The Babylon Rite (11 page)

This was good, maybe. Fewer distractions meant she could concentrate on the task at hand: recording the murals.

Another scramble, up another flight of mud-brick steps, brought Jess to the Second Enclosure, where another large mural showed the concluding rites of the sacrifice ceremony.

Finding an angle to best catch the light, she took her photos of the row of prisoners, painted in vivid red. But the sea-wind was brisk up here on the higher levels and it kicked at her hair, which fluttered over the lens. Irritatedly she pushed her hair back, and considered what she was seeing.

The meaning of this penultimate mural was plain enough: the third stage of the ceremony, the procession to ritualized murder. But why did the prisoners have erections? The murals definitely showed them sexually aroused. Were they really aroused by the proximity of death? Turned on by their own approaching slaughter? It was yet another great puzzle of Moche culture: the sexualization of death; yet here it was, daubed in lurid red on the wall of a temple. Naked men waiting to die – with erections.

What was that noise?

That rattling?

She swivelled, alarmed – but it was just the homeless wind, catching at a flap of canvas.
Flap, flap, flap.
She was very definitely alone, with just the lamenting seagulls for company.

The final flight of cracked adobe steps brought her to the top of the pyramid, where the breeze was truly stiff, but the view spectacular, straight out to sea, beyond the other huacas. A faint thread of green, to the distant north, showed where the feeble Chicama River reached the Pacific.

She turned back to her work. And the Final Enclosure. Here the murals were most eroded, yet most unsettling. After being paraded and tortured – stabbed and whipped – the condemned men, still with their inexplicable sexual arousal, were brought into the highest and most sacred patio, quite open to the sky. And there, at last, the prisoners’ throats were cut with the great sacrificial tumi knife, in a complex and stylized interaction. The same figures were always involved in this mass murder: the Warrior Priest, the Bird Priest and the Priestess. It was presumed that these were Moche nobles and priests, wearing special clothes and jewels.

At the same time as the throats of the victims were cut, the ordinary citizens gathered to watch. And then the people held hands like children, and slowly danced around the dying men, playing ring-a-ring-a-rosy; they sang and chanted and danced as they watched the blood being drained from the men’s deftly-opened throats.

The blood was probably siphoned through little silver pipes – or toucan bones – and poured into the great chalice. This cup of sacred blood was then given to the Bird Priest, who drank the hot blood of the victims even as they died very slowly in front of him.

Jess shuddered. It was, frankly, appalling. And yet the sacrifice ceremony was not the end of the Moche terrors. Nor was it the worst.

Here was an image, often encountered in Moche sites, that no one had entirely deciphered. It was called the Decapitator, and it was thought to be one aspect of the high but unidentified Moche deity. Whoever this god was, here he seemed to be worshipped in the form of a massive tarantula, because tarantulas severed the heads of their victims. This great painted spider, with his lurid bulging eyes and his multiple octopoidal arms, nearly always held a severed head in his hands. And a tumi knife. But here he was lording it over a frieze that stretched right away around a central room, painted on the external wall at about waist height.

And the frieze showed women coupling with pumas, maybe even being raped by pumas. What the hell did
that
mean? It was truly, and richly, disturbing. It was almost too much. Jess felt a need to calm herself.
This is just archaeology!
There was no need to be spooked.

And yet she
was
a little spooked; it was so lonely out here. She
really
wanted a signal on her cell. The urge to talk to a friend, to talk to Dan, and hear his comforting reassuring scholarly voice, was strong. It didn’t even matter what they talked about, just a voice would be good, a voice plucked from the air – literally a voice in the wilderness.

She had so few friends in Peru. Apart from Dan, there was just Laura working down in Nazca, and Boris her old tutor in Iquitos. Both of them hundreds of miles away. Yes there were Larry and Jay at the dig, but they were more colleagues than chums, though she liked them a lot.

That left just Dan. And he was also her boss.

Part of Jessica liked the loneliness, the solitude. She’d always been a loner – ambitious, dedicated, trying to be the girl her father would have wanted. That was why her relationships had, hitherto, been so casual. Just sex and friendship, nothing serious. No attachments. Nothing to get in the way of the work.

But now her essential loneliness, her drive, was emphasized by her situation: she was
literally
alone, in a frightening desert, surrounded by Decapitator gods and murals of dying men.

She shivered. Remembering herself as that tiny girl in the hospital room, watching her father, slipping into his terminal unconsciousness, in the darkness of the night. She shivered, and closed her eyes. Her hand was definitely trembling as she took her last photos. Maybe her diabetes was getting worse. But she carried on anyway. Because she had just one more photo to take.

The final shot was one of the most revolting of all El Brujo’s secrets, contained in the very last mural at the end of the wall. In this strange final mural the builders of El Brujo had positioned a real ankle bone in the
painted
ankle of the depicted priest. The bone slotted into the wall was human
,
as they knew from tests. The mural was, in other words, a kind of collage made from
real human remains
.

The wind dropped, even as her thoughts raced.
Could this be it?
Could this be the answer: the way in to the Moche culture, to their mysterious worship? Maybe this humble bone was a symbolic and universal key.

The bone was positioned exactly where the mural showed an ankle, of a priest. Why? Perhaps because the bone was a deliberate
clue
. It was emblematic advice to anyone who saw the Moche murals of the Sorcerer:
Look, all this is true. All this happens. We really do all of this.

She nearly dropped the camera. Jess stared, appalled, at her own trembling hand. She definitely needed sugar.

Snatching up her stuff, she paced across the patio, past the puma room, past the murals; she took the muddy steps as fast as she could, and then at last she was on the flats and running to the Hilux. Jumping in, she reached straight for her soda, guzzled it and waited for the glucose to correct her blood sugar.

But as she sat back in relief, a terrible, long-buried shard of memory finally worked its way to the surface of her mind.

She remembered her dad before he died. The way his hands used to shake.

It was DCI Ibsen’s second visit to the scene of crime – if it was a crime – but he still had to fortify himself. Indeed, as he passed the fluttering police tape and walked towards the off-white SOC tent which entirely covered the car, he experience a greater, nauseating apprehension than he had during his first visit to the scene, six hours before.

The Mini was parked along the Inner Circle, in the middle of Regent’s Park. Ibsen glanced left and right as he approached the tent.

Down there was the boating lake, and the bandstand. A row of bare willows looked stark against the chilly grey waters and the overcast sky. On the other side of the road lay the Regent’s Park open-air theatre, Queen Mary’s Rose Gardens, flower beds and fountains, and empty footpaths making sad diagonals across the lawns.

On a winter’s night, like last night – which was when the incident must have occurred – this was definitely a good place to choose: if you wanted somewhere very quiet, in central London, to slice off your own head with a chainsaw.

‘Sir?’

‘Constable.’

The uniformed man quickly stooped and unzipped the entrance, allowing Ibsen inside.

It was even colder within the tent than without. Letting his eyes adjust to the soft, suffused daylight inside, Ibsen leaned and gazed through the driver’s side window of the car.

The cadaver was still here, though it was about to be moved: a headless corpse sitting in the front seat. The clothed body was in rigor mortis, and it was also twisted, tormented, locked in a shouting grimace from the sheer stunning pain induced by auto-decapitation.

The head had tumbled off the body onto the passenger seat. It lay there on its side, gory with dried blood, looking unreal. It looked, momentarily to Ibsen, like a fake head from some execution scene in a TV series about the Tudors; a ludicrous wax head in a basket.

Behold the head of a traitor.

And yet: it all was too horribly real. The guy really had parked here, and got out his chainsaw, and sawn his own head off. The noise must have been tremendous, Ibsen surmised: the buzz of the saw, the grinding of steel on bone, the glottal scream of reflexive pain, the final rasp of blood-frothed air from the severed windpipe, and then … nothing. Did the chainsaw keep buzzing until it ran out of fuel? Presumably so. It had already been removed from the stiff cold grasping fingers – and taken away by Forensics.

They now knew the chainsaw was an unusual, pricey model, a Unifire Rescue Saw, stocked by only one shop in London, and they consequently already knew it had been bought just yesterday, by the victim, the suicide: Patrick Klemmer.

Leaning close to the driver’s side window – for some reason the only window not liberally splashed with blood – Ibsen stared in at the headless body.

What did they already know of Patrick Klemmer?

He was a rich kid. Another
very
rich kid. Twenty-seven years old, heir to a large fortune; his retail billionaire German father had gifted him a two-million-pound flat in London – just across the park, in Cumberland Terrace.

In other words, it seemed that young Patrick was, like Nikolai Kerensky, a European playboy: Patrick Klemmer’s particular
thing
was sex parties. He organized them for a living, as much as he needed a living: themed orgies and swinging sex parties – erotic masques for bored, affluent young Londoners, people perhaps not unlike himself. The business, for all its scandalous nature, was a proper business: their initial investigations showed Patrick Klemmer was doing well, making a good profit.

So why had he killed himself?

Ibsen marvelled once more at the flamboyant spray of arterial blood across the windscreen. And the blood hadn’t just spattered the windscreen, it had sprayed the passenger window, the ceiling, the rear seats. There was one elegant Art Nouveau signature of blood even on the rear window.

Enough. Ibsen checked his watch. Pathology would be here to take away the body in a few minutes. He had just wanted to see it one more time.

Unzipping the tent, the DCI stepped out into the damp and chilly December air and breathed, deep and longing.

The constable on duty gave him a sympathetic nod. ‘Doesn’t get any prettier, does it, sir?’

‘No,’ Ibsen agreed. ‘It certainly does not.’

‘Any idea why, sir? I mean, like, a
chainsaw
?’

Ibsen gazed at a pair of grey Canada geese flapping laboriously across the blank white sky. ‘If you wanted to cut your head off, that’s virtually the only way to do it. A chainsaw, with one bold movement. Either that or fall onto the saw. Almost any other method and you lose consciousness, or blood, too quickly, before you can complete the task. Some people have managed to guillotine themselves, under falling sash windows with blades attached, for instance, but that’s very complex and difficult. Or you could hang yourself from too high a drop, and wrench the head off, but that needs mathematical precision, the drop and bodyweight and so forth.’

‘Er, yes, I see, sir.’

‘Sorry. A surplus of information?’

‘Not at all, sir.’

Ibsen smiled, politely. ‘Please ask Path to give me a call when they get here. I’m going over to Klemmer’s flat now, Cumberland Terrace.’

‘I can get Jim to give you a lift, sir, he’s just—’

‘No bother, Constable. It’s a walk in the park.’

Ibsen turned and made his way through a gate into Queen Mary’s Gardens. The fountains had been switched off. A few couples patrolled the deserted flower beds. The darkening afternoon was dank and uninviting – even without the knowledge that there was a headless corpse somewhere in the vicinity.

As he walked, a strange but sudden sense of dread made Ibsen hurry along in his polished Barker brogues. It was odd. Most odd. As if he was being pursued by something he could not properly see. He actually glanced behind, into the twilight, as if he expected to see – to see – to see
what
?

This was foolish. Ibsen cogitated as he paced.
Solvitur ambulando.
Solve it by walking. He often found walking good for working out puzzles. These deaths, they had to be linked: two rich kids, two bizarre and brutal suicides with an underlying motif of sexuality. But: what, and how, and why?

Perhaps the young man’s apartment would yield the answer. Ibsen was nearly there: ten minutes’ brisk strolling had brought him to the Outer Circle; crossing the road brought him to the impressive entrance of Cumberland Terrace, another of the vast white-pillared mock-palaces that comprised the Nash Terraces, two-hundred-year-old Regency apartment blocks overlooking the park. A beautiful and very expensive place to live.

Klemmer’s big, first-floor flat was busy with activity: three policemen were in the kitchen, another in the master bedroom. But Ibsen walked straight into the luxuriantly modernist sitting room and gazed at the view from the vast, floor-to-ceiling sash windows.

The vista stretched right across the Regent’s Park, to the minaret of the Regent’s Park mosque, the green heights of Primrose Hill, and to the south, the millionaire townhouses of Marylebone, where the houselights were flickering on, rich and yellow.