'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 cafe.
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 cafe, 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
