The Cloncurrys were descended from Buck and Burnchapel Whaley, from the founders of the Irish Hellfire Club!
He beamed at the screen. He was on a roll, on a high. He felt he could crack the whole thing. He was hitting the sweet spot. Knocking every ball for six. He could solve the damn thing now. Here and now. Right here-at his desk.
So where could the gang be? Where could they be hiding? For a long time he and Boijer and the rest of the squad had presumed the gang was slipping in and out of Britain, going to Italy, or France. On a private plane, or maybe by boat. But maybe he and Boijer were looking in the wrong place. Just because certain gang members were Italian or French didn’t mean they were going to France or Italy. They might be in another country: but they could be in the one country you didn’t need a passport to get to when you left Britain. Forrester looked up. Boijer was coming through the door.
‘My Finnish friend!’
‘Sir?’
‘I think I know.’
‘What?’
‘Where they are hiding, Boijer. I think I know where they are hiding.’
40
Rob sat in his flat and watched the video obsessively. Cloncurry had sent it three days before, in an email.
The video showed his daughter and Christine in a nondescript little room. Lizzie’s mouth was gagged, as was Christine’s. They were tied, firmly and lavishly, to wooden chairs.
And that’s all it showed of them. They were in clean clothes. They didn’t look injured. But the tight leather gags around their mouths and the terror welling in their eyes made the video almost unwatchable, for Rob.
So he watched it every ten or fifteen minutes. He watched it and watched it, and then he wandered around his flat, in his underwear, unshaven, unshowered, in a daze of despair. He felt like a deranged old saint in the Desert of Anguish. He tried to eat some toast and then gave up. He hadn’t eaten a proper meal in a long time. Apart from the breakfast his ex-wife had cooked him a few days back.
He’d been over to Sally’s to discuss their daughter’s fate and Sally had, in her generous way, made him bacon and eggs, and for the first time in ages Rob had felt hungry and he had got halfway through the meal but then Sally had started crying. So Rob had stood up and comforted her with a hug: but that just made it worse: she had shoved him away and said it was all his fault and she yelled and cried and slapped him. And Rob had just stood there as she slapped him and then thumped him in the stomach, flailing. He took the blows, placidly, because he felt she was right. She was right to be angry. He had brought this terrible situation upon them. His ceaseless pursuit of the story, his selfish desire for journalistic fame, his mindless denial of the increasing danger. The mere fact he wasn’t in the country to protect Lizzie. All of it.
The drenching guilt and the self-hatred Rob felt at that moment felt almost good. A least it was reaclass="underline" a genuine, searing emotion. Something to pierce the oddly numb despair he felt so much of the time.
His only other lifeline to sanity was the phone. Rob spent hours gazing morosely at it, willing it to ring. And the phone did ring, many times. Sometimes he got calls from friends, sometimes from colleagues at work, sometimes from Isobel in Turkey. The callers were all trying to help, but Rob was impatient-for the one communication he wanted: the call from the police.
He already knew they had a promising lead: Forrester had rang four days back saying they now reckoned the gang was possibly somewhere around Montpelier House, south of Dublin. The home of the Irish Hellfire Club. The detective had explained Scotland Yard’s route to this conclusion: how the killers were surely moving in and out of the country, because of their ability to totally disappear, yet they weren’t being traced by Customs and passport checks. That meant they must be escaping to the one foreign country for which you didn’t need passport checks-when leaving the UK.
They must have driven or flown to Ireland.
All that was very plausible. But Forrester had felt it necessary, when talking to Rob, to add some strange supporting theory-about buried victims and the Ribemont death-pit and Catalhoyuk and a murderer called Gacy, and the fact that Cloncurry would choose somewhere near his ancestors’ victims…And Rob had switched off at that point.
He was far from convinced that Forrester was right with these psychological speculations. It just seemed to be a hunch and Rob didn’t trust hunches. He didn’t trust anyone. He didn’t trust himself. The only thing he could trust was the sincerity of his own self-loathing, and the fierceness of his anguish.
That night he went to bed and slept for three hours. He dreamed of a crucified animal, screaming on a cross, a pig or a dog maybe. When he woke it was dawn. The image of the nailed animal persisted in his mind. He took some Valium. When he woke again it was noon. His mobile phone was ringing. Ringing! He ran to the table and picked up.
‘Hello? Hello.’
‘Rob.’
It was…Isobel. Rob felt his mood dive precipitously; he liked and admired Isobel, he craved her wisdom and succour, but right now he just wanted to hear from the police, the police, the police.
‘Isobel…’
‘No news then?’
He exhaled. ‘Not since last time, no. Nothing. Just…just these fucking emails. From Cloncurry. The videos…’
‘Robert, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. But…’ She paused. Rob could picture her in her gracious wooden house, staring at the blue Turkish sea. The mental image was piercing, reminding Rob of how he and Christine had fallen in love. There, under the Marmara stars.
‘Robert, I have an idea.’
‘Uhn.’
‘About the Black Book.’
‘OK…’ He could barely muster any interest.
Isobel was not dissuaded. ‘Listen, Rob. The Book. That’s what these bastards are looking for, right? The Black Book? They are absolutely desperate. And you’ve told them you can find it, or you’ve found it, or whatever, to keep them going…Correct?’
‘Yes, but…Isobel we haven’t got it. We have no idea where it is.’
‘But that’s it! Imagine if we do find it. If we do locate the Black Book then we’ve got some real leverage over them, haven’t we? We can…swap…negotiate…you see my meaning?’
Rob assented gruffly. He wanted to be energized and excited by this phone call. But he felt so tired.
Isobel talked on. As she did, Rob wandered barefoot through the flat, cradling the phone under his chin. Then he sat at his desk and gazed at the shining laptop. There was no email from Cloncurry. No new email, at least.
Isobel was still talking; Rob tried to focus. ‘Isobel, I’m not with you. Sorry. Say again?’
‘Of course…’ She sighed. ‘Let me explain. I think they-the gang-might be barking up the wrong tree. Vis à vis the book.’
‘Why?’
‘I’ve been doing some research. We know, at one point, the gang were interested in Layard. The Assyriologist, who met the Yezidi. Correct?’
A dim memory wafted across Rob’s distractions. ’The break-in, at the school, you mean?’
‘Yes.’ Isobel’s voice was crisp now. ‘Austen Henry Layard, who instigated the Nineveh Porch. At Canford School. He is famous for meeting the Yezidi. In 1847.’
‘OK…we know that…’
‘But the truth is he met them twice! He met them again in 1850.’
‘Rrright…so…’
‘It’s all in this book I’ve got-I’ve only just remembered. Here. The Conquest of Assyria. Here’s what it says: Layard went to Lalesh in 1847. As we know. Then he returned to Constantinople and there he met the British ambassador to the Sublime Porte.’
‘Sublime…’
‘Porte. The Ottoman Empire. The ambassador was called Sir Stratford Canning. And that’s when it all changes. Two years later, Layard goes back to the Yezidi again-and this time is met with inexplicable triumph, and he finds all the antiquities that made him famous. And all this is true. It’s in the history books. So you see…?’