rhythmic creaking of the bed. He was raping her again. All Adam could see were bare ankles, kicking, listlessly, at Ritter’s leather boots. Then the kicking stopped. Hannah’s feet were stroking the boots.
Stroking?
‘Rapingggg her.’ Nina somehow choked the words around her gag. ‘ Hhheehmm.’
Adam’s anger and confusion boiled with the blood in his back. It was self-evidently true: Ritter was raping her. Now he heard a stifled scream. Then a coarse laugh; and the muzzled groan of someone, doing something. Was he cutting her as well?
The bed slats creaked obscenely, again and again and again. Through the crack in the door Adam saw that Ritter apparently had her upside-down. Taking her from behind. The radiator burned. The creaking went on and on and on and still the rapist blurted his disgusting hoarse grunts. Hannah moaned as if she was dying.
The moans were followed by ardent breathing, and then whispered noises and sighing; and then quietness. Liquid noises. Gurgling. Then again nothing.
Gurgling?
Adam yearned and burned against the scorching radiator. Hannah’s legs were no longer visible. What had Ritter done to her? Killed her? Suddenly he was sure Ritter had killed her. Raped her, then killed her.
Nina was crying again; Adam felt like crying himself. But he didn’t. He found he was just waiting for the next scene in this grotesque yet inexorable melodrama. When Ritter would come out and unchain Nina, and take her into the bedroom. And do the same to her: rape her and kill her so Adam could hear. So he could imagine.
A brutal noise shattered his terminal reverie.
The door had crashed open. The noise was… downstairs.
Brutal shouts and noises.
Two seconds later police in blue steel helmets and flak jackets were swarming into the sitting room. Half a dozen of them, staring at Nina and Adam. Adam struggled in his shackles and motioned at the door — the bedroom — but even as he did so Ritter emerged, half naked, gun in hand. A dazzling and deafening helicopter light pierced the window shutters; and then the room filled with gas, or smoke — a smoke grenade — then there was a massive crash of glass; Adam strained to see — it was Ritter — he had run into the bedroom and hurled himself, bodily, through the window, which was just visible. The window was shattered; he’d jumped from the first floor.
The police ran into the bedroom. Adam heard shouts outside, and more gunshots: they must be pursuing Ritter, through the back gardens. Two other cops snapped the shackles that chained Nina and Adam to the burning radiator, then the metal links of their vile gags.
Nina hurled the plastic from her mouth, shoved herself to her feet and ran to the bedroom door.
But a large policeman stopped her. Stout and strong in his blue flak jacket.
‘But it’s my sister. My sister!’
The cop held her by her trembling shoulders. ‘You don’t want to see what’s in there.’
32
Witches’ Market, Chiclayo
‘Qasiy chay ruwasqaykita osqhayman!’
This wasn’t the curandero. Jessica opened her eyes. She looked up and left. It was Larry Fielding. And he was shouting at the wizard.
‘Mana ruwanki chayqa qanmantacha yachakunki!’
Behind him was a policeman. A policeman? The Peruvian officer had a gleaming peaked cap, and a hand poised on the butt of a gun, ready to draw.
The wizard shrivelled away: cowering and protesting. Larry reached and pulled the rank cloth from Jessica’s mouth; she phlegmed the horrible taste into the dust and coughed up her questions.
‘What the — what the? Jesus — Larry — how did you find me?’
He shrugged: a bashful saviour. ‘I was watching you, and you seemed evasive. We gotta watch out for each other! Didn’t quite believe your supermarket shtick.’
‘But…’
‘The market traders told me someone had grabbed you so I went to get the cops to help.’
As the boy unfastened Jessica’s bonds, Larry snapped questions at the shaman, who grovelled his replies.
‘Kay warmika milloymi apamun nunakunata.’
Larry nodded, grimly and disdainfully.
Jess stood up. There was still lizard blood on her stomach. The policeman handed her a handkerchief; she did her best to rub the gore from her skin. The Quechua conversation rattled around the shack, coarse and staccato, like dried beans in a gourd. Larry was the only one in the TUMP team who could speak the ancient Incan tongue.
‘What?’ she said. ‘What were they doing?’
He put a firm hand on her shoulder. ‘It was just an exorcism. They weren’t going to kill you, or even harm you. They just think you need exorcising.’ He glanced around the sun-lanced shack, at the witchy little dolls, the sprigs of dried monkey paws.
‘Exorcising! Why?’
Larry shook his head. ‘You know why. They think TUMP is hexed! They reckon we have cursed the area, stirring all these ancient Moche demons — like the pishtacas.’ He gestured at her rolled-up jeans. ‘They weren’t actually going to cut off your feet, it was just symbolic. They were trying to placate the Moche god by performing, I guess, a phoney Moche ceremony.’
The policeman spoke, impatiently, and in very fast Spanish. But Jess could clearly discern the meaning: he wanted them to leave the market.
‘We’d better go,’ said Larry. ‘This is their world. The Quechua speakers. We’d better go now.’
Jess was unlikely to disagree. Unsteadily she walked out of the shack. In the darkened aisles of traders she breathed the reeking air of the main market with abject relief; it was just as it always was. People were sitting at dirty counters drinking from steel mugs of coca tea, eating rancid plates of brown octopus, and buying eels in bottles. And monkey paws.
Behind them, in the shack, Jess could hear the policeman yapping angrily at the bruja. ‘What will happen to them?’
‘Slap on the wrist, maybe. The police sympathize with the locals. They don’t want us here either, Jess.’ He grabbed her by the elbow and they stepped into the grubby sunshine of Chiclayo. Black turkey vultures circled, inevitably, in the dusty blue sky over the dusty orange cathedral. As if the whole city was carrion.
‘The cop told me something.’ He gazed at her. ‘That gunman who came for Dan has been here too, with friends, asking questions, terrorizing people, asking about us in Zana. And asking about McLintock.’
‘ Here?’ Jess shook her head. ‘They came here?’ She was still trying to shake off the memory of the little boy with his dirty, wet finger circling her ankle with warm blood. ‘And this guy, McLintock. How does he fit into this?’
Larry ignored her question. ‘There’s something else you need to know.’
‘What?’
‘They’ve made a discovery. At Huaca D.’
‘I know, I was there. I-’
‘No. A new discovery. This morning. A major, major discovery. Dan phoned me an hour back. And it changes everything. Apparently.’ Larry sighed. ‘That’s all I damn well know! That’s all Dan said. It changes everything.’
They sprinted to the car.
Two hours later she was back in Huaca D. The same dust, the same sleeping bones; yet this time it was all different.
‘ All children?’
Dan nodded, making the beam from his headtorch jiggle forlornly. ‘All of them children.’ He stepped into the antechamber. ‘We broke in by accident, this morning. One of the villagers put a shovel through the wall; we found a
