Chapter Eighteen
EIGHTEEN
“I suppose you’re going to ruin my dinner tonight by regaling me with what you’ve found?
” I spin round in my chair to face Izzy and start to reply, but she holds up a hand to silence me as my mouth hangs open.
“I’m not even angry, I promise.” She pulls up a chair from the empty desk next to me and sits down, dumping her bag on the floor. “Come on, then. Hit me with it.”
“Really?” I say, weirdly excited to share my findings.
“You’re going to tell me eventually anyway, so you might as well do it now.” Izzy leans back and folds her arms. “I know you too well, Fliss. Get it off your chest.”
“Are you sure?” I ask. Izzy raises her brows.
“Okay, thank you.” I hand her Tracing Provenance.
“Look at the last chapter.” I tap the end of my pen on my knee as she reads the passage, watching her eyes flick across the page.
I know when she reaches the section about blood and hair when her lips twitch in disgust.
“Jesus. Is that for real?” She hands back the book, and I shrug before placing it on the desk.
“I guess so? It’s a pretty legit source, and it fits with what the guy who verified the painting said.”
“So the self-portrait probably has blood and hair in it, too?”
“Yep.”
“That’s disgusting.” Izzy shakes her head. “How come they’ve never been able to tell who it belongs to? What about DNA?”
“I thought about that too, but the murders took place well before DNA was used in forensics. But look at this.” I quickly type into my phone and show Izzy an article about the Blackwood University murder.
“DNA matches were used right here to solve the case decades later.” Her eyes glaze over—she’s heard about that case ever since I found out it had been reopened.
“Sorry. What I’m saying is that if we could somehow check the DNA in the paintings, there’s the possibility it could be matched to a distant relative now.
It’s a massive long shot, but it would be a great place to start if I knew how to go about it. ”
“Okay, I understand that, but what’s that got to do with the witchy stuff?” She nods toward the computer screen.
“The rituals? I was looking for reasons why someone might use blood and hair. It’s so rogue.”
“And?”
“And I found a website that mentioned rituals involving human blood and hair.”
Izzy raises her brows in disbelief. “You looked that up? Miss Rationality?”
“Nooo.” I stretch out the word like a petulant toddler. “I looked up something else, and that was generated as a popular search.”
“Let me see,” Izzy asks. I point at the web address I copied down and she taps it into her phone. “This looks like he could have been following a spell, some kind of obscure magic.” She looks at me. “This is dark, Fliss.”
“I know. But we don’t know for sure that he was following a ritual. It’s more likely he was a criminal psychopath, or maybe suffering from some disease that made him lose his senses. I think there was a load of syphilis around back then, and that literally melted people’s brains.”
“Back up. What if he was ill?” Izzy leans back, her face thoughtful. “He could have been trying some blood magic to restore his health.”
“But why would he think that would work? I know it was over a century ago, but what you’re saying sounds medieval.”
“I suppose you do anything if you’re desperate to get better.” Izzy shrugs but won’t meet my eyes. I leave the comment hanging in the air.
“I found some articles that are probably about the victims,” I say, flipping back to my notes. “They weren’t very detailed, but the dates were helpful. I’ll need to do a bit more digging to come up with some names, though, as they were all Jane Does—”
“Jane whats?”
“That’s what an unidentified body is usually called, a Jane or John Doe.
” Izzy opens her mouth, but I carry on. “I don’t actually know why, okay?
That’s just what they’re called.” She doesn’t reply, so I point at the list I made earlier.
“This is called the victimology—it’s what the women all had in common. ”
Victims were all vulnerable females (potentially sex workers but that could just be an assumption).
All were found at secluded scenes with an element of privacy (buildings that were abandoned/being renovated).
All were “bound” (restrained?) and “bled” (exsanguinated).
“You know an unsettling amount about this stuff.” Izzy pushes the notebook away. “So the murders stopped around the time the paintings and the dead artist were discovered?”
“It looks like it.”
“So why weren’t they linked back then?”
“Could have been one of a hundred things, but I think because of the time and place, the women who were killed were probably poor or alone in the city, so they were forgotten about quickly.” I chew on my bottom lip, lost in thought.
“These initial reports only mention the bare-bones details, but from what I could see on the BBK victims…these women weren’t just killed and discarded—they looked posed, like there was some kind of meaning behind it.
Like they were meant to be found in those positions… ”
“Like they were going to be painted?” Izzy asks softly.
“Precisely.”
Izzy shakes her head. “I knew I should’ve gone for lunch with the others instead of coming to find you,” she says, pinching the top of her nose with her forefinger and thumb. “And you think he was either born evil or had something wrong with his brain?”
“Well, I wouldn’t put it that way, but yeah, that seems most probable.”
“But a journalist or investigator would have to keep an open mind, right? Explore all avenues?”
“Of course. You should look at a case from every angle.”
“Then look into the rituals,” she urges, showing me her phone. “It says here that people who performed magic on others used hair, fingernails, teeth, or, erm, bodily fluids to cast spells.” She makes a retching face. “Grim.”
“What’s your point?”
“Isn’t casting a bad spell the same as a curse?”
“He wouldn’t have to curse the women, though, would he?” I argue, glancing around the library. I really don’t need anyone to hear us having this conversation. “Because he killed them. It would be pointless.”
“He could be cursing anyone who looks at the paintings.”
“No.” I shake my head slowly, mulling over the idea. “It doesn’t make sense, plus it’s not real.”
“You don’t have to believe it.” Izzy shrugs, putting her phone away and standing, her not-so-subtle cue for me to wrap it up.
“If he was doing some kind of ritual, then it was real to him, wasn’t it?
That’s all that matters.” She picks up her bag from the floor.
“Now get me out of here. All this talk is freaking me out.”