Stres underlined “ordinary criminals” before reading the last file. Maria Kondi, aged twenty-seven. Married. Died suddenly as she left mass on Sunday. Raped at night two days after her burial. No bodily harm. Jewellery and wedding ring not stolen.
He rubbed his forehead. It was the second case of necrophilia in recent years. Good God, he sighed, in a sudden fit of weariness. But it wasn’t a true rape, just ordinary sex. Almost normal …
His deputy looked just as worried as he had the previous day. He also looked very unwell, Stres thought.
“As I have said before, and as I repeated to you yesterday,” he began, “my research in these archives has led me to a conclusion about this disturbing incident quite different from those commonly held.”
I never imagined that lengthy contact with archives could make a man’s face look so much like cardboard, Stres thought.
“And,” the deputy went on, “the explanation I have come to is also very different from what you yourself think.”
Stres raised his eyebrows in astonishment.
“I’m listening,” he said as his aide seemed to hesitate.
“This is not a figment of my imagination,” the deputy went on. “It is a truth that became clear to me once I had scrupulously examined the Vranaj archives, especially the correspondence between the old woman and Count Thopia.”
He opened the folder he was holding and took out a packet of large sheets of paper yellowed by time.
“And just what do these letters amount to?” Stres asked impatiently.
His deputy took a deep breath.
“From time to time the old woman told her friend her troubles, or asked his advice about family affairs. She had the habit of making copies of her own letters.”
“I see,” said Stres. “But please, try to keep it short.”
“Yes,” replied his deputy, “I’ll try.”
He took another breath, scratched his forehead.
“In some letters, one in particular, written long ago, the old woman alludes to an unnatural feeling on the part of her son Kostandin for his sister, Doruntine.”
“Really?” said Stres. “What sort of unnatural feeling? Can you be more specific?”
“This letter gives no details, but bearing in mind other things mentioned in later letters, particularly Count Thopia’s reply, it is clear that it was an incestuous feeling.”
“Well, well.”
Thick drops of sweat stood out on the deputy’s forehead. He continued, pretending not to notice his chief’s ironic tone.
“In fact, the count immediately understood what she meant, and in his reply,” said the aide, slipping a sheet of paper across the table to Stres, “he tells her not to worry, for these were temporary things, common at their ages. He even mentions two or three similar examples in families of his acquaintance, emphasising that it happens particularly in families in which there is only one daughter, as was the case with Doruntine. ‘However, alertness and great caution are needed to make this somewhat unnatural emotion revert to normal. In any event, we’ll talk about this at length when we see each other again’.”
The deputy looked up to see what impression the reading had had on his chief, but Stres was staring at the tabletop, drumming his fingers nervously.
“Their subsequent letters make no further mention of the matter,” the aide went on. “It seems that, as the count predicted, the brother’s unhealthy feeling for his sister had become a thing of the past. But in another letter, written several years later, when Doruntine was of marriageable age, the old woman tells the count that Kostandin is unable to conceal his jealousy of any prospective fiancé. On his account, she says, we have had to reject several excellent matches.”
“And what about Doruntine?” Stres interrupted.
“Not a word about her attitude.”
“And then what?”
“Later, when the old woman told the count of the distant marriage that had just been arranged, she wrote that she herself, alongside Doruntine and most of her sons, had long hesitated, concerned that the distance was too great, but that this time it was Kostandin who argued vigorously for the prospective marriage. In his letter of congratulations, the count told the old woman, among other things, that Kostandin’s attitude towards the marriage was not at all surprising, that, on the contrary, in view of what she had told him it was understandable that Kostandin, irritated by the possibility of any local marriage which would have forced him to see his sister united with a man he knew, could more easily resign himself to her marriage to an unknown suitor, preferably a foreigner as far out of his sight as possible. It is a very good thing, the count wrote, that this marriage has been agreed upon, if only for that reason.”
The deputy leafed through his folder for a few moments. Stres was staring hard at the floor.
“Finally,” the aide continued, “we have here the letter in which the old woman described the wedding to her correspondent, and, among other things, the incident that took place there.”
“Ah yes, the incident,” said Stres, as if torn from his somnolence.
“Though this incident passed largely unnoticed, or in any event was considered natural enough in the circumstances, it was only because people were unaware of those other elements I have just told you about. The Lady Mother, on the other hand, who was well acquainted with these elements, offers the proper explanation of the event. Having told the count that, after the church ceremony, Kostandin paced back and forth like a madman, and that when they had accompanied the groom’s kinsmen as far as the highway, he accosted his sister’s husband, saying to him: ‘She is still mine, do you understand, mine!’ the old woman tells her friend that this, thank God, was the last disgrace she would have to bear in the course of this long story.”
Stres’s subordinate, apparently fatigued by his long explanation, paused and swallowed.
“That’s what these letters come to,” he said. “In the last two or three, written after her bereavement, the old woman complains of her loneliness and bitterly regrets having married her daughter to a man so far away. There’s nothing else. That’s it.”
The man fell silent. For a moment the only sound came from Stres’s fingers tapping on the table.
“And what does all this have to do with our case?”
His deputy looked up.
“There is an obvious, even direct, connection.”
Stres looked at him with a questioning air.
“I think you will agree that there is no denying Kostandin’s incestuous feelings.”
“It’s not surprising,” Stres said. “These things happen.”
“You will also admit, I imagine, that his stubborn desire to have his sister marry so far away is evidence of his struggle to overcome that perverse impulse. In other words, he wanted his sister to have a husband as far from his sight as possible, so as to remove any possibility of incest.”
“That seems clear enough,” said Stres. “Go on.”
“The incident at the wedding marks the last torment he was to suffer in his own lifetime.”
“In his lifetime?” Stres asked.
“Yes,” said the deputy, raising his voice for no apparent reason. “I am convinced that Kostandin’s unslaked incestuous desire was so strong that death itself could not still it.”
“Hmm,” Stres said.
“Incest unrealised survived death,” his aide went on. “Kostandin believed that his sister’s distant marriage would enable him to escape his yearning, but, as we shall see, neither distance nor even death itself could deliver him from it.”