Forrester had reached the edge of the stone circle. The silent grey menhirs curved away from him on either side. Some seemed to be sleeping: prone and fallen like mighty warriors slain. Some were rigid and defiant. He remembered what he had read about Castlerigg; about the squarish enclosure of ‘important but unknown purpose’. If you had come all this way to bury something, this was surely where you would do it-in the most symbolic part of the site. If Castlerigg mattered to you, this was your target.
The detective scanned the circle. It didn’t take him long to find the enclosure: a rectangular site marked out by lower stones, besides the most eroded megaliths.
For twenty minutes Forrester examined these lower stones. He padded and prodded at the damp dark soil and the soggy, acidic turf. A soft lakeland rain started to fall. Forrester felt its cold drops on his neck. Maybe he was heading up another cul de sac.
Then he spotted something in the long wet grass: a small line of sliced earth. Dark soil disturbed, then replaced, barely visible to the naked eye-unless you knew what you were looking for. He knelt and dug at the sods with his bare hands. It was unscientific-Forensics would be appalled, but he had to know.
Within seconds his fingers touched something cold and hard-but not a stone. He dislodged the object from its little grave and brushed off the soil. It was a small glass vial. And inside the vial was a very intense-looking liquid the colour of dark red rum.
25
The streets were red with blood. Rob was walking through the old town to meet Christine, at the caravanserai. It was dusk. Everywhere he looked: he saw great splashes of blood-up the walls, along the pavements, outside the Vodafone outlet. The locals were slaughtering goats and sheep-and doing it publicly, in the streets. Rob presumed that it was part of the holiday Christine mentioned, but it was still unnerving.
He paused at the corner, by a clocktower, and watched as one man struggled to hold a white-skinned goat between his legs. The man wore baggy black pantaloons-shirwals, the traditional Kurdish dress. Setting the fuming cigarette on a stool beside him, the man picked up a long, glittering knife and plunged the blade into the lower stomach of the goat.
The animal screamed. The man was unfazed. He turned, picked up his cigarette, had another puff, put it down again. Blood was drooling from the stomach of the wounded goat. The man leaned further over, grimaced, then vigorously ripped the knife straight up the quivering, pinkwhite belly. Blood pissed out of the animal, showering the road in front. The goat no longer screamed and struggled but whimpered, sensuously. Its long-lashed eyelids fluttered as it died. The man yanked open the great gash, and viscera slithered out, the pastel-coloured organs tumbling neatly into a shallow plastic bowl on the pavement.
Rob walked on. He found Christine by the archway, that led to the caravanserai. His expression of surprise and perplexity obviously said it all.
‘Kurban Bayram,’ she said. ‘The last day of hajj.’
‘But why the goats?’
‘And sheep.’ Christine threaded her arm through his as they walked along the shuttered streets of the bazaar. Cooking smells wafted. Roasting goat and broiled sheep. ‘It’s called the Sacrifice Holiday. It commemorates Abraham and Isaac, the near sacrifice of Isaac.’
‘Kurban Bayram, of course. They have that in Egypt and Lebanon; I know it welclass="underline" it’s called Eid…But,’ he shook his head, ‘They don’t kill animals in the street! They do it inside, and they slit the throats.’
‘Yes,’ She agreed. ‘The Urfans treat it as a special, local festival. Because Abraham comes from here.’ She smiled. ‘And it is quite…blood-thirsty.’
They had reached a small square with cay houses and cafés in which men were smoking shishas. Many of them were wearing, for Kurban Bayram, the long black baggy Kurdish trousers. Others had special embroidered robes. Their women passed in front, decked in flashing jewellery, or sporting purple headscarves trimmed with silver. Some were tattooed with henna, their hands and feet liberally and gorgeously painted; their headscarves were hung with silver trinkets. The scene was pungently colourful.
But they weren’t here to sight-see.
‘There it is.’ Christine nodded at a small house down a shady road. ‘Beshet’s address’.
The heat of the day was draining from the streets, like water after a flood. Rob squeezed Christine’s hand. ‘Good luck.’
Christine crossed the road and knocked on the door. Rob wondered how unorthodox and unsettling it would be for Beshet to have a white western women come to his house. When Beshet opened the door, Rob scrutinized his expression and saw surprise and anxiety there, but also that puppydog languish again. Rob was confident Christine would get the keycode.
He walked back to the square and surveyed the scene. Some children, carrying firecrackers, greeted him.
‘Hey you, American!’
‘Hello…’
‘Happy Bayram!’
The children laughed, as if they had stirred some exotic and slightly frightening beast in the zoo; then they scattered up the road. The pavements were still red with blood but the slaughter had stopped. Moustachioed Kurds, smoking their shishas at café tables, greeted him with a smile. Sanliurfa was, Rob decided, the strangest place. It was implacably exotic, and somehow hostile; yet the people were some of the friendliest Rob had ever encountered.
He barely noticed Christine as she stole up to him, and said: ‘Hello.’
He turned, alerted. ‘You got it?’
‘I got it. He wasn’t keen…but he gave it to me.’
‘OK, so…’
‘Let’s wait until it’s dark.’
A quick walk brought them to the main road out of the old town. A taxi took them to Christine’s apartment, where they spent a nervous few hours surfing the net, trying not to worry, then worrying. At eleven they crept out of the apartment block and walked to the museum. The streets were much quieter now. The blood had been washed away; the holiday was nearly over. A scimitar of moon shone above them. Stars glittered like tiaras around the spires of the minarets.
At the gates to the museum Rob looked up and down the street. No one was about. He could hear Turkish TV voices from a shuttered house a block down. Otherwise, there was silence. Rob pushed and the gate swung open. At night the garden was an intensely atmospheric place. Moonlight silvered the wings of the desert demon Pazuzu. There were busts of Roman emperors, broken and crumbling; and Assyrian warlords, frozen in marble, their lion hunts never ending. The history of Sanliurfa was here, in this garden, dreaming in the moonlight. The demons of Sumeria screamed silently; stone beaks open for five thousand years.
‘I need two codes.’ said Christine. ‘Beshet gave me both of them.’
She approached the front door of the museum. Rob hung back, checking that they were alone.
They were alone. There was a car parked under the fig trees. But it looked as if it hadn’t been moved in a few days. Rotten figs were splattered across the windshield. A smear of jam and seeds.
The door clicked. Rob swivelled to find the front door was open. He paced up the steps and joined Christine inside. The air within the museum was hot: there was no one here to open windows or doors. And no air conditioning. Rob wiped the sweat from his forehead. He was wearing a jacket to carry everything they needed: flashlights, phones, notebooks. In the main room, the oldest statue in the world glowed dimly in the darkness, with his sad obsidian eyes staring mournfully into the gloom.
‘Down here,’ said Christine.