by Tom Knox
‘Nor did I. At first. But all other explanations are coming up short, and in the right setting, of slowly and steadily ritualized hysteria or hypnosis, we think you can induce people to kill themselves. Like Jonestown. Guyana.’
Adam Blackwood shook his head. ‘But that means Hannah McLintock must have had … must have been …’
‘Connected with the other suicides. Yes. Perhaps in some sex club with strange rituals, and initiation ceremonies. Hannah and her fiancé, they are – they were – a rich young London couple. Correct? Not entirely unlike our other victims. So we need to know more about her. Which is why I want you to ask her sister …’
‘No!’
‘Adam. We will question her ourselves. But you are close to her.’
A very long silence ensued. The muffled sound of traffic was restive, stirred in its dreams. Ibsen filled the silence. ‘I also think that this cult stuff, this sexual hypnosuggestion, might be linked to Archibald McLintock’s researches – his discoveries.’
‘Why?’
‘He committed suicide himself. In a fairly unusual way. Serenely. As if he was mesmerized. I have spoken to the Scottish police, read your own interview notes, Adam – you said he had a certain air of serenity that morning in Rosslyn.’
‘Archibald McLintock? A sex cult? Absurd. It’s surreal. He was seventy years old!’
Ibsen began to speak, but suddenly Adam interrupted.
‘Except … there was … something …’
‘What?’
‘The pots. The strange ceramics. He went to Peru. And brought them back. They are macabre, from the Moche culture. And some of the Moche shit, in the archives, is weird and bloodthirsty. I got a book and read up. See—’ He crossed the room and returned with a hardback book bristling with bookmarks.
Ibsen read the title. Sex, Death and Sacrifice in Moche Religion.
‘I got it off Amazon.’ Adam stared down at the book. ‘I’ve been reading it all week. It’s all in here. The Moche were very strange. Obsessed with bestiality. And sex with the dead. They were possibly into self-mutilation. I don’t know what the link is, but there must be a link.’
Ibsen was already scribbling in his own notebook. Noting the title of the volume. ‘Yes. The pots! I saw them in the photo. Thank you. We will look into this too.’ He put down his notebook and glanced at his watch. ‘OK. Adam, as I say we need to get cracking. I appreciate your help, and I understand your scepticism. But before I go I should say I also have one more hunch, which is a little more substantial, and relevant, which you should know.’
‘Yes?’
‘I believe there might be rival gangs after the McLintock discovery.’
‘How come?’
‘Differing descriptions. Remember the man you saw in McLintock’s flat, the intruder?’
‘Of course.’
‘That wasn’t Ritter. Was it?’
‘I guess not … I only got a glimpse.’
‘The man you saw in the flat had tattoos on his hands, right?’
Adam nodded.
‘But Ritter had tatts on his arm. So that means we probably have two different burglars in the flat in the space of a few weeks. The first intruder, the American who confronted McLintock, that was probably Ritter. It makes sense. The second – the one you saw – was someone else. We don’t know who yet.’
Adam leaned over. ‘I need another drink.’ Reaching for the whisky bottle, he unscrewed it and poured another inch and a half.
Ibsen waited, then gave his explanation. ‘Here’s the logic. Let’s say McLintock discovered this erotic hypnosis, this ancient or forgotten ritualistic trance, or whatever it is. In Peru maybe. God knows. Ritter, it seems, certainly had access to it. And he or his gang presumably got it from McLintock, or stole it from him. Ritter used it on Hannah, the hypnosuggestion, and it’s been tested on these rich kids. And it works. It is extremely powerful. I guess they want to make sure no one else gets it … Like a rival mafia.’
Adam swallowed then said, quietly, ‘I suppose that does make some sort of sense.’ He was frowning. ‘Because … They would want this great and precious bloody secret, this trick, this whatever it is, they would want it to remain a secret, to remain their secret. Right? Which means they’d want to snuff us out more than anyone, because we are on the same trail.’
‘Yes.’
‘Which means we are really in danger. Horrible danger.’ Adam offered the policeman a fearful smile. ‘Thanks. Thanks a whole bunch.’
‘I am truly sorry. But yes, that’s how I see it.’ He offered Adam his hand. ‘We’ll be in touch. And you must call whenever you want, day or night.’
Adam shook the policeman’s hand. Ibsen noted how tall the Australian was. Tall and muscular, yet deeply frightened, and who could blame him?
The evening was cold outside, a wind was skirting off the Common. Ibsen walked quickly to the car where Larkham had been patiently waiting. They had parked several streets away, down a dark and unused side road, just in case anyone had been observing and following them. He quickened his pace, thinking hard about the interview. The Moche pottery: how had he forgotten that? The sheer velocity of the case was knocking him off his stride.
He passed the open door of a brightly-lit newsagent, dispersing a tinny Christmas carol into the freezing air. The last corner turned, he saw the car at the end. Dark and waiting. Larkham was just a silhouette in the car in the gloom.
A strange silhouette. Ibsen walked quicker.
A very strange silhouette.
He stopped. Larkham was stiffened with early rigor mortis. Larkham was dead.
34
Huaca D, Zana, Peru
The beam of the killer’s flashlights probed deeper into the passage, illuminating the floating dust. Jessica flattened herself, in animal panic, against the mud wall. Her heart galloped in her chest, so loud she reckoned it must be audible, booming down the adobe corridor.
Again the torchbeam flicked this way and that, investigating, while the male voices at the passage entrance debated. Evidently they knew she was in here, or they suspected someone was in the huaca. Jessica listened, intent. Sure enough she heard the word matar: to kill. They were discussing whether to kill whoever was inside.
She had to hide.
Stealthily, she inched up the passage, sidling into the darkness, turning off her own headtorch as she went.
The blackness absorbed her at once: an intense and devouring darkness. And Jessica hated the dark. The fear of what she had to do, where she had to go – crawl into the huaca, towards the tombs, in the terrible darkness – would have been insurmountable if the alternative hadn’t been worse: a callous death in the dust outside.
But the blackness was hateful. It grasped at her: it took the air from her mouth. Putting one palm in front of the other, patting her way along, Jessica negotiated the zigzagging passageway, crawling like a blind mammal in the darkness. Like a human mole.
Here the passage turned, she turned with it, smelling the warm earth all around her, scraping her hard hat on the mud ceiling, knocking her knees against pebbles and rocks. Or maybe these were bones, not rocks. The huaca was riddled with tombs and corpses.
Breathing quickly in the warm, humid, constricted air, Jessica looked back. The darkness extended as far behind her as in front of her. The blackness was so intense it felt viscous, as if she was drowning in a sump of crude oil.
What was that?
Maybe a noise, a whispered voice carried along the passage. She heard voices. They must have made their decision, and now they were coming after her in the dark, following the same confusing and circuitous passageways, hunting her down.
Urgently she continued her eyeless crawl, chafing soil from the ceiling with her hard hat, soil that fell in hissy little whispers on to her body; one especially vigorous mudfall made her stop, and wait, tense, until the drizzle of soil concluded. Then she pushed on, into the black heart of the tombs.
She’d made it to the antechamber of Tomb 1.
She could tell because she was kneeling on bones. Under her hands and her knees were the disarticulated skeletons of the servants, with their willing amputations. And now she had to crawl straight through them – straight through the middle of the skeletal remains – so that she could get to the senior tomb.
The bones crumbled under her scrabbling sneakers. She couldn’t see the skulls, she couldn’t see anything, but she could sense their sad, immortal grins. Jessica kicked the last metre and climbed the low mud shelf and as she did she heard the voices, very near.
They really were coming after her. And they were very close behind.
She had to hide, quickly, somewhere in the tomb. Racing on her scratched and bleeding knees Jessica forced herself through the stone portals. At once she tripped on the square-metre strings that gridded the floor; with a loud crack she fell into the piles of corpse beetles, the trashy, gaudy crunch of thoraxes. She had fallen face first into the pile and now they were in her mouth: she was eating the beetles who ate human corpses; it was disgusting.
Spitting the vileness from her mouth, Jessica moved on, slithering through the crackling insect shells, and then at last she half-stood, and ran and threw herself blindly at the wall.
A light.
The torch beam of her pursuers was now visible in the antechamber beyond: a dim and troglodytic light, sinister and subterranean. And coming her way. Fevered with desperation and terror, Jessica groped her way to the corner of the room where the secret entrance to the second antechamber was concealed.
The passage was virtually a hole in the ground, hidden behind a mud wall. Would the killers see it? This was her only chance. Jessica squeezed herself into the tight and grimy final passage. It was so narrow it seemed to her that she was now being swallowed by the mud, swallowed by the Moche pyramid, eaten up by their unknown gods.
A minute later she was in the antechamber. She could sense the higher space around her, even if she could not see it. And she could stand up. She could also sense the little skeletons of the children, sleeping in their kindergarten, their hearts removed.
There was nothing Jess could do now but wait. She squatted in the far darkness of the chamber, her eyes closed to the terror; but the terror was the same with her eyes open or shut. She wiped the mud from her blinded eyes and just stared into the blackness.
Subdued murmurs, echoing down the long huaca passages. The word ulluchu … they were talking about ulluchu, and the way they said it was strange, not quite right, spoken in a different accent. Not Peruvian? The pronunciation chimed in Jessica’s mind. But she didn’t know why, and she didn’t care, because now the voices were dwindling, they weren’t getting any nearer, they seemed to be moving away.
Time passed. With no sign of the killers. Maybe she was going to make it?
But then despair grasped at her, in the darkness. Even if she did survive, what was the point? If she lived longer, that maybe just meant she would die soon, but more slowly. From Huntington’s. And that would be worse. Much, much worse.
Maybe it would be better if she was shot now: simple and painless.
Yet even as she thought this, her soul stirred with rebellion. Clinging to life.
Jessica stared into the blackness, where the Muchika children lay sleeping. Devoid of visual stimuli, her mind conjured up pictures of its own: she was seeing her father again. Thrashing in his bed, angry, then crying, then angry, then very silent again: the longest silence of all. And now Jessica could see herself in the hospice: she was a child, looking at the body on the bed, looking at the body where her father had been, and she was wondering where he had gone.
Jessica remembered her own reactions. Staring at the dead body, outraged, tearful, and wondering where the life had gone. Her mother’s soothing stories of Jesus and angels and heaven had not consoled her. With a seven-year-old’s basic sense of morality, she felt she’d been robbed. Someone or something had stolen her father away, and he would surely be returned.
But he never returned.
There. Now.
A voice. In the tomb.
She returned to alertness with a startle and suppressed a cry of fear.
The voices were getting louder. They were coming down the passageway into the hidden antechamber.
So this was it. They’d found the concealed passage. Death had not relinquished her, after all.
The killers emerged into the chamber; they had dazzling headtorches. They were tall silhouettes flashing beams of light right into her eyes. She held up her hands in supplication, visoring her eyes in the glare. But she could see one thing well enough: the men had raised their guns, and they were pointed her way.
35
Clapham Common, London
The carol singers were gathered under the bare-boned plane trees, by Holy Trinity Church, warbling of merriment and figgy pudding. The hardiest joggers sprinted past, white earphones in place, oblivious and sweating despite the chill.
Nina sat between Adam and Jason, on the cold park bench. She pulled the sleeves of her blue jumper over her small white hands. ‘Poor bastard.’ She shook her head. ‘And he had kids, didn’t he? A baby?’
Adam nodded. Fighting off the fear and despair. This was the first time he and Nina had really discussed what the detective had told him: that Ibsen had returned to his car to find DS Larkham dead. Garrotted, while he sat in his car; his face contorted into a smile.
‘And there was a note, right?’ Jason said.
‘Yes. “One of ours, one of yours.” That’s what it said, that’s all it said.’
Nina interrupted, ‘So they must have been looking for us, failed, but found the poor cop. But we’re next.’
Adam quickly replied. ‘We don’t know that.’ Though he knew it to be true. Ibsen had said as much to him, sounding shaken.
Jason sighed. Adam’s best friend had been back from a hard assignment in Spain for just a few hours, and the tiredness showed in his face. Now Adam felt a deep shiver of guilt, dragging his old friend into all this terror.
‘So what the hell do we do now?’ Nina asked.
Adam looked into her eyes, seeking her real feelings. Ever since the discovery of Larkham’s death, she had appeared to strengthen, paradoxically. The sobbing had stopped, the rheumed eyes had disappeared. She had slept. Probably, Adam guessed, she was faking the strength, but the fakery was good, and necessary. He answered as best he could. ‘Ibsen suggested we could go into protective custody.’
‘You mean put us under bloody house arrest? Yeah, great.’
Jason gestured at the police car parked at the edge of the Common. Two officers sat patiently inside: their protection. A pair of officers didn’t seem quite so impressive, not any more.
‘You’re already pretty restricted. But living with the cops in some dismal safe house, that could be even worse.’
‘Exactly. It’s pish. I’m not doing it!’ Her voice was decisive. ‘Who knows when we’d ever emerge? These guys, the Camorra, are famously patient: they will wait years if necessary, didn’t you say that, Jason?’
Jason agreed. ‘I did a story once on them once, they will cross the world to take out enemies and rivals.’
‘Well they’re not doing it to me.’ Nina swore. ‘My sister is already dead. My dad is dead. They’ve killed two-thirds of my family. I don’t care any fucking more. I’m not hiding in some stupid hole.’ Her voice was impassioned, maybe a little broken, but it was undefeated. ‘I’m not going to hide for the rest of my life.’
Adam stared at her: she was like Alicia, yet she was also much, much stronger. ‘What do you suggest we do, then?’
‘We get moving. We find the answer.’
‘We continue searching? The trail your father laid?’
‘Of course.’
‘But they will just hunt us across Europe.’ Adam gazed at the police car, dwarfed by daunting London traffic.
Jason interrupted. ‘You could set a decoy? Pretend that you’re still in Britain, get a mate in the press to leak a story s
aying you’ve been taken into protective custody. That would buy you some time.’
‘Yes,’ Nina said. Her eyes were fiercely bright. ‘Yes. Adam? Yes? Would Ibsen buy that?’
‘I don’t know. I guess. Quite possibly. Yes …’ The idea began to quicken in Adam’s mind. Fight back: do something. Stop the terrible waiting. It was tempting, but there was a problem. ‘But what about you, Jason, what would you do? They might—’
Jason shook his head. ‘I’m flying to the States Tuesday. A three-month assignment on the West Coast, Canada, Oregon. I’ll be just fine, dude. Will that cop agree to this?’
‘Yes, I think so. In the end it’s up to us. Of course we’d have to come back as witnesses at some point. But that could be months.’
‘So,’ said Nina, ‘that’s what we do. We do it fast, and we keep moving. We don’t give them a chance to catch us. Here.’ She reached for her jeans pocket, and brought out an envelope.
Adam recognized her writing. France, August 4th-9th. ‘Your father’s receipts. You brought them?’
‘I had the feeling we would make this decision.’ Her smile was fixed. ‘This is where he went next.’ She opened the envelope. ‘Southwest France. Near Bergerac.’
‘Where?’
‘It’s a castle. The Templars were imprisoned there. It’s called Domme. He spent three days there. It must be crucial.’ She murmured the words like a prayer for the dead. ‘Domme Castle, Sarlat-le-Canéda. In the Dordogne.’
36
Huaca D, Zana, Peru
‘Mio Dios.’ The torchbeams played across the little skeletons, illuminating one tiny skull, then another. ‘Esto es terrible.’
The voice was unexpected: not the same as before. Jessica squinted to see who was in the tomb, then she glimpsed the shine of a cap badge. Police. It was the police.
The Peruvian officers lifted her to her feet. The police? She felt a sudden urge to fight back, to protest: they had frightened her so much, sent her into the darkest terror. Vainly she slapped a hand away, pushed at one of the officers. Almost flailing.