The Genesis Secret: (16 page)

Rob put down his phone and surveyed the tedious bustle of Istanbul airport. He’d spent an hour talking to his daughter: a happy, chatting, wistful, delightful hour. He’d then spent a slightly fractious and annoying ten minutes talking to her mother. His ex-wife, it turned out, was taking his daughter Lizzie to the country for a fortnight, starting today. Even if he flew home this minute he would miss her.

Rob rubbed the tiredness from his face. They’d arrived in the middle of the night and grabbed some frazzled sleep on the airport seats. It hadn’t really de-stressed him. What an incredible twentyfour hours it had been. What a bizarre chain of events. And what was he going to do now?

‘Hey soldier.’ Christine was brandishing cans of Diet Coke. ‘Thought you could use one of these.’

Rob took his can, gratefully, and cracked it open; the icy cola stung his broken lip.

‘Is everything OK at home, Robert?’

‘Yes…’ He watched a Chinese businessman
hawking exuberantly into a rubbish bin. ‘No. Not really. Family stuff…’

‘Ah.’ She gazed levelly across the transit lounge. ’Look at it. All so ordinary. Starbucks. McDonalds…You’d never think we were nearly kidnapped. Just last night.’

Rob knew what she meant. He sighed, and gazed resentfully at the Departures screen. Their flight for London was many hours away. He really didn’t want to be here, killing time. But he didn’t want to go back to London if his daughter wasn’t there. What was the point? What he wanted to do was to resolve the story, finish the deal. He’d already spoken to his editor and told him a slightly bowdlerized version of the latest developments. Steve had sworn, twice, and then asked Rob if he felt safe. Rob had said that, despite it all, he felt fine. So Steve had tentatively agreed that Rob could continue-‘as long as you avoid getting shot in the head’. He had even promised to put some more money in Rob’s account to help things along. So the compass was pointing in one direction. Don’t quit. Don’t give up. Press on. Get the story.

But there was a big problem with pressing on: Rob didn’t know how Christine was feeling. The ordeal at the museum had been extremely frightening. He felt he could deal with what had happened, because he was used to danger. He’d handled Iraq. Just about. Could he expect Christine to be equally stoical? Was it asking too much of her? She was a scientist, not a news journalist.
He finished the Coke and wandered over to the rubbish bin to toss the can. When he came back Christine scrutinized him with a faint smile. ‘You don’t want to fly home, do you?’

‘How did you guess?’

‘The way you keep scowling at the departure board, like it’s your worst enemy.’

‘Sorry.’

‘I feel exactly the same, Robert. Too many loose ends. We can’t just run away can we?’

‘So…what shall we do?’

‘Let’s go and see my friend, Isobel Previn. She lives here.’

Half an hour later they were hailing an airport cab; ten minutes after that, they were streaking along the motorway: heading into the hubbub of Istanbul. En route, Christine reprised the backstory of Isobel Previn.

‘She lived in Konya for a long time. Working with James Mellaert. Catalhoyuk. And she was my tutor at Cambridge.’

‘Right. I remember you saying.’

Rob gazed out of the cab window. Beyond the flyovers and housing estates he could see a huge dome surrounded by four lofty minarets: Hagia Sophia, the great cathedral of Constantinople. Fifteen hundred years old.

Istanbul, it seemed, was a curious and kinetic place. Ancient walls collided with shiny skyscrapers. The streets were filled with western-looking people:
girls in short skirts, men in smart suits-but every so often they sped past some Levantine neighbourhood, with grimy blacksmiths, and veiled mothers, and lines of lurid washing. And surrounding it all, visible between the apartment blocks and the office towers, was the mighty Bosphorus, the great arc of water dividing Asia from Europe, and the West from the East. The barbarians from civilization. Depending on which side you lived.

Christine called her friend Isobel. Rob gleaned from the overheard conversation that Isobel was delighted to hear from her former student. He waited for the call to conclude, then asked, ‘So where does she live?’

‘She’s got a house on one of the Princes Islands. We can get a ferry from the port.’ Christine smiled. ’It’s very pretty. And she’s invited us to stay.’

Rob assented, happily.

Christine added, ‘She might well be able to help with the…archaeological mysteries.’

The hideous little mummy in the amphora: the olive jar. As the cab driver shouted at the lorries, Rob asked Christine more about the Canaanites.

‘I used to work at Tell Gezer,’ Christine said. ’It’s a site in the Judaean Hills, half an hour from Jerusalem. A Canaanite city.’

The car was heading downhill now. They’d turned off the road and were crawling through crowded, energetic streets.

‘The Canaanites used to bury their firstborn children, alive, in jars. Some were found at the site.
Babies in jars, just like the ones in the museum vault. So I think that’s what we found in the cellar. A sacrifice.’

The horrible image of the baby’s face filled Rob’s thoughts. The terrible, silent scream on the baby’s face. He shuddered. Who the hell would bury a child alive? In a jar? Why? What was the evolutionary purpose? What could drive you to do that? What kind of God demanded that? What
had
happened at Gobekli? Another thought occurred to him as the car turned onto a thrumming seafront. ‘Wasn’t Abraham linked with the Canaanites?’

‘Yes,’ said Christine. ‘When he left Haran and Sanliurfa he descended into the land of the Canaanites. That’s what the Bible says anyhow. Hey, I think we’re here.’

They were just outside a ferry terminal. The concourse was heaving: with children, and girls on bicycles, and men carrying boxes of sesame biscuits. Again Rob sensed the fault line of civilization running right through the city: it was almost schizophrenic. Men in jeans stood by men with lavish Muslim beards; girls in mini-dresses laughed on their mobile phones next to silent girls in black chadors.

They bought tickets and headed for the top deck. Strolling by the taffrail, Rob felt his spirits lift. Water, sunlight, fresh air, cool breezes. How he had missed this. Sanliurfa was so ferociously landlocked, sweltering in the bowl of Kurdistan.

The boat chugged along. Christine pointed out some of the sights of the Istanbul skyline. The
Golden Horn. The Blue Mosque. Topkapi Palace. A bar where she and Isobel once got very drunk on raki. Then she reminisced about Cambridge, and her university days. Rob laughed at her stories. Christine had been quite wild. Before he knew it, the ferry-horn blew: they’d reached the island.

The little pier was crowded with Turks, but Christine spotted Isobel immediately. It wasn’t hard. The silvery-haired old woman was conspicuous amidst the darker faces. She was wearing swirling clothes. An orange silk scarf. And lorgnettes.

They walked down the gangplank. The two women hugged and then Christine introduced Rob. Isobel smiled, very graciously, and advised Rob that her house was a half-hour walk.

‘I’m afraid we don’t have cars on the islands, you see. They’re not allowed. Thank God.’

As they threaded their way, Christine told Isobel the whole extraordinary story of the last few weeks. The horrible murder. The incredible finds. Isobel nodded. She sympathized over Franz. Rob detected an almost mother/daughter relationship between the two women. It was touching.

Considering this, he was reminded of Lizzie again. Lizzie would like this island, he decided. It was pretty, yet faintly mysterious too, with its wooden houses and tamarisk trees, its crumbling, Byzantine churches and cats sleeping in the sun. All around them was glittering water, and in the distance was the famous skyline of Istanbul. It was gorgeous. Rob firmly resolved to bring her here, one fine day.

Isobel’s house was glamorously old: a cool summer retreat for Ottoman princelings. The white stone house stood by a well-shaded beach and looked across the water towards some of the other isles.

They sat down on cushioned sofas and Christine finished the narrative of Gobekli and the last few weeks. The whole house was quiet as she finished the tale with its outrageous coda: their near-kidnapping at the museum.

Silence sang in the air. Rob could hear the plash of water beyond the half-open shutters, and the creak of pine trees in the sun.

Isobel toyed languidly with her lorgnettes. They finished the tea. Christine shrugged at Rob as if to say,
maybe Isobel can’t help. Maybe the puzzle is too difficult.

Rob sighed, feeling tired. But then Isobel sat up: alert, with her eyes sparkling. She asked Rob to show her the mobile phone photo of the symbol on the jar.

Rob fished in his pocket, retrieved the phone and flicked to the image. Isobel contemplated the photo. ‘Yes. As I thought. It’s a sanjak. A symbol used by the Cult of Angels.’

‘The cult of what?’

‘The Cult of Angels, the Yezidi…’ She smiled. ’I’d better explain. That remote part of Kurdistan around Sanliurfa is a remarkable breeding ground of beliefs. Christianity, Judaism and Islam all have strong roots there. But there are other, even older, faiths, that inhabit the Kurdish lands. Like
Yarsenism, Alevism, and Yezidism. Together they are called the cult of angels. These religions are maybe five thousand years old, maybe older. They are unique to that part of the world.’ She paused. ‘And Yezidism is the oldest and strangest of all.’

‘In what way?’

‘The customs of the Yezidi are intensely peculiar. They honour sacred trees. Women must not cut their hair. They refuse to eat lettuce. They avoid wearing dark blue, because they say it is too holy. They are divided strictly into castes, who cannot marry each other. The upper castes are polygamous. Anyone of the faith who marries a non-Yezidi risks ostracism, or worse. So they never marry outside the faith. Ever.’

Christine interrupted. ‘Hasn’t the Cult of Angels basically died out, in Turkey?’

‘Almost. The last of the Angelicans live mainly in Iraq, about half a million of them. But there are still a few thousand Yezidi in Turkey. They are fiercely persecuted everywhere, of course. By Muslims, Christians, dictators…’

Rob asked, ‘But what do they believe?’

‘Yezidism is syncretistic: it combines elements of many faiths. Like Hindus, they believe in reincarnation. Like ancient Mithraists, they sacrifice bulls. They believe in baptism, like Christians. When they pray they face the sun, like Zoroastrians.’

‘Why do you think the symbol on the jar is a Yezidi symbol?’

‘I’ll show you.’ Isobel walked to the bookshelf on the far wall and returned with a volume. Halfway through the book the found a picture showing a curious copper stick with a bird poised on the top. The book said the symbol was a ‘Yezidi sanjak’. It was the exact same symbol inscribed on the jars.

Isobel shut the book and asked Christine, ‘Now. Tell me the full names of the workmen, at the site. And the surname of Beshet at the museum.’

Christine closed her eyes, trying to remember: faltering a little, she recited a list of half a dozen names. Then a few more.

Isobel nodded. ‘They are Yezidi. The workmen, at your site. They are Yezidi. And so is Beshet. And I presume the men who came to kidnap you were Yezidi too. They were protecting those jars in the museum.’

‘That makes sense,’ said Rob, quickly working it through in his mind. ‘When you look at the sequence of events. What I mean is: when Christine went to Beshet for the keycode, he gave it to her. But then he must have called his fellow Yezidis and told them what we were doing. And so they came to the museum. They were tipped off!’

Christine interrupted. ‘Sure. But why should the Yezidi be so worried about some old jars? However ghastly the contents? What’s it got to do with them now? Why the hell were they so desperate to stop us?’

‘That’s the nub.’ said Isobel.

The shutter had stopped creaking. The sun sparkled on the placid waters beyond the window.

‘There’s one more thing,’ said Isobel. ‘The Yezidi have a very strange god. He is represented as a peacock.’

‘They worship a bird?’

‘And they call him Melek Taus. The peacock angel. Another name for him is…Moloch. The demon god adored by the Canaanites. And another name for him is Satan. According to Christians and Muslims.’

Rob was nonplussed. ‘You mean the Yezidi are
Satanists?
’

Isobel nodded cheerfully. ‘Shaitan, the demon. The terrible god of the sacrifice.’ She smiled. ‘As we understand it, yes. The Yezidi worship the devil.’

Cloncurry. This was their very last name, and the very best hope. Forrester sorted through the papers and photos on his knee, as the rain spattered the windscreen. He and Boijer were in a hire car in northern France, heading south from Lille. Boijer was driving, Forrester was reading: fast. And hoping they were finally on the right track. It certainly looked good.

They’d spent the last few days talking to headmasters and rectors and student advisors, phoning reluctant doctors in university clinics. Quite a few likely candidates had emerged. A drop-out from Christ Church, Oxford. A couple of expellees from Eton and Marlborough. A schizophrenic student, missing from St Andrews. Forrester had been shocked at the number of students diagnosed as schizophrenic. Hundreds across the country.

But the candidates had all been ruled out, one way or another. The posh Oxford drop-out was in a mental hospital. The St Andrews student was
known to be in Thailand. The Eton expellee had died. In the end they had drilled it down to one name: Jamie Cloncurry.

He had all the right credentials. His family was extremely wealthy, and of aristocratic descent. He’d been very expensively schooled at Westminster where his behaviour, according to his housemaster, was eccentric verging on violent. He had beaten another pupil and come perilously close to expulsion. But his academic brilliance had afforded him a second chance.

Cloncurry had then gone to Imperial College in London to study mathematics. One of the finest scientific universities in the world. But this grand opportunity hadn’t solved his problems; indeed his wildness had only intensified. He’d dabbled in hard drugs and been caught with call-girls in his Hall of Residence. One of them had reported him to the police for brutality, but the Crown Prosecution Service had dropped the charge on the grounds of an unlikely conviction: she was a prostitute, he a gifted student at a top university.

Crucially, it seemed Cloncurry had gathered around him a number of extremely close friends-Italians, French and American. One of his fellow students said Cloncurry’s social circle was ‘a weird clique. Those guys worshipped him’. And, as Boijer and Forrester had established, in the last two or three weeks that clique had disappeared. They hadn’t been seen at lectures. A concerned sibling had reported her brother as missing. The college
had posters of him in the union bar. An Italian kid: Luca Marsinelli.

The young men had left no trace. Their student digs were empty of evidence. No one knew or even especially cared where they had gone. The clique members were disliked. Acquaintances and neighbours were bafflingly vague. ‘Students come and go all the time.’ ‘I thought he’d gone back to Milan’. ‘He just said he was taking a holiday.’

At Scotland Yard they had therefore been obliged to make some tough decisions. Forrester’s team couldn’t follow every lead with equal zeal. Time was running out. The Toyota Landcruiser had been found, abandoned, on the outskirts of Liverpool, the gang having evidently guessed that the car was a liability. The gang had gone to ground, but Forrester knew they would surely strike again, and soon. But where? There wasn’t time for speculation. So Forrester had ordered his team to zero in on Cloncurry, the alleged leader.

The Cloncurry family lived, it turned out, in Picardy in Northern France. They had an ancestral home in Sussex, a large flat in London, and even a villa in Barbados. But for some reason they lived in the middle of Picardy. Near Albert. Which was why Forrester and Boijer had caught the first Eurostar this morning from London St Pancras to Lille.

Forrester surveyed the huge and rolling fields, the pinched little woods; the grey and steely sky
of northern France. Every so often, one of the hills would be adorned by another British wartime cemetery: a lyrical but melancholy parade of chaste marble headstones. Thousands and thousands of graves. It was a depressing spectacle, not helped by the rain. The trees were in Maytime blossom, but even the blossom was wilted and helpless in the relentless drizzle.

‘Not the most attractive part of France, is it, sir?’

‘Hideous,’ Forrester answered. ‘All these cemeteries.’

‘Lots of wars here, right?

‘Yes. And dying industries. That doesn’t help.’ He paused, then said, ‘We used to come here on holiday.’

Boijer chuckled. ‘Nice choice.’

‘No not here. What I mean is we used to go camping in the south of France, when I was a kid. But we couldn’t afford to fly, so we had to drive all the way down through France. From Le Havre. And we used to come through here, through Picardy. Past Albert and the Somme and the rest of it. And every time I would cry. Because it was so bloody ugly. The villages are so ugly because they were all rebuilt after the Great War. In concrete. Millions of men died in these wet fields, Boijer. Millions. In Flanders Fields.’

‘I guess so.’

‘I think the Finns were still living in igloos at the time.’

‘Yes, sir. Eating moss.’

The two men laughed, quite laddishly. Forrester needed some light relief. The Eurostar journey had been equally sombre: they’d used the hours to go over the pathology reports one more time. To see if they’d missed anything. But nothing had jumped out at them. It was just the same chilling scientific analysis of the wounds. Extensive haemorrhage. Stab wound in the fifth intercostal. Death by traumatic asphyxia.

‘Think this is it,’ said Boijer.

Forrester checked the sign: Ribemont-sur-Ancre. 6km. ‘You’re right. This turn-off.’

The car swerved onto the slip road, scything through gathered pools of rainwater. Forrester wondered why it rained so much in north-east France. He remembered stories of Great War soldiers drowning in mud, literally drowning in their hundreds and thousands, in the churned wet rainy mud. What a way to die. ‘And take a right here.’

He checked the address of the Cloncurrys. He’d rung the family and got their agreement to an interview just a day ago. The mother’s voice was cold and slightly quavery on the phone. But she had given him instructions. Go past the rue Voltaire. A kilometre further on. Then take the left, towards Albert. ‘Take this left…’

Boijer swung the wheel and the hire car crunched through a rutted puddle; the road was virtually a farm track.

Then they saw the house. It was large and
impressive, shuttered and dormered, with a severely sloping roof in the French style. But it was also sombre, dark and oppressive. An odd place to come and live.

Jamie Cloncurry’s mother was waiting for them at the end of the wide, looping driveway. Her accent was icily posh. Very English. Her husband was just inside the door, in an expensive tweed jacket and corduroys. His socks were bright red.

In the sitting room a maid served coffee. Mrs Cloncurry sat opposite them, with her knees pressed tightly together. ‘So, Inspector Forrester. You wish to talk about my son Jamie…’

The interview was painful. Stilted and laborious. The parents claimed they had lost control of Jamie in his mid teens. By the time he reached university they had lost all contact, too. The mother’s mouth twitched, very slightly, as she discussed Jamie’s ‘problems’.

She blamed drugs. And his friends. She confessed she blamed herself, as well, because they had sent him to boarding school-to be a boarder at Westminster. This had increased the young man’s isolation within the family. ‘And so he with-drew from us. And that was that.’

Forrester was frustrated. He could tell where the interview was going. The parents knew nothing: they had practically disclaimed their son.

As Boijer took over the questioning, the DCI scanned the large and silent sitting room. There were many family photos-of the daughter, Jamie’s
sister. Photos of her on holiday, on a pony, or at her graduation. Yet no photos of the son. Not one. And there were family portraits too. A military figure: a Cloncurry from the nineteenth century. A viscount in the Indian Army. And an admiral. Generations of distinguished forebears were staring from the walls. And now possibly-probably-there was a murderer in the family. A psychotic killer. Forrester could feel the shame of the Cloncurrys. He could feel the pain of the mother. The father was practically silent during the interview.

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.’