The Marks of Cain (17 page)

‘Yes and no. Recall that the Inquisition was run by the Dominicans – the black friars – or the Dogs of God, as they were called, because of their zealotry and sadism. It’s a medieval pun on their name. Domine Cani. Dogs of God!’

‘Gotta love those medieval puns.’

‘The Dominicans were the great witch burners of the medieval era. Two Dogs of God wrote the
Malleus Malleficarum
, the “Hammer of Witches” – the witchfinders’ Bible. Gosh, it’s nearly three o’clock.’

The lady was now standing. Simon stood and shook Ms Winyard’s hand, as she apologized, elegantly.

‘I’m sorry to dash. The Guildhall library shuts at four. But I can answer your last questions – you want to know what happened to all these fascinating archives.’

‘I do.’

‘Very well. Some rightwing Dominicans were especially keen on the Curse of Cain. They believe it to this day. They refused to relinquish materials which, they felt, supported their cause. At the same time the Pope didn’t want a schism – Popes never want a schism! – so a compromise was reached.’

‘Go on.’

‘The documents relating to the Cagots and the Basques were stored in great security. They were kept at the Angelicum, the Dominican University in Rome. For centuries they were safe. But then, after the war, after the Nazis, this was not felt to be a safe place, for such…provocative data. You can see the problem.’ She smiled, gently. ‘So what happened? The rumour is that they were spirited away to somewhere even more secure. But that is just a rumour. The answer to your question, the tantalizing truth is: no one knows for sure! Scholars have speculated on this matter for decades. Deducing what happened to the Basque and Cagot materials. It’s quite the theological crossword puzzle.’

‘And what do
you
think?’

‘Me? I suspect the archives were just destroyed and all this conspiracy stuff is candyfloss. And that’s what I told Angus Nairn, to his disappointment. But there it is. And this is where I must leave you, before my entire day disappears.’

‘OK…thank you so much.’ Simon felt sated: he was still digesting the strange lunch, and the even stranger information. ‘Thanks again. This has been hugely useful.
Clarifying
things.’

The professor said it was nothing.

Her smiling face disappeared down the spiral metal stairs. Paying the bill and pocketing the receipt, Simon descended the stairs a few moments later.

In the street he hailed a cab, feeling a pleasurable rush of accomplishment as he did so. He’d earned this cab ride home: he’d done some good work. He could sit in the back of the big London taxi and smoke a fat if metaphorical cigar.

But then he remembered. Fazackerly. As the taxi sped past the clock repair shops and glass-walled apartment blocks of Clerkenwell, he took out his mobile and listened to his voicemails.

The first message was long, incoherent and discursive. The professor said he was sitting in his office for the last time and he had some new theories he thought might interest Simon. He waffled about ‘ecclesiastical opponents of my research’. He mentioned a Pope. He apologized for going on so long, and being a ‘garrulous old bachelor rather feeling the pinch of mortality’; the voice message actually went on so long this apology was silenced by the end of the allotted timespan.

Then Simon listened to the second message.

It wasn’t a message. At least, it wasn’t an intentional communication as such. It was obviously a call made by accident, when the redial button on a mobile is pressed by error, by sitting on it, or knocking it in a bag.

Fazackerly had called Simon the second time by mistake. And the second call was the sound of someone in unspeakable pain. Maybe, surely, horribly – someone dying.

It was grotesque. Simon sat in the back of the taxi, the sweat like beads of clinging and frozen dew on his forehead: listening to this terrible recording.

The beginning of the message was a kind of low, groaning sigh. In the background was a buzz. Like a distant buzzsaw heard in a forest. Lumberjacks at work. The moaning was sincere and despairing, a mixture of fear and pain; then it accelerated to ferocious panting. And then came the gurgling, a rasping, choking gurgle, like someone gargling hot vomit,
unable to breathe. And all the time in the background was that terrible
buzz.

The most piercing aspect of this horrifying message was the one discernible word – ‘Stop’ – between the gargles and the final, terrifying rasps. That word was enough to identify Fazackerly.

‘Stop,’ said Simon, rapping fiercely on the taxi glass.

They were just two hundred yards from the GenoMap offices.

The cabbie braked, abruptly. And turned his puzzled face.

Simon threw a twenty pound note at the taxi driver, then he raced out of the taxi – down the elegant terraces alongside Gordon Square. He found the old battered door, it was half open. He kicked upstairs, and upstairs again, taking the stairs three at a leap. Desperate now.

Inside. He was inside the lab and the GenoMap offices. The machines were cold and unused. The hydroshear and the centrifuge were silent. It all looked normal, or the same as before. The dusty machines. The emptied desks. The place deserted. The doors open. A gonk left on a table by some departed scientist. A grinning gonk.

Where was Fazackerly? Maybe it had all been nothing? Maybe he had misinterpreted that
terrible
second message?

This panic returned when he heard the buzzing. It was the same buzzing as on the phone. Like a wood-saw heard through endless leafless trees in a snowbound forest. Someone cutting logs away over there, in the black and white distance.

There. It was emanating from the corner of the lab. It was one of the machines Fazackerly had shown Simon on his perfunctory tour of the lab. The industrial-sized microwave, used for sterilization and antigen retrieval and histology and –

He rushed over. The enormous wardrobe-sized machine
was whirring away. It was cooking, busily cooking, like a happy and humming housewife. There was something inside the oven.

Simon knew, of course, and of course he didn’t want to know. He averted his face, then he turned around again, fighting the desire to run into the street, to flee in disgust and dreadful panic.

Pressed against the tinted glass pane of the vast microwave oven was a face. A cooked and sweated old face, drooling liquid from the white and crinkled nostrils. Fazackerly was inside the oven. Broiled but unbrowned. His skin was bleached and pink, one poached eye was hanging from the socket.

The buzzing stopped. The microwave pinged.

The wound in his hand was healing, but the pain was still there. And the anxiety was relentless.

David was standing in the sunlit garden of the Cagot house, winding bandages around his blooded hand. The garden was overgrown, with fallen trees and ivied paths and flowers growing from the tumbledown walls. But the garden was also big, and hidden from everywhere, and it got the air and light, unlike the damp and sinister hallways of the ancient Cagot house. A good place to talk. A good place to think about your beloved grandpa’s
Nazi connection.

As he tied the last bandage, David felt a grief, inside him, not far from the surface, from the conversation with Madame Bentayou. He had been mulling over their remarkable dialogue, and every time he reached the same inevitable conclusion. It
did
make horrible sense. They must all have been prisoners, at Gurs – José, Granddad, Eloise’s grandmother.

The facts certainly pointed to incarceration at the Nazi camp; moreover, the hidden wealth of his grandfather, the guilt and the furtiveness, seemed to imply some kind of profiteering. Or something. Even collaboration.

It was a ghastly idea, yet unavoidable. Was Granddad complicit with the Nazis? If not, how did he get the money? And why was he so evasive at the end? Why the mystery?

David sat down on a stone bench, then stood up. The dampness of the moss was soaking into his jeans. Everywhere in this rotten and syphilitic place was so fucking
damp.
The walls were sodden with medieval humidity. The garden rioted with unlovely life: David had seen a fat torpid slow-worm the first day, sliding brazenly into the kitchen.

It was detestable. The filthy Cagot house. It made David detest
them
: the Cagots. He wanted to flush away the grime from the countless Cagots who had hid here, slept here, fucked in here, cooked their stupid Cagot meals…

David calmed himself. The Cagots were being killed.
They deserved pity.

How easy it was to hate.

A kestrel swung through the sky, which was fast clouding over. David heard a noise, and turned: Amy was at the door. She frowned his way; he smiled back. She and he had been forced to sleep, these last few nights, in the same dark musty bedroom – forced by the nastier, damper, more rotted state of all the other available rooms. They had bedded down beside each other, in adjoining bunks. Nothing physical had happened between them, yet…something
had
happened between them.

They had talked long into the nights, alone, by the flickering candlelight. Faces inches from each other: like kids hiding under the sheets.

And here she was: open, ready, prepared. His very close friend. Something good had come out of this terror and darkness: his deepening friendship with Amy Myerson. But then he realized: she was
frowning.

‘What’s wrong? Is it José?’

‘No. He still won’t say a word. No –’ The frown was urgent and serious. ‘It’s Eloise.’

‘What?’

‘She’s disappeared. At least I think she has. Can’t find her anywhere.’

The first spatters of rain were cold on David’s neck.

He ran into the house at once. And they started looking. They found José and Fermina in the damp sitting room, sullen and silent. Like peasants in a medieval Flemish painting. Like two ragged survivors of a terrible winter, huddled against the enduring cold.

‘José. We can’t find Eloise. Have you seen her?’

José mumbled a ‘No’. His face was set in the same expression he had worn since they came here. Self-pitying and resentful, and barely concealing his sorrowful fears. Of what?

Amy gasped with exasperation.

‘Let’s try upstairs.’

But there was nothing: Eloise really was gone. They tracked through all the many bedrooms. Nothing. They explored the garden, the front garden, the back garden. They walked a few nervous paces into the darkening woods, that fed into the ravine, whose stern and brutal stone walls rose behind the house.

Nothing.

Slowly, a cold unpleasant idea overcame David. Had she been snatched? Had she wandered into Campan proper? Eloise had said several times that she desperately wanted to use email and she desperately wanted to go to church for confession. Either of those tasks would have taken her over the bridge. Had she taken a stupid risk? Had she gone into the village?

They stood in the dim light of the hallway and discussed their options. They had no choice. They had to go and get her and bring her back. Amy volunteered to explore the village; David insisted he would do it.

He ran out, and up the rutted road that led to the bridge. He was in the centre of the cagoterie, the ruinous ghetto. Calling Eloise’s name, he sprinted past the shattered houses and barns. Was she inside one of the ruined Cagot hovels? But surely not: the black sockets of their empty windows were silent. The battered doors of the cagoterie hadn’t been opened in fifty years. Rusted scythes lay in the grass unused. A larger house had a goose foot
painted
on the wall: crudely spray-painted. And next to it a cackling teenage graffito:

Fous les camps Cagot!

David crossed the bridge. The rain was drenching now but he didn’t care. He was at the end of the lane. By the walled churchyard. He walked past a slumped and grinning rag doll, with its head burst open, showing the yellow straw stuffing inside; he pushed the gate, negotiated the path, and entered the church.

It wasn’t a Sunday, so he was surprised to see a service.

The congregation was tiny, half a dozen old people and a geriatric priest. And four mansized rag dolls. The service was some kind of harvest festival. A dismal little collection of tomatoes, corncobs, and tinned Del Monte pineapple was arranged by the altar. It took David two seconds to work out Eloise was not amongst the worshippers. The priest was staring at David but he ignored the hostile glare.

Striding outside the church again, he pushed the squealing gate, then ran through the punishing rain to the one place where Eloise might have gone, to maybe use the internet, a small
tabac
with a terminal or two.

The shop was shut; there wasn’t even a rag doll in the window. Eloise had gone, completely gone. David felt a mixture of anger, worry – and an ardent empathy. Eloise’s sadness, the terrible sadness of the newly orphaned, reminded him all too easily of his own sadness, his own orphaning.
She was like him. She had suffered like him.
He thought of her
proud, defiant, silent tears, as she drove them away from Miguel in Gurs.

Eloise was brave. She deserved so much better than this. He had to find her before Miguel did. But he didn’t know where to turn. Where had she gone? And why? What was happening to them all?

There were so many questions, falling on them, drenching them all, like a Pyrenean cloudstorm. They were drowning in puzzles and mystery. And they had to reach for the only answer, their only lifesaver.

José.

David ran through the teeming rain, past the war memorial, down to the bridge and the river, and the gutted cagoterie. The wetness slid down his neck, it damped his shirt to his chest. He didn’t care. He was angry now: the flickering idea that Eloise had been taken by Miguel was all too gruesome and too angering.

He found Amy in the hall of the Cagot house, waiting: her blonde hair bright in the gloom. They talked for one minute, the conclusion of their debate was immediate. Amy agreed: they had to confront José. And David was the man to do it, because the conversation could be brutal and Amy was too close to the Garovillos.

David prepared himself as he crossed the hall: he focussed his angry thoughts. He was going to extract the truth. Whatever it took.