David Hewson - The Villa of Mysteries

Then he sneezed, an astonishing sneeze, a two-lungs-ful sneeze, with a big hooting follow-through loud enough to wake the dead and decidedly liquid too. Automatically she closed her eyes, aware that the air around her was, for a good few seconds, misty with fluid. When she opened them Randolph Kirk was digging into that big, red bulbous nose as hard as he could with the scruffiest hankie she’d ever seen, one covered in dark curlicues that looked like alien hieroglyphics.

“Professor Kirk?” she asked, smiling and wishing she could stop the little refrain “Booger Bill, Booger Bill” running round her head like a schoolyard chant.

“Yes?” He looked around. He was on his own, she guessed. Was a lone woman that frightening?

“Teresa Lupo. I called. About the book.”

She’d laid the praise on thick over the phone. People who wrote books always liked that.

“Oh, excuse me,” he gasped, attacking the padlock with some keys. “I’m being so rude. Come in, please. You’re most welcome.”

He spoke with that clipped, precise accent the educated English always used in Italy. The kind you got from Cambridge and Oxford academics who thought a touch of local slang and vernacular was beneath them.

He broke off for one more cataclysmic sneeze. “Blasted cold. Hate these things.”

She circumnavigated him at a suitable distance. They walked past the excavated remains of an old villa, covered in scaffolding and tarpaulins, and on towards the bigger of the two portable blocks. There, Kirk led her to his office, which was a mess. Papers everywhere. Bits of rock. Photographs of paintings. And one small window that hardly let in any light. He slumped into an old leather chair that looked as if it had come out of the Ark. She perched on a flimsy cane stool opposite that was, she guessed, meant for students. He offered her a warm can of Coke. She declined.

“You liked the book?”

“I loved it, Professor. It opened my eyes. You know, I always thought that period of history was so interesting. You just lit up so many new corners for me.”

“My,” he sighed then popped a couple of pills in his mouth and washed them down with the Coke. “Too kind. And you know I never did make any money out of it at all. Damned publisher paid me a pittance for the manuscript, printed a few copies then hid them in a garage on Romney Marsh somewhere. It’s a miracle you found it.”

“Miracles happen.”

“They do,” he said smiling, toasting her with a can.

She looked outside. The place was deserted.

“Not digging today?”

“The rest of the team are on a field trip in Germany for a week. I just came in to do some paperwork.” He waved a hand at the pile of documents on his desk.

“Are you sure you should be at work? What with the flu and all?”

“It’s needed,” he said then added, with no small measure of pomposity, “I am a head of department, you know.”

“Of course,” she said ruefully, unable to take her eyes off the hankie which was burrowing away again.

“Would you like to see it?”

“What?”

“Our Villa of Mysteries? What else? Normally we don’t let people in without an appointment. And then we’re pretty choosy. You wouldn’t believe the amount of theft that goes on around here. Only a couple of weeks ago we had two Americans hunting around outside the gates with a metal detector, would you believe? Had to send a couple of lads to chase them off.”

“Quite. Later, perhaps.”

He seemed disappointed by her reaction. She should have looked more enthusiastic. “It’s not as famous as the one at Pompeü, of course, but that doesn’t make it less interesting.”

“Is it as big?”

“Oh yes. Bigger probably, once we finish digging.”

“As big as they get? Temples like this?”

He looked briefly uncomfortable, as if this was a question he hadn’t expected. “Temple’s not the right word. These places were more a private religious establishment. Temples tend to be more public.”

“Of course.” She thought about the dirt beneath the dead girl’s nails. It couldn’t have come from Ostia. It was Roman, no doubt about it. “I just wondered… if you find something so fascinating in the suburbs. What would a place like this be like in Rome?”

He sniffed. “Vast. Astonishing. It’s out there somewhere, I imagine. Waiting to be found. As I said in the book, it is the Palace of Mysteries. The wellhead of the cult. The place every acolyte wished to visit, perhaps, before they died. Not that anyone will give me the money to look for it, of course.” He stared sourly at the papers in front of him. “Even if I had the time.”

He was a curious mix of arrogance and self-pity. He liked to tantalize, too. Perhaps that was all his book amounted to, a kind of historical tease. “I would love to see around, Professor,” she said. “The thing is, I have some important questions I need to ask you first.”

He suddenly looked worried, off-guard. “You do?”

She folded her arms, placed her elbows on the desk and peered frankly into his beady eyes. Randolph Kirk didn’t look well and it wasn’t just the cold. He seemed tired, as if he hadn’t been sleeping much lately. Nervous too. “I’ve got to be honest with you. When I said I was a fellow academic who needed a little advice I wasn’t being entirely frank.”

“You weren’t?” he said quietly.

She pulled out her ID card. “Professor, strictly speaking this is not official business. Actually no one back at the Questura even knows I’m here so there’s no need to get worried or think this is a police thing in any way. I won’t waste your time with the reasons.”

You wouldn’t even believe them, she thought. You wouldn’t credit how stupid cops can be when it comes to using academic, intellectual resources.

“The point is this. I’m a pathologist attached to the state police. I’ve got a corpse on my slab right now that, for the life of me, looks as if it came from one of the selfsame rituals you described so accurately in your book. The corpse those same Americans who came here found. The papers wrote all about it.”

“They did?” he bleated. Randolph Kirk didn’t look as if he read papers much or watched TV.

“She’s got a tattoo on the shoulder. A mask. Screaming. She’s clutching a thyrsus. Fennel with a pine cone on the end. There’s grain in one of her pockets. Just the kind of thing you wrote about. The body was found not far from here. In peat, which preserved it and threw out conventional dating techniques, which confused me… us for a while.”

He shuffled in the old leather seat, making it swivel and squeak and squeal. “Oh.”

She was starting to find him annoying. “All that is just as you described in the book. She was sixteen, too. The right age. What’s different is this. Her throat was cut. From behind. One move, sharp knife.”

Teresa Lupo made the gesture, arcing her arm as if she were wielding the blade. Kirk’s florid cheeks went a shade paler and the hankie performed a double dance across his face.

“And it can’t be what I thought. She’s not a peat body from a couple of thousand years old, maybe sacrificed here and then buried in the bog. We know who she is. Or at least we think we do. And she died just sixteen years ago. They even put a coin in her mouth. A tip for the ferryman. Can you beat that?”

“No,” he whispered. “I can’t.”

“I just need to understand more about what motivated these people. What exactly did they hope to gain? Knowledge?”

He shook his head. “Not knowledge.”

“What then? Some kind of personal advantage? Or was it just like joining a club or something?”

He thought about those ideas. “A club,” he said. “That’s an interesting idea.”