another great puzzle of Moche culture: the sexualization of death; yet here it was, daubed in lurid red on the wall of a temple. Naked men waiting to die — with erections.
What was that noise?
That rattling?
She swivelled, alarmed — but it was just the homeless wind, catching at a flap of canvas. Flap, flap, flap. She was very definitely alone, with just the lamenting seagulls for company.
The final flight of cracked adobe steps brought her to the top of the pyramid, where the breeze was truly stiff, but the view spectacular, straight out to sea, beyond the other huacas. A faint thread of green, to the distant north, showed where the feeble Chicama River reached the Pacific.
She turned back to her work. And the Final Enclosure. Here the murals were most eroded, yet most unsettling. After being paraded and tortured — stabbed and whipped — the condemned men, still with their inexplicable sexual arousal, were brought into the highest and most sacred patio, quite open to the sky. And there, at last, the prisoners’ throats were cut with the great sacrificial tumi knife, in a complex and stylized interaction. The same figures were always involved in this mass murder: the Warrior Priest, the Bird Priest and the Priestess. It was presumed that these were Moche nobles and priests, wearing special clothes and jewels.
At the same time as the throats of the victims were cut, the ordinary citizens gathered to watch. And then the people held hands like children, and slowly danced around the dying men, playing ring-a-ring-a-rosy; they sang and chanted and danced as they watched the blood being drained from the men’s deftly-opened throats.
The blood was probably siphoned through little silver pipes — or toucan bones — and poured into the great chalice. This cup of sacred blood was then given to the Bird Priest, who drank the hot blood of the victims even as they died very slowly in front of him.
Jess shuddered. It was, frankly, appalling. And yet the sacrifice ceremony was not the end of the Moche terrors. Nor was it the worst.
Here was an image, often encountered in Moche sites, that no one had entirely deciphered. It was called the Decapitator, and it was thought to be one aspect of the high but unidentified Moche deity. Whoever this god was, here he seemed to be worshipped in the form of a massive tarantula, because tarantulas severed the heads of their victims. This great painted spider, with his lurid bulging eyes and his multiple octopoidal arms, nearly always held a severed head in his hands. And a tumi knife. But here he was lording it over a frieze that stretched right away around a central room, painted on the external wall at about waist height.
And the frieze showed women coupling with pumas, maybe even being raped by pumas. What the hell did that mean? It was truly, and richly, disturbing. It was almost too much. Jess felt a need to calm herself. This is just archaeology! There was no need to be spooked.
And yet she was a little spooked; it was so lonely out here. She really wanted a signal on her cell. The urge to talk to a friend, to talk to Dan, and hear his comforting reassuring scholarly voice, was strong. It didn’t even matter what they talked about, just a voice would be good, a voice plucked from the air — literally a voice in the wilderness.
She had so few friends in Peru. Apart from Dan, there was just Laura working down in Nazca, and Boris her old tutor in Iquitos. Both of them hundreds of miles away. Yes there were Larry and Jay at the dig, but they were more colleagues than chums, though she liked them a lot.
That left just Dan. And he was also her boss.
Part of Jessica liked the loneliness, the solitude. She’d always been a loner — ambitious, dedicated, trying to be the girl her father would have wanted. That was why her relationships had, hitherto, been so casual. Just sex and friendship, nothing serious. No attachments. Nothing to get in the way of the work.
But now her essential loneliness, her drive, was emphasized by her situation: she was literally alone, in a frightening desert, surrounded by Decapitator gods and murals of dying men.
She shivered. Remembering herself as that tiny girl in the hospital room, watching her father, slipping into his terminal unconsciousness, in the darkness of the night. She shivered, and closed her eyes. Her hand was definitely trembling as she took her last photos. Maybe her diabetes was getting worse. But she carried on anyway. Because she had just one more photo to take.
The final shot was one of the most revolting of all El Brujo’s secrets, contained in the very last mural at the end of the wall. In this strange final mural the builders of El Brujo had positioned a real ankle bone in the painted ankle of the depicted priest. The bone slotted into the wall was human, as they knew from tests. The mural was, in other words, a kind of collage made from real human remains.
The wind dropped, even as her thoughts raced. Could this be it? Could this be the answer: the way in to the Moche culture, to their mysterious worship? Maybe this humble bone was a symbolic and universal key.
The bone was positioned exactly where the mural showed an ankle, of a priest. Why? Perhaps because the bone was a deliberate clue. It was emblematic advice to anyone who saw the Moche murals of the Sorcerer: Look, all this is true. All this happens. We really do all of this.
She nearly dropped the camera. Jess stared, appalled, at her own trembling hand. She definitely needed sugar.
Snatching up her stuff, she paced across the patio, past the puma room, past the murals; she took the muddy steps as fast as she could, and then at last she was on the flats and running to the Hilux. Jumping in, she reached straight for her soda, guzzled it and waited for the glucose to correct her blood sugar.
But as she sat back in relief, a terrible, long-buried shard of memory finally worked its way to the surface of her mind.
She remembered her dad before he died. The way his hands used to shake.
15
The Inner Circle, Regent’s Park, London
It was DCI Ibsen’s second visit to the scene of crime — if it was a crime — but he still had to fortify himself. Indeed, as he passed the fluttering police tape and walked towards the off-white SOC tent which entirely covered the car, he experience a greater, nauseating apprehension than he had during his first visit to the scene, six hours before.
The Mini was parked along the Inner Circle, in the middle of Regent’s Park. Ibsen glanced left and right as he approached the tent.
Down there was the boating lake, and the bandstand. A row of bare willows looked stark against the chilly grey waters and the overcast sky. On the other side of the road lay the Regent’s Park open-air theatre, Queen Mary’s Rose Gardens, flower beds and fountains, and empty footpaths making sad diagonals across the lawns.
On a winter’s night, like last night — which was when the incident must have occurred — this was definitely a good place to choose: if you wanted somewhere very quiet, in central London, to slice off your own head with a chainsaw.
‘Sir?’
‘Constable.’
The uniformed man quickly stooped and unzipped the entrance, allowing Ibsen inside.
It was even colder within the tent than without. Letting his eyes adjust to the soft, suffused daylight inside, Ibsen leaned and gazed through the driver’s side window of the car.
The cadaver was still here, though it was about to be moved: a headless corpse sitting in the front seat. The clothed body was in rigor mortis, and it was also twisted, tormented, locked in a shouting grimace from the sheer stunning pain induced by auto-decapitation.
The head had tumbled off the body onto the passenger seat. It lay there on its side, gory with dried blood, looking unreal. It looked, momentarily to Ibsen, like a fake head from some execution scene in a TV series about the Tudors; a ludicrous wax head in a basket.
Behold the head of a traitor.
And yet: it all was too horribly real. The guy really had parked here, and got out his chainsaw, and sawn his own head off. The noise must have been tremendous, Ibsen surmised: the buzz of the saw, the grinding of steel on bone, the glottal scream of reflexive pain, the final rasp of blood-frothed air from the severed windpipe, and then…
