office and asks who had it delivered.
‘Is this a joke, lads?’ he asks the boys.
He is told it came via fat-priest-post, a man flustered, who was unaware of its sender. At nine, Inspector Fabregat goes home. He has dinner with his son at the table and that evening he makes love to his wife.
Twenty-four hours later a second missive arrives, this time delivered by a choirboy, who uncovered the letter cleaning the seat of the confessional in Santa Maria del Mar before the evening mass of Whit Monday. The letter is delivered duly to Fabregat, who opens the envelope to find a second wad of parchment. On the outer sheet the tail-biting-serpent-of-eternal-fucking-life. On the inner pages an identical diagram. The nine letters placed around concentric circles. One dial within another. In the same curling script someone has written:
You have called me
Thrice Great
Two-Faced
Forked Tongue.
Inspector Fabregat’s blood curdles. For half an hour Fabregat chews his lip. What is this? A prank? Some punk kid getting him back? A lunatic?
Thrice Great? He turns the phrase around.
What does it mean?
For surely it means something.
They find the first victim in the small hours of morning on Tuesday, 10 June 2003. Fabregat follows a young sergeant through a passageway between tight apartment blocks. Beneath the hanging gardens of Baluard de les Drassanes, lit by a few torpid lamps, the bleakly painted apartment blocks turn a damp and dreary grey. Laundry dangles from windows: brown knickers, faded linen. Sweat malingering. The washing feral in the night, stained with hanging shadows like half-lit jamones serranos . One disappointed ambulance in the centre of a square. Blockades on all entrances, and traffic on the bypassing road has ceased. Police tape circles around the trunks of each of the outer lamp posts and trees, with the exception of the young jacaranda at the centre, around which the team of suits now clusters, looking at fingernails, pollen, semen, blood – looking for hair follicles and gum, fingerprints and grime – a melancholy storm wheeling round the object in question. Little feet dangling towards the pavement. Dead as bone china. A child. Fabregat starts. Barely a woman. Hanging from a rope attached to a branch of the jacaranda tree. Auburn hair falling over her chest. Wounds dry. He looks up into her. Emotions rise in his chest he had forgotten. He battens down. Look closer. He ignores the chatter of the team around him. Presses on. A camera flashes. No warmth. Pop! Pop! goes the flash. Her mouth? A cave of darkness .
Fabregat squints. Observes the hanging body. Faint red lines in the skin of the girl – No – don’t look at her face again – not yet. A scarlet letter B. Skin pristine in its clarity, hair lustrous, tumbling down over shoulders. In life she would have been lovely, a real beauty. He studies her carefully. Clinically. Between her nipples someone has carved the points of a crescent moon. Around her navel, a circle, the full rim of a sun around her belly button. Fabregat steadies himself. Records the litany of sins: ‘. . . Lacerations made to the body. Tongue removed in its entirety. Muscle severed at the base. Victim appears to be in her mid-teens . . . ’ The forensic officer points to her hands – ‘ Image of a snake cut into her left palm, a . . . ’ Fabregat slows, squinting at the mark. Don’t focus on her face. How had she died? Strangulation, he thinks, clocking the bruised skin on her neck. Mutilated first, then strangled.
‘Cross cut into her right palm, all flesh wounds, a few millimetres deep,’ one of the investigators barks.
There is a C on her forehead, between the eyes.
Fabregat stops. Nine letters in total . His face pales. The letters correspond exactly to the parchment charts on his desk. B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, K , cut onto a child-cum-crime-scene, opened up for inspection. Words whiplash through his skull. Verses of a demented poetry. You
‘Is this a joke, lads?’ he asks the boys.
He is told it came via fat-priest-post, a man flustered, who was unaware of its sender. At nine, Inspector Fabregat goes home. He has dinner with his son at the table and that evening he makes love to his wife.
Twenty-four hours later a second missive arrives, this time delivered by a choirboy, who uncovered the letter cleaning the seat of the confessional in Santa Maria del Mar before the evening mass of Whit Monday. The letter is delivered duly to Fabregat, who opens the envelope to find a second wad of parchment. On the outer sheet the tail-biting-serpent-of-eternal-fucking-life. On the inner pages an identical diagram. The nine letters placed around concentric circles. One dial within another. In the same curling script someone has written:
You have called me
Thrice Great
Two-Faced
Forked Tongue.
Inspector Fabregat’s blood curdles. For half an hour Fabregat chews his lip. What is this? A prank? Some punk kid getting him back? A lunatic?
Thrice Great? He turns the phrase around.
What does it mean?
For surely it means something.
They find the first victim in the small hours of morning on Tuesday, 10 June 2003. Fabregat follows a young sergeant through a passageway between tight apartment blocks. Beneath the hanging gardens of Baluard de les Drassanes, lit by a few torpid lamps, the bleakly painted apartment blocks turn a damp and dreary grey. Laundry dangles from windows: brown knickers, faded linen. Sweat malingering. The washing feral in the night, stained with hanging shadows like half-lit jamones serranos . One disappointed ambulance in the centre of a square. Blockades on all entrances, and traffic on the bypassing road has ceased. Police tape circles around the trunks of each of the outer lamp posts and trees, with the exception of the young jacaranda at the centre, around which the team of suits now clusters, looking at fingernails, pollen, semen, blood – looking for hair follicles and gum, fingerprints and grime – a melancholy storm wheeling round the object in question. Little feet dangling towards the pavement. Dead as bone china. A child. Fabregat starts. Barely a woman. Hanging from a rope attached to a branch of the jacaranda tree. Auburn hair falling over her chest. Wounds dry. He looks up into her. Emotions rise in his chest he had forgotten. He battens down. Look closer. He ignores the chatter of the team around him. Presses on. A camera flashes. No warmth. Pop! Pop! goes the flash. Her mouth? A cave of darkness .
Fabregat squints. Observes the hanging body. Faint red lines in the skin of the girl – No – don’t look at her face again – not yet. A scarlet letter B. Skin pristine in its clarity, hair lustrous, tumbling down over shoulders. In life she would have been lovely, a real beauty. He studies her carefully. Clinically. Between her nipples someone has carved the points of a crescent moon. Around her navel, a circle, the full rim of a sun around her belly button. Fabregat steadies himself. Records the litany of sins: ‘. . . Lacerations made to the body. Tongue removed in its entirety. Muscle severed at the base. Victim appears to be in her mid-teens . . . ’ The forensic officer points to her hands – ‘ Image of a snake cut into her left palm, a . . . ’ Fabregat slows, squinting at the mark. Don’t focus on her face. How had she died? Strangulation, he thinks, clocking the bruised skin on her neck. Mutilated first, then strangled.
‘Cross cut into her right palm, all flesh wounds, a few millimetres deep,’ one of the investigators barks.
There is a C on her forehead, between the eyes.
Fabregat stops. Nine letters in total . His face pales. The letters correspond exactly to the parchment charts on his desk. B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, K , cut onto a child-cum-crime-scene, opened up for inspection. Words whiplash through his skull. Verses of a demented poetry. You
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