was the quietness in the room. Maybe it was the thought of that poor man beaten and abused. But now he really did want to talk about something much deeper, something much darker. The real stuff. It was time. Maybe it was time to talk about Sarah.
But silence filled the room. Forrester thought about his daughter. He closed his eyes. He lay back. And he thought about Sarah. The trusting blue eyes. Her giddy laughter. Her first words. Apple. App-ull. Their first child. A beautiful daughter. And then…
And then. Sarah. Oh, Sarah.
He rubbed his eyes. He couldn't talk about it. Not yet. He could think about it: he thought about it all the time. But he couldn't talk about it. Yet.
She had been seven years old. She'd just gone wandering off in the dark, one winter night. She'd just gone wandering off, out of the door, no one was watching. And then they'd searched and they searched, and the police and the neighbours and everyone searched…
And they'd found her. In the middle of the road, under the motorway bridge. And no one knew if it was murder or if she had just fallen off the bridge. Because the body was so mashed. Run over by so many cars in the dark. The lorries and cars probably thought they were driving over a tyre.
Forrester was sweating. He hadn't thought about Sarah this deeply in months, maybe years. He knew he needed to release this. To get it out. But he couldn't. He half turned and said, 'I'm sorry, Doctor. I just can't. I still think about it every hour of every day, you know? But…' He gulped. The words wouldn't come. But the thoughts were racing. Every day he wondered, even now: did someone find her and rape her and then drop her off the bridge or did she just fall-but if she just fell how did it happen? Sometimes he thought he knew. Sometimes in his heart of hearts he suspected she must have been murdered. He was a cop. He knew this stuff. But there were no witnesses, no evidence. Maybe they would never know. He sighed and looked across at the therapist. She was serene. Serene and sixty-five years old and grey-haired and smiling quietly.
'It doesn't matter.' She said. 'One day…'
Forrester nodded. He smiled at their catchphrase. Maybe one day. 'I just find it hard sometimes. My wife gets depressed and she turns away at night. We never have sex from one month to the next, but at least we are alive.'
'And you have your son.'
'Yes. Yes we have him. I guess sometimes you have to be grateful for what is, rather than what isn't. I mean. What do alcoholics say in AA? You got to fake it to make it. All that bullshit. I guess that's what I've got to do. Just do that. Pretend I'm OK sometimes.' He stopped again and the silence echoed around the warm sitting room. At last he sat up. His hour was up. All he could hear was traffic, muffled by the windows and the curtains.
'Thanks, Dr Edwards.'
'Please. As I said, call me Janice. You've been coming here six months.'
'Thanks, Janice.'
She smiled. 'I'll see you next week?'
He stood. They shook hands, politely. Forrester felt cleansed and slightly lighter in spirit.
He drove back to Hendon in a calm and pleasantly pensive mood. Another day. He'd got through another day. Without drinking or shouting.
The house was full of his son's noise when he keyed the door. His wife was in the kitchen watching the news on TV. The smell of pasta and pesto wafted through. It was OK. Things were OK. In the kitchen his wife kissed him and he said he'd been to a session and she smiled and seemed relatively content.
Before supper Forrester went outside into the garden and rolled a tiny spliff of grass. He felt no guilt as he did it. He smoked the weed, standing on his patio, exhaling the blue smoke into the starry sky, and sensed his neck- muscles unknotting. Then he went back into the house and lay on the floor of the sitting room and helped his son with a puzzle. And then there was a phone call.
In the kitchen his wife was sieving the penne. Hot steam. The smell of pesto.
'Hello?'
'DCI?'
Forrester recognized his junior's slight Finnish accent immediately. 'Boijer, I'm just about to eat.'
'Sorry, sir, but I got this strange call…'
'Yeah?'
'That friend of mine-Skelding, you know, Niall.'
Forrester thought for a moment, then he remembered: the tall guy who worked on the Home Office murder database. They'd all had a drink once.
'Yeah, I remember. Skelding. Works on HOLMES.'
'That's right. Well he just called me and said they've got a new homicide, the Isle of Man.'
'And?'
'Some guy's been killed. Very nasty. In a big house.'
'Long way away, the Isle of Man…'
Boijer agreed. Forrester watched his wife sauce the penne with the vivid green pesto. It looked slightly like bile; but it smelled good. Forrester coughed impatiently. 'As I said, Boijer, my wife's just made a very nice dinner and I-'
'Yes, sorry, sir, but the thing is, before this guy was killed, the attackers cut a symbol into his chest.'
'You mean…'
'Yes, sir. That's right. A Star of David.'
11
The day after Franz's supper party Rob rang his ex-wife's home. His daughter Lizzie picked up. She still didn't really know how to use a phone. Rob called into it, 'Darling, use the other end.'
'Hello, Daddy. Hello.'
'Dar…'
Just hearing Lizzie talk gave Rob a stabbing sense of guilt. And also a sheer basic pleasure that he had a daughter. And an angry desire to protect her. And then an extra guilt that he wasn't there, in England, protecting her.
But protecting her from what? She was safe in suburban London. She was fine.
When Lizzie had worked out the right end of the phone, they talked for an hour and Rob promised to send her jpegs of where he was. Then he reluctantly put the phone down and decided it was time to get to work. Hearing his daughter often did this: it was like an instinct, something genetic. The reminder of his family duties energized his work reflex-go and earn some money to feed the offspring. It was time to write his article.
But Rob had a dilemma. Moving the phone from his hotel bed to the floor he lay back and thought. Hard. The story was so much more complex than he had envisaged. Complex and interesting. First there was the politics: the Kurdish/Turkish rivalry. Then the atmosphere at the dig, and amongst the locals: their resentment-and that death prayer…And what about Franz's clandestine late-night digging? What was all that about?
Rob got up and walked to his window. He was on the top floor of the hotel. He opened the window and listened to the sound of a muezzin calling from a mosque somewhere nearby. The song was harsh, barbarous even-yet somehow hypnotic. The inimitable sound of the Middle East. More voices joined the rising carol. The call for prayer echoed across the city.
So what was he going to write for the paper? A part of him strongly wanted to stay and investigate further. Get to the bottom of the story. But what was the point in that, really? Wasn't that just indulging himself? He didn't have forever. And if he included all this odd and perplexing stuff it altered and maybe even ruined his article. At the very least it complicated the narrative-and therefore compromised it. The reader would be left confused, and arguably unsatisfied.
So what should he write? The answer was obvious. If he just stuck to the simple and fairly astonishing historical stuff he would be fine. Man Discovers the World's Oldest Temple. Mysteriously buried two thousand years
