The Genesis Secret: (9 page)

Forrester woke in an almost feverish sweat. He blinked at the dingy curtains of his Douglas hotel room. For a moment the nightmare lingered: giving a palpable yet absurd savour of evil to the hotel fixtures: the wardrobe door had swung half-open, showing the blackness within; the television lurked, squat and ugly, in the corner.

What had he dreamed? He rubbed the sleep from his face and remembered: he’d dreamed the usual, of course. A small body. A bridge. Then the bump-bump-bump of cars, driving over a ’tyre’.

Bump bump bump.

Bump bump bump.

He got up, walked to the window and drew the curtains. To his surprise it was light: very light. The sky was white and blank and the streets were busy;
he was going to be late for the press conference.

He made it just in time. The sizeable hall was already bustling. The local police had commandeered the biggest room in St Anne’s Fort. A handful of local journalists had been joined by a dozen national hacks. Two news crews with digicams, big headphones and long grey microphones were loitering at the back. Forrester saw a familiar head of blonde hair: it was the London correspondent for CNN. He’d seen her at several media briefings before.

CNN? Someone had obviously tipped off the London media about the macabre nature of the murder. From the back of the hall, he surveyed the room. Three policemen were sitting at the front; Deputy Chief Hayden was in the middle, flanked by a couple of younger guys. A big blue screen above them said
Isle of Man Constabulary.

The Deputy Chief Constable raised a hand. ‘If we could begin…’ He talked the journalists through the circumstances of the crime, citing the discovery of the body, and laconically describing the way the man’s head had been buried in the soil.

One journalist gasped.

Hayden paused, allowing time for this gruesome detail to sink in. Then he appealed for witnesses to come forward. His presentation concluded, he scanned the room. ‘Any questions?’

Several hands shot up.

‘The young lady at the back?’

‘Angela Darvill, CNN. Sir, do you think there
is a link between this murder and the recent case in Covent Garden?’

This was unexpected. Hayden winced visibly, then flashed a glance at Forrester, who shrugged. The Scotland Yard officer didn’t know what to advise. If the media knew about the link already there was nothing anyone could do about it. They would have to ask the media to keep it quiet so the murderers didn’t know the police had linked the cases; but you couldn’t unsay what someone had obviously said.

The DCC acknowledged Forrester’s shrug then returned his gaze to the American journalist. ‘Miss Darvill, there are certain shared peculiarities. But anything beyond that is mere speculation at the moment. I wouldn’t like to comment further. We appreciate your discretion on this, as I am sure you realize.’ With that, he looked around the room seeking a different questioner. But Angela Darvill raised her hand again.

‘Do you think there is a religious element?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘The Star of David. The carving in the chest. In both cases?’

The local journalists turned to stare at Angela Darvill. The question had thrown them; it had unsettled the whole room. Hayden hadn’t mentioned the ‘design’ of the knife cuts.

The room was hushed as Hayden replied. ‘Ms Darvill. We have a brutal and very serious crime to investigate. The clock is ticking. So. I think I
should take a few more questions from…others. Yes?’

‘Brian Deeley,
The Douglas Star.
’ The local hack speculated about possible motive and Hayden said they had no motive at present. The two men batted some more questions and answers between them. Then a national newsman stood up and asked about the victim’s circumstances. Hayden told them that that the victim was a wellliked local man with a wife and children living in town. He was a keen sailor. The DCC gazed about the room, staring at each face in turn. ’Some of you might even know his boat,
The Manatee.
He used to go sailing with his son Jonny.’ He smiled sadly. ‘The lad is just ten years old.’

For a few seconds, no one spoke.

The Manx police, Forrester thought, were doing a good job. The blatant emotion was deft. That was how you got witnesses to come forward: appeal to the heart not the head. And they really needed witnesses. Because they had no evidence, no DNA, no prints. Nothing.

Hayden was gesturing at a balding man in an anorak. ‘The chap in the corner? Mr…?’

‘Harnaby. Alisdair. Radio Triskel.’

‘Yes?’

‘Do you think the crime is linked to the unusual history of the building?’

Hayden’s fingers drummed on the tabletop. ‘I’m not aware of any unusual history.’

‘I mean the way the castle was first built. Is it perhaps important? You know, all the legends…?’

The policeman’s fingers stopped drumming. ‘As of this moment, Mr Harnaby, we are following all lines of investigation. But I hope we aren’t pursuing legends. And that’s all I can tell you. Now.’ He stood up. ‘I think we have some work to do, so if you would excuse us, I do believe there’s coffee in the tent at the front.’

Forrester looked around. It had been a good, professional press conference: but he still felt unsettled. Something was bothering him. He looked at Harnaby. What was this guy talking about? The ‘unusual history’ of the building? It chimed with Forrester’s thoughts. Something was wrong here. The architecture: the pastiche effect of the building: something was wrong.

Alisdair Harnaby was reaching under his chair for a blue plastic shopping bag. ‘Mr Harnaby?’

The man turned, his thin-rimmed spectacles shiny in the striplight.

‘My name is DCI Forrester. I’m with the Met.’

Harnaby looked nonplussed. Forrester added: ’Scotland Yard? Do you have a minute?

The man put down his plastic bag and Forrester sat beside him. ‘I’m interested in what you said. About the unusual history of the building. Can you elaborate?’

Harnaby nodded, his eyes twinkling. He gazed about the empty hall. ‘What you see today is actually a rather crude copy of the previous building.’

‘Right, so…’

‘The original fort, St Anne’s Fort, was demolished in 1979. It was also known as Whaley’s Folly.’

‘And it was built by?

‘Jerusalem Whaley. A rake.’

‘A what?’

‘A buck. A roisterer. An upper class thug. You know the kind of thing.’

‘A kind of playboy?’

‘Yes and no.’ Harnaby smiled. ‘We are talking real sadism here, through the generations.’

‘For instance?’

‘Whaley’s father was Richard Chappell Whaley. But the Irish called him “Burnchapel” Whaley.’

‘Because…’

‘He was a member of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. A Protestant. And he used to burn Irish Catholic churches. With the worshippers inside.’

‘Ask a stupid question.’

‘Well, yes.’ Harnaby grinned. ‘Quite unsavoury! And Burnchapel Whaley was also a member of the Irish Hellfire Club. They were an awful shower of hooligans, even by the standards of the time.’

‘OK. And what about Jerusalem Whaley, his son?’

Harnaby frowned. The room was now so quiet that Forrester could hear the patter of drizzle on the long sash windows.

‘Tom Whaley? He was another Georgian buck. As brutal and reckless as his father. But then
something happened. He came back to Ireland after a long journey east to Jerusalem. Hence his nickname: Jerusalem Whaley. When he returned, it seemed that the journey had changed him. It broke him.’

Forrester frowned. ‘How?’

‘All we know is that Jerusalem Whaley returned a very different man. He built this strange castle: St Anne’s Fort. He wrote his memoirs. A surprisingly remorseful book. And then he died. Leaving behind the castle and a lot of debts. But a fascinating life! Absolutely fascinating.’ Harnaby paused. ’Forgive me, Mr Forrester, am I talking too much? I do get carried away sometimes. Bit of a passion of mine, local folklore. I have a radio programme, on local history you see.’

‘Don’t apologize. This is very interesting. I’ve actually only got one more question. Is there anything left of the old building?’

‘Oh, no. No no no. It was all pulled down.’ Harnaby sighed. ‘This was the 1970s! They would have pulled down St Paul’s Cathedral if they could. Really. Such a shame. A few years later and the building would have been conserved.’

‘So nothing was left?’

‘Yes. Although…’ Harnaby’s face clouded. ’There is something…’

‘What?

‘I’ve often wondered…There is one more legend. Rather odd really.’ Harnaby clutched his plastic bag. ‘I’ll show you!’

The older man waddled to the door and Forrester followed him into the front garden. In the breeze and the cold and the drizzle, Forrester looked left: he could see Boijer by the police tent. The CNN girl was walking past with her crew. Forrester mouthed to Boijer, and pointed at Angela Darvill:
talk to her: find out what she knows.
Boijer nodded.

Harnaby plodded across the soggy front lawns in front of the castellated house. Where the lawns gave way to hedges and walls, the older man knelt as if he was about to do some gardening. ‘See!’

Forrester crouched alongside and scoped the wet dark earth.

Harnaby smiled. ‘Look! Do you see? The soil is darker here than it is here.’

It was true. The soil seemed to change colour slightly. The soil of the castle lawn was definitely peatier and darker than the soil further from the house. ‘I don’t understand. What is it?’

Harnaby shook his head. ‘It’s Irish.’

‘Sorry?’

‘The soil. It’s not from here. It’s maybe from Ireland.’

Forester blinked. It was raining again, and harder this time. But he took no notice of it. The clockwork of the case was turning over in his mind. Turning over quite fast. ‘Please explain?’

‘Buck Whaley was an impulsive man. He once bet someone he could jump out of a second storey
window on a horse and survive. He did it-but the horse died!’ Harnaby chuckled. ‘Anyhow. The story is that he fell in love with an Irish girl, just before he moved here. To Man. But this presented him with a problem.’

‘Which was?’

‘His bride’s marriage contract said she was only ever allowed to live on Irish soil. Yet this was 1786, and Whaley had just bought this house. He was determined to bring his wife here, despite the contract.’ Harnaby’s eyes were twinkling.

Forrester thought about it. ‘What you mean is he shifted tons of Irish soil to live on? So she lived on Irish earth?’

‘In a nutshell. Yes. He shifted a huge boatload of soil to the Isle of Man, and thereby fulfilled his vows. Or so they say…’

Forrester laid a palm on the damp dark earth, now spotted blackly with rain. ‘So the whole building is built on that same Irish earth. This soil here now?’

‘Very possibly.’

Forrester stood up. He wondered if the murderers knew this bizarre story. He had a firm sense they did know. Because they had ignored the building and instead had gone straight for the last possible authentic remnant of Whaley’s Folly. The earth on which it was built.

Forrester had one more question. ‘OK, Mr Harnaby, where would the soil have come from?’

‘No one is entirely sure. However,’ the journalist
took off his spectacles to rub some rain from the lenses. ‘However…I did once have a theory-that it came from Montpelier House.’

‘Which is?’

Harnaby blinked. ‘The headquarters of the Irish Hellfire Club.’

Rob and Christine retreated to her neighbourhood. They parked, with a jolt, at the corner of her street. As he climbed down from the Land Rover, Rob looked left and right. At the end of Christine’s street was a mosque, its minarets were slender and lofty, bathed in lurid green floodlighting. Two moustached men in suits were arguing in the shadows down the way, right next to a big black BMW. The men briefly looked at Rob and Christine, then went back to their angry exchange.

Christine led Rob into a dusty hallway of a modern block. The lift was busy, or out of order, so they took three flights of stairs. The apartment was large, airy and bright-and almost devoid of furniture. Neat piles of books were simply stacked on the polished wooden floor, or shelved in their hundreds along one wall. A big steel desk and a leather sofa were set to one side of the living room. A wickerwork chair was in the opposite corner.

‘I don’t like clutter’, she said. ‘A house is a machine for living in.’

‘Le Corbusier.’

She smiled and nodded. Rob smiled too. He liked the flat. It was very…Christine. Simple, intellectual, elegant. He checked out a picture on the wall: it was a large and eerie photograph of a very strange tower. A tower of orange gold bricks surrounded by desultory ruins, with vast tracts of desert beyond.

The two of them sat side-by-side on the leather sofa and Christine got out the book again. As she leafed once more through Breitner’s scrawled pages, Rob had to ask, ‘So. Einkorn wheat?’

But Christine wasn’t listening; she was holding the book very close to her face, ‘This map?’ she said to herself. ‘These numbers…and these here…The woman Orra Keller…Maybe…’

Rob waited for his reply. There was no reply. He felt a breeze in the room: the windows were open to the street outside. Rob could hear voices-out there. He went to the window and stared down.

The moustached men were still hanging around, but now they were standing right beneath Christine’s block of flats. Another man in a dark puffy anorak was lurking in the doorway of the shop opposite: a big Honda motorbike showroom. The two moustached men looked up as Rob leaned out of the window. They stared at him wordlessly. Just looking up at him. The anoraked man was
also looking up. Three men were staring at Rob. How menacing was this? Then Rob decided he was being paranoid. The whole of Sanliurfa could not be following them; these men were just…just men. It was just coincidence. He pulled the window to, and looked around the room.

Maybe one of the many books on the shelves could help. He thumbed his way past a few titles.
The Syrian Epipaleolithic…Modern Electron Microanalysis…Pre-Columbian Anthropophagy…
Not exactly bestsellers. He saw a more general book.
Encyclopaedia of Archaeology.
Slipping it down from the shelf, he flicked straight to the index and found it right away.
Einkorn wheat, page 97.

With Sanliurfa’s night breezes filling the room, and Christine silently perusing the notebook, Rob scanned and digested the information.

Einkorn wheat, it turned out, was a kind of wild grass. According to the book it grew naturally in south-east Anatolia. He looked at a small map on the facing page of the encyclopaedia which showed that Einkorn was local to the area around Sanliurfa. In fact, it seemed to grow in very few other regions. Rob read on.

Einkorn was apparently a grass of the lower mountains and the foothills. It was crucial to the first agriculture, the move from hunter gathering to farming. Along with Emmer wheat it was probably ’the first ever life form domesticated by man’. And that first domestication had occurred in and around south-east Anatolia. Around Sanliurfa.

The page he was reading linked him to another article: on the origins of agriculture. Judging by the Einkorn, this subject was important to the whole Gobekli mystery-so Rob turned to this article, too. He speed-read the pages.
Pigs and chickens. Dogs and cattle. Emmer and einkorn.
But then the final paragraphs caught his eye.

‘The great mystery of early agriculture is the Why, not the How. There is ample proof that the transition to early agriculture meant great hardship for the first farmers, certainly when compared to the relatively free and generous lifestyle of a hunter-gatherer. Skeletal remains show that these primal farmers were subject to more diseases than their hunting forebears, and had shorter and harder lives. Domesticated animals in the early stage of farming have, likewise, scrawnier physiques than their wild ancestors…’

Rob thought about the little stalk of wheat, then read on. ‘Contemporary anthropologists further attest that hunter-gatherers lead a relatively leisured existence, toiling no more than two or three hours a day. Yet farmers need to work most of the hours of daylight, especially in spring and summer. Much of primitive farming is backbreaking and monotonous.’ The article concluded: ‘Such is the striking shift in conditions that some thinkers have seen a certain tragic decline in the onset of agriculture, from the Edenic freedom of the hunter, to the daily labour of the farmer. Such speculations are
clearly beyond the remit of science, and this article, nonetheless…’

Rob shut the book. He could hear the breeze in the curtains. The cool, slightly mournful desert wind was really picking up now. Rob slotted the book back on the shelf, and momentarily closed his eyes. He was tired again. He wanted to go to sleep, lulled by this lovely wind. Its soft and gentle reproach.

‘Robert!’ Christine was scanning the last page of the notebook minutely.

‘What?’

‘These numbers. You are a journalist. You know a story. What do you think?’

Rob sat down beside Christine and looked at the last pages of the book. Again there was the ’map’. One waggly line which became four lines, which looked maybe like rivers. The bobbly lines seemed to be mountains. Or sea. Probably mountains. And then there was a crude symbol of a tree-indicating a forest perhaps? Besides, that was some kind of animal. A horse or a pig. Breitner was definitely no Rembrandt. Rob leaned closer. The numbers were bizarre. On one page was a simple list of digits. But many of these same numbers were repeated on the page with the map. Above the map was a compass sign with the number 28 by the arrow for east. Then 211, next to one of the waggly lines. Twenty-nine was written by the tree symbol. And there were more: 61, 62-and some much higher numbers: 1011,
1132. And then that last line about Orra Keller. There were no more numbers after that. No more of anything. The notebook ended poignantly-halfway down a page.

What did it mean? Rob started adding the numbers together. Then he stopped doing that because it seemed pointless. Maybe they were connected to the dig-maybe the numbers were a code for finds, and these marks showed places where the finds has been unearthed? Rob had already speculated that the map was a map of Gobekli. It was the obvious solution. But it didn’t seem to fit. There was only one river near Gobekli-the Euphrates, and that was a good thirty miles off. The map moreover had no symbol for Gobekli itself-nothing indicating the megaliths.

Rob realized he had been in a reverie for several minutes. Christine was looking at him.

‘Are you OK?’

He smiled. ‘I’m intrigued. It’s intriguing.’

‘Isn’t it? Like a puzzle.’

‘I was wondering if the numbers mean finds? Things you have discovered in Gobekli? I remember seeing numbers written on some of those little bags you have…where you put arrowheads and stuff?’

‘No. It’s a nice idea, but no. The finds are numbered when they go to the vaults, in the museum. They have letters joined with numbers.’

Rob felt he had left her down. ‘Ah well. Just a theory.’

‘Theories are good. Even if they are wrong.’

Rob yawned again. He had done enough for one day. ‘Do you have anything to drink?’

The simple question had a bracing effect on the Frenchwoman. ‘My God.’ She stood up. ‘I am so sorry. I am not being very hospitable. Do you want a whisky?’

‘That would be fantastic.’

‘Single malt?’

‘Even better.’

He watched as she disappeared into the kitchen. Moments later, she came back with a tray bearing a mug filled with ice, two chunky glass tumblers and a bottle of mineral water alongside a tall bottle of Scotch. She set the glasses on the desk and unscrewed the bottle of Glenlivet, pouring out two serious inches of Scotch. The dark, tigery liquor glittered in the light from the sidelamp.

‘Ice?’

‘Water.’

‘Commes les Brittaniques.’

She splashed some water out of the plastic bottle, handed Rob the glass and sat down beside him. The glass was cold in Rob’s grasp, as if it had been kept in the fridge. He could still hear the voices outside. They had been arguing for an hour. What about? He sighed and pressed the cold glass to his forehead, rolling it from side to side.

‘You are tired?’

‘Yeah. Aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’ She paused. ‘So. Do you want to sleep here? The sofa is very nice.’

Rob thought about this: about the moustached men outside. About the dark loitering figure in the doorway. He suddenly felt a very strong urge not to be alone, and he really didn’t want to walk the half a mile to his hotel. ‘Yeah, if it’s OK.’

‘Of course it is.’ She quickly swallowed the rest of her scotch, then went about the flat, finding him a duvet and some pillows.

Rob was so tired he fell asleep the moment Christine turned off the lamp. And as soon as he slept, he dreamed. He dreamed of numbers, he dreamed of Breitner and a dog. A black dog streaking along a path and a hot sun. A dog. A face.

A dog.

And then his dreams were interrupted by a bang. He was woken by a very loud
bang.

He jumped up from the sofa. It was light. How long had he been asleep? What was that noise? Groggily, he checked his watch. It was nine in the morning. The flat itself was quiet. But that repeated banging, what was it?

He rushed to the window.