by Tom Knox
The two hours passed with elaborate slowness. At the end Mrs Cloncurry escorted them to the door. Her piercing blue eyes stared into Forrester, not at him, but into him. Her aquiline face matched the photo of Jamie Cloncurry that Forrester had already sourced from the Imperial College student records. The boy was handsome, in a high cheek-boned way. The mother must have once been beautiful; she was still as thin as a model.
‘Inspector,’ she said, as they stood at the door. ’I wish I could tell you that Jamie didn’t do these…these terrible things. But…but…’ She fell quiet. The husband was still hovering behind his wife, his red socks glowing in the gloom of the hallway.
Forrester nodded and shook the woman’s hand. At least they’d had their suspicions all but confirmed. But they weren’t any nearer finding Jamie Cloncurry.
They scrunched to the car. The rain had finally relented, at least a little. ‘So we know it’s him,’ said Forrester, climbing in.
Boijer keyed the engine. ‘Reckon so.’
‘But where the fuck is he?”
The car sludged through the damp gravel onto the winding road. They had to negotiate the narrow streets of the village to get to the autoroute. And Lille. On the way through Ribemont, Forrester spotted a little French café, a humble brasserie: its lights were inviting in the drizzly greyness.
‘Shall we get some lunch?’
‘Yes, please.’
They parked in the Place de la Revolution. An enormous and morbid memorial, to the Great War dead, dominated the silent square. This tiny village, Forrester reckoned, must have been right in the middle of the fighting during the war. He imagined the place during the height of the Somme offensive. Tommys loitering by the brothels. Wounded in ambulances racing to the tented hospitals. The ceaseless boom of the shelling, a few miles away.
‘It’s a funny place to live,’ said Boijer. ‘Isn’t it? When you’re so rich. Why live here?’
‘I was wondering the same.’ Forrester stared at the nobly agonized figure of a wounded French soldier, immortalized in marble. ‘You’d think if they wanted to live in France, they’d live in Provence or somewhere. Corsica. Cannes. Somewhere sunny. Not this toilet.’
They walked to the café. As they pressed the door Boijer said, ‘I don’t believe it.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t buy the weeping mother bit. I don’t think they are ignorant as they say. There’s something strange about it all.’
The cafe was virtually deserted. A waiter came over, wiping his hands on a grubby towel.
‘Steak frites?’ said Forrester. He had just enough French to order food. Boijer nodded. Forrester smiled at the waiter. ‘Deux steak frites, s’il vous plaît. Et un bière pour moi, et un…?’
Boijer sighed. ‘Pepsi.’
The waiter said a curt merci. And disappeared.
Boijer checked something on his BlackBerry Forrester knew when his junior was having bright ideas because he stuck his tongue out like a schoolboy working on a sum. The DCI sipped his beer as Boijer Googled. Finally the Finn sat back. ’There. Now that’s interesting.’
‘What?’
‘I Googled the name Cloncurry and Ribemontsur-Ancre. And then I Googled it with just Ancre.’
‘OK…’
Boijer smirked, a hint of victory on his face. ’Get this, sir. A Lord Cloncurry was a general in the First World War. And he was based near here. 1916.’
‘We know that the family has a military back-ground—’
‘Yes, but…’ Boijer smile’s widened. ‘Listen to this.’ He read a note he had scrawled on the paper tablecloth. ‘During the summer of 1916 Lord Cloncurry was notorious for his grotesquely wasteful attacks on impregnable German positions. More troops died under his command, proportionately, than under any other British general in the entire war. Cloncurry subsequently became known as the Butcher of Albert.’
This was more interesting. Forrester eyed his junior.
Boijer lifted a finger, and quoted: ‘“Such was the carnage under Cloncurry’s leadership, sending wave after wave of infantry into the pitiless machine-gun fire of the well-trained, well-armed Hanover Division, his tactics were compared, by several historians, to the futility of…human sacrifice”.’
The cafe was dead quiet. Then the door rattled as a customer stepped inside, shaking the rain from his umbrella.
‘There’s more,’ said Boijer. ‘There’s a link from that entry. With a curious result. It’s in Wikipedia.’
The waiter set two plates of steak frites on the table. Forrester ignored the food. He stared hard at Boijer. ‘Go on.’
‘Apparently during the war they were digging up trenches or something, or mass graves maybe…anyway, they found another site of human sacrifice. An iron age site. Celtic tribes. They found eighty skeletons.’ Boijer quoted again. ‘“All headless, the skeletons had been piled up and tangled together along with weapons”.’ Boijer looked up at his boss. ‘And the bodies were contorted into unnatural positions. It’s apparently the biggest site of human sacrifice in France.’
‘Where is this?’
‘Here, sir. Right here. Ribemont-sur-Ancre.’
30
Rob stirred. Christine was besides him, still sleeping. In the night she had kicked half the sheets off. He looked at her glowing suntan. He caressed her neck, kissed her bare shoulder. She murmured his name, rolled over; and decorously snored.
It was nearly noon. The sunlight was streaming through the window. Rob got out of the bed and headed for the bathroom. As he sluiced the sleep from his face and hair, he thought about Christine: how it had happened. Them; the two of them; him and her.
He had never experienced a romance like this before: they seemed to have gone from being friends to holding hands, to kissing, to sleeping together as if it was the most obvious and natural thing in the world. A simple and expected evolution. He remembered when he had been nervous about her, reluctant to show his feelings. That felt ludicrous now.
But even if their relationship seemed obvious it was, paradoxically, still richly strange and marvellous. Maybe the best comparison, Rob decided, was with a brilliant new song you heard on the radio for the first time. Because the melody of a great song seems so right it makes you say: Ah, of course, yes, why didn’t anyone think of that brilliant tune before? It just needed someone to write down the notes.
Rob rinsed his face and reached blindly for the towel. He dried himself, and stepped from the shower. He looked left. The bathroom window was wide open so that he was gazing across the Sea of Marmara to the other Princes Islands. Yassiadi. Sedef Adasi, with the villages and forests of Anatolia in the distance. White-sailed yachts drifted languidly across the blue. The scent of pine needles, warmed by the sun, filled the little bathroom.
Being here in this house had no doubt helped their love affair: had nurtured and developed it. The island was such a heavenly oasis, a vivid contrast to roiled and violent Sanliurfa. And Isobel’s Ottoman home was so quiet: so winsome and untroubled. Sunlit and snoozing by the waves of Marmara; there weren’t even cars to disturb the peace.
For ten days Rob and Christine had recuperated here. They’d also explored the other islands. They’d seen the grave of the first English Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, sent by Elizabeth the First. They’d nodded as a local guide showed them the wooden house where Trotsky lived. They’d laughed over Turkish coffee in the waterfront cafes of Buyukada, and drunk heady glasses of raki with Isobel in her rose-scented garden, as the sun set over distant Troy.
And it was on one of those soft warm evenings, under the scattered jewellery of the Marmara stars, that Christine had leaned over and kissed him. And he had kissed her back. Three days later Isobel politely and subtly asked her maid to put the guest towels in just one room.
Rob padded through. The bedroom shutters were squeaking in the summer breeze. Christine was still asleep, her dark hair sprayed across the Egyptian cotton pillowslip. He crossed the parquet floor, barefoot, threw on
his clothes and boots, and went quietly downstairs.
Isobel was on the phone. She smiled and waved at Rob and gestured him to the kitchen, where Andrea the maid was making coffee. Rob pulled a chair from under the kitchen table, and thanked the maid for his coffee. And then he sat there, absentmindedly, but happily, staring out of the wide-open kitchen door at the roses and the azaleas and the bougainvillea of the garden.
Ezekiel the cat-‘Ezzy’, as Isobel called her-was chasing a butterfly around the kitchen floor. Rob teased the cat for a few idle minutes. Then he sat back and picked up a newspaper, a day old Financial Times, and read about some Kurdish suicide bombers in Ankara.
He set the paper down again. He didn’t want to know about any of this. He didn’t want to hear about violence or danger or politics. He wanted this idyll to persist; he wanted to stay here with Christine for ever, and bring Lizzie here, too.
But the idyll could not last: Steve his editor was making impatient noises. He either wanted the story done or Rob on another assignment. Rob had filed a couple of Turkish news items to keep things cool back at the office, but everyone knew that this state of grace was temporary.
Rob stepped into the garden and gazed out to sea. There was another alternative. He could just give up his job. Stay here with Christine. Charter a boat, hire it out to tourists. Become a squid fisherman like the Greeks on Burgazada. Join the Armenian café owners in Yassiada. Potter about Isobel’s garden. Just give everything up, and live out his days in the sun. And somehow he could bring Lizzie here too. With his daughter here, laughing on the beach, he would be surrounded by the women he loved, and life would be perfect…
And now he sighed and smiled at his own fond delusions. Love was addling his brain. He had a job, he needed money, he had to be practical.
Rob watched a catamaran in the distance. The line of its white sail looked like a swan as it crossed the stretch of water.
A noise disturbed his reverie. Rob turned, and there was Isobel coming out of the kitchen.
‘I’ve just had the most intriguing phone call from an old friend at Cambridge. Professor Hugo De Savary. Have you heard of him?’
‘No…’
‘Writes a lot. Does TV shows. But he’s a very fine scholar nonetheless. Christine knows him. I think she did a term of his lectures at King’s. In fact I think they were friends…’ Isobel tilted a smile. ‘Where is Christine anyway?’
‘Still fast asleep.’
‘Ah, young love!’ She took Rob’s arm. ‘Let’s go down to the beach. I’ll tell you what Hugo said.’
The beach was rocky and small, but pretty; and almost completely isolated. They sat on a bench of rock and she told him about De Savary’s phone call. The Cambridge historian had explained to Isobel everything he had learned from the police, and added everything he surmised himself about the gruesome murders across Britain. The gang of killers. The connection with the Hellfire Club and the link of human sacrifice in the murders.
‘Why did De Savary ring you?’
‘We’re old friends. I was at Cambridge too, remember.’
‘Yes, but what I mean is, how does this connect with everything we’ve discovered?’
‘Hugo knows I am something of an expert on Turkish and Sumerian antiquity, on ancient religions of the Near East. Such as the Yezidi. He was asking my opinion on a theory. Connected with them. A strange little coincidence. Or maybe not.’ She paused. ‘Hugo believes this gang, the killers, are looking for something closely associated with the Hellfire Club.’
‘Right. I understand that-they are digging up places associated with the club. But what are they looking for? And where do the Yez fit in?’
‘It’s very speculative. Hugo hasn’t even told the police. But he thinks it might be connected with the Black Book. That’s what the gang are pursuing, possibly…’
‘The Black Book? Explain?’
Isobel ran through the story of Jerusalem Whaley: as a friend of Hugo De Savary she’d heard lots of juicy stories about the Hellfire Club. Endless stories of depravity. ‘When he came back from the Holy Land, Thomas Whaley, or Jerusalem Whaley as he was thereafter known, brought with him a cache. A box. A hoard of some kind…’
‘What was it?’
‘Your guess is nearly as good as mine. But we do know he prized his find hugely, believed he’d proved a theory. He called it his “great evidence” in his many letters to friends. Supposedly he was given these materials by an old Yezidi priest. The Yezidi have a caste of priests, singing priests who hand down the oral tradition of the Yezidi. Because there isn’t much of a literary tradition.’
‘And he met with one of these priests, in Jerusalem? Who gave him something?’
‘Presumably. We can’t be sure because Whaley’s memoirs are irritatingly vague. But some scholars think it might be the Black Book of the Yezidi. The sacred book of the Angelicans.’
‘They have a Bible?’
‘Not any more. But their oral traditions say there was, once, a great body of sacred and mystical writing that embodied Yezidi myths and beliefs. Contemporary legends also say that the only copy was taken by an Englishman hundreds of years ago. Might some exiled priest have given the Black Book to Whaley? For safe keeping? The Yezidi have always felt embattled. They might have wanted to preserve their most precious object somewhere safe. Like faraway England. Buck Whaley certainly brought something remarkable with him on his return from the Levant. Moreover, this item, whatever it was, eventually left him a broken man.’
‘OK. So where is it now? The Black Book? If that’s what it is?’
‘Disappeared. Possibly destroyed. Possibly hidden.’
Rob’s thoughts started to race. He looked into the older woman’s serene grey eyes. Then he said: ’How can we find out what the gang are really looking for? How can we investigate this link to the Yezidi?’
‘Lalesh,’ said Isobel. ‘That’s the only place you could get real answers. The sacred capital of the Yezidi. Lalesh.’
Rob felt a shiver of disquiet. He knew he had to go to this place, Lalesh: to get answers, to finish the story. Steve was pressuring him to do the second and concluding article, and to write it properly Rob needed to tie up the straying ends: to find out about this ‘Black Book’.
But Rob also knew where Lalesh was. He’d heard of it before, from other journalists. It had featured in the news, in recent years, more than once. For all the wrong reasons.
‘I know Lalesh, he said. ‘That’s in Kurdistan isn’t it? South of the border?’
Isobel nodded gravely.
‘Yes. It’s in Iraq.’
31
That evening Rob told Christine that he had to go to Lalesh, and explained to her why.
She looked at him without saying anything. He told her, again, that Lalesh was the obvious place to finish the story. The answers to most of their puzzles lay with the Yezidi. The sacred capital was the only place he could find truly learned Yezidi. Scholars who could unwrap the enigma. And obviously it made sense for Rob to go alone. He knew Iraq. He knew the risks. He had contacts in that country. His paper would cover his enormous insurance bill, but they wouldn’t pay for Christine. So he had to go to Lalesh-and he had to go alone.
Christine seemed to accede and accept. And then she turned and walked, wordless, into the garden.
Rob hesitated. Should he join her? Leave her alone?
His reverie of indecision was broken by Isobel, humming a song as she walked through the kitchen. The older woman glanced at Rob, and then at the silhouetted figure, sitting in the garden.
‘You told her?’
‘She seemed OK about it, but then…’
Isobel sighed. ‘She was like this at Cambridge. When she’s upset, she doesn’t chuck things at walls, just bottles it up.’
Rob was torn. He hated to upset Christine, but the journey was a necessity: he was a foreign correspondent. He couldn’t pick or choose where his stories led him.
‘You know, I’m slightly surprised,
’ Isobel said.
‘By what?
‘That she fell for you anyway. She doesn’t normally go for men like you. With cheekbones and blue eyes. Dashing adventurers. It’s usually older men. You do know she lost her dad when she was young, don’t you? She’s like any girl with that in her background. Always been attracted to the missing father figure. Advisors. Tutors.’ Isobel looked Rob in the eye. ‘Protectors.’
Across the waters came the hooting of a ferry. Rob listened to the echo rebounding. Then he stepped through the kitchen doorway, into the garden.
Christine was alone on the garden seat, staring through the moonlit pines. Without turning, she said, ‘Isobel is very lucky. This house is so beautiful.’
He sat down beside her and took her hand. The moonlight made her fingers seem very pale. ‘Christine, I need a favour.’
She turned to look at him.
He explained. ‘While I am in Lalesh…’ He paused. ‘Lizzie. Watch over her a little. Can you?’
Christine’s face was shadowed. A passing cloud had obscured the moon. ‘But I don’t understand. Lizzie’s with her mother.’
Rob sighed. ‘Sally works very hard at her job. Her studies. She’s got legal exams. I just want someone I really trust to…keep another eye on her. You’ll be staying with your sister, right? In Camden?’
Christine nodded.
‘So that’s barely three miles from Sally’s house. Knowing you were there, or just nearby, would make it a lot easier for me. Then maybe you could email me. Or call. I’ll ring Sally to make sure she knows who you are. She might even welcome the help. Maybe…’