David Hewson - The Villa of Mysteries

“Damn. So you’re saying he just kept it all in his head?”

“All what? He didn’t know anyone.”

But he did. He had to. He made a call and then the crap hit the fan. Except it couldn’t be like that. The crap had to be on its way already. All she’d done was accelerate it a touch, speed up the machine a little. Nevertheless, he made a call .

She slammed down the phone, aware that Regina Morrison was, to her astonishment, uttering noises that sounded very like an offer of dinner.

“What is wrong with these people?” she wondered out loud.

She walked back over and stared at the corpse of Randolph Kirk, wishing she could wake him up for one minute and ask a few simple questions.

Her head was back in Kirk’s office now, watching him work at his nose with that disgusting piece of cloth.

“Booger Bill, Booger Bill,” she whispered to herself, aware that Monkboy looked ready to call in the men from the funny farm at any moment. “Never in my life have I seen a handkerchief in that condition, not even in the middle of a flu epidemic. ”Not even—“

Monkboy watched her, petrified. “You’re not leaving this room,” he warned. “I will lock that door, I will swaddle you in bandages, I swear—”

“Oh my God,” she gasped, then foxed him altogether. She was smiling beatifically.

“Please—” he whined.

“His clothes, Silvio. I want them. Now.”

THEY ARE DRESSED, moving, through the door, out into the cold and the caves, his legs as heavy as lead, detached from his control. She has to help him round this baffling labyrinth of tunnels, stumbling in and out of the yellow pools of light cast by the random bulbs that hang from the ceiling.

Stay in the shadows , he says. Until I tell you .

They enter another room and she holds him, keeping them both close to the wall, in the darkness. It’s a large chamber, one he remembers, well lit in the centre. He notices now that there is a table at its centre, dusty, with rickety chairs, maybe as many as twelve. An ancient wand—his head searches for the name Teresa Lupo gave it, thyrsus—lies at one end, in front of a chair that is high-backed and grander than the rest. A theatrical mask, with the familiar gaping mouth and dreadlocks, sits next to it, black-eyed, a dead totem, waiting to be reanimated.

The walls are what he recollects best from the night before. Picture upon picture, blonde on blonde, the same shining colour as Miranda’s hair now. Suzi Julius and Eleanor Jamieson, young and innocent, laughing for the camera, thinking they’d live forever. They haunt the room like ghostly, incandescent twins, their glittering eyes following everything.

Miranda Julius darts into the light and picks up the thyrsus, waves it in the air. Specks of dust dance in the yellow light. The smell of ancient fennel, faintly sweet, reaches his nostrils.

She replaces the wand, returns and looks at him. There are voices, distant ones. This curling, twisting tangle of caverns could encompass scores of chambers. He tries to think for both of them.

Her hand is on his arm. Her eyes are bright orbs alight in his face.

There is a dark alcove set back from the table. He pulls her further into the shadows and the effort makes his head hurt, his breath comes in snatched pants.

He takes her face in his hands. His head’s starting to clear now. He can hear his own voice and it’s real.

“Miranda. The best thing we can do is find a way out of here. Find some help and come back for Suzi.”

There’s such fear in her face. She embraces him, her hands reach behind his back for something unseen, her head moves to the back of his neck, lips bite hard on the skin there. She’s moving, pressing herself now to his lips. She lunges forward, kisses him, thrusts herself into his mouth, probing, probing, feeling the softness. And this time he is certain. A tiny object rides the tip of her long, strong tongue until it reaches the back of his throat. He gags, begins to fall, and a voice somewhere in his head sings, one pill makes you bigger .

He opens his eyes and sees her lips moving to the words as she holds him, blocking his mouth with his fingers until he swallows.

SILVIO DI CAPUA LOOKED at the object on the table, shivered then let out a long, pained groan. It was Randolph Kirk’s handkerchief, a piece of once-white pristine fabric now crumpled into a compact ball held tightly together by a random collection of solidified green and grey gloops.

“Don’t turn squeamish on me, Silvio,” she said. “Scalpel?”

“Oh come on,” he complained. “You want me to find you a surgical mask too?”

Teresa Lupo gave him the extra cold look, the one she saved for special occasions. “Wouldn’t be a bad idea, would it?”

He grumbled and passed her the instrument. “This is insane. This is the most insane thing I have seen in these recent insane times.”

“Booger Bill wrote those numbers down somewhere,” she insisted. “It wasn’t on the back of his hand. It wasn’t on the cuffs of his shirt. And there was more stuff on this damn hankie than mere snotballs. It was only my natural reticence that stopped me remembering this before.”

She could swear he stamped his little feet on the tiles at that. “Teresa! There’s something creepy about this need of yours to please. Even if you’re right we shouldn’t be doing this. We should be handing it over to forensic.”

“This is human snot, Silvio. Our territory.”

“Excuse my pointing this out but we are not looking for snot. Snot we have by the bucket. We are looking for some phone number this weird, dead bastard has thoughtfully written down, hopefully in indelible ink, in between the snot. Which, all things taken into consideration, is both a very strange thing to do and indubitably a job for forensic.”

She found a point of entry and began to ease the fabric, holding down one end with the gloved fingers of her left hand. “If you’d met Professor Randolph Kirk in the flesh you wouldn’t be saying that. You’d think it the most normal thing in the world, as normal as—”

An entire corner of the fabric fell over under the pressure of the blunt side of the blade.

“I did surgery once, Silvio,” she said proudly.

“On a hankie?”

“Adaptability, my man. We live in modern times. Adaptability is everything. Behold…”

There were numbers there. Six of them, written in a tiny, cramped hand, mostly so old the ink was blurring into the fabric. One she recognized straightaway. It was Regina Morrison’s. This really was his address book. She hated to think what the rest were. A dry cleaners? Did Randolph Kirk even grace such an establishment?

But one was more promising. The ink was fresh, the strokes of his spidery hand unblemished. This number had never gone through the wash like the others. Maybe, she thought, written just a day or two before he died.

“Gimme that report,” she ordered.

He clutched the thing to his chest. “This is not right. Not right at all. We should just pass this information on to the people who need it and let them decide what it’s worth. It isn’t our job—”

The ferocity of her gaze stopped him dead.

“Silvio, if you tell me one more time what my job is I will, I swear, fire you and fire you good. In case you hadn’t noticed, those lovely policemen out there are busy chasing all the big things they like to think of as their prey. People who plant bombs. People who kill and kidnap other people. Were I to walk into their midst bearing a hankie, albeit one of more than minor interest, I would be inviting their ridicule. Who knows? They might even invent a name for me. What do you think? Crazy Teresa? How does that sound, huh?”