by Tom Knox
Rob swivelled. Christine was standing in the bedroom doorway, looking cool and relaxed again in white shirt and khakis.
‘What a total wanker.’
Christine shrugged acceptantly. ‘Peut-être. He was just doing his job.’
‘He made you cry.’
‘Talking about Franz. Yes…I haven’t done that for a few days.’
Rob picked his jacket up. Then he put it down. He stared at Breitner’s notebook on the desk. He didn’t know what to do now. He didn’t know where he was headed or where this story was going; he just knew he was involved and possibly even endangered. Or was that paranoia? Rob stared at the picture on the wall. The unusual tower. Christine followed his gaze.
‘Haran.’
‘Where is it?’
‘Not so far away, an hour or so.’ Her eyes sparkled. ‘You know, I have an idea. Would you like to see it? Get out of Urfa again? I’d rather like to be somewhere else. Anywhere but here.’
Rob nodded keenly. He felt drawn to the desert more and more, the longer he was here in Kurdish Turkey. The starkness of the desert shadows, the silence in the empty valleys: he liked it all. And right now that desert emptiness was very preferable to the alternative: a day of skulking in hot and watchful Sanliurfa. ‘Let’s go.’
It was a long drive: the landscape south of Urfa was even more brutal than the desert surrounding Gobekli. Great yellow flatlands stretched to shimmering grey horizons; sandy wastes besieged the odd dilapidated Kurdish village. The sun was burning. Rob rolled the car window down as far as it would go but the breeze was still hot, as if a team of blowtorches had been turned on the Land Rover.
‘In the summer it can reach 50° here,’ Christine said, changing gear with a lusty crunch. ‘In the shade.’
‘I can believe it.’
‘Didn’t always used to be like that of course. The climate changed ten thousand years back. As Franz told you…’
For about fifty klicks they talked about Breitner’s notebook: the map and the scrawl, and of course the numbers. But neither of them had any new ideas. Rob’s subconscious was on vacation. His Kekule idea hadn’t worked.
They passed an army roadblock. The blood-red flag of the Turkish state hung limp under the noontime sun. One of the soldiers stood up, wearily checked Rob’s passport, leered briefly at Christine through the car window, then waved them on down the burning road.
Half an hour later Rob saw it, suddenly, the strange tower, looming. It was a broken pillar of a building constructed from burnt mud bricks seven storeys high, but shattered at the top. It was enormous.
‘What is it?’
Christine swerved off the main road, towards the tower. ‘It belongs to the oldest Islamic university in the world. Haran. A thousand years old at least. It’s derelict now.’
‘It looks like the tower on the Tarot cards. The tower hit by lightning?’
Christine nodded distantly, staring out of the window as she parked; she was staring at a row of little homes with mud domes for roofs. Three kids were kicking a football made of rags, in the yard that abutted the tiny houses. Goats bleated in the heat. ‘See those?’
‘The mud houses? Uh-huh?’
‘They’ve been here since the third millennium BC maybe. Haran is vastly old. According to legend, Adam and Eve are meant to have come here, after being thrown out of Paradise.’
Rob thought of the name: Haran. It was triggering some deep memory of his father, reading out the Bible. ‘And it’s mentioned in Genesis.’
‘What?’
‘The Book of Genesis,’ Rob repeated. ‘Chapter 11 verse 31. Abraham lived here. In Haran.’
Christine smiled. ‘I’m impressed.’
‘I’m not. Wish I didn’t remember any of that crap. Anyway,’ he added. ‘How can they be sure?’
‘What?’
‘How can they be sure it’s the town where Adam and Eve lived after the Fall? Why not London? Or Hong Kong?’
‘I don’t know…’ She smiled at his sarcasm. ‘But it’s pretty clear, as you say, that the early Abrahamic traditions date back to this area. Abraham is strongly linked with Sanliurfa. And, yes, Haran is where Abraham got the call from God.’
Rob yawned, and got out of the car, and gazed across the dust. Christine joined him. Together they watched a mangy black goat scratch itself against a rusty old bus; the bus, inexplicably, had blood down one side. Rob wondered if the local farmers used the bus as a makeshift abattoir. This was a strange place.
‘So,’ he said, ‘we’ve established this is where Abraham came from. And he was the founder of…the three monotheistic religions, right?’
‘Yes. Judaism, Christianity and Islam. He started them all. And when he left Haran he went down into the land of Canaan, spreading the new word of God, the single God of the Bible, the Talmud and the Koran.’
Rob listened to this with a vague but insistent sense of unease. He leaned against the car and pondered; he was getting more flashbacks to his childhood. His father reading from the Book of Mormon. His uncles quoting Ecclesiastes. Glory O young man in thy youth. That was the only line from the Bible Rob had ever really liked. He said the line aloud, then he added: ‘What about the sacrifice? The slaying of the son?’ He searched Christine’s intelligent face for confirmation. ’I remember some story about Abraham and his son, right?’
Christine nodded. ‘The slaying of Isaac. The Prophet Abraham was going to butcher his own son, as a sacrifice, a sacrifice ordered by Jehovah. But God stayed the knife.’
‘There you go. Pretty decent of the old man.’
Christine laughed. ‘Do you want to stay here, or shall I take you somewhere even weirder?’
‘Hey, we’re on a roll!’
They jumped back in the car. Christine shifted a gear and they sped away. Rob sat back, watching the landscape blur into dust. Every so often the mouldering hills were punctuated by the odd ruined building, or a crumbling Ottoman castle. Or a dust devil, whirring its solitary way across the wastes. And then, unbelievably, the desolation intensified. The road got rockier. Even the blue of the desert sky seemed to darken, to turn a brooding purple. The heat was almost insupportable. The car rattled around bleached yellow promontories, and along hot rutted tracks. Barely a tree disturbed the endless sterility.
‘Sogmatar,’ said Christine, at last.
They were approaching a tiny village, just a few concrete shacks, lost in a silent bare valley in the middle of the baked and mighty nothingness.
A big jeep was parked incongruously outside one shack and there were a few other cars; but the roads and yards were devoid of people; it reminded Rob instantly and queerly of Los Angeles. Big cars and endless sunshine-and no people.
Like a city hit by plague.
‘A few rich Urfans have second homes here,’ said Christine. ‘Along with the Kurds.’
‘Why the fuck would anyone live out here?’
‘It’s got a lot of atmosphere. You’ll see.’
They stepped out of the car, into the kiln of dusty heat. Christine led the way, scrambling over decaying old walls, past scattered and carved blocks of marble. The latter looked like Roman capitals. ‘Yes,’ Christine said, sensing Rob’s next question. ’The Romans were here, and the Assyrians. Everyone came here.’
They approached a big dark hole in an odd and very squat building: it was a building carved literally out of the rock face. They stepped inside the low-slung structure. It took a few seconds for Rob’s eyes to adjust.
Inside, the smell of goat shit was oppressive. Pungent and dank, and oppressive.
‘This is a pagan temple. To the moon gods,’ said Christine. She pointed at some crudely carved figures cut into the walls of the shadowy interior. ’The moon god is here, you can see his horns-see-the curve of the new moon.’
The badly eroded effigy had a sort of helmet: two horns like a crescent moon balanced on his head. Rob ran a hand over the stone face. It was warm, and strangely clammy. He drew his hand back. The decaying
effigies of the dead gods stared at him with their eroded eyes. It was so quiet in here: Rob could hear his own heartbeat. The noise of the outside world was barely perceptible: just the tinkling bells of goats, and the churning desert wind. Hot sunlight blazed at the door, making the dark room seem even darker.
‘Are you OK?’
‘Fine. I’m fine…’
She walked towards the opposite wall. ‘The temple dates from the second century AD. Christianity was sweeping the region, but here they still worshipped the old gods. With the horns. I love it here.’
Rob gazed about him. ‘Very nice. You should buy a condo.’
‘Are you always sarcastic when you are uncomfortable?’
‘Can we get latte?’
Christine chuckled. ‘I’ve one more place to show you.’ She led him out of the temple and Rob felt a serious relief as they exited the clammy, fetid darkness. They headed up a slope of scree and hot dust. Turning for a moment to take a breath, Rob saw a child staring at them from one of the humble houses. A small dark face in a broken window.
Christine scrambled up and over a final rise. ’The Temple of Venus.’
Rob climbed the last metres of scree to stand beside her. The wind was brisk up here, yet still burning hot. He could see for miles. It was an extraordinary landscape. Miles and miles of endless, rolling, blanched-out desolation. Dying hills of dead rocks. The mountains were marked with the black empty sockets of caves. These were, Rob presumed, more temples and pagan shrines, each more derelict than the last. He stared at the floor on which they stood, the floor of a temple, open to the sky. ‘And all this was built when?’
‘Possibly by the Assyrians, or the Canaanites. No one knows for certain. It’s very old. The Greeks took it over, then the Romans. It was certainly a place of human sacrifice.’ She pointed out some grooves in the carved rock beneath them, ‘See. That was to let the blood flow out.’
‘OK…’
‘All these early Levantine religions were very keen on sacrifice.’
Rob looked out across the desert hills and down at the little village. The child with the face was gone; the broken window was empty. One of the cars was on the move: taking the valley road out of Sogmatar. The road ran alongside a dried up old river bed. The course of a dead river.
Rob imagined being sacrificed up here. Your legs tied with rough twine, your hands bound behind your back, the foul breath of the priest in your face; and then the thud of pain as the knife plunged into your ribcage…
He breathed deeply and wristed the sweat from his forehead. It was surely time to go. He gestured in the direction of their car. Christine nodded and they walked down the hill to the waiting Land Rover. But halfway down the slope, Rob stopped. He stared at the hill.
Suddenly: he knew. He had worked out what the numbers meant.
The numbers in Breitner’s notebook.
19
The weather was still grim. The lead-grey sky was as sombre as the green and windswept fields beneath. Boijer, Forrester and Alisdair Harnaby were in a big dark car, speeding south across the Isle of Man. Ahead of them was another long black car: containing DCC Hayden and his colleagues.
Forrester was feeling the anxiety. Time was passing: slipping from his grasp. And every minute they lost brought them all closer to the next horror. The next inevitable murder.
He sighed, heavily. Almost angrily. But at least they were now onto something: following a proper lead. A farmer had spotted something odd in a remote corner of the Isle, way down in the south near Castletown. Forrester had urgently persuaded Alisdair Harnaby to come along for the interview, as he felt the man might be good for some more information. The historical angle. It seemed important.
But first Forrester wanted to know what the CNN woman had said; Boijer was keen to divulge. The Finnish DS explained that Angela Darvill had heard about the Craven Street case ‘from some hack on the Evening Standard’.
‘So she linked them,’ said Forrester. ‘Fair enough.’
‘Yes that’s right, sir. But she said something else. Apparently there was a similar case. New York State and Connecticut. In New England.’
‘How similar?’
‘Same kind of elaborate torture.’
‘Star of David?’
Boijer said no, then added, ‘But carvings in the skin, yes. And flayings. She said it was one of the most horrible cases she’d ever covered.’
Forrester sat back and looked out of the window. Low damp sober green hills stretched away on all sides. Small farms dotted the rural emptiness, and small hunched trees, with their branches shaved brusquely and bizarrely to an angle by the prevailing winds. The scenery reminded him of a holiday he’d once taken in Skye. There was a melancholy beauty to the landscape, a melancholy beauty which edged close to real, haunting sadness. Forrester drove the thought of his daughter from his mind, and asked: ‘Who committed the murders?
‘They never found out. Weird though: the similarity, I mean…’
Ahead of them the road dwindled to little more than a rutted track, which led on through the wind-battered hedgerows to a farm. The two cars parked. The five policemen and the amateur historian walked down the track towards the low-slung white farmhouse. Boijer stared down at his shoes, now soggy with clay, and tutted with a young man’s vanity. ‘Damn. Look at that.’
‘Should have brought your wellies, Boijer.’
‘Didn’t know we were going hiking, sir. Can I claim these on exes?’
Forrester was glad to laugh. ‘See what I can do.’
One of the white helmeted constables accompanying Hayden knocked on the door of the farmhouse, and at last it was opened by a surprisingly young man. Forrester wondered why the word ‘farmer’ always conjured up an image of a middle aged gent brandishing a hoe, or a shotgun. This farmer was handsome and no more than twenty-five.
‘Hello, hello. The Deputy…?’
‘Chief Constable,’ supplied Hayden. ‘Yes. And you must be Gary?’
‘Yep. I’m Gary Spelding. We spoke on the blower. Come in, guys. Horrible day!’
They crowded into the warm, welcoming, and pinewoody farmhouse kitchen. Biscuits were arrayed on a plate: Boijer grabbed one with enthusiasm.
Forrester was suddenly conscious of their numbers. Five was too many. But they all wanted to know about the lead. What Spelding had seen. Over two potfuls of tea, provided by his smiling wife, Spelding told his story. The afternoon of the murder he had been fixing a gate on his farm. He was about to head back home, the job done, when he’d seen ‘something strange’. Forrester let his tea go cold as he listened.
‘It was a big four by four. Chelsea tractor.’
Hayden leaned over the kitchen table keenly. ‘Where exactly?’
‘Road at the end of the farm. Balladoole.’
Harnaby interrupted. ‘I know it.’
‘Course we get a few tourists there now and again. The beach is just beyond. But these guys were different…’ Spelding swivelled his mug of tea, and smiled at Hayden. ‘Five young men. In telecoms overalls.’
‘Sorry?’ said Boijer.
Spelding turned to Forrester’s junior. ‘They were all wearing big green overalls, with Manx telecom insignia. Mobile phone company.’
Forrester took over the questioning. ‘And they were doing what?
‘Just wandering around my fields. And I thought that was odd. Pretty odd. Yep.’ Spelding sipped some tea. ‘Not least because we have no masts down here, no reception. It’s a deadzone for mobiles. So I wondered what they were doing. And they were all young. Young guys. But it was nearly dark and pretty cold so they weren’t surfers.’
‘Did you talk to them?’
Spelding blushed faintly. ‘Well I was gonna. They were walking on my farm, for a start. But the way they looked at me when I went near…’
‘Was?’
‘Nasty. Just…’ The farmer’s blush deepened. ’Kind of nasty. Glaring. So I thought discretion was the better option. Rather cowardly, sorry.
And then I saw your press conference on the news and I started to wonder…’
DCC Hayden sank the rest of his tea. He looked at Forrester, then back at Spelding.
Over the next half hour they got the remaining information from Gary Spelding. Detailed descriptions of the men: all tall and young. Descriptions of the car: a black Toyota Landcruiser, though Spelding could remember no numberplate. But at least it was a lead. A break. Forrester knew these were likely to be the men there were looking for. Posing as Telecoms workmen was a good cover. There were phone masts everywhere; everyone wanted mobile coverage, 24/7. You could work late at night without arousing suspicion. ‘We’ve got a network failure.’
But the gang had come to an area without any mobile phone reception. Why had they done that? Was it possibly their first mistake? Forrester felt his hopes rising. You needed luck in this job. This might be his stroke of luck.
The interview was finished. The teapot was empty. Outside, the lid of grey clouds had partially lifted. Slants of sunshine shone down on the wet fields. The policemen lifted their trousers from the mud as they walked with the farmer down to the Balladoole Road.
‘Just through here,’ said Spelding. ‘This is where I saw them.’
They all gazed across the rucked and muddy field, bordered by the small country road. A doleful cow was staring at Boijer. Beyond the cow was a long curve of grey sand, and then the frigid grey sea, lit by the occasional dazzle of sunshine.
Forrester indicated the lane. ‘Where does that go?’
‘To the sea. That’s all.’
Forrester climbed the last gate; followed by Boijer and the rest, who showed rather less alacrity. He stood exactly where the car had parked. It was an odd place to stop if you were headed for the bay. It was half a mile back from the shoreline. So why did they park here? Why not drive the last half mile? Did they fancy a walk? Clearly not. So they must have been looking for something else.
Forrester climbed back on to the nearest gate. He was nine feet in the air now. He looked all around him. Just fields and stone walls and sandy meadows. And the unhappy sea. The only point of interest was the nearest field. Which, from Forrester’s vantage, showed some shallow bumps, and stray rocks. He got down from the gate and turned to Harnaby, who was panting from the walk. ‘What are they?’ asked Forrester. ‘Those little bumps?’