“You broke into his office?” Teresa gasped, a little in awe.
Regina Morrison tapped her nameplate. “That’s what titles are for. I came up with something too, locked away in a drawer with some teeny little padlock on it. Randolph hadn’t a clue, you know. The man was utterly unworldly. You don’t seem the squeamish sort, Teresa. Am I right?”
“I’m a pathologist.”
“Sorry. I meant ”prudish.“ ”
“Me?”
Regina Morrison opened a drawer and passed over a manila folder. On the cover, written in a sloping, intelligent hand, was scrawled a single word: “Maenads.” And a picture was glued there too, a print of a familiar ancient theatre mask, howling through an exaggerated mouth. Then she leaned across the desk and said, in a conspiratorial whisper, “You know who they were, don’t you? The Maenads?”
“Remind me,” Teresa hissed, snatching through the pages of typed text and photographs, breathless, head reeling.
“The followers of the god. Call him Dionysus. Call him Bacchus. Either works. The Maenads were his women. He—or by implication—his followers—made them initiates through these mysteries of theirs.”
Teresa’s fingers were racing through the documents. “What happened exactly? At these mysteries?”
“Not even Randolph claimed to know that. Not exactly. From what we discussed I think he had a better idea than he put in that book, though. It was a ritual, Teresa. It’s important you remember that.”
She paused over a page of incomprehensible text. “Why?”
“Because rituals are formal. They have a structure. Nothing happens by accident. These girls weren’t snatched from the street. Some of them volunteered. Some of them were gifts from their family.”
“What?” It seemed incomprehensible to her. “Why would any mother or father do that?”
“Because they thought it was right. Why not? Plenty of girls get given to the church today to become nuns. Is it that different?”
She thought of the book. “Nuns don’t get raped.”
“They’re both offerings to their chosen god. The difference lies in the detail. Take out some of the weirder parts—the parts Randolph liked—it’s not that different. Gifts or volunteers, they submitted to the ceremony. They became brides of the god. It’s just that the Dionysians consummated that marriage, physically, in the shape of some hanger-on like Randolph, I imagine.”
“And afterwards?”
“Afterwards they belonged to him. And the men who followed him. They worshipped him. Or them. Once a year he returned to meet his new brides and renew his gift for those who’d gone before. He gave them all that they wanted: ecstasy, frenzy. If Randolph was right, the nasty parts, the violence and the unbridled sexual encounters, occurred after the marriage, not during it. They enjoyed what we would call an orgy. Pure, mindless, dangerous, liberating. Then they went back to their homes and were good mothers for another year. Have you read The Bacchae, or is Euripides not to your taste?”
“Not recently.”
Regina Morrison reached into the bookshelf behind her and took out a slim, blue leather-backed volume. “Borrow it if you like. You can interpret the story in a number of ways. The liberal tradition says it’s an analogy for the dual nature of humanity, the need to give our wild side an outlet now and then because if we don’t it will surface anyway, when we least want it. The natural order breaks down. People get torn limb from limb by crazy women thirsty for blood just because someone broke the rules, unwittingly even.”
She leaned forward over the desk. “Do you want to know what I think?”
Teresa Lupo wasn’t sure she did but, all the same, found herself asking, “What?”
“It’s just about men and power and sex. How they can have it whenever they want, regardless of how a woman feels. And how we’re supposed to be grateful however much we hate it because, well, let’s face things, the god lives with them, not us, and the only way we get a taste is if we let them put a little bit of him inside us. Are you getting my drift?”
“Oh, I am, I am,” Teresa agreed.
“One doesn’t wish to appear the puritan, Teresa. As a Scotswoman I am all too aware of that. There’s nothing wrong with—what was it that American woman called it?—the ”zipless fuck.“ Everyone likes some mindless carnality from time to time. Half an hour of pleasure and nothing to think of afterwards. You must have done the same?”
Teresa Lupo looked at the staid, elegant woman opposite her and after a while could still only think of one thing to say. “Yes.”
“But a quick fuck in the dark’s not the same, is it? Old Randolph planned all this. It’s all just so damnably male.”
“Agreed. We must have dated the same men over the years, Regina, believe me.”
“I don’t date men anymore,” Regina Morrison said very sweetly. “Where’s the hunt? Where’s the challenge? When you know they’re panting for it anyway, with whomever or whatever they can find, what’s the point? Here. Let me give you my card. My mobile’s on there.”
“Right,” she replied, cursing her own stupidity, taking the item from the woman’s slim hand in any case.
“It’s a question of timing,” Regina Morrison said. “Everything is.”
Teresa looked again at the file. There were pages and pages. And photographs. Lots of photographs.
“What is?” she asked idly.
“Finding this girl is your idea, isn’t it? That’s why you’re here on your own. The police don’t think there’s any connection.”
Teresa stared at her. The woman had been two steps ahead all along. It was disquieting. “They’re not sure.”
“You’d best hope they’re right and you’re wrong, my dear. Think about the dates.”
“The dates?”
“You read the book. Tomorrow is Liberalia. The day for making new Maenads. And the day the old ones come out to play.”
“Yes. I know that.” She thought of Nic Costa. “We know that.”
Regina Morrison smiled at her, bemused. “You seem somewhat… distracted.”
Teresa Lupo took out one photo from the folder and placed it on the desk. Then she stifled a sneeze with a lone finger.
It was an old picture, shot secretly like the rest, in poor interior light using a cheap camera. Home-developed probably, which explained the thin, washed-out colours. That and its age. She could just about make out the images on the walls in the background. They were almost the same as the dancing fauns and leering satyrs in Kirk’s book, from the place that seemed to double as his strange, private playground at Ostia. But not quite. This was somewhere different. The paintings looked even older, and more sinister somehow. The place looked larger too. Perhaps he’d found the Villa of Mysteries and kept it for this one particular purpose.
Barbara Martelli was in the centre of the shot. She wore a plain white tee-shirt and jeans. She looked so young, just a teenage kid, so sweet it almost hurt. Teresa Lupo’s head hurt trying to reconcile these conflicting images into some sane, comprehensible whole: innocence on the verge of being spoiled, of entering the long path that would transform this lovely kid into a murderous black-helmeted insect. Was the beast in her already, a cocoon of hate and death just waiting, growing over the years?
She didn’t want to look too closely at the figure next to Barbara. It was Eleanor Jamieson. That much was quite clear. But seeing the girl like this—alive, full of spark and expectation—was almost more than Teresa Lupo’s pained, congested head could bear. She’d come to think of her as a mummified corpse on a shining silver table. This image made her something else, a real, looming presence haunting Teresa’s head, and emphasized, almost to breaking point, the enormity of her death. This was all before. The god hadn’t visited them yet. Maybe they never even knew he was on the way.