'So, if he had brought it back he might have brought it here, to the building designed for the best antiquities, the ones he kept to himself? Right?'
'Vraiment!'
Forrester frowned. 'But I thought we established that Jerusalem Whaley already had the Black Book. How does Layard get involved?'
De Savary shrugged. 'Who knows? Maybe Jerusalem Whaley thought he had the Book, but didn't. Maybe he gave the Book back to the Yezidi and Layard went to get it again, a century later. Shuttling back and forth! My personal hunch, for what it is worth, is that Jerusalem Whaley had the Book all along, and Layard is just a diversion.'
'But the main thing is we can assume that this is what the gang are after. Otherwise they wouldn't have come here. So it's not necessarily anything to do with the Hellfire Club in itself. The gang are actually after the Black Book of the Yezidi. That's their real prize.'
'Yes.'
Forrester whistled, almost cheerfully. He slapped De Savary on the back. 'Thanks for coming, Hugo.'
De Savary smiled, though he felt guilty for doing so. The smell of the man's exposed flesh had not quite left his nostrils.
A loud shout ripped through the silent wood.
'Angus! Angus!'
Something was up. Another shout echoed across the parkland. The shout was coming nearer.
De Savary and Forrester scrambled up the rise. A constable was running across the lawns, chasing something. Shouting out the name Angus.
'That's the dog handler,' said Forrester. 'Lost his dog. Hey, Johnson! Where's the dog?'
'Sir! Sir!' The constable kept running. 'Just gone past you, sir. Over there!'
De Savary swivelled and saw a large dog galloping towards the school buildings. It was having trouble running. Because it was dragging something. Something long, and slippery, and sullen grey. What was that? It looked very strange. For a moment the professor got the surreal and sickening idea that the dog was dragging a kind of ghost. He ran across to it. The dog turned, guarding its prize. It growled as De Savary approached.
The professor shuddered as he looked down. The dog was drooling over a long and stinking sheath, frayed into ribbons and strips.
It was a complete human skin.
33
Rob had been in Dahuk for ten days. The taxi driver from Habur had refused to go any further.
At first Rob had been reasonably content with this. Dahuk was a likeable and animated Kurdish city: poorer than Sanliurfa, but without the sense of brooding Turkish oversight. Dahuk was also enticing because the Yezidi were a visible presence. There was even a Yezidi cultural centre-a big old Ottoman house on the outskirts of town, ramshackle and noisy. Rob spent the first few days hanging around the centre. It was full of beautiful dark-haired girls with shy smiles and long embroidered dresses and laughing lads with Barcelona football shirts.
On the wall inside the centre's hall was a striking picture of the peacock angel, Melek Taus. When he first saw it, Rob had stared at it for a good ten minutes. It was a strangely serene image, the demongod, the fallen angel, with his splendid tail of emerald and aquamarine. The tail of a thousand eyes.
The Yezidi at the centre were wary but not that unfriendly. The moustachioed Yezidi men gave him tea and pistachios. A couple of them spoke faltering English, more than a few spoke German. They told him this was because there was a strong Yezidi presence in Germany. 'We have been destroyed everywhere else, we have no future here, now only you Christians can help us…'
What the Yezidi would not do was discuss the finer points of their faith. As soon as Rob started asking about the Black Book, or Sanliurfa, or the sanjak, or the worship of Melek Taus, the expressions turned to scowls, or disdain, or a defensive incomprehension. And then the moustached men got shirty, and stopped handing over saucers of pistachios.
The other sticking point was Lalesh itself. It turned out-and Rob was annoyed at himself for his lack of prior information, for rushing into this so impetuously-that no one actually lived in Lalesh. It was a sacred city in the truest sense of the phrase: a ghost town for angels, a city for exclusively sacred things: holy spirits, ancient texts, venerable shrines. The villages around Lalesh were busy and thronging, but the Yezidi only went into Lalesh itself to pray or worship, or for festivals, which would make any outsider conspicuous.
Moreover, just getting to Lalesh for a non-Yezidi was a difficult and even dangerous task, it seemed. Certainly no one wanted to take Rob. Not even after a hundred-dollar bribe. Rob tried more than once. The taxi drivers just looked at his money mistrustfully, and said a curt 'La!'
By the tenth night Rob felt like giving up. He was lying on his bed in his hotel room. The city was noisy and fervid outside. He went to his open window and gazed across the concrete rooftops and the dark winding alleys. The hot Iraqi sun was going down over the grey-gold Zagros Mountains. Old women in pink headscarves were hanging out washing next to enormous satellite dishes. Rob could see plenty of church spires amongst the minarets. Churches of the Gnostics maybe. Or the Mandeans. Or the Assyrian Christians. The Chaldeans. There were so many ancient sects here.
Closing the window to block out the evening call to prayer, Rob returned to his bed and picked up his mobile. He found a good Kurdish network and called England. After a few long beeps Sally came on the line. Rob expected his ex-wife to be her usual curt but polite self. But Sally was oddly warm and enthusiastic: then she explained why. She told Rob she had met his 'new girlfriend' and actually liked her, a lot. Sally told Rob she approved of Christine, and that he must have finally returned to his senses if he'd started dating real women, not those bimbos he normally went for.
Rob laughed and said he'd never regarded Sally as a bimbo; there was a pause, and then Sally laughed, too. It was the first laughter they had exchanged since the divorce. They chatted some more, as they had not chatted in quite a while. And then Rob's ex-wife handed the phone to their daughter. Rob felt piercingly sad when he heard his daughter's voice. Lizzie told her dad that she had been to the zoo to see 'nanimals'. She said she could raise her arms right above her head. Rob listened with a mixture of joy and grief and he said he loved her and Lizzie demanded daddy come home. Then he asked her if she had met the French lady Christine. Lizzie said yes and she really liked her and mummy liked her too. Rob said that was great, and then he blew a kiss to his giggling daughter. He rang off. It felt slightly weird, his new girlfriend and his ex-wife making friends. But it was better than mutual animosity. And it meant there were more people looking after his daughter when he wasn't there.
But then it occurred to him that maybe it was time he was 'there': maybe it was time he went back home. Maybe he should just quit. The story hadn't panned out as he'd hoped. He hadn't even made it to Lalesh, but it didn't look like there was any point anyway. The Yezidi were too opaque. He couldn't speak enough Arabic or Kurdish to get beyond their ancient obscurantism. How could he hope to unlock the secrets of a six thousand year old faith by just pottering around this ancient city saying 'Salaam'? He was stymied; his hopes were dwindling by the hour. Sometimes that happened. Sometimes you didn't get the story.
Grabbing his door key, Rob left his hotel room. He was hot and bothered and he needed a beer. And there was a nice bar on the corner of his street. He slumped into his usual plastic seat outside the Suleiman Cafe. Rob's temporary friend, Rawaz the cafe owner, brought him some chilled Turkish beer, and a saucer of green olives. The life of the Dahuk streets passed on by. Rob rested his forehead in his hands and thought again about the article. Looking back on his determined and impulsive excitement at Isobel's house, he wondered what he had really wanted. Some mysterious priest to explain everything, perhaps in a secret temple, with savage carvings on the wall. And flickering flames from the oil lamps. And of course a couple of handy devil worshippers, happy to be photographed. But instead of realizing his naive journalistic dream Rob was drinking Efes beer and listening to gaudy Kurdish pop from the music store next door. He might as well have been in Sanliurfa. Or London.
'Hello?'
Rob looked up. A young man was standing, slightly hesitantly, by his table. He wore clean jeans and a well- pressed shirt. He had a round face. He looked scholarly. Geeky even. Yet prosperous and kind. Rob asked the man
