‘It’s a funny place to live,’ said Boijer. ‘Isn’t it? When you’re so rich. Why live here?’
‘I was wondering the same.’ Forrester stared at the nobly agonized figure of a wounded French soldier, immortalized in marble. ‘You’d think if they wanted to live in France, they’d live in Provence or somewhere. Corsica. Cannes. Somewhere sunny. Not this toilet.’
They walked to the café. As they pressed the door Boijer said, ‘I don’t believe it.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I don’t buy the weeping mother bit. I don’t think they are ignorant as they say. There’s something strange about it all.’
The cafe was virtually deserted. A waiter came over, wiping his hands on a grubby towel.
‘Steak frites?’ said Forrester. He had just enough French to order food. Boijer nodded. Forrester smiled at the waiter. ‘Deux steak frites, s’il vous plaît. Et un bière pour moi, et un…?’
Boijer sighed. ‘Pepsi.’
The waiter said a curt merci. And disappeared.
Boijer checked something on his BlackBerry Forrester knew when his junior was having bright ideas because he stuck his tongue out like a schoolboy working on a sum. The DCI sipped his beer as Boijer Googled. Finally the Finn sat back. ’There. Now that’s interesting.’
‘What?’
‘I Googled the name Cloncurry and Ribemontsur-Ancre. And then I Googled it with just Ancre.’
‘OK…’
Boijer smirked, a hint of victory on his face. ’Get this, sir. A Lord Cloncurry was a general in the First World War. And he was based near here. 1916.’
‘We know that the family has a military back-ground-’
‘Yes, but…’ Boijer smile’s widened. ‘Listen to this.’ He read a note he had scrawled on the paper tablecloth. ‘During the summer of 1916 Lord Cloncurry was notorious for his grotesquely wasteful attacks on impregnable German positions. More troops died under his command, proportionately, than under any other British general in the entire war. Cloncurry subsequently became known as the Butcher of Albert.’
This was more interesting. Forrester eyed his junior.
Boijer lifted a finger, and quoted: ‘“Such was the carnage under Cloncurry’s leadership, sending wave after wave of infantry into the pitiless machine-gun fire of the well-trained, well-armed Hanover Division, his tactics were compared, by several historians, to the futility of…human sacrifice”.’
The cafe was dead quiet. Then the door rattled as a customer stepped inside, shaking the rain from his umbrella.
‘There’s more,’ said Boijer. ‘There’s a link from that entry. With a curious result. It’s in Wikipedia.’
The waiter set two plates of steak frites on the table. Forrester ignored the food. He stared hard at Boijer. ‘Go on.’
‘Apparently during the war they were digging up trenches or something, or mass graves maybe…anyway, they found another site of human sacrifice. An iron age site. Celtic tribes. They found eighty skeletons.’ Boijer quoted again. ‘“All headless, the skeletons had been piled up and tangled together along with weapons”.’ Boijer looked up at his boss. ‘And the bodies were contorted into unnatural positions. It’s apparently the biggest site of human sacrifice in France.’
‘Where is this?’
‘Here, sir. Right here. Ribemont-sur-Ancre.’
30
Rob stirred. Christine was besides him, still sleeping. In the night she had kicked half the sheets off. He looked at her glowing suntan. He caressed her neck, kissed her bare shoulder. She murmured his name, rolled over; and decorously snored.
It was nearly noon. The sunlight was streaming through the window. Rob got out of the bed and headed for the bathroom. As he sluiced the sleep from his face and hair, he thought about Christine: how it had happened. Them; the two of them; him and her.
He had never experienced a romance like this before: they seemed to have gone from being friends to holding hands, to kissing, to sleeping together as if it was the most obvious and natural thing in the world. A simple and expected evolution. He remembered when he had been nervous about her, reluctant to show his feelings. That felt ludicrous now.
But even if their relationship seemed obvious it was, paradoxically, still richly strange and marvellous. Maybe the best comparison, Rob decided, was with a brilliant new song you heard on the radio for the first time. Because the melody of a great song seems so right it makes you say: Ah, of course, yes, why didn’t anyone think of that brilliant tune before? It just needed someone to write down the notes.
Rob rinsed his face and reached blindly for the towel. He dried himself, and stepped from the shower. He looked left. The bathroom window was wide open so that he was gazing across the Sea of Marmara to the other Princes Islands. Yassiadi. Sedef Adasi, with the villages and forests of Anatolia in the distance. White-sailed yachts drifted languidly across the blue. The scent of pine needles, warmed by the sun, filled the little bathroom.
Being here in this house had no doubt helped their love affair: had nurtured and developed it. The island was such a heavenly oasis, a vivid contrast to roiled and violent Sanliurfa. And Isobel’s Ottoman home was so quiet: so winsome and untroubled. Sunlit and snoozing by the waves of Marmara; there weren’t even cars to disturb the peace.
For ten days Rob and Christine had recuperated here. They’d also explored the other islands. They’d seen the grave of the first English Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, sent by Elizabeth the First. They’d nodded as a local guide showed them the wooden house where Trotsky lived. They’d laughed over Turkish coffee in the waterfront cafes of Buyukada, and drunk heady glasses of raki with Isobel in her rose-scented garden, as the sun set over distant Troy.
And it was on one of those soft warm evenings, under the scattered jewellery of the Marmara stars, that Christine had leaned over and kissed him. And he had kissed her back. Three days later Isobel politely and subtly asked her maid to put the guest towels in just one room.
Rob padded through. The bedroom shutters were squeaking in the summer breeze. Christine was still asleep, her dark hair sprayed across the Egyptian cotton pillowslip. He crossed the parquet floor, barefoot, threw on his clothes and boots, and went quietly downstairs.
Isobel was on the phone. She smiled and waved at Rob and gestured him to the kitchen, where Andrea the maid was making coffee. Rob pulled a chair from under the kitchen table, and thanked the maid for his coffee. And then he sat there, absentmindedly, but happily, staring out of the wide-open kitchen door at the roses and the azaleas and the bougainvillea of the garden.
Ezekiel the cat-‘Ezzy’, as Isobel called her-was chasing a butterfly around the kitchen floor. Rob teased the cat for a few idle minutes. Then he sat back and picked up a newspaper, a day old Financial Times, and read about some Kurdish suicide bombers in Ankara.
He set the paper down again. He didn’t want to know about any of this. He didn’t want to hear about violence or danger or politics. He wanted this idyll to persist; he wanted to stay here with Christine for ever, and bring Lizzie here, too.
But the idyll could not last: Steve his editor was making impatient noises. He either wanted the story done or Rob on another assignment. Rob had filed a couple of Turkish news items to keep things cool back at the office, but everyone knew that this state of grace was temporary.
Rob stepped into the garden and gazed out to sea. There was another alternative. He could just give up his job. Stay here with Christine. Charter a boat, hire it out to tourists. Become a squid fisherman like the Greeks on Burgazada. Join the Armenian café owners in Yassiada. Potter about Isobel’s garden. Just give everything up, and live out his days in the sun. And somehow he could bring Lizzie here too. With his daughter here, laughing on the beach, he would be surrounded by the women he loved, and life would be perfect…