The Babylon Rite by Tom Knox Page A

Jess felt a need to calm herself.
This is just archaeology!
There was no need to be spooked.
    And yet she
was
a little spooked; it was so lonely out here. She
really
wanted a signal on her cell. The urge to talk to a friend, to talk to Dan, and hear his comforting reassuring scholarly voice, was strong. It didn’t even matter what they talked about, just a voice would be good, a voice plucked from the air – literally a voice in the wilderness.
    She had so few friends in Peru. Apart from Dan, there was just Laura working down in Nazca, and Boris her old tutor in Iquitos. Both of them hundreds of miles away. Yes there were Larry and Jay at the dig, but they were more colleagues than chums, though she liked them a lot.
    That left just Dan. And he was also her boss.
    Part of Jessica liked the loneliness, the solitude. She’d always been a loner – ambitious, dedicated, trying to be the girl her father would have wanted. That was why her relationships had, hitherto, been so casual. Just sex and friendship, nothing serious. No attachments. Nothing to get in the way of the work.
    But now her essential loneliness, her drive, was emphasized by her situation: she was
literally
alone, in a frightening desert, surrounded by Decapitator gods and murals of dying men.
    She shivered. Remembering herself as that tiny girl in the hospital room, watching her father, slipping into his terminal unconsciousness, in the darkness of the night. She shivered, and closed her eyes. Her hand was definitely trembling as she took her last photos. Maybe her diabetes was getting worse. But she carried on anyway. Because she had just one more photo to take.
    The final shot was one of the most revolting of all El Brujo’s secrets, contained in the very last mural at the end of the wall. In this strange final mural the builders of El Brujo had positioned a real ankle bone in the
painted
ankle of the depicted priest. The bone slotted into the wall was human
,
as they knew from tests. The mural was, in other words, a kind of collage made from
real human remains
.
    The wind dropped, even as her thoughts raced.
Could this be it?
Could this be the answer: the way in to the Moche culture, to their mysterious worship? Maybe this humble bone was a symbolic and universal key.
    The bone was positioned exactly where the mural showed an ankle, of a priest. Why? Perhaps because the bone was a deliberate
clue
. It was emblematic advice to anyone who saw the Moche murals of the Sorcerer:
Look, all this is true. All this happens. We really do all of this.
    She nearly dropped the camera. Jess stared, appalled, at her own trembling hand. She definitely needed sugar.
    Snatching up her stuff, she paced across the patio, past the puma room, past the murals; she took the muddy steps as fast as she could, and then at last she was on the flats and running to the Hilux. Jumping in, she reached straight for her soda, guzzled it and waited for the glucose to correct her blood sugar.
    But as she sat back in relief, a terrible, long-buried shard of memory finally worked its way to the surface of her mind.
    She remembered her dad before he died. The way his hands used to shake.

15
The Inner Circle, Regent’s Park, London
    It was DCI Ibsen’s second visit to the scene of crime – if it was a crime – but he still had to fortify himself. Indeed, as he passed the fluttering police tape and walked towards the off-white SOC tent which entirely covered the car, he experience a greater, nauseating apprehension than he had during his first visit to the scene, six hours before.
    The Mini was parked along the Inner Circle, in the middle of Regent’s Park. Ibsen glanced left and right as he approached the tent.
    Down there was the boating lake, and the bandstand. A row of bare willows looked stark against the chilly grey waters and the overcast sky. On the other side of the road lay the Regent’s Park open-air theatre, Queen Mary’s Rose Gardens, flower beds and fountains, and empty