Tom Knox - The Genesis Secret

'Thanks, Dr Edwards.'

'Please. As I said, call me Janice. You've been coming here six months.'

'Thanks, Janice.'

She smiled. 'I'll see you next week?'

He stood. They shook hands, politely. Forrester felt cleansed and slightly lighter in spirit.

He drove back to Hendon in a calm and pleasantly pensive mood. Another day. He'd got through another day. Without drinking or shouting.

The house was full of his son's noise when he keyed the door. His wife was in the kitchen watching the news on TV. The smell of pasta and pesto wafted through. It was OK. Things were OK. In the kitchen his wife kissed him and he said he'd been to a session and she smiled and seemed relatively content.

Before supper Forrester went outside into the garden and rolled a tiny spliff of grass. He felt no guilt as he did it. He smoked the weed, standing on his patio, exhaling the blue smoke into the starry sky, and sensed his neck-muscles unknotting. Then he went back into the house and lay on the floor of the sitting room and helped his son with a puzzle. And then there was a phone call.

In the kitchen his wife was sieving the penne. Hot steam. The smell of pesto.

'Hello?'

'DCI?'

Forrester recognized his junior's slight Finnish accent immediately. 'Boijer, I'm just about to eat.'

'Sorry, sir, but I got this strange call…'

'Yeah?'

'That friend of mine-Skelding, you know, Niall.'

Forrester thought for a moment, then he remembered: the tall guy who worked on the Home Office murder database. They'd all had a drink once.

'Yeah, I remember. Skelding. Works on HOLMES.'

'That's right. Well he just called me and said they've got a new homicide, the Isle of Man.'

'And?'

'Some guy's been killed. Very nasty. In a big house.'

'Long way away, the Isle of Man…'

Boijer agreed. Forrester watched his wife sauce the penne with the vivid green pesto. It looked slightly like bile; but it smelled good. Forrester coughed impatiently. 'As I said, Boijer, my wife's just made a very nice dinner and I-'

'Yes, sorry, sir, but the thing is, before this guy was killed, the attackers cut a symbol into his chest.'

'You mean…'

'Yes, sir. That's right. A Star of David.'

The day after Franz's supper party Rob rang his ex-wife's home. His daughter Lizzie picked up. She still didn't really know how to use a phone. Rob called into it, 'Darling, use the other end.'

'Hello, Daddy. Hello.'

'Dar…'

Just hearing Lizzie talk gave Rob a stabbing sense of guilt. And also a sheer basic pleasure that he had a daughter. And an angry desire to protect her. And then an extra guilt that he wasn't there, in England, protecting her.

But protecting her from what? She was safe in suburban London. She was fine.

When Lizzie had worked out the right end of the phone, they talked for an hour and Rob promised to send her jpegs of where he was. Then he reluctantly put the phone down and decided it was time to get to work. Hearing his daughter often did this: it was like an instinct, something genetic. The reminder of his family duties energized his work reflex-go and earn some money to feed the offspring. It was time to write his article.

But Rob had a dilemma. Moving the phone from his hotel bed to the floor he lay back and thought. Hard. The story was so much more complex than he had envisaged. Complex and interesting. First there was the politics: the Kurdish/Turkish rivalry. Then the atmosphere at the dig, and amongst the locals: their resentment-and that death prayer…And what about Franz's clandestine late-night digging? What was all that about?

Rob got up and walked to his window. He was on the top floor of the hotel. He opened the window and listened to the sound of a muezzin calling from a mosque somewhere nearby. The song was harsh, barbarous even-yet somehow hypnotic. The inimitable sound of the Middle East. More voices joined the rising carol. The call for prayer echoed across the city.

So what was he going to write for the paper? A part of him strongly wanted to stay and investigate further. Get to the bottom of the story. But what was the point in that, really? Wasn't that just indulging himself? He didn't have forever. And if he included all this odd and perplexing stuff it altered and maybe even ruined his article. At the very least it complicated the narrative-and therefore compromised it. The reader would be left confused, and arguably unsatisfied.

So what should he write? The answer was obvious. If he just stuck to the simple and fairly astonishing historical stuff he would be fine. Man Discovers the World's Oldest Temple. Mysteriously buried two thousand years later…

That was enough. It was a cracking story. And with some striking pictures of the stones and the carvings and an angry Kurd and Franz in his spectacles and Christine in her elegant khakis it would look good, too.

Christine. Rob wondered if his barely suppressed desire to stay and investigate the story further was actually because of her. His barely suppressed desire for her. He wondered if she could tell what he felt. Probably. Women could always tell. Yet Rob never had a clue. Did she even like him? There was that hug…And the way she put her arm through his last night…

Enough. Picking up his rucksack and chucking in pens, notebooks and sunglasses, Rob left his hotel room. He wanted to visit the dig one last time, ask a few more questions, and then he'd have sufficient material. He'd already been here five days. Time to move on.

Outside the hotel Radevan was leaning against his taxi arguing about football or politics with the other cabbies, as ever. He looked up when Rob stepped out into the sunshine, and smiled. Rob nodded. They had a little rigmarole going now.

'I want to go to the bad place.'

Radevan laughed:

'The bad place? Yes, Mr Rob.'

Radevan did his chauffeur thing with the car door and Rob jumped in feeling energetic and determined. He'd made the right choice. Do the piece, invoice for exes-then head back to England and insist on some proper time with his daughter.

The drive to Gobekli was uneventful. Radevan picked his nose and complained loudly about the Turks. Rob stared out across the wastes, towards the Euphrates, the blue Taurus Mountains beyond. He'd come to like this desert, even if it unnerved him. So old, so weary, so malevolent, so stark. The desert of the wind demons. What else was hiding under its shallow hills? A weird thought. Rob stared across the wilderness.

They got there quickly. With a squeal of bald tyres, Radevan parked. He leaned out of the window as Rob walked to the dig. 'Three hours, Mr Rob?'

Rob laughed. 'Yep.'

The dig was frenetic today, busier than Rob had seen it. New trenches were being laid. Deep new gouges into the hills, showing ever more stones. Rob understood that the digging season was coming to an end and Franz was keen to crack on. The digging season was remarkably short-the site was simply too hot in high summer, and too exposed in winter. And anyway the scientists apparently needed nine months of exegesis and laboratory work to process what they had found in the three months of actual digging. That was the archaeological year: three months of spadework, nine months of thinking. Quite relaxed, really.

Franz and Christine and the paleobotanist-Ivan-were having a debate in the tented area. They greeted Rob with a wave and he sat down and more tea was served. Rob liked the endless production line of Turkish tea, the ritual tinkling of spoons and tulip-shaped glasses, the taste of the sweet dark cay. And hot black tea was oddly refreshing in the dry desert sun.

Over his first glass of tea Rob told them his news. That he was finishing up, that this was his last visit. He checked Christine's face as he said this. Did he see a flicker of regret? Maybe. His mood sashayed a little. But then he remembered his job. He had to ask some more questions, his very last queries. That was why he was here. Nothing else.