The Serpent Papers

by Jessica Cornwell

  I begin the familiar distractions. Memory games. The warm triangle of his chest. Sleeping beside. I push him away. Walking through the village this morning, you bought coca de patata, a spongy sweet cake made of boiled potato and sugar. I tear the packet containing the alcohol swab. The skin on my upper left arm tickles. I pinch at the fat, pulling it down from the bone. A tight knot remains from last week. With my fingers, I feel for fresh skin, four centimetres lower, hoping the lump will go down. From the road leading to the river, you saw the roof of the car. Mallorca’s policia local. Vehicle unusually festive. Painted like a medieval flag, raucous red and purple, blue lights dull on the roof. No sirens yet. I insert the pre-filled syringe into the auto-inject, wipe my skin with alcohol. Seven seconds. Count. Never habitual, never comfortable. When you entered the car, the policeman swore. ‘It’s fucking freezing,’ he’d hissed as he rubbed his hands together. Unseasonably cold, colder than ever before. You offered him coca. Crumbs landing on his collar as we drove out of the village, away from the azure bell tower, the Charterhouse bold. Your anchor on the hill.

  Click. Click, goes the syringe, buckling against my skin.

  I am done.

  At the appointed hour, Manel Fabregat opens the door to his flat, a simple address overlooking the Plaça de la Revolució. He is a short, heavy-set man in his late fifties, blessed with thick legs and a full, muscular torso, resplendent in a black shirt reminiscent of the uniform of Los Mossos d’Esquadra, the urban crime unit of Barcelona’s police force. Flesh handsomely creased, weather-worn and athletic. Though the pallor of his complexion has faded, his dark eyes are compellingly alive and his mouth remains tender, while the shadows of his lower lashes are filled with a baleful sadness.

  ‘Come in! Come in!’

  Eyes dart over my shoulder. I follow him to a luminous sitting room, white walls bursting with photographs of family, a pretty wife, a boy playing soccer, old men and women at a house in the country. A dog lopes forward, a German shepherd who shoves his black snout into my legs, wagging his tail.

  ‘Meet Panza,’ Fabregat booms. The inspector’s name is hard, factory-made vowels slamming into consonants. ‘Just push him out of the way, push him! There you go, girl.’

  Fabregat invites me to take a seat on the sofa across from him. He crosses his legs in his armchair and offers tea. A biscuit? Sugar? On the wall behind him there are also photographs of the policeman with his troops, and athletic awards from his youth.

  ‘My son wins these now.’ Afternoon light streams in.

  Fabregat’s sunroom is framed in white curtains harking to a past century. Light scatters through lace steeples and dewdrops. A small teacup filled with dried rose petals on the table. Bleached linen tablecloth. The air exudes a chalky mix of mint and sugar. On the wall, a devotional shrine to the Virgin Mary – ‘My wife’s,’ Fabregat explains. He offers tea, then settles into his chair. Panza rests his face on Fabregat’s knee, yellow hound eyes half closed. Fabregat runs his fingers through the dog’s coat twice before he meets my gaze.

  He smiles. Shark-like. Polite. ‘I’ve given it some thought, and I think you should know that Picatrix sounds like Pikachu. The Pokémon.’

  ‘It’s a reference to a medieval magician,’ I say tartly. ‘A man with three names.’

  ‘Huh,’ says Fabregat. He cracks a nut between his teeth.

  ‘You don’t look the part.’

  Of what? An academic? A treasure hunter? There’s almost a tinge of disappointment on his face. He studies me carefully. What was he expecting? Mouse hair, pinned back? Owl glasses?

  ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty-seven.’

  ‘You look younger.’ He sniffs into a handkerchief produced from a pocket. ‘I wouldn’t take you seriously if I met you on the street.’

  I’ve hidden my frame in an oversized knitted sweater, thick grey wool, and retreat further into it, pulling the sleeves down to my wrists.

  ‘Generally, I’m phobic of academics, but I’ve decided to make an exception . . .’ Fabregat stiffens ever so slightly and leans forward, pointing to the coffee table, where a stack of photocopies rests neatly beside a green folder. ‘I didn’t go to university,’ he says. ‘Went straight into working. No time for an education. A roofer for a while, helping my father. Then a security guard. Then an entry-level policeman. I read for pleasure, not for notas. We weren’t pijo . . .’ He sighs. ‘But to business.’

  I can tell the man is smart.

  Eyes snapping over me. Drinking me in. Taking my number.

  ‘You sent a set of images to a colleague of mine for review at Los Mossos. Dated 1851 in Barcelona. Drawn by an Englishman. Lew-ell-eeeen.’ He struggles with the pronunciation. ‘Seeet-wall.’

  ‘Sitwell,’ I say. ‘Yes.’

  An illustration of a girl’s body carved with nine letters, above a picture of a nightingale.

  ‘It gave me quite a shock when that arrived in my inbox. I thought – what are they drinking on Mallorca? Lightning, chapels, books, Americans . . . Next thing you know, there’ll be a secret society,’ he says, looking straight at me. ‘You’re not a member of a secret society?’

  ‘No.’ I shift my weight. No special handshakes or occult machinations.

  He looks at me wryly. ‘Your letter intrigued me. I must thank you for coming. It’s a good thing, I hope. The case was one I worked on quite extensively; I’m very pleased you’re here. You’re serious about getting involved?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say.

  ‘You’re certain?’

  A sideways glance. I am a curiosity. The day’s singular event.

  He mutters under his breath. Disbelieving. She’s a child. És una nena. He slows, using the Catalan word for little girl. The nickname sticks, rapidly replacing my own. ‘It’s not a very nice story, Nena. Quite different to your books, I should think.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I say. You’d be surprised.

  ‘I’ve had you checked out.’

  ‘And what did you find?’

  ‘My friends in Palma tell me you’re gathering a reputation as a bit of a local savant. A circus act. You do some pretty strange things.’

  ‘Professionally or personally?’

  ‘You’ve had a few episodes on the job recently.’ He waggles his fingers at me. ‘It seems someone on the island has taken a strong dislike to you. I heard about the fire. Gossip travels fast in these parts. Rumour has it you’re a psychic? Part time? Full time?’

  ‘That’s not the phrasing I would use.’

  ‘But you’re kinda funny, aren’t you? You hear things other people don’t.’

  I recoil.

  Psychic is false.

  As succinctly as I can, I explain that I listen. It is my preferred name for what I do, which is a kind of heightened feeling – mediated now and controlled.

  No, not psychic – I repeat. I do not know things other people do not know. I cannot solve a murder by closing my eyes and psychically knowing something magical. I’m not going to snap my fingers and conjure a solution. That’s absurd. I can’t tell you what you are thinking unless you want me to know – but I can watch you, closely, and I can listen, and the same is true of books and stone – or perhaps, even listening is inaccurate. The more I understand a situation, the better I can trace the invisible threads that run through it. I feel like a bat. Generally speaking, my work mostly takes place in libraries and museums, in the deep archives, the underground layers, the boxes that people have left behind, or in more corrupt cases, hidden. I move in the shadows. I watch his right eyelid spasm, and withhold. Don’t tell the whole truth. That in the last year of university I spent two months asleep believing I was awake before the doctors realized I was in a constant state of REM. That while in hospital I had eruptions of pain in my head and my skin broke out in rashes. That when I awoke the voices were so loud that blood ran from my earlobes and nostrils. That I’m a freak in the clinical sense of the word. Instead I bait him – oh, when it comes, the chase is addictive. I a
m like you. A good researcher is a bloodhound, following the molecular brush of a human hand against paper.

  ‘And you enjoy investigating the past?’ Fabregat’s mouth splits open.

  ‘It is the only thing that keeps me sane.’

  ‘Your Catalan is excellent. Ideal. For what I want you to do for us. If you feel up to the job, that is.’

  Of course.

  ‘You were living in Barcelona in 2003, but you didn’t personally know these guys? Hernández or Sorra? Never met? No? Good.’ He looks at me closely. ‘But you’d heard of her before she died?’

  How could I not have?

  ‘And the murders? Did you read the papers?’

  Yes. I nodded. ‘I followed them closely.’

  ‘Out of interest? Passion? Curiosity?’ he asks.

  ‘All of the above.’

  ‘And this is why you sent us the letters. Illustrations of the corpse?’ Fabregat flicks through his notes. ‘You made the connection?’

  ‘I don’t want to waste anybody’s time.’

  I can feel him studying me.

  ‘Neither do I,’ he says. ‘May I see the originals?’

  I open my purse and give him the package. Flinching as he pulls open the wax paper. These are mine.

  ‘They are identical,’ he says.

  I let him rest in a sensation of discovery.

  I know the markings intimately now. He will be looking at the serpent drawn like an S over the centre of the left palm, and the cross like a brand on the right. He will be drinking in the circle round her navel, and the crescent moon on her chest, the alphabet on each flank of her body, the letters across her forehead.

  A document in the flesh is always different than a scanned image. The freshness of the ink impresses itself upon you – subsumes you, draws you into the tantalizing allure of a corporeal attachment. Someone living wrote this once. Someone held this paper, a century and a half earlier. Someone whose hand shook as he wrote.

  ‘They match your case in every detail,’ I say.

  He draws the pages closer to his nose. ‘He was a good artist, the boy . . . What happened to him?’

  ‘We’re tracing that now. Sitwell left Spain in the winter of 1852, heir to an enormous fortune given to him by a friend and mentor. He returned to England where he deposited documents in libraries in London and Oxford.’

  Documents I have had the pleasure of locating and assessing over the past two years. They all pertain to the palimpsest and Illuminatus. But Fabregat does not need to know this.

  ‘And you believe you know who did this?’

  ‘Not with certainty.’

  For a while he is silent. Thinking.

  ‘Certainty,’ he murmurs. ‘Funny thing, that.’ Lost in Sitwell’s illustrations. ‘No one else has seen these?’

  ‘Not that I’m aware of. Not in living memory.’

  His voice sharpens.

  ‘You’re right to draw a parallel.’

  He puts the papers down. Satisfied.

  ‘We agreed over the phone what the stipulations of this project would be, but I repeat them now. I am retired, and have no direct jurisdiction over the police, but the Hernández case is the great tragedy of my career, one of my life’s profound dissatisfactions – of which, I hasten to inform you, there are few. Perhaps if what happened had been contained I could forget. Close the book, as it were. Move on. But that is not the case.’ His face darkens. ‘Now, your letters suggest that identical killings happened in Barcelona as early as 1851? That . . .’ He pauses. ‘Interests me . . . I want us to be careful. Sensitive. If you take this research on, you have the support of the police. You work as a writer, a psychic –’ his hand twitches on the papers – ‘whatever it is you do.’ He waves his hand again. ‘A two-week preliminary examination of Natalia Hernández, her character, her work, her habits. Talk to people. Get them comfortable. Say you’re retelling the case as an independent project, your grant research, analysing her death as an artist – don’t look so excited, Verco! I’ll explain what that is as we go along. I’ll help you set up interviews – just get them talking about her, and that Sorra kid. Ask questions. Read into their lives; get a feel of the city. Any facts you need that we’ve already filed I’ll send you. I want you to meet Sharp as well – have a look at that book. At this point we’ve tried everything – I’ve had every expert in Europe on the case. The question for me has always been why: I’ve never understood that. Perhaps you can . . . just feel. I’ll give you support if you need it, but I don’t want you to try and engage with anyone on a more investigative level. I want you shadowed. I want to know where you are. And I want you to actually keep notes, actually write things down. I’ll pay you – personally, with a little help from the force. We don’t usually work with your kind of people and I don’t want you getting into any trouble. I want you to stay extremely, extremely safe. Over-compensate for that, OK?’

  I agree. ‘I mentioned over the phone . . . Anything I find along the way? Anything that comes up – I can use that for my own work?’

  He opens the green envelope and pushes the contents forward.

  ‘Have a read.’

  On the little side table beside his armchair there is a black pen. I read over the contracts, the confidentiality agreement. Then I take his pen and sign.

  ‘This has become somewhat of a hobby for me.’ Fabregat pleased with himself. We drink from little china cups. He offers me a biscuit.

  ‘I value the calm now,’ he says. ‘Life is good. I’d like to reassure you of that.’ And very slowly, ex-Inspector Manel Fabregat paints a picture of the events as he witnessed them.

  Things began two weeks before Hernández died. (The first letter came on 8 June, Fabregat barks through a mouthful of almonds, Sunday of the Pentecost, 2003.) Fat Father Canço in the church of Santa Maria del Pi found the envelope in a confessional at four in the afternoon, with no indication of the sender. Being a responsible citizen, Canço trundled over to the Ciutat Vella’s police station to ask that the letter be delivered to the man in question. Fabregat opened the letter idly, settling into the chair behind his desk, hat tipped onto the back of his crown, reading glasses perched on his nose. A piece of thick paper, like an old parchment, on which someone has drawn an illuminated diagram like the round face of a compass or an astrolabe for navigating stars, twelve centimetres’ radius, outlined in gold ink, heavy blue lines executed with comfortable precision.

  Fabregat examines the figure closely, noting that it contains four outer rings, divided into nine equal parts. The triangles create a star with nine points, aligned with each of the nine sections. Three points of the uppermost triangle are labelled in Catalan: com, medi, l’extrem. Beginning, middle, end. In each of the nine sections an exquisite capital letter – B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, K – and a sequence of numbers (1 to 9) around the outer rim. Fabregat skims this tersely, eyes hunting for what he considers the crucial detail. In the bottom left-hand corner, written in an eccentric, sloping calligraphy:

  Find me in the Utterance of Birds.

  Fabregat’s eyebrows furrow.

  He growls to himself and sits up in his chair. Reads the line again. Then he turns the parchment over. A picture of a serpent consuming its tale in gold leaf. Shimmering on the page. The-snake-of-tail-biting-eternal-life – or whatever-the-fuck-it’s-called. Within the coil of the snake, the phrase in Catalan: All is One. Half of the snake is solid gold; the other half outlined in a thin silver. Hippy bullshit. He does not take it seriously because he does not understand it, but at the same time the inspector grows suspicious. He props the letter up at the base of his lamp, goes out of the office and asks who had it delivered.

  ‘Is this a joke, lads?’ he asks the boys.

  He is told it came via fat-priest-post, a man flustered, who was unaware of its sender. At nine, Inspector Fabregat goes home. He has dinner with his son at the table and that evening he makes love to his wife.

  Twenty-four hours later a second missive arrives, this
time delivered by a choirboy, who uncovered the letter cleaning the seat of the confessional in Santa Maria del Mar before the evening mass of Whit Monday. The letter is delivered duly to Fabregat, who opens the envelope to find a second wad of parchment. On the outer sheet the tail-biting-serpent-of-eternal-fucking-life. On the inner pages an identical diagram. The nine letters placed around concentric circles. One dial within another. In the same curling script someone has written:

  You have called me

  Thrice Great

  Two-Faced

  Forked Tongue.

  Inspector Fabregat’s blood curdles. For half an hour Fabregat chews his lip. What is this? A prank? Some punk kid getting him back? A lunatic?

  Thrice Great? He turns the phrase around.

  What does it mean?

  For surely it means something.

  They find the first victim in the small hours of morning on Tuesday, 10 June 2003. Fabregat follows a young sergeant through a passageway between tight apartment blocks. Beneath the hanging gardens of Baluard de les Drassanes, lit by a few torpid lamps, the bleakly painted apartment blocks turn a damp and dreary grey. Laundry dangles from windows: brown knickers, faded linen. Sweat malingering. The washing feral in the night, stained with hanging shadows like half-lit jamones serranos. One disappointed ambulance in the centre of a square. Blockades on all entrances, and traffic on the bypassing road has ceased. Police tape circles around the trunks of each of the outer lamp posts and trees, with the exception of the young jacaranda at the centre, around which the team of suits now clusters, looking at fingernails, pollen, semen, blood – looking for hair follicles and gum, fingerprints and grime – a melancholy storm wheeling round the object in question. Little feet dangling towards the pavement. Dead as bone china. A child. Fabregat starts. Barely a woman. Hanging from a rope attached to a branch of the jacaranda tree. Auburn hair falling over her chest. Wounds dry. He looks up into her. Emotions rise in his chest he had forgotten. He battens down. Look closer. He ignores the chatter of the team around him. Presses on. A camera flashes. No warmth. Pop! Pop! goes the flash. Her mouth? A cave of darkness.