The puzzle yielded. The Hellfire Club was obviously crucial. But precisely who or what were they?

As far as Forrester could tell from Google, the Hellfire Club, in both Ireland and England, was a secret society of upper class ne’er-do-wells. But that was all. They were unsavoury and dangerous, maybe, indulged and hedonistic certainly; but truly Satanic and murderous? Most historians reckoned they were little more than a drinking club which sometimes got a little ribald. The rumours of devil worship were largely dismissed.

That said, there was one expert who disagreed. Forrester scribbled the name on a pad. A professor Hugo De Savary, at Cambridge University no less, reckoned that the Hellfires were serious occultists. Though he had been ridiculed for his views.

But even if De Savary was right it still didn’t answer the rest of the awkward questions. What were the gang looking for? Why were they digging stuff up? How was it connected with the Hellfires? What was the point in turning over lawns and cellars? Were they seeking treasure? Demonic gewgaws? Old bones? Cursed diamonds? Sacrificed children? Forrester’s mind was fizzing-a little too much. He had done enough for one morning. He had done well. He felt as if he had finally gathered all the main jigsaw pieces, or someone had tipped them all in his lap. The only problem was that he had lost the box and couldn’t see the lid. So he didn’t know what the jigsaw pieces were meant to represent, he didn’t have a clue what picture he was trying to recreate. Still, at least he had the pieces…

Stifling a yawn, Forrester yanked his jacket from the back of the swivel chair and fed his arms into the sleeves. It was lunchtime. He’d earned a nice lunch-Italian maybe. Penne arrabiata at the trattoria down the road. With some good tiramisu to follow, and a nice long read of the sports pages.

On his way out of the office, he glanced down at his desk. His daughter smiled back at him, with her innocent face shining. Forrester paused, feeling a sharpness inside. He looked at the picture of his son, and then again at the picture of his daughter. He thought of her voice. Saying her first real words. Appull-App-ull. App-ull daddy! App-ull…

The pain was sharp. He laid the picture flat on the desk, and stepped through the door.

The first thing he saw was Boijer, breathless and excited.

‘Sir, I think we have something!’

‘What?’

‘ Toyota. The black Toyota.’

‘Where?’

‘Heysham, sir. In Lancashire.’

‘When-’

‘Two days ago.’

Rob and Christine were sitting in the tea-house by the Pool of Abraham. The honeyed stones of the Mevlid Halil mosque were glowing in the morning light: their mellow hues reflected placidly in the water of the fishpond.

They had spent the previous evening researching the Eden theory separately: Christine on the laptop in her flat, Rob in a net café: dividing their time to get more data more quickly. And now they had met to discuss it. They had come here for the anonymity: it felt safer to be sitting amongst the crowds. The strolling friends and off-duty soldiers, the kids eating fried mutton balls with one hand as their mothers gazed at the carp. The only jarring note was a police car parked discreetly at the edge of the tea-gardens.

Rob was remembering how he’d arrived at his solution. They had discussed Genesis when they were in Sogmatar and Haran. And Christine had also mentioned the Adam and Eve legend. This combination must, Rob realized, have triggered memories of his father reciting the Bible; so he had seen how the numbers could be read. Chapter x verse y. Digit followed by digit. But now they had to examine this solution, more deeply, and compare notes on the underlying logic.

‘OK.’ He took a gulp of tea. ‘Let’s go through it again. We know that agriculture began here. The first place in the world. In the area immediately surrounding Gobekli. Sometime around 8000 BC, yup?’

‘Yes. And we know roughly when and where farming began…’

‘Because of the archaeological evidence: “domestication is a shock to the system”. I read that in the book in your flat. The skeletons of people change, they grow smaller and less healthy…’

‘Yyyyes,’ Christine agreed, hesitantly. ‘As the human body adapts to a protein-poorer diet, and a more arduous lifestyle there is certainly a change in skeletal size, in the robustness of the physique. I have seen that in many sites.’

‘So. Early domestication is a trial. Likewise, newly-domesticated animals get scrawnier.’

‘Yes.’

‘But…’ Rob leaned forward. ‘When this domestication happened, in 8000 BC, that was also the time when the local landscape began to alter. Around here. Right?’

‘Yes, the trees were chopped down and the soil leached away and the area became very arid. As it is now. Whereas before, it was…paradisiacal.’ She smiled meditatively. ‘I remember Franz talking about Gobekli as it must have been. He said it was once a prachtvolle Schafferegion-a glorious pastoral region. It was a region of forests and meadows, rich with game, and wild grasses. And then the climate changed, as agriculture took over. And then it became a weary place-that had to be worked ever harder.’

Rob took out his notebook and recited, ‘As God says to Adam: “cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life”. Genesis Chapter 3, verse 17. Three seventeen.’

Christine rubbed her temples with her fingertips. She looked tired, which was unusual for her. But then she shook herself, and pressed on. ‘I have heard this theory before: that the story of Eden is a folk-memory, and an allegory.’

‘You mean, like, a metaphor?’

‘According to some, yes. If you look at it one way the Eden story describes our hunter-gatherer past, when we had time to wander through the trees and pick fruit and gather wild grasses…like Adam and Eve, naked in paradise. And then we fell into farming and life got harder. And so we were expelled from Eden.’

Rob looked at two men holding hands, crossing the bridge over the little rivulet; the bridge that led to the teahouse. ‘But why did we really start farming?’

Christine shrugged. ‘No one knows. It is one of the great mysteries. But it certainly started here. In this corner of Anatolia. The very first pigs were domesticated at Cayonu, that’s just seventy miles away. Cattle were domesticated at Catalhoyuk, to the west.’

‘But how does Gobekli fit in precisely?’

‘That’s a difficult one. It’s a miracle that hunters created such a site. Yet it shows that the life before farming was very leisured. These men, those hunters, they had time to learn the arts, to sculpt, to make exquisite carvings. It was a huge leap forward. Yet they didn’t know how to make pots.’ Christine’s silver crucifix glinted in the sunshine as she spoke. ‘It’s bizarre. And of course sexuality developed, too. There are many erotic images in Gobekli. Animals and men with enlarged phalluses. Carvings of women, splayed and naked women…’

‘Maybe they ate the fruit from the tree of knowledge’? said Rob.

Christine smiled politely. ‘Maybe.’

They were quiet for a moment. Christine turned nervously to her left, as a swarthy policeman patrolled with his radio buzzing. Rob wondered why they were both so paranoid. Neither of them had done anything wrong. But Officer Kiribali had been so sinister. And what about the men staring up at the flat. What was that all about? He dismissed his fears. There was still ground to cover. ’Then there’s the geography?’

‘Yes.’ Christine nodded. ‘The topography. That’s also important.’

‘There aren’t four rivers near Gobekli.’

‘No. Just one. But it’s the Euphrates.’

Rob remembered what he had read in the net café. ‘And scholars have always reckoned that Eden, if it lay anywhere, must have been somewhere between the Tigris and the Euphrates. The fertile crescent. The earliest site of civilization. And the Euphrates is actually mentioned in Genesis, as rising in Eden.’