The Genesis Secret

24

Were they too late? Had they missed them, again?

DCI Forrester gazed across the stone circle at the brown-green moorlands of Cumbria beyond. He recalled another case that had seen a search for clues, in a place like this. A murderer who buried his wife on the Cornish moors. That homicide had been macabre: the head was never found. And yet, even that hideous crime lacked some of the sinister quality of this present mystery. There was a real danger in this sacrificial gang: psychopathic violence allied with subtle intelligence. A menacing combination.

Stepping over a low wooden stile, Forrester focused on his latest evidence. He knew the gang had fled the Isle of Man-just a few hours after the murder. He knew that they'd caught the first car ferry from Douglas to Heysham, on the Lancashire coastline, long before any alert had been sent to ports and airports. He knew all this because an observant docker at Heysham had remembered that he'd seen a black Toyota Landcruiser coming through the port on the earlymorning ferry two days before, and he'd noticed five young men climbing out of the Toyota in the ferryport terminal car park. The men had gone for breakfast together. The docker had gone in for breakfast and sat next to the gang in the cafe.

Forrester approached one elegant grey standing stone, filigreed with lime-green moss. He reached in his pocket for his notebook, and flicked through his record of the interview with the docker. The men were all tall and young. They had expensive clothes. Somehow they didn't look right. The strangeness of this scenario had piqued the young docker's curiosity. Douglas to Heysham was not the most energetic of shipping lanes. The early morning car ferry from Douglas usually got farmers, the odd businessman and maybe some tourists. Five silent tall young men in a very expensive black Landcruiser? So he had tried to chat with them over their bacon and eggs. He hadn't had much luck.

Forrester scanned down the notes. The men didn't want to talk. One of them said a very brief good morning. He maybe had a foreign accent. French or something. Could have been Italian, not sure. One of the others had a posh English accent. Then they just got up and left. As if I had ruined their breakfast.

The docker hadn't taken down a number plate. But he had heard one of them say a word like 'Castleyig' as they walked out of the cafe, in the pale morning light, to their waiting car. Forrester and Boijer had rapidly researched Castleyig. To no one's surprise there was no such place. However, there was a Castlerigg not that far from Heysham. And it was quite well known.

Castlerigg turned out to be one of the better preserved stone circles in Britain. It comprised thirty-eight stones of variable sizes and shapes and was tenuously dated to 3200 BC. It was known also for a group of ten stones forming a rectangular enclosure, the purpose of which was 'unknown'. In his Scotland Yard office, Forrester had Googled 'Castlerigg' and 'human sacrifice' and found a long tradition associating the two. A stone axe had been discovered at the Castlerigg site in the 1880s. Some had surmised that it had been used in a Druidic sacrificial rite. Of course many scientists disputed this. Antiquarians and folklorists maintained that there was no disproof of sacrifice, either. And the tradition of sacred butchery was old. It was even cited by the famous local poet Wordsworth, in the 1800s.

With the Cumbrian breeze at his back, Forrester read through the stanza of the poem. He'd copied it down at Heysham library: At noon I hied to gloomy glades Religious woods and midnight shades Where brooding superstition found A cold and awful horror round While with black arm and bending head She wove a stole of sable thread And hark, the ringing harp I hear And lo! her Druid sons appear Why roll on me your glaring eyes Why fix on me for sacrifice?

It was a warm spring day up here on the Cumbrian hills, the late April sun was shining brightly on the surrounding, bare green hills, the dewy turf, the distant firwoods. And yet something in this poem made Forrester shiver.

'"At noon I hied to gloomy glades",' said Forrester.

Boijer, striding across the grass, looked nonplussed. 'Sir?'

'It's that poem by Wordsworth.'

Boijer smiled. 'Oh yeah. Must admit-didn't recognize it.'

'Likewise,' said Forrester, closing his notebook. The DCI recalled his inner city comprehensive, a struggling young English teacher trying to forcefeed Shakespeare's Macbeth to a bunch of kids more interested in underage drinking, reggae music and shoplifting. An entirely pointless exercise. Might as well teach Latin to astronauts.

'Beautiful place,' said Boijer.

'Yes.'

'Are you sure they came here Sir? To this place?'

'Yes.' said Forrester. 'Where else were they going?'

'Liverpool maybe?'

'No.

'Blackpool?'

'No. And if they were going anywhere else they would have got the ferry to Birkenhead. That leads directly to the motorway. But they came to Heysham. Heysham leads practically nowhere. Except to the Lake District. And here. I can't believe they are doing a pleasant tour of the Lakes. They went to a Viking burial site on Man associated with sacrifice. Then they came here. To Castlerigg. Another place associated with sacrifice. And of course the docker overheard them. They were coming here.'

Boijer and Forrester walked to one of the tallest menhirs. The stone was mottled and patched with lichen. A sign of clear air. Forrester laid a flat palm against the ancient stone. The stone was just slightly warm to his touch. Warmed by the mountain sun, and old, so very old. 3200 BC.

Boijer sighed. 'But what really attracts them to these circles and ruins? What's the point?'

Forrester grunted. It was a good question. A question he had yet to answer. Down in the river valley, beneath the high plateau of Castlerigg, he could see the Cumbrian police squad cars; four of them parked in the sun by a picnic spot, and a couple of other police cars trundling down the narrow lakeland road, trawling the local farmsteads and villages to see if anyone had witnessed the gang. So far they had had no luck. Nothing at all. But Forrester was sure they had visited Castlerigg. It fitted too well. The circle was a notably atmospheric place. And intense. Whoever built this high and lonely circle in the shaved cradle of hills knew something about aesthetics. Feng shui even. The whole circle, standing on its table of dewy grass, was set in a kind of amphitheatre. A theatre in the round. The billowing hills were the terraces, the audience, the bleachers. And the stone circle itself was the stage, the altar, the mise en scene. But a stage-set for what?

Boijer's radio crackled. He pressed the button and talked to one of the Cumbrian officers. Forrester listened in. It was clear from Boijer's expression and his perfunctory words of acknowledgement that the Cumbrian police were still drawing a blank. Maybe the gang hadn't come here after all.

Forrester walked on. A fox was stealing over a field and edging along a copse across the nearest valley: a furtive blur of brushy red. But then the fox turned and gazed behind it, staring directly at Forrester, showing a wild animal's fear and cruelty. Then it was gone, darting into the woodland.

The sky was clouding over: at least partly. Patches of black were scudding across the moorland hills.

Boijer caught up with Forrester. 'You know, sir, we had a weird case in Finland a few years back. Might be relevant.'

'Case of what?'

'It was called the Landfill Murder.'

'Because they buried the body in a dump?.'

'Sort of. It started in October 1998. If I remember right, a man's left leg was found on a dumping ground near a little town called Hyvinkaa. North of Helsinki.'

Forrester was confused. 'Weren't you already living in England by then?'

'Yes, but I followed the news from home. As you do. Especially grisly murders.'

Forrester nodded. 'What happened?'

'Well, the police got nothing at first. Only clue they had was the leg. But then there were suddenly…well, all these headlines…The police claimed they had arrested three people suspected of the murder and they claimed there were indications of satanic worship.'

A wind was kicking up. Whistling across the ancient circle.

'In April 1999 the incident came back into the headlines, when the case went to court. Three kids, young people, were charged. The strange thing is, the judge ordered that the court records should be suppressed for forty years, and all the details kept quiet. Unusual for Finland. But some of the details leaked out, anyway. Horrible stuff. Torture, mutilation, necrophilia, cannibalism. You name it.'

'So who was the victim?'

'A guy of about twenty-three. He was tortured and killed by three of his friends. I think they were all in their early twenties or late teens.' Boijer frowned, trying to remember. 'The girl was 17-she was the youngest. Anyway the murder took place after a bout of drinking. Days of it. Homemade schnapps. Brennivin they call it in Iceland. The Black Death.'

Forrester was interested. 'Describe the murder.'

'He was slowly mutilated with knives and scissors. Killed over a period of many hours. Bits of him were progressively cut off. The judge called it a prolonged human sacrifice. After the victim died the three friends abused the body, ejaculated into his mouth and so on. Then they cut off his head, and I think his legs and arms. And they removed some his internal organs, kidneys and the heart. They dismembered him, basically. And they ate some of the body.'

Forrester was watching a farmer, striding down a country lane, half a mile in the distance. He asked, 'And what does this tell you? I mean, what association do you make with this case?'

His junior shrugged. 'The kids were all Satan worshippers, death metal fans. And they had a history of sacrilege. Church burnings. Desecrating tombs, sort of thing.'

'And?'

'And they were into paganism, ancient sites. Places like this.'

'Though they buried the body in a landfill, not at Stonehenge.'

'Yes. We don't have a Stonehenge in Finland.'

Forrester nodded. The farmer had disappeared behind a rise in the landscape. The ancient standing stones were growing greyer and darker as the clouds covered the sun. Typical lakeland weather-from shining spring sun, to brooding, winter cold in half an hour. 'What were the murderers like? What's the sociology?'

'Definitely middle class. Rich kids even. Certainly not from the fringes.' Boijer zipped up his anorak against the gathering cold. 'Children of the elite.'

Forrester chewed a stalk of grass and regarded his junior. Boijer's bright red anorak brought a fierce and sudden image to Forrester's mind: a body gutted open, unzipped, oozing red blood. Forrester spat the stalk from his mouth.

'Do you miss Finland, Boijer?'

'No. Sometimes…Maybe a little.'

'What d'you miss?'

'Empty forests. Proper saunas. And I miss…cloudberries.'

'Cloudberries?'

'Finland's not very interesting, sir. We have ten thousands words for getting drunk. The winters are too cold, so all you do is drink.' The wind brushed the Finn's blonde hair over his eyes, he swept it back. 'There's even a joke. They tell it in Sweden. About how much the Finns drink.'

'Go on.'

'A Swede and a Finn agree to meet to drink together. They bring several bottles of very strong Finnish vodka. They sit across from each other in perfect silence, and pour glasses of vodka, not speaking. After three hours the Swede fills both glasses and says "Skol". The Finn looks at him in disgust, and asks: "Did we come to talk or did we come to drink?"'

Forrester laughed. He asked if Boijer was hungry and his junior eagerly nodded; with Forrester's assent, Boijer went off to eat his usual tuna sandwich in the car.

The DCI walked on alone, brooding, surveying his surroundings. The forests around here were government owned: Forestry Commission plantations. Strict squares of sterile firs marching across the landscape like Napoleonic regiments. Platoons of birches, marching silently and unobserved. He thought about Boijer's story. The Landfill Murders of Hyvinkaa. Was it possible that the Sacrifice Gang were burying corpses or bones or objects, not digging things up? But nothing appeared to have been buried in Craven Street. And nothing was buried in St Anne's Fort. But had they checked properly?

Forrester had reached the edge of the stone circle. The silent grey menhirs curved away from him on either side. Some seemed to be sleeping: prone and fallen like mighty warriors slain. Some were rigid and defiant. He remembered what he had read about Castlerigg; about the squarish enclosure of 'important but unknown purpose'. If you had come all this way to bury something, this was surely where you would do it-in the most symbolic part of the site. If Castlerigg mattered to you, this was your target.

The detective scanned the circle. It didn't take him long to find the enclosure: a rectangular site marked out by lower stones, besides the most eroded megaliths.

For twenty minutes Forrester examined these lower stones. He padded and prodded at the damp dark soil and the soggy, acidic turf. A soft lakeland rain started to fall. Forrester felt its cold drops on his neck. Maybe he was heading up another cul de sac.

Then he spotted something in the long wet grass: a small line of sliced earth. Dark soil disturbed, then replaced, barely visible to the naked eye-unless you knew what you were looking for. He knelt and dug at the sods with his bare hands. It was unscientific-Forensics would be appalled, but he had to know.

Within seconds his fingers touched something cold and hard-but not a stone. He dislodged the object from its little grave and brushed off the soil. It was a small glass vial. And inside the vial was a very intense-looking liquid the colour of dark red rum.