Rob leapt on the gang-leader, lodging a knee on Cloncurry’s uninjured shoulder so that he couldn’t move. Now he had Cloncurry at his mercy. He could hold him here as long as he liked.

But Rob had no intention of showing mercy.

‘Your turn,’ said Rob.

He reached into his pocket for his Swiss Army knife. Slowly and carefully he unclasped the biggest blade and twisted it in the air for a moment, then he looked down.

Rob found himself smiling. He was wondering what to do first, how to torture and maim Cloncurry so that it would cause the maximum pain, before the killer’s inevitable death. Stab him in the eye? Carve off an ear? Slit the scalp open? What? But as Rob lifted the knife, he saw something in Cloncurry’s leering expression. A kind of shared and exultant shame, a hopeful yet defiant evil. The bile of revulsion rose in Rob’s throat.

Shaking his head, Rob closed the knife and put it back in his pocket. Cloncurry wasn’t going anywhere: he was bleeding to death right here. His leg was shattered, his hand was gone, the arm was hanging off. He was unarmed, and mutilated, dying from the shock of the pain and blood-loss. Rob didn’t need to do anything.

Rolling off the killer, Rob turned to his daughter.

He ungagged her immediately. She cried out Daddy daddy daddy and then she said Christine! and Rob turned, ashamed. He’d quite forgotten Christine in his urge to save Lizzie; but Christine was saving herself, and a moment later Rob reached down to the waters to grab her hand and help her out of the surging water. He hauled her up onto the dust, and she lay there, panting.

Then Rob heard a noise. Turning, he saw Cloncurry dragging himself along in the dust, creaking and slow, his half-severed arm hanging at his side, the wound in his thigh gaping wide and raw. As he crawled, he left a trail of blood behind him. He was heading straight for the water.

He was going to make the last sacrifice: suicide. Jamie Cloncurry was going to drown himself. Rob watched, transfixed and appalled. Cloncurry was at the water’s edge now. With a grunt of great pain he hauled himself the final yard, and then he flopped down into the scummy cold waves with a great splash. For a moment his head bobbed amongst the grinning skulls, and his bright eyes stared straight at Rob.

And then he sank beneath the waves. Gently spiralling down, to join the bones of his ancestors.

Christine sat upright, shaking her phone, making sure it was still working. At last, miraculously, she got a signal and rang Sally and began telling her the good news. Rob listened, half-dazed, halfhappy, half-dreaming. He found himself scanning the horizon and did not know why. Then, a minute later, he realized why he was scanning the horizon.

There were police cars speeding across the dust, negotiating their way between the fingers of floodwater. A few moments later the hilltop was alive with policemen and officers and soldiers-and there was Kiribali. In his dustless suit, wearing a wide bright smile. He was snapping orders into his radio, and pointing directions to his men.

Rob sat on the sand and hugged his daughter close.

50

Two hours later they drove slowly back to Sanliurfa. Rob and Christine and Lizzie were wrapped in blankets in the back of the biggest police car, one of a long convoy of police vehicles.

Evening was falling. Rob’s clothes were drying in the desert warmth, the fine mellow breeze whistling through the car windows. The last rays of sun were streaks of crimson against the purple and black of the darkening west.

Kiribali was in the passenger seat in the front of the car; he turned and looked at Rob, and at Christine, and then he smiled at Lizzie. He said to Rob, ‘Cloncurry was of course paying the Kurds all along. Paying more than us, paying more than you. We had known something was up for a while. The Breitner murder, for instance. The Yezidi didn’t mean to kill him, just frighten him. But he was killed. Why? Someone had persuaded the men at the dig to…go that extra mile. Your friend Cloncurry.’

‘OK. And then…?’

Kiribali sighed, and flicked some dust from his shoulder. ‘I have to confess, we didn’t know anything for a time. We were perplexed and confounded. But then I got a call, very recently, from your excellent policemen at Scotland Yard. But we were still in the pickle, Robert. Because we didn’t know where you were.’ Kiribali smiled. ‘And then Mumtaz! The little one, he came to me. He told us everything, just in time. It is always so good to have…contacts.’

Rob looked at Kiribali, barely registering what he was saying. Then he looked down at his hands. They were still slightly rusty with dried blood: Cloncurry’s blood. But Rob didn’t care, he didn’t give a damn: he had saved his daughter’s life! That was all that mattered. Rob’s thoughts were a jangle of anxiety and relief and a weird bruising joy.

They drove on, quietly. And then Kiribali spoke again. ‘You do know I am going to take the parchment, with the map, don’t you? And the skull. I shall take that too. The whole Black Book.’

‘Where are you going to put them?’

‘With all the other evidence.’

‘You mean the museum vaults.’

‘Of course. And we have changed the keycode!’

A large police van overtook them, its brake lights ruby in the dusk.

‘Please understand,’ said Kiribali. ‘You are safe. That is good. We shall hold the Kurds for a while, then let them go. Radevan and his foolish friends.’ He smiled urbanely. ‘I shall let them go because I have to keep the peace here. Between the Turks and the Kurds. But everything else will be locked away, forever.’

The car drove on. The warm evening air was delicious as it breezed through the windows: sweet and soft. Rob inhaled and exhaled; he stroked his daughter’s hair. She was half asleep now. And then Rob noticed that they were passing the Gobekli turn off. It was just visible in the rising moonlight.

Rob hesitated. Then he asked Kiribali if they could go and look at Gobekli Tepe, one last time.

Kiribali asked the driver to stop the car, and he gazed across at Rob and Christine and Lizzie. The two girls were asleep: the policeman’s smile was indulgent. He nodded, and radioed the other vehicles-informing them that they would all meet later, in Urfa. Then the driver turned the car and drove off-road.

It was the same familiar route. Over the shallow hills, past the Kurdish villages with their open sewers and straying goats and minarets floodlit a lurid green. A dog yapped, and chased the car. It chased them for a half a mile, then ran off into the gloom.

They drove further into the darkness. Then they crested the rise and were on the low hill, overlooking the temple. Rob got out of the police car, leaving Lizzie with her head laid in Christine’s lap; both of them asleep.

Kiribali got out too. Together, the two men strolled the rolling path that led to the temple.

‘So,’ said Kiribali. ‘Tell me.’

‘Tell you what?

‘What you were doing in the valley? The Valley of Killing?’

Rob thought for a moment, and then he explained, tentatively. He gave a brief outline of the Genesis Secret, the most cursory sketch. But it was enough to intrigue: in the moonlight Rob could see Kiribali’s eyes widening.

The detective smiled. ‘And you believe you understood? That you really worked it all out?’

‘Maybe…But we don’t have any photos. It was all lost in the flood. No one would believe us. So it doesn’t matter.’

Kiribali sighed, rather cheerfully. They had reached the top of the little hill, by the single mulberry tree. The megaliths were visible, casting a shadow by moonshine. Kiribali slapped Rob on the back. ‘My writer friend. It matters to me. You know I love English literature. Tell me what you think…Tell me the Genesis Secret!’