Tom Knox - The Genesis Secret

'There's the Star,' said Boijer.

He was right. Forrester walked around and looked at the front of the corpse. A Star of David had been gouged into the man's chest; the wound looked even deeper and nastier than the torture inflicted on the janitor.

'Fuck,' Forrester said, again.

Standing next to him, Hayden smiled, for the first time this morning. 'Well,' he said, 'I'm glad you feel the same way. I thought it was just us.' Three hours later Forrester and Boijer were sharing plastic cups of coffee in the big tent at the front of the mansion. The local cops were arranging a press conference, in the 'fort'. The two Met officers were alone. The corpse had finally been moved, after thirty-six hours, to the coroner's lab in town.

Boijer looked at Forrester. 'Not sure the natives are very friendly.'

Forrester chuckled. 'I think they had their own language until…last year.'

'And cats.' said Boijer, blowing cool air across his coffee. 'Isn't this the place where they have those cats without tails?'

'Manx cats. Yep.'

Boijer stared out through the flapping open doorway of the police tent, at the big white building. 'What would our gang be doing out here?'

'Christ knows. And why the same symbol?' Forrester knocked back some more coffee. 'What more do we know about the victim? You spoke to the scene of crime guy?'

'Yacht designer. Working upstairs.'

'On a Sunday?'

Boijer nodded. 'Yep. Usually the place is deserted, at weekends. But he was working his day off.'

'So he just got unlucky?'

Boijer swept his blonde Finnish hair back from his blue Finnish eyes. 'Like the guy in Craven Street. Probably heard a noise.'

'Then came downstairs. And our lovely killers decided to cut him up, then stick his head in the ground like a croquet hoop. Till he died.'

'Not very nice.'

'What about the CCTV?'

'Nothing.' Boijer shrugged. 'The woodentop told me they'd drawn a blank on the cameras, all of them. Zip.'

'Of course. And the prints and footwear marks. They'll get nothing. These guys are insane, but not stupid. They are the opposite of stupid.'

Forrester stepped outside the tent and gazed up at the house, blinking away the soft drizzle that was now falling. The building was dazzling white. Newly painted. Quite a landmark for local sailors. High and white and castellated, right above the jetty and the port. He scanned the battlements and scrutinized the sash windows. He was trying to work out what linked an eighteenth century house in London with what looked like an eighteenth century house in the Isle of Man. But then something struck him. Maybe it wasn't. He squinted. There was just something wrong with this building. It wasn't the real deal-Forrester knew enough about architecture to surmise that. The brickwork was too neat, the windows all recent-no more than ten or twenty years old. The building was evidently a pastiche, and not an especially good one. And, he decided, it was possible the killers knew this. The modern interior of the modern house was entirely undisturbed. Only the gardens had been dug up. The gang had obviously been looking for something, again. But they weren't looking in the house. Only the garden. Apparently, they knew where to look. Apparently, they knew where not to look.

Apparently, they knew quite a lot.

Forrester turned his collar up against the chilly drizzle.

It was just getting dark by the time they climbed into Christine's Land Rover. Rush hour. Within a few hundred metres the car had come to complete stop. Stuck in gridlock.

Christine leaned back, and sighed. She turned the radio on, and then off. Then looked at Rob. 'Tell me more about Robert Luttrell.'

'Such as?'

'Job. Life. You know…'

'It's not that interesting.'

'Try me.'

He gave her a brief resume of the last decade. The way he and Sally had rushed into marriage and parenthood; the discovery she was having an affair; the ensuing and inevitable divorce.

Christine listened, keenly. 'Are you still angry about it?'

'No. It was me, as well. I mean-it was partly my fault. I was always away. And she got lonely…And I still admire her, kind of.'

'Sorry?'

'Sally,' he said. 'She's training to be a lawyer. That takes guts. As well as brains. To change your career in your thirties. I admire that. So it's not like I hate her or anything…' He shrugged. 'We just…diverged. And married too young.'

Christine nodded, then asked about his American family. He sketched in his Scots-Irish background, the emigration to Utah in the 1880s. The Mormonism.

The Land Rover at last moved forward. Rob looked across at her. 'And you?'

The traffic was really thinning out. She floored the pedal, accelerated. 'Jewish French.'

Rob had guessed this by the name. Meyer.

'Half my family died in the Holocaust. But half didn't. French Jews did OK, in the war, comparatively.'

'And your mum and dad?'

Christine explained that her mother was an academic in Paris, her dad a piano tuner. He had died fifteen years back. 'In fact,' she added, 'I'm not sure he did much piano tuning even when he was alive. He just sat around the flat in Paris. Arguing.'

'Sounds like my dad. Except my dad was a bastard, too.'

Christine glanced over at him. The sky behind her, framed by the car window, was purple and sapphire. A spectacular desert twilight. They were well outside Sanliurfa now. 'You said your father was a Mormon?'

'He is.'

'I went to Salt Lake City once.'

'Yeah?'

'When I was in Mexico, working at Teotihuacan, I took a holiday in the States.'

Rob laughed. 'In Salt Lake City?'

'Utah.' She smiled. 'You know. Canyonlands. Arches Park.'

'Ah.' He nodded. 'That makes more sense.'

'Marvellous scenery. Anyway we had to fly through SLC…'

'The most boring big town in America.'

An army truck overtook the Land Rover, with Turkish troops hanging casually out the back, shadowy in the dusk. One of them waved and grinned when he saw Christine, but she ignored him. 'It wasn't New York, but I quite liked it.'

Rob thought about Utah, and Salt Lake City. His only memories of SLC were of dreary Sundays, going to the big Mormon cathedral. The Tabernacle.

'It's funny,' Christine added. 'People laugh at the Mormons. But you know what?'

'What?'

'Salt Lake City is the only big town in America where I have felt perfectly safe. You can walk down the street at 5 a.m. and no one's going to mug you. Mormons don't mug people. I like that.'

'But they eat terrible food…and wear polyester slacks.'

'Yes, yes. And some towns in Utah you can't even buy coffee. The drink of the devil.' Christine quietly smiled. The desert air was warm through the open window of the Land Rover. 'But I'm serious. Mormons are nice. Friendly. Their religion makes them that way. Why do atheists sneer at people of faith, when faith makes you nicer?'

'You're a believer, right?'

'Yes.'

'I'm not.'

'I guessed.'

They laughed.

Rob leaned back, scanning the horizon. They were passing a concrete shack he'd seen before. Plastered with posters of Turkish politicians.

'Isn't this near the turning?'

'Yes. Just up ahead.'

The car slowed as they neared their junction. Rob was thinking about Christine's belief: Roman Catholicism, she had said. He was still confused by this. He was still confused by a lot of things about Christine Meyer: like her love for Sanliurfa, despite the local, very patriarchal attitude to women.

The Land Rover swerved off the asphalt. Now they were rattling along the rubbled track, in real darkness. The headlights picked out stray bushes, and bare rocks. Maybe a gazelle, skittering into the gloom. A tiny village, illuminated by a few straggly lights, twinkled on the side of a hill. Rob could just make out the spear of a minaret in the shrouding twilight. The moon was just rising.