The Babylon Rite (17 page)

‘Your mother is still alive?’

‘She lives in Redondo, LA.’

Laraway nodded. Then he picked up, and put down, a pen. ‘You were witness to your father’s
decline
? I do not wish to sound glib or presumptuous. And I am not a psychologist. However, you must have been quite traumatized?’

Jess tried not to blink too fast. To give anything away. She wanted the Sechura sea fog to slide in through the windows and fill the room and wreath her, wrap her with phantasmic shrouds, hide her away from this.

‘I guess I was … Yep. Yes, of course it did. I was very young. My brother was much older. He took it better. Losing a father that young, like I did, I must, it must always affect a child.’

‘Especially a daughter, vis-à-vis the father.’ Andrew Laraway smiled, distantly. ‘I do understand. My own father lost his father when he was just nine. I believe it affected him all his life. When you lose a parent at an untimely age, it is fundamentally destabilizing, you forever have the sensation that even the world beneath your feet cannot be relied upon. My father used to compare it to living in an earthquake zone, the Pacific rim of the emotions. Like here in Peru!’ He leaned forward, spoke more quietly. ‘Could you describe your father’s symptoms? As much as you remember them? I know it might be hard but it would be beneficial.’

Jessica felt the sick dread of something hideous approaching. Faltering, she gave her answer. For several minutes she recalled, as best she could, her father’s trembling; perhaps a fit; his anger and fear; his terrible decline at the end.

‘I was seven, like I say. Maybe I’ve blocked some of it out, maybe I am totally wrong.’

The next silence was the worst of all.

‘No. I don’t think you are wrong, Miss Silverton.’ Suddenly Andrew Laraway’s expression had gone from avuncular concern to something much, much darker. He cleared his throat. ‘Jessica. This is very difficult to say. I want you to prepare yourself.’

The panic was rising in her throat.

Laraway spoke very softly, his words like a soothing prayer in a silent chapel. ‘I wouldn’t normally do this but you have been demanding answers, any answers—’

‘Go on!’

‘Well. Here it is. The symptoms you describe in your father don’t sound like any cancer I know. They sound like Huntington’s Disease. And that is …’ He took a deep breath, and continued. ‘That is a very evil way to die. It begins, innocently enough, with a slight loss of coordination, maybe an unsteady gait, and … fine trembling in the hands. As the disease advances, the body movements become repetitive and jerky: spasticated; this is accompanied by wasting of the muscles, heart decay, and many other symptoms. Violent episodes, terrible depressions. Then comes the terrible darkness of pure dementia.’ Laraway’s gaze was unblinking. ‘There is, of course, no cure. Moreover, Huntington’s Disease is genetic. Many people who might have inherited the disease actively refuse a genetic test to see whether they are carriers. Why? Because it is incurable – therefore they don’t want to know. Likewise, some parents keep the knowledge of the disease from their children, so their lives won’t be blighted by the fear. As the poet said, “Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof”.’

The panic in Jessica’s throat had been replaced by an icy cold. She was swallowing coldness. ‘You think I am a carrier?’

His smile was bleak, yet empathetic. ‘There are certain early indications. You have some symptoms which are otherwise rather contrary. The only way we can know for sure is if you have a genetic test. But that … well that is something many people resist.’

Her heart was pounding now.

‘Do I have all the symptoms?’

‘One of the crucial early presentations is epileptic fits, that’s a clinching diagnostic sign. The beginning of the real decline. You’ve not had any of those?’

‘No.’

‘Well, then we do not know. As I say, only a genetic test can tell us.’ He stood. ‘I am so very sorry. One is never sure whether to impart a frightening and potentially false diagnosis like this … However, you seemed distressed and confused, and very much wanting to know. And now it is up to you to decide. You might also consider calling your mother, and asking for the truth.’

He was reaching out a hand. After delivering this possible death sentence, he was just reaching out a hand.

Jessica stood, and shook his hand.

‘Jess, you must call me any time you like, you must feel free to come here whenever.’

‘Thank you.’

She walked to the door, looking at her feet as she did so. Was she stumbling? She was not stumbling. She was dazed, that was all.

At the door she turned; she had to ask one more question. ‘Dr Laraway, if you were me, would you have the test?’

His smile was sadly sincere. ‘I really don’t know, Jessica, I really don’t know. And that’s the truth.’

Closing the door behind her, she walked past the receptionist and took the elevator to the ground floor.

Outside, the thrumming, grimy, fervent and slummy city seemed the same as ever. Bewilderingly normal and scruffy; and yet everything had changed. Jessica stared at her cellphone. She could maybe call her mother right now and get the truth: did her father have that disease? Had she been lied to, to protect her from the fear? If they had lied to her, the lie was no longer working: she had the fear. She was too scared to even call.

Instead, and for a reason she could not fathom in herself, Jessica took a taxi from the centre of town to the Texaco garage, and the Museo Casinelli. Or where they used to be.

Climbing out of the taxi, she stared. She was glad she had come here. The charred and ruined buildings were a fittingly melancholy sight: a temporary wooden fence had been erected around the shell of the building, but it was rickety and already broken. She could see, through the gaps, the black spars of burned concrete, the spoil heaps of ash and dust.

At first she tried not to think of poor Pablo, down there, consumed in the fire. But she couldn’t resist: maybe she wanted to think of him. Maybe that was a good way to go. Burned to death, a few minutes of pain. Better than months and years of decline and terror, then madness and agony.

Jessica felt sick, right down to her lungs, sick and somehow guilty. Maybe she had brought this on herself. Perhaps she had dug up something horrible, an ancient evil, the god of death and killing.

She had woken the sleeping gods of the Moche, and now they would not be dismissed.

The angel was sleeping and quiet.

Ibsen gazed, perplexed, at the marble angel lying on the marble grave. It was an odd concept, even in a graveyard sculpture. Did Victorians actually believe that angels slept? Or maybe it was dead? Could angels die?

‘Mark?’

‘Sorry.’ He wiped the last crumbs of all-day-breakfast sandwich from his lips, with a Prêt A Manger napkin. ‘Just thinking, love. Sorry.’

His wife Jenny smoothed her nurse’s uniform; she had a small tray of takeaway salad on her knees. ‘You know I’ve only got thirty minutes.’

‘For lunch?’

‘We’re busy, Mark! Short-staffed in Maternity, there are a couple of girls with flu …’

‘The bloody Whittington Hospital is always bloody busy.’ Ibsen tutted. ‘They work you too bloody hard. You’re too bloody good for this job. You’ve got a bloody first-class degree. Bloody hell.’

‘But I
enjoy
it.’ She laughed. Dropping her plastic fork in her plastic tray, she stroked him under his chin and gently kissed his cheek, then murmured, slyly, yet shyly, ‘Besides, Detective Chief Inspector. You always told me you liked the uniform.’

As ever, his younger wife’s solicitations melted Ibsen, inside him, somewhere very important. For a second they sat together, staring silently across the mossed old statuary of the empty cemetery, at the stooped and wintry willows that loomed over eighteenth-century tombs, like tall but servile chamberlains admiring a royal baby in a crib.

Mark and Jenny occasionally came here to eat lunch, whenever Ibsen was free and in north London, near Jenny’s workplace. It was more for her than for him. DCI Ibsen always found Highgate Cemetery unsettling even as his wife found it obscurely soothing.

Today, on a cold December afternoon, the ancient graveyard was at its most melancholy, but at least it suited their subject. Suicide.

‘How come
you
suddenly have all day, anyway?’

‘We’re waiting on a lead, been waiting for two days. I thought I’d take a break and see my lovely, overworked wife.’

‘A lead? You mean you got something from that poor, poor girl? Imogen … Fitzsomething?’

‘Yes.’

‘But Mark, I thought she died.’

‘She did, Jen. The blood loss was horrific, stage 4 hypovolemia – a coma – she drifted in and out but the haemorrhaging was too profuse.’

‘So?’

‘She wrote an address, when she was lucid, she wrote down an address for us, just before she died. And a taxi driver has reported he took her there, three days before her suicide.’

‘And you think it’s where this guy lives, the bloke with the tattoos?’

Ibsen nodded, flourished his mobile phone. ‘Larkham’s checking it out now. I may have to go any moment.’

Jenny stood up. ‘Well come on, then, let’s be quick. I can explain
everything
you need to know about suicide clusters. In about twenty minutes.’

Ibsen grabbed her empty salad tray, and his voided sandwich packet, and dumped them in a bin. Then they walked the paths between the crumbled and mouldering graves. He sneaked a glance at his phone. Nothing yet.

‘OK. Suicide clusters work by social contagion, often spread through the media, or the internet. Social networks. Sometimes there is a celebrity suicide, widely reported, which is then copied by young, impressionable people.’

‘That doesn’t sound like our situation. There’s no rap artist who cut his own head off.’

‘No. Which is why I reckon you are better looking at mass suicides. Which are different.’

She walked on and he followed, attentive.

‘There have actually been quite a few large-scale suicides in history. Masada in ancient Israel is a famous example. Okinawa in Japan in World War Two’s another. One of the worst was the suicide of the women of Souli, in Greece: they threw their children over the precipice, and then jumped themselves, to avoid capture by the Ottomans.’

They turned left, past the Egyptian Avenue, with its Luxorlike pillars, its pharaonically slanted arches. The silence here, at the centre of the cemetery, was extraordinary.

‘But modern-day mass suicides are usually related to some kind of cult, or cultic religion. Led by a charismatic leader, some clever evil man with a hold over them. Think of Heaven’s Gate. Or the Order of the Solar Temple. The most famous, naturally, was the People’s Temple in the Jonestown incident.’

‘I remember that one – the audiotape—’

‘Yes. A whole community who willingly killed themselves, hundreds of them. They literally drank poisoned Kool-Aid, at the behest of some ghastly tyrant. And so they all died. Awful.’

Ibsen recalled the famous images: the bodies sprawled on the damp Guyanan grass afterwards, women and men and children, side by side by side, as if they were sleeping peacefully, as if they had just lain down in orderly rows to kip, and yet they were dead. So, yes, Jenny was right: suicide could be induced en masse. In an intense religious setting. But what did that actually mean to this particular case? With individuals? He shook his head. ‘I dunno, sweetheart. These victims in London – they’re not teens copying some doomy, wrist-slitting guitarist, but they’re not desperate god-botherers in the jungle, either. And they’re not all in one place at one time. They are smart, rich, young, very well-educated Londoners, with everything to live for, and no reason to die.’

Jenny stepped over a snaking root of ivy. ‘Well. Exactly. I think it’s a cult with something else too, some other element.’

‘What?’

‘Hypnosis for a start. Some kind of sexualized hypnosis. This explains your victims’ profiles. Psychologists know that the most easy people to hypnotize tend to be the most intelligent.’

The crows barked in the skeletonized trees.

‘So you’re saying you can hypnotize people into killing themselves?’

‘Why not? If you combine hypnosis with sex and religion, some kind of death cult, a sophisticated sex-and-death cult, then you have the beginnings of an explanation, a sort of upper-class Jonestown – isn’t that possible? You did say these people were all going to sex and swingers’ clubs, right?’

‘Yes.’ He mused. ‘Yes. That is true. So there maybe is a particular sex club where they got into some stranger, darker, ritualized stuff? Some cultic trance.’

The idea was good.

Jenny tugged him down the darker of two paths; Ibsen pondered as he walked.

This theory was certainly plausible. In which case they needed to look for more links between the victims. They hadn’t found a common denominator of this sort, yet – a specific sex club they all went to – but something like this had to exist. Somewhere, out there, was maybe a ghastly dungeon in a rich man’s home, a drawing room decorated with skulls. It was absurd yet it made a ghoulish and awful sense.

A rotting angel stared at them from the enormous tomb of Julius Beer. A great monument to someone entirely forgotten.

Jenny said, ‘I also think these suicides are, in some way, autoerotic. The pain itself is the pleasure. The pain is the cause of the pleasure.’

‘How?’

‘Think of it this way. We get lots of people in Casualty who are cutters, self-harmers. They cut themselves on the arm, they slice their fingers, gouge themselves. Usually women. Why do they do it? Because they are depressed, exhibitionist, self-haters, masochistic, blah-de-blah, but also because, on a purely mechanical level, they enjoy the pain. They are addicted to the pleasurable release from self-inflicted pain, the endorphins.’

Another crow heckled the dead from somewhere in the birches and oaks, then flapped further into the chaos of ivy green. The large portals of the dynastic tombs gawped at Ibsen. Like open mouths. Shocked.