The Sleeping Nymph, page 35
Francesco had lied to her before: it must not happen again.
Teresa had no proof against him, but every time her inquiring gaze lifted another layer of dust off the truth, his name seemed to come up one way or another, like a sting in her eye.
“Here’s the file you were waiting for, Superintendent.”
“Thank you.”
Teresa took the report Parisi had handed her, the file still warm from the printer. It was the unofficial summary she had managed—after much effort—to extract from the forensics team. The DNA analysis they had performed on the hair she had found in her apartment was an almost perfect match for Francesco’s. The percentages left no room for doubt: a first-degree blood relative. A sister.
Ewa.
Whoever had broken into her home and stolen her diary knew where Ewa’s remains were hidden.
Either that, or Ewa wasn’t dead at all.
She tried to push that last thought away, as it seemed too divorced from that sense of reality she was trying desperately to cling to, even when the world conspired to steal it away from her.
She found Marini in the office they shared and beckoned him over.
“Let’s get started,” she told him.
They went to the room where Francesco had been made to wait for at least half an hour without anyone bothering to explain why. Teresa hoped to find him with his patience wearing thin and gearing up for a confrontation. She wanted to make him lose control and see how far he was prepared to go when he felt threatened.
But instead, she found a man showing no trace of emotion and who seemed determined to resist all attempts to rattle him. Was he trying to hide a crime he’d committed? Or was he simply trying to preserve what was left of his peace of mind?
Teresa sat down opposite him.
“You’ve been lying to me,” she said, getting straight to the point. “If you do it again, I’ll have to do something about it.”
“Like a teacher with a naughty child?” he said sardonically.
“No. Like a police officer with a recalcitrant witness.”
She saw him stiffen in his chair.
“So, you’ve decided to condemn me now?” he asked her.
“You’re present in every single frame of this story,” said Teresa, evading his question.
“You’re making a criminal of me?”
A suspect, Teresa thought, but she kept that to herself. He had no motive, after all. Or at least not one that she could discern.
“How was your relationship with your sister, Ewa?” she asked him.
“It was affectionate, naturally.”
“Are you aware of the continued existence of certain practices, certain beliefs still being cultivated in this valley?”
“Excuse me?”
Teresa brought out the bag containing the third piece of evidence they had found inside Hanna’s tomb: she could see now that the braided thyme was actually an ouroboros, that ancient archetypal representation of the cyclical nature of time.
“The eternal return,” she murmured, placing the object where he could see it and finally allowing herself to say out loud the words that had been whirling around her mind for some time now. “Shamanism. Female shamanism.”
Francesco didn’t reply. He seemed unable to tear his eyes from the object Teresa had pulled out of her bag.
“Do you know what this is?” Teresa asked him.
“No.”
“But you can guess.”
He said nothing.
“It’s a very old symbol that seems to have survived through the ages, appearing in identical form across a number of cultures and civilizations,” Teresa resumed. “A circle with no beginning or end, a serpent or a dragon eating its own tail. A representation of primordial androgyny, and of immortality.”
At last, he looked up.
“And is there anything wrong with that?”
“Not really, except that we found it in the tomb of a woman who was stabbed through the heart with a stake and then burned, and also in the tomb of another woman whose corpse was stolen.”
Teresa wished there had been some other way to tell him, but she knew she needed to provoke him into some kind of reaction.
“Hanna was killed?” he asked, his voice as flat as the blade of a knife.
“Yes.”
“And you brought me here because you think I’m the killer.”
“I brought you here so that you can tell me what happened that night when your sister’s daughter burned in a fire in the barn a couple of hundred yards from your house.”
Francesco blinked.
“I can’t tell you what happened, because I was asleep. How boring, isn’t it? Horrifying, even: when Hanna died, I was dreaming.”
It was a chilling moment. His poise was at once impressive and disturbing. Then again, the mechanisms of the human mind are never as simple as they appear, and even Francesco had faltered. A casual observer would have missed the way his body language contrasted with what he was saying—the tiny, uncontrollable movements of his head that reflected the denial from his subconscious. An untrained ear wouldn’t have noticed the occasional upward lilt of his voice, as if he were having trouble controlling it, as if his words weren’t really answers but questions: Am I saying the right thing?
Maybe he knew more than he was willing to admit to, or maybe he was just shielding himself from remorse for not having been there when he had been needed.
Teresa knew that you had to tread very carefully when it came to navigating the landscape of the human soul.
Evil deceives, she reminded herself. But it could no longer surprise her. She had seen its every manifestation, and there was no new flourish it could produce. That, at least, was something.
She leaned toward him.
“Maybe you were asleep that night,” she told him. “Maybe you didn’t have anything to do with her death. Maybe. But one thing is for sure: you have the opportunity now to help me find out what really happened.”
He, too, leaned forward now, echoing her tone.
“I let you into my home. I told you about my people and revisited my worst memories to answer your questions, and now you treat me like a criminal. Is it the truth you want? Ask the person who was there that night. There have always been rumors about Matriona. She was there the night Hanna died. Didn’t you know? I’m sure I’ve told you.”
Teresa felt the blow.
Did he tell me? Is he lying? Or did I forget? Maybe I wrote it down in my diary, or maybe it never happened.
Francesco looked at her as if he wanted to see right into her soul.
“You seem confused, Superintendent,” he remarked, as if he knew about the disease that stalked her mind.
Did he have her diary? Or were the symptoms of her illness beginning to show even when she was convinced she was keeping them at bay? Maybe it was just her paranoia making her suspicious of everyone she encountered. Or maybe he was an excellent actor.
Marini came up to her and showed her a message he’d just received on his phone, confirming that there were no fingerprints other than Teresa’s on the diary page they had retrieved from the ruins of the cottage in the woods.
She looked at Francesco, but he remained impassive.
She could feel a sense of unease gripping her tight enough to break her bones.
It’s like hunting a ghost, she thought, but soon her frustration turned into fresh determination. She had Matriona and she had a ghost—and ghosts usually never left the place they had died.
86
Krisnja huddled in her jumper and walked faster toward the woods. From the kitchen window, she had seen her cat trot along the path and disappear among the trees. It wasn’t safe: there had been a fox sniffing around the field next to the house for the past few days.
The day’s dawn sprinkled dewdrops over the world, throwing a gleaming cloak of pink and violet like a layer of ash over the valley and all the way up to the tips of the mountains. The forest was a colorless limbo, mist rising from the undergrowth. Krisnja was surprised by that pillowy silence. Though the night had ended, the forest still seemed to be asleep, locked in an unnatural slumber.
She saw what looked like the tip of a tail slipping away behind a bush just ahead of her.
“Orpheus!” she called out, running after him. Her voice echoed in the fog.
A pair of crows flew across the path, low over the ground, and she let out a frightened scream.
Silence fell over the forest again, broken only by the heavy sound of Krisnja’s breathing, in time with the sense of foreboding rising within her, and the thoughts hammering away in her head.
She felt like she was being watched. What had begun as a vague feeling of unease had now assumed the contours of a hidden presence.
For the first time in her life, she was scared of the place where she had grown up. Dark spots in the fog now began to swirl and form familiar silhouettes: the grave faces of Ewa, Hanna and Aniza, billowing in the mist.
Krisnja rubbed at her eyes. When she opened them again, the faces had disappeared.
She looked back in the direction she’d come from, but the path seemed to have dissolved in a wall of smoke. There was something there, not far from where she stood. It was walking—but no, not really. What it was doing—the way it was doing it—could never be described in human terms. Krisnja could hear the sound of its bones breaking as it approached her. She could hear the bubbling of its bodily humors, the clicking of its tendons. She could smell its scent.
The sound of her own keening wail reached her ears, and she began to run without knowing which direction she was heading in. She had been plunged into a dark and hostile realm now, and from its recesses rose a savage roar.
Krisnja fell into a tangle of brambles, its army of tiny hooks tearing at her clothes and slicing open the skin on her face and arms. She tried desperately to break free, but her struggling merely tightened the grip of the prickly vines on her body. She realized then, and far too late, that the monstrous creature had led her exactly where it had wanted her to go: into a trap.
Her breathing now was accompanied by another’s. Her terrified sobs were echoed by a guttural laugh.
Krisnja was like a butterfly trapped in a spiderweb: she could only move her eyes. When she finally worked up the courage to open them, what she saw took her breath away.
Standing before her was the Warwar, the keeper, the creature her grandmother, Ewa, used to tell her about.
It had two names, reflecting its dual nature.
Tikô Wariö: he who guards.
Tikô Bronô: he who protects.
The “fierce guardian” the legends spoke of had curling horns and blood-red eyes. And the face of a woman.
87
In the barn where Hanna had died, time had stopped. The signs of the destruction that had taken place that night were still present, crystallized into black charcoal, preserved in the building’s ravaged wooden beams, in its foundations laid bare under the floor.
No one had bothered to restore the barn, or perhaps they had chosen not to. It still stood on a hill that overlooked the village and Teresa wondered if it survived now as a monument to something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.
She hadn’t had a chance to speak with Krisnja yet about the night her mother had died. She had called around to see her, but the young woman hadn’t been home.
All that Francesco had told her was that Krisnja had witnessed the fire that night. Her grandmother had been holding her in her arms when she had run to try to stop the fire, but there had been nothing she could do. Ewa’s screams had woken up the whole village.
The barn was an annex to the house in which Krisnja had lived with her mother and grandmother, the same house she still lived in, alone, and that Teresa was observing now from the adjacent meadow. A colossal oak tree stood between the two buildings, a swing made of rope and timber hanging abandoned from one of its branches. It was rocking in the wind, as if some invisible presence were pushing it lazily about while observing the flurry of activity currently taking place in the barn.
Krisnja wasn’t the only person Teresa wanted to speak to. She had dispatched Parisi and de Carli to keep an eye on Matriona’s house, too, which was at the back of her tavern. Teresa would pay her a visit herself soon enough, but before she confronted her, she needed to find evidence of the murder that had taken place in that barn.
Death, she reflected, always leaves its mark on the world of the living.
It moves on human limbs, it touches the material realm with human fingertips and prints, it leaves flecks of warm spit in its wake. Like a ghost, it haunts and never leaves the place of its last farewell. The inspection of the barn had been going on for over an hour now and Teresa was sure that the presence of death would soon be revealed. She knew what they needed to look for and she had issued the forensics team with very specific instructions.
“What are you thinking about?” Marini asked her.
Teresa chewed on the frame of her glasses.
“Fire,” she replied.
“You don’t think the fire was an accident.”
“I don’t, and what’s more, I don’t think it was started just to destroy the evidence of the murder.”
“So it was significant in some way?”
“In more ways than one, in fact. Most people overlook the fact that death by fire is the most devastating and violent fantasy a killer’s mind could possibly conjure up. Flames consume the body, reduce it to ash. It is total, complete annihilation. Pyromania is often considered an indicator of borderline personality disorder.”
An officer from the forensics team called out to them from the other side of the building. As they walked up to him, he looked at Teresa as if she were a clairvoyant.
“You were right,” he said in amazement. “It’s exactly like you said.”
He showed them a section of the floor where the debris from the fire had just been cleared, revealing a series of raised stains, which the forensics team had tagged as evidence.
Teresa and Marini crouched down.
Teresa ran a gloved finger over the stains. The forensics officer had rubbed the ash off them, revealing the redness beneath.
“It’s wax,” Marini murmured incredulously.
A semicircle of flickering red candles, thought Teresa.
Those were the marks she had been looking for. Ten years later, they were still there.
The traces of a fire ritual.
88
“Something’s going on at Matriona’s place, Superintendent. There have been women from the village turning up at her door since dawn,” said de Carli.
One after the other, the women of the community co-operative had been converging on Matriona’s home in a silent, brisk parade. The only male present was a young man Teresa had never seen before and who seemed to be keeping a watchful eye over the procession of women, like an apprehensive guardian. When he saw Teresa and Marini approaching, he slipped away inside the building. Matriona emerged shortly thereafter and marched up to them with a flinty look in her eye.
“This is not a good time,” she told them.
“What were you doing in the barn?” said Teresa, forgoing pleasantries. “What were you and Hanna doing there before the fire broke out?”
She saw Matriona flinch.
“It’s taken ten years for this village to stop whispering behind my back, Superintendent,” she replied. “And ten years to gain Krisnja’s trust after she watched her mother die that night. I don’t intend to revisit those horrors now.”
“Tell me what happened,” Teresa repeated, unmoved.
Matriona gave her a sad smile, but her expression was steely.
“I’ll show you instead,” she said, taking off her fingerless gloves off and dropping them to the floor.
Underneath, her hands were wrapped in bandages. She peeled those off, too, and showed the backs of her hands to Teresa. The skin there looked as if it had liquefied, then curdled. She turned her palms upward: they were covered in sores deep enough to expose her flesh.
“I’ve tried everything, but they just won’t heal. Sometimes they seem to be getting better, but then they’ll open again. The pain has become part of my life now; it’s been like this ever since that night.”
Matriona picked up her gloves and put them back on, her eyes fixed on Teresa’s.
“There is nothing to say, except that I was too late to save Hanna and the fire had already started by the time I got there. As you can see, I tried to get through to her anyway, but at some point, I had to decide whether to save my own life or die with her. By the time Ewa had run to the barn with Krisnja sobbing in her arms, there was nothing more that could be done. Nothing.”
“Was Hanna expecting you?” Teresa asked.
“No, but I knew I’d find her there.”
“Why?”
Matriona didn’t reply, so Teresa decided to do it for her.
“Our investigation has brought to light traces of melted candle wax in the ruins of the barn. The remains of a magic circle, perhaps. I think the two of you got involved in something you couldn’t quite control and the game got out of hand. I think you were practicing a form of shamanism.”
“It’s not a game, Detective.”
“That almost sounds like a threat. Should I be worried?”
“Not if you come in peace.”
“There won’t be any peace until we’ve done right by the dead. Hanna was murdered—but perhaps you knew that already.”
She saw Matriona clench her jaw, the suspicion on her face shifting to determination.
“And you think I did it?”
“You were there.”
“I was there because for months, Hanna had been acting strange. She was becoming more and more distant, and she was clearly upset about something. I wanted to be with her. I wanted to be there for her. But I was too late to save her—too late in every way. I’ll have to live with that for the rest of my life. And if someone really did kill her, then I suppose the thing that had been suffocating her all that time was fear.”
