The Black Monastery

by Stav Sherez

  Her nose immediately wrinkled at the smell of cigarette smoke. She hated it when he smoked in the house. That’s what the conservatory was for. She worried about how the smell would seep into their rugs and curtains. She could see thin tendrils of smoke creeping into the frames of pictures and yellowing the spines of her books.

  She walked into the room, and there he was, on the sofa, wearing nothing but his puke-green Stratocaster, an overfilled ashtray keeping him company.

  At that moment she both loved him fiercely and hated him furiously. And she hated herself for not being able to make up her mind. He was the one thing in her life she hadn’t immediately been able to decide – bad for me or good for me? – and it worried her, that she couldn’t have certainty, even in this.

  She picked the ashtray off the sofa, upended it into the bin, then quickly wrapped the bin plastic around the ash so it wouldn’t infuse the air. She bent down and kissed him on the cheek.

  ‘Hi,’ he said, raising his head, which was as big as one of those Middle Eastern watermelons she saw in the grocery shops of Queensway. She loved his head, its stature and authority. It was like something off Mount Rushmore.

  ‘How did it go?’

  He never forgot to ask her about herself, and, even though she wasn’t entirely sure he wanted to know the answer, she liked him for that, for taking the time, for realising small things mattered.

  ‘Good,’ she lied.

  His eyes crinkled. She called it his mole look, but she’d never told him this. He put the guitar down. Frowned. Looked at her as if searching for someone he used to know.

  ‘Anything wrong?’ It was casual but it was also not so casual.

  ‘Why do you say that?’ She looked away from him. She hated how easily he could read her.

  He laughed. ‘You want to tell me?’

  ‘The usual,’ she sighed. There were no secrets she could keep from him. ‘I’m just so tired of it.’ She sat down beside him but then noticed another ashtray. She got up, picked it off the floor, undid the plastic, scooped it and buried it. She noticed that several of the cigarette butts were much thinner than the Camels Don normally smoked. She wondered about that. Examined them, but there was no tell-tale lipstick smear. Maybe he’d had a friend round. Maybe it was just that.

  She boiled the kettle, set his espresso machine to ‘on’ and tried to decide between the fourteen different types of herbal tea that loitered in her cupboards. She hadn’t drunk coffee for years.

  ‘Have you seen the news?’ Don said, taking the espresso and lighting a Camel at the same time. She scanned his face for any change but there was nothing she could see. She wondered when would be the best time to tell him. ‘You know I haven’t.’

  ‘There was a train crash in Bangladesh; two hundred dead.’

  He liked pointing the worst things out to her. The horror and atrocity neatly framed by the black edges of the television screen. He loved programmes on Africa.

  ‘I really don’t want to know.’

  ‘No, of course not.’ He took a deep drag off the cigarette, and, as he exhaled, she could see the coiling snakes of smoke sneak up to blemish her books.

  He turned the TV on. A woman was crying, trying to speak, but all that came out were sounds, unmediated language. The syntax of shock and disfigurement. Kitty looked away. ‘For God’s sake!’

  He snorted, exhaling a precise amount of tobacco smoke.

  ‘Just turn it off, please. I’ve seen enough.’

  ‘Enough of what? You never watch the news, never pick up a paper. You’re so scared of confronting the world you’d rather make up your own world.’

  ‘Since when are you mister amateur fucking psychologist?’

  He didn’t say anything to that. His head sagged, and his chin touched the top of his collarbone as he went back to the guitar. Kitty took a sip of her tea; it tasted like boiled water with some faint flavouring scraped from the pipes. She put it down.

  ‘I’m going to Greece.’ And there it was. Unloosed between them, landing with an almost palpable plop. Don looked at her as if waiting for the punch line to some obscure joke.

  ‘On Saturday. I need to get away.’ She wanted him to say something, to react. His silences scared her more than anything. ‘Did you hear me?’

  He rubbed his chin. She noticed he’d shaved that morning, cut himself too.

  ‘That’s a great idea.’

  It was so unexpected, it left her breathless. She was so stunned she didn’t know what to say. She knew how much the gig meant to him. ‘I have to go, Don, I really do.’

  ‘A holiday would do you good.’

  She wanted an argument. The Don she knew. ‘Is there something wrong?’ She looked at him. Wanted him to say, please stay, even though she knew she wouldn’t.

  ‘Why would anything be wrong?’ He got up. ‘You’re always thinking the worst, Kitty. Sure, it would have been nice for you to come …’

  ‘Like you were there for me tonight?’ She couldn’t resist it, and if she’d thought about it she would have held back, but now that it was out she was pleased. ‘You never come to my events. Not once in the past five years, and yet you expect me to come to every little gig you play.’ She felt good saying it. Good and bad. Good for herself but bad for them. It was the conversation that hovered over the edges of their marriage, from that day in the emergency room until now.

  ‘You don’t need me,’ he replied, still barely raising his head from the guitar. ‘You’re famous. Everybody loves you. Your books sell to countries I’ve never even heard of.’

  ‘That’s not the point.’ She was amazed at how little he really knew her and how long it had taken her to realise this.

  She climbed the stairs, past their bedroom, the radio sending out wisps of melody and static, and round the corner, through the extension and into the white room. She knew Don wouldn’t follow her in there. He hadn’t been inside for five years. ‘It’s just plain morbid,’ he’d told her. ‘It’s an excuse for you to not let go,’ he’d added when that hadn’t worked. But here she was.

  She sat on the floor, feeling its cold prickle against her legs. There was no furniture. There was nothing but the room and her thoughts. The one uncluttered space in her life.

  They’d painted the room during her sixth month. It would be perfect for a nursery they both knew the first time they saw it. The window overlooking the park. The quiet and high ceilings. The comforting sense of proportion.

  A couple of months after it happened, a moving company had come and taken the cot, the mobile of spinning dogs, the blankets and the playpen. Now it was just a room.

  It had taken her fourteen months to step over its threshold again. She’d often opened the door and stood staring across the border, watching the trees change colour through the window. And then, one day, she stepped in. And found that the place she’d so feared was now the only place she could find respite. Don wouldn’t come in. The room was far away from the pull of the ringing phone. It was a room without memory, without a present or future.

  She stared at the walls and thought about her trip. She could see the small island, the sleepy bays and rustic shops, the long walks she would take through the forested hills, the silence and peace and beauty of it all. She willed the sea and shoreline until it rippled against the white wall. Until she felt she was coming back to herself again.

  THREE

  They blamed it on a drifter. One of the many who surfed through the Greek Islands on a search for women and prolonged ecstasy in the summer months. He fitted the profile. He was already what everyone expected him to be.

  It was over almost before it began. The newspapers had their front pages. The island got back its nights of unbroken sleep. The companies began booking tourists again. Another murder successfully solved. Nikos had arrived a few months after the arrest. It was all over by then, the island returned to its normal self.

  Now he’s on the promontory again. Standing in the circle of ruins again. Staring down at a body
again.

  Two months before, it had been a local boy. Two months before, it had been the start of the season. Now there was no doubt. Now they would have to eat their words.

  The girl lies staked to the altar. It is exactly the same as before. And before that.

  Last year, before he came back to the island, they found a tourist girl and then, a month later, a local boy. This year it’s the other way around, but in all other respects it’s the same. The centipedes. The carvings. The body torn and stitched. The faceless skull staring up into a yawning sky.

  He knows it’s wrong to feel like this. To stare down at the body of a young girl and be thankful the killer’s resurfaced. But it provides him an opportunity. A way of settling obscure debts and uneasy years. He’s been given another chance, he knows, and the fact this girl had to pay for it with her life only makes him more determined.

  * * *

  ‘Same as the last one.’

  ‘You’re certain?’

  The coroner turns away from the teenager’s body. He shrugs. ‘What? It doesn’t look the same to you?’

  They’re in an annex of the police station. A temporary morgue on loan from the fish market. Plenty of ice and long, flat tables. The stink of fish guts and blood mixes with the corpse smell. That sweet and sickly delicacy which will take days to leave Nikos’s nostrils.

  ‘I know it looks the same, but is it the same?’ He strokes his moustache. The smell of stale cigarettes rises from his fingers. It’s better than the smell of the room.

  ‘Nothing is exactly the same.’ The coroner sighs, tired and worn out from a night at the table.

  Nikos checks his frustration. Breathes out slow. ‘Would you say it was the work of the same person then?’

  The coroner looks back down at the body of the girl as if to remind himself, but his findings are etched as deep into his brain as they are on the strip of tape wherein he records them. ‘Absolutely,’ he says. ‘Unless, of course, it’s a copycat. Someone who knew the details of the previous murders.’

  Nikos stares down at the girl. The Y cut not sewn back up yet, she looks like a mannequin, dressed awkwardly in a suit of blemished skin.

  ‘Is there anything significantly different about this one?’ He’s still catching up. He remembers reading the reports on the bodies found last year, a tourist and a local. About the age they should be driving in cars to dark, deserted parks, necking boyfriends, drinking under lights, making plans for the future.

  The coroner’s shoulders turn into each other as he leans over the body. He sniffles, takes a handkerchief out of his pocket and wipes his nose. ‘I’d say this one was faster.’

  ‘Faster?’ Getting information from the coroner was harder than extracting angels from a piece of stone. Nikos understands the old man’s reticence. How these are the highlights of his working life. Moving around the small islands grouped in the Aegean, how it’s mostly heart attacks and strokes and lung infections. He’s loathe to let this one go, like a hunter come upon a rare and fantastic lion.

  The coroner stuffs the handkerchief back into his pocket. ‘The two last year seemed more deliberate. He took more time over them. Same with the boy a couple of months ago. This one was quick. There was less bleeding before death. No signs of struggle at all. Maybe the killer got bored.’

  ‘Or maybe he’s just got better at it.’

  The old man takes Nikos through his findings. It’s all on tape, and Nikos will review and transcribe the evidence from there, but the coroner wants to show off. He doesn’t want the tape to get all the credit.

  His fingers are fine-boned and curved like baby bananas. The nails cut short and square. Liver spots and wrinkles create a topographic map on the old man’s hands as he slowly runs them across the dead skin.

  ‘These were made post mortem.’ His fingers trace the line of incision across the girl’s torso. The cut begins about an inch above the navel. It falters at first then gains precision as it spans her stomach, turning down at right angles just in front of the kidneys. The incision winds its way around the pubis and the two ends meet under the girl’s sex organs.

  ‘See where he slipped.’ The coroner’s pointing to the faltering line above the navel. ‘It would be logical to assume that’s where the killer started. He was probably still shaking from the adrenaline of killing the girl and couldn’t get a good grip. He made three points of entry before he got control of his hands. See how after that the line is true, all the way down to the bottom? Once he got going he finished quickly. There’s no marks to indicate he stopped.’

  ‘He made the whole cut in one go?’ Nikos swallows down the taste of the girl’s fear, the look in her eyes, the sound of her screams.

  ‘It’s easy,’ the coroner replies, his eyes glinting, ‘anyone who can carve a roast could have made those cuts. Didn’t need to have any specialist knowledge, before you ask.’

  ‘You’re saying it’s the work of an amateur.’

  ‘Well, if this is his fourth body, I’m not sure we can still call him an amateur.’

  ‘And the centipedes?’ It’s the part he doesn’t want to get to. The part that freaks him out the most. Murder he can handle – but this? This is beyond mere murder. This is showing-off time. Some psycho’s version of installation art.

  ‘The centipedes were all dead when they were placed inside the body. There’s no eggs, no sign they were still alive.’

  ‘Anything on the centipedes themselves?’

  ‘I’m not an entomologist but they look like normal island centipedes to me.’

  Nikos nods. He already has several of their carcasses sealed and bagged and on their way to a specialist at the University of Athens.

  ‘Same with the mouth?’

  The coroner grins. His teeth look green under the flickering fluorescent. ‘Those centipedes were also dead. Stuffed deep into the throat cavity. He stitched the mouth back up with the same thread as the torso.’

  ‘Same thread we found last year?’

  The coroner nods, ‘Pretty much. A different batch perhaps but the same type. Basic hardware thread.’

  This is a dead end, he knows. Last month Nikos pinned his hopes on the thread. But results came back disappointing. There were no fingerprints. The thread could be bought at any hardware store or fishing supply on any of a hundred islands. Three weeks of inter-office memos and questioned shopkeepers failed to bring up any mention of someone buying a large quantity. He’ll send this thread off to Athens too, but he knows it’s pointless.

  They’ve left the face till last. Even after the centipedes and the gouged-out pelvic area, this is worse. Nikos stares at the red and yellow mess of muscle and capillary. The eyes protuberant and lidless. The peeled back mocking smile and pink gums.

  ‘Again, same as the others.’ The coroner traces a bony finger under the neckline. ‘He cut the throat first. Then used that aperture to peel back the skin. It’s pretty easy actually, no medical skill involved, make the cuts in the right place and it’s like peeling a banana.’

  ‘Why do you think he removes the faces?’

  The coroner smiles gnomically, ‘That’s your job, inspector. All I can say is I don’t know why the killer would go to so much trouble when the victim’s already dead.’

  Nikos has his ideas, but he keeps them to himself. He looks down at the neck, the wide-open scarlet smile halfway down the throat. ‘He cut their throat first – you’re certain about this?’

  ‘Before any of the other cuts.’

  ‘And there’s no signs of struggle?’

  The coroner nods.

  ‘Do you think he lures them up to the ruins? Or does he just wait, hoping someone will show up? Either he came up behind them, surprised them, or he knew the victims. They felt safe with him.’

  ‘As I said, that’s your end of things.’

  Nikos thanks the old man. He goes to the sink, strips off the latex gloves and washes his hands three times until the soap burns his skin.

  The phone call co
mes half an hour later. Nikos sits at a taverna smoking away the smell of death and disinfectant. He’s on his third coffee when Petrakis calls. It’s the call he’s been waiting for and the call he’s been dreading. The one he knew would come as soon as he found the body up by the ruins.

  ‘So?’ Petrakis’s voice is sharp and edged, as if honed like a trusted blade. He’s no longer Police Chief; Nikos has that job now. He’s the Mayor. Which means he’s Nikos’s boss again.

  When Nikos started out, a twenty-two-year-old rookie, Petrakis was the legendary police chief of Palassos, more arrests to his record than Eliot Ness. He left in a flurry of disgrace and cover-up. Five years later, he’s running for mayor and wins in a landslide. By then Nikos was back in Athens, working robbery and homicide. Trying to forget everything that happened in the summer of 1974. He thought he’d never see Petrakis again, but then he thought he’d never return to Palassos either.

  ‘So,’ Nikos repeats, knowing where this conversation is heading, ‘I went over the coroner’s findings.’

  There’s the sound of clacking ice cubes on the other end of the phone, and Nikos remembers Petrakis’s habit of stirring the ice in his Scotch with his fingers. ‘And?’

  ‘It’s the same as last year. Same as the boy two months ago.’

  Nikos hears Petrakis drawing breath, then the gurgle of the whisky. ‘You can’t come out and say this is the work of the same perpetrator as last year.’

  ‘But it is.’

  ‘Are you one hundred per cent sure?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ Nikos replies.

  ‘Nevertheless, we can’t say that. We can’t admit we sent the wrong guy to prison.’