
The house was full of his son’s noise when he keyed the door. His wife was in the kitchen watching the news on TV. The smell of pasta and pesto wafted through. It was OK. Things were OK. In the kitchen his wife kissed him and he said he’d been to a session and she smiled and seemed relatively content.
Before supper Forrester went outside into the garden and rolled a tiny spliff of grass. He felt no guilt as he did it. He smoked the weed, standing on his patio, exhaling the blue smoke into the starry sky, and sensed his neck-muscles unknotting. Then he went back into the house and lay on the floor of the sitting room and helped his son with a puzzle. And then there was a phone call.
In the kitchen his wife was sieving the penne. Hot steam. The smell of pesto.
‘Hello?’
‘DCI?’
Forrester recognized his junior’s slight Finnish accent immediately. ‘Boijer, I’m just about to eat.’
‘Sorry, sir, but I got this strange call…’
‘Yeah?’
‘That friend of mine-Skeldin
g, you know, Niall.’
Forrester thought for a moment, then he remembered: the tall guy who worked on the Home Office murder database. They’d all had a drink once.
‘Yeah, I remember. Skelding. Works on HOLMES.’
‘That’s right. Well he just called me and said they’ve got a new homicide, the Isle of Man.’
‘And?’
‘Some guy’s been killed. Very nasty. In a big house.’
‘Long way away, the Isle of Man…’
Boijer agreed. Forrester watched his wife sauce the penne with the vivid green pesto. It looked slightly like bile; but it smelled good. Forrester coughed impatiently. ‘As I said, Boijer, my wife’s just made a very nice dinner and I—’
‘Yes, sorry, sir, but the thing is, before this guy was killed, the attackers cut a symbol into his chest.’
‘You mean…’
‘Yes, sir. That’s right. A Star of David.’
11
The day after Franz’s supper party Rob rang his ex-wife’s home. His daughter Lizzie picked up. She still didn’t really know how to use a phone. Rob called into it, ‘Darling, use the other end.’
‘Hello, Daddy. Hello.’
‘Dar…’
Just hearing Lizzie talk gave Rob a stabbing sense of guilt. And also a sheer basic pleasure that he had a daughter. And an angry desire to protect her. And then an extra guilt that he wasn’t there, in England, protecting her.
But protecting her from what? She was safe in suburban London. She was fine.
When Lizzie had worked out the right end of the phone, they talked for an hour and Rob promised to send her jpegs of where he was. Then he reluctantly put the phone down and decided it was time to get to work. Hearing his daughter often did this: it was like an instinct, something genetic. The reminder of his family duties energized his work reflex-go and earn some money to feed the offspring. It was time to write his article.
But Rob had a dilemma. Moving the phone from his hotel bed to the floor he lay back and thought. Hard. The story was so much more complex than he had envisaged. Complex and interesting. First there was the politics: the Kurdish/Turkish rivalry. Then the atmosphere at the dig, and amongst the locals: their resentment-and that death prayer…And what about Franz’s clandestine late-night digging? What was all that about?
Rob got up and walked to his window. He was on the top floor of the hotel. He opened the window and listened to the sound of a muezzin calling from a mosque somewhere nearby. The song was harsh, barbarous even-yet somehow hypnotic. The inimitable sound of the Middle East. More voices joined the rising carol. The call for prayer echoed across the city.
So what was he going to write for the paper? A part of him strongly wanted to stay and investigate further. Get to the bottom of the story. But what was the point in that, really? Wasn’t that just indulging himself? He didn’t have forever. And if he included all this odd and perplexing stuff it altered and maybe even ruined his article. At the very least it complicated the narrative-and therefore compromised it. The reader would be left confused, and arguably unsatisfied.
So what should he write? The answer was obvious. If he just stuck to the simple and fairly astonishing historical stuff he would be fine. Man Discovers the World’s Oldest Temple. Mysteriously buried two thousand years later…
That was enough. It was a cracking story. And with some striking pictures of the stones and the carvings and an angry Kurd and Franz in his spectacles and Christine in her elegant khakis it would look good, too.
Christine. Rob wondered if his barely suppressed desire to stay and investigate the story further was actually because of her. His barely suppressed desire for her. He wondered if she could tell what he felt. Probably. Women could always tell. Yet Rob never had a clue. Did she even like him? There was that hug…And the way she put her arm through his last night…
Enough. Picking up his rucksack and chucking in pens, notebooks and sunglasses, Rob left his hotel room. He wanted to visit the dig one last time, ask a few more questions, and then he’d have sufficient material. He’d already been here five days. Time to move on.
Outside the hotel Radevan was leaning against his taxi arguing about football or politics with the other cabbies, as ever. He looked up when Rob stepped out into the sunshine, and smiled. Rob nodded. They had a little rigmarole going now.
‘I want to go to the bad place.’
Radevan laughed:
‘The bad place? Yes, Mr Rob.’
Radevan did his chauffeur thing with the car door and Rob jumped in feeling energetic and determined. He’d made the right choice. Do the piece, invoice for exes-then head back to England and insist on some proper time with his daughter.
The drive to Gobekli was uneventful. Radevan picked his nose and complained loudly about the Turks. Rob stared out across the wastes, towards the Euphrates, the blue Taurus Mountains beyond. He’d come to like this desert, even if it unnerved him. So old, so weary, so malevolent, so stark. The desert of the wind demons. What else was hiding under its shallow hills? A weird thought. Rob stared across the wilderness.
They got there quickly. With a squeal of bald tyres, Radevan parked. He leaned out of the window as Rob walked to the dig. ‘Three hours, Mr Rob?’
Rob laughed. ‘Yep.’
The dig was frenetic today, busier than Rob had seen it. New trenches were being laid. Deep new gouges into the hills, showing ever more stones. Rob understood that the digging season was coming to an end and Franz was keen to crack on. The digging season was remarkably short-the site was simply too hot in high summer, and too exposed in winter. And anyway the scientists apparently needed nine months of exegesis and laboratory work to process what they had found in the three months of actual digging. That was the archaeological year: three months of spadework, nine months of thinking. Quite relaxed, really.
Franz and Christine and the paleobotanist-Ivan-were having a debate in the tented area. They greeted Rob with a wave and he sat down and more tea was served. Rob liked the endless production line of Turkish tea, the ritual tinkling of spoons and tulip-shaped glasses, the taste of the sweet dark cay. And hot black tea was oddly refreshing in the dry desert sun.
Over his first glass of tea Rob told them his news. That he was finishing up, that this was his last visit. He checked Christine’s face as he said this. Did he see a flicker of regret? Maybe. His mood sashayed a little. But then he remembered his job. He had to ask some more questions, his very last queries. That was why he was here. Nothing else.
His journalistic need was to put the dig in context. He’d been reading some more history books-prehistory books-and he wanted to place Gobekli Tepe somewhere within that history. See how it fitted in, how it gleamed in the mosaic of wider human history-the evolution of man and civilization.
Franz was happy to oblige. ‘This area,’ he waved his arm at the yellow hills beyond the open-sided tents, ‘is where it all began. Human civilization. The first written language is cuneiform, that started not far away. Copper smelting is originally Mesopotamian. And the first true towns were built in Turkey. Isobel Previn could tell you all about that.’
Rob was mystified. Then he remembered the name-Christine’s tutor at Cambridge. Isobel Previn. Rob had also read the name in various history books-Previn had worked with the great James Mellaert, the English archaeologist who excavated Catalhoyuk. Rob had enjoyed reading about Catalhoyuk-not least because they dug it up so quickly. Three years of lusty shovelling and it was nearly all revealed. That was the heroic, Hollywood age of archaeology. Nowadays, as far as Rob could tell, things had slowed down. Now there were so many experts in different fields-archaeometallurgists, zooarchaeologists, ethnohistorians, geomorphologists-it had all got very intricate. A complex site could take decades to unravel.
Gobekli Tepe was such a site. Franz had been digging in Gobekli since 1994; Christine had implied that he would spend the rest of his working life here. A whole working life on one site! But then again, it was the most amazing a
rchaeological site in the world. Which was probably why Franz looked so chuffed most of the time. He was smiling right now-explaining to Rob about the early history of pottery and agriculture, both of which came after Gobekli Tepe was built. Both of which also started nearby.
‘The first ever signs of farming can be found in Syria. Gordon Childe called it the Neolithic Revolution and it happened not far to the south. Abu Hureyra, Tell Aswad, places like that. So you see this really is the cradle. Metalwork, pottery, farming, smelting, writing all began near Gobekli. Ja?’
Christine added, ‘Yes, though actually there is some evidence of rice farming in Korea in 13,000 BC, but it is enigmatic.’
Ivan, who had been silent until now, also joined in: ‘And there is some strange evidence that pottery may have started and then stopped before that, in Siberia.’
Rob turned. ‘Sorry?’ Franz looked slightly irritated by his colleague’s interruption, but Rob was intrigued. ‘Go on?’
Ivan blushed. ‘Erm…we have evidence from eastern Siberia, maybe Japan, of an even earlier civilization. A northern people. Possibly they died out, because the evidence disappears. We do not know. We have no idea where they went.’
Franz looked nettled. ‘Ja, ja, ja, Ivan. But still! This area is where it really happened. The Near East! Here.’ He slapped his hand on the table for emphasis, making the teaspoons rattle. ‘All of it. All of it started here. The first kilns for making pots. That was in Syria, and Iraq. The Hittites made the first iron. In Anatolia. The first domestic pigs were in Cayonu, the first villages were in Anatolia, and…and of course the first temple…’