I remember that one the audiotape-
Yes. A whole community who willingly killed themselves, hundreds of them. They literally drank poisoned Kool-Aid, at the behest of some ghastly tyrant. And so they all died. Awful.
Ibsen recalled the famous images: the bodies sprawled on the damp Guyanan grass afterwards, women and men and children, side by side by side, as if they were sleeping peacefully, as if they had just lain down in orderly rows to kip, and yet they were dead. So, yes, Jenny was right: suicide could be induced en masse. In an intense religious setting. But what did that actually mean to this particular case? With individuals? He shook his head. I dunno, sweetheart. These victims in London theyre not teens copying some doomy, wrist-slitting guitarist, but theyre not desperate god-botherers in the jungle, either. And theyre not all in one place at one time. They are smart, rich, young, very well-educated Londoners, with everything to live for, and no reason to die.
Jenny stepped over a snaking root of ivy. Well. Exactly. I think its a cult with something else too, some other element.
What?
Hypnosis for a start. Some kind of sexualized hypnosis. This explains your victims profiles. Psychologists know that the most easy people to hypnotize tend to be the most intelligent.
The crows barked in the skeletonized trees.
So youre saying you can hypnotize people into killing themselves?
Why not? If you combine hypnosis with sex and religion, some kind of death cult, a sophisticated sex-and-death cult, then you have the beginnings of an explanation, a sort of upper-class Jonestown isnt that possible? You did say these people were all going to sex and swingers clubs, right?
Yes. He mused. Yes. That is true. So there maybe is a particular sex club where they got into some stranger, darker, ritualized stuff? Some cultic trance.
The idea was good.
Jenny tugged him down the darker of two paths; Ibsen pondered as he walked.
This theory was certainly plausible. In which case they needed to look for more links between the victims. They hadnt found a common denominator of this sort, yet a specific sex club they all went to but something like this had to exist. Somewhere, out there, was maybe a ghastly dungeon in a rich mans home, a drawing room decorated with skulls. It was absurd yet it made a ghoulish and awful sense.
A rotting angel stared at them from the enormous tomb of Julius Beer. A great monument to someone entirely forgotten.
Jenny said, I also think these suicides are, in some way, autoerotic. The pain itself is the pleasure. The pain is the cause of the pleasure.
How?
Think of it this way. We get lots of people in Casualty who are cutters, self-harmers. They cut themselves on the arm, they slice their fingers, gouge themselves. Usually women. Why do they do it? Because they are depressed, exhibitionist, self-haters, masochistic, blah-de-blah, but also because, on a purely mechanical level, they enjoy the pain. They are addicted to the pleasurable release from self-inflicted pain, the endorphins.
Another crow heckled the dead from somewhere in the birches and oaks, then flapped further into the chaos of ivy green. The large portals of the dynastic tombs gawped at Ibsen. Like open mouths. Shocked.
She squeezed his hand. Moreover, some psychologists believe that we can actually be physically aroused by death itself. We find it erotically pleasurable to die. Relatedly, the French call an orgasm le petit mort, the little death. Shelley called the climax the death which lovers love.
Ibsen murmured, Hanged men are said to orgasm. Hmm. At the moment of asphyxiation. He shook his head, Its prison folklore. Ive often wondered if there was any truth in it but I dont know
They were right at the end of the path, heading back towards daylight: the trees and shrubs and menacing tombs were yielding to street noise. Ibsen felt an urgent need to jog, to get the heck out of here.
This also fits with the idea that you are dealing with a cult, or a secret religion, Jenny added. Because many religions in the past have played upon the eros-pain nexus.
Once more in English?
Think of the Catholics, think of Saint Theresa ecstatically pierced by arrows. Or some Shia Muslims, flaying themselves that could be sexual. Or even the Nazis. The skulls of the SS. They certainly sexualized and fetishized pain and death, the smart black uniforms, the totenkopf.
Christ! Youre saying were dealing with some kinky Nazi-Catholic-Muslim sex cult. In central London?
Im just giving you ideas! She smiled, and looked at her watch. Anyway. Times up. Emergency C-sections wont wait, not even for handsome detectives.
But-
She was already kissing him, and already walking to the cemetery gate. He followed, still asking questions; she waved her hand impatiently.
Im just guessing, Mark! But Ive got to go. Bye, sweetheart dont forget to get some milk!
She waved goodbye, and was gone. Running down Highgate Hill. Sweet and young and happy. His lovely and intelligent wife. Ibsen gazed at the dark blue of her anorak until she was entirely lost to view.
Then he made his slow way past the venerable redbrick Georgian houses to Highgate Tube, which was so confusingly far from Highgate Village.
His phone trilled. He took the call. Larkham.
Antonio Ritter!
What?
Detective Sergeant Larkham repeated, rushing his words in his excitement,
Tony Ritter. The man with the tatts. Shis name, sir. He lives at the address, near the Barbican, weve seen him going in. American. Half Puerto Rican. In and out of prison. FBI record. Smart. Links to the Camorra.
Im on my way. Text me the details. Meet you there. Now.
Sir.
Ibsen snapped shut the call. Even as he felt the excitement rise, he felt the doubts. A simple career criminal? That didnt quite fit. What was a gangster doing in the middle of this? But his wifes ideas were all too chillingly believable. Some kind of suicide cult.
This meant there could be there must be many more victims out there. Waiting to die. At any moment.
24
Temple Bruer, Lincoln Heath
Temple Bruer grew up in the middle of the vast Lincoln Heath, which spread out south of the city. The heath would have always been sparsely populated, and in the Templars time would have been especially desolate and forbidding.
Unlike now, said Adam, when it is so amazingly inviting. Jesus, this road is useless.
Nina put her fathers book down and gazed across the flatness. Everything was flat, monotonous, and bleak. The morning snow had turned to heavy sleet which thrashed the windscreen, almost defeating the wipers effortful thump.
Could that be it?
Adam followed her gesturing hand. As far as he could tell, she was pointing at rain-smeared glass, blank grey sky, and endless fields of grey grass. And nothing else.
Could that be it?
Adam followed her gesturing hand. As far as he could tell, she was pointing at rain-smeared glass, blank grey sky, and endless fields of grey grass. And nothing else.
What?
There. That building. Over there.
Adam slowed the car, entirely blocking the narrow country lane. It didnt seem to matter. Theirs was probably the only vehicle for miles. He hoped it was the only vehicle for miles: therefore, no one was pursuing them. And now he saw.
Ah Yes.
He could just make out the low darkness of some buildings, half-concealed behind a copse of stark trees. He drove on very, very slowly. The mud churned; pebbles rattled against the chassis; the wheels slid and groaned.
A sign. Adam.
He gazed up; she was right. A tiny and splintered wooden sign, virtually hidden by blackthorns, showed the way.
Temple Bruer. Ancient Monument. 1? miles.
Adam wrenched the car left and they patrolled the little side-lane. He could see patches of snow left in the ragged fields, and hazel and holly trees, sheared by the easterlies. So We know your dad spent a whole day here it must be important. Right?
He goes on about the loneliness. Nina scanned the lines quickly. Apparently, in the eighteenth century this was the one part of the London-to-York route which stagecoach owners couldnt insure. Too many highwaymen. Too many legends of witches and ghosts.
Her face was looking his way: white and uncertain in the gloom of the car. Then she turned, and scanned the rainy horizon. Adam could make out a tower now. Barns and a kind of farmhouse and a squat grey tower.
Listen to this. The Reverend Dr G Oliver, vicar of the nearby village of Scopwick, undertook the first historical survey of the surviving tower of Temple Bruer preceptory.
And?
Oliver reported finding charred bones and bodies encased in walls, evidence of murder and infanticide. He proposed that these remains had belonged to victims of severe Templar law enforcement.
Seriously?
Quite serious. My dad actually quotes Olivers survey. Verbatim. Some of these vaults were appropriated to uses that it is revolting to allude to. In one of them a niche or cell was discovered, which had been carefully walled up; and within it the skeleton of a man, who appears to have died in a sitting posture, for his head and arms were found hanging between the legs. Another skeleton of an aged man was found in these dungeons; his body seems to have been thrown down without order or decency, for he lay doubled up. And in the fore part of his skull were two holes which had evidently been produced by violence.
Christ.
They were just a hundred yards away now; and the sense of remoteness was deepening. Just a few miles from a main road, yet they were lost in Englands deep and darkening winter.
Wait. Nina turned a page. Theres more. In a second corner of these vaults, many indications of burning exist: cinders mixed with human skulls and bones. This horrible cavern has also been closed up with masonry. She read on, silently, then half-closed the book, Look, you can park here. By the tree.
She was right. The road, which was now little better than a mudded track, opened out into a kind of farmyard which surrounded the ancient Templar tower. A light was already on inside the farmhouse. They climbed warily from the car. The sleet had abated, yet the very air was soaked.