by Tom Knox
‘But we can’t go yet. Not until I know more!’
‘You mean this vault thing? The museum? What was all that about?’
The waiter was hovering, expecting them to leave. But Christine ordered another two glasses of sweet, ruby-coloured cay. And then she said, ’The last line in the notebook. Cayonu Skulls, cf Orra Keller. You remember the Cayonu skulls?’
‘No,’ confessed Rob. ‘Tell me.’
‘Cayonu is another famous archaeological site. Almost as old as Gobekli. It’s about a hundred miles north. It’s where the pig was first domesticated.’
The waiter set two more glasses on the table and two silver spoons. Rob wondered if you could get tea-poisoning, from too much tea.
Christine continued, ‘Cayonu is being dug up by an American team. A few years ago they found a layer of skulls and dismembered skeletons under one of the central rooms of the site.’
‘Human skulls?’
Christine nodded. ‘And animal bones too. Tests also showed a lot of human blood had been spilt. The site is now called the Skull Chamber. Franz was fascinated by Cayonu.’
‘So?’
‘The evidence at Cayonu points to some kind of human sacrifice. This is controversial. Kurds do not want to think their ancestors were…blood-thirsty. None of us wants to think that! But most experts now believe the bones in the skull room are the residue of many human sacrifices. The people of Cayonu built their houses on foundations made out of bones, the bones of their own victims.’
‘Nice.’
Christine stirred some sugar into her tea. ‘Hence the final line in the book. The Edessa Vault.’
‘Sorry?’
‘That’s what the curators of Sanliurfa Museum use as a name for the most obscure archives in the museum, dedicated to pre-Islamic remains. That section is called the Edessa Vault.’
Rob grimaced. ‘Sorry Christine, you’re losing me.’
Christine elaborated. ‘Sanliurfa has had many many names. The Crusaders called it Edessa, like the Greeks. The Kurds call it Riha. The Arabs, al-Ruha. The city of prophets. Orra is another name. It’s a transliteration of the Greek name. So Edessa means Orra.’
‘And Keller?’
‘Is not a name!’ Christine smiled, triumphantly. ’It’s the German for cellar, basement, vault. Franz capitalized it because that’s what Germans do, they capitalize nouns.’
‘So…I think I see…’
‘When he wrote “Orra Keller” he basically meant the Edessa Vault. In the basement of the Urfa museum!’
Christine sat back. Rob leaned forward. ‘So he’s telling us that something is in the Edessa Vault. But didn’t we already know that?’
‘But why put it in the notebook? Unless he is reminding himself? About something special? And then…what does “cf” mean?’
‘Can find…er…can…’
‘It is from the Latin. Confer. Meaning compare or contrast. It’s an academic shorthand. Cf. He is saying compare the famous Cayonu Skulls with something in the museum vaults. But there is, or there was, nothing of significance down there. I went through the archives myself when I first came here. But remember,’ she wagged a finger, in a teacherly way, ‘Franz was digging up things at Gobekli, secretly, at night-just before he was murdered.’ Her face was flushed with excitement, and maybe even anger.
‘And you think he put his finds in there? In the pre-Islamic vaults?’
‘It’s an ideal place. The dustiest part of the museum basement, the furthest reach of the cellars. It’s secure, concealed and virtually forgotten.’
‘OK.’ said Rob. ‘But it’s still a pretty wild theory. Tenuous.’
‘Maybe. However…’
It dawned on Rob. ‘You were testing Kiribali.’
‘And you saw how he reacted! I was right. There’s something in those cellars.’
The tea was nearly cold. Rob drained his glass and looked across the table. Christine had hidden depths. Hidden cunning. ‘You want to go and look?’
She nodded. ‘Yes, but it’s locked. And the door is keycoded.’
‘Another break-in? Way too dangerous.’
‘I know that.’
The wind sussurated in the limes. Over the bridge, a woman in full chador was holding her baby and kissing the baby’s fat pink fingers, one by one.
‘Why do you want to do all this, Christine? Who go to these lengths? On a hunch?’
‘I want to know how and why he died.’
‘So do I. But I’m getting paid for it. This is my job. I’m on a story. You are taking big risks.’
‘I do it…’ She sighed. ‘I do it because…he would have done it for me.’
A realization, half-formed, crept over Rob. ‘Christine, forgive me. Were you and Franz…ever…?’
‘Lovers? Yes.’ The Frenchwoman turned away, as if concealing her emotions. ‘A few years ago. He gave me my first real chance in archaeology. This amazing site. Gobekli Tepe. There weren’t any bones then. He didn’t need an osteoarchaeologist. Yet he invited me because he admired my work. And a few months after I came we…fell in love. But then it ended. I felt guilty. The age difference was too much.’
‘You ended it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did he still love you?’
Christine nodded, and blushed. ‘I think he did. He was so gracious and courteous about it. Never let it interfere. Could have asked me to go, but didn’t. It must have been very difficult for him, having me there, still with those feelings. He was a fine archaeologist, but he was an ever finer man. One of the nicest men I have ever known. When he met his wife it was easier, thank God.’
‘So you think you owe him this?’
‘I do.’
They sat in silence for several minutes. The soldiers were feeding the carp in the pond. Rob watched a waterman on his donkey, loping down a path. But then, he had an idea. ‘I think I know how you can get the code.’
‘How?’
‘The curators. At the museum. Your pals.’
‘Casam? Beshet? The Kurdish guys?’
‘Yes. Beshet particularly.’
‘But…’
‘He’s got a huge crush on you.’
She blushed again, this time fiercely. ‘Not possible’.
‘Yes, yes possible. Totally.’ Rob leaned across. ’Trust me, Christine, I know what pathetic male adoration looks like. I’ve seen how he stares at you, like a spaniel…’ Christine looked mortified. Rob chuckled. ‘I’m not sure you realize the effect you have on men.’
‘But what does that matter?’
‘Go to him! Ask him for the code! Odds on he’ll give it you.’
The woman in the chador had stopped kissing her baby. The tea-house waiter was staring at them, wanting the table for new customers. Rob took out some money and laid it on the cloth. ‘So you go and get the code. And then we’ll go to the museum and see what’s in there. And if there’s nothing we go. Agreed?’
Christine nodded. ‘Agreed.’ Then she added, ’Tomorrow’s a holiday.’
‘Even better.’
They both stood. But Christine looked hesitant and troubled.
‘What?’ said Rob. ‘What else?’
‘I’m frightened, Robert. What could be so important that Franz hid it in the vault without telling us? What could be so horrifying that it had to be hidden? What was so terrible that it must be compared with the Cayonu skulls?’
24
Were they too late? Had they missed them, again?
DCI Forrester gazed across the stone circle at the brown-green moorlands of Cumbria beyond. He recalled another case that had seen a search for clues, in a place like this. A murderer who buried his wife on the Cornish moors. That homicide had been macabre: the head was never found. And yet, even that hideous crime lacked some of the sinister quality of this present mystery. There was a real danger in this sacrificial gang: psychopathic violence allied with subtle intelligence. A menacing combination.
Stepping over a low wooden stile
, Forrester focused on his latest evidence. He knew the gang had fled the Isle of Man-just a few hours after the murder. He knew that they’d caught the first car ferry from Douglas to Heysham, on the Lancashire coastline, long before any alert had been sent to ports and airports. He knew all this because an observant docker at Heysham had remembered that he’d seen a black Toyota Landcruiser coming through the port on the earlymorning ferry two days before, and he’d noticed five young men climbing out of the Toyota in the ferryport terminal car park. The men had gone for breakfast together. The docker had gone in for breakfast and sat next to the gang in the café.
Forrester approached one elegant grey standing stone, filigreed with lime-green moss. He reached in his pocket for his notebook, and flicked through his record of the interview with the docker. The men were all tall and young. They had expensive clothes. Somehow they didn’t look right. The strangeness of this scenario had piqued the young docker’s curiosity. Douglas to Heysham was not the most energetic of shipping lanes. The early morning car ferry from Douglas usually got farmers, the odd businessman and maybe some tourists. Five silent tall young men in a very expensive black Landcruiser? So he had tried to chat with them over their bacon and eggs. He hadn’t had much luck.
Forrester scanned down the notes. The men didn’t want to talk. One of them said a very brief good morning. He maybe had a foreign accent. French or something. Could have been Italian, not sure. One of the others had a posh English accent. Then they just got up and left. As if I had ruined their breakfast.
The docker hadn’t taken down a number plate. But he had heard one of them say a word like ‘Castleyig’ as they walked out of the café, in the pale morning light, to their waiting car. Forrester and Boijer had rapidly researched Castleyig. To no one’s surprise there was no such place. However, there was a Castlerigg not that far from Heysham. And it was quite well known.
Castlerigg turned out to be one of the better preserved stone circles in Britain. It comprised thirty-eight stones of variable sizes and shapes and was tenuously dated to 3200 BC. It was known also for a group of ten stones forming a rectangular enclosure, the purpose of which was ’unknown’. In his Scotland Yard office, Forrester had Googled ‘Castlerigg’ and ‘human sacrifice’ and found a long tradition associating the two. A stone axe had been discovered at the Castlerigg site in the 1880s. Some had surmised that it had been used in a Druidic sacrificial rite. Of course many scientists disputed this. Antiquarians and folklorists maintained that there was no disproof of sacrifice, either. And the tradition of sacred butchery was old. It was even cited by the famous local poet Wordsworth, in the 1800s.
With the Cumbrian breeze at his back, Forrester read through the stanza of the poem. He’d copied it down at Heysham library:
At noon I hied to gloomy glades
Religious woods and midnight shades
Where brooding superstition found
A cold and awful horror round
While with black arm and bending head
She wove a stole of sable thread
And hark, the ringing harp I hear
And lo! her Druid sons appear
Why roll on me your glaring eyes
Why fix on me for sacrifice?
It was a warm spring day up here on the Cumbrian hills, the late April sun was shining brightly on the surrounding, bare green hills, the dewy turf, the distant firwoods. And yet something in this poem made Forrester shiver.
‘“At noon I hied to gloomy glades”,’ said Forrester.
Boijer, striding across the grass, looked nonplussed. ‘Sir?’
‘It’s that poem by Wordsworth.’
Boijer smiled. ‘Oh yeah. Must admit-didn’t recognize it.’
‘Likewise,’ said Forrester, closing his notebook. The DCI recalled his inner city comprehensive, a struggling young English teacher trying to forcefeed Shakespeare’s Macbeth to a bunch of kids more interested in underage drinking, reggae music and shoplifting. An entirely pointless exercise. Might as well teach Latin to astronauts.
‘Beautiful place,’ said Boijer.
‘Yes.’
‘Are you sure they came here Sir? To this place?’
‘Yes.’ said Forrester. ‘Where else were they going?’
‘Liverpool maybe?’
‘No.
‘Blackpool?’
‘No. And if they were going anywhere else they would have got the ferry to Birkenhead. That leads directly to the motorway. But they came to Heysham. Heysham leads practically nowhere. Except to the Lake District. And here. I can’t believe they are doing a pleasant tour of the Lakes. They went to a Viking burial site on Man associated with sacrifice. Then they came here. To Castlerigg. Another place associated with sacrifice. And of course the docker overheard them. They were coming here.’
Boijer and Forrester walked to one of the tallest menhirs. The stone was mottled and patched with lichen. A sign of clear air. Forrester laid a flat palm against the ancient stone. The stone was just slightly warm to his touch. Warmed by the mountain sun, and old, so very old. 3200 BC.
Boijer sighed. ‘But what really attracts them to these circles and ruins? What’s the point?’
Forrester grunted. It was a good question. A question he had yet to answer. Down in the river valley, beneath the high plateau of Castlerigg, he could see the Cumbrian police squad cars; four of them parked in the sun by a picnic spot, and a couple of other police cars trundling down the narrow lakeland road, trawling the local farmsteads and villages to see if anyone had witnessed the gang. So far they had had no luck. Nothing at all. But Forrester was sure they had visited Castlerigg. It fitted too well. The circle was a notably atmospheric place. And intense. Whoever built this high and lonely circle in the shaved cradle of hills knew something about aesthetics. Feng shui even. The whole circle, standing on its table of dewy grass, was set in a kind of amphitheatre. A theatre in the round. The billowing hills were the terraces, the audience, the bleachers. And the stone circle itself was the stage, the altar, the mise en scène. But a stage-set for what?
Boijer’s radio crackled. He pressed the button and talked to one of the Cumbrian officers. Forrester listened in. It was clear from Boijer’s expression and his perfunctory words of acknowledgement that the Cumbrian police were still drawing a blank. Maybe the gang hadn’t come here after all.
Forrester walked on. A fox was stealing over a field and edging along a copse across the nearest valley: a furtive blur of brushy red. But then the fox turned and gazed behind it, staring directly at Forrester, showing a wild animal’s fear and cruelty. Then it was gone, darting into the woodland.
The sky was clouding over: at least partly. Patches of black were scudding across the moorland hills.
Boijer caught up with Forrester. ‘You know, sir, we had a weird case in Finland a few years back. Might be relevant.’
‘Case of what?’
‘It was called the Landfill Murder.’
‘Because they buried the body in a dump?.’
‘Sort of. It started in October 1998. If I remember right, a man’s left leg was found on a dumping ground near a little town called Hyvinkaa. North of Helsinki.’
Forrester was confused. ‘Weren’t you already living in England by then?’
‘Yes, but I followed the news from home. As you do. Especially grisly murders.’
Forrester nodded. ‘What happened?’
‘Well, the police got nothing at first. Only clue they had was the leg. But then there were suddenly…well, all these headlines…The police claimed they had arrested three people suspected of the murder and they claimed there were indications of satanic worship.’
A wind was kicking up. Whistling across the ancient circle.
‘In April 1999 the incident came back into the headlines, when the case went to court. Three kids, young people, were charged. The strange thing is, the judge ordered that the court records should be suppressed for forty years, and all the details kept quiet. Unusual for Finland. But some of
the details leaked out, anyway. Horrible stuff. Torture, mutilation, necrophilia, cannibalism. You name it.’
‘So who was the victim?’
‘A guy of about twenty-three. He was tortured and killed by three of his friends. I think they were all in their early twenties or late teens.’ Boijer frowned, trying to remember. ‘The girl was 17-she was the youngest. Anyway the murder took place after a bout of drinking. Days of it. Homemade schnapps. Brennivin they call it in Iceland. The Black Death.’
Forrester was interested. ‘Describe the murder.’
‘He was slowly mutilated with knives and scissors. Killed over a period of many hours. Bits of him were progressively cut off. The judge called it a prolonged human sacrifice. After the victim died the three friends abused the body, ejaculated into his mouth and so on. Then they cut off his head, and I think his legs and arms. And they removed some his internal organs, kidneys and the heart. They dismembered him, basically. And they ate some of the body.’
Forrester was watching a farmer, striding down a country lane, half a mile in the distance. He asked, ‘And what does this tell you? I mean, what association do you make with this case?’
His junior shrugged. ‘The kids were all Satan worshippers, death metal fans. And they had a history of sacrilege. Church burnings. Desecrating tombs, sort of thing.’
‘And?’
‘And they were into paganism, ancient sites. Places like this.’
‘Though they buried the body in a landfill, not at Stonehenge.’
‘Yes. We don’t have a Stonehenge in Finland.’
Forrester nodded. The farmer had disappeared behind a rise in the landscape. The ancient standing stones were growing greyer and darker as the clouds covered the sun. Typical lakeland weather-from shining spring sun, to brooding, winter cold in half an hour. ‘What were the murderers like? What’s the sociology?’
‘Definitely middle class. Rich kids even. Certainly not from the fringes.’ Boijer zipped up his anorak against the gathering cold. ‘Children of the élite.’
Forrester chewed a stalk of grass and regarded his junior. Boijer’s bright red anorak brought a fierce and sudden image to Forrester’s mind: a body gutted open, unzipped, oozing red blood. Forrester spat the stalk from his mouth.