The Serpent Papers

by Jessica Cornwell

  Everybody cross-examined.

  No.

  She did not seem afraid.

  She seemed confident.

  In control.

  ‘Sad. She was sad,’ said one young woman with a piercing in her nose. Perhaps ‘sad’ was another word for frightened?

  No. Not that either. The crowd agreed that, were it not for her beauty and that flavour of familiarity which afflicts the famous, no one would have noticed them. But there she was, the face of the moment: Natalia Hernández.

  Speaking to a surly young man who had no right to be speaking to her, and something deep – something uncomfortable – passed between them. So that people noticed. And what they noticed seemed to be an exchange of packets. Of money? Of drugs? And also a flirtation no one could understand or overhear. But when the Beautiful Actress kissed the Stranger, everybody noticed. Everyone in that crowd could remember that precise moment, because they were watching a famous face with curiosity, as they drank cervesas and cañas at two in the morning on the night of Sant Joan, and felt rather pleased with themselves that an actress had chosen to frequent the same bar as they did and that their taste was so precise, so on the pulse! The crowd remembered the dancing and the talking that happened near the window, and they remembered the moment the actress left the bar with that Surly Young Man.

  ‘Around three thirty . . . maybe?’

  ‘I’d put it closer to four . . .’

  And they described him well.

  ‘He looked like a wraith.’

  ‘An addict.’

  ‘A hot mess.’

  His clothes were dirty. His shirt was torn at the collar, hanging open on his chest.

  ‘He had hair on the back of his hands.’

  ‘He was ugly as a dog.’

  This was unkind – Fabregat does not think Adrià or dogs are ugly.

  ‘I saw her drink with him. Very happy. Beautiful.’

  The bartender’s face crumpled. Hair cut close to his ears, arms covered in ornate ink – the Virgin of Guadalupe, a dancing skeleton, a rosary. The bartender is thin and long and lean. No older than twenty-five.

  ‘No lo puedo creer.’ I can’t believe it.

  Sancho the doorman stands with his hands in his pockets, looking sour. He is rotund in the classic sense, with a belly that bulges over his belt in a slight, wobbling curl – but strong: upper body well-extended before the mirrors of his home, weights in each hand, biceps balanced.

  ‘They came out to drink a few times at the back – both of them . . . He offered me a cigarette – they were happy – early on – bailando – bailando, dancing – o sea – Yeah. Just there, both of them. I smoked with them, before they went back in – don’t usually do that, but I mean . . . Natalia Hernández – Well, I just said yes. Because she was there with – Sí tío – Sí! Sí!’

  The Cleaner of the Bathrooms pitches in a confirmation.

  ‘She went into the bathroom to put mascara on. She was a little drunk. But nothing else. No funny business in the toilets. Clean – yeah – from what I saw. Some kid? Yeah, I came up and saw him. Black hair – beard – not a regular. New face here.’

  Smacks lips. ‘Cute. He was cute. Pero loco.’ The cleaner has skin that flakes like chalk. Too much foundation.

  ‘Ay, macho – spend enough time working down here and you can see the crazy in their eyes.’

  More mundane details follow.

  ‘He was wearing grubby Converse.’

  ‘He stank of sweat and marijuana.’

  Other adjectives spilt forth.

  Shifty, uncomfortable, haggard, harried . . . and then the crueller names.

  Hijo de puta. Asesino. Diablo. Cabrón. Monstro.

  At 8 a.m. on the Feast Day of Sant Joan, the youthful fury that greets de la Fuente at the door to Adrià Sorra’s apartment is not what that good fellow had expected. He coughs loudly, rights his stance, moves his chest forward, and states, clear and concise as possible:

  ‘Policia! Sergeant de la Fuente. Can you please confirm that this is the residence of Sr Adrià Daedalus Sorra? Señorita . . . ?’ De la Fuente’s confidence wilts under the eyes of an irate woman.

  ‘Sharp. Emily Sharp.’

  The policemen and forensic specialists congregate behind de la Fuente expectantly. Can it be that de la Fuente has lost his nerve? But de la Fuente is made of stronger stuff than that. He rights himself, continues, stepping further into the hallway; the squad fans out around him.

  ‘Have you been in contact with Sr Sorra in the last twenty-four hours?’ De la Fuente holds Emily’s gaze.

  ‘No.’

  Unconvincing. De la Fuente twitches. His team moves further into the apartment. If he’s there, they’ll want to get him fast – if he’s asleep in his bed with his knife – they’ll grab him. Keep her distracted.

  He clears his throat again, sticking his chest further into the air.

  ‘Sr Adrià Sorra. Is he here?’

  ‘No,’ the American says, trying to hide her increasing annoyance. ‘No, he is not here.’

  ‘But this is his residence?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And, Miss . . . you are his . . .’ De la Fuente’s bald forehead wrinkles into lewd suggestions. Emily switches deftly to Catalan. Disgust at the idea evident.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ Emily says. ‘I live with his sister too – we all live together. The apartment is theirs.’

  An American Catalanista! And an attractive one at that! De la Fuente’s resolve softens. Or a murderer’s accomplice. Pull yourself together, man!

  ‘When was the last time you saw Sr Sorra?’

  ‘I spent the weekend with him and his family.’

  ‘Where did you see him last?’

  ‘At the Girona train station. We left him there to catch the train back to Barcelona Sunday morning.’

  ‘Two days ago?’

  ‘Yes.’ She falters.

  ‘What time?’

  ‘Around eleven.’

  ‘And you saw Sr Sorra when you arrived home?’

  ‘No. He can’t get in at the moment . . .’ Emily stops herself.

  ‘What do you mean by that, Miss Sharp?’

  She looks down at her feet.

  ‘He lost his keys.’

  ‘You didn’t let him up?’

  Emily shakes her head.

  De la Fuente’s eyes rest on the honey-coloured interior door. ‘You’ve had a forced entry here.’ He points to the shattered glass by the handle.

  ‘Adrià broke it four days ago.’

  ‘Is he very violent, Miss Sharp?’

  ‘No . . . well . . . Yes. He has been lately.’

  ‘Perfectly understandable, Miss Sharp. Is Mr Sorra’s sister here?’

  ‘No. She is still with her family. In Girona.’

  ‘Thank you, Miss Sharp.’ De la Fuente snaps into business: ‘We will be conducting a search of your apartment and holding you for questioning. I apologize for any inconvenience.’

  Sergeant de la Fuente is not impressed by what he discovers. Adrià’s room is a slovenly dive. The place reeks. The windows to the outer balcony have been closed for days. Plates of food not cleared to the kitchen. On one wall, a collection of antique blades and a Swiss Army knife. A large double bed with unmade sheets, a battered desk pushed to the side and . . . revolting . . . De la Fuente shudders . . . the most obscene drawings covering the walls. Repeated portraits of a man’s face with electric rods emerging from his nose. Wild eyes with many lashes. Bitter monsters and genitalia. Beside a shelf containing two university files, the boy has cut a message into the floral wallpaper paper: La Topografía del Dolor. ‘The Topography of Pain’. His writing scattered, angry, a terrifying scrawl. Followed by a series of barely legible lines from the Communist Manifesto.

  ‘Jefe!’ Caporal Gómez calls. De la Fuente treads on the path the team have laid out. He crosses to the centre of the living room, and places his hand on Gómez’s shoulder. ‘Take a look at this.’

  De la Fuente
’s jaw locks.

  There, on the walls of the living room, across from a decapitated doll’s head and strewn peacock feathers, is a cabinet which the sergeant has opened to reveal a dragon’s hoard of vials and bottles and medical capsules, barbiturates – amobarbital, pentobarbital, then lithium and benzodiazepine, more innocuous ibuprofen and paracetamol, along with other names he does not recognize: Zyprexa, Lamictal, Symbyax.

  A terrible cold settles in the marrow of de la Fuente’s bones.

  It is a journalist who inadvertently finds the last clues of Adrià Sorra’s life. As the heat presses into his shoulders and the sand sneaks behind his heels, Pepe Calderon regrets the decision to humour his grandmother – a ninety-seven-year-old woman with a beach-front apartment who claimed she had seen a man drown in the sea that morning. Even at the water’s edge it is sweltering – hot hot hot – so hot his curiosity wanes, dips back down to the blasé state of contentment which has become his norm. He approaches the boulders of the sea break.

  Big porous black stones, the home of rats and the animals that hunt them. At the far end – twenty metres out into the sea – two fishermen have erected a parasol and look for crabs.

  At first nothing.

  His effort is lacklustre. He walks down to the sea for show, turning to wave at his grandmother, who should go back inside soon – it’s too hot for her, much too hot for her – and then, as he turns to plod his way back up the wet sand he sees the shoes. A pair of men’s Converse, size eleven, high tops, laces dirty. Underneath the first rocks of the sea wall, tucked into the side facing away from the shore so that they would be hidden initially from view. Pepe can feel the eyes of the old lady on him as he stoops to turn the shoes over. A pair of socks and a pair of shoes – and – Pepe’s heart quickens. That’s blood on the grey rubber rim of the shoe, and blood on the left one’s laces. Not in small quantities either. That undeniably foul smell.

  A profusion of human gore, dried and cracking in the sun.

  Pepe stands still for a moment.

  Then he calls Fabregat, speaking first to a receptionist at the police department, then the man in question.

  ‘What?’ Fabregat roars.

  Pepe walks back to the end of the promenade.

  ‘I know this sounds strange – but I’ve just found what may be your suspect’s shoes. You should get someone down here now. And if you have any video surveillance out here – any shop-front footage, check it. You’ll thank me for it if I’m right.’

  And in the end? Fabregat sighs. The media took hold of the story. ‘Natalia Hernández MURDERED,’ the tabloids yowled. National papers splashed her body across the front page. From Valladolid to Zaragoza, old men discussed the matter over games of chess and wives gossiped with their hairdressers. Have you heard what happened? There was speculation and recrimination, analysis of personal habits and family life, lovers and career. Her fame and beauty cruelly eclipsed the other victims, relegating ‘Las Rosas’ to bit parts in a famous woman’s saga. Long before the police announced Adrià Sorra’s disappearance, a leading commentator remarked that the murderer of Natalia Hernández and Las Rosas was probably a fascist from the corrupt epicentre of Madrid bent on stirring political dissent in the city. In a time of financial stability, the arrival of the euro and the economic boom, tourism has been the main source of revenue in Barcelona and now some mad Madrileño was destroying Catalonia’s image by giving it a reputation as a murderous enclave of occult serial killers. A psychological expert was interviewed who added that the killer’s abandonment of mutilated female bodies in municipal spaces suggested a love of spectacle and that the killings were deliberately attention-seeking in motive. Inspector Manel Fabregat, when interviewed that morning, assured the public that the police were very close to finding the source of this violence.

  In the evening papers, El Corazón’s Pepe Calderon commented on the sensational elements of the case – the means by which the bodies had consistently been attacked by a man obsessed by the art of calligraphy. Mothers kept their teenage daughters in that night, young women were encouraged to travel in groups, to avoid the dark corners of El Raval and not speak to strangers. It was not a man that did this, it was el Diablo. The dark king. Un vampiro. And so it continued, until the police initiated a manhunt, revealing that their primary suspect had flesh and bones and blood and was named Adrià Daedalus Sorra: last seen by his parents at eleven o’clock on the morning of the 22nd, at the train station in Girona. The boy had run away from his uncle en route to Barcelona, secretly getting out at Mataró, before switching trains and coming in to Barcelona on his own. Adrià Sorra spent the next twenty-four hours on the streets, at squat parties and nights out, and had not returned to his apartment on Passeig del Born. When an anonymous source came forward with Adrià’s diary, the city raged. He had fantasies of necrophilia and cannibalism. He wrote about the recent murders with the sexual appetite of a voyeur, considering them a philosophical problem – a symptom of modern societal dysfunction – and an apotheosis of his most illicit and secret desires: ‘A Fucking Social Revolution’.

  His diary also contained innumerable erotic dreams involving his sister’s friend and housemate, a young woman named Emily Sharp, who testified at length to Sorra’s instability and proclivity to violence. He had no concrete alibis for the nights of the respective murders. He was a raver, his friends said, rarely slept; secretive, but fun – charismatic, a wild child, uncontrollable. Doctors came forward to comment on his illness, his therapy, his resistance to treatment: an unfortunate character. The specialist who had been dealing with him said that while she had never suspected he might realize his fantasies, she did not doubt that it was possible. The patient is extremely unstable. He is obsessed with blood and organs and anarchism. I regret not having taken further measures to section him that weekend. The city cried in consternation: Where is this killer? Where has he gone? And so it went on through the night and the next day and the next until Adrià Sorra’s body washed up on the beach in Sitges and no one could ask him any questions any more.

  At first Manel Fabregat ran with it. Despite his bouts of mania, Adrià Sorra was – according to his professors – genuinely brilliant. The Philosophy Department ranked him at the top of the class, but the boy suffered a kind of split personality. At university he presented the veneer of an erudite, high-achieving student; by night he became a hedonistic, sexual animal. Adrià Sorra seemed the perfect psychopath (if that term even means anything, Fabregat mutters darkly, I’m not sure that it does). Violent, unpleasant, he’d broken into his apartment on Friday, beaten the shit out of his sister . . . His parents – for that matter – were as aggressive as the boy must have been in life: they were proud, aloof, selfish, vile. Their son had been running wild for two weeks and his absentee jet-set parents hadn’t seen fit to stop him, or help him, or treat him. It was a shit show, as far as Fabregat was concerned, an upper-class quagmire, with two snob architects defending their monster of a child. And yet, as their lawyers repeatedly pointed out, there were certain elements of the puzzle that didn’t fit. Specifically the letters. Why send the letters? Adrià Sorra was no calligrapher. The boy could barely draw – in fact he suffered from dyspraxia, his handwriting a nearly illegible scrawl. The university had supplied him with a volunteer who took his notes during lectures. Adrià typed his academic essays on an enormous desktop computer. The forensic handwriting analysts agreed: when they studied Sorra’s diary in comparison to the parchment evidence, it was clear that the boy had not written the illuminated verses. Nor, for that matter, would he have been capable of cutting such intricate patterns onto the skin of his victims. He doesn’t know anything about the Middle Ages, his mother hurled at the investigators, arguing that her son had a vivid imagination, and was chronically ill, that he had been blighted by poor timing. Faced with the honesty of the camera footage, the Sorras insisted that their son followed Natalia out of the club, and that he had stumbled on her body, and feeling on edge and suicidal himself, had car
ried her to the steps of the cathedral and then decided to end his own life in the sea. The argument that Adrià was the killer, however, was strengthened by the sudden abating of death that followed his disappearance. On Sant Joan’s Day everything ended, Fabregat explains. There were no more corpses hanging from the branches of trees. The inferno that had opened up in the city closed without fanfare, leaving in its wake a long, empty silence.

  ‘And the letters?’ I ask.

  ‘That psychotic pretence at a game?’ Fabregat explodes. ‘What do you think happened with those?’

  Nothing.

  ‘We were forced to leave them as an enigma, an unresolved itch. I couldn’t make head nor fucking tail of them. But mystery breeds obsession. I’ll be the first to admit that. It was like staring at a Sudoku problem with no apparent solution. Mind-bogglingly irritating.’

  The inspector couldn’t sleep at night. He couldn’t work. He couldn’t function. Worse, he began having dreams of a serpent. The very snake that formed the insignia on the letters unravelled itself and haunted him in his sleep. He dreamt that the snake wanted to speak to him, to lead him through a black thicket to a house where the ground was filled with bones of buried women. In one dream the snake appeared in pieces, cut into shreds, in another the snake was enormous, like a boa or a python, and reared on its tail and stretched above him. He felt unhinged. Derailed. Unable to focus. His superiors began to notice: Fabregat is making mistakes. Fabregat has lost his cool. The inspector developed shingles and night terrors. Stress riddled his body as the unsolved mystery consumed him. It was a block like no other. The inspector believed passionately that he had been asked to decipher a message that he could not understand. He felt played with. Teased. Manipulated. Frustration nearly destroyed him. That year, Fabregat became convinced that there was another malevolent force in the mix, a person or persons who had walked away from his investigation unscathed, but whose hands were as bloody as the devil’s. Six months later Fabregat’s nerves got the better of him and he took a sabbatical before returning to the force for the next ten years and retiring gently at the age of fifty-two. His schoolteacher wife supports the family now and Fabregat reads the paper at home.