The Serpent Papers

by Jessica Cornwell

  Fabregat squints. Observes the hanging body. Faint red lines in the skin of the girl – No – don’t look at her face again – not yet. A scarlet letter B. Skin pristine in its clarity, hair lustrous, tumbling down over shoulders. In life she would have been lovely, a real beauty. He studies her carefully. Clinically. Between her nipples someone has carved the points of a crescent moon. Around her navel, a circle, the full rim of a sun around her belly button. Fabregat steadies himself. Records the litany of sins: ‘. . . Lacerations made to the body. Tongue removed in its entirety. Muscle severed at the base. Victim appears to be in her mid-teens . . .’ The forensic officer points to her hands – ‘Image of a snake cut into her left palm, a . . .’ Fabregat slows, squinting at the mark. Don’t focus on her face. How had she died? Strangulation, he thinks, clocking the bruised skin on her neck. Mutilated first, then strangled.

  ‘Cross cut into her right palm, all flesh wounds, a few millimetres deep,’ one of the investigators barks.

  There is a C on her forehead, between the eyes.

  Fabregat stops. Nine letters in total. His face pales. The letters correspond exactly to the parchment charts on his desk. B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, K, cut onto a child-cum-crime-scene, opened up for inspection. Words whiplash through his skull. Verses of a demented poetry. You have called me / Thrice Great /Two-Faced / Forked Tongue . . . Was she the answer to his riddle? The hanging figure of the voiceless girl? Later the medical examiner gives his verdict, flanked by earnest students from the university. He points to shallow wounds like tattoos on the girl’s body.

  ‘Those are medieval letters – styled after roman uncials – all capitalized. Made with a steady hand – real artistry. It’s not easy to cut flesh with precision like that. Ten centimetres in length, depending on position. The incisions suggest a variety of tools – a boning knife has been used in certain places, a razor blade here. Body meticulously cleaned. No conclusive DNA. She died after her tongue was removed – I believe the letters, cuts in the palms and the markings on her breast and stomach came subsequent to asphyxiation. Also we have what looks like forced sexual entry. He needed time to do this – there will be a place he kept her alive, and a place he worked on the body.’ The victim is Rosa Bonanova. Sixteen, only child, went missing four days earlier, last seen walking home in the evening from a choral rehearsal in the Eixample.

  The forensic graphologists have a field day when Fabregat sends them his letters. The message comes back clear: same calligrapher? Same writing? Same hand, on body and paper. Her case logged by the police. In the pictures, she had been pretty and smiling.

  On the cusp of transformation.

  Gone now.

  Fabregat’s hackles are up.

  He is not an inspector who enjoys murder.

  A third letter follows swiftly, left in the confessional of the old monastery of St Peter of Puelles on Thursday, 12 June. Addressed to Sr Manel Fabregat of Policia de la Generalitat de Catalunya. The inspector’s eyes bulge. Insolence rising like fog towards him. This time the sender has written:

  No more riddles.

  I will teach you.

  Follow. Heed my words.

  Ancient Crimes.

  And left two dates like bookends:

  1182–1188

  Fabregat does not waste time. Missing persons! he shouts to his team – flag them up, chase any leads, distressed parents, disappearances – I want to know about it. No talking, lads! No leaks to the bastard media. I don’t want them knowing any steps to this dance!

  This is not the first time the killer has done this.

  It is too practised. Too rehearsed. Is there any history? Any incident in the past? He feels a net tightening . . . No more riddles? And beneath this a profound, restless unease. Why me? Why single me out? The recipient of such strange knowledge.

  The answer comes in a second body, discovered on Friday, 13 June 2003 by the bartender of the nightclub Genet Genet – who stumbles over his words – relaying how he found the body after the club closed, taking out the trash – his nerves break as he talks to the police who have pulled him to the side of the building near the narcosala – I just found her (he repeats as a man who has lost his mind) – she was covered in blood – the blood has soaked through his shirt – and she had been left there, hanging from a lamp post – he looks away from the street, casts his eyes towards heaven. A strong man refusing to weep. I . . . I . . . But she too is gone, her soul departed, and not in a pleasant way. Xavi has found a woman without a tongue. Her mouth a pool of blood. Her body naked but for the letters carved into her chest, throat and arms. Lakes form around her, pouring from the stump of her tongue and the letters on her body. From the pictures on her hands.

  Working at the scene, Fabregat is interrupted by a shadow who pushes herself up against the wall behind the blue-and-white tape, coughs loudly and lights a cigarette.

  ‘Another one for the bin bag.’

  The old prostitute lisps. Matter-of-fact.

  ‘Trust me.’ She burps a malingering cloud of smoke. Tired peroxide hair. Yellow plastic crown. Lavender eye shadow. Lips like a foul red barn.

  ‘She’s a nobody.’ The woman smirks, face cloaked in darkness. Her voice rasps like a rusty saw, bent from overuse.

  ‘Como tú, Mosso.’

  The hair on the back of Fabregat’s neck rises.

  ‘Basura.’ She sounds the syllables out in a song.

  Ba-Su-Ra.

  You are trash.

  Dust on the wind.

  ‘Tell them to forget it,’ she croaks. ‘Nobody knows her. Nobody cares.’

  The second body is identified as the medical student Rosario Sarrià, twenty-three years old, training to be a nurse, interning at the Hospital Clinic. She had been living alone in Sant Gervasi. No one had reported her missing, though she had not shown up for seminars on Wednesday or Thursday. And her classmates had begun to worry.

  Soon words come in from the specialists. The cryptographers and analysers, the historians at the University of Barcelona. Words Fabregat has never seen before and struggles to understand. Any ciphers? Any codes? Any anagrams? Fabregat asks. Hopeful. Thinking of a book he read on the subject. No. No. And. No. Fabregat is grasping at straws. However . . . The carvings on the body also seem to be alchemical – the circle around the belly button echoes the alchemist’s shorthand for Gold, a perfect circle around a dot at the centre. The crescent between the breasts may be the alchemical notation for Silver. The snake on the left hand suggests an affirmation of sin, the cross on the right hand a representation of divine judgement. And the eternal-serpent-biting-its-fucking-tail on the letters?

  Professor Guifré, expert and medievalist with the Special Collections department at the University of Barcelona, responds with the following:

  ‘That snake is an ouroboros. Dating from second-century Alexandria – taken from an alchemical treatise called The Chrysopeia of Cleopatra – the Catalan here echoes the Greek proclamation hen to pan – literally one is all. The black and white halves suggest Gnostic duality. The ouroboros has traditionally been accepted as the stamp of a continuous cycle, eternal consumption and creation. An elliptical generative force containing the universe. The ouroboros also alludes to ancient mystical traditions associated with turning coarse metals into gold . . . If there is a code, I believe you’re looking at an alchemical one.’

  And the tongues? Why cut out the tongues? If everything else is so charged, there must be a significance in that. The professor doesn’t know. Fabregat sits dejected, head down at his desk. Why send all this to him? Why carve these things onto a woman’s body?

  ‘You’re looking for a man obsessed with the occult.’ Guifré warbles over the telephone. ‘Your killer is an enthusiast of alchemy. An aficionado of black magic. One of these – what do you call them? – a Goth,’ Guifré suggests, pleased with his grip of pop-culture. ‘A cloak-and-dagger type. A reader of fantasy.’

  Fabregat sees things differently. Someone Herculean. Precise. Clinical. Eff
icient. Fabregat adds his observations to the list. A female officer approaches Fabregat. He looks at her blankly. She hands him a cup of coffee. They talk awhile. She musters the courage to forward a theory. It does not fly. He shakes his head woefully.

  ‘We’ll get the bastard, Inspector,’ she says.

  Fabregat isn’t sure. There are no marks, no prints, no traces of a killer. The guy’s too clean. He’s professional. No one saw him . . . How does no one see a man hang a body from a lamp post in the middle of a city? Unless they are afraid? Perhaps the witnesses are afraid? Perhaps they know him. Or he is a phantom? A ghost? Round Fabregat goes. Round and round again.

  * * *

  Monday, 16 June 2003.

  A fourth letter arrives. Found after evening mass on the fountain in Plaça de Sant Felip Neri. The priest asks that Fabregat send a courier. He does not want to touch the envelope. Inside, the diagram of the concentric dials is identical to the previous three missives. The message consists of four lines and one set of dates:

  Count the grains of Sand

  And measure the Sea.

  Read the deaf-mute

  And hear the voiceless.

  1312–1317

  Nothing more.

  Tuesday, 17 June.

  First light. Sun rising benignly on the sea. A hot radiance. A couple walking their dog in the hills behind Barcelona find a body hanging from the trees on a trail spiking off from the Carretera de les Aigües. The golden retriever sniffs her out below Tibidabo, at the bend above the heart of the city, behind a stone bench and water fountain, hidden in a black thicket. She is hanging by a cord round her neck, swaying in the air, just metres up from the trail, hidden behind brambles and ivy, in amidst the leafy oaks and Aleppo pines, where it smells of damp spring and mud.

  Tibidabo. A favourite childhood haunt. Fabregat feels robbed of sovereignty as he slides his car past the police check onto the dirt road. Assaulted. Violated.

  Tibidabo. Named for the devil’s Latin – the temptation of Christ on the mountaintop.

  All this will I give you . . . On Tibidabo you get some air and a better view of the city, stretching, yawning from her sleep. Flickering towards the harbour.

  From the mountain you see everything. Barcelona flesh-coloured. Undulating skin all the way to the sea. Parc Güell, directly to the south, the port of Barceloneta, the city open like two hands cupped for water. There are hills to all sides, Collserola, Putget, Montjuïc – the mouths of the rivers Besòs and Llobregat, the diagonal line of Las Ramblas, a bold incision, confident, stripping the city centre into two triangular pieces. Viewed from this height the Gothic and the Raval are mirrored human lungs, breathing against the spine of the Ramblas.

  Fabregat swears under his breath as his car chunters down the white dirt path to the place where they have found her. He sees the menagerie of vehicles – the white motorcycles and yellow ambulance, the black-and-blue vans. He catches a glimpse through the windscreen of the distant Christ-figure on the top of the wedding cake temple of the Sacred Heart. Perched at the summit of the range. Arms open, greeting Fabregat.

  Smiling down on the forest.

  It is not a normal place for Roseanne Aribau to be found. The third victim lived miles away, at a hippy community near Terrassa. She had been reported missing on Friday by her friends, who said she had not returned from a training session conducted in Barcelona. She had taken the Ferrocarriles into town on Wednesday, spent two nights in Gràcia and then . . . silence. Her phone did not answer.

  Usually she texts. I pick her up at the station. That had been the plan, her friend said.

  What is her profession? The police asked.

  She’s a doula – A doula? thought Fabregat. What in hell’s name is that?

  A midwife, someone says. A new-age midwife.

  * * *

  To be sure, it had been an animal.

  A goat kept by some farmer in the foothills but the suggestion – no, the implications of the prints, in such proximity to the corpse – leaves a sick feeling in the base of the inspector’s stomach. When Fabregat had arrived on the scene, the young Mosso on duty was green in the face. When asked what he had seen, the boy revealed that a creature had moved in the shadows that was like a man in shape, but had been too dark to discern. When he had pursued the figure, it had disappeared into the forest and the cadet returned to watch over the body of the girl. Retracing his steps, the cadet had looked down at the ground, where he had noticed beneath her body a muddy print tracked from the puddle in the ditch of the road. The prints, which the cadet had later shown to Fabregat, were not in the shape of a human foot, but the cloven print of a hoof, like that of a ram. Only much larger. The size of a grown man’s shoe.

  He blinks. An apparition. The imagination.

  ‘I think it was the devil,’ the young officer said, and crossed himself.

  But superstition will not get the better of Manel Fabregat.

  ‘It was a goat. Pull it together, tío.’

  Later Fabregat lights a cigarette and inhales fiercely. The effect is welcome. He walks to the look-out point, the stone bench on the side of the white dirt track that runs above Barcelona. He scans the hillside. How would he have approached?

  He thinks carefully.

  The zigzag cut above Bonanova and Sarrià. By the roundabout.

  Is it gated?

  Yes. He remembers. By a thin metal chain that runs between two wooden posts.

  He makes a call to his officers. They check the entry point. Sure enough, the lock of the metal chain that stretches across the turnout has been cut.

  The bolt hacked through.

  When Fabregat holds the cut metal in his hand, he runs his eyes over the surrounding apartments. A modern development with a swimming pool. Slick gated gardens. Surveillance cameras. His eyes light up. Hope. Someone will have seen him. Vehicles are not meant to pass through here. The headlights would have streaked into their windows. The investigative team checks all the apartments. A woman comes forward. Around two in the morning, she thinks. A city car pulled up. Lights very low. She could not see the make. It was black, she thinks, or silver . . . the witness says again. That’s not helpful, Fabregat barks. Any licence plate? Any number? The look of disappointment on Fabregat’s face makes the woman blush. But it is something. It is something to go on. When they check the camera there is no tape to record on. Fabregat turns purple with rage. What is the fucking point of a camera if it doesn’t record anything? He returns to the dark copse at the bend in the white track. Runners have gathered at either side, desperate to complete their daily circuit. Kicking up dust at their heels.

  Fabregat says: No. You cannot pass. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not for a while.

  Then he looks up at the trees and asks them: What have you seen?

  As if they would want to tell him.

  At first he had been confident that they would find an answer – no killer could commit these atrocities without leaving some piece of himself on the material. Discovery of a suspect was just a question of time, he told his team – keep looking, trace everything, study the ground – the pollen – the mud – their flesh. Look for anything in their gut . . . What had they eaten? What had they drunk? Look for the numbers of coffees they had consumed in a day, when they had last been to the bathroom. Look into their faces, the wounds on their throat and chest, the brutal severing of flesh – what knife had he used? What blade had caused these lacerations in the mouth, the markings of her stomach? In all his career of cleaning marital spats off the kitchen table, responding to rape, armed robberies, burglaries, breaking-and-enterings, pick-pocketing, smuggling and human trafficking, Inspector Fabregat has never worked on a case like this. His previous exposure to manslaughter had (fortunately) come in instances of ones and twos, generally male on female, and most often between two people who knew each other. Crimes of passion in which the perpetrator came forward within days or killed themselves or did any number of peculiar things that did not include (a) returning to kil
l again, or (b) sending cryptic letters by phantom post that looked like the holdings of the University of Barcelona’s archive of illuminated manuscripts . . .

  He shudders at the thought of the copy of the latest document he had sent to the expert’s desk. It arrived as the others did. Another confessional. Another envelope addressed to Manel Fabregat. Inside:

  Serpentarius!

  One-who-is-arriving!

  Know this:

  Nine books of Leaves gave forth this rage of man

  Fabregat chews his lip. He smokes ruefully. Barcelona is not famous for its serial killers. Any loco comes here and they get distracted by the beach. Scenes like this? It’s just not in keeping with the atmosphere. On a personal level, it irks him.

  Act Two starts quietly. It is the morning of Sant Joan’s Day. The holiday in Barcelona stretches over forty-eight hours. Festivities began on the evening of 23 June with la Revetlla de Sant Joan and culiminate now in the sleepy Feast Day, the 24th. On this occasion, the sun rises behind the imposing pinnacles of Barcelona’s Cathedral. Dominant spires sprouting from the heart of what was once the walled Roman city Barcino, said to have been founded by Hercules, half man, half god, who loved the girl Pyrene, namesake for the Pyrenees; or perhaps Hamilcar Barca, father of Hannibal, the Carthaginian, built the first structures on Mont Tàber. The Great Cathedral rests here now. La Catedral de la Santa Creu i Santa Eulàlia. Gargantuan. Brooding. Product of a fiscal boom, the brainchild of a medieval superpower long since dwindled. Nowhere else in the world are there so many great churches in such close proximity. The thrust of the cathedral feels drunk on power, still famous for exorcisms, exalted soil, stone-plated, façade ornamental, deceptive, a neo-Gothic addition made in the nineteenth century. Hung with the silhouettes of angels peering down on mysteries below. Studying the tourists with their cameras, the covered markets, the beggars and street cleaners, the businessmen in suits, the activists, the strikers, the politicians, the stoners and salesmen of squeaking birds who garble whistles in their mouths and shoot flashing lights into the sky, hoping to entrance a customer. In the night the gargoyles and angels have been gossiping with one another beneath the belfries. Watching something unusual. Something curious. Stone eyes gaze on the form of a girl. Laid out on the eleven steps leading to the mouth of the cathedral like an offering to an indifferent god.