by Tom Knox
‘St Anne’s Fort,’ said Hayden. ‘It’s offices now.’
The place was roped off with police tape. Forrester saw that a tent had been erected on the front lawns and glimpsed a policeman carrying an old Kodak fingerprint camera into the building. Climbing out of the car Forrester wondered about the capabilities of the local force. When had their last homicide been? Five years back? Fifty? They probably spent most of their time busting dope smokers. And underage drinkers. And gays. Wasn’t this the place where homosexuality was still illegal?
They went straight into the house, through the main doors. Two younger men wearing antiputrefaction masks glanced at Forrester. One of them was holding a tin of aluminium powder. They stepped into another room. Forrester went to follow the forensic officers but Hayden touched him on the arm. ‘No,’ he said, ‘the garden.’
The house was enormous, yet characterless inside. It had been brutally converted into offices: someone had ripped out the previous interiors and installed strip lighting and grey partitions, filing cabinets and computers. There were models of boats and ferries on some of the desks. A couple of nautical charts hung on a wall; the offices presumably belonged to a shipping corporation or marine design company.
Following the Deputy Chief, Forrester stepped into a hallway from which big glass doors opened on to a wide rear garden, closed in on all sides by high hedges, and a wooded rise right at the back. The garden had been rudely dug up in various places; in the middle of these chewed-up green lawns was a large, yellow, crime scene tent, the flap zipped shut, concealing whatever was inside.
Hayden opened the glass doors and they walked the few yards to the yellow tent. He turned to the two London officers. ‘Are you ready?’
Forrester felt impatient. ‘Yes, of course.’
Hayden pulled back the flap.
‘Fuck,’ said Forrester.
The corpse was of a man in his thirties, he guessed. It had its back to them; and it was stark naked. But it wasn’t that which caused him to swear. The man’s head had been buried headdown in the lawn-with the rest of his body sticking out. The position was at once comical and deeply unsettling. Forrester immediately guessed the victim must have asphyxiated. The murderers must have dug a hole, forced the man’s head in, then packed the soil around, suffocating him. A nasty, weird, cold way to die. Why the hell would you do that?
Boijer was walking around the corpse, looking appalled. Even though the tent seemed to be colder than the windswept garden outside, a distinct smell came off the body. Forrester wished he had one of the SIRCHIE masks to block out the odour of decomposition.
‘There’s the Star,’ said Boijer.
He was right. Forrester walked around and looked at the front of the corpse. A Star of David had been gouged into the man’s chest; the wound looked even deeper and nastier than the torture inflicted on the janitor.
‘Fuck,’ Forrester said, again.
Standing next to him, Hayden smiled, for the first time this morning. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’m glad you feel the same way. I thought it was just us.’
Three hours later Forrester and Boijer were sharing plastic cups of coffee in the big tent at the front of the mansion. The local cops were arranging a press conference, in the ‘fort’. The two Met officers were alone. The corpse had finally been moved, after thirty-six hours, to the coroner’s lab in town.
Boijer looked at Forrester. ‘Not sure the natives are very friendly.’
Forrester chuckled. ‘I think they had their own language until…last year.’
‘And cats.’ said Boijer, blowing cool air across his coffee. ‘Isn’t this the place where they have those cats without tails?’
‘Manx cats. Yep.’
Boijer stared out through the flapping open doorway of the police tent, at the big white building. ‘What would our gang be doing out here?’
‘Christ knows. And why the same symbol?’ Forrester knocked back some more coffee. ‘What more do we know about the victim? You spoke to the scene of crime guy?’
‘Yacht designer. Working upstairs.’
‘On a Sunday?’
Boijer nodded. ‘Yep. Usually the place is deserted, at weekends. But he was working his day off.’
‘So he just got unlucky?’
Boijer swept his blonde Finnish hair back from his blue Finnish eyes. ‘Like the guy in Craven Street. Probably heard a noise.’
‘Then came downstairs. And our lovely killers decided to cut him up, then stick his head in the ground like a croquet hoop. Till he died.’
‘Not very nice.’
‘What about the CCTV?’
‘Nothing.’ Boijer shrugged. ‘The woodentop told me they’d drawn a blank on the cameras, all of them. Zip.’
‘Of course. And the prints and footwear marks. They’ll get nothing. These guys are insane, but not stupid. They are the opposite of stupid.’
Forrester stepped outside the tent and gazed up at the house, blinking away the soft drizzle that was now falling. The building was dazzling white. Newly painted. Quite a landmark for local sailors. High and white and castellated, right above the jetty and the port. He scanned the battlements and scrutinized the sash windows. He was trying to work out what linked an eighteenth century house in London with what looked like an eighteenth century house in the Isle of Man. But then something struck him. Maybe it wasn’t. He squinted. There was just something wrong with this building. It wasn’t the real deal-Forrester knew enough about architecture to surmise that. The brickwork was too neat, the windows all recent-no more than ten or twenty years old. The building was evidently a pastiche, and not an especially good one. And, he decided, it was possible the killers knew this. The modern interior of the modern house was entirely undisturbed. Only the gardens had been dug up. The gang had obviously been looking for something, again. But they weren’t looking in the house. Only the garden. Apparently, they knew where to look. Apparently, they knew where not to look.
Apparently, they knew quite a lot.
Forrester turned his collar up against the chilly drizzle.
14
It was just getting dark by the time they climbed into Christine’s Land Rover. Rush hour. Within a few hundred metres the car had come to complete stop. Stuck in gridlock.
Christine leaned back, and sighed. She turned the radio on, and then off. Then looked at Rob. ’Tell me more about Robert Luttrell.’
‘Such as?’
‘Job. Life. You know…’
‘It’s not that interesting.’
‘Try me.’
He gave her a brief résumé of the last decade. The way he and Sally had rushed into marriage and parenthood; the discovery she was having an affair; the ensuing and inevitable divorce.
Christine listened, keenly. ‘Are you still angry about it?’
‘No. It was me, as well. I mean-it was partly my fault. I was always away. And she got lonely…And I still admire her, kind of.’
‘Sorry?’
‘Sally,’ he said. ‘She’s training to be a lawyer. That takes guts. As well as brains. To change your career in your thirties. I admire that. So it’s not like I hate her or anything…’ He shrugged. ‘We just…diverged. And married too young.’
Christine nodded, then asked about his American family. He sketched in his Scots-Irish background, the emigration to Utah in the 1880s. The Mormonism.
The Land Rover at last moved forward. Rob looked across at her. ‘And you?’
The traffic was really thinning out. She floored the pedal, accelerated. ‘Jewish French.’
Rob had guessed this by the name. Meyer.
‘Half my family died in the Holocaust. But half didn’t. French Jews did OK, in the war, comparatively.’
‘And your mum and dad?’
Christine explained that her mother was an academic in Paris, her dad a piano tuner. He had died fifteen years back. ‘In fact,’ she added, ‘I’m not sure he did much piano tuning even when he was alive. He just sat around the flat in Par
is. Arguing.’
‘Sounds like my dad. Except my dad was a bastard, too.’
Christine glanced over at him. The sky behind her, framed by the car window, was purple and sapphire. A spectacular desert twilight. They were well outside Sanliurfa now. ‘You said your father was a Mormon?’
‘He is.’
‘I went to Salt Lake City once.’
‘Yeah?’
‘When I was in Mexico, working at Teotihuacan, I took a holiday in the States.’
Rob laughed. ‘In Salt Lake City?’
‘Utah.’ She smiled. ‘You know. Canyonlands. Arches Park.’
‘Ah.’ He nodded. ‘That makes more sense.’
‘Marvellous scenery. Anyway we had to fly through SLC…’
‘The most boring big town in America.’
An army truck overtook the Land Rover, with Turkish troops hanging casually out the back, shadowy in the dusk. One of them waved and grinned when he saw Christine, but she ignored him. ‘It wasn’t New York, but I quite liked it.’
Rob thought about Utah, and Salt Lake City. His only memories of SLC were of dreary Sundays, going to the big Mormon cathedral. The Tabernacle.
‘It’s funny,’ Christine added. ‘People laugh at the Mormons. But you know what?’
‘What?’
‘Salt Lake City is the only big town in America where I have felt perfectly safe. You can walk down the street at 5 a.m. and no one’s going to mug you. Mormons don’t mug people. I like that.’
‘But they eat terrible food…and wear polyester slacks.’
‘Yes, yes. And some towns in Utah you can’t even buy coffee. The drink of the devil.’ Christine quietly smiled. The desert air was warm through the open window of the Land Rover. ‘But I’m serious. Mormons are nice. Friendly. Their religion makes them that way. Why do atheists sneer at people of faith, when faith makes you nicer?’
‘You’re a believer, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m not.’
‘I guessed.’
They laughed.
Rob leaned back, scanning the horizon. They were passing a concrete shack he’d seen before. Plastered with posters of Turkish politicians.
‘Isn’t this near the turning?’
‘Yes. Just up ahead.’
The car slowed as they neared their junction. Rob was thinking about Christine’s belief: Roman Catholicism, she had said. He was still confused by this. He was still confused by a lot of things about Christine Meyer: like her love for Sanliurfa, despite the local, very patriarchal attitude to women.
The Land Rover swerved off the asphalt. Now they were rattling along the rubbled track, in real darkness. The headlights picked out stray bushes, and bare rocks. Maybe a gazelle, skittering into the gloom. A tiny village, illuminated by a few straggly lights, twinkled on the side of a hill. Rob could just make out the spear of a minaret in the shrouding twilight. The moon was just rising.
Rob asked Christine directly: about her attitude to Islam. She explained that she admired aspects of it. Especially the muezzin.
‘Really?’ Rob said. ‘All that wailing? I sometimes find it intrusive. I mean, I don’t hate it, but still…sometimes…’
‘I think it’s moving. The cry of the soul, imploring God. You should listen more closely!’
They took the second turning past a final, silent Kurdish village. A few more kilometres, and they would see the shallow hills of Gobekli, silhouetted in the moonlight. The Land Rover rumbled as Christine took the ultimate curve. Rob didn’t know what to expect at the dig, following the ‘accident’. Police cars? Barriers? Nothing?
There was indeed a new barrier, set across the track. It said Police. And Keep Out. In Turkish, and English. Rob got out of the car and pushed the blue barrier aside. Christine drove on and parked.
The site was deserted. Rob felt serious relief. The only indication that the dig was now the scene of a suspicious death was a new tarpaulin, erected over the trench where Franz had been pushed-that and a sense of emptiness in the tented area. Lots of things had been taken away. The big table had been moved, or dismantled. This season’s dig was definitely over.
Rob glanced at the stones. He’d wondered before what it would be like, standing amongst them at night. Now, quite unexpectedly, here he was. They were shadowy in their enclosures. The moon had fully risen and was casting white darkness across the scene. Rob had an odd desire to go down into the enclosures. Touch the megaliths. Rest his cheek against the coolness of the ancient stones. Run his fingers along the carvings. He’d wanted to do that, in fact, the very first time he’d seen them.
Christine walked up behind him. ‘Everything OK?’
‘Yes!’
‘Come on then. Let’s be quick. This place…rather scares me at night.’
Rob noticed that she was averting her gaze from the trench. The trench where Franz had been killed. He sensed how difficult this visit must be for her.
They walked swiftly over the rise. To the left was a blue plastic cabin: Franz’s personal office. The door was freshly padlocked.
Christine sighed. ‘Damn.’
Rob thought for a second. Then he jogged back to the Land Rover, opened the car’s back door, and fumbled in the darkness. He returned with a tyre jack. The desert breeze was warm and the moonlight glinted on the padlock. He shoved the jack in the lock, twisted, and the padlock snapped open.
Inside, the cabin was small and pretty empty. Christine shone a torch around. A spare set of spectacles sat on an empty shelf. Some textbooks were haphazardly scattered on a desktop thick with dust. The police had taken almost everything.
Christine knelt down, then sighed again. ‘They took the bloody locker.’
‘Really?’
‘It was hidden down here. By the little fridge. It’s gone.’
Rob felt a keen disappointment. ‘So that’s that?’ It was a wasted journey.
Christine looked deeply sad. ‘Come on’, she said. ’Let’s go before someone sees us. We’ve already broken into a murder scene.’
Rob picked up the tyre jack. Again, as he walked to the car, past the shadowy pits, he felt that strange urge to go and touch the stones. To lie down next to them.
Christine opened the driver’s door of the Land Rover. The interior light came on. Simultaneously, Rob opened the back doors to stow the jack. And immediately he saw it: the light was glinting on a shiny little notebook. Nestling on the back seat; black but expensive looking. He picked it up. Opening the cover, he saw the name Franz Breitner-in small, neat handwriting.
Rob paced around the car and leaned in through the passenger door to show Christine his find.
‘Jesus!’ she cried. ‘That’s it! That’s Franz’s notebook! That’s what I was after. That’s where he wrote…everything.’
Rob handed it over. Her face intent, Christine flicked through the pages, muttering: ‘He wrote it all in here. I’d see him doing it. Secretly. This was his big secret. Well done!’
Rob climbed into the passenger seat. ‘But what’s it doing in your car?’ As soon as he asked the question he felt a little stupid. The answer was obvious. It must have fallen out of Franz’s pocket when Christine was driving him to hospital. Either that, or Franz knew he was dying, as he lay bleeding on the backseat, and took it out of his pocket and left it there. Deliberately. Knowing that Christine would find it.
Rob shook his head. He was turning into a conspiracy theorist. He had to get a grip. Reaching left, he slammed his door, making the car rattle.
‘Whoops,’ said Christine.
‘Sorry.’
‘Something fell.’
‘What?’
‘When you slammed the car door. Something fell out of the notebook.’
Christine was scrabbling on the floor of the foot well, running her hands this way and that beneath the pedals. Then she sat back, holding something in her fingers.
It was a dry stalk of grass. Rob stared at it. ‘Why on earth would Franz preserve that
?’
But Christine was gazing at the grass. Intently.
15
Christine drove even faster than usual back into town. On the outskirts, where the scruffy desert bumped into the first grey concrete apartment blocks, they saw a feeble attempt at a roadside café, with white plastic tables arrayed outside, and a few truck drivers drinking beer. The drivers were drinking with guilty expressions.
‘Beer?’ said Rob.
Christine glanced across. ‘Good idea.’
She turned right and parked. The drivers stared over, as Christine climbed from the car and threaded her way to a table.
It was a warm evening; insects and flies were whirling around the bare bulbs strung outside the cafe. Rob ordered two Efes beers. They talked about Gobekli. Every so often a huge truck would thunder down the road, lights blazing, en route to Damascus or Riyadh or Beirut, drowning out their conversation and making the light bulbs shiver and kick. Christine flicked through the pages of the notebook. She was rapt, almost feverish. Rob sipped his warm beer from his scratchy glass and let her do her thing.
Now she was flicking this way and that. Unhappily. At length she chucked the book onto the table, and sighed. ‘I don’t know…It’s a mess.’
Rob set down his beer. ‘Sorry?’
‘It’s chaotic.’ She tutted. ‘Which is strange. Because Franz was not messy. He was scrupulous. ’Teutonic efficiency’ he would call it. He was rigorous and exact. Always…always…’ Her brown eyes clouded for a second. She reached firmly for her beer, drank a gulp and said, ‘Take a look for yourself.’
Rob checked the early pages. ‘Seems OK to me.’
‘Here,’ she said, pointing. ‘Yes, it begins very neatly. Diagrams of the excavations. Microliths noted. But here…look…’
Rob flicked some more pages until she stopped him.
‘See, from here it falls apart. The handwriting turns into a scrawl. And the drawings and little doodles…chaotic. And here. What are all these numbers?’
Rob looked closely. The writing was nearly all in German. The handwriting at first was very neat; but it did get scrawlier to the end. There was a list of numbers on the last page. Then a line about someone called Orra Keller. Rob remembered a girl he’d known in England called Orra. A Jewish girl. So who was this Orra Keller? He asked Christine; and she shrugged. He asked her about the numbers. She shrugged again-more emphatically. Rob noted there was also a drawing in the book: a scribbled sketch of a field, and some trees.