The Serpent Papers (33 page)

What if someone else traced Hernández, tracked her down, courted her, as I am now following her trail?
My stomach turns:
and if this same person is following you? Faster. You must be faster.

Fabregat watches me intently.

‘Facts, girl. I need facts.’

‘You said you wanted to find out who wrote you these letters,’ I murmur. ‘I can get you closer to this person than you ever thought possible.’
How much do I tell him? Minimum. Bare minimum. Keep it close. The roots in your throat. Keep them in.
‘What makes your letters interesting is their awareness of Illuminatus. That is highly unusual. We are a small pool, Inspector. Trackable. Locatable.’

Fabregat’s hand opens and closes on the table. He does not interrupt.

‘I know everyone who reads Illuminatus. I have handled all the available material.’ Fabregat drinks the information in slowly. The energy lowers in his belly. ‘The lines of verse you received in 2003 quote a document Rex Illuminatus salvaged in the late 1200s. A Greek poem that may have been hidden for nearly two millennia. Only one copy of the
Serpent Tongue
Poem is known to exist, and it came into our records three years ago. This fragmented poem had spent over a century at the bottom of a sealed archival box at Oxford University. And who knows how much longer locked away in an old Mallorcan monastery. It would not have been available at the time of your murders.’

‘
Val
.’

‘So your author either had access to an alternative edition of the poem in print, or knew an oral version of the poem . . . a song which fell out of popular circulation over seven centuries ago. That puts them in a fairly limited category. Such a limited category that I can tell you, with almost one hundred per cent certainty, who she is.’

‘
She?
’ Fabregat chokes.

‘Natalia Hernández
.
’ Ash in my mouth: hair of the flea.
Almost an apology
. I had expected Fabregat to rage, to shout, to kick, but instead he is profoundly contained. Professional. Quiet.
Natalia Hernández?
I’m not sure where to begin. I feel the weight of shadows settling in the white walls around us, resting their spines against door handles, peering over the photograph and papers.
Still angry.
I say it bluntly, because I can say nothing else. I speak about Cristina Rossinyol, about the books I have found – though not what I am looking for. I tell Fabregat about the nature of a colophon, the signatures of scribes, how the ouroboros is a family mark belonging to Natalia Hernández, knowing that they are also listening. The wording crucial.
An order, an invective. It positions you in the mythology. It’s like a sign post – a street name.
I take him through the beats.
Like mother like daughter, I recognize the hand, shared between scribes.
Facts aid me. Fabregat’s letters, written in 2003, quote the single page of Ruthven’s palimpsest verbatim. But Harold Bingley’s research team only discovered Ruthven’s palimpsest in the spring of 2011. The translation of the Greek subtext occurred a year and a half later. Even if someone had seen Ruthven’s page, if they had opened the sealed box in the dusty archives of Oxford, and read through Ruthven’s laboratory notes to find the cut sheet of parchment, they would have garnered nothing. The Greek subtext is illegible to the naked eye. No one could have divined the content of the poems so accurately without being familiar with the original. This makes for a valuable temporal incongruence. I parse through Natalia’s lines, translating them as I see fit. She wanted you to understand, Fabregat.
That if you do certain things, you will find me. Then you will become Serpentarius, Snake Bearer. One-who-is-arriving! And the holy path that they have called knowledge will be yours. You must speak the language of the deaf-mute, hear the voiceless, see the silenced one.

Fabregat sits by the low table in the police meeting room. He stares at his hands.
‘
This changes everything. But you can’t prove it yet.’ He looks at me fiercely. Combative.

I falter. Try to speak more clearly.

‘The language of birds, the language of the deaf-mute, the book of leaves – all that is code for a universal language that Rex Illuminatus believed could express and control the smallest elements of life on a fundamental scale. He describes this language as an essential magic. An elemental force that the alchemist codified into the alphabet carved onto your victims bodies—’

‘Why are you the only person to see this?’ He cuts me off.

‘I have one area of expertise. I can only tell you what I have deduced in relation to that body of knowledge.’

Fabregat gestures to the officer.
Put these back in their boxes. Take them back to the grave, to the sealed containers, to the mobile shelving units. Take them away.

In the dusk light, Fabregat steers with confidence.
The inspector’s guide to the city.
With the life-long habit of an investigator, he reels off facts, veering down Carrer Nou de la Rambla while I struggle to keep up
.

‘At eleven o’clock on Sunday morning, Adrià Sorra leaves his parents’ vehicle and walks into the Girona train station with his uncle. He initially caught the 11.23 train to Barcelona, due to arrive in the city at 13.26. But Adrià leaves his uncle’s care in Mataró, stepping off the train under the pretext of going to the bathroom. He then boards the subsequent train to Barcelona, and refuses to respond to any contact from his parents or his uncle. He purchases a water bottle from the station café in Passeig de Gràcia at 14.40, along with a
chorizo bocadillo
. His movement through the station is captured on CCTV footage.He goes off the radar for twenty-four hours, staying at a squat outside of the city, before coming in for a midsummer’s party on the evening of Sant Joan, 2003. At 18.00 and 18.07 on 23 June 2003, Adrià makes calls to Lola Jiménez, a twenty-two-year-old Comparative Literature student from the Universitat Autónoma, and Sjon de Vries, a twenty-six-year-old foreign resident and local drug dealer of Anglo-Dutch parentage. Sjon (aka Tree) and Adrià Sorra plan to meet here – at a bar called La Rosa del Raval – at 22.00. Adrià arrives at La Rosa around 22.30, de Vries is also late for the appointment. Sjon and Adrià share a few drinks (according to the barman, several Voll-Damms). They meet a stranger: an Austrian–Venezuelan actor and Raval local by the name of Kike Vergonoya, who invites them to a party at the club in Plaça Reial. Ostensibly to deal drugs.’

Fabregat stops on the Carrer de l’Hospital and points down the street to the top of the long oval roundabout that forms the Rambla del Raval. We turn, heading back towards Las Ramblas.

‘Sjon and Adrià Sorra left La Rosa del Raval around 00.45 on 24 June 2003.’ He veers down an alleyway lined with trash, inhaling the sticky air of the darkness. In the distance, the night sings, flooded with inky female voices from a neighbouring bar. Then right again, onto an ugly street lined with ramshackle buildings.

Fabregat winces slightly, running his hand through his hair. He pauses.

‘Cigarette?’

‘No, thanks,’ I say.
I’d smoke too many with you.

For a while we are silent.

We reach a once-glamorous dive on the Plaça Reial. A large square, muted marigold and cream, peppered with palms. Black fountain at its centre.
Font of the Three Graces. Daughters of Zeus.
Colonnades bristling with cafés and restaurants, nightclubs and boozers.
Despite the cold, Fabregat chooses to sit outside. Palm trees windswept. Water drenched. Embittered. The regulars at the bar recognize him – they nod their heads slightly, agree to behave. Fabregat on home turf. He orders two Voll-Damms from the waiter.

‘You have a boyfriend?’ he asks in the chair beside me. His eyes scan the buildings above us.

‘Yes.’

‘He knows what you’re up to?’

‘Not entirely.’

‘You should tell him.’

‘Why?’

‘Don’t you always tell him what you’re up to?’

‘No.’

‘And he doesn’t mind.’

‘I think he does.’

‘But you don’t care?’

‘My work is more important.’

‘Huh,’ Fabregat says. He looks at me sharply. ‘And what about me? Do you tell me everything? Can I trust you?’

What’s in this for you?
is what he wants to say.

You are hunting for a man, Fabregat, but I? I am hunting for a book.

And I will only help you so far as I can.

‘Now,’ Fabregat says. ‘You can see the entrance to the members club Eufòria
in the corner of the square. The bar’s not marked, you buzz into what looks like an apartment complex. You can see the entrance to it just there –’ he points to a black unmarked door across the street from our bar. ‘Natalia Hernández attended a party here with Oriol Duran. Playboy actor and wild child, generally harmless. Duran, Natalia Hernández, Villafranca, Sánchez, Joaquim Espuma, Alejo Castelluci and several other members of the glitterati theatre scene are all in attendance . . .’ He pauses.

‘Just a stone’s throw from where I worked. Five minutes walking.’ He sighs. ‘Almost in sight of the police station.
Everything happened right under my nose.
I wanted you to see the place before you get properly started. Walking this shit in person is always better than reading your books, I’ll tell you that.’

He throws back the beer, snaps his finger at the barman.
Food? Calamares.
Fabregat is hungry.

‘Adrià Sorra and Natalia Hernández meet for the first time here. Zero evidence suggests that they have been or ever were in contact before.’

‘Do you have any surveillance camera footage from the bar? Any photographs?’

‘Yes.’ A machine on task. ‘The paparazzi did us a favour.’

He slides another set of pictures across to me. The scene: the internal bar at Eufòria
shot from a camera positioned overhead, looking down from a balcony into the crowd. Natalia Hernández leans over the bar, elbows extended, hands clasped beneath her chin. Oriol Duran. Auburn hair, sideburns, forelock cut close to the face, good-looking and he knows it – body like a gymnast.

Fabregat notes the contours of Oriol’s muscles with his index finger: ‘A strong
cabronazo
.’

Oriol orders a whisky. Natalia tugs on his shoulder, whispers in his ears – No, two. Natalia turns around, she’s seen someone she knows, comes back, orders a third drink – for who? Three drinks in two hands cupped together to form a triangle.
Toma.
Duran hands Natalia a drink. The cameras at the bar catch it well – the first sign – three drinks but no third party appears, not yet. Natalia is laughing. She’s wearing a doll-collared silk shirt, tied at the throat with a pink ribbon. Neat. Precise. Low profile, though you can slightly see the contour of a bra through the shirt, which shows up dark on camera. Her hair is pulled back against her neck in a tight, black bun, make-up minimal, except for the signature tint across her lips, and that amber, flawless skin. Her hands move nervously when she speaks, agitated, energetic, but I have a feeling that’s more personality than anxiety – she’s not afraid of him. Not Oriol, she’s smiling, intimate, Oriol’s hands outstretched, laughing – and he’s reaching with money for the drinks, the bartender cracks a joke. They laugh. Their shoulders move – she touches his shoulder – the crowd is heaving but they exist apart – did you catch that? – she touched his shoulder – and then they left? They or he?

‘And Natalia, when does she leave the bar?’ I ask.

‘For good? We’re not certain.’