In the dusty square of car park that led to the dig, Rob gave Radevan a healthy tip, and told him he’d make his own way home. Radevan looked at Rob, then at the folding money in his hand, then at Christine, standing just behind Rob. He gave Rob a big knowing grin, and turned the car around. As the driver revved the engine he called out of the car window, ‘Maybe tomorrow, Mr Rob?’
‘Maybe tomorrow.’
Radevan sped off.
Christine’s car was a rusty Land Rover. She opened the passenger door from the inside and hastily cleared lots of documents from the passenger seat-textbooks and academic magazines-chucking them haphazardly in the back. Then she gunned the engine and they set off at serious pace, for the main road-careering down the rubbly hillsides, out onto the burnt yellow plains.
‘So…what’s up?’ Rob had to shout his question
above the noise of the car tyres, popping over rocks.
‘The main problem is politics. You have to remember this is Kurdistan. The Kurds think the Turks are stealing their heritage. Taking all the best stuff to museums in Ankara and Istanbul…I’m not sure it’s totally untrue.’
Rob watched a flash of sunlight on an irrigation canal. He’d read that this area was the subject of a massive agricultural campaign: the Great Anatolia Project, using the waters of the Euphrates to bring the desert back to life. The project was controversial because it was flooding, and drowning, dozens of ancient and unique archaeological sites. Though luckily not Gobekli. He looked back at Christine, changing gear viciously.
‘What is true is that the government won’t allow the locals to make money out of Gobekli Tepe.’
‘Because?’
‘Because of perfectly valid archaeological reasons. The last thing Gobekli needs is thousands of tourists crawling all over. So the government don’t build signs, they keep the roads like this. And that means we can work in peace.’ She turned the steering wheel sharply, and accelerated. ‘But I can also see the Kurdish point of view. You must have seen some of the villages on the way up here.’
Rob nodded. ‘A couple.’
‘They don’t even have running water. Sanitation.
They barely have schools. They are dirt poor. And Gobekli Tepe, if it were properly marketed, could be a huge money-spinner. Bringing a lot of money to the region.’
‘And Franz is in the middle of this argument?’
‘Smack bang. He has pressure from all sides. Pressure to do the dig properly, pressure to hurry up, pressure to employ lots of local people. Pressure to stay in charge even.’
‘So that’s why he is ambivalent about publicity?’
‘Naturally he’s proud of what he’s discovered. He’d love the world to know. He’s been working here since 1994.’ Christine slowed to let a goat cross the road, then sped on again. ‘Many archaeologists move around a lot. I’ve worked in Mexico, Israel, France since I left Cambridge six years back. But Franz has been here more than half his career. So yes he’d like to tell the world! But if he does that, and Gobekli becomes truly famous, as famous as it
should
be, well then some big chief in Ankara might decide that a Turk should be in charge. And get all the glory.’
Rob understood the situation better. But it still didn’t quite explain the strange atmosphere at the dig. The workers’ resentment. Or maybe he was imagining it?
They reached the main road, spun onto the level tarmac, and headed faster, through increasing traffic, for Sanliurfa. As they overtook fruit lorries and army trucks they talked about Christine’s interest: human remains. How she used to work
on human sacrifices at Teotihuacan. Her stint in Tel Gezer and Megiddo in Israel. The Neanderthal sites of France.
‘Ancient hominids lived in southern France for hundreds of thousands of years, people like us, but not quite like us.’
‘Neanderthals, you mean?’
‘Yes, but also maybe
Homo erectus
and
Homo antecessor.
Even
Homo heidelbergensis.
’
‘Er…OK…’
Christine laughed. ‘Am I losing you again? Fair enough-let me show you something
really
cool. If this doesn’t grab you nothing will.’
The car was headed for the centre of Sanliurfa. Concrete houses were jumbled on hills; big shops and offices stretched down dusty, sunlit boulevards. Other streets were more shaded and antique: as they clawed their way through the traffic Rob saw a section of Ottoman arcading, the entrance to a bustling, dark souk, mosques hidden behind crumbling stone walls. Sanliurfa was obviously divided into an old-very old-district, and new quarters sprawling out into the semi-desert.
Looking left, he saw a large park-like area, with glittering pools and canals, and bijou teahouses, a charming oasis in the grime and hubbub of the big Kurdish town.
‘The Golbasi Gardens,’ said Christine. ‘And those are the fish pools of Abraham. Locals think the Prophet Abraham put the carp in himself.
This city is amazing-if you like history. I love it here…’
The car had made it through the narrower streets of the old town. Jerking the wheel left, Christine took a wide road up a hill and veered between the gates of a tree-shaded building. The sign said
Sanliurfa Museum.
Just inside the museum were three unshaven men sipping black tea: they stood and greeted Christine warmly. In return she joshed with them in a familiar way, in Turkish, or Kurdish. It was certainly some language Rob didn’t understand.
The pleasantries done, they passed through the inner doors into the small museum, where Christine led Rob to a statue. It was two metres high: a cream-coloured stone effigy of a man with black stone eyes.
‘This was dug up in Sanliurfa ten years ago when they were laying foundations for a bank near the fishponds. It was found amid the remains of a Neolithic temple, maybe eleven thousand years old. So this is probably the oldest statue of a man ever found. Anywhere. It’s the oldest selfportrait in stone in the history of the world. And it just sits here, by the fire extinguisher.’
Rob looked at it. The statue’s expression was infinitely sad, or frighteningly regretful.
Christine gestured at the face. ‘The eyes are obsidian.’
‘You’re right. It’s amazing.’
‘There,’ Christine said. ‘I persuaded you!’
‘But what the hell is it doing here? I mean, if it’s so famous, why isn’t it in Istanbul and all over the press? I’ve never even heard of it!’
Christine shrugged and the movement made her silver crucifix glint against her suntanned skin. ’Maybe the Kurds are right. Maybe the Turks don’t want them to be too proud of their heritage. Who knows?’
As they strolled out into the museum’s leafy garden, he told her about the stare of the man, the apparent hatred. The odd atmosphere at the site.
Christine frowned. For a few minutes she paced around, showing Rob the various remains scattered in the garden, the Roman gravestones and Ottoman carvings. As they neared the car, she pointed to another statue: a representation of a bird-like man with wings outstretched. It had a narrow face with slanting eyes, cruel and menacing. ‘That was found near Gobekli. It’s a desert demon of the Assyrians, I think. Maybe the wind devil Pazuzu. The Assyrians and Mesopotamians had hundreds of demons, it’s quite a scary theology. Lilith the maid of desolation, Adramalech, the demon of sacrifice. Many of them associated with the desert wind, and desert birds…’
Rob was sure she was stalling. He waited for her to respond to his question.
Suddenly, she turned to him. ‘OK. You’re right. There is…an atmosphere at the dig. It’s funny.
I’ve never experienced anything like it before, and I’ve been in digs all over the world. The workmen, they seem to resent us. We give them good money but still…they resent us.’
‘Is it the Turkish-Kurdish thing?’
‘No. Actually. I don’t think it is. Or at least it’s not just that,’ Christine led them back to the car, parked under a fig tree. ‘There’s more to it than that. All these weird accidents keep happening. Ladders falling away. Stuff collapsing. Cars breaking down. It’s more than coincidence. Sometimes I actually think they want us to stop, and go away. As if they are…’
‘Hiding something?’
The Frenchwoman blushed. ‘It’s stupid. But yes. It’s as if they are trying to hide something. And there’s something else. I might as well tell you.’
Rob had the car door half open. ‘What?’
Inside the car, Christine said, ‘Franz. He does digs. At night. On his own, with a couple of workers.’ She started the car, and shook her head. ‘And I’ve absolutely no idea why.’
DCI Forrester sat at his messy desk in New Scotland Yard. He had in front of him more photos of the wounded man, David Lorimer. The images were hideous. Two viciously inscribed stars in the man’s chest, blood trickling down the skin.
The Star of David.
Lorimer.
Clearly Scottish, not Jewish. Did the raiders think he was Jewish? Were
they
Jewish? Or Nazis? Is that what the journalist was on about? The neo-Nazi angle? Forrester turned and looked again at the official scene-of-crime shots of the cellar floor: the treacle-black soil disturbed by the spades and shovels. The hole made by the raiders was deep. They were certainly looking for something. And looking hard. Had they found it? But if they were looking for something why had they bothered to mutilate the old man when he disturbed them? Why not just knock him out or tie him up, or kill him cleanly? Why the elaborate, ritualistic cruelty?
Forrester suddenly wanted a proper drink. Instead he sipped his black tea, from a chipped mug bearing the image of an England flag, then got up and walked to his tenth-storey window. From this vantage he had a good view across Westminster and central London. The big steel bicycle wheel of the London Eye, with its alien glass pods. The Gothic pinnacles of the Houses of Parliament. He looked at a new building going up in Victoria and tried to work out what style it was. He’s always had a hankering to be an architect; had even applied to an architectural school as a teenager, then beaten a retreat when he heard the training was seven years long. Seven years with no proper salary? His parents didn’t like the sound of that-nor did Forrester. So he’d joined the police. But he still liked to think he had a well-informed layman’s knowledge of the subject. He could tell Wrenaissance from Renaissance, postmodern from neo-classical. It was one of the reasons he liked working and living in London, despite all the hassle: the architectural richness of the urban tapestry.
He drained the rest of the tea, went back to his desk and sifted through the reports the SIO had distributed at morning prayers-the 9 a.m. meeting on the Craven Street incident. CCTV footage had failed to spot any suspicious characters on the streets around. There were no other eye witnesses, despite a day of appeals. The first twenty-four hours were the golden hours of any investigation:
if you got no significant leads in that time you knew the case was going to be hard. And thus it had proved. Forensics were drawing blank after blank: the intruders had even erased, very carefully, their bootprints. The crime was cleverly and deftly executed. Yet they had taken time to maim and torture the old man, very precisely. Why?
At a loss, Forrester opened up Google, typed in
Benjamin Franklin House
and found that it was built in the 1730s and 40s. Making it, as Forrester had guessed, one of the older domestic houses in the area, featuring authentic panelling, box cornices, a first floor saloon ‘with dentils’. There was a dog-leg stair, with carved ends and ‘Doric columnnewels’. He clicked open another window to find out what column newels were, and, for that matter, dentils.
Nothing of interest.
The rest of the description was more of the same. Craven Street was a survivor of early Georgian London. A snicket of the gin-drinking eighteenth century town tucked away between the Slovenian fire-eaters and Kiwi opera singers of modern Covent Garden, and the itinerant junkies and shouting cabbies of scruffy Charing Cross.
This info didn’t help much. So, what about Franklin himself? Could there be some connection with
him
and the unknown men? Forrester Googled ‘Benjamin Franklin’. He already had a vague idea about him being the guy who found
electricity with a kite, or something. Google gave him the rest.
Benjamin Franklin, 1706-1790 was one of the best-known Founding Fathers of the United States. He was a leading author, political theorist, politician, printer, scientist, and inventor. As a scientist he was a major figure in the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity.
Forrester clicked on, feeling slightly inadequate.
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Franklin learned printing from his older brother and became a newspaper editor, printer, and merchant in Philadelphia. He spent many years in England and France, speaking five languages. He was a lifelong Freemason, including in his liberal circle Joseph Banks the botanist and Sir Francis Dashwood, the British Chancellor. He was also a secret agent for many years…
Forrester sighed, and clicked off. So the man was a polymath. So what? Why dig in his cellar? Why mutilate the caretaker of his museum centuries later? He checked the clock on his computer. He needed lunch, and he hadn’t achieved much. He hated this feeling-a whole morning going by with nothing achieved. It was irritating at quite a deep and existential level.
OK, he thought. Maybe try something from a different angle. Something more oblique. He Googled ‘Benjamin Franklin Museum cellar’.
And there, almost immediately. Yes! Forrester felt prickles of adrenalin. He scanned the screen urgently.
On the very first website was a verbatim newspaper report from
The Times,
dated February 11, 1998.
Bones Discovered in Founding Father’s House
Excavators at the Craven Street home of Benjamin Franklin, the Founding Father of the USA, have made a macabre discovery: eight skeletons concealed beneath the flagstones of the wine cellar.
Initial estimates suggest that the bones are about 200 years old and were buried at the time Franklin was living in the house, which was his home from 1757 to 1762, and from 1764 to 1775. Most of the bones show signs of having been dissected, sawn or cut. One skull has been bizarrely drilled with several holes. Paul Knapman, the Westminster Coroner, said yesterday, ‘I cannot totally discount the possibility of a crime. There is still a possibility that I may have to hold an inquest.’
The Friends of Benjamin Franklin Museum claim that the bones had no occult or criminal connection. They say the bones were probably placed there by William Hewson, who lived in the house for two years and who had built a small anatomy school at the back of the house. They note that while Franklin perhaps knew what Hewson was doing, he probably did not participate in any dissections because he was much more of a physicist than a medical man.
Forrester sat back. The cellar had been dug up before. With surprising results. Was this why the
guys had returned? And what was this about ’occult or criminal connections’?
Occult…
The detective smiled. He was looking forward to lunch now. It was possible that he had the first sniff of a lead.