The Genesis Secret

29

Cloncurry. This was their very last name, and the very best hope. Forrester sorted through the papers and photos on his knee, as the rain spattered the windscreen. He and Boijer were in a hire car in northern France, heading south from Lille. Boijer was driving, Forrester was reading: fast. And hoping they were finally on the right track. It certainly looked good.

They'd spent the last few days talking to headmasters and rectors and student advisors, phoning reluctant doctors in university clinics. Quite a few likely candidates had emerged. A drop-out from Christ Church, Oxford. A couple of expellees from Eton and Marlborough. A schizophrenic student, missing from St Andrews. Forrester had been shocked at the number of students diagnosed as schizophrenic. Hundreds across the country.

But the candidates had all been ruled out, one way or another. The posh Oxford drop-out was in a mental hospital. The St Andrews student was known to be in Thailand. The Eton expellee had died. In the end they had drilled it down to one name: Jamie Cloncurry.

He had all the right credentials. His family was extremely wealthy, and of aristocratic descent. He'd been very expensively schooled at Westminster where his behaviour, according to his housemaster, was eccentric verging on violent. He had beaten another pupil and come perilously close to expulsion. But his academic brilliance had afforded him a second chance.

Cloncurry had then gone to Imperial College in London to study mathematics. One of the finest scientific universities in the world. But this grand opportunity hadn't solved his problems; indeed his wildness had only intensified. He'd dabbled in hard drugs and been caught with call-girls in his Hall of Residence. One of them had reported him to the police for brutality, but the Crown Prosecution Service had dropped the charge on the grounds of an unlikely conviction: she was a prostitute, he a gifted student at a top university.

Crucially, it seemed Cloncurry had gathered around him a number of extremely close friends-Italians, French and American. One of his fellow students said Cloncurry's social circle was 'a weird clique. Those guys worshipped him'. And, as Boijer and Forrester had established, in the last two or three weeks that clique had disappeared. They hadn't been seen at lectures. A concerned sibling had reported her brother as missing. The college had posters of him in the union bar. An Italian kid: Luca Marsinelli.

The young men had left no trace. Their student digs were empty of evidence. No one knew or even especially cared where they had gone. The clique members were disliked. Acquaintances and neighbours were bafflingly vague. 'Students come and go all the time.' 'I thought he'd gone back to Milan'. 'He just said he was taking a holiday.'

At Scotland Yard they had therefore been obliged to make some tough decisions. Forrester's team couldn't follow every lead with equal zeal. Time was running out. The Toyota Landcruiser had been found, abandoned, on the outskirts of Liverpool, the gang having evidently guessed that the car was a liability. The gang had gone to ground, but Forrester knew they would surely strike again, and soon. But where? There wasn't time for speculation. So Forrester had ordered his team to zero in on Cloncurry, the alleged leader.

The Cloncurry family lived, it turned out, in Picardy in Northern France. They had an ancestral home in Sussex, a large flat in London, and even a villa in Barbados. But for some reason they lived in the middle of Picardy. Near Albert. Which was why Forrester and Boijer had caught the first Eurostar this morning from London St Pancras to Lille.

Forrester surveyed the huge and rolling fields, the pinched little woods; the grey and steely sky of northern France. Every so often, one of the hills would be adorned by another British wartime cemetery: a lyrical but melancholy parade of chaste marble headstones. Thousands and thousands of graves. It was a depressing spectacle, not helped by the rain. The trees were in Maytime blossom, but even the blossom was wilted and helpless in the relentless drizzle.

'Not the most attractive part of France, is it, sir?'

'Hideous,' Forrester answered. 'All these cemeteries.'

'Lots of wars here, right?

'Yes. And dying industries. That doesn't help.' He paused, then said, 'We used to come here on holiday.'

Boijer chuckled. 'Nice choice.'

'No not here. What I mean is we used to go camping in the south of France, when I was a kid. But we couldn't afford to fly, so we had to drive all the way down through France. From Le Havre. And we used to come through here, through Picardy. Past Albert and the Somme and the rest of it. And every time I would cry. Because it was so bloody ugly. The villages are so ugly because they were all rebuilt after the Great War. In concrete. Millions of men died in these wet fields, Boijer. Millions. In Flanders Fields.'

'I guess so.'

'I think the Finns were still living in igloos at the time.'

'Yes, sir. Eating moss.'

The two men laughed, quite laddishly. Forrester needed some light relief. The Eurostar journey had been equally sombre: they'd used the hours to go over the pathology reports one more time. To see if they'd missed anything. But nothing had jumped out at them. It was just the same chilling scientific analysis of the wounds. Extensive haemorrhage. Stab wound in the fifth intercostal. Death by traumatic asphyxia.

'Think this is it,' said Boijer.

Forrester checked the sign: Ribemont-sur-Ancre. 6km. 'You're right. This turn-off.'

The car swerved onto the slip road, scything through gathered pools of rainwater. Forrester wondered why it rained so much in north-east France. He remembered stories of Great War soldiers drowning in mud, literally drowning in their hundreds and thousands, in the churned wet rainy mud. What a way to die. 'And take a right here.'

He checked the address of the Cloncurrys. He'd rung the family and got their agreement to an interview just a day ago. The mother's voice was cold and slightly quavery on the phone. But she had given him instructions. Go past the rue Voltaire. A kilometre further on. Then take the left, towards Albert. 'Take this left…'

Boijer swung the wheel and the hire car crunched through a rutted puddle; the road was virtually a farm track.

Then they saw the house. It was large and impressive, shuttered and dormered, with a severely sloping roof in the French style. But it was also sombre, dark and oppressive. An odd place to come and live.

Jamie Cloncurry's mother was waiting for them at the end of the wide, looping driveway. Her accent was icily posh. Very English. Her husband was just inside the door, in an expensive tweed jacket and corduroys. His socks were bright red.

In the sitting room a maid served coffee. Mrs Cloncurry sat opposite them, with her knees pressed tightly together. 'So, Inspector Forrester. You wish to talk about my son Jamie…'

The interview was painful. Stilted and laborious. The parents claimed they had lost control of Jamie in his mid teens. By the time he reached university they had lost all contact, too. The mother's mouth twitched, very slightly, as she discussed Jamie's 'problems'.

She blamed drugs. And his friends. She confessed she blamed herself, as well, because they had sent him to boarding school-to be a boarder at Westminster. This had increased the young man's isolation within the family. 'And so he with-drew from us. And that was that.'

Forrester was frustrated. He could tell where the interview was going. The parents knew nothing: they had practically disclaimed their son.

As Boijer took over the questioning, the DCI scanned the large and silent sitting room. There were many family photos-of the daughter, Jamie's sister. Photos of her on holiday, on a pony, or at her graduation. Yet no photos of the son. Not one. And there were family portraits too. A military figure: a Cloncurry from the nineteenth century. A viscount in the Indian Army. And an admiral. Generations of distinguished forebears were staring from the walls. And now possibly-probably-there was a murderer in the family. A psychotic killer. Forrester could feel the shame of the Cloncurrys. He could feel the pain of the mother. The father was practically silent during the interview.

The two hours passed with elaborate slowness. At the end Mrs Cloncurry escorted them to the door. Her piercing blue eyes stared into Forrester, not at him, but into him. Her aquiline face matched the photo of Jamie Cloncurry that Forrester had already sourced from the Imperial College student records. The boy was handsome, in a high cheek-boned way. The mother must have once been beautiful; she was still as thin as a model.

'Inspector,' she said, as they stood at the door. 'I wish I could tell you that Jamie didn't do these…these terrible things. But…but…' She fell quiet. The husband was still hovering behind his wife, his red socks glowing in the gloom of the hallway.

Forrester nodded and shook the woman's hand. At least they'd had their suspicions all but confirmed. But they weren't any nearer finding Jamie Cloncurry.

They scrunched to the car. The rain had finally relented, at least a little. 'So we know it's him,' said Forrester, climbing in.

Boijer keyed the engine. 'Reckon so.'

'But where the fuck is he?"

The car sludged through the damp gravel onto the winding road. They had to negotiate the narrow streets of the village to get to the autoroute. And Lille. On the way through Ribemont, Forrester spotted a little French cafe, a humble brasserie: its lights were inviting in the drizzly greyness.

'Shall we get some lunch?'

'Yes, please.'

They parked in the Place de la Revolution. An enormous and morbid memorial, to the Great War dead, dominated the silent square. This tiny village, Forrester reckoned, must have been right in the middle of the fighting during the war. He imagined the place during the height of the Somme offensive. Tommys loitering by the brothels. Wounded in ambulances racing to the tented hospitals. The ceaseless boom of the shelling, a few miles away.

'It's a funny place to live,' said Boijer. 'Isn't it? When you're so rich. Why live here?'

'I was wondering the same.' Forrester stared at the nobly agonized figure of a wounded French soldier, immortalized in marble. 'You'd think if they wanted to live in France, they'd live in Provence or somewhere. Corsica. Cannes. Somewhere sunny. Not this toilet.'

They walked to the cafe. As they pressed the door Boijer said, 'I don't believe it.'

'What do you mean?'

'I don't buy the weeping mother bit. I don't think they are ignorant as they say. There's something strange about it all.'

The cafe was virtually deserted. A waiter came over, wiping his hands on a grubby towel.

'Steak frites?' said Forrester. He had just enough French to order food. Boijer nodded. Forrester smiled at the waiter. 'Deux steak frites, s'il vous plait. Et un biere pour moi, et un…?'

Boijer sighed. 'Pepsi.'

The waiter said a curt merci. And disappeared.

Boijer checked something on his BlackBerry Forrester knew when his junior was having bright ideas because he stuck his tongue out like a schoolboy working on a sum. The DCI sipped his beer as Boijer Googled. Finally the Finn sat back. 'There. Now that's interesting.'

'What?'

'I Googled the name Cloncurry and Ribemontsur-Ancre. And then I Googled it with just Ancre.'

'OK…'

Boijer smirked, a hint of victory on his face. 'Get this, sir. A Lord Cloncurry was a general in the First World War. And he was based near here. 1916.'

'We know that the family has a military back-ground-'

'Yes, but…' Boijer smile's widened. 'Listen to this.' He read a note he had scrawled on the paper tablecloth. 'During the summer of 1916 Lord Cloncurry was notorious for his grotesquely wasteful attacks on impregnable German positions. More troops died under his command, proportionately, than under any other British general in the entire war. Cloncurry subsequently became known as the Butcher of Albert.'

This was more interesting. Forrester eyed his junior.

Boijer lifted a finger, and quoted: '"Such was the carnage under Cloncurry's leadership, sending wave after wave of infantry into the pitiless machine-gun fire of the well-trained, well-armed Hanover Division, his tactics were compared, by several historians, to the futility of…human sacrifice".'

The cafe was dead quiet. Then the door rattled as a customer stepped inside, shaking the rain from his umbrella.

'There's more,' said Boijer. 'There's a link from that entry. With a curious result. It's in Wikipedia.'

The waiter set two plates of steak frites on the table. Forrester ignored the food. He stared hard at Boijer. 'Go on.'

'Apparently during the war they were digging up trenches or something, or mass graves maybe…anyway, they found another site of human sacrifice. An iron age site. Celtic tribes. They found eighty skeletons.' Boijer quoted again. '"All headless, the skeletons had been piled up and tangled together along with weapons".' Boijer looked up at his boss. 'And the bodies were contorted into unnatural positions. It's apparently the biggest site of human sacrifice in France.'

'Where is this?'

'Here, sir. Right here. Ribemont-sur-Ancre.'