The Babylon rite

23

Highgate, London

The angel was sleeping and quiet.

Ibsen gazed, perplexed, at the marble angel lying on the marble grave. It was an odd concept, even in a graveyard sculpture. Did Victorians actually believe that angels slept? Or maybe it was dead? Could angels die?

‘Mark?’

‘Sorry.’ He wiped the last crumbs of all-day-breakfast sandwich from his lips, with a Pret A Manger napkin. ‘Just thinking, love. Sorry.’

His wife Jenny smoothed her nurse’s uniform; she had a small tray of takeaway salad on her knees. ‘You know I’ve only got thirty minutes.’

‘For lunch?’

‘We’re busy, Mark! Short-staffed in Maternity, there are a couple of girls with flu…’

‘The bloody Whittington Hospital is always bloody busy.’ Ibsen tutted. ‘They work you too bloody hard. You’re too bloody good for this job. You’ve got a bloody first-class degree. Bloody hell.’

‘But I enjoy it.’ She laughed. Dropping her plastic fork in her plastic tray, she stroked him under his chin and gently kissed his cheek, then murmured, slyly, yet shyly, ‘Besides, Detective Chief Inspector. You always told me you liked the uniform.’

As ever, his younger wife’s solicitations melted Ibsen, inside him, somewhere very important. For a second they sat together, staring silently across the mossed old statuary of the empty cemetery, at the stooped and wintry willows that loomed over eighteenth-century tombs, like tall but servile chamberlains admiring a royal baby in a crib.

Mark and Jenny occasionally came here to eat lunch, whenever Ibsen was free and in north London, near Jenny’s workplace. It was more for her than for him. DCI Ibsen always found Highgate Cemetery unsettling even as his wife found it obscurely soothing.

Today, on a cold December afternoon, the ancient graveyard was at its most melancholy, but at least it suited their subject. Suicide.

‘How come you suddenly have all day, anyway?’

‘We’re waiting on a lead, been waiting for two days. I thought I’d take a break and see my lovely, overworked wife.’

‘A lead? You mean you got something from that poor, poor girl? Imogen… Fitzsomething?’

‘Yes.’

‘But Mark, I thought she died.’

‘She did, Jen. The blood loss was horrific, stage 4 hypovolemia — a coma — she drifted in and out but the haemorrhaging was too profuse.’

‘So?’

‘She wrote an address, when she was lucid, she wrote down an address for us, just before she died. And a taxi driver has reported he took her there, three days before her suicide.’

‘And you think it’s where this guy lives, the bloke with the tattoos?’

Ibsen nodded, flourished his mobile phone. ‘Larkham’s checking it out now. I may have to go any moment.’

Jenny stood up. ‘Well come on, then, let’s be quick. I can explain everything you need to know about suicide clusters. In about twenty minutes.’

Ibsen grabbed her empty salad tray, and his voided sandwich packet, and dumped them in a bin. Then they walked the paths between the crumbled and mouldering graves. He sneaked a glance at his phone. Nothing yet.

‘OK. Suicide clusters work by social contagion, often spread through the media, or the internet. Social networks. Sometimes there is a celebrity suicide, widely reported, which is then copied by young, impressionable people.’

‘That doesn’t sound like our situation. There’s no rap artist who cut his own head off.’

‘No. Which is why I reckon you are better looking at mass suicides. Which are different.’

She walked on and he followed, attentive.

‘There have actually been quite a few large-scale suicides in history. Masada in ancient Israel is a famous example. Okinawa in Japan in World War Two’s another. One of the worst was the suicide of the women of Souli, in Greece: they threw their children over the precipice, and then jumped themselves, to avoid capture by the Ottomans.’

They turned left, past the Egyptian Avenue, with its Luxorlike pillars, its pharaonically slanted arches. The silence here, at the centre of the cemetery, was extraordinary.

‘But modern-day mass suicides are usually related to some kind of cult, or cultic religion. Led by a charismatic leader, some clever evil man with a hold over them. Think of Heaven’s Gate. Or the Order of the Solar Temple. The most famous, naturally, was the People’s Temple in the Jonestown incident.’

‘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 — they’re not teens copying some doomy, wrist-slitting guitarist, but they’re not desperate god-botherers in the jungle, either. And they’re 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 it’s 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 you’re 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 — isn’t 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 hadn’t 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 man’s 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, ‘It’s prison folklore. I’ve often wondered if there was any truth in it… but I don’t 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! You’re saying we’re dealing with some kinky Nazi-Catholic-Muslim sex cult. In central London?’

‘I’m just giving you ideas!’ She smiled, and looked at her watch. ‘Anyway. Time’s up. Emergency C-sections won’t 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.

‘I’m just guessing, Mark! But I’ve got to go. Bye, sweetheart — don’t 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. S’his name, sir. He lives at the address, near the Barbican, we’ve seen him going in. American. Half Puerto Rican. In and out of prison. FBI record. Smart. Links to the Camorra.’

‘I’m 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 didn’t quite fit. What was a gangster doing in the middle of this? But his wife’s 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.