The Babylon Rite - Tom Knox

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hero. Yet he was just a fucking villain, as far as I could tell.’

      ‘You know his name?’

      ‘No.’

      ‘Was he Nik’s lover?’

      ‘Jesus, I hope not.’

      ‘Did you ever see him again?’

      ‘Who?’

      ‘This American.’

      She stared straight at Ibsen. ‘I never saw Nik again. That’s what I’m telling you. The last time I saw Nikolai alive was then: Soho House, two weeks ago. That was it. I’m telling the fucking truth.’

      Ibsen sat back. He believed her. So they needed to find this American. But how? He felt the irritation inside himself, as something just out of reach.

      ‘Tatts,’ said Larkham, from the sill where he was perched. ‘You said he had tattoos?’

      The girl turned, the light from the window gentle on her face. Ibsen could imagine her on stage. Spotlit.

      ‘Yeah. Serious tattoos. He had a skull tattooed on his hand. Both hands maybe …’

      Larkham and Ibsen immediately swapped glances. Ibsen reached for another document, a print from Kerensky’s laptop. The skull screensaver.

      ‘Skulls like this?’

      The girl took the barest moment to look at the print-out, and she shuddered visibly.

      ‘Skulls just like that.’

      They concluded the interview ten minutes later. Two hours after that, Ibsen was back home, in the chaos of domesticity, talking football with his son, trying to use his wife’s intelligence.

      Jenny was good at this stuff. She worked as a nurse, but she had a first-class degree in psychology from Bristol. The nursing was a choice. The psychology was a talent.

      Ibsen cooked the dinner – rib-eye steaks and rocket salad – while Jenny stood at the kitchen door, a big glass of Merlot in a cradling hand. And while he cooked he told her about the case.

      Her wise grey eyes narrowed as she listened to the details. ‘Jesus. His own hands and feet?’

      ‘One hand, both feet, yup.’

      ‘… That’s just ghastly.’

      ‘Yes. And all the sexual stuff. Any idea? How could anyone do that? What’s the psychology?’

      ‘Let me think …’

      He knew her well enough to see this as a good sign. She was engaged and intrigued. But she needed time to ponder.

      They ate the dinner, and Jenny walked the dog because she wanted the fresh air. When they went to bed, Ibsen tried to read an entire page of an Ian McEwan novel, but failed. Yet again.

      He was woken at six a.m. He thought in his half-dreaming sleepiness that it was a fire alarm, then realized it was his phone, ringing merrily.

      Jenny was breathing in deep sleep, beside him. He picked up, his hushed voice was sodden with tiredness. ‘Hello?’

      ‘Sorry, sir.’

      It was Jonson: the SOC officer from Bishops Avenue.

      ‘DS. Ffff … What time is it?’

      ‘Far too early, sir. Sorry to disturb you. But we have another suicide, and we think it may be linked.’

      ‘Linked?’ Ibsen’s weary brain tried to engage the gears. ‘How can they be linked, I mean, how do you know?’

      ‘This one also tried to cut his own head off, sir.’

      ‘What?’

      ‘And this one succeeded.’

      14

       Huaca El Brujo, Chicama Valley, north Peru

       ‘Gracias.’

      Jess waved in gratitude to Ruben, the gateman at the temple complex. He waved back, and lifted the wooden barrier for her Hilux. His little motokar, his three-wheeled ride home, was parked by the kiosk. It had Jesus es Amor stencilled in purple letters on the transparent plastic roof.

      The day was hot yet clammy: typical muggy Sechura weather this close to the coast. She turned in her seat as she passed the kiosk and the gate. From here, looking west, she could see the Pacific, a line of dull sparkle, where the big dirty waves crashed on the lonely shoreline.

      The only interruptions to the desert flatness were the bumps. The sacred huacas.

      Changing down a gear, she accelerated towards the pyramids. Another kilometre in her pick-up brought her to Huaca Cao Viejo, known to the locals as El Brujo. The Sorcerer.

      It was, like most Moche ruins, an unprepossessing site: a large adobe pyramid, very weathered and eroded – somewhat like a vast, ghastly, and collapsing chocolate sundae – maybe thirty metres high and a hundred metres wide. Beyond and around it were other, smaller pyramids, stretching down to the coast, half a kilometre east, where the waves made a distant thunder, where dead dogs lay on their vile bleaching spines and howled at the sullen sky.

      It was a bleak and grisly location, yet the nothingness felt necessary, even soothing. Right now Jess needed the calm grey nullity to salve her anxieties; the events in the huaca last week still jangled uncomfortably in her mind. The cinnabar, the skeletons, the flesh-eating beetles, the unknown god. How did it all fit together?

      There was no easy solution. So she needed to focus on the issue at hand.

      Swerving sharp and right, she parked the car on the ruins of the old Spanish church. Notebook and camera zipped briskly in her rucksack, she opened the car door and inhaled. The humid air was distinctly flavoured by the sea: salty, and tangy, maybe slightly rancid. Weighing the keys in her hand, she wondered whether to lock the pick-up; then locked it, feeling stupid as she did so. There probably wasn’t another human being, apart from Ruben, for ten kilometres. It was just her and the crying seagulls.

      A quick walk brought her to the muddy steps of El Brujo, which she ascended to the First Enclosure. Scraps of burned wood and old paper scribbled with Quechua spells and curses, littered the beaten earth en route. This was not unexpected. Probably some curanderos – some local shamans – had been here, performing their strange ceremonies in the depths of the desert night. The local villagers still revered the spiritual power of these huacas, hence the local name for the huaca – the Sorcerer. The descendants of the Moche still came to this horrible place to partake of whatever power the sacred pyramid possessed.

      Jess strode close to the largest wall, and knelt to take photos. Here, in red and gold, and white and blue, were the great treasures of El Brujo: long wall murals showing fish and demons and seahorses and manta rays and dancing skeletons, and the sacrifice ceremony.

      As they now knew, beyond doubt, this ceremony really happened. And this mural described it: precisely.

      Jess scrutinized, and scribbled her notes. How was it enacted? First, it seemed, the Moche warriors performed some kind of ritualized combat. The main object of this brawl was to grab the opponent’s hair. When a man had his hair seized, he fell to the ground: submissive, and willingly doomed. All of these stylized combats took place within the community. DNA analysis showed this. The fights weren’t with enemies, but between friends and relatives, between brothers and uncles. The sole purpose of the fighting was to produce endless victims: for the sacrifice.

      She snapped and clicked. And scribbled again in her notebook.

      The ritual proceeded from here, with minor variations. The defeated warriors were stripped naked, and bound by ropes at the neck, like slaves being walked to the African coast. After that, as the next murals showed, the prisoners were taken inside the precincts

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