The Marks of Cain (19 page)

‘What? What of the Jews?’

José regarded David.

‘The Holocaust. Eugen Fischer told me – why the Germans did what they did. The truth of the Holocaust. That is all I can say.’

‘What?’

José’s eyes were fluttering. Almost as if he was falling asleep. David reckoned the old man must be exhausted: confessing these murderous and long-buried secrets. He let go of José’s arm. But continued the questioning:

‘José, I need to know about Miguel. All this is the reason Miguel killed my parents. Right? He is ashamed of his Cagot blood. Yes?’

‘Yes. This is the worst mistake I ever made. I told my son the truth, when he was maybe nineteen. He never forgave me. He was so proud to be Basque up to then. The great ETA activist…’

‘So he was angry. And he thought my mother and father…were about to uncover his shame.’

‘
Sı
.’

‘And then he finds out I am on the same chase. And he needs to kill me, too.’

The wind rattled the dusty glass in the windows.

‘
Sı sı
. It is so.’ José grimaced. ‘But there is still more…Davido.’

‘My grandfather, you mean?’ David felt the question hanging in the air, like the dampness of the house. A revenant of the past. A ghost he had to exorcise. ‘Tell me, José. Was my grandfather…was he also a collaborator?’

‘No!’ The reply was fierce. ‘Do not think that! Your grandfather was a good man. No…I mean Miguel.’

‘What? What is it?’

‘There is something strange and terrible about my son. You must be very careful. Sometimes I have thought about killing him myself. Before he kills me. Before he kills everyone. He will kill me one day.’

‘Why?’

‘It is the way he is made. By God. My son is…bad to the bone. Is that the phrase? And yet I love him. He is my son. Remember I am so old, I thought I would never have a child, but then young Fermina…we had a baby. A son. We were so happy.
Ena semea…’

The old man’s eyes were bright, for the first time in days; then they dimmed over again, dimmed unto darkness.

‘But as he grew up…we realized he has the true shame of the Cagots. The true shame. But he is big and strong and clever. And he has friends, helpers. Powerful people you do not understand. The Society.’

‘What is the Society?’

‘No. I cannot say. Enough. Please.’ The tears were rolling now. ‘Leave me this last shame to conceal.’ José wiped the smears of the elver grease from his mouth. ‘I have told you far far too much. Too much, too late. If I tell you more no one will let you live. Because the secret Miguel is protecting is not just about me, about me and him and the Cagots. It is far far deeper than that, Davido, it is so terrible and dangerous, for us all, for all
la humanidad.
The secret will get you killed, if not by Miguel then by someone else. His friends. The Society. Anyone.’ The old man looked, hard, at David. ‘You understand? I am saving your life by not telling you any more!’

This was more than perplexing. It was bizarre. David sat in the half-lit dampness, trying to work it out. The rain was still nailing slates on the roof. Through the window he could see the fog, the votive mist summoned from the forests by
the downpour; the streams were brawling down the slopes, to join the torrential Adour.

David tried again, one more question. But José was resolutely unforthcoming. The old man, it seemed, had had enough.

Silence.

It was all an intense frustration, he had so many more questions. The death of his parents. Where the money came from. What was this about the Holocaust? What secret was so terrible it meant inevitable death?

Yet he wasn’t going to get more answers, at least not now.

The door was thrown open: it was Fermina. The anger in her was blazing, she was shrieking at José, her bangles jangling, she was almost beating him with her words.

Her ferocious monologue was in Basque and Spanish, and yet the meaning was clear, she was asking José: what have you told him? You fool. What secrets have you revealed?

And then, in front of David, the younger wife came over – and she slapped the old husband – contemptuously.

José cowered under the blow, unresisting.

David was paralyzed by this ghastly scene. He watched, mute and inert, as Fermina slapped José twice, then grabbed her husband’s frail hand, and hauled him to his feet – and dragged him from the room like a naughty infant. The door slammed. The stairs creaked.

Alone by the hearth of the old Cagot house, David heard another door slam, upstairs. The whole building shuddered in response; the dew-heavy cobwebs trembled along the cornices, dust motes flittered, unhappily, from room to room.

The light was sickly. Simon got up and walked to the window, pulled the curtains. He was greeted by the relatively quiet traffic of mid-morning. Twisting the watch on his wrist, he checked the time.
It was nearly 11 a.m.
; after a night of fraught insomnia, he had finally and evidently slept.

The silence from downstairs told him that he had missed Suzie and his son. He must have slept through it all – as she made breakfast, got Conor dressed, then took him to nursery school, before heading off for her own shift at the hospital.

He felt the acid reflux of fear and guilt. Again. The same feelings he had all night, the same feelings he’d had all week. Maybe he would never sleep well again? Not without a drink. Not without many drinks. He was scared, and guilty. And very very bored. He no longer had a role. Following Fazackerly’s murder the
Telegraph
editor had taken Simon off the story, because it was all getting too hairy.
What if they come for you next, Simon? What if your articles are tipping off the killers?

Lonely at the window, the journalist stared as the vehicles blurred past. One car raced to the lights then halted with a squeal. Simon got the usual surge of parental anger: slow
down, you bastard, I have a little son. And then again he felt the pang of guilt: who was
really
threatening his son?
Really?
Who was endangering his young life? Who had brought death and mayhem so close to the family home?

Him. The father. The ambitious careerist. Him.

Simon knew he was in peril. Right now he wanted a drink more than he had in years. He was risking his hard-won sobriety. But what was he meant to do? He didn’t have the motivation to get to a NA meeting. Yet he was bored and guilty, and scared.

Stepping into the bathroom, he showered in very hot water, brushed his teeth, chucked on some clothes and returned to the bedroom, feeling very slightly better.

Maybe it wasn’t his fault.

Of course it was his fault.

Maybe it wasn’t
all
his fault.

Opening his laptop, going online, he looked yet again at the emails from Tomasky and Sanderson, discussing Fazackerly’s death, the strange parade of events and aftermath.

A few moments after he had found the professor, parboiled in his own laboratory oven, the police had rushed in, alerted by Simon’s own call. They had swiftly escorted the stammering journalist away, then they had debriefed him, calmed him, interviewed him, they had even donated him a session or two with trauma specialists in the following days.

But Simon was still troubled by the appalling scene in the GenoMap lab, and he had sought succour and solace by emailing and telephoning questions to the detectives. He found Tomasky the best sounding board: the cheerful Pole had a sincere Catholic faith which helped; he had a dark Slavic yet Londony humour which also assisted: salty asides about death, which ‘was about as bad as a weekend in Katowice’.

Tomasky and Sanderson had tried to explain the ‘logic’
of Fazackerly’s death to Simon, that killing him in the microwave was clever, and brutally efficient: silent and swift, leaving no gunshot wounds, no DNA evidence. The killers’ only bad luck was that Fazackerly’s powerful cellphone could get a signal inside a metal box.

And yet. It still seemed like a grotesque medieval torture to Simon – being boiled alive in a microwave. Your blood plasma literally boiling in your veins.

He shut down the emails with a heartfelt sigh. The thought of blood reminded him of his brother; the memory of his brother was perturbing and yet energizing. Right this minute, his brother was locked away. Simon was therefore the only Quinn with offspring and a future. He had a responsibility. To earn and work and pass on his name.

And now Simon felt a surge of returning pride, self-esteem – even anger.

To hell with this. He needed to shape up: Fazackerly’s death
wasn’t
his fault. So his articles may have pointed the killers in the direction of the professor; equally, they may not. Whatever the case: he, the journalist, was just doing his job, being a hack. Following the lead. His soul agonized for the danger to his family – but how else was he meant to feed them?

There was no other means: this was his career. But that still left the practical problem. How was he going to feed his family
now
? He was a freelancer, who lived off stories – but he’d been kicked off his best ever story. And now he had nothing else to do, nothing to write. No other commissions. What was he supposed to do today, tomorrow, next week? Go back to writing accounts of petty crime?

Idly, he Googled ‘witch murders’, just to see if there were any developments. Just in case.

The news this morning was subdued, compared to the furore that had greeted Fazackerly’s murder last week: just
one or two follow-up pieces. An American website was rehashing the entire chain of bizarre events for the delectation of its more prurient readers. Simon noted this American journalist had actually stolen some of Simon’s lines, and shamelessly used Simon’s quotes from Fazackerly.

Bastards.

He sipped water. And then he had an idea. Quite a fetching idea. There was
nothing
to stop him following the clues, chasing up leads, even if he actually wrote zero. He could still write, and research – if only for his own satisfaction. And even if he was barred from daily journalism on the story, at the end he could…do a book? Yes! If he had all the notes he could still write a book. And then he could make some real money, when it was all over. He could do a job and feed his wife and son and pay his debt to his conscience, and the bank, without annoying his editor, or the cops.

Simon flexed his fingers. Then he attacked the search engines.

The trick he deployed was one of his favourites when he was on a complex investigative story and he needed new leads: he would throw randomly associated phrases into the internet and online newsfeeds, juggling quote marks, seeing what came out.

For two hours he toyed with words. He tried various combinations of Scottish and Killing and Nairn, GenoMap and Fazackerly and Basque.

Nothing.

He tried some more.

Syndactyly, Witch, Cagot, Inheritance, Murder, Canaan…

Nothing.

He tried one more time, a whole host of words: Scoring, French, Nazi, Burning, Deformity, Torture, Genetic, Homicide, Gascony, Bequest…

And…There! Yes. He’d lucked out: two possibly related news items.
Two.

The first was a murder in Quebec. A Canadian news website gave a brief resume. A very old woman had been killed three weeks ago in her house just outside Montreal. The woman had been shot, for no apparent reason. It was the very last line of the report that really made him pay attention: the woman was apparently Basque, and as a young girl she had been interned in a Nazi concentration camp. In Gurs. The French Basque Country. The murder was a total mystery, as nothing had been stolen,
despite the victim’s wealth.

This had to be linked.
Had to.
Even if it wasn’t, it needed more investigating. He wrote down the details on his pad, then turned to the next news item. The article had been carried by a couple of newsfeeds a few weeks ago.

The headline was: ‘Bizarre Bequest Leads to Million Dollar Basque Mystery’

A thirty-something man called David Martinez was staring out of a photo: he was holding a map. Martinez had an awkward grin in the photo, as he brandished the map, a kind of uncomfortable smile. The article said the map showed places in
the Basque Country.
Moreover it said the young man’s grandfather had died and left him two million dollars – and according to the newspaper
this had come as a complete surprise
.

Simon scanned the article, feeling quite alive with excitement. He didn’t want a drink any more. He wanted to know what
this
was about: a link to the Basques, a mysterious amount of money, a very old man – thousands of miles away – now dead.

The article gave him almost everything: it even explained that David Martinez had been a lawyer in London prior to his inheriting this mysterious sum.

It took two minutes on the net to find out the ‘well known
law company’ where David Martinez had worked: there were lists of lawyers of every company.

Walking to the window, Simon called Martinez’s firm on his mobile. A clipped voice requested his name and credentials, he handed them over: Simon Quinn from the
Daily Telegraph
.

He was batted around the system for a few moments, put on hold, put through to HR, put back on hold…but then he reached a superlatively snooty man, apparently David Martinez’s boss, Roland De Villiers, who was more than keen to hand out Martinez’s mobile number. The boss actually added, for good measure, ‘I do hope he’s in trouble.’

The call clicked off, abruptly.

Simon looked at his notepad, resting on the windowsill. It was a British number that the lawyer had airily handed over. He keyed the numbers, but the ensuing ringtone was long bleeps – indicating that this guy Martinez was abroad – in Spain maybe?

Then a hesitant voice came down the satellite.

‘Yes…Who is this?’

The smell of congealed eels hung in the air. Mist was sidling into the room stealthy and needy. David sat in the silence and the chill, wondering at José’s words. Then he welcomed the return of his wits.
He needed to speak to Amy
. To tell her all of this.

‘Amy!’

His voice echoed. He tried again.

‘Amy?’

Where was she? He hadn’t seen her for an hour. It was hard to believe she was outside in the rain.

He called again. His voice bounced off the mouldering woodwork, and down the empty corridor. Nothing.

A swift search told him there was no one on the ground floor: all he could hear was the incessant skitter of rat tails, as the vermin fled his approach through each unsavoury chamber.

How about the room they shared? He and Amy? Where they had talked through the night?

He had to take the stairs; he had to go up the stairs. The pounding of his feet matched the pounding of his pulse as he called Amy’s name again – nothing, the hallway was empty.

He pushed the door and as he did his mind filled: the imagined scene of his parents, dying in their car, came suddenly and vividly into mental view. His mother’s head crushed, blood drooling politely from her slackened mouth…

Maybe the same had happened to Amy. Everyone close to him was taken away:
everyone.

David scanned the room he and Amy had shared. Empty. It was bereft even of rats, or ravens cackling at the window. The bunks were still shifted together; the old picture of a Jesuit saint was still askew on the peeling wall. Slumlike dampness seeped from the ceiling.

There was one bedroom left, Fermina and José’s room. No doubt the door was locked and barred against the world.

Maybe she was in there?

David gathered his valour and stepped down the hallway and called through the door, Amy –
Amy
– but the returning silence was claustrophobic.

This was intolerable. He yearned to escape, to find the truth and find Amy – and then run away, get out of this awful house, this monument to oppression; the pains and terrors of the Cagots – branded, excluded, humiliated – seemed to have soaked into the bricks and mortar. David wanted to find her, and then fly.

He poised a fist to knock on the door. He would kick the door in, if necessary.

But his knock was stayed by
a voice
– right behind him.

‘David?’

He swivelled. It was
Amy.

‘Where have you been?!’

‘Downstairs –’ Amy shook her head ‘– the cellar…to check –’

‘What?’

‘For passages. The
chemins des Cagots
. You remember? Eloise said there were passages, built by the Cagots – I thought if
we were in trouble, we could use them…but I only found vaults –’

He put two hands on her shoulders.

‘José told me, told me all of it – everything. He’s locked in there – with Fermina –’

He tilted a frown, leftwards, indicating the door.

‘But why?’

He began to explain.

And he stopped almost at once. Their conversation was slashed in half by a horrible and unmistakable sound.

A gunshot. And then another gunshot.

Inside the Garovillos’ room.

They ran to the door and shoved against the rusted locks. The wood and metal resisted for a minute, then two minutes. But the planks were wormed, and the hinges were ancient, the doorway began to splinter, and then it swung open. They were inside.

David gazed across, and he felt his heart shrivel in bitter disgust. Amy had a hand to her face, shrouding her tears.

Two corpses were sitting in two chairs.

José and his wife.

Fermina Garovillo had been shot at close range through the temple, the side of her head was simply
missing
; the obscene wound was echoed and amplified by a splattered patch of blood on the wall nearby. José had shot his wife first, it seemed – and then turned the gun on himself. And his wound was worse: the entire top of his cranium, taken clean away. Burn marks on his thin white lips showed how he had done it, put the gun between his teeth, pulled the trigger – blasting away his own brains.

More blood on the ceiling and the wall behind confirmed the suicide. David took one quick look at the grey jellylike stuff balanced on top of the chair – and he felt the rising bile of nausea.

But why?

Why had they done it?

An answer, the answer, came immediately. The menacing slurch of tyres, outside.

David went straight to the window and scanned the scene, his muscles tense with alarm. And there. There it was. The reason for José and Fermina’s suicide, maybe. A red car, driving slowly between the dripping trees. Miguel was surely inside the car. David recalled old José’s words.
One day he will kill me
.

Amy joined David at the window. She cursed and shivered, simultaneously.

But there was faint hope. The red car slowed to a stop, then it started up once more,
going the wrong way
. David realized, with a tiny jolt of optimism, that Miguel must still be
looking
for them. The Wolf didn’t
quite
know where it was, he was driving up and down. For how long he’d been doing this, who knew. However he had discovered their exile in Campan – torturing Eloise maybe? – he hadn’t pinned down the precise location of the refuge.

But it wouldn’t take him long. Eventually he would see the concealed turning. Miguel would drive past the bushes, and look in the right direction. And then discover the house. And then come and kill them.
Epa. Epa. Epa
.

‘The gun!’ said Amy.

‘What?’

‘There must be a gun.’

She was right. David scanned swiftly around the room for José’s gun. The old man must have had a gun to shoot himself and his wife. And there – a glimpse of black metal in the greyish light. David reached between José’s lifeless legs and picked up the pistol. It was still warm. He figured there must be bullets left inside. There had only been two gunshots.

He lifted the gun and held it, pointing the muzzle at the ceiling.

For a second the madness of it all gyred in David’s mind: a year ago he was a lethargic media lawyer. Bored, safe, and incoherently sad. Commuting on the District Line tube, going home to a microwave chicken curry, maybe a pint with a friend. Maybe meaningless sex with someone he didn’t love, if he was lucky. Now he was terrified, and angry, and hunted – and yet the paradox was there again: he felt
more
alive than ever.

He wanted to live now: he wanted to live so much. To find out the deeper reasons for his parents’ murder, and to take revenge for their deaths. But the
first
thing was to escape.

‘The back garden,’ said Amy, her tears visibly repressed. She was being strong, she looked angry. ‘Through the garden, the ravine? We can go that way?’

They hurried out of the door and along the hall; the damp old planks thudded and creaked as they took themselves downstairs, to the rear of the house – from there the garden and the gate led to the forests; but Amy pulled him back.

‘Listen!’

He listened; she was right. Voices. Out there in the garden, maybe over the wall – in the woods.

‘We can’t risk it,’ she hissed. ‘The road?’

‘Miguel’s car.’

They sighed with frustration – and fear. David felt the rage inside. ‘We’re stuck. Dammit we’re just stuck. He’s got us trapped!’

‘No. The cellar!’ She grabbed his arm. ‘I am sure there are passages down there. C’mon, we have to find them.’

She turned, and they ran down the musty hallway – and turned right. There was an old cellar door under the stairs. David reached for the handle.

The subtle growling of a car engine was distinct. Somewhere out there in the rain and the ruins the car was coming
very
close, prowling past the old cottages of the Cagots, taking the
turning that led to the hideout. The voices outside, in the woods at the rear, were still audible. Closing in.

The door to the cellar opened on a dingy set of descending stairs, plunging into the dark dark underworld of the Cagot refuge.

They had no choice. David followed Amy down the steps, into the blackness. He turned and shut the door firmly behind them, immersing them in even deeper darkness. It felt like drowning at night.

‘Amy –’

‘Yes!’

‘You’re OK?

‘Here’s the floor…I think.’

David took out his phone and switched it on and used the light of the screen to see; the feeble glimmer illuminated the echoing black cellar. He surveyed the gloom.

‘Wait.’

Amy had a finger to her lips. They stood still, and mute. Frightened. Male voices were discernible.
Inside the house.

‘The vaults!’

David squinted. Now that his eyes were adjusting, he could see the true size of the cellar. It was enormous – high ceilinged and enormous, stretching into the dark, a real medieval dungeon. Somewhere for storing a lot of food, maybe, when the Cagots had to hide out.

Giving off the main vaulted cellarspace was a series of massive wood-and-metal doors, leading, it seemed, to more dark, clammy chambers. Three of the doors were open, two closed.

‘We need to search – the spaces –’

They peered into the first vault. It was so cold and sticky in this secondary cellar, their breath hung in the air, the spectres of words. David flashed the phone-light around. The goose’s foot was carved on the lintel. The mark of Cain. David turned his light quickly this way and that, but the
space was empty. A narrow stone bench ran along the side, empty. The smell was faintly rancid.

More noises scuffled upstairs. Then the thump of boots on stairs. The men were searching the upper floors of the house. They would find José and Fermina. That might delay them. David tried not to speculate on Miguel’s reaction. He would come upon the grisly sight of his self-murdered parents: he would be more angered than ever before.

And then the terrorist would realize, he would descend. And find the cellar door.

Trying to quell his panic, David paced to the next vault. The second one was like the first, empty, long and obscurely pungent. His anxiety was like a drumbeat. Accelerating.

He stepped further inside, ensuring there was no concealed exit. There wasn’t. The third vault was the same: it had no other doors. Now Miguel’s dark voice could be heard – in the hallway above. Shouting. Soon he would see the cellar entrance.

They had come to the fourth and penultimate vault. It was sealed. The metal door was tall and mossed over with decay.

‘Try it!’ Amy whispered. ‘We have to –’

‘Hold the light –’

Amy took the phone and poised it – as he tugged, fiercely, at the cold metal handle. He tugged harder, and then again, even harder. The door began to slide, very slowly. It wheezed and complained, slowly yielding to his desperate struggles. The metal grated resentfully against the stone – and then it seemed to explode: it fell open and a swamping deluge of brown and rancid fluid came after, a wave of thick and malodorous soup that was so fierce it knocked them both to the cellar floor.

They were slipping now, slipping and gasping in the slimy water; and David could see, knocking and bobbing in the subsiding floods: yoghurty flaps of flesh, and grimacing human heads, and fibrous, amputated arms; the heads were
half decayed, the hair on one face was like rusty brown wire; a protruding arm bone was sticking out of leathery strings of muscle –

‘Amy?’

She was struggling to stand up, slipping in the juices of the corpses. He stared at her, suffused with horror. They were covered with brown-green, waxy slime. And then David succumbed to his gag reflex: he briefly puked into the pooling fluids, and puked again. Amy was coughing, violently, as she stood up; then she seemed to steel herself, and she closed her eyes, and she opened her eyes, and she pointed to the ceiling.

The voices above were sharper, nearer, angrier, the men were nearly done searching the house. She hissed:

‘The last door – what choice –’

Skidding through the puddles, they approached the final door.

The insanity of the scene did not prevent the danger approaching. Together, they pulled at the door handle, the metal slipping in their greasy hands. The obvious fear was written on Amy’s face – what if this was another flood, of fluids and bones? – but it wasn’t. The door opened quite easily. It opened onto a dry and lofty space, and at the end of the vault gaped…a passageway. Clung with spiderwebs, long and dismal, and stretching into further blackness.

‘The
chemin
!’

Amy was already inside, beckoning David to follow. He paused to shut the chamber door behind them. Quietly yet emphatically. It wouldn’t stop anyone. It wouldn’t stop the Wolf. It might delay their pursuers a few vital minutes.

‘OK.’

The passageway was too low to walk properly: they had to crouch, and scuttle, desperately, like hapless large insects.

But they were escaping at last. The footfalls and voices grew faint. But when the men found the cellar door?

‘Which way now?’

David switched the phone-light left and then right, the pitiful torchbeam revealed more passages branching off. The roof of the nearest passage was pierced by a worm, wriggling and pink. He could feel the clammy fluids on his jeans, he was covered with decaying human bodies, smeared with a scum of ancient human fat. The gag reflex tugged at his throat, once again.

‘This one,’ Amy said, her voice half-choked. ‘Pointing left. It must – surely – it must –
go to the woods –’

‘Now!’

They made their way, in frightened silence, until a soft thunder halted their progress, joined by a tinkling: water was dripping through the soil above, dripping down the muddy walls.

‘The Adour?’ she said. ‘We’re going in a
different
direction.’

‘It’s too late now.’ He grabbed Amy’s wet hand. ‘
Quick
–’

A few metres further, the dirty passageway began to broaden, and gain height until it was almost possible to walk. Until it was almost possible to run.

They ran.
The passage curved to the left and the right and then it stopped at some stairs of impacted soil. At the top of the stairs was a trap door.