The Marks of Cain (9 page)

‘My sweet red
marrubi…
The little girl.
Sí
? You love your Papa still…’

He was biting at her white breasts, his hands were dark on her white buttocks, he was a black overpowering shape on the whiteness of her flesh, nuzzling at her red nipples; his dark wolfish mouth consuming. David felt the blur of despair.

And then, grotesquely, the terrorist climaxed. His arms shivered and he slumped forward.

His head lay on her white naked breasts. She was stroking his head, caressing him.

And then she widened her eyes and stared at David with an unfathomable expression.

‘Let’s go.’

David was choked.

‘What?’

‘He’s asleep. He always falls asleep after sex. Always. The deepest sleep. We have a chance!’

She was gently pushing Miguel away. David realized, bewildered, that she was right: Miguel was snoring, utterly unconscious. The terrorist didn’t even stir as Amy pushed him aside, onto the sandy rockfloor.

David diverted his gaze as Amy threw her clothes on; the vortex of questions inside him was spinning: had she really done all this so they could
escape
? What kind of black and cruel comedy was this? As he looked away, he spotted the pistol, fallen from Miguel’s grasp.

‘My hands.
Amy.’

Amy was already there, untying him. As soon as his smarting wrists were unbound, David leaned and picked up the gun; then checked Enoka was nowhere to be seen.

He had a chance to shoot the terrorist. Shoot the wolf. David looked at the sleeping head of his tormentor.

He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t kill a sleeping man, he couldn’t kill a man. He was a lawyer, not a killer, the whole thing was absurd, evil but absurd; and besides, even if he killed him, he couldn’t defeat him. The graffiti would still be scrawled on the walls of Basque villages.
Otsoko
. The Wolf. And the image of what he’d just witnessed would never quit.

Amy was imploring him. ‘Please!’

He surrendered to her urgency. They crept down the rockshelf, out of the cave, beyond the clearing. They were going to make it. David felt the thrill of escape even as his mind reeled at the harrowing scene he had been forced to observe; Amy was running ahead now, up a pathway, between trees and bushes.

‘Zara. She’ll be there – any minute.’

They raced to the end of the path, and then the path became a lane, and then the lane became a misty village road. The spire of Zugarramurdi church loomed across a desolate square.

‘There!’

Amy was sprinting towards a car parked up by the church. She flung open the door and David opened the other door; Zara was inside asking questions in frantic Spanish, but Amy just said: ‘Go!’

The car sped out of the square, out of Zugarramurdi, down another mountain road.

David looked across the passenger seat.

Amy was silent, but crying.

Zara drove them speedily to the road where they had left the hire car; it took a bare few minutes to drive what had taken them an hour to crawl. Amy was silent the entire way; she dried her tears and said nothing, despite Zara’s repeated and insistent queries.

The Spanish journalist gave them a puzzled glare as they eventually stepped out into the rain. Zara was quite obviously needled by the mystery and the ensuing silence. With a wordless pout Zara handed Amy her bag: the bag she had collected, as instructed, from Amy’s flat using the spare key.

Then Zara gave her friend one last searching and bewildered glance before starting up her car and driving off.

Still swathed in silence, they walked quickly up the sodden path, and climbed into David’s mudded rental.

It was like they were behaving automatically. Robotically. The mist drifted between the trees. David sat at the wheel, turned on the motor, and slid the car to the edge of the road. They were at the dead and darkling heart of the forest.

He took the gun from his pocket, contemplated it for a moment, then he hurled it from the car with vigorous resolution; he pressed the throttle, and they turned a swift right,
speeding away, towards France. Away from Spain, away from Miguel, away from the killer. Away from the witch’s cave of Zugarramurdi.

Amy said nothing. David said: ‘Are you OK?’

‘Yes.’ She was staring levelly out of the window, staring at the fleeing ranks of trees. ‘I’m OK.’

A car rumbled into view ahead – David fought the surge of fear: but it was a farmer in a blue and mud-smeared van. They overtook the van, and he watched it disappear into the fog behind them.

Whole minutes passed. Amy gazed expectantly across the gearwell.

‘We’re going to France?’

‘
Yes
.’

‘OK…That’s good.’

They were ascending again. After ten kilometres, they attained a grey rocky crest, a balding spot in the woods, watched over by soaring eagles with imperial wings, and then they were over the imperceptible frontier and inside France, driving past deserted old passport booths, and descending from the peaks.

David enjoyed a fraction of relief. At least they were out of Spain, where he and Amy had nearly been killed. Where Amy had been…raped. Was it rape?
What had just happened?

For the fifteenth time in thirty minutes, he clocked the rearview mirror. Just to check, to see if there were any cars following. Any
red
cars.

They were alone on the road; he massaged the tension from his neck muscles. As they curved the mountain roads, he found himself thinking of the witch burnings. Of Zugarramurdi.

He could imagine the scenes of terror: a young woman being pulled, by her hair, across that dismal cobbled square; he saw the villagers shouting at her, throwing stones, with
mangy dogs barking and snapping. He could hear the frightened peasant children, sobbing in the dungeon…Denouncing their parents. He could see the black-hooded priests, stripping the women naked, searching for the Devil’s claw-marks…

He tried to clear his mind, focussing on the route. Now they were descending into the foothills, the sun had begun to burn through the thinning clouds; soon enough the clouds were gone. Blue autumn skies reigned over the green hills and valleys of southern Gascony.

‘He was cutting trees when I met him,’ she said.

David looked across the car, jolted from his reveries.

She repeated her words. Her speech was a monologue, a very necessary monologue.

‘When I first saw Miguel. It was at a Basque fair. The Basques have these rustic sports. They call them
la force Basque. Herri Koralak
. Trials of rural strength.’ Her fringe lifted in the soft freshet of breeze from the open car window. ‘He was throwing boulders, and chopping logs, and winning the tug of war. You know, he was like this…
legend.
The Wolf was already a legend, everyone talked about him, the giant from Etxalar, son of the famous José Garovillo, this guy with inhuman strength. A
jentilak
from the forest of Irauty. He was bare chested when I saw him and I was twenty-three and it was purely physical. I’m sorry. Sorry. So fucking sorry.’

He wondered why she was apologizing; he wondered who she was apologizing to. He listened to her as she talked and talked, her words blurring into the noise of the engine and the strobing of the woodland sun.

‘Then I realized he was clever, but…but, you know, a killer, truly brutal. And the strength, this famous tall guy, the
jentilak
, it was…tainted, it was married to a pure cruelty. But the sex was good, at first. That’s the truth and I’m sorry. He used to tie me up. I bit him. He cut me once, on the
scalp, with a knife. We had a sex game, with a knife. I came when he did it.’

She was staring straight ahead, her eyes fixed on the horizon of hills. ‘Then I began to feel sick. Quite soon. With the sex, the taint of violence. And he was seriously troubled, mentally, emotionally, every way. Pathologically. Whenever we had really passionate sex, he always fell into this deep, deep sleep, almost comatose. What is that about? I don’t know.’

Now she looked at him. ‘So there it is. That was the only way I knew…to give us a chance. He was surely going to kill you. Maybe me too. So I let him fuck me, as I thought that might save us. Sorry. You can stop the car now if you want and leave me here. I can hitch.’

Her face was a picture of resisted tears. David felt the anger abating, it was replaced with a voyeuristic sympathy, a shared and unseeing terror of what she must have been through. So she had done it to save them; it was rape. A kind of rape. Maybe not rape. But she had saved his life.

‘You don’t have to talk about it any more,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to talk about it ever again.’ And he meant it. But she shook her head, her mouth trembling, as she surveyed the rolling Gascon dales, green and mellow, through the car window.

‘I want to talk about it. I knew as soon as he walked in the cave he would want to do…something like that. The same hungry smile. He liked sex in the open, the risk of being caught, being seen by others. We did it in the witch’s cave before. That’s how I knew where we were. He was always ravenously sexual, like he was starved.’

‘I’m so sorry, Amy.’

‘Don’t be. It
wasn’t
rape. It was just
disgusting
. I did love him once and I can never forgive myself for that. But he was going to kill you. He was probably going to torture you. And so.’

‘Is he…’ David didn’t know how to phrase it. ‘Is he ill? I mean he’s obviously a bastard but it feels like more than that.’

‘Who knows. Psychotic maybe. The facial tic always made me wonder. And the sleep and the inexorable libido…He used to want sex five or six times a day. Anywhere. With lots of…’ She grimaced, and continued: ‘Like I said. Tying up. Biting. Cutting. And worse. You know.’

‘OK…’

He reached out for her hand; he touched it, blindly, his eyes on the curving hilly road. He said nothing for a few kilometres.

Then he gave voice to obvious question, the same question as before.

‘Can we go to the police now?’

‘No.’

‘I knew you’d say that.’

Her smile was polite.

‘Sure. But it’s true. No police. That’s one thing José taught me. When the Basques are involved, don’t trust the police
anywhere
, on either side.’ She gave him another bleak and tight–lipped smile. ‘You know there are five police forces in the Basque Country? All dangerous. Some are killers for Spain. Some are infiltrated by ETA…We might walk straight back into danger.’

‘Yes, but we’re in France.’

‘Same difference. Let’s just…get away. Think about it.’

He subsided. She was maybe right; he suspected she was wrong; but after the last few hours, he didn’t want to question her or press her any further than he needed to.

They drove, the sun was warm, they drove.

David and Amy swapped seats, Amy taking his directions. He had a firm idea where they should go: further north and east, into Gascony, away from Spain. Towards the next towns marked on the map. Savin. Campan. Luz Saint Sauveur.

He knew where they were going, because he was more determined than ever to discover the truth about the churches and the map and his grandfather. The savagery and horror of the last days had only made him
more purposeful.
And he was, to his own surprise, excited by this velocity, this targeting, this rationale for everything. His life, at last, had a satisfying if difficult goal, his existence was speedy and directed, after a decade of anomie and apathy; it was like being on a very fast train after driving aimlessly on a beach.

Did Amy know where they were going? Probably, possibly, who could say. She seemed to fool him and beguile him at the same time. She was like a deep blue rockpool, full of deceptively clear water. When she spoke she was honest and candid and he thought he could see everything: see to the bottom, the rock. But when he dived in, he realized the truth. He could drown in the cold plunging blues, her depths were unsounded.

So they drove.

But this was big empty country, and the little French roads were slow and full of tractors and farmers’ trucks. For several hours they trundled through yawning little villages and forgotten Basque hamlets, past farmyards advertising
Fromage d’Iraty
on homemade placards. In the hypnotic, mid-afternoon sunshine, David found himself wearily dreaming, again, this time remembering his childhood. Playing touch rugby in the summer with his father – he remembered his father’s bright happy smile; the pungent aroma of the leather rugby ball, rough against David’s hand. A big family dog cantering across the lawn.
Happiness.
And then the sadness
.

At length they stopped at a vast Carrefour hypermarket on the main Mauleon road where they ate a lonely
croque monsieur
and
salade verte
in the sterile cafe; where they bought clothes and toothpaste, staring silently at each other across
the supermarket aisle as they did so. They were refugees, hiding out. And they couldn’t even trust the police?

At last they ascended to the little town of Mauleon Lecharre, lying alongside a pretty river and surrounded by the green Pyrenean hills.

David steered them straight to the medieval core of the town, and parked. He stretched himself, aching horribly after the long drive, after the terrors of the cave and the forest. The town was quiet and couples were wandering the twilit, cobbled streets. Amy and David joined the promenade: they walked to the riverside, and stared at the waters from the bridge. Swallows were curling about in the softening dusk of early autumn. David yawned.

‘I’m exhausted.’

‘Me too.’

They left the car where it was and walked to the nearest hotel, a pretty but modest two star near the main town square, with a fifty-something French manageress. The woman’s fingernails were so long and over-varnished they looked like purple talons.

‘Bonsoir! J’ai deux chambres…mais très petites…’

‘That’s fine,’ said David. Trying not to look at her claws.

The elevator was the smallest in Gascony. David slept, but fitfully. He dreamed all the way through the night.

He dreamed the house was burning.

Voices were calling from inside the fire, asking David to help – but he couldn’t do anything. He was standing in the garden staring at the fiercely burning house, at the flames licking up the walls, and then he saw a charred and blackened face at the window. It was his mother. She was inside the burning house and she was tapping the glass, trying to touch her son, and she was saying
it’s not your fault, David, it’s not your fault
and suddenly church bells were ringing out wildly and David –

Woke up.

Sweating.

It wasn’t church bells.

Sweating.

It was the hotel phone. Coughing away the phlegm of the bad dream, he groggily reached for the phone.

‘David? Hello?’

It was nine a.m. It was Amy.

Showered and dressed, he went downstairs. When Amy came down to join him for breakfast, on the al fresco hotel terrace perched above the river, she looked at him inquiringly.

He immediately confessed.

‘Bad dreams. I keep thinking about my parents’ death. Baffling dreams.’

‘Not surprising, maybe…’

‘It seems relevant, but I don’t know why.’

‘Perhaps you should tell me. Explain. It might help.’

‘But…what?’ He shrugged, feeling helpless, a victim of his endless incoherent memories. ‘What shall I tell you?’

‘I don’t know. You could tell me how it happened?’ She smiled, and her smile had a yearning empathy. He had a desire to hug her; he ignored this. She said, ‘Tell me…how you found out about the crash.’

‘OK…Well…’ Then he stopped, because it was vastly difficult. He had never really talked about it before. David stared at his half-eaten croissant, his pot of Xapata cherry jam. Amy assisted him.

‘How old were you at this point?’

‘Fifteen.’

Amy said slowly, and with a gentle incredulity.

‘Fifteen…?’

‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘And they just went away on holiday, one summer, my mum and dad.’

‘That’s very young, for…your mother and father to leave you alone?’

‘Yep,’ said David. ‘And it was unusual. They were very good parents, we’d always had nice holidays
together
. Then suddenly – my mum said she and Dad were going away for a month
on their own
. Abroad.’

‘They left you totally alone in England?’

David stared about. Just two other guests were on the terrace, a German man and wife silently buttering their sliced open baguettes. The holiday season was over. He tried not to think about Miguel. He looked back at Amy.

‘They left me with friends in Norwich. Friends of my mum’s, the Andersons. We were all very close, their kids and me. In fact it was them, the Andersons, who took me in when…when Mum and Dad…when they had the…the thing, you know, the crash. When they were killed.’

‘OK.’

‘But this is what’s strange!’ said David, his voice unexpectedly loud. He flushed, then continued more quietly. ‘This is the odd thing: I remember I asked my mum, before they went, why they were going without me and she said:
we’re going to find out the truth –
and then my dad sort of laughed but it was kind of different, embarrassed.’