The Serpent Papers (14 page)

At first nothing.

His effort is lacklustre. He walks down to the sea for show, turning to wave at his grandmother, who should go back inside soon – it’s too hot for her, much too hot for her – and then, as he turns to plod his way back up the wet sand he sees the shoes. A pair of men’s Converse, size eleven, high tops, laces dirty. Underneath the first rocks of the sea wall, tucked into the side facing away from the shore so that they would be hidden initially from view. Pepe can feel the eyes of the old lady on him as he stoops to turn the shoes over. A pair of socks and a pair of shoes – and – Pepe’s heart quickens.
That’s blood on the grey rubber rim of the shoe, and blood on the left one’s laces. Not in small quantities either.
That undeniably foul smell.

A profusion of human gore, dried and cracking in the sun.

Pepe stands still for a moment.

Then he calls Fabregat, speaking first to a receptionist at the police department, then the man in question.

‘What?’ Fabregat roars.

Pepe walks back to the end of the promenade.

‘I know this sounds strange – but I’ve just found what may be your suspect’s shoes. You should get someone down here now. And if you have any video surveillance out here – any shop-front footage, check it. You’ll thank me for it if I’m right.’

And in the end?
Fabregat sighs. The media took hold of the story. ‘Natalia Hernández MURDERED,’ the tabloids yowled. National papers splashed her body across the front page. From Valladolid to Zaragoza, old men discussed the matter over games of chess and wives gossiped with their hairdressers.
Have you heard what happened?
There was speculation and recrimination, analysis of personal habits and family life, lovers and career. Her fame and beauty cruelly eclipsed the other victims, relegating ‘Las Rosas’ to bit parts in a famous woman’s saga. Long before the police announced Adrià Sorra’s disappearance, a leading commentator remarked that the murderer of Natalia Hernández and Las Rosas was probably a fascist from the corrupt epicentre of Madrid bent on stirring political dissent in the city. In a time of financial stability, the arrival of the euro and the economic boom, tourism has been the main source of revenue in Barcelona and now some mad Madrileño was destroying Catalonia’s image by giving it a reputation as a murderous enclave of occult serial killers. A psychological expert was interviewed who added that the killer’s abandonment of mutilated female bodies in municipal spaces suggested a love of spectacle and that the killings were deliberately attention-seeking in motive. Inspector Manel Fabregat, when interviewed that morning, assured the public that the police were very close to finding the source of this violence.

In the evening papers,
El Corazón
’s Pepe Calderon commented on the sensational elements of the case – the means by which the bodies had consistently been attacked by a man obsessed by the art of calligraphy. Mothers kept their teenage daughters in that night, young women were encouraged to travel in groups, to avoid the dark corners of El Raval and not speak to strangers.
It was not a man that did this, it was el Diablo.
The dark king. Un vampiro.
And so it continued, until the police initiated a manhunt, revealing that their primary suspect had flesh and bones and blood and was named Adrià Daedalus Sorra: last seen by his parents at eleven o’clock on the morning of the 22nd, at the train station in Girona. The boy had run away from his uncle en route to Barcelona, secretly getting out at Mataró, before switching trains and coming in to Barcelona on his own. Adrià Sorra spent the next twenty-four hours on the streets, at squat parties and nights out, and had not returned to his apartment on Passeig del Born. When an anonymous source came forward with Adrià’s diary, the city raged.
He had fantasies of necrophilia and cannibalism. He wrote about the recent murders with the sexual appetite of a voyeur, considering them a philosophical problem – a symptom of modern societal dysfunction – and an apotheosis of his most illicit and secret desires: ‘A Fucking Social Revolution’.

His diary also contained innumerable erotic dreams involving his sister’s friend and housemate, a young woman named Emily Sharp, who testified at length to Sorra’s instability and proclivity to violence. He had no concrete alibis for the nights of the respective murders. He was a raver, his friends said, rarely slept; secretive, but fun – charismatic, a wild child, uncontrollable. Doctors came forward to comment on his illness, his therapy, his resistance to treatment:
an unfortunate character.
The specialist who had been dealing with him said that while she had never suspected he might realize his fantasies, she did not doubt that it was possible.
The patient is extremely unstable. He is obsessed with blood and organs and anarchism. I regret not having taken further measures to section him that weekend.
The city cried in consternation: Where is this killer? Where has he gone? And so it went on through the night and the next day and the next until Adrià Sorra’s body washed up on the beach in Sitges and no one could ask him any questions any more.

At first Manel Fabregat ran with it. Despite his bouts of mania, Adrià Sorra was – according to his professors – genuinely brilliant. The Philosophy Department ranked him at the top of the class, but the boy suffered a kind of split personality. At university he presented the veneer of an erudite, high-achieving student; by night he became a hedonistic, sexual animal. Adrià Sorra seemed the perfect psychopath (
if that term even means anything
, Fabregat mutters darkly,
I’m not sure that it does
). Violent, unpleasant, he’d broken into his apartment on Friday, beaten the shit out of his sister . . . His parents – for that matter – were as aggressive as the boy must have been in life: they were proud, aloof, selfish, vile. Their son had been running wild for two weeks and his absentee jet-set parents hadn’t seen fit to stop him, or help him, or treat him. It was a shit show, as far as Fabregat was concerned, an upper-class quagmire, with two snob architects defending their monster of a child. And yet, as their lawyers repeatedly pointed out, there were certain elements of the puzzle that didn’t fit. Specifically the letters. Why send the letters? Adrià Sorra was no calligrapher. The boy could barely draw – in fact he suffered from dyspraxia, his handwriting a nearly illegible scrawl. The university had supplied him with a volunteer who took his notes during lectures. Adrià typed his academic essays on an enormous desktop computer. The forensic handwriting analysts agreed: when they studied Sorra’s diary in comparison to the parchment evidence, it was clear that the boy had not written the illuminated verses. Nor, for that matter, would he have been capable of cutting such intricate patterns onto the skin of his victims.
He doesn’t know anything about the Middle Ages
, his mother hurled at the investigators, arguing that her son had a vivid imagination, and was chronically ill, that he had been blighted by poor timing. Faced with the honesty of the camera footage, the Sorras insisted that their son followed Natalia out of the club, and that he had stumbled on her body, and feeling on edge and suicidal himself, had carried her to the steps of the cathedral and then decided to end his own life in the sea. The argument that Adrià was the killer, however, was strengthened by the sudden abating of death that followed his disappearance. On
Sant Joan’s
Day everything ended, Fabregat explains. There were no more corpses hanging from the branches of trees. The inferno that had opened up in the city closed without fanfare, leaving in its wake a long, empty silence.

‘And the letters?’ I ask.

‘That psychotic pretence at a game?’ Fabregat explodes. ‘What do you think happened with those?’

Nothing.

‘We were forced to leave them as an enigma, an unresolved itch. I couldn’t make head nor fucking tail of them. But mystery breeds obsession. I’ll be the first to admit that. It was like staring at a Sudoku problem with no apparent solution. Mind-bogglingly irritating.’

The inspector couldn’t sleep at night. He couldn’t work. He couldn’t function. Worse, he began having dreams of a serpent. The very snake that formed the insignia on the letters unravelled itself and haunted him in his sleep. He dreamt that the snake wanted to speak to him, to lead him through a black thicket to a house where the ground was filled with bones of buried women. In one dream the snake appeared in pieces, cut into shreds, in another the snake was enormous, like a boa or a python, and reared on its tail and stretched above him. He felt unhinged. Derailed. Unable to focus. His superiors began to notice:
Fabregat is making mistakes. Fabregat has lost his cool.
The inspector developed shingles and night terrors. Stress riddled his body as the unsolved mystery consumed him. It was a block like no other. The inspector believed passionately that he had been asked to decipher a message that he could not understand. He felt played with. Teased. Manipulated.
Frustration nearly destroyed him. That year, Fabregat became convinced that there was another malevolent force in the mix, a person or persons who had walked away from his investigation unscathed, but whose hands were as bloody as the devil’s. Six months later Fabregat’s nerves got the better of him and he took a sabbatical before returning to the force for the next ten years and retiring gently at the age of fifty-two. His schoolteacher wife supports the family now and Fabregat reads the paper at home.

In the brightly lit sunroom, sitting with me in the present day of this wintry January in Gràcia, ex-Inspector Fabregat deflates like a sad balloon. The breath sags in his chest. He stands and thanks me, ushering me out towards the evening, but stops me at the door.

‘One more thing: it is personal conjecture, nothing more. Natalia’s murder was different than the others. Brutal, fast, efficient. A cut to the artery below her ear. A slice to the lower muscle of her tongue. Very sharp blade, high speed, done in a matter of seconds. She must have been like a fucking water fountain, there was so much blood, it was all over the kid’s clothes . . . Who would do that? Kill that fast, and then take the body on a twenty-minute walk through town to the cathedral? Adrià may have been crazy – I’m sure he was crazy – but he wasn’t able to kill like that – I don’t think so . . . We are hunting for an expert – you’ve got to understand that. A person or persons who had killed many times before. Everything about it was habitual. Rehearsed. Up until Natalia’s death he never appeared on camera, left no trace of himself on victim or on site . . .’

‘What are you saying?’

‘That it doesn’t match, you see – what serial murderer would carry his fourth victim to the steps of a cathedral and leave her there before drowning himself in the sea? I’ve thought about that for a decade. The man who killed those women was calculating. Terrifyingly so. He was not impulsive. Each step had its own logic. Where does Adrià Sorra fit in that? He was a pawn, a means of hiding someone. So our fucker could just evaporate away. No one believes me –
Ay Fabi
, they say –
Ostras, not again. Let it go, they’re all ten years dead. Ghosts don’t care.
But I can’t shake my feelings. Natalia’s death held its own message; one I never knew how to read. Each letter gave me a riddle and a body. But there was no letter for Natalia. Call it an old man’s intuition – but I am convinced of this: Natalia knew him intimately. Bear that in mind, when you speak to people. The real murderer is out there. In this city. Tanning on the beach. Eating olives. Being a bastard. If I am right, he will be one of her crowd. He is someone she would have recognized, someone she trusted and then feared. Someone she knew.’

VI

HUNTING

Outside it is cold. Much colder than I had expected. I stroll down Passeig de Gràcia towards the shoreline, skirting the shadows along gridlocked, elegant fissures in the flesh of the Catalan capital, made with surgical precision across the chest of Barcelona.

In January, Barcelona feels lean. Stripped of leaves. Draped in slate clouds, and soft, rising mist. As I walk through the city, I see the metropolis shifting.
Scraped, and scraped again.

Written and rewritten.

There is the Eixample, the new expansion, a victory of modernist foresight. Gaudí’s house of bones, Casa Batlló
.
Aquamarine tiles undulating and bulbous. Once-fortified walls hide beneath ring roads. I cross the vast Plaça de Catalunya, carrying my papers. Soon Barcelona slips into medieval garb.