‘ Jerusalem Whaley. A rake.’

‘A what?’

‘A buck. A roisterer. An upper class thug. You know the kind of thing.’

‘A kind of playboy?’

‘Yes and no.’ Harnaby smiled. ‘We are talking real sadism here, through the generations.’

‘For instance?’

‘Whaley’s father was Richard Chappell Whaley. But the Irish called him “Burnchapel” Whaley.’

‘Because…’

‘He was a member of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy. A Protestant. And he used to burn Irish Catholic churches. With the worshippers inside.’

‘Ask a stupid question.’

‘Well, yes.’ Harnaby grinned. ‘Quite unsavoury! And Burnchapel Whaley was also a member of the Irish Hellfire Club. They were an awful shower of hooligans, even by the standards of the time.’

‘OK. And what about Jerusalem Whaley, his son?’

Harnaby frowned. The room was now so quiet that Forrester could hear the patter of drizzle on the long sash windows.

‘Tom Whaley? He was another Georgian buck. As brutal and reckless as his father. But then something happened. He came back to Ireland after a long journey east to Jerusalem. Hence his nickname: Jerusalem Whaley. When he returned, it seemed that the journey had changed him. It broke him.’

Forrester frowned. ‘How?’

‘All we know is that Jerusalem Whaley returned a very different man. He built this strange castle: St Anne’s Fort. He wrote his memoirs. A surprisingly remorseful book. And then he died. Leaving behind the castle and a lot of debts. But a fascinating life! Absolutely fascinating.’ Harnaby paused. ’Forgive me, Mr Forrester, am I talking too much? I do get carried away sometimes. Bit of a passion of mine, local folklore. I have a radio programme, on local history you see.’

‘Don’t apologize. This is very interesting. I’ve actually only got one more question. Is there anything left of the old building?’

‘Oh, no. No no no. It was all pulled down.’ Harnaby sighed. ‘This was the 1970s! They would have pulled down St Paul ’s Cathedral if they could. Really. Such a shame. A few years later and the building would have been conserved.’

‘So nothing was left?’

‘Yes. Although…’ Harnaby’s face clouded. ’There is something…’

‘What?

‘I’ve often wondered…There is one more legend. Rather odd really.’ Harnaby clutched his plastic bag. ‘I’ll show you!’

The older man waddled to the door and Forrester followed him into the front garden. In the breeze and the cold and the drizzle, Forrester looked left: he could see Boijer by the police tent. The CNN girl was walking past with her crew. Forrester mouthed to Boijer, and pointed at Angela Darvill: talk to her: find out what she knows. Boijer nodded.

Harnaby plodded across the soggy front lawns in front of the castellated house. Where the lawns gave way to hedges and walls, the older man knelt as if he was about to do some gardening. ‘See!’

Forrester crouched alongside and scoped the wet dark earth.

Harnaby smiled. ‘Look! Do you see? The soil is darker here than it is here.’

It was true. The soil seemed to change colour slightly. The soil of the castle lawn was definitely peatier and darker than the soil further from the house. ‘I don’t understand. What is it?’

Harnaby shook his head. ‘It’s Irish.’

‘Sorry?’

‘The soil. It’s not from here. It’s maybe from Ireland.’

Forester blinked. It was raining again, and harder this time. But he took no notice of it. The clockwork of the case was turning over in his mind. Turning over quite fast. ‘Please explain?’

‘Buck Whaley was an impulsive man. He once bet someone he could jump out of a second storey window on a horse and survive. He did it-but the horse died!’ Harnaby chuckled. ‘Anyhow. The story is that he fell in love with an Irish girl, just before he moved here. To Man. But this presented him with a problem.’

‘Which was?’

‘His bride’s marriage contract said she was only ever allowed to live on Irish soil. Yet this was 1786, and Whaley had just bought this house. He was determined to bring his wife here, despite the contract.’ Harnaby’s eyes were twinkling.

Forrester thought about it. ‘What you mean is he shifted tons of Irish soil to live on? So she lived on Irish earth?’

‘In a nutshell. Yes. He shifted a huge boatload of soil to the Isle of Man, and thereby fulfilled his vows. Or so they say…’

Forrester laid a palm on the damp dark earth, now spotted blackly with rain. ‘So the whole building is built on that same Irish earth. This soil here now?’

‘Very possibly.’

Forrester stood up. He wondered if the murderers knew this bizarre story. He had a firm sense they did know. Because they had ignored the building and instead had gone straight for the last possible authentic remnant of Whaley’s Folly. The earth on which it was built.

Forrester had one more question. ‘OK, Mr Harnaby, where would the soil have come from?’

‘No one is entirely sure. However,’ the journalist took off his spectacles to rub some rain from the lenses. ‘However…I did once have a theory-that it came from Montpelier House.’

‘Which is?’

Harnaby blinked. ‘The headquarters of the Irish Hellfire Club.’

Rob and Christine retreated to her neighbourhood. They parked, with a jolt, at the corner of her street. As he climbed down from the Land Rover, Rob looked left and right. At the end of Christine’s street was a mosque, its minarets were slender and lofty, bathed in lurid green floodlighting. Two moustached men in suits were arguing in the shadows down the way, right next to a big black BMW. The men briefly looked at Rob and Christine, then went back to their angry exchange.

Christine led Rob into a dusty hallway of a modern block. The lift was busy, or out of order, so they took three flights of stairs. The apartment was large, airy and bright-and almost devoid of furniture. Neat piles of books were simply stacked on the polished wooden floor, or shelved in their hundreds along one wall. A big steel desk and a leather sofa were set to one side of the living room. A wickerwork chair was in the opposite corner.

‘I don’t like clutter’, she said. ‘A house is a machine for living in.’

‘Le Corbusier.’

She smiled and nodded. Rob smiled too. He liked the flat. It was very…Christine. Simple, intellectual, elegant. He checked out a picture on the wall: it was a large and eerie photograph of a very strange tower. A tower of orange gold bricks surrounded by desultory ruins, with vast tracts of desert beyond.

The two of them sat side-by-side on the leather sofa and Christine got out the book again. As she leafed once more through Breitner’s scrawled pages, Rob had to ask, ‘So. Einkorn wheat?’

But Christine wasn’t listening; she was holding the book very close to her face, ‘This map?’ she said to herself. ‘These numbers…and these here…The woman Orra Keller…Maybe…’

Rob waited for his reply. There was no reply. He felt a breeze in the room: the windows were open to the street outside. Rob could hear voices-out there. He went to the window and stared down.

The moustached men were still hanging around, but now they were standing right beneath Christine’s block of flats. Another man in a dark puffy anorak was lurking in the doorway of the shop opposite: a big Honda motorbike showroom. The two moustached men looked up as Rob leaned out of the window. They stared at him wordlessly. Just looking up at him. The anoraked man was also looking up. Three men were staring at Rob. How menacing was this? Then Rob decided he was being paranoid. The whole of Sanliurfa could not be following them; these men were just…just men. It was just coincidence. He pulled the window to, and looked around the room.

Maybe one of the many books on the shelves could help. He thumbed his way past a few titles. The Syrian Epipaleolithic…Modern Electron Microanalysis…Pre-Columbian Anthropophagy… Not exactly bestsellers. He saw a more general book. Encyclopaedia of Archaeology. Slipping it down from the shelf, he flicked straight to the index and found it right away. Einkorn wheat, page 97.