dolls to the local wizards.
Jess tried to pacify her terrors, to rationalize them. She knew these people: the real Peruvians, the country- folk and mountain-dwellers, the descendants of the Moche and the Chavin and the Cham Cham who believed and practised the ancient magic. They were not usually killers. If anything, they were all too inert and passive, ruefully resigned to the terrible forces of nature — drought and El Nino, white men and dictatorships.
But her rationalizations only got her so far. And then they gave out entirely. Jess was terrified.
And now something was happening. The curandero in the Abercrombie sweats had reached into a smelly plastic tank — to pull out a large wriggling lizard, almost a foot long.
The lizard writhed and yawned in his hand. With the air of someone who had done this many times before, the man took a lazy puff on his foul-smelling cigarette, shifted the butt in his mouth, exhaled pungent smoke through clenched yellow teeth, then stuck a knife in the animal. A pitiful, wheezing cry emanated from it. The curandero lifted up the lizard, which was now bleeding copiously from the half-gutted belly.
Hamuy kayman llank anaykita ruway!
The tone was abrupt: it sounded as if he was ordering someone into action. A boy stepped nervously from the shadows, and reached around Jess. She flinched at his touch. The feel of his grimy infant fingers on her tee shirt, under her denim jacket, was chillingly unpleasant. The boy lifted up her T-shirt, exposing her naked stomach.
The curandero hoisted the thrashing lizard over her stomach and dribbled copious warm blood from its riven gut so that the blood fell on her bare skin, like drops of melting red wax from a candle. The urge to clean it off immediately was unbearable.
‘ Para, por favor.?Que estas haciendo? ’ Stop. Stop. What are you doing?
No reply. The shaman had his eyes closed. He circled the dying, writhing lizard, sprinkling its hot reptilian blood on Jess’s arms and thighs now. Then he vigorously squeezed and twisted the creature as if he was squeezing the last drops from a wet rag, flicking tiny drops of darker blood all over her breasts and her belly. At last he flung the dead reptile to the dirty floor.
‘Stop…’
Her voice was weak with fear. The curandero bent down and blew cigarette smoke over her chest and face, talking and muttering as he did, blowing more smoke on the lizard-blood pooled in her navel; then more hot smoke in her face, chanting and smoking, and blowing, his breath soiled with the smell of green soup.
Her attention was diverted to her own legs: Jess gazed down in horror.
The little boy was doing something down there. Rolling up her jeans, to expose her ankles. She gazed in urgent terror as he reached up and dipped his fingers in the blood on her stomach; then used it to draw lines around her ankles, like a surgeon marking the lines of incision.
Were they going to cut off her feet at the ankles?
Jessica screamed as loud as she was able.
The curandero sighed, took a fetid cloth and rammed it in her mouth. Jessica screamed, but silently now, muffled and helpless. The curandero’s boy had finished drawing blood circles on both her ankles. Straining against her bonds, Jess tried to cough out the cloth, but it was no good. They really were going to do it: they were going to cut off her feet, like the mad and terrible Moche.
Lifting a tobacco-stained finger, the curandero ordered the boy back into the shadows. Then he took up the long vicious knife he had used to gut the lizard.
Jessica rocked violently back on the chair, trying to fling herself away, without success. She was stuck here, in this terrible shack, stuck with the painted caiman skulls, the meek little statues of Jesus, the bowls of raw coca paste.
She felt the first touch of the blade on her ankles. A shy and tentative gesture, explorational. Jessica closed her eyes and waited for the driving pain as the metal cut into her skin.
And then her bones.
29
Thornhill Crescent, Islington, London
Hannah McLintock scrolled through the page on her laptop. The room was getting dark, as afternoon declined into twilight; her blonde Celtic hair was illuminated by the glow of the screen. Adam sat back and watched as the two sisters leaned nearer to the computer on the kitchen table.
The older sister spoke. ‘So the porch at the church was covered with these Green Men? Like tiny gargoyles?’
Adam nodded. ‘Yes, and there were about fifty of them. And it’s the only chunk of the ancient Temple left, on the exterior. We know your father went there to look at the church. But he couldn’t get inside. So that’s what he must have come to see. The Green Men in the porch. There are, of course, Green Men at Rosslyn too.’
Hannah nodded, distracted. And scrolled down her screen a little more. Then she sat back, with an air of et voila! ‘Here it is, in Wikipedia. The Green Man.’
‘Read it out,’ suggested Adam.
Hannah obliged. As she did Adam glanced around the dimly-lit kitchen. The fridge was large and brushed and steel. Fashionable cookbooks filled a shelf, next to tall glass vessels full of obscure pasta. The selection of olive oils was intense. A glamorous party invitation was stuck by magnets to the fridge door.
It was all very eloquent, and it said: this is a nice prosperous house. The home of a young, attractive, privileged metropolitan London couple, a couple doing well, a couple maybe thinking of having children.
And where did Nina fit into all this? The unmarried unattached younger daughter, with her drinking and her dark, dark hair.
Adam could discern the dynamic between the sisters. There was a strong bond there, but also perhaps a tiny bit of resentment. Nina was the prettier one: she was certainly the more damaged and neurotic, the more fragile.
Hannah was attractive but more stolid, more sensible perhaps; yet she had already made a slight and apparently jesting remark about Nina being ‘Dad’s favourite’. Adam had also noticed a definite bickering underlying their mutual sadness at their father’s death, Hannah apparently feeling that their father’s final illness, the cancer he had kept quiet, entirely explained his suicide.
The older sister finished her recitative from Wikipedia. ‘So we know the Green Man is a common architectural motif. Originally pagan. We know that they represent, probably, a wild man of the woods, a fertility figure, or even a pre-Christian heathen god like Woden. Commonly they have leaves for hair and beards, and sometimes shoots growing from their mouths, eyes, and noses. They are found-’ she checked the screen, ‘-across Europe. They date from the eleventh century to the twentieth. Some of the earliest can be seen in Templar sites in the Holy Land.’
Nina sat back on the kitchen stool. ‘What does that tell us? Cube root of fuck all.’
Adam gazed at the dark black rectangle of kitchen window, smeared with snowmelt. Who was out there, pursuing them? The serious anxiety was actually a flavour in his mouth: as if he was sucking a key. Sour and metallic. And the winter night was so dark.
‘Can we have a light on?’
‘Sorry,’ Hannah said. ‘I got carried away, I didn’t realize, yes of course.’ Her accent was almost perfectly English, the Scottishness long since departed. There was a stark contrast with Nina: blonde and brunette, English and Scottish. But he could also sense the sincere love between the sisters as well: their hugs and kisses on meeting had been unabashed.
Soft bright light flooded the kitchen; Adam gazed at a photo perched on top of a breadmaker: a recent holiday photo of Hannah and her boyfriend with palm trees behind them. He was as blonde as her.
‘Where is… ah…’
Hannah followed his gaze to the photo. ‘My fiance? Nick? In Paris working, but he’s back tomorrow.’
Adam felt the barometer of risk twitching further towards danger. The fiance was away. So he was the only man in the house. If anything happened he would have to defend them. Follow the notebooks to the daughter.
