found?' Bosch asked the policeman. 'Yes, on her back with her arms and legs spread out.' 'He left her labels on,' Bosch pointed out to Miss Wood.
'So I see’ said Miss Wood. 'The labels are hard to get off, but whatever he used to make this kind of wound would have cut through them like paper. Has the tool been identified?'
'It was electronic, whatever it was,' the policeman replied. 'We think it might have been a scalpel or some kind of electric saw. Each wound is a deep single cut.' He stretched his hand out across the table and tapped one of the photos closest to him with a pencil. 'There are ten of them altogether: two in the face, two in the chest, two in the stomach, one in each thigh, and two in her back. Eight of them forming crosses, so four crosses altogether. The two in the thighs are vertical. And don't ask me the reason for that either.' 'Did she die from the wounds?'
'Probably. I've already told you, we're waiting for the report from-' 'Do we have an estimated time of death?
'Taking into account the state of the body, we think it must have happened on Wednesday night, a few hours after she was driven away in the van.'
Miss Wood was holding her glasses between the fingers of her left hand. She used them to gently tap Bosch's arm:
'I'd say there isn't that much blood in the photos. Do you agree?' 'I was thinking the same.’
'It's true,' the policeman said. 'He didn't kill her in the wood. Perhaps he cut her up in the van. Maybe he used some sort of sedative, because the body showed no signs of a struggle or of having been bound. Afterwards, he dragged her to the clearing and left her on the grass.'
'Then spent his time tearing off her clothes in the open air,' Miss Wood chimed in, 'ignoring the risk that those amateur birdwatchers might have decided to study their owls a night earlier.'
'Yes, that's odd, isn't it? But as I already said, these people behave-'
‘I understand,' said the woman, interrupting him as she put her glasses back on. They were dark Ray-Bans with gold frames. The policeman thought it must be impossible for Miss Wood to see anything in the red-tinged gloom of this office. Reflected in the glasses, the red curve of the desk formed two pools of blood. 'Could we hear the recording now?' 'Of course.'
The detective bent over to reach into a leather briefcase. When he straightened up, he was holding a portable cassette recorder. He placed it on the desk next to the photos, as if it were just another souvenir of a tourist trip.
'We found it at the feet of the corpse. A two-hour chrome-coloured cassette with no writing or marks on it. It seems to have been recorded on a good machine.'
He jabbed at the start button. The sudden roar led Bosch to raise his eyebrows. The policeman quickly lowered the volume. 'Sorry, it's very loud,' he said. A pause. A whirring sound. Then it started.
At first there was heavy breathing, Then the crackling sound of a fire. Like a bird enveloped in flames. Then a hesitant breath, and the first word. It sounded like a complaint, or a moan. Then it came again, and this time it was audible: Art. More anxious breathing, then the first tentative phrase. The voice was nasal, interrupted by panting, the sound of paper, microphone hiss. It was an adolescent's voice, speaking in English:
'Art is also destruc… destruction… in the past that's all it… was. In the caves they painted what… what they wanted to sa
… sacri… sacri…'
Whirring sounds. A brief silence. The policeman pressed the pause button.
'He stopped recording here, probably to make her repeat the phrase.'
The next part was clearer. Each word was pronounced slowly and clearly. What came over from this new declaration was a desperate attempt by the speaker not to get it wrong. But something else, that could well have been terror, broke through the icy pauses: the caves they painted only what they wanted to sacrifice… Egyptian art was funerary art… Everything was dedicated to death… The artist is saying: I have created you to hunt and destroy you, and the meaning of your creation is your final sacrifice… The artist is saying: I have created you to honour death… Because the art that survives is the art that has died… where beings die, works endure…
The policeman switched off the recorder.
'That's all there is. We're analysing it in the laboratory, of course. We think he did it in the van with the windows closed, because there's not much background noise. It was probably a written text they forced her to read.'
An intense silence followed these words. It's as if by hearing her, hearing her voice, we've finally understood the horror of it all, thought Bosch. He was not surprised at this reaction. The photos had impressed him, of course, but to some extent it was easy to keep your distance from a photo. In his days as a member of the Dutch police, Lothar Bosch had developed an unexpected coldness when confronted with the ghastly red phantoms that appeared in the darkroom. But hearing a voice is very different. Behind the words lay a human being who had died a horrible death. The figure of the violin player appears more clearly when we hear the violin.
To Bosch's eyes, accustomed to seeing her posing in the open air or inside rooms and museums, naked or semi-naked and painted in many different colours, she had never been a 'little girl' as the policeman had called her. Except once, two years earlier. A Colombian collector called Cardenas with a somewhat obscure past had bought her in The Garland by Jacob Stein. Bosch had been concerned what might happen to her in that hacienda on the outskirts of Bogota while she was posing eight hours a day for her owner wearing only the tiniest of velvet ribbons round her waist. He had decided to give her extra protection, and summoned her to his offices in the New Studio in Amsterdam to tell her this. He still had a clear memory of it: the work of art came into his office dressed in T-shirt and jeans, her skin primed and eyebrows shaved off. She was wearing the customary three yellow labels, but apart from that had not been painted at all. She held out her hand: 'Mr Bosch,' she said.
It was the same voice as the girl in the recording. The same Dutch accent, the same smooth quality. Mr Bosch.
With a simple gesture and these few words, the canvas had been transformed into a twelve-year-old girl right before his eyes. It happened in a flash. Bosch's mind was flooded with images of his own niece, Danielle, who was four years younger than Annek. All of a sudden he realised he was allowing a 'little girl' to go and work more or less naked in the house of an adult male with a criminal record. But the giddiness soon subsided, and he became neutral and level-headed once more. She's not a girl, she's a canvas, of course, he told himself. As it turned out, nothing had happened to the work of art in the Bogota hacienda. Now though, someone had cut her to pieces in a Viennese wood.
Listening to the recording, Bosch had been recalling the gentle pressure of her right hand, and the words 'Mr Bosch' pronounced with such unconscious delicacy. Two different sources for his impressions, but they gave the same reply: softness, warmth, innocence, softness. ..
The policeman was leaning forward, as if expecting him to say something. 'Why would he leave a recording?' Bosch asked.
'This kind of madman wants the whole world to hear how he sees things,' the policeman said. 'Has the van been found yet?' Miss Wood wanted to know.
'No, but it soon will be, if he hasn't got rid of it somehow. We know the make and the licence number, so…' 'He was very clever,' Bosch said. 'Why do you say that?'
'All our vans have a tracking device. A GPS satellite system which transmits the position of the vehicle at all times. We installed it a year ago to guard against the theft of valuable works of art. On Wednesday night we lost the signal from this van soon after it left the museum. He must have found the device and deactivated it.'
'Why did you take so long to get in touch with us? You only contacted us on Thursday morning.'
'We didn't realise we had lost the signal. The tracking device sets off an alarm if the van leaves the pre- established route, if there's an accident, or if it's stationary for a long while before reaching the hotel. But in this case, the alarm did not go off, and we did not realise we could not pick up the signal.'
'Which means the guy knew about the device’ the policeman observed.
That's why we thought Oscar Diaz must have been in on it, or have murdered her himself.'
'Let's see if I've got this straight. Oscar Diaz was the person responsible for taking her to the hotel. He was some kind of security guard employed by you, is that right?' 'Yes, one of our security agents,' Bosch agreed.
'But why would one of your own security agents do something like that?'
Bosch looked first at the policeman, then at Miss Wood, who still sat without saying a word.
'We have no idea. Diaz has an impeccable record. If he was crazy, he managed to hide it very well for
