‘You are surrounded by armed police. You must get out of the car. Now.’
The constables crouched lower, training their rifles. The driver’s side car door was opening, very
slowly. Forrester leaned forward, to catch his first glimpse of the gang.
A can of cider rolled onto the concrete with a clatter. The driver emerged from the car. He was about seventeen, visibly drunk, and visibly terrified. Two more figures got out and raised their shaking hands. They were also seventeen, eighteen. They had strings from party poppers draped pinkly over their shoulders. One of them had a red lipstick kiss on his cheek. The tallest of them was wetting himself, a big stain of urine spreading across the front of his jeans.
Kids. They were just
kids.
Students on a prank. Probably trying to spook themselves in the evil caves.
‘For fuck’s sake!’ Forrester snapped at Boijer. ’For fuck’s
sake.
’ He spat onto the ground and cursed his luck. Then he told Boijer to go and arrest the kids. For something. Anything. Drunk driving.
‘Jesus!’ The DCI slouched back to the Portakabin, feeling like an idiot. He was being made a fool of by this bastard Cloncurry. The posh young psychopath had escaped them again: he was too smart to fall for a dumb trick like this. So what would happen next? Who would he kill? And how would he do it?
A piercing and terrible idea gripped the DCI. Of course.
Forrester ran to the police car, grabbed his jacket and found his mobile. With shaking hands he
keyed in the number. He lifted the phone to his ear, urging the signal to kick in.
Come on come on come on.
Forrester was ardently praying he wasn’t too late.
But the phone just kept ringing.
By the time Hugo De Savary woke up his boyfriend was already halfway out of the door. Mumbling about an anthropology lecture at St John’s.
When De Savary got downstairs, he saw that his handsome young lover had left behind the usual mess in the kitchen: breadcrumbs everywhere, an eviscerated
Guardian,
marmalade smeared on an uncleared plate and coffee grounds dark and soggy in the sink. Yet De Savary didn’t mind. He was happy. His boyfriend had kissed him passionately this morning: kissed him awake. They were really getting on well. And, even better, De Savary had one of his favourite days ahead of him: a day of pure research. No stressful writing; no boring meetings in Cambridge, let alone London; no important phone calls to make. All he had to do was sit in the garden of his country cottage, go through some papers and read an unpublished thesis or two. A very nice day of leisured reading and thinking. Later he might drive over to Grantchester and do some
chores and some book shopping: at about 3 p.m. he had his only social engagement, with his old pupil, Christine Meyer. She was coming for the afternoon, and she was bringing the daughter of her boyfriend, the journalist who had written the richly intriguing piece in
The Times
about the Yezidi and the Black Book and this strange place called Gobekli Tepe. When she had contacted him Christine had said she wanted to talk about the links between her boyfriend’s story and the murders across England.
De Savary was keen to talk about this. But he was also simply keen to see Christine again. She had been one of his brightest students-his favourite student-and she was doing good work at Gobekli Tepe, it seemed. Good but rather hair-raising work, judging by the more excitable elements of
The Times
article.
He spent a quick ten minutes clearing up the breakfast things. Then he texted his lover:
Is it utterly impossible to slice bread without destroying the kitchen? Hugo xx
As he sluiced the dark coffee grounds down the sink, he got a text back.
Dont napalm my village ok Ive got finals xxx
De Savary laughed out loud. He wondered if he was falling in love with Andrew Halloran. He knew it was foolish if so: the lad was only twenty-one. De Savary was forty-five. But Andrew was so very handsome, in a seductively uncaring way. He just threw clothes on and seemed to look perfect every morning. Especially with a little stubble to offset
the deep blue eyes. And De Savary quite liked the fact that Andrew was probably seeing other men, too. A little mustard on the sandwich: it helped. The sweet torment of jealousy…
Collecting his papers and books, he walked out into his garden. It was a beautiful day. Almost distractingly so: the birdsong was too sweet. The scent of late May blossom too heady. De Savary could hear children laughing in a garden across the Cambridgeshire meadows, though his cottage was very isolated.
He tried to concentrate on his work. He was researching a long and rather learned
TLS
article on violence as a part of English culture. But as he sat in the morning sunshine his mind kept wandering back to the themes that had dominated his thoughts lately. The gang murdering their way across Britain. And the links to the curious story coming out of Turkey.
Picking up his sun-warmed phone from the lawn, De Savary contemplated calling Detective Chief Inspector Forrester to see if the police were having any luck at West Wycombe caves. But then he thought better of it, and put the phone back down. He was confident that the gang would, at some point, search out the caves. If they were so frenziedly seeking the Black Book, then the Hellfire Caves were an obvious place to look. Whether the police trap would work was an entirely different matter. It was a gamble. But gambles sometime paid off.
The sun was very warm now. De Savary dropped
his papers onto the grass, stretched out on his deckchair and closed his eyes. The children were still laughing, somewhere across the water meadows. He thought about the Yezidi. Clearly this journalist, Rob Luttrell, had discovered something. The Black Book of the Yezidi must once have revealed some crucial information about this extraordinary temple, Gobekli Tepe, which appeared to be so central to their faith and their ancestry. A tiny hint of disquiet trilled through him as he thought about
The Times
piece. The gang had surely seen it-seen it and absorbed it. They weren’t stupid. The article implied that Rob Luttrell had garnered vital information about the Black Book. The article also mentioned Christine by name. The gang might therefore come looking for the couple at some point down the line. De Savary reminded himself to tell Christine when she came over that she could conceivably be in danger. The two of them, Rob and Christine, needed to take care: until the gang was caught.
De Savary leaned from his deckchair and picked up his photocopied thesis:
Fear of the Mob: Riots and Revelry in Regency London.
The birds chirruped in the apple tree behind him. He read and took notes; then read some more, and took some more notes.
Three hours later he had finished. He slipped some shoes on, climbed in his little sports car and thrummed over to Grantchester. He went to the bookshop and idled between the shelves for a pleasant hour; after that he strolled to the computer shop and bought some ink cartridges
for his printer. Then he remembered that Christine was coming over, so he stopped off at a supermarket and bought some fresh lemonade and three punnets of strawberries. They could sit in the garden, and have strawberries in the sun.
On the drive back to his cottage De Savary hummed a tune. The Bach Double Violin Concerto. Such a beautiful peace of music. He resolved to download a new version when he had time.
For another hour he Googled in his study; then the doorknocker went and there was Christine. Smiling and suntanned, with an angelic little blonde girl in tow. De Savary beamed with pleasure: he had always thought that if he hadn’t been gay Christine was the sort of girl he could have loved: dreamy and sexy, but demure and somehow innocent too. And of course deeply gifted and clever. And this suntan suited her. As did the little girl by her side.
Christine placed a hand on the girl’s shoulder. ’This is Lizzie, Robert’s daughter. Her mum’s in town doing a course…and I am her adopted mother for the day!’
The girl did a sweet sort-of curtsey as if she was meeting the Queen and then giggled and solemnly shook De Savary’s hand.
As Christine followed him through to the garden she was already telling him gossip and stories and theories: it was as if they were back in his rooms at King’s. Laughing and talking, passionately: about archaeology and love, about Sutton Hoo and James
Joyce, about the prince of Palenque and the meaning of sex.
In the garden De Savary poured the lemonade and offered the strawberries. Christine was animatedly describing Rob. De Savary could see the romance in her eyes. They talked about him for a short while and Lizzie said she was looking forward to seeing her daddy coz he was bringing her a lion. And a llama. Then she asked if she could play on the computer and De Savary happily agreed, as long as she stayed where they could see her; the little girl skipped inside the cottage, and sat by the open French windows, absorbed in her computer game.
De Savary was pleased he and Christine could now talk more freely. Because he wanted to talk about something else. ‘So, Christine,’ he said. ‘Tell me about Gobekli. It sounds
incroyable.
’
For the next hour Christine outlined the whole remarkable story. By the time she had finished the sun was just edging the treetops over by the water meadows. The professor shook his head. They discussed the strange interring of the site. Then they moved on to the Hellfire Club and the Black Book, conversing as they used to do: two engaged and lively minds with similar cultural interests: literature, history, archaeology, painting. De Savary was really enjoying the dialogue. Christine told him, as an aside, that she was trying to teach Rob the daunting delights of James Joyce, the great Irish modernist, and De Savary’s eyes
sparkled. This cued him up for one of his latest theories. He decided to tell her. ‘You know, Christine, I was looking at James Joyce again the other day, and something struck me…’
‘Yes?’
‘There’s a passage in
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
I’ve just wondered if—’
‘What?’
‘Sorry?
‘What was that?!’
Then he heard it. A loud thump behind them. Coming from the cottage. A strange, loud and ominous crash.
De Savary’s immediate thought was for Lizzie. He stood and turned, but Christine was already rushing past him. He dropped his glass of lemonade onto the lawn and ran after her, and as did so he heard something worse: a muffled shriek.
He found Christine inside the house and in the hands of several young men wearing dark jeans and ski masks. Only one man was unmasked. He was black-haired and handsome. De Savary knew him immediately. He’d seen the CCTV image in an email from Forrester.
It was Jamie Cloncurry.
De Savary felt like crying out: at the idiocy of it all. The gang had knives and guns. One of the guns was pointed at him. This was clearly ludicrous. This was Cambridgeshire. On a sweet Maytime afternoon. He had just been to the supermarket to buy some strawberries. On the way home he had
whistled some Bach. And now there were armed psychopaths in his cottage!
Christine was trying to cry out and she was wriggling: but then one of the men punched her very hard in the stomach and she stopped writhing. She moaned. Her eyes were wild and wide. She stared at De Savary and he saw her total fear.
The tallest man, Jamie Cloncurry, waved his pistol languidly at De Savary. ‘Tie him to the chair.’
The voice was very educated: chillingly so. De Savary could hear stifled cries from the kitchen. Lizzie was in there, and she was crying. Then the girlish crying ceased.
Two of the gang members strapped De Savary to the chair. They put a sweaty gag around his mouth and tied it ferociously tight, making his lips bleed as the gag pressed his lips against his incisors. But it wasn’t this pain that was most troubling De Savary. It was the way they were tying him to the dining chair. They were tying him so he was sitting on the chair the wrong way round: straddling the seat, his chest pressed against the wooden chair back. Big straps were lashed around him. His ankles were bound, very tightly, under the chair. His wrists were twined viciously together also under the chair; his chin was painfully propped on the chair back. Everything hurt. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t see Christine or Lizzie: his ears detected a faint whimpering, in another room. But then his thoughts were drowned by mental terror when he heard the next
words of Jamie Cloncurry, standing somewhere behind him.
‘Have you ever heard of blood eagling, Professor De Savary?’
He gulped-and then he couldn’t help it: he started to cry. The tears ran down his face. He had guessed they were going to kill him. But this? Blood eagling?
Jamie Cloncurry came around and looked close at him, his pale and handsome face very slightly flushed. ‘Of course you have heard of blood eagling, haven’t you? After all, you wrote that book. That rather alarming piece of pop history.
The Fury of the Northmen.
’ Cloncurry was sneering. ‘All about Viking rites and beliefs. Rather lurid, if you don’t mind my saying so. But I suppose that’s how you accrue sales…’ The young man was holding a book in his hands, quoting from a page: ‘“And now we come to one of the most repellent concepts in the annals of Viking cruelty: the so-called blood eagle. Some scholars dispute that this gruesome rite of sacrifice ever existed, but various references in the sagas and in skaldic poetry can leave an open mind in little doubt: the rite of the blood eagle existed. It was an authentic sacrificial ceremony of the North”.’ Cloncurry smiled in De Savary’s direction, and then went on, ‘“The notorious blood eagle rite was performed, according to Norse accounts, on various eminent personages, including King Ella of Northumbria, Halfdan son of King Harfagri of Norway, and King Edmund of England”.’
De Savary felt his bowels begin to liquefy. He wondered if he was going to soil himself.
Cloncurry turned a page, and read on. ‘“Accounts of blood eagling differ in detail, but essential elements remain the same. The victim first has his back sliced open close to the backbone. Sometimes the skin is peeled away beforehand. Then the exposed ribs are broken at the spine, perhaps with a hammer or mallet; maybe they are cut. The shattered ribs are then splayed out like a spatchcocked chicken, revealing the grey lungs beneath. The victim remains fully conscious as his pulsing lungs are yanked from the chest cavity and flung out across the shoulders, so that the victim resembles an eagle with its wings outspread. Salt is sometimes sprinkled in the enormous wounds. Death must have come sooner or later, perhaps from asphyxiation or blood loss; or a simple heart attack from the sheer terror induced by the cruelty of the act. The Irish poet Seamus Heaney cites the blood eagle in his poem “Viking Dublin”: “With a butcher’s aplomb they spread out your lungs, and made you warm wings for your shoulders”.’
Cloncurry snapped shut the book and laid it on the dining table. De Savary was quivering with fear. The tall young man smiled widely. ‘“Death must have come sooner rather than later”. Shall we see if that is true, Professor De Savary?’
The professor closed his eyes. He could hear the men behind him. His bowels were empty: he had soiled himself in terror. A vile faecal smell offended
his own nostrils. There was some murmuring behind him. Then De Savary felt the first crippling pain: as the knife plunged into his back and ripped downwards. The shock made him almost vomit. He rocked back and forth in his chair. A man laughed in the background.
Jamie Cloncurry spoke. ‘I am going to have to cut your ribs with some humble pliers. I’m afraid we don’t have a mallet…’
Another laugh. De Savary heard a cracking noise and felt a hammering pain near his heart as if he had been shot; he realized they were cutting his ribs one by one. He felt them bend, then break.
Crack.
Like something very taut being snapped. He heard another crack; and then another. He vomited around the gag. He hoped he would choke on his own vomit, and he hoped he would die very soon.