The Marks of Cain (11 page)

‘Thank you, Tim. Thank you…very much.’

He had an urge to throw the stupid toy into the bushes. He also wanted to cherish the object, fiercely. There was an unbearable poignancy in the toy’s small, pathetic crudeness.

Bill Fanthorpe stepped closer. ‘Tim was doing craftwork. Thought you might like it…’

‘Yes,’ said Simon. ‘It’s lovely. Thanks.’

Bill stepped back; the journalist hugged his brother one more time – and then Tim beamed his mad wide anxious smile and the younger sibling got the usual horrible sense that his brother resembled his own boy, Conor – it was the same smile,
the very same smile.

Girding himself, Simon resisted the urge to sprint down the lane; he shook hands with Fanthorpe, and slowly walked to the car. And as he walked back to the car he felt his soul
keening with grief. He still held the little toy in his hand. He took out his wallet and slipped the toy inside, next to the clasp of hair he kept: from when Conor was a baby.

The sadness was so intense that he was relieved to make it to the car – and relieved to be stuck in traffic thirty minutes later; stuck in the eternal gridlock of the North Circular. The reliability of this horrible congestion was somehow soothing. So utterly predictable.

His car had been stationary ten minutes, spattered by some September drizzle, when his phone rang.

It was Edith Tait.

She told him she had just had an enormous surprise. She was mentioned in Julie Charpentier’s will.

This didn’t seem so surprising. Staring at the car in front, he asked the old woman to explain.

‘It’s the amount, Mister Quinn, the actual sum. I called the police fella to tell him, but he wasn’t in…so, well, I thought you might like tae know. So I tried you.’

Simon changed a gear, his car moved forward three inches.

‘Go on. How much?’

‘Well now.’ Edith laughed, self-consciously. ‘It’s a wee bit embarrassing.’

‘Edith?’

The Scots lady drew a breath, then answered.

‘Julie left me half a million pounds.’

The weather was worsening. Swathes of sour rainfall swept across the stalled and angry traffic.

Amy was phoning José, from the end of the breakfast terrace. David watched: her animated gestures, the way her blonde hair was harped by the freshening breeze. He could tell by the frown on her face that the conversation was odd, or difficult. She sat down. He leaned across.

‘What did José say? Did you ask him about my parents? Is this all about my parents?’

Amy laid the phone on the table. ‘Well…it was very difficult to work out. He was rambling, almost incoherent. Worse than when you showed him the map.’

‘And…?’

‘He said we had to get away. That Miguel was
extremely dangerous.
He also said not to trust the police. As I thought. And he said Miguel was probably coming after us.’

David growled his impatience.

‘Is that all? We
know that
.’

‘Yes. But he also seemed…odd.’ Amy set her cardiganned elbows on the tablecloth, which was strewn with golden flakes of croissant. ‘José told me he was leaving. Going into hiding.’

‘José? Why?’

Her shrug expressed perplexity. ‘No idea. But he was scared.’

‘Of Miguel?’

‘Perhaps. The police. Wish I knew.’

A raindrop hit the paper tablecloth, a grey spot next to the phone.

‘Well I’m
not bloody
running away,’ David said. ‘I need to know what happened to Mum and Dad. If this is all linked…God knows how.’ He stared directly into her fine blue eyes. Not unlike his mother’s. ‘Did he say nothing about my mum and dad, at all?’

She murmured.

‘No, he didn’t. I’m sorry.’

David sat back with a curt sigh of frustration. They had got as far as they could with José, yet José surely knew more. Sipping the last of his coffee, David winced at the taste of the dregs, and then he winced again, staring at Amy’s phone.

The mobile.

The revelation was a mild electric shock. He reached out, grabbed Amy’s cellphone, and looked at her.

‘This is it!’

‘What?’

‘He must be using this.
I think Miguel’s using mobiles.
To find us.’

‘What?’

‘You can trace mobiles, right? Triangulation. It’s easy.’

‘How…’

‘This is the French Basque Country, you told me yourself. ETA have sympathizers everywhere around here, even in the police force. Maybe in mobile phone companies, too. Telecoms?’

Her gaze was intense.

‘I made that phone call outside the witch’s cave.’

‘Exactly. He knows your number. And now you’ve called José he’ll be after us in Mauleon. Probably coming here right now.’

A fresh wind swept over the terrace. David stood up – and opened the phone, and took out the sim card. Then he leaned, and took aim, and span the little card into the river. Amy stared. He snapped the phone shut, and handed it back. ‘OK. Let’s go. Your bags are packed?’

‘They’re already in the car, with yours, but why –’

‘We can get another sim card! Come on!
’

He led the way down the terrace steps to the waiting car. Then they drove away from Mauleon.

He pointed blindly at the map as he motored: already doing ninety kilometres an hour. ‘OK. Please…
Amy
, work out a route. Make it a zigzag, unpredictable. Let’s go and see these churches.
Right now.’

Obediently she examined the old map, the pattern of blue stars. The forests unfurled as they accelerated. The mountains were coned with snow in the distance: a row of brooding Klansmen.

The town of Savin was easy to find. An hour of fast, anxious driving brought them to its cluster of sloped roofs. Savin was prettily situated on a crest, overlooking the grey farms and vineyards. They parked on a side street, looking up and down. For Miguel. For the red car. The street was empty.

A smell of incense enveloped David as they entered Savin church. A few Americans were taking pictures of a spectacularly ornate organ. David glanced at a rough old font, the pedestal of which comprised a trio of carved stone peasants: holding up the water. The faces of the peasants were sad. Limitlessly sad.

Then David paced around the nave, and through the choir; he peered into the chancels, where the flagstones
were striated with soft colour from the stained glass windows. He stepped into a side chapel dedicated to Pope Pius the Tenth. A stern portrait dominated the little chapel. The long-dead Pope glared eternally through the incensed and sepulchral gloom.

There was nothing else in the church. Amy had already given up, she was sitting in a pew. She looked tired.

But he felt curious about something. Or was it nothing? Or was it something?

There was another door, a smaller door, to the side. Why were there were
two
church doors, one so obviously humbler than the other? He stood and gazed around. He looked back. This little door was tucked away in the corner of the church, the southwest corner; low and modest. Was that significant? How many churches had two doors? Lots, maybe.

Approaching the smaller door, David touched the granite surround: the cold and ancient jamb was worn smooth. The iron handle was rusted and unused. And brutally chiselled into the lintel of the door was a slender, spindly, peculiar arrow, of three lines meeting at the bottom: the arrow was pointing down.

He stepped back, nearly bumping into a priest who was hovering behind.

‘Er,
je m’excuse…
sorry…’

The priest gave him a sharp, wary glance, then paced away down the nave with a swish of nylon vestments.

David stared, transfixed, at the arrow. He was recalling the font in Lesaka. That church had possessed two fonts, and carved into one of them was a similar cruel arrow. Primitive but definite: three carven lines converging at the top: an arrow. That arrow was pointing up.

His thoughts were whirring now, the cogs of the puzzle turning fast. What about the church in Arizkun, that had two doors
and two cemeteries
. How could he forget that second
cemetery? The image of an angel, with a tawny cigarette butt screwed in the eye, was lodged in his memory.

Just like the old woman with the goitre, pointing and cussing.

Shit people, shit people, shit people.

He was closer. How close he didn’t know. But he was close and he wanted to keep moving. He signalled to Amy – shall we go? – she smiled in a wan way, and stood. But David kept his thoughts to himself as they retreated to the car. Because some of his thoughts were truly disturbing. Was there some direful link between the markings on the font and the markings…on Amy’s scalp? He believed her story about Miguel: the sex game with a knife. Her painful honesty as she admitted this had been all too authentic. But the scars. The scars were odd. The marks made on the foreheads of witches after the Sabbath intercourse with Satan.

It was too much and too headily upsetting, too rich a mix of repellent ideas. David felt faintly nauseous as he walked the car park gravel. A damp grey drizzle was falling. They didn’t say a word as they headed for the next town, slaloming across Gascony, trying to throw Miguel off their tracks.

Sixty kilometres of empty road brought them, very slowly, to Luz Saint Sauveur. The winding route ran spectacularly between walls of rock, with occasional side roads rudely blasted through the oppressive chasm walls: they were heading towards the Pyrenees once more. Clouds collared the black, brooding, saturnine mountaintops like white lacy ruffs around Van Dyck grandees.

Turning a final corner they saw their destination nestled in a vivid green valley. The old and sombre heart of Luz Saint Sauveur concealed another ancient clutch of low slung houses surrounding a very old church. They parked right by the church, climbed out, and entered. David just knew he
was near to the sobbing heart of the mystery, at least this part of it: what the churches meant. He had no idea what the solution might be, but he could hear the noise of it, the long wailing cry of confession:
this is what it all means.

There were two other people inside the
église parroissial
of Luz Saint Sauveur. Sitting on the rear pew with a woman who seemed to be his mother was a young and evidently retarded man. His eyes were rolling, a wet line of spittle ran down his chin, like the track of a slug. His mother’s face was prematurely aged, visibly wearied by the necessity of caring for the son. The cretin. David felt a surge of sympathy; he offered the woman a helpless but sincere smile.

Amy had been staring at the altar, and the chancels. Her expression, as she returned, was despairing.

‘I don’t get it. There’s nothing.’

‘I’m not so sure…maybe there is something.’

‘Sorry?’

He gazed her way.

‘Look for two. Two of something. Two doors, two cemeteries, two –’

‘Two fonts? I saw two fonts. Over here…’

They walked over, their footsteps echoing in the stony silence.

This church also had two fonts, and one of them was hidden away in a cobwebbed corner, half-concealed, musty. It was small and humble and somehow melancholy.

Just like in Lesaka.

Amy said: ‘But…Why two? Why ever should there be two?’

‘I don’t know,’ he answered. ‘Let’s just keep going.’

Another tense and silent hour found them in the remote Pyrenean village of Campan, sequestered and isolated at the end of a side-valley. David buzzed down the window and stared, as they rolled down the main street.

Every house had a large rag doll grinning in the window, or at the door. Gawky rag dolls, almost the size of grown men, were sitting in shop windows. Another big doll was lying on the road, fallen from some high sill – it stared up at the wild Pyrenean peaks that imprisoned Campan.

Amy gazed at the dolls.

‘Jesus.’

They parked in a side street and strode to the empty centre of the village. Their route passed a tiny, rundown, shuttered
office du tourisme;
in the window of the office was a small typed sign. Amy read it aloud, and then translated for David’s benefit: the festival of rag-doll-making was apparently a local tradition, for centuries the people of little Campan had made these big effigies, known as
mounaques
, and in mid September the people would put their handmade rag dolls on display in windows and doors, in shops and in cars.

It was a village of dolls. A village of silent, impassive doll faces, smiling absurdly at nothing. The smiles felt like jeers or insults.

Not that there was anyone to feel menaced or insulted: Campan was deserted, locked up, empty, taciturn, shuttered. One old woman was stepping out of a horse meat shop; she stared their way, then frowned, and walked quickly around the corner.

They reached the main
place
of Campan. A mournful war memorial, a bus stop, and a shop, also closed, marked the centre of everything; one short road led to a bridge, over the rushing River Adour. Even from here David could see that the opposite bank of the river was utterly derelict, a field of roofless cottages and mouldering barns.

Campan was wholly empty,
and half abandoned.

The other road off the
place
led straight to the church. A metal gate gave onto an overgrown churchyard surrounded by a tall, grey stone wall.

The church door itself was open, so they stepped straight through. The nave was adorned with cheap purple plastic flowers. Four dolls sat on the front pew, staring at the altar: an entire manikin family.

David hunted for twoness, yet he couldn’t find it. Campan had one font, one door, one pulpit and four rag dolls grinning like cretins, like inbred retards.

Not
two.

Amy maybe sensed his frustration, she put a hand on his shoulder.

‘Maybe it’s more complicated…’

‘No. I’m
sure
that’s it. Two.
It has to be.
’ He was snapping the words angrily, and unfairly. Amy flinched, and he apologized. He said he needed fresh air and stepped outside again, into the churchyard. The overcast autumn day was clammy and oppressive, but still an improvement on the dankness of the interior.

He breathed in, he breathed out, calming himself. Staring lucidly. Working it out. The distant mountaintops peered over the plastered brickwork of the church wall.

David gazed at the wall.

If there was a second door it might be in this strange, high castellated wall, which barricaded the entire churchyard.

His search was hampered by the wet brambles that brawled between the graves. Enormous spiders scuttled from his steps.

‘What are you doing?’

Amy had followed him out.

He lifted a hand, without turning.

‘Looking…for doors. In this wall. Don’t know what else to do.’

He kicked his way through the sodden undergrowth, flattening wild roses, and clambering over broken tombstones. The air was damp to the point of rain; the graves were slippery to the touch. He climbed and slithered and examined.

The wall was intact, the ancient bricks were apparently unpierced. Amy called out.

‘Here!’

She was behind him, pulling back some ivy, which had draped one section of the wall. Behind the ivy was a door, shut and dead, but
a door
. He hurried over and leaned near to see: the tiny door exuded age, the stone surround was crooked, the brown wood was rotten, yet the door was somehow still firm. Resolutely shut. Shut for centuries.

David looked closer. The lintel was carved.

Urgently he ripped away the last coils of ivy and revealed the inscripted symbol in the centre of the stone.

‘Here.’ He was anxiously excited. ‘This arrow. I keep seeing it. The font, the doors, the arrows.’

Amy was shaking her head.

‘That’s not an arrow.’

‘What?’

‘I know that’s not an arrow.’

‘How?’

‘Because there’s one on a house in Elizondo. I remember walking past it with José, one day years back. I asked him what the symbol meant. He was evasive. Oddly evasive.’

‘I don’t –’

‘All I remember is this: what he called it,
Patte d’oie
. I remember distinctly because he used the French.’

‘Patt – what does that mean. Patt…?’

‘
Patte d’oie
. Goose’s foot. An ancient symbol.’ Amy brushed some more mud from the incised lines, so brusquely carved into the stone. ‘This is a goose’s foot, not an arrow. It’s a webbed goose’s foot.’