Cloncurry grinned. ‘Anyway, you get the picture. You know what I want. You’ve realized I have Lizzie and that I’m keeping her alive for just one reason, and one reason only-I want the Black Book-and I know you know where it is Rob, because Isobel told me that you know. She told me what happened in Lalesh. We had to cut one of her ears off to elicit the info, but she told us. I ate the ear. No I didn’t. I fed it to the chickens. No I didn’t. Who gives a flying fig? Point is: she told us everything. She told us you sent her here to get the Book, because you can’t come yourself, because the local police chappie, that stylish Mr Kiribali, will put you in jail. So you sent Isobel Previn to do the job. Unfortunately I was here already and I scooped her liver out and cooked it up á la Provençale. So now, Rob, you have one more day. My patience is running out. Where is the Book? Haran? Mardin? Sogmatar? Where is it? Where was Isobel going? We tortured her as much as we could but she was a brave old lesbian and wouldn’t give us that final clue. So I need to know. And if you don’t tell me within twenty-four hours, then it’ll be little Lizzie’s turn for the jam-jars, I’m afraid. Because my patience will have snapped.’ He nodded, soberly. ‘I’m a reasonable man, as you know, Robbie, but don’t let my obvious kindness deceive you. Truth be told, I do have a bit of a temper, and I can sometimes get…snitty. Now I’m talking to you, Sally, yes you, the ex-Mrs Luttrell, dear weeping Sally-I can see you, peeping over the camera with your little piggy eyes, Sally, are you listening? Stop crying, you liquidizing whore. One day is what you’ve got, twenty-four little hours, to think it all over, and then, well then your daughter gets shoved in a jar and buried alive. So I expect to hear from you very soon.’ He leaned towards the camera switch. ’Or it’s pickling time.’
45
The videolink fizzed and shut down. Sally had retreated to the sofa, once more, and was quietly crying. Rob went over and out an arm around her.
It was Christine who got it together first. She dried her eyes and said, ‘So. We know he’s in Urfa. That means Cloncurry must have been thinking along the same lines as…’ she sighed, profoundly, ‘as poor Isobel.’
‘You mean the Austen Layard theory?’ asked Rob.
‘Surely. What else? Cloncurry must have reached the same conclusion concerning the Book. So I guess he flew to Kurdistan, with Lizzie, in that private plane.’
Forrester nodded. ‘Yup. Might have been doing it for months. False name, etc. We’ll get onto Turkish air traffic control.’
Rob shook his head. ‘You don’t know Kurdistan! If Cloncurry is clever-and he is-then he could have landed almost unnoticed. In some areas the Turks barely have control. And of course he could have flown to Iraqi Kurdistan and crossed the border. It’s a huge and lawless region. Not exactly Suffolk.’
Sally made an imploring gesture. ‘So what do we do?’
‘We look here. We look in Ireland,‘ said Christine.
‘Sorry?’
‘The Black Book. It’s not in Urfa. I think poor Isobel was wrong. I think the Book is still here.’
The policemen exchanged glances. Rob frowned.
‘How come?’
‘I had several days in a wardrobe to think about the Black Book. And I know the Layard story. But I reckon Layard was just buying off the Yezidi with money and that was why he returned. So I reckon that’s a dead end.’
‘So where is it, then?’
‘Let’s go outside,’ she said. ‘I need fresh air to think it through. Just give me a few minutes.’
Obediently, they trooped out of the office and took the steel lift to the ground floor and exited into the mild summer air. The Dublin sky was now bluish and pale; the breeze was gentle off the river. Tourists were staring at an old boat moored by the quays. A strange parade of gaunt bronze statues blocked half the pavement. The group walked slowly down the quayside.
Dooley pointed to the statues. ‘Memorial for the Famine. Starvelings from the Famine would queue on these docks, waiting for boats to New York.’ He turned and gestured at the shiny new office buildings and the glittery glass atria: ranked along the quays. ‘And all that used to be brothels and wharves and terrible slums, the old red light district. Monto. Where James Joyce went whoring.’ He paused, then added, ‘Now it’s all fusion bistros.’
‘All is changed, changed utterly…’ murmured Christine. And then she went very quiet.
Rob looked at her and could tell at once that she knew something. Her fine mind was engaged.
They stopped at a glamorous new footbridge and watched the grey river water surging torpidly to the Irish Sea.
Then Christine asked Forrester to tell her again the strange word De Savary had written just before he died.
‘“Undish”.’
‘Undish?’ said Rob, bemused.
‘Yeah. Spelled as it sounds. U N D I S H.’
The group was silent. A few seagulls cawed. Sally asked the question that hovered between them. ‘What the hell does undish mean?’
‘We don’t have any idea,’ Forrester replied. ‘It’s got some musical connection but that doesn’t seem relevant.’
Rob observed Christine and saw that she was half smiling. Then she said, ‘James Joyce! That’s it. James Joyce. That’s the answer.’
Rob frowned. ‘I don’t see the relevance.’
‘That’s what Hugo was talking to me about, that was the last thing he said to me, before the gang arrived. In Cambridgeshire.’ She was talking fast, and walking just as fast-towards the footbridge. ‘When I last saw him-De Savary-he said he had a new theory. About the Whaley evidence, the Black Book. And he mentioned Joyce.’ She looked at Rob. ‘And he knew that I was trying to get you to read Ulysses or Portrait-’
‘Without much luck!’
‘Sure. But, still. I’ve been thinking about this while I was imprisoned. And now…Undish.’ She snatched a pen from her handbag and scrawled the word on an opened notebook.
UNDISH.
She looked down at the handiwork. ‘Undish undish undish. There’s no such word. But that’s because De Savary was trying to deceive the killers.’
‘What?’
‘If he’d written the whole word they might have seen it and Cloncurry would have worked it out. He couldn’t have known if they were coming back. So instead he wrote a nonsense word. But a nonsense word that he reckoned someone might work out. Maybe you, Rob. If you ever heard it.’
Rob shrugged. ‘Still don’t get it.’
‘Of course not. You never did read Joyce, despite my enthusiasm! And you’d need to know the books well. Hugo and I loved talking about Joyce. Endless discussions.’
Dooley interrupted impatiently, ‘All right then, so what does undish mean?’
‘It doesn’t mean anything. But it just needs one letter to complete it. The letter T. Then it becomes…’ She scrawled an extra letter next to the word on her notebook and showed it to them. ‘Tundish!’
Rob sighed. ‘That’s great, Christine. But who or what’s a tundish? How the hell does that help Lizzie?’
‘It’s not a common word. It occurs only once, as far as I know, in major English literature. And that’s the point. Because the passage in which it occurs is in Joyce’s first masterpiece. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. And I think there may be a serious clue in there. To help us.’ She looked at the faces all around her. ‘Remember that Joyce knew more about Dublin than any man. He knew everything: every legend, every scrap of information, every tiny anecdote, and he poured them into his books.’
‘OK,’ said Rob, dubiously.
‘Joyce would have known every secret and myth about the Irish Hellfires. And what they did.’ Christine snapped her notebook shut. ‘So I’m guessing that passage might just tell us where to find what we need, to save Lizzie.’ She stared across the river. ‘And there, I believe, is a bookshop.’