The Serpent Papers by Jessica Cornwell

housemate, a young woman named Emily Sharp, who testified at length to Sorra’s instability and proclivity to violence. He had no concrete alibis for the nights of the respective murders. He was a raver, his friends said, rarely slept; secretive, but fun – charismatic, a wild child, uncontrollable. Doctors came forward to comment on his illness, his therapy, his resistance to treatment: an unfortunate character. The specialist who had been dealing with him said that while she had never suspected he might realize his fantasies, she did not doubt that it was possible. The patient is extremely unstable. He is obsessed with blood and organs and anarchism. I regret not having taken further measures to section him that weekend. The city cried in consternation: Where is this killer? Where has he gone? And so it went on through the night and the next day and the next until Adrià Sorra’s body washed up on the beach in Sitges and no one could ask him any questions any more.
    At first Manel Fabregat ran with it. Despite his bouts of mania, Adrià Sorra was – according to his professors – genuinely brilliant. The Philosophy Department ranked him at the top of the class, but the boy suffered a kind of split personality. At university he presented the veneer of an erudite, high-achieving student; by night he became a hedonistic, sexual animal. Adrià Sorra seemed the perfect psychopath ( if that term even means anything , Fabregat mutters darkly, I’m not sure that it does ). Violent, unpleasant, he’d broken into his apartment on Friday, beaten the shit out of his sister . . . His parents – for that matter – were as aggressive as the boy must have been in life: they were proud, aloof, selfish, vile. Their son had been running wild for two weeks and his absentee jet-set parents hadn’t seen fit to stop him, or help him, or treat him. It was a shit show, as far as Fabregat was concerned, an upper-class quagmire, with two snob architects defending their monster of a child. And yet, as their lawyers repeatedly pointed out, there were certain elements of the puzzle that didn’t fit. Specifically the letters. Why send the letters? Adrià Sorra was no calligrapher. The boy could barely draw – in fact he suffered from dyspraxia, his handwriting a nearly illegible scrawl. The university had supplied him with a volunteer who took his notes during lectures. Adrià typed his academic essays on an enormous desktop computer. The forensic handwriting analysts agreed: when they studied Sorra’s diary in comparison to the parchment evidence, it was clear that the boy had not written the illuminated verses. Nor, for that matter, would he have been capable of cutting such intricate patterns onto the skin of his victims. He doesn’t know anything about the Middle Ages , his mother hurled at the investigators, arguing that her son had a vivid imagination, and was chronically ill, that he had been blighted by poor timing. Faced with the honesty of the camera footage, the Sorras insisted that their son followed Natalia out of the club, and that he had stumbled on her body, and feeling on edge and suicidal himself, had carried her to the steps of the cathedral and then decided to end his own life in the sea. The argument that Adrià was the killer, however, was strengthened by the sudden abating of death that followed his disappearance. On Sant Joan’s Day everything ended, Fabregat explains. There were no more corpses hanging from the branches of trees. The inferno that had opened up in the city closed without fanfare, leaving in its wake a long, empty silence.
    ‘And the letters?’ I ask.
    ‘That psychotic pretence at a game?’ Fabregat explodes. ‘What do you think happened with those?’
    Nothing.
    ‘We were forced to leave them as an enigma, an unresolved itch. I couldn’t make head nor fucking tail of them. But mystery breeds obsession. I’ll be the first to admit that. It was like staring at a Sudoku problem with no