The Serpent Papers (11 page)

Fabregat swears under his breath as his car chunters down the white dirt path to the place where they have found her. He sees the menagerie of vehicles – the white motorcycles and yellow ambulance, the black-and-blue vans. He catches a glimpse through the windscreen of the distant Christ-figure on the top of the wedding cake temple of the Sacred Heart. Perched at the summit of the range. Arms open, greeting Fabregat.

Smiling down on the forest.

It is not a normal place for Roseanne Aribau to be found. The third victim lived miles away, at a hippy community near Terrassa. She had been reported missing on Friday by her friends, who said she had not returned from a training session conducted in Barcelona. She had taken the
Ferrocarriles
into town on Wednesday, spent two nights in Gràcia and then . . . silence. Her phone did not answer.

Usually she texts. I pick her up at the station. That had been the plan
,
her friend said.

What is her profession? The police asked.

She’s a doula
 – A doula? thought Fabregat. What in hell’s name is that?

A midwife
, someone says.
A new-age midwife.

* * *

To be sure, it had been an animal.

A goat kept by some farmer in the foothills but the suggestion – no, the implications of the prints, in such proximity to the corpse – leaves a sick feeling in the base of the inspector’s stomach. When Fabregat had arrived on the scene, the young
Mosso
on duty was green in the face. When asked what he had seen, the boy revealed that a creature had moved in the shadows that was like a man in shape, but had been too dark to discern. When he had pursued the figure, it had disappeared into the forest and the cadet returned to watch over the body of the girl. Retracing his steps, the cadet had looked down at the ground, where he had noticed beneath her body a muddy print tracked from the puddle in the ditch of the road. The prints, which the cadet had later shown to Fabregat, were not in the shape of a human foot, but the cloven print of a hoof, like that of a ram. Only much larger. The size of a grown man’s shoe.

He blinks.
An apparition. The imagination.

‘I think it was the devil,’ the young officer said, and crossed himself.

But superstition will not get the better of Manel Fabregat.

‘It was a goat. Pull it together,
tío
.’

Later Fabregat lights a cigarette and inhales fiercely. The effect is welcome. He walks to the look-out point, the stone bench on the side of the white dirt track that runs above Barcelona. He scans the hillside.
How would he have approached?

He thinks carefully.

The zigzag cut above Bonanova and Sarrià. By the roundabout.

Is it gated?

Yes.
He remembers.
By a thin metal chain that runs between two wooden posts.

He makes a call to his officers. They check the entry point. Sure enough, the lock of the metal chain that stretches across the turnout has been cut.

The bolt hacked through.

When Fabregat holds the cut metal in his hand, he runs his eyes over the surrounding apartments. A modern development with a swimming pool. Slick gated gardens.
Surveillance cameras.
His eyes light up.
Hope. Someone will have seen him. Vehicles are not meant to pass through here. The headlights would have streaked into their windows.
The investigative team checks all the apartments. A woman comes forward. Around two in the morning, she thinks. A city car pulled up. Lights very low. She could not see the make. It was black, she thinks, or silver . . . the witness says again. That’s not helpful, Fabregat barks. Any licence plate? Any number? The look of disappointment on Fabregat’s face makes the woman blush.
But it is something. It is something to go on.
When they check the camera there is no tape to record on. Fabregat turns purple with rage.
What is the fucking point of a camera if it doesn’t record anything?
He returns to the dark copse at the bend in the white track. Runners have gathered at either side, desperate to complete their daily circuit. Kicking up dust at their heels.

Fabregat says:
No. You cannot pass. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not for a while.

Then he looks up at the trees and asks them:
What have you seen?

As if they would want to tell him.

At first he had been confident that they would find an answer – no killer could commit these atrocities without leaving some piece of himself on the material. Discovery of a suspect was just a question of time, he told his team – keep looking, trace everything, study the ground – the pollen – the mud – their flesh. Look for anything in their gut . . . What had they eaten? What had they drunk? Look for the numbers of coffees they had consumed in a day, when they had last been to the bathroom. Look into their faces, the wounds on their throat and chest, the brutal severing of flesh – what knife had he used? What blade had caused these lacerations in the mouth, the markings of her stomach? In all his career of cleaning marital spats off the kitchen table, responding to rape, armed robberies, burglaries, breaking-and-enterings, pick-pocketing, smuggling and human trafficking, Inspector Fabregat has never worked on a case like this. His previous exposure to manslaughter had (fortunately) come in instances of ones and twos, generally male on female, and most often between two people who knew each other. Crimes of passion in which the perpetrator came forward within days or killed themselves or did any number of peculiar things that did not include (a) returning to kill again, or (b) sending cryptic letters by phantom post that looked like the holdings of the University of Barcelona’s archive of illuminated manuscripts . . . 

He shudders at the thought of the copy of the latest document he had sent to the expert’s desk. It arrived as the others did. Another confessional. Another envelope addressed to Manel Fabregat. Inside:

Serpentarius!

One-who-is-arriving!

Know this:

Nine books of Leaves gave forth this rage of man

Fabregat chews his lip. He smokes ruefully. Barcelona is not famous for its serial killers. Any loco comes here and they get distracted by the beach. Scenes like this? It’s just not in keeping with the atmosphere. On a personal level, it irks him.

Act Two starts quietly. It is the morning of Sant Joan’s Day. The holiday in Barcelona stretches over forty-eight hours. Festivities began on the evening of 23 June with
la Revetlla de Sant Joan
and culiminate now in the sleepy Feast Day, the 24
th
. On this occasion, the sun rises behind the imposing pinnacles of Barcelona’s Cathedral. Dominant spires sprouting from the heart of what was once the walled Roman city Barcino, said to have been founded by Hercules, half man, half god, who loved the girl Pyrene, namesake for the Pyrenees; or perhaps Hamilcar Barca, father of Hannibal, the Carthaginian, built the first structures on Mont Tàber. The Great Cathedral rests here now.
La Catedral de la Santa Creu i Santa Eulàlia.
Gargantuan. Brooding. Product of a fiscal boom, the brainchild of a medieval superpower long since dwindled. Nowhere else in the world are there so many great churches in such close proximity. The thrust of the cathedral feels drunk on power, still famous for exorcisms, exalted soil, stone-plated, façade ornamental, deceptive, a neo-Gothic addition made in the nineteenth century. Hung with the silhouettes of angels peering down on mysteries below. Studying the tourists with their cameras, the covered markets, the beggars and street cleaners, the businessmen in suits, the activists, the strikers, the politicians, the stoners and salesmen of squeaking birds who garble whistles in their mouths and shoot flashing lights into the sky, hoping to entrance a customer. In the night the gargoyles and angels have been gossiping with one another beneath the belfries. Watching something unusual.
Something curious.
Stone eyes gaze on the form of a girl. Laid out on the eleven steps leading to the mouth of the cathedral like an offering to an indifferent god.

Fuck!
the medic whispers, as he pulls the shirt from the female body. Her flesh still warm. The assistant by his side loses his balance, and trips. The medic shouts.
Get up! Get up!

Natalia Hernández?

The world stops for a moment and stares.
Or her double?
The assistant chokes. It might not be her. But they know. Everybody knows. Someone has pulled the hair from her face, leaving sticky marks on her cheek, and her brow, where they have tried to clean the death away. She has been gored in her belly and her chest. Punctured. Many places. She is porous. A quagmire. Her lips fresh-rouged. Mouth a lake of darkness. A policeman retches on the steps.

And yet her face so still?

The medic gives a small prayer under his breath as he inspects her neck.

There are wounds all over this girl. God, he was cruel. Ostres!
The medic whistles. He feels a chill on the air, as if in the presence of ghosts. A nasty icy-frost, even in the heat of summer.
Natalia Hernández.
Retrospectively, people will wonder how they left her there.

They will feel a collective sense of remorse.

She who was so beautiful.

The housewives will read the tabloids with attention.

This the medic knows with certainty as he feels the nothingness of Natalia Hernández’s pulse. She whom they held so tenderly in their hearts.

Across the city, the doorman on Carrer de Muntaner will slam his fist into the desk. He had not known to alert the police that she never came home – Natalia Hernández who always came home at eleven – who never went out later – not even on an opening night.
Hòstia, Santa Maria! Quin horror!
Her hair pristinely coiled at the nape of her neck in a tight bun. Stage make-up thick on her face, and those luminous lips, burst berries against brown skin. Delicate limbs fold like the crumpled hind legs of a colt. Fingers long and curled in a death grip on her chest. Two moles, constellations at the corner of her neck and jaw. And yet she looks serene. Dreaming into herself, she disappears.

Elsewhere, all is not as it seems. As the case unfolds, an investigator brings the media’s attention to Natalia Hernández’s doorman at No. 487, who saw a stranger enter and leave his building that fateful morning, taking the elevator to Natalia’s floor in the lavish apartment complex on leafy Muntaner. Said doorman fails to recognize the man on his departure from the building. The little that he could remember upon questioning was that he was nondescript and sandy-haired, slight features, of an average height. ‘I don’t know, I suppose it could have been anyone. I didn’t see him come in. I assumed he was a romantic friend of one of our inhabitants, leaving after the night.’ At 6.30 a.m. the mystery man is promptly forgotten. Later the doorman will claim he was a ghost – a demon, a spirit – no human could have crept by, not in that nasty, serpentine way, slithering along the floor so that he could not be seen by the human eye! Smoke, however, is not so easy to dismiss, and by seven in the morning the living room of 5A, No. 487, has raged into a blazing inferno. Black clouds billow out from the cracks around the apartment door into the fifth-floor hall of No. 487. Fire of this kind never before seen on Muntaner. And still it worsens. In the workroom of Natalia Hernández the heat reaches a vat of turpentine, stacked on the shelf – the flames consume everything – and then the great explosion – a magnificent fireball rising in the air. Sprinkler systems flood the floors to either side. When the fire brigade arrive they struggle to put out the roaring flames, by which time the living room is blackened, the two sofas a disfigured mass of leather, smelling like a burnt carcass, and at the centre of the living room a charred circle of thick black dust. Inside the ash are still discernible the woman’s implements of writing, the spines of books smoke-eaten and destroyed, the pages incinerated in a fire caused by a flame which had met the gas stove (left on) and exploded through the small adjacent kitchen into the living room of the apartment. The firemen suspect arson – the door to the apartment ajar, the taps running in the kitchen. What remains bizarre is that this incendiary cloud of black smoke engulfs Natalia Hernández’s apartment approximately one hour and fifty-seven minutes after her death.