The Marks of Cain
The Marks of Cain

Epigraph

The voice of thy brother’s blood crieth unto me from the ground.

Genesis, 4:10

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Epigraph

Author’s Note

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

43

44

45

46

47

48

49

50

51

Acknowledgements

About The Author

By Tom Knox

Copyright

About the Publisher

Author’s Note

The Marks of Cain is a work of fiction. However, it draws on many genuine historical, archaeological and scientific sources.

In particular:

The monastery of Sainte Marie de La Tourette stands in the forests and vineyards of central France. Designed by Le Corbusier, the building was constructed in the 1950s. Five years after completion the building was threatened with closure, as so many of the monks were suffering mental problems.

Eugen Fischer was a German scientist, famous for his studies in human heredity, firstly amongst the Basters of Namibia, and then for Hitler and the Nazi party. He survived the Second World War, and continued his work without prosecution.

In 1610, the King of Navarre asked his physicians to examine twenty-two of his ‘Cagot’ subjects.

1

Simon Quinn was listening to a young man describe how he’d sliced off his own thumb.

‘And that,’ said the man, ‘was the beginning of the end. I mean, cutting off your thumb, with a knife, that’s not nothing, is it? That’s serious shit. Cutting your own thumb off. Fucked my bowling.’

The urge to laugh was almost irrepressible; Simon repressed it. The worst thing you could do at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting was laugh at someone’s terrible story. Just not done. People came here to share, to fess up, to achieve some catharsis by submitting their darkest fears and shames: and thereby to heal.

The young man finished his story: ‘So that’s when it, like, kicked in. I realized I had to do something, about the drugs and the pop. Thank you.’

The room was silent for a moment. A middle-aged woman said a breathy thank you, Jonny, and everyone else murmured: thank you, Jonny.

They were nearly done. Six people had shared; pamphlets and keyrings had been distributed. This was a new group for Simon, and he liked it. Usually he went to evening NA meetings nearer his flat and his wife and son in Finchley Road, the London suburbs. But today he’d had to come into Hampstead for business and en route he’d decided to catch a new meeting, try somewhere fresh; he was bored of the boozers at his usual meets, with their stories of guzzling lighter fuel. And so he’d rung the NA hotline and found this meeting he’d never been to before, and it turned out it was a regular lunchtime job – with interesting people who had good stories.

The pause was prolonged. Perhaps he should share his own story now? Give a little change?

He decided to tell the very first story. The big one.

‘Hello, my name’s Simon and I’m an addict.’

‘Hello, Simon…’

‘Hi, Simon.’

He leaned forward – and began:

‘I was a drunk…for at least ten years. And I wasn’t just an alcoholic, I was…a polydrug abuser, as they say. I did absolutely everything. But I don’t want to talk about that. I want to…explain how it started.’

The leader of the group, a fifty-something man with soft blue eyes, nodded gently.

‘Whatever you want. Please go on.’

‘Thank you. Well. OK. I…grew up not far from here, in Belsize Park. My parents were pretty affluent – my father’s an architect, my mother was a lecturer. My background is Irish but…I went to private school in Sussex. Hence the stupidly middle-class English accent.’

The leader offered a polite smile. Listening attentively.

‘And…I had an older brother. We were rather a happy family…At first…Then at eighteen I went off to university and while I was there I got this frantic phone call from my mother. She said, your brother Tim has just lost it. I asked her what she meant and she said, he’s just lost it. And it was true. He’d suddenly come home from university – and he’d started talking absolutely mad stuff, talking equations and scientific formulas…and the maddest thing of all is that he was doing it in German.’

He gazed around the faces, gathered in this basement room. Then continued:

‘So I shot home and it turned out my mother was right. Tim had gone mad. Genuinely cracked. He was doing a lot of skunk with his chums at uni – maybe that was a catalyst – but I think he was schizophrenic anyway. Because that’s when schizophrenia usually kicks in, between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five. I didn’t know that then of course.’

The middle-aged woman was sipping from a plastic cup of tea.

‘Tim was a science student. Seriously bright – much brighter than me. I can barely say bonjour but he could speak four languages. As I say, he was doing a physics PhD, at Oxford, but he’d come home suddenly…without warning – and he was ranting, quoting scientific formulas in German. Doing it all night, walking up and down the landing. Das Helium und das Hydrogen blah blah blah. All through the night.

‘My parents realized my brother had a pretty serious problem – and they took him to a doctor, and they prescribed Tim the usual drugs. The wretched little pills. Antipsychotics. And they worked for a while…But one night when I was home for Christmas I heard this muttering noise and…and it was this voice. Again. Yes. Das Helium und das Hydrogen. And I lay there wondering what to do. But then I heard this terrible scream and I rushed from my bedroom and my brother was in…’ He closed and opened his eyes. ‘My brother was there in my mother’s bedroom and they were alone because my father was away…and…and my brother was attacking her, hacking at my mother, with a machete. A big knife. A machete. I don’t know precisely what it was. But he was chopping away at her, our mother, so I jumped him and I held him down and there was blood everywhere, just everywhere – actually sprayed up the walls. I very nearly throttled him. Almost killed my own brother.’

Simon drew breath.

‘The police came and they took him away and…my mother went to hospital and they stitched her up, but she lost the use of some fingers, some nerves were severed. But that was all, really, which was incredibly lucky. She could have died – but she was alright. And then we had this terrible dilemma as a family – should we press charges? My father and I said “Yes”, but my mother said “No”. She loved Tim more than the rest of us. She thought he could be treated. So we agreed with her, stupidly, crazily, we agreed. Then Tim came home and he seemed OK for a while, on the drugs, but then one night I heard it: Das Helium und das Hydrogen…’

Simon could feel the sweat on his forehead; he hurried on with his story.

‘Tim was muttering, again, in his room. And of course that was that. We called the police – and they came straight round. Then they put Tim in an asylum. And that’s where he is now. Locked and bolted and shut in his box. He’s been there ever since. He’ll be there the rest of his life.’

As his conclusion approached, he experienced the usual relief. ‘So that’s when I started drinking – to forget, you know. Then sulphates and then pretty much everything…But I finally stopped the boozing six years ago and yes I did my course of NA antibiotics, my sixty meetings in sixty days! And I’ve been clean ever since.

‘And I now have a wife and a son and I dearly love them. Miracles do happen. They really do. Of course I still don’t know why my brother did what he did and what that means but…I look at it this way: maybe I haven’t got his genes, maybe my boy will be alright. Who knows. One day at a time. And that’s my story. And thanks very much for listening. Thank you.’

A murmur of thank yous filled the warm fuggy space, like the responses of a congregation. The ensuing silence was a coda; the hour was nearly up. Everyone stood and hugged, and said the Serenity Prayer. And then the meeting was finished, and the addicts filed out, climbing up the creaky wooden stairs, out into the graveyard of Hampstead Church.

His mobile rang. Standing at the church gates, he clicked.

‘Quinn! It’s me.’

The phone screen said Withheld, but Simon recognized the voice immediately.

It was Bob Sanderson. His colleague, his source, his man: a Detective Chief Inspector – at New Scotland Yard.

Simon said a bright Hi. He was always pleased to hear from Bob Sanderson, because the policeman regularly fed the journalist good stories: gossip on high profile robberies, scuttlebutt on alarming homicides. In return for the information, he made sure that DCI Sanderson was seen, in the resultant articles, in a flattering light: a smart copper who was solving crimes, a rising star in the Met. It was a nice arrangement.

‘Good to hear your voice, DCI. I’m a bit broke.’

‘You’re always broke, Quinn.’

‘It’s called freelancing. What do you have?’

‘Something nice maybe. Strange case in Primrose Hill.’

‘Yes?’

‘Oh yes indeed.’

‘So…What is it? Where?’

The detective paused, then answered:

‘Big old house. Murdered old lady.’

‘Right.’

‘You don’t sound very enthusiastic.’

‘Well.’ Simon shrugged, inwardly, watching a bus turn left by the Tube, heading down to Belsize Park. ‘Primrose Hill? I’m thinking…aggravated burglary, thieves after jewels…Not exactly unknown.’

‘Ah, well that’s where you’re wrong.’ The policeman chuckled, with a hint of seriousness. ‘This isn’t any old fish and chip job, Quinn.’

‘OK then. What makes it strange?’

‘It’s the method. Seems she was…knotted.’

‘Knotted?’

‘Apparently so. They tell me that’s the proper word.’ The policeman hesitated. Then he said, ‘Knotted! Perhaps you should come and have a look.’

2

Beyond the hospice window stretched the defeated beauty of the Arizona desert: with its vanquished sands, stricken creosotes, and blistered exposures of basalt. The green arms of the saguaro cacti reached up, imploring an implacable sun.

If you had to die, David Martinez thought, this was a fitting place to die, on the very outskirts of Phoenix, in the final exurb of the city, where the great Sonoran wastes began.

Granddad was murmuring in his bed. The morphine drip was way up high. He was barely lucid at the moment – but then, Granddad was barely lucid most of the time.

The grandson leaned over and dabbed some sweat from his grandfather’s face with a tissue. He wondered, yet again, why he had come here, all the way from London, using up his precious holidays. The answer was the same as ever.

He loved his Grandfather. He could remember the better times: he could remember Granddad as a dark-haired, stocky, and cheerful man; holding David on his shoulders in the sun. In San Diego, by the sea, when they were still a family. A small family, but a family nonetheless.

And maybe that was another reason David had made it all the way here. Mum and Dad had died in the car crash fifteen years ago. For fifteen years it had been just David in London, and Granddad living out his days in distant Phoenix. Now it would just be David. That sobering fact needed proper acknowledgement: it needed proper goodbyes.

Granddad’s face twitched as he slept.

For an hour David sat there, reading a book. Then his grandfather woke, and coughed, and stared.

The dying patient gazed with a puzzled expression at the window, at the blue square of desert sky, as if seeing this last view for the first time. Then Granddad’s eyes rested on his visitor. David felt a stab of fear: would Granddad look at him and say, Who are you? That had happened too often this week.

‘David?’

He pulled his chair closer to the bed.

‘Granddad…’

What followed wasn’t much of a conversation, but it was a conversation. They talked about how his grandfather was feeling; they touched briefly on the hospice food. Tacos, David, too many tacos. David mentioned that his week of holiday was nearly up and he had to fly back to London in a day or two.

The old man nodded. A hawk was making spirals in the desert sky outside, the shadow of the bird flickered momentarily across the room.

‘I’m sorry…I wasn’t there for you, David, when your mom…and your dad…y’know…when it happened.’

‘Sorry?’

‘You know. The…crash, what happened…I’m so damn sorry about all of it. I was stupid.’

‘No. Come on, Granddad. Not this again.’ David shook his head.

‘Listen. David…please.’ The old man winced. ‘I gotta say something.’

David nodded, listening intently to his grandfather.

‘I gotta say it. I could’ve…I could’ve done better, could’ve helped you more. But you were keen to stay in England, your mom’s friends took you in, and that seemed best…you don’t know how difficult it was. Coming to America. After the war. And…and your grandmother dying.’

He trailed into silence.

‘Granddad?’

The old man looked at the afternoon sun, now slanting into the room.

‘I got a question, David.’

‘Yes. Sure. Please.’

‘Have you ever wondered where you come from? Who you really are?’

David was used to his Granddad asking him questions. That was part of their relationship, how they rubbed along: the older man asking the grandson about younger things. But this was a very different question – unexpected – yet also very acute. This wasn’t any old question. This was The Question.

Who was he really? Where did he really come from?

David had always ascribed his sense of rootlessness to his chaotic upbringing, and his unusual background. Granddad was Spanish but moved to San Diego in 1946 with his wife. She had died giving birth to David’s father; his father then met his mother, a nurse from England, working at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

So, for the first few years of David’s life there had maybe been a certain sense of who he was – an American of Anglo-Hispanic parentage, a Californian – but the Latino surname and the dark Spanish looks still marked them out, as a family, as not quite your normal one hundred percent Americans. After that they’d moved to Britain, and then to Germany and then Japan, and then back to Britain – with his father’s career in the US Air Force.

By the end of this world tour, by the time he was ten or twelve, David hadn’t felt American, British, Spanish, Californian – or anything much. And then his mum and dad had died in the crash – and the sense of being cut off, of being alone and anonymous and floating, had only worsened. Alone in the world.

Granddad repeated the query. ‘So…David? Do you? Do you ever think about it? Where you come from?’

David lied and shrugged and said, No, not really. He didn’t feel like getting into all that, not right now.

But if not now, then when?

‘OK. OK,’ the old man stammered. ‘OK, David. OK. And the new job? Job? You like that? What are you doing, I forget…’

Was Granddad losing it again? David frowned, and said:

‘Media lawyer. I’m a lawyer. It’s OK.’

‘Only OK?’

‘Nah…I hate it.’ David sighed at his own candour. ‘I thought…at least reckoned it might be a bit glamorous. You know…pop stars and parties. But I just sit in a dismal office and call other lawyers. It’s crap. And my boss is a tosser.’

‘Ah…Ah…Ach…’ It was a wrenching, old man’s cough. Then Granddad lay back and stared at the ceiling. ‘Didn’t you get a good college…college degree? Some kinda science, no?’

‘Well…I did biochemistry, Granddad. In England. Not a lot of money in that. So I turned to law.’

Another hiatus. The light was bright in the room. At last his grandfather said:

‘David. You need to know something.’

‘What?’

‘I lied.’

The silence in the room was stifling. Somewhere in the hospice a gurney rattled.

‘You lied? What does that mean?’

He scrutinized his grandfather’s face. Was this the dementia, reasserting itself? He couldn’t be sure, but the old man’s face looked alert as he elaborated.

‘Fact, I’m lying now, son…I just…just can’t…get past it, David. Too late to change. A las cinco de la tarde. I’m sorry. Desolada.’

This was perplexing. David watched the old man talk.

‘OK I’m tired, David. I…I…I…Now I need to do this. Please look in there…Least I can do this. Please.’

‘Sorry?’

‘In the bag at the end…of my bed. Kmart. Look see. Please!’

David got up smartly, and went to the assorted bags and luggage stored in the corner of the room, beyond the bed. Conspicuous in the rather forlorn pile was a scarlet Kmart bag. He picked it up, and scoped inside: there was something papery and folded at the bottom. Maybe a map?

Maps had been one of David’s passions as a child, maps and atlases. As he unfolded this one, in the desert light from the window, he realized he was holding a rather beautiful example.

It was a distinctly old-fashioned road map, with dignified shading and elegant colouration. Soft grey undulations showed mountains and foothills, lakes and rivers were a poetic blue, green polygons indicated marshland beside the Atlantic. It was map of southern France and northern Spain.

He sat down and scrutinized the map more closely. The sheet had been marked very neatly with a blue pen: little blue asterisks dotted those grey ripples of mountains, between France and Spain. Another single blue star marked the top right corner of the map. Near Lyon.

He looked at his grandfather, questioningly.

‘Bilbao,’ said the old man, visibly tiring now. ‘It’s Bilbao…You need to go there.’

‘What?’

‘Fly to Bilbao, David. Go to Lesaka. And find José Garovillo.’

‘Sorry?’

The old man made a final effort; his eyes were blurring over.

‘Show him…the map. Then ask him about churches. Marked on the map. Churches.’

‘Who’s this guy? Why can’t you just tell me?’

‘It’s been too long…too much guilt, I cannot, can’t admit…’ The old man’s words were frail, and fading. ‘And anyway…Even if I told you, you wouldn’t believe me. No one would believe. Just the mad old man. You’d say I was mad, the crazy old man. So you need to find out for yourself, David. But be careful…Be careful…’

‘Granddad?’

His grandfather turned away, staring at the ceiling. And then, with a horrible sense of inevitability, the old man’s eyelids fluttered shut. Granddad had fallen back into his fitful and opiated sleep.

The morphine pump ticked over.

For a long while, David sat there, watching his grandfather breathe in and breathe out, quite unconscious. Then David got up and closed the blinds; the desert sun was almost gone anyway.

He looked down at the map sitting on the hospice chair; he had no idea what it signified, what connection his granddad had with Bilbao or with churches. Probably it was all some ragged dream, some youthful memory returning, between the lucidity and the dementia. Maybe it was nothing at all.

Yes. That was surely it. These were just the ramblings of a dying old man, the brain yielding to the flood of illogic as the final dissolution approached. Sadly, but truly, he was crazy.

David picked up the map and slid it into his pocket, then he leaned and touched his grandfather’s hand, but the old man did not respond.

With a sigh, he walked out into the hot Phoenix summer night, and climbed into his rented Toyota. He drove the urban freeway to his motel, where he watched soccer on a grainy Mexican satellite station with a lonely sixpack and a pizza.

His grandfather died early the following morning. A nurse rang David at the motel. He immediately called London and told his friends – he needed to hear some friendly voices. Then he called his office and extended his ‘holiday’ by a few days, on the grounds of bereavement.

Even then his boss in London sounded a little sniffy, as it was ‘only’ David’s grandfather. ‘We are very busy, David, so this is exceptionally tiresome. Do be quick.’

The service was in a soulless crematorium, in another exurb of Phoenix. Tempe. And David was the only real mourner in the building. Two nurses from the hospice showed up, and that was it. No one else was invited. David already knew he had no other family in America – or anywhere for that matter – but having his relative loneliness underscored like this, felt notably harsh – indeed cruel. But he had no choice in the matter. So David and the two nurses sat there, together and alone, and exposed.

The ceremony was equally austere: at his grandfather’s request there were no readings, there was nothing – except for a CD of discordant and exotic guitar music, presumably chosen by his grandfather.

When the song was done, the coffin trundled abruptly into the flames. David felt the briskness like a punch. It was as if the old man had been quick to get off stage, eager to flee this life – or keen to be relieved of some burden.

That afternoon David drove deep into the desert, seeking the most remote location, as if he could lose his sadness in the wasteland. Under an ominously stormy sky, he scattered the ashes between the prickly pears and the crucifixion thorns. He stood for a minute and watched the ashes disperse, then walked to his car. As he returned to the city, the first fat raindrops smacked the windscreen; by the time he reached his motel a real desert storm had kicked up – jagged arcs of lightning volting between the black and evil clouds.

His flight was looming. He began to pack. And then the motel phone trilled. His ex girlfriend maybe? She’d been calling on and off the last couple of days: trying to elevate David’s mood. Being a good friend.

David reached for the phone and answered.

‘Uh-huh?’

It wasn’t his ex. It was a breezy American accent.

‘David Martinez? Frank Antonescu…’

‘Uh…hello.’

‘I’m your grandfather’s lawyer! First of all, can I say – I’m so sorry to hear of your bereavement.’

‘Thank you. Uhm. Sorry. Uh…Granddad had a lawyer?’

The voice confirmed: Granddad had a lawyer. David shook his head in mild surprise. Through the motel room window he could see the desert rain pummelling the surface of the motel swimming pool.

‘OK…Go on. Please.’

‘Thank you. There’s something you oughta know. I’m handling your grandfather’s estate.’

David laughed – out loud. His granddad had lived in a heavily mortgaged old bungalow; he drove a twenty-year-old Chevy, and he had no serious possessions. Estate? Yeah, right.

But then David’s laughter congealed, and he felt a pang of apprehension. Was this the reason for his grandfather’s weird shame: was the old man bequeathing some insuperable debt?

‘Mister Martinez. The estate comprises two million dollars, or thereabouts. In cash. In a Phoenix Bank savings account.’

David swayed in the high wind of this revelation; he asked the lawyer to repeat the sum. The lawyer said it again, and now David experienced The Anger.

All this time! All this time his grandfather had been loaded, minted, a fucking millionaire? All the time, he, David, the orphaned grandson, had been struggling, fighting, working his way through university, just keeping his head above water – and all along the Beloved Grandfather had been sitting on two million dollars?

David asked the lawyer how long his grandfather had possessed this money.

‘Ever since he hired me. Twenty years minimum.’

‘So…why the hell did he live in that crappy little house? With that car? Don’t get it.’

‘Damn straight,’ said the lawyer. ‘Trust me, Mister Martinez, I would tell him to use it, spend it on himself, or give it you of course. Never would. At least he got a good rate of interest.’ A sad chuckle. ‘If you ever do find out where the money came from, please let me know. Always puzzled me.’

‘So what do I do now?’

‘Come by the office tomorrow. Sign a few documents. The money is yours.’

‘Just like that?’

‘Just like that.’ A pause. ‘However…Mister Martinez. You should know there is one codicil, one clause to the will.’

‘And that is?’

‘It says –’ The lawyer sighed. ‘Well…it’s a little eccentric. It says that first you have to utilize some of the cash to…do something. You have to go to the Basque Country. And find a man called José Garovillo in a town called Lesaka. I think that’s in Spain. The Basque Country, I mean.’ The lawyer hesitated. ‘So…I guess the best way to do it is this: when you reach Spain you just let me know and I’ll wire the cash into your account. After that it’s all yours.’

‘But why does he – did he – want me to find this guy?’

‘Search me. But that’s the stipulation.’

David watched the rain through the window, as it turned to drizzle.

‘OK…I’ll drive by tomorrow morning.’

‘Good. See you at nine. And once again, my sympathies on your loss.’

David dropped the phone and checked the clock: working out time differences. It was too late for him to call England and tell anyone the bizarre and amazing news; it was too late for him to ring his boss and tell him to go choke on his stupid job.

Instead he went to the little table and picked up the map. He unfolded the soft, sadly faded paper and scrutinized the tiny blue asterisks. The stars had been firmly and neatly handwritten next to placenames. Striking placenames. Arizkun. Elizondo. Zugarramurdi. Why were these places marked out? What did this have to do with churches? Why did his grandfather even own this map?

And how come his impoverished grandfather had two million dollars that he never touched?

He needed to look for flights to Bilbao.

3

In the crowded Arrivals lounge of Bilbao airport he opened his laptop and emailed Frank Antonescu. Attached to the email was a jpeg of himself holding a Basque newspaper, to prove his arrival in the country: to fulfil the one stipulation of his grandfather’s will. The entire escapade was surreal, and borderline foolish, and yet this was what his grandfather wanted. So David was happy to obey.

Despite the troublesome time difference, the lawyer emailed back, at once – and with impressive efficiency: the money was being wired over.

Clicking on a website, David checked his bank account.

There. It was really there.

Two point one million dollars.

The feeling was unsettling, as well as gratifying.

He was rich but in a garish and discomfiting way; he didn’t quite feel himself; he felt like someone had snuck into his house, and painted his furniture gold. Was he even allowed to sit down?

Shutting his laptop, David yawned, and yawned again, and glanced through the wide glass terminal doors. It was raining, very hard. And he was very tired. He could do the rest of his travelling tomorrow.

Sheltering ineptly under his copy of El Correo David wheeled his luggage to the taxi rank; he was saved by a cheerful cab driver with a lurid Barcelona soccer shirt under a smart leather jacket, who smoked and chattered as they pulled out of the airport.

The taxi slashed along the rainy motorway. On the left was the distant greyness of the Atlantic Ocean, on the right sudden green hills reached to the clouds; in the steep dips between the hills lurked steelworks and papermills, and factories with tall redbrick chimneys churning out ribbons of smoke the colour of faded white underwear.

David buzzed down the window and let the rain spit onto his face. The cold rain was good – because it pierced the weary numbness; it roused him, and reminded him. He gazed at the Basque Country. He was here.

He’d done some investigating during his thirty-hour flight around the world: some internet research into the Basque Country, and the Basques.

He now knew that some people thought the Basques were descended from Neanderthals. He knew that they had surprisingly long earlobes. He knew they had a unique and complex language unrelated to any other language in the world; he knew that Arrauktaka meant ‘to hit someone with an oar’.

He had also learned that the word ‘bizarre’ came from the Basque word for ‘bearded’; that the people were tall and burly compared to Spaniards; that the Basques were expert whalers; that they had special cherries, a passion for rugby, their own form of linen, a wavy solar symbol called a lauburu, and a tiny wild horse called a pottok.

David buzzed the window shut. The research had been diverting enough, but it hadn’t been able to give him any of the information he really wanted. Who was José Garovillo? What was this reference to churches? What about Granddad’s map?

The memory of Granddad was a discernible pain. David fought back the emotion; if he thought of his grandfather the thread of cognition could so easily lead to his parents. So he needed to do and not think; and he had one more severance to make, one more definite change to enact.

He picked up his mobile and pressed.

The phone rang in London.

‘Roland De Villiers. Yes?’

It was the normal snooty, self-consciously weary locution. The same voice that David had endured for half a decade.

‘Roland, it’s David. I –’

‘Oh for God’s sake. Rilly. David. Where are you now?’

‘Roland –’

‘You do realize your desk is piled high? I don’t care about your frankly peripheral circumstances. You are a professional, get a grip. I expect to see you behind that screen in the next hour or –’

‘I’m not coming back.’

A pause.

‘You have one hour to get back here –’

‘Give my job to that guy in accounts. The one who’s banging your wife. Bye.’

David clicked off. And then he laughed, quietly. He could picture his boss in his office, red faced with anger.

Good.

In front of him the motorway dipped and curved; they seemed to be cutting towards the middle of the city. Grey apartment blocks, stained by rain, stood to attention along the route.

The taxi driver looked up at David, mirrorwise:

‘Centro urbano, señor? Hotel Donostia? Sí?’

‘Sí. Er…sí. Yes. Centre of the city. Hotel…Donostia.’

The driver turned off the autopista and headed down into the wide and principal streets of the town. Large grey offices exuded an air of damp pomposity in the gloom. Many of them seemed to be banks. Banco Vizkaya. Banco Santander. Banco de Bilbao. People were scurrying past the sombre architecture, with umbrellas aloft; it was like a photo of London in the 1950s.

The Hotel Donostia was very much as it had appeared on the website: faded but formal. The concierge looked disdainfully at David’s creased shirt. But David didn’t care – he was almost delirious with tiredness. He found his room and fought with his keycard; then he collapsed into his oversoft bed and slept for eleven straight hours, dreaming of a house with no one inside. He dreamed of his parents, alive, in a car – with small wild horses, cantering across the road.

Then a scream. Then redness. Then a small boy running across an enormous empty beach. Running towards the sea.

When he woke, he opened the curtains – and gawped. The sky was bright blue: the September sun had returned. David pulled on his clothes, filled up on coffee and pastries, then called a cab, and hired a car at the railway station. After a moment’s hesitation, he rented the vehicle for a month.

The main road out of grimy Bilbao took him east towards the French border. Again he thought of his mum and dad and Granddad; he averted himself from the thought, and concentrated on the route. Was he going the right way? He pulled over at an Agip service station; its huge plastic logo – of a black dog spitting red fire – was overly bright in the harsh sunlight. Parked up, he took out the old map and traced his finger over the cartography, examining those delicate blue stars dotting the grey foothills. They looked like distant policelights, glimpsed through mist and rain.

Then he half-folded the map, and for the first time he noticed there was proper writing, in a different hand, scribbled on a corner of the map’s reverse. Seen in the stark sunlight the writing was very faint, and possibly in Basque, or Spanish. Maybe even German. The writing was so small and faded it was quite indecipherable.

It was another puzzle – and he was no nearer to solving any of it. But at least the map told him one thing: he was going the right way, into the ‘real’ Basque Country. He started the car once again.

The drive was hypnotic. Sometimes he could see the blue ocean, the Bay of Biscay, sparkling in the sun. Sometimes the road ducked instead through those dark green shady valleys, where the white-painted Basque houses looked like cuboid mushrooms, suddenly sprouted overnight.

At last the road divided, near San Sebastian; thence the smaller, prettier road headed for the interior: the Bidasoa Valley. It was as scenic as his research had promised. Tumbling mountain rivers ran down shady gorges, enormous oak and chestnut forests whispered in the delicate September air. Lesaka was close. He was in the Basque Navarre. He was nearly there.

As David slowed, he noticed.

Something was happening in Lesaka. The edge of the town was marked by big black police vans, with metal grilles over the windscreens. Surly-looking Spanish riot policemen were sitting on walls, and chatting on mobile phones; they all had very obvious guns.

One of the cops stared at David, and frowned at the car, and checked the numberplate. Then he shook his head, and pointed at a parking space. Mildly unnerved, David slotted in the car. The policeman turned away, uninterested. He just wanted David to stop and walk.

Obediently, David slung his rucksack over his shoulder and paced the rest of the way into Lesaka. He remembered what he had read about Basque terrorism: the campaign for Basque independence by the terror group ETA. It was a nasty business: killings and bombings, intense and surreal atrocities, men in women’s wigs shooting teenagers dead. Very nasty.

Was this police activity connected with that?

It was surely possible; yet it was hard to reconcile such horrible enormities with a place like Lesaka. The quiet air was cool and sweet: mountain freshness. The sky was patched with cloud, but the sun was still shining down on ancient stone houses, and an old church on a hill, and mild stone palazzos surrounding little squares. On streetcorners there were strange pillars, carved with the curvilinear sun symbol, like an Art Nouveau swastika. The lauburu. David said the word to himself, as he walked through Lesaka.

Lauburu.

Not knowing quite what to do next, he sat on a bench in the central plaza, staring at a large stone house hung with the green, red and white Basque flag, the ikkurina. He felt a sudden foolishness: what should he do next? Just…ask people? Like some amateur detective?

An old woman was sitting next to him, clutching a rosary, and muttering.

David coughed, as courteously as he could, then leaned nearer and asked the woman, in his faltering Spanish: did she know a man called…José Garovillo?

The woman glanced warily his way, like she suspected him of some imminent street crime; then she shook her head, rose to her feet, and walked off – scattering pigeons as she departed. David watched her shadow disappear around a corner.

For the rest of the afternoon he tried his best: he asked more strangers on the streets and stepped inside two supermercados, but he got the same blank or even hostile reactions. No one knew José Garovillo, or no one, at least, wanted to talk about him. In frustration David retreated to his car, hauled out some clothes and a toothbrush, and booked into a little hotel at the end of the main road: the Hotel Eguzki.

The allegedly double room had a design of shepherds’ crooks on the wall, and bathtaps which coughed rusty water. David spent the evening eating supermarket chorizo, watching Spanish TV quiz shows, or gazing at the indecipherable writing on the map. He could feel the loneliness like a song in the air. A wistful old folk song.

The morning found him more determined. His first visit was to the church, a decayed and musty building with a fragrance of mildewed leather hassocks. A stricken wooden Christ gazed longingly at the vacant pews. There were two fonts. The smaller of these was carved with a strange symbol, like an arrow, incised brutally into the old grey stone.

He touched the stone, which had been polished to smoothness by the centuries, by a million peasant hands, reaching in for the magic water, daubing it on grubby foreheads.

In nomine patris, et filii, et spiritus sancti…

Enough. This was useless. David hoisted his bag and exited the church, stepping with relief into the grass-scented daylight. Where would people congregate? Where would he find life and chatter and answers?

A bar.

He made for the busiest street, lined with shops and cafes; then he selected the Bar Bilbo. There was music jangling inside, and through the thick windows he could see people drinking.

A few faces turned as he entered. The dark and dingy bar was crowded. A group of teens were chattering in a corner, talking the most guttural Spanish David had ever heard. Sitting at the opposite table was a young woman, an attractive blonde girl. She glanced his way, then turned back to her cellphone. The rest of the bar was dominated by swarthy, black-haired men, downing glasses of cloudy cider and laughing along to the music.

It was then that David recalled – the music. It was the same kind of music that had been playing at Granddad’s funeral. Wasn’t it? A vigorous, slightly discordant guitar song. What did this mean? Was there some direct link to the Basques? Was his grandfather actually…Basque?

David had never heard his granddad speak anything but Spanish – and English. And their family name was authentically Hispanic. Martinez. Yet the stocky men actually looked like Granddad. And David’s father, for that matter.

Another mystery. The mysteries were breeding.

Leaning on the bartop, he ordered some cerveza in his conspicuously pathetic Spanish. Then David sat down at a nearby table and drank the beer. Again he felt paralyzed: idiotic. But he also remembered his grandfather’s words: go to Lesaka, find José Garovillo, and ask about the map. So he should do it. Just do it.

He stood up, and tapped the shoulder of the largest guy at the bar.

‘¿Ola?’

The man ignored him.

‘Er…Buenos días.’

Several other customers, with wide brooding faces, were contemplating David’s failed attempt at conversation. Faces impassive. Yet somehow surly.

He tapped the man’s burly shoulder once more.

‘¿Buenos días, señor?’

Again, the man ignored him.

Two of the other drinkers were now glaring at David and asking him sharp questions in their glottal accents. He didn’t understand what they were saying. So David pointed at the map, and reverted to English.

‘Look, I’m sorry to interrupt…but. Really sorry. But this map…I was just kinda given this by my grandfather…and told to come here and look…at these places – see, Ariz…kun, Elizonda? Also I need to find a guy called José Garovillo. Do you know where I could find him?’

Now the biggest man turned, and he said something very terse.

David was lost.

‘Er…I’m sorry…But…my Spanish is pretty poor?’

The men scowled, with real fury; David realized he must have made some major error. He’d gone too far. He had no idea why or how, but he’d done something stupid. The atmosphere had most definitely intensified. The music had been switched off.

One of the cider drinkers was yelling abusively at David. Across the room the barman was jerking a thumb at the door. David knew he should take the hint. He raised both hands – and made for the exit.

But the drinkers moved first, three of them were up and blocking the way: obstructing his escape route. The big guy had been joined by a man with a denim shirt and muddy boots, and another guy with a Led Zeppelin singlet and tatts on his shoulders.

Jesus. What now?

His best choice was to just barge his way through, hope to reach the door and the light and freedom. But he made one more attempt at talking his way out.

‘Look – guys – sorry – por favor –’ It was useless; he was stammering. One of the cider drinkers was actually rolling up his sleeves.

‘Stop!’

David swivelled, and saw the blonde girl. She was physically interposing herself between David and his assailants – and she was talking very quickly to the men. Her smart and staccato Spanish was accented, and the words came too fast for David to understand.

Yet her intervention was…working. Whatever she was saying – it was succeeding. The anger in the men perceptibly dwindled; scowls became sullen glares, the cold angry faces sank back into the shadows. She was rescuing him from a nasty beating.

He looked at the girl, she looked at him, and then she looked right past him.

Now David realized – maybe there was another reason the guys had fallen back. Right behind him, a figure was walking across the room. If the drinkers had been calmed by the girl, they were positively cowed by this new figure emerging from the shadows. Where had he come from?

The man was tall and dark. His face was stern, half shaven, and mournfully aggressive. He was maybe thirty-five years old. Maybe an athletic forty. Who was this? Why had he silenced everyone?

‘Miguel…?’

It was the barman – gabbling nervously.

‘Er…Miguel…Eh…Dos equis?’

Miguel ignored the offer. He was gazing with his dark, deepset eyes directly at the blonde girl and David. He was standing close. His breath was tinged with some alcohol, strong wine or brandy. But he didn’t seem drunk. Miguel turned, and looked at the girl. His voice was deep and smooth.

‘Amy?’

Her answer was defiant. ‘Adiós, Miguel.’

She took David’s hand, and started pulling him towards the door. Quickly and firmly. But Miguel stopped her. He reached out – and simply grabbed Amy’s throat. Her fingers loosened from David’s grasp.

And then Miguel hit her. Hard. A shocking and brutal blow across the face. The girl fell to the floorboards, sprawling in the cigarette butts and screwed tapas napkins.

David gaped. This sudden violence, against a much smaller young woman, was so shocking, so utterly and casually outrageous, David was stunned. Immobile. What should he do? He gazed around. No one else was going to intervene. Some of the drinkers were actually turning away, giving each other weak and cowardly grins.

David leapt on Miguel. The Basque man may have been bigger and taller than David – and David wasn’t short – but David didn’t care. He remembered being beaten as a teenager. The angry orphan. People picking on the weak or vulnerable. Fuck that.

He had Miguel round the neck, he was trying to get room for a punch.

He failed. Grabbing this man was like riding a surging bull: the taller man stiffened, swivelled, and threw him contemptuously onto the floor. David grabbed at a bar stool, pulling himself to his feet. But then he felt another, quite absolute pain: he was being struck by something metal.

As the blackness descended, he realized he was being pistol-whipped.

4

Simon Quinn paid the cabbie, quit the taxi, and shot a glance along the stucco Georgian terrace. His laptop bag felt heavy on his shoulder.

The murder house was painfully obvious: two police vans were parked outside, with forensic officers in white paper suits offloading steel-grey Scene of Crime suitcases. Festoons of blue and yellow police tape roped off the frontage of the tall, elegant London terrace.

He felt a sudden twinge of apprehension. DCI Sanderson had described the murder as a…knotting. What the hell did that mean?

The nerves were palpable, indeed visible: a faint tremble in his hand. He’d attended a lot of murder scenes in his job – crime and punishment were his journalistic meat and drink – but that word…knotting. It was odd. Disquieting.

Ducking under the police tape he was met at the threshold by the bright young face of DS Tomasky. Sanderson’s new junior officer, a cheerful Londoner of Polish descent. Simon had met him once before.

‘Mister Quinn…’ Tomasky smiled. ‘Fraid you missed the corpse. We just moved her.’

‘I’m here because the DCI called me…’

‘Wants his name in the tabs again?’ Tomasky laughed in the pleasant autumnal sunshine. Then he stopped laughing. ‘I think he’s got some photos to show you.’

‘Yes?’

‘Yeah. Pretty gruesome. Be warned.’

Tomasky leaned an arm across the doorway, physically barring the journalist from entering the house. Beyond Tomasky’s arm, he could see two more forensic officers stepping in and out of a room, with their blue paper facemasks hanging loose.

‘How old is the victim?’

The policeman didn’t move his arm.

‘Old. From southern France. Very old.’

Looking up at the stucco frontage of the house, Simon glanced left and right.

‘Nice place for an old lady.’

‘Tak. Must have been wealthy.’

‘Andrew, can I go in now?’

DS Tomasky half-smiled.

‘OK. The DC is in the room on the left. I was just trying to…prepare you.’

The detective sergeant gestured Simon through the door. The journalist walked down the hallway, which smelled of beeswax and old flowers – and the gases and gels of forensic investigation.

A voice halted him.

‘Name of Françoise Gahets. Never married.’

It was Sanderson. His lined and lively face was peering around the door of the room at the end of the hallway.

‘DCI! Hello.’

‘Got your notebook?’

‘Yes.’ Simon fished the pad from his pocket.

‘Like I said, name of Françoise Gahets. She never married. She was rich, lived alone…We know she’s been in Britain sixty years, no close relatives. And that’s all we’ve got so far. You wanna see the SOC?’

‘Unless you want to get, ah, pizza.’

Sanderson managed a very faint smile.

They crossed the doorway. As they did Sanderson continued:

‘Body was found by the cleaner yesterday. Estonian girl called Lara. She’s still downing the vodkas.’

They stepped to the end of the sitting room. A white-overalled, white-masked forensic officer swerved out of the way, so the two men could see.

‘This is where we found her. Right here. The body was moved this morning. She was…sitting right there. You ready to see the photos?’

‘Yes.’

Sanderson reached to a sidetable. He picked up a folder, opened it, and revealed a sheaf of photographs.

The first photo showed the murdered old woman, fully clothed, kneeling on the floor with her back to them. She was wearing gloves, oddly enough. Simon checked the photo against the reality in front of him.

Then he looked back at the photo. From this angle the victim looked alive, as if she was kneeling down to search for something under the TV or the sofa. At least she looked alive – if you regarded her up to the neck only.

It was the head that made Simon flinch: what the murderer, or murderers, had done to the head.

‘What the…’

Sanderson offered another photograph:

‘We got a close-up. Look.’

The second photo was taken from a few inches away: it showed that the entire top of the victim’s scalp had been wrenched away, exposing the white and bloody bone of her skull.

‘And check this one.’

Sanderson was proffering a third image.

This photo showed the detached scalp itself, a bloody clogged mess of wrinkled skin and long grey hair, lying in the carpet; rammed through the hair was a thick stick – some kind of broom handle maybe. The grey hair was tightly wound around this stick, many many times, all twisted and broken. Knotted.

Simon exhaled, very slowly.

‘Thanks. I think.’

He gazed around the room: the bloodstains on the carpet were still very visible. It was fairly obvious how the killing must have been done: bizarre – but obvious. Someone had made the old woman kneel down, by the TV, then they had forced the stick through her long grey hair, then they had turned the stick around and around, winding the hair ever tighter on the stick, chewing all her hair into one great painful knot of blood and pain, tearing at the roots of the hair on her scalp, until the pulling pressure must have snapped, tearing off the entire scalp.

He picked out one of the last photos. It was taken from the front, showing the woman’s expression. His next words were instant – and reflexive.

‘Oh my God.’

The old woman’s mouth was torqued into a loud yet silent scream, the last frozen expression of her suffering, as the top of her head was twisted off, and popped away.

It was too much. Simon stiffened, and dropped the folder of photos on the sidetable; he turned and walked to the marble fireplace. It was empty and cold, with dried grasses in a vase, and a photo of some old people. A kitsch plaster statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary smiled from the centre of the mantelpiece, next to a small ceramic donkey. The yawning image of his brother, his hands coated in blood, came unbidden to his mind.

He purged it, and turned.

‘So…Detective…judging by that broom handle…it looks like…They twisted and twisted the hair, until it ripped off the top of…of her head?’

Sanderson nodded.

‘Yep. And it’s called knotting.’

‘How do you know?’

‘It’s a form of torture. Used through the centuries, apparently.’ He glanced at the door. ‘Tomasky did his research, like a good lad. He says knotting was used on gypsies. And in the Russian Revolution.’

‘So…’ Simon shuddered at the thought of the woman’s pain. ‘So…she died of shock?’

‘Nope. She was garrotted. Look.’

Another photo. Sanderson’s pen was pointing to the woman’s neck; now the journalist leaned close, he could see faint red weals.

It was puzzling, and deeply grotesque. He frowned his distaste, and said:

‘But that’s…rather confusing. Whoever did this, tormented the old woman first. And then killed her…expertly…Why the hell would you do all that?’

‘Who the fuck knows?’ Sanderson replied. ‘Bit of a weird one, right? And here’s another thing. They didn’t steal a thing.’

‘Sorry?’

‘There’s jewellery upstairs. Totally untouched.’

They walked to the door; Simon felt a strong urge to get out of the room. Sanderson chatted as they exited.

‘So…Quinn. You’re a good journalist. Britain’s seventh best crime reporter!’ His smile faded. ‘I’m not kidding, mate. That’s why I asked you here – you like a bloody mystery story. If you work out the mystery, do let us know.’

5

When he came to, groggy and numb, they were both outside, by the door to the bar. In the mountain sun. The girl was bleeding from her forehead, but not much. She was shaking him awake.

A shadow loomed. It was the barman. He was standing, nervously shifting from foot to foot, wearing an expression of compassionate fear.

He said in English, ‘Amy. Miguel – I keep him inside but but but you go, you must go – go now –’

She nodded.

‘I know.’

Once more the blonde girl grabbed David’s hand. She was pulling him upright. As David stood, he felt the muscles and bones in his face – he was hurting. But he wasn’t busted. There was dried blood on his fingers, from where he must have tried to protect himself – and protect the girl.

‘Crazy.’ She was shaking her head. ‘I mean. Thank you for doing that. But crazy.’

‘I’m sorry.’ David was wholly disorientated. She was British. ‘You saved me first anyway. But…I don’t…don’t understand. What just happened in that bar?’

‘Miguel. It was Miguel.’

That much he knew already. Now she was tugging him down the silent Basque street, past little restaurants advertising raciones and gorrin. Past silent stone houses with towers.

David regarded his rescuer. She was maybe twenty-seven, or twenty-eight, with a determined but pretty face, despite the bruise and the blooding. And she was insistent.

‘C’mon. Quick. Where’s your car? I came by bus. We need to get out of here before he gets really angry. That’s why I tried to pull you away.’

‘That wasn’t…really angry?’

She shook her head.

‘That was nothing.’

‘Sorry?’

‘You’ve never heard of Miguel? Otsoko?’

‘No.’

‘Otsoko is Basque for wolf. That’s his codename. His ETA codename.’

He didn’t wait for any further explanation; they ran to his car and jumped in.

David stared at her across the car. ‘Where should we go? Where?’

‘Any village that’s not Lesaka. Head that way…Elizondo. My place.’

David gunned the engine and they raced out of town. Amy added:

‘It’s safe there.’ She looked his way. ‘And we can clean you up, you’re still a bit of a mess.’

‘And you?’

Her smile was brief. ‘Thanks. Go this way.’

David twisted the wheel, his nerves tautened by the idea of Miguel, ‘the Wolf’. The barman and the drinkers had obviously dissuaded Miguel from further violence: but maybe the Wolf would change his mind.

The Wolf?

David sped them urgently out of the little town, past the Spanish police, past the last stone house; he was agitated by all the puzzles. What had happened in the bar? Who was Miguel? Who was this girl?

He realized, again, that her Spanish had been spoken with a British accent.

What was she doing here?

As they raced down the narrow road, through the sylvan countryside, he sensed that he had to inquire, that she wasn’t just going to tell him too much, unprompted. So he asked. Her face was shadowed with dapples of sun – light and dark shadows that disguised the bruising on her face – as she turned. His first query was the most obvious of all.

‘OK. I guess we go to the police. Right? Tell them what happened.’

He was astonished when she shook her head.

‘No. No, we can’t, we just…can’t. Sorry, but I work with these people, live with them, they trust me. This is ETA territory. And the police are the Spanish. No one goes to the police.’

‘But…’

‘And what would I say anyway? Mmm?’ Her blue eyes were burning. ‘What do I say? A guy hit me in a bar? Then they would ask his name…and I would have to say the Wolf. And there, that’s it – then I’ve betrayed an ETA hero, a famous ETA fighter.’ Her expression was grimly unamused. ‘That would not be good for my longevity. Not in deepest Euskadi.’

David nodded, slowly, accepting the explanation. But her replies had triggered more questions: she worked with these people? How? Where? And why?

He asked again, outright, about her situation. She turned away from him, to stare at the mellow green fields.

‘You want to know now?’

‘I’ve got a lot of questions. Why not now?’

A pause, then she said:

‘OK. OK. You did try to save my life. Maybe you deserve to know.’

Her slender face was set in determined profile, as she offered her answers.

Her name was Amy Myerson. She was Jewish, twenty-eight, and from London, where she’d been educated, taking a degree in foreign languages. She was now an academic at San Sebastian University, teaching Eng Lit to Basque kids. She had fetched up here in the Basque Country after a couple of years backpacking. ‘Smoking too much hash in Morocco. You know.’

He managed a smile; she didn’t smile in return. Instead she added: ‘And then I found myself here, the Pays Basque, between the forests and the steelworks.’ The spangled sunlight from the trees was bright on the windscreen. ‘And I also got involved in the struggle for independence. Met some people from Herri Batasuna, the political wing of ETA. I don’t support the violence, of course…But I do believe in the goal. Basque freedom.’ She was looking out of the window again. ‘Why shouldn’t they be free? The Basques have been here longer than anyone else. Maybe thirty thousand years. Lost in the silent valleys of the Navarre…’

They were at the main Bidasoa highway; huge cement lorries were thundering past. Amy instructed him:

‘Turn right.’

David nodded; his lip was still throbbing. His jaw ached where the pistol butt had smashed across it. But he could tell he clearly had no broken bones. A life of looking after himself, as an orphan, had made him a good judge of his physical condition. He was going to be OK. But what about her?

Amy was gazing his way.

‘So. That’s my autobiography, not a bestseller. What about you? Tell me your story.’

It was only fair: she should know too.

Swiftly he sketched his strange and quixotic situation: his parental background, the bequest from his grandfather, the map and the churches. Amy Myerson’s blue eyes widened as she listened.

‘Two million dollars?’

‘Two million dollars.’

‘Christ. Wish someone would leave me two bloody million dollars!’ Then she put a hand to her pretty white teeth. ‘Oh God. You must be grieving. Stupidest remark in the world. I’m sorry…It’s just…this morning.’

‘It’s alright. I understand.’ David wasn’t annoyed. She had just saved him from a beating – or worse – as much as he had saved her. He remembered Miguel’s dark eyes glaring.

‘Take this left here.’

David dutifully steered them off the main road; they were on a much quieter highway now. Ahead of them he could see a wide and sumptuous valley, leading to hazy blue mountains. The upper slopes of the mountains were lightly talced with snow.

‘The Valley of Baztan,’ said Amy. ‘Beautiful, no?’

She was right: it was stunning. He gazed at the soothing view: the cattle standing knee-deep in the golden riverlight, the somnolent forests stretching to the blue-misted horizon.

After ten minutes of admirable Pyrenean countryside, they pulled past a tractor repair depot, then a Lidl supermercado, and entered a small town of dignified squares and little bakeries, and chirruping mountain streams that ran past the gardens of ancient sandstone houses. Elizondo.

Her flat was in a modern development just off the main road. Amy keyed the door and they snuck in; her flat had tall windows with excellent views of the Pyrenees up the valley. With their slopes draped with ice and fog, and the summits looming blue above, the mountains looked like a row of Mafiosi at the barber’s, white-sheeted to the neck.

A row of killers.

He thought of Miguel as Amy busied herself in the kitchen. Miguel, Otsoko, the Wolf. The immensely strong muscles, the tall dark shape, the deeply set eyes. He tried not to think of Miguel. He glanced around the apartment: the walls were sparsely decorated but the bookshelves were full of heavyweight literature: Yeats and Hemingway and Orwell. A mighty volume called The Poetry of Violence.

What did she teach these kids at San Sebastian University?

Then he swivelled: she had returned, carrying paper towels and flannels and antiseptic cream, and a plastic basin of hot water; together they knelt on the bare wooden floors, and tended to each other’s wounds. She dabbed at his lip with a white flannel; the cloth came away red and brown with old blood.

‘Ouch,’ he said.

‘Not broken,’ she said. ‘Brave soldier.’

He waved away the absurd compliment; she bent to her task, squeezing the flannel in the water, making soft crimson blooms of his blood. Then she spoke.

‘We could go to the doctor…but we’d just have to sit for six hours to get a stitch, maybe. Don’t see the point. Mmm?’

He nodded. Her expression was serious, impassive and reserved. He guessed there were still a lot of things she wasn’t telling him yet; but then again he hadn’t yet asked her the truly probing question: why had Miguel attacked her, so instantly and angrily?

‘OK, Amy, let me help you.’ He took a clean flannel and moistened it with hot water. She presented her face, eyes shut, and he began to dab and wash the blood from her hairline. She winced at the tang of the water, but said nothing. As he cleaned her wound, he questioned her.

‘I want to know more about that bar.’

‘Uh-huh?’

‘What I don’t get is…is…It wasn’t just that guy Miguel, the whole place was punchy. What did I do wrong? How did I upset so many people just by asking a couple of questions?’

Amy’s head was tilted, letting him clean her forehead. She was silent for a moment, and then she said:

‘OK, here’s the deal. Lesaka is one of the most nationalist towns in the Basque Country. Fiercely proud.’

David nodded, and took some paper towels, beginning to dry the deep but now unbleeding scratch.

‘Go on…’

‘And then there’s ETA. The terrorists. Miguel’s friends.’ She frowned. ‘They killed some Guardia Civil, just two weeks ago. Five of them, in a horrible bomb, in San Sebastian. And then the Spanish police shot dead four ETA activists. Madrid claims they were also planting a bomb. Basques are saying it was cold-blooded reprisal.’

‘Ah.’

‘That’s why there are police everywhere. It’s majorly tense. The Spanish police can be extremely violent when they are taking on ETA. It’s a vicious spiral.’

David sat back, examining his work on her wound. She would be alright; he would be alright. But there was something odd that he had noticed, something that was not quite alright.

When he had been washing the blood from Amy’s forehead, he had seen a scar. A strange and complex scar: curving arcs of some deep yet decorative cuts – hidden under her bright blonde hair.

He said nothing.

Her injuries treated, Amy was sitting back. She was cross-legged in her jeans and trainers, her hands flat on the bare floorboards.

‘So you wanna know what else you did wrong?’

‘Yes.’

‘Let’s take it in order. First you accused the guys of talking Spanish in a ferociously Basque-speaking area. That isn’t so hot. And then you must remember the political tension. As I explained.’

‘Sure. And?’

‘And…well…there’s something else as well.’

‘What?’

‘You said something quite provocative on top of all that.’

‘I did?’

‘You mentioned José Garovillo. That’s when I came across to try and help you, when you said that. I told them I knew you, that you were a bloody idiot, they should pity you –’

‘Er, thanks.’

‘I had to say that. Because when I heard you banging on about José, I knew you were in deep trouble.’

‘So…who is he?’

She gazed across the tepid water, in the plastic basin.

‘You don’t know?’

David felt increasingly stupid, and increasingly frustrated.

Amy explained:

‘José Garovillo is very old now, but he’s really quite famous around here.’

‘You mean you actually know him? You can help me find him?’

‘I know him well. I can email him today, tell him about you. If you want.’

‘But…Great. That’s great!’

‘Wait.’ Her face was unsmiling; she lifted a hand to slow his words. ‘Listen. A lot of people round here know Garovillo. Because he’s a cultural icon, one of the intellectuals who helped revive Basque language and culture – way back when. In the 60s and 70s. He was also a member of ETA in the 60s.’

‘He’s famous? But I looked him up on the net! There was nothing.’

Amy answered: ‘But he’s only famous amongst Basques. And in ETA he was just called José. You’d never see his full name written down…ETA people like to keep a low profile. And Garovillo has been a Basque radical since way back – he was interned by Germans in the war, over in Iparralde.’

‘Sorry?’

She turned and waved a small white hand at the window.

‘There. The land beyond! The French Basque Country, over the mountains. In 1970 he was arrested and tortured by Franco, and then by the Socialists. He used to drink in the Bar Bilbo, years ago. He’s pretty famous – or notorious.’ Her face was serious. ‘Not least because of his son…’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘His son’s name is…Miguel.’

‘The guy who attacked us…’

‘Is José’s son. The Wolf is José Garovillo’s son.’

6

David booked himself into a hotel on the outskirts of Elizondo, to wait for Amy’s email to José to do the job. The Hotel Gernika was nothing special. It had a small swimming pool, a modest breakfast bar, and lots of leathery old French guests on cycling holidays wearing alarmingly tight Lycra shorts. But that was fine by David.

With his money, his unaccustomed wealth, he could have booked into the best hotel in Navarre – but it didn’t seem right. He wanted to be inconspicuous. Anonymous and unnoticed: just another tourist in a nice but mediocre hotel. So he grabbed his bags and booked himself in, and spent the rest of the day staring from his humble balcony, gazing out at the mountains. The cirques and summits seemed to shimmer, knowingly, exulting in their own remoteness.

It was a hot and dusty day. In the evening he decided on a swim: he walked into the hotel gardens and stripped to his shorts, and dived in the blue inviting water of the pool. He gasped as he surfaced, the water was freezing, straight from the mountains, unheated.

His whole body was tingling, his heart was thumping, it was a perfect metaphor for his situation. Three weeks ago he was a bored and listless commuter, reading free newspapers on the train, drinking machine coffee at work, doing the daily rounds of nothingness. As soon as he arrived in the Basque Country he had plunged right into it, straight into this mystery and strangeness and violence; and yet it felt good. Shocking but good; bracing but invigorating. Like diving into a pool of freezing mountain water. Making his body tingle.

I am alive.

The next day Amy called him: she’d had an idea. She reckoned that he should maybe publish his story, to help with the puzzle. Amy said she knew a local journalist who was willing to write it up; her way of thinking was that the more people who knew the questions, the better the chance they might locate some of the answers.

David agreed to the idea, with only the faintest sense of reluctance.

They met again in the journalist’s spare white flat; the young, dark-haired writer, Zara Garcia, banged out the article on a laptop. The piece appeared in a Spanish newspaper just half-a-day later. It was immediately picked up and translated by some English language newsfeeds.

When David finally read the published story, on his own laptop, sitting with Amy in a little wifi cafe near the main plaza of Elizondo, he felt anxiety as well as excitement. The article was headlined ‘Bizarre Bequest Leads to Million Dollar Basque Mystery’.

It had a photo taken by Zara of David holding up the map; the newspaper offered an email address where people could get in touch with David, if they had any ideas that might help.

The journalist had left out the connection with José Garovillo: she’d explained that it was too incendiary and provocative in the political climate. Reading the article, David decided this omission had definitely been a good idea; he already felt exposed enough by the newspaper piece. What if Miguel read it?

He shut the laptop and looked at Amy, in her purple denim jacket and her elegantly slender jeans. She looked back at him, silent, and blue eyed; and as she did, he felt the oddness of their situation – like an inexplicable shiver on a very warm day. Already they were sort-of friends: forced together by that horrible and frightening scene in the Bar Bilbo. And yet they were not friends; they were still total strangers. It was dissonant.

Or maybe he was just unnerved by the noise in the bar. The slap and laughter of kids playing pelota, the peculiar Basque sport, in the square outside, was very audible. Children were thwapping the hard little pelota ball against a high wall. The noise was repetitive and intense. She glanced his way.

‘Shall we go somewhere else?’

‘If you have time.’

‘Academic holiday. And I’d like to help, while my students are off shooting the police.’ She smiled at his alarmed response. ‘Hey. That was a joke. Where do you want to go?’

‘I want to start looking at the churches. On my map…’

‘OK.’

‘But first…I’d like to go somewhere I can have a proper drink.’ He looked at her for a long moment, then he confessed: he was still feeling the nerves, the fear, the aftereffects of Miguel’s attack.

‘Let’s go for a glass and talk,’ she said.

A few minutes’ driving brought them to a hushed little village; the sign said Irurita. Old men sat snoozing under berets, outside cafes. Parking the car by the village church they walked to one of the cafes; they sat under a parasol. The clear mountain air was refreshing, the sun was warm. Amy ordered some olives and a bottle of the chilled local white wine that she called txacolli.

The waitress served them at their shaded table with a nimble curtsey.

Amy spoke:

‘You haven’t asked me the most obvious question of all.’

He demurred; her expression was serious.

‘You ought to know this…if I am going to introduce you to José.’

He drank some of his cold fresh wine, and nodded. ‘OK. If you insist. Why did Miguel attack you? He came out of nowhere, then…assaulted you. Why?’

Her answer was fluent:

‘He hates me.’

‘Why?’

She pressed her hands together, as if praying. ‘When I first came to the Basque Country I was…as I said, very interested in ETA. The cause of independence. I thought it was a laudable ambition, for an ancient people. I even sympathized with the terrorists. For a while. For a few months.’

‘And…’

‘Then I met José. The great José Garovillo. We became very good friends, he showed me where to buy the best pintxos in Bizkaia. He told me everything. He told me he had renounced violence, after the fall of Franco. He said terrorism was a cul de sac for the Basque people, within a democratic Spain.’

‘But his son –’

‘Disagreed. Obviously.’ She gazed straight at David. ‘But then José got me a job, teaching English at the university. And you see…a lot of the kids who come into my class are very radical, from the backstreets of Vittoria and Bilbao, ready to die for ETA. The girls are even more fierce than the boys. Killers in miniskirts.’

Her lips were pink and wet from the txacolli. ‘I see it as my task to maybe steer them away from ETA, from violence, and the self-destruction of terrorism. So I teach them the literature of revolution: Orwell on the Civil War, Yeats on the Irish rebellion. I try to teach them the tragedy as well as the romance of a violent nationalist struggle.’

‘And that’s why Miguel hates you? He thinks you are working against ETA.’

‘Yes. I knew he’d been abroad for a while, though I did hear a rumour he was back. But I thought it was safe to go see my friends in the Bilbo. But he must have been in the bar already. Hanging out in one of the back rooms, with his ETA comrades…’

‘Then he heard the row.’

‘Yes. And he walked out. Saw me. With you.’ She grimaced. ‘And did his favourite thing.’

The explanation was good, if not perfect. David still felt the echo of an unexplained space, a dark blur on the image. What else was she not telling him? What about the scar on her scalp?

He stopped thinking as the waitress placed some olives on their table.

‘Gracias,’ he said. The girl nodded and bobbed and replied in that thick guttural Spanish accent: kakatazjaka…Then she waved to a friend across the cobbled plaza, and made her way back to the bar.

‘You know it’s funny,’ said David, half turning to Amy. ‘I’ve not heard any Basque being spoken. Not yet.’

‘Sorry?’

‘I’ve been in the Basque Country for two days. I’ve seen it written on signs everywhere. But not heard anyone speaking it.’

She gazed at him from under her blonde fringe – as if he was retarded.

‘That girl spoke Basque just then.’

‘…She did?’

‘Yep.’

Amy’s denim jacket was off; David noticed the golden hairs on her suntanned arms as she reached again for her glass of wine.

‘And all the guys in Lesaka,’ she said, tilting her glass. ‘They were all speaking Basque. Hence their anger when you tried talking Spanish.’

David cocked an ear, listening to the chatter of the waitress. Kazakatchazaka.

Amy was right. This was surely Basque. And yet it sounded like they were talking a very bizarre Spanish. And he’d been hearing it all along without realizing.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘it took me a while, when I first came here, to realize I was surrounded by Basque speakers. I just thought they had over-the-top Spanish accents.’ She looked beyond him – at the whitewashed church walls. ‘I think it’s because Basque is so strange, the ear and the mind can’t entirely comprehend what’s being heard.’

‘Have you learned any?’

‘I’ve tried, of course! But it’s just impossible, weird clauses, unique syntax.’ She lifted her chin. ‘Here’s an example of how mad Basque is. What’s the first phrase you learn in any foreign language?’

‘“Do you speak English?”’

‘Comedy genius. What else?’

‘…“Can I have a beer?”’

‘Exactly. Une bière s’il vous plaît. Ein bier bitte.’

‘So how do you say “Can I have a beer” – in Basque?’

Amy looked at him.

‘Garagardoa nahi nuke.’

They sat there in the sun, in tense but companionable silence. And then a gust of wind rippled the parasol. David looked left: clouds were scudding in from the west, thicker clouds were rolling down the nearest Pyrenean slope, like a white sheepskin coat slowly falling from the shoulders.

‘OK,’ said David. ‘How do we know Miguel isn’t going to just turn up here, and follow you? And hurt you. I don’t get it. You seem calm. Fairly calm anyway.’

‘He was drunk. He’s only ever hit me once before.’

‘He’s done it before?’

She blushed. Then she quickly added: ‘He usually hangs out in Bilbao or Bayonne – with the other ETA leaders. He rarely comes to Navarre, might get seen. We were just very very unlucky. And anyhow I’m not going to let that bastard chase me away.’

Her final words were defiant: the slender nose uptilted, eyes wide and angry.

David saw the conviction and the sense in her statement; but he still felt queasy and tense. Just sitting here in the autumn breeze. Doing nothing.

‘OK. Let’s go and see the churches on my map.’

Amy nodded, and rose; when they climbed in the car the first flickers of drizzle were spitting on the windscreen.

‘How quickly it changes. In the autumn.’

The rain was a majorette’s drum-roll on the car roof. David reached in the glovebox and took out the precious paper; carefully unfolding the leaves, he showed her the map that had brought him halfway round the world.

He noticed her fingernails were bitten, as she pointed at the asterisks.

‘Here. Arizkun.’

‘You know it?’

‘I know of it. One of the most traditional Basque villages. Way up in the mountains.’ She looked squarely at David. ‘I can show you.’

David reversed the car. He followed Amy’s lucid directions: towards France and the frontier, and the louring mountains. Towards the Land Beyond.

The villages thinned as they raced uphill. Ghosts of fog were floating over the steeply sloping fields, melancholy streamers of mist, like the pennants of a departing and spectral army.

‘We’re right near the border…’ she said. ‘Smugglers used to come over here. And rebels. Witches. Terrorists.’

‘So which way?’

‘There.’

Amy was indicating a tiny winding turn off – with a sign above it, just perceptible through the mist.

The road to Arizkun was the narrowest yet: high mountain hedges with great rock boulders hemmed them in, like bigger people trying to bully them into a corner. More mountain peaks stretched away to the west, a recession of summits in the mist.

‘On a clear day you can see right into France,’ said Amy.

‘Can barely see the damn road.’

They were entering a tiny and very Basque village square. It had the usual Basque pelota court, several terraces of medieval stone houses, and a bigger stone mansion, adorned with a sculpted coat of arms. A wyvern danced across the damp heraldic stone: a dragon with a vicious coiling tail, and feminine claws.

The village was desolately empty. They parked by the mansion, which was spray-painted with ETA graffiti.

Eusak Presoak, Eusak Herrira.

Beneath this slogan was an even larger slash of graffiti. Written in the traditional jagged and ancient Basque script, the word was unmistakable.

Otsoko.

Next to the word was a black stencil of a wolf’s head.

The Wolf.

Amy was standing next to David, looking at the graffito.

‘Some of the Basque kids worship him…’ she said.

‘Why?’

‘Cause he’s so perfectly ruthless. A brilliant killer…who comes and goes. Who never gets caught.’

She was visibly shivering. She added:

‘And they admire the cruelty. Of course.’

‘Miguel is…especially cruel?’

‘Rhapsodically. Voluptuously. Poetically. The Spanish torture Basque radicals, but Miguel tortures them right back. He frightens the fuck out of the Spanish police. Even the anti terrorists.’

Amy leaned to look at the graffito. David asked:

‘What kind of tortures?’

Her fringe of blonde hair was dewed with water in the mist. ‘He buried one Guardia Civil guy in quicklime.’

‘To destroy the evidence?’

‘No no no. Miguel buried the man alive, in quicklime, up to his neck. Basically he dissolved him. Alive.’

Abruptly, she walked on. David jogged after her, together they walked down a damp stony path, between two of the older Basque houses. David looked left and right. Brown and thorny sunflowers decorated the damp wooden doors, hammered fiercely to the planks. Some of the wayside thistles had been made into man shapes. Manikins made out of thistles.

The silence of the village was unnerving. As they paced through the clinging mist, the echo of their footsteps was the only noise.

‘Where the hell is everyone?’

‘Killed. Died. America.’

They were at the end of the lane. The houses had dwindled, and they were surrounded by rocks and thickets. Somewhere out there was France, and the ocean – and cities and trains and airports.

Somewhere.

Abruptly, a church appeared through the mist. Grey-stoned and very old, and perched above a ravine which was flooded with fog. The windows were gaunt, the location austere.

‘Not exactly welcoming. The house of God?’

Amy pushed at a rusty iron gate. ‘The churches are often like this. They used to build them on older sites, pagan sites. For the ambience, maybe.’

David paused, perplexed. Odd circular stones, like circles balanced on squares, were set along the path to the church door. The stones were marked with lauburus – the mysterious and aethereal swastika. David had never seen circular gravestones before.

‘Let’s try inside,’ he said.

They walked down the slippery cobbled path to the humble wooden church door. It was black, old, wet – and locked.

‘Damn.’

Amy walked left, around the side of the church – shrouding herself with mist. David followed. There was a second, even smaller door. She twisted the rusty handle; it opened. David felt the lick of moisture on his neck; it was cold now, as well as gloomy. He wanted to get inside.

But the interior of the church was as unalluring as the exterior. Dank and shadowy, with unpainted wooden galleries of seating. The reek of rotten flower-water was intense; five stained glass windows filtered the chill and foggy daylight.

‘Curious,’ said Amy, pointing up. One of the stained glass windows showed a large bull, a burning tree, and a white Basque house. Then she elaborated, still pointing at the window.

‘The Basques are very devout, very Catholic. But they were pagan until the tenth century, and they keep a lot of their pre-Christian imagery. Like that. That house – there –’ she gestured to the main window ‘– that’s the exte, the family house, the sacred cornerstone of heathen Basque culture. The souls of the Basque dead are said to return to a Basque house, through subterranean passages…’

David stared. The stained glass tree was burning in the cold glass light.

‘And the woman? In the other window.’

‘That’s Mari, the lady of the witches.’

‘The…’

‘Goddess of the witches. The Basque witches. We do not exist, yes we do exist, we are fourteen thousand strong.’ She looked at him, her eyes blue and icy in the hanging light. ‘That was their famous – or infamous – saying. We do not exist, yes we do exist, we are fourteen thousand strong.’

Her words were visible wraiths in the chill; her expression was obscure. David had a strong desire to get out; he didn’t know what he wanted to do. So he made for the little door, and exited with relief into the hazy daylight. Amy followed him, smiling, and then immediately headed left. Away from the path, disappearing behind the stage curtains of fog.

‘Amy?’

Silence. He said again:

‘Amy?’

Silence. Then:

‘Here. What’s this? David.’

He squinted, and saw her: a vague shape in the misty graveyard: female and slender, and elusive. David quickly stepped across.

‘Look,’ she said. ‘Another graveyard…With derelict graves.’

She was right. There was a secondary cemetery, divided from the main churchyard by a low stone wall. This cemetery was much more neglected. A crude statue of an angel had fallen onto the soggy grass; and a brown cigarette had been contemptuously stubbed out – in the angel’s eye. Circular gravestones surrounded the toppled angel.

A noise distracted them. David turned. Emerging from the mist was an old woman. Her face was dark. She was dressed in a long black skirt and a ragged blue jumper, over which she was wearing a T-shirt imprinted with Disney characters; Wall-E, The Lion King, Pocahontas.

The woman was also deformed. She had a goitre the size of a grapefruit: a huge tumorous growth bulging out of her neck, like a shot putter holding the shot under his chin, getting ready to throw.

The crone spoke. ‘Ggghhhchchc,’ she said. She was pointing at them, her goitre was lividly bulging as she gabbled, her face vividly angry. She looked like a toad, croaking.

‘Graktschakk.’ She pointed at them with a long finger, and then at the neglected graveyard.

‘What? What is it?’ David’s heart was pounding – foolishly. This was just an old woman, a sad, deformed old woman. And yet he was feeling a serious fear, a palpable and inexplicable alarm. He turned. ‘Amy – what is she saying?’

‘I think it’s Basque. She’s saying…shit people,’ Amy whispered, backing awkwardly away.

‘Sorry?’

‘She says we are shit people. Shit people. I’ve no idea why.’

The woman stared. And croaked some more. It was almost like she was laughing.

‘Amy. Shall we get the hell out?’

‘Please.’

They scurried up the path, David tried not to look at the woman’s enormous goitre as he passed; but then he turned and looked at her goitre. She was still pointing at them, like someone accusing, or denouncing, or laughing.

They were almost running now; David stuffed the map in his pocket as they escaped.

The sense of relief when they made the car was profound – and preposterous. David pressed the locks and turned the engine and spun the wheel – reversing at speed. They rumbled over the cobbles, past the stencil of Otsoko – the silently grinning black wolf’s head.

Amy’s mobile phone bleeped as they crested a hill: the telecom signal returning.

‘It’s José Garovillo. It’s José.’

‘So.’ His excitement was real; his fear was repressed. ‘What’s his response?’

She looked down, reading her message. ‘He says…he is willing to meet you. Tomorrow.’ She shook her head. ‘But…this is a little odd…there’s something else.’

‘What?’

‘He says he knows why you are here.’

7

The tiny four-seater plane soared across the windswept fields of Shetland, heading for the rough blue sea already visible in the distance.

‘It’s just a twenty-minute flight,’ said the pilot, above the loud engines. ‘Might get a bit bumpy when we reach the coast.’

Simon Quinn was squeezed in the back of the minuscule plane alongside DCI Sanderson; sitting next to the pilot was DS Tomasky.

The speed of events was bewildering. Simon had learned only the previous afternoon, while watching Shrek with his son, Conor, that there was another murder case, linked to the Primrose Hill knotting. And already he was here: flying across the lonely, sunlit cliffs, with the words of his excited editor at the Daily Telegraph still reverberating in his mind: you know the cliché, Simon: murder is money. Our readers will lap this up. Go and have a look!

It was certainly a juicy story. He could envisage the headlines – and the byline photo. But there was a mystery here, too. All he had been told was that the new victim, Julie Charpentier, was also old, and she was from the South of France. But the circumstance which had apparently clinched the link, to the satisfaction of the police, was the fact that the woman was tortured. The details of the ‘tortures’ were, so far, unrevealed.

When he’d heard about the murder, he’d had to beg Sanderson to take him along; promising him some very nice coverage in the resulting article. The DCI had yielded to the journalist’s pleas – with a laconic chuckle: ‘Make sure you bring a strong stomach. They kept the corpse there for a few days so we could see it.’

The plane raced over the cliffs, out to sea. Leaning forward, the journalist asked the pilot:

‘What’s it like?’

‘Sorry?’ The pilot – Jimmy Nicolson – lifted one of his earphones, to hear better. ‘Didnae catch it. Say again?’

‘What’s it like, living on Fowler?’

‘Foo-lah,’ Jimmy laughed. ‘Remember what I said. Foula is pronounced Foo-lah.’

‘Yep. Sorry.’

‘Don’t worry,’ the pilot answered. ‘We’re used to people not knowing about us.’

‘You mean?’

‘Since they evacuated Saint Kilda, Foula is the most remote inhabited place…in the whole of Britain…’

Simon peered out of the window at the oceans. Chops of foam were mere flicks of whiteness against the enormous wastes of water. For several minutes they flew on in silence. He felt his stomach churn – he didn’t know if it was the nauseating rollercoaster ride of the airplane, or his apprehension at visiting the murder scene. Yet he was also adolescently excited. Headlines. He would get headlines.

‘There,’ said Jimmy Nicolson. ‘Foula!’

Just perceptible through the sea-haze was a small but gutsy outcrop: a looming outlier of treeless, grass-topped rock, surmounted by steep hills. The cliffs looked so enormous and the hills so daunting it was hard to believe anyone could pitch a tent on the island, let alone find enough flat space to build a house. But there were houses there: small crofts and cottages, tucked against the slopes.

And now they were banking towards Foula’s only landing spot. A patch of green turf.

Sanderson laughed. ‘That’s the airstrip?’

‘Flattest part of the isle,’ said Jimmy. ‘And we’ve never had a crash. Anyway if you overshoot, you just end up in the sea.’ He chuckled. ‘Hold onto your bonnets, gentlemen.’

It was the steepest descent Simon had ever made in a plane: they were plunging headlong towards the airstrip, as if they intended to plough up the fields with the propeller. But then Jimmy yanked fiercely on the joystick, and the plane tilted up, and suddenly they were coming to a stop, ten yards from the vandalizing waves.

Tomasky actually applauded.

‘Nice landing.’

‘Thank you,’ said Jimmy. ‘Look now, here’s the widow Holbourne. And Hamish Leask.’

Already the red-cheeked locals were slapping Jimmy on the back, and helping him to unload stores from the hold of the little aircraft; a few of them were nodding respectfully at DCI Sanderson. A tall red-haired man, in a police uniform, came over and introduced himself to the Scotland Yard officers.

‘Hamish Leask. Northern Constabulary.’

Sanderson smiled politely:

‘Of course. We talked. Hello!’ He gestured. ‘This is the freelancer I mentioned. Simon Quinn. He’s covering…things for the Telegraph.’

‘Och, yes. A proper newspaper.’ Leask shook Simon’s hand with crushing vigour. Before the journalist could reply, Jimmy intervened:

‘Terrible thing, Hamish. Terrible thing.’

Leask nodded. Without a word. Then he turned to face his guests. ‘So, chaps – shall we go straight to it?’

‘Yes please.’

‘I’ve been using Jimmy’s car. Very generous of him. Just over there.’

The five men strode across the meadows to a blue and very muddy four-wheel drive. The inside of the Range Rover smelt of peat, dogs and sheep-farming.

They drove past a small harbour. On the shingly beach, small wooden boats were lying on their sides, like drunks asleep on park benches. The biggest boat of all, a red metal tugboat, was oddly craned above the icy waters: literally lifted out of the harbour-water by an enormous metal claw.

Leask explained:

‘They have to lift the boat up, or it would get crushed in the storms.’

‘But…’ Simon said. ‘It’s made out of metal.’

Jimmy laughed: ‘You haven’t seen the storms on Foula.’

The road ran through fields with dark brown sections of soil, where peat had been brutally chopped from the sward. Sheep were nibbling at the salty grass.

Finally they rocked around a corner, where the road turned into a track; beyond that a few humble, off-white cottages were scattered on the last fields, staring at the sea – some looked empty, some had smoking chimneys. And all of these homesteads had a crouched and fearful appearance, huddled against the punitive wind: like dogs too often clattered by a brutal owner.

The path to Charpentier’s croft – the apparent scene of the crime – was short and soggy. Simon was glad he was wearing his walking boots.

‘OK,’ said the Shetland inspector. ‘We haven’t touched anything since the discovery.’

Sanderson said:

‘Just as it was found?’

‘And a wee bit grim! Gird yourselves. The body was discovered by a friend, Edith Tait. Another old lady who lives in the cottage just over that field. She’s gone to stay on the other side of the island.’

The modest croft seemed innocent enough in the cool northern sunlight. Whitewashed and foursquare. There was no sign of police activity, none of the kerfuffle Simon had expected.

Hamish looked at the assembled faces; he paused, theatrically.

‘Shall we?’

Everyone nodded; Hamish Leask thrust open a second door and Simon swiftly scanned the room. The furniture was austere; a painting of the Queen was hanging next to a photo of a Pope. And there was the corpse: lying on the floor, next to the fireplace.

The woman was old, she was dressed in some kind of housecoat. Her body below the neck was virtually untouched; her grey hair was long. She was dark-skinned and barefoot. But it was her face and shoulders that showed what had really happened.

Her face was shredded. Literally ripped into shreds: flaps of skin hung from her cheeks and forehead; the lips had been cut away but left to dangle, livid pink flesh showed inside the savage wounds. Her tongue had been sliced in two: it was protruding, and forked by the slice. Blood was spattered over her throat, the longest ribbon of skin draped down to her chest. Despite the complex and barbaric wounding, an expression was still visible: her face was contorted by pain.

Simon felt himself weaken, somehow, at the appalling sight: it was worse than he had anticipated. Much worse. But he needed to stay lucid and cogent: do his job, be a journalist. He took a pen from his pocket – he needed to grasp something to calm himself.

DCI Sanderson approached the corpse. The detective stooped to look at the bruises on the neck. Blood had drained into the victim’s chest, discolouring the flesh; the intense rotten odour of decomposition was quite profound. The corpse would have to be moved very, very soon.

‘Hey, Tomasky. Have a look.’

The Polish DS dutifully stepped near. Simon quelled his sense of repulsion, and did the same – uninvited.

Sanderson whistled, almost appreciatively.

‘Expertly done, again. Another garrotting.’

Simon followed the line of the DCI’s pen: he was pointing at some thin weals on the neck. They were livid and painful-looking. Blood had been drawn, but the bruising was minimal, the killing had indeed been swift, ruthless, and expert. As the DCI said. And yet the torture looked wild and insane.

Something else caught Simon’s attention. He looked down at her feet. Something there was not quite right; something there was…not right at all.

He didn’t know whether to mention it.

Sanderson was off his haunches and saying, briskly: ‘You’ll need to get her to Pathology in Lerwick, right?’

‘Aye, we’re flying her out this afternoon. Kept her too long. But we thought you might want to see the scene first, Detective. Seeing as it is so…unusual.’

‘Lifted anything?’

‘Noo. No signs of forced entry – but that means nothing on Foula, people don’t lock their doors. No prints. Just…nothing.’

He shrugged; Sanderson nodded, distractedly.

‘Yes. Yes, thank you.’

Tomasky mused, aloud. ‘O moj boze. Holy Mother. The face.’

Sanderson came back: ‘Quite something.’

Simon was puzzled, as well as horrified. He was still thinking about her feet. The weirdness of it all. He turned.

‘So the big question is…what links this woman to Françoise Gahets?’

Sanderson was gazing about the room. ‘Yup. We’re on it,’ he said, pensively. ‘She was from Gascony. Isn’t that right, Hamish?’

‘Aye. French Basque Country near Biarritz. Came here with her mother when she was very young, sixty or seventy years ago.’

A sober pause enveloped them; the moan of the ceaseless Foula wind outside was the only noise, carrying the faint bleats of sheep.

‘Enough?’ said Hamish.

‘Enough for now,’ Sanderson answered. ‘We’ll want to speak to her friend, of course.’

‘Edith Tait.’

‘Maybe tomorrow?’

The Shetland inspector nodded, and turned to Jimmy Nicolson.

The good cheer of the pilot had quite departed. ‘She was such a grand old gal. Came here after the war they say. Now look at her.’

He put a shielding hand to his eyes, and walked out of the room.

Leask sighed. ‘Foula is a tiny wee place. This has hit them hard. Let’s go for a walk.’

He led them outside into the cold bright air. Jimmy Nicolson was sitting in his car, passionately smoking a cigarette. Tomasky wandered over to join him, but Hamish Leask was already hiking in the opposite direction: up the nearest hill. He turned and called over his burly shoulder.

‘Let’s climb the Sneug! I feel a need to clear my lungs.’

Simon and Sanderson glanced at each other, then turned and pursued the Shetland officer.

The incline was austere, it was too exhausting to talk as they made their ascent. The journalist found his blood thumping painfully in his chest as, at last, they crested the top of the mighty hill.

The wind at the top was fierce. They were on the edge of a sudden cliff. He edged closer to the drop to have a look.

‘Bloody hell!’

Seagulls were wheeling at the bottom of the cliffs, but they were minuscule flakes of whiteness.

‘Good God. How high is that?’

‘One of the biggest sea-cliffs in Europe, maybe in the world,’ said Leask. ‘More than half a mile down.’

Simon stepped back.

‘Very advisable,’ said Leask. ‘The wind can whip you off these clifftops – and just flip you over the edge.’ Hamish chuckled, soberly, and added, ‘And yet you know what…what is truly amazing?’

‘What?’

‘These cliffs kept the Foulans going for centuries.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Look. See here –’ The Shetland officer was pointing at some distant atoms of birdlife, halfway down the enormous rockwall. ‘Puffin yonder, they nest on the cliffside. In the old days, when food ran low after a long winter, the local men would climb down the cliffs and steal the eggs and the chicks. It was a vital source of protein in the bad times. Baby puffin is very tasty – lots of fat, ye see.’

‘They’d climb down these cliffs?’

‘Aye. They actually developed a strange deformity. Like a kind of human subspecies.’

‘Sorry?’

‘The men of Foula. And Saint Kilda too.’ Hamish shrugged, his rust-red hair riffling in the wind. ‘Over the centuries they developed very big toes, because they used them for climbing the cliffs. I suppose that was evolution. The men who climbed best happened to be the ones with big toes, so they got wives and had well-fed children, and passed on their big toes.’

‘Are you serious?’

‘Quite serious.’ Hamish smiled serenely.

But Simon was not feeling serene; the talk of the weird toes of the Foulans had brusquely reminded him. What he saw. The old woman’s bare feet. He had to mention it.

‘Guys. Can we, ah, get out of this wind?’

‘Of course.’

The two policemen, and the journalist, walked down to a hollow, then lay back on the dewy turf. Simon said: ‘You mentioned toes, Mister Leask.’

‘Aye.’

‘Well. It’s funny but…Julie Charpentier’s toes…Did either of you notice?’

Leask looked blank. ‘I’m sorry?’

‘You didn’t see anything unusual about the victim? Her feet?’

‘What?’

Simon wondered if he was making an idiot of himself.

‘The toes of her right foot were deformed. Slightly.’

Sanderson was frowning.

‘Go on, Simon.’

‘I think the word is syndactyly. My wife is a doctor.’

‘And syn…’

‘Yes. Syndactyly. Webbed toes. Two of the old woman’s toes were conjoined, at least partially. It’s rather rare, but not unknown…’

Sanderson shrugged. ‘So?’

Simon knew it was a big guess. But he felt sure he was onto something.

‘Do you remember the woman in Primrose Hill? What she was wearing?’

The change in Sanderson’s expression was sudden.

‘You mean the gloves. The fucking gloves!’

Before Simon could say anything else, Sanderson was on his feet and speaking on his mobile; the DCI took his phone a few yards down the sunlit slope, talking animatedly all the while. The wind was too boisterous for Simon to hear the conversation.

He sat in the cool yet dazzling sun, thinking of the woman’s pain, her lonely screaming pain. Hamish Leask had his eyes shut.

A few minutes later, Sanderson returned, his normally ruddy face whiter; quite pale with surprise.

‘I just called Pathology in London.’ He turned towards Simon. ‘You were right. The gloves were concealing a deformity; Pathology had already noted it.’ He looked away again, staring at the distant ocean. ‘He said it was digital syndactyly. The Primrose Hill victim had two…webbed fingers.’

The sea birds were calling from the cliffs below.

8

They took the Bidasoa Road through the misty green valley, chasing the tumbling river downhill, and then shaving a sudden right, up into the hills, into another Basque Navarrese village, past the obligatory stone fountain and the deserted grey fronton. David could sense the small tightness of anxiety: what did José Garovillo know? What was he going to say?

The village was called Etxalar.

David said the word Etxalar out loud, practising the pronunciation; Amy smiled, very gently.

‘No. Don’t say the x like an x, you say tchuhhhh.’

‘Etch…alarrrr?’

‘Much better.’

They were stalled behind a cattle truck. Amy seemed distracted. She asked him, apropos of nothing, about his past life, London, America, his job. He sketched a few details.

Then she asked him about his lovelife.

He paused – but then he confessed he was single. Amy asked why.

The cow in the truck stared at them, reproachfully. David answered:

‘I guess I push people away, before they get too close. Perhaps because I lost my parents. Don’t trust people to hang around.’

Another silence. He asked, ‘And you? Are you attached?’

A silence. The cattle truck moved on, and they followed, accelerating past small orchards of pear trees. At last Amy said, ‘David, there’s something I should tell you. I’ve been lying. At least…’

‘What?’

‘I’ve not been giving you all the information.’

‘About what?’

The green-blue of the mountains framed her profile. Her conflicted thoughts were written on her face. David offered:

‘You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want.’

‘No,’ she answered, ‘you deserve an explanation. And we are going to meet José, Miguel’s father.’

Amy turned and regarded David; there was a tension and yet an audacity in her expression.

‘We were lovers. Miguel was my boyfriend. Years ago.’

‘Jesus.’

‘I was twenty-three. I’d just arrived in the Basque Country. I was alone. Young and stupid. I never mentioned it…Because I guess I am…ashamed.’

David turned the wheel as they drove around a corner; the trees and hedges shivered in the slipstream as they passed. He had to ask: ‘You knew he was ETA. And yet you…?’

‘Slept with him?’ She sighed. ‘Yes, I know. Muy stupido. But I was young like I say and…young girls go for bastards, don’t they? The bad boy. That Heathcliff shit, the older man bollocks. Even the glamorous violence.’ She shook her head. ‘I guess it had some juvenile allure. And he was mysterious. And he’s smart and good looking and a famous guy, famously strong and active.’ She forced a weak smile. ‘He looks a bit like you, actually. Except older and a little thinner.’

‘Except I don’t mutilate, torture and kill people and…I don’t hit women in bars.’

‘Of course. Of course. I realized this myself after about two months, that he was just a nasty piece of work. And…’ She shrugged, awkwardly, then confessed. ‘And there was something sick about him, as well. He was kinky. In bed. I dumped him after two months.’

David didn’t know what to say; her honesty was disarming.

He tried another question as they sped past a farmhouse.

‘Do you still have contact?’

‘No. Not if I can help it. But sometimes it’s inevitable. Miguel introduced me to his dad, to José, who is still a good friend – he helped me get my job. And I really love my job…The same way I love these mountains.’ She sighed. ‘But Miguel is always bloody there, lurking, he’s pursued me ever since…You know what you did in that bar, that was very brave.’

‘Did he hit you when you were together?’

‘Yes. That’s when it happened. He hit me once and that’s when I dumped him. Bastard.’

He thought of the scar on her forehead. It didn’t quite match a scene of domestic abuse. But he didn’t want to pry further. The farms were turning into forests, they were slowly ascending the mountains.

‘Amy. Thanks for telling me.’ He looked at her. ‘You didn’t have to tell me any of this. In fact, you don’t have to do any of this.’

‘I’m in it now.’

‘Kinda.’

‘Not kind of,’ she said. ‘Definitely. And besides, I feel a…rapport. With your situation.’

‘How come?’

‘Because of my own family.’ Light, spiteful rain spattered the windscreen. ‘My father died when I was ten, my mother started drinking soon after. My brother and I practically had to look after ourselves. Then my brother emigrated to Australia. And yet my drunken mum and my distant brother – that’s all I have left, because the rest of my family died in the Holocaust – all those ancestors, the cousinage. They all died. So I guess I feel…a bit of an orphan.’ She turned to look at him. ‘Not unlike you.’

Amy’s yellow hair was kicking in the cool rainy breeze through the car window. Her monologue seemed to have calmed her; she seemed less alarmed.

‘Take the right here. Past the chapel.’

He turned the wheel obediently.

‘I wonder,’ she said, ‘I sometimes wonder if my Jewishness explains my attachment to the Basques, because they have such a sense of who they are, and where they belong. They’ve been here for so long. One people, living in one place. Whereas the Jews have wandered, we just keep wandering.’ She rubbed her face, as if trying to wake herself up. ‘Anyway. We are nearly there.’

David changed a gear as he took a final corner. He thought of Miguel Garovillo, the lean, menacing features, the dark and violent eyes. Amy had assured him Miguel was not going to show up at his father’s house. José had guaranteed he would not be around.

But the way Miguel had come for Amy in the bar was just too hard to forget. Wild and violent jealousy. Something more than jealousy. A kind of lustful hatred.

Amy gestured. ‘Slow down – it’s the little road here.’

It was a shaded and very rutted track, that seemed to lead directly into the misty mountain forests. Carefully David nudged the car through the muddy narrows; just as the wheels began to slither they turned into a clearing and Amy said: ‘There.’

The house was tiny, pretty, brightly whitewashed, and trimmed with green wooden shutters. The rain had stopped and spears of sunlight lanced the evanescing fog. And standing in front of the house, proudly waving a beret, was the sprightliest old man David had ever seen. He had very long earlobes.

‘Epa!’ said José Garovillo, looking at David very closely as he climbed out of the car. ‘Zer moduz? Pozten naiz zu ezagutzeaz?’

‘Uh…’

‘Hah. Don’t worry, my friend David…Martinez!’ The old man chuckled. ‘Come in, come in, I am not going to make you speak Basque. I speak your language perfectly. I love the English language, I love your swearwords. Fuckmuppet! So much better than Finnish.’

He smiled and turned to Amy. And then his smiling face clouded for a moment as he regarded the fading bruise on her face.

‘Aii. Amy. Aiii. I am so so so sorry. Lo siento. I hear what happened in the Bilbo.’ The man shuddered with remorse. ‘What can I do? My son…my terrible son. He frightens me. But, Amy, tell me what to do and I will do it.’

Amy leaned close and reassured him with a hug.

‘I’m fine. David helped me. Really, José.’

‘But Amy. El violencia? It is so terrible!’

‘José!’ Amy’s response was sharp. ‘Please. I am completely OK.’

The elderly smile returned.

‘Then…we must go and eat! Always we must eat. When there is trouble the Basques must eat. Come inside, Davido. We have a feast to satisfy the jentilaks of the forest.’

There was no time to ask any further questions; as soon as they sat down they were presented with food and drink, endless food and drink.

Fermina, José’s much younger wife, turned out to be a fervent cook; with dark eyes and bangled arms she served them traditional Basque food from her miniature kitchen, all of it rapturously introduced and explained by José. They had fiery nibbles of Espelette chillies skewered with tripotx – lamb’s blood sausage from Biraitou; they had a Gerezi beltza arno gorriakin – a cherry soup the colour of claret served with a white blob of crème fraiche; then the ‘cheeks of the hake’ decorated with olives; this was followed by unctuous kanougas – chocolate toffee – and soft turron nougat from Vizcaya, and Irauty sheep’s cheese next to a daub of cherry jam, and all of it sluiced down with foaming jugs of various Basque ciders: red and green and yellow and very alcoholic.

Between the courses of this enormous meal, José talked and talked, he explained the origins of the beret amongst the shepherds of Bearn, he declaimed on the splendours of the ram-fighting of Azpeita, he showed David a cherished ormolu crucifix once blessed by Pope Pius the Tenth, he spoke mysteriously of the cromlechs in the forests of Roncesvalles built by the legendary giants and the mythical Moors, the jentilaks and the mairuaks.

It was exhausting – but also engaging, even hypnotic. By the end David felt obese, drunk, and something of an amateur linguist. He had almost forgotten the fierce grip of anxiety, and the reason why he was here. But he hadn’t wholly forgotten. He could never wholly forget. El violencia, el violencia.

It was hard to forget that.

David looked at Amy. She was gazing out of the window. He looked back.

José was sipping a sherry; Fermina was busy in the kitchen, making coffee it seemed. It was the right moment. David filled the silence, and asked José if he’d like to hear the story, the reason for David’s mission to Spain. José sat back.

‘Of course! But as I said in my texting message, I think I know the answer already. I know why you are here!’

David stared at the old man.

‘So?’

He paused dramatically. ‘I knew your grandfather. As soon as Amy told me the name, Martinez, I knew.’

‘How? When?’

‘Long time ago – so many years!’ The old man’s smile was persistent. ‘We were childhood friends in…in Donostia, before the war. Then our families fled to France in 1936. To Bayonne. Where they have the Jewish chocolate. The best chocolate in the world!’

David leaned close, asking the most obvious question.

‘Was my grandfather a Basque?’

José laughed with a scornful expression – as if this was a surreally stupid query.

‘But of course! Yes. He did not tell you? How very typical. He was a man of…some enigmas. But yes he was a Basque! And so was his young wife, naturally!’ José glanced pertly at Amy, and then back at David. ‘There now, David Martinez. You are Basque, in part at least: a man of Euskadi! You can play the txistu on San Fermin day! And now, have I answered all your questions? Is the mystery solved?’

David sat quietly for a few seconds, absorbing the information. Was this all there was to it? Granddad was a Basque, but never admitted it?

Then David remembered the map, and the churches. And the inheritance. How did that fit in?

‘Actually no, José. There is more.’

‘More?’

Amy interrupted: ‘José…The stuff in the papers. The bequest…The map. You didn’t see it?’

‘I never read the newspapers!’ José said, his smile slightly fading. ‘But what is this other mystery? Tell me! What else must you know?’

David gazed Amy’s way, with a questioning expression: she shrugged, as if to say, go on, why not, we’re here now.

So David began. He told the story of his grandfather, and the churches, and the bequest. As he did, he reached in his pocket and pulled out the map, marked with blue stars.

The atmosphere in the cottage was transformed.

Fermina was standing by the kitchen door, wrapped in a consternated silence. The old man was frowning as he stared at the map. Frowning very profoundly: almost tragically. He looked almost…bereaved.

Shocked by the effect of his story, David dropped the map on the table. It was as if the light in the room had dimmed; the only brightness came from the soft white pages of the map itself.

José leaned over and took the map in his hands. For a few minutes, he caressed the worn paper. Opening it, he examined the blue asterisks, muttering and mumbling. No one moved.

Then he looked up at David.

‘Forget about this. Please, I beg you. Forget about this. You don’t want to know any more about the churches. Keep your money. Get rid of this map. Go back to London. Por favor.’

David opened his mouth. No words emerged.

‘Take it away,’ said José, handing the map back. ‘Get it out of my house. I know it is not your fault. But…get it out of my house. Never mention these matters again. Ever. That…that map…the churches…this is the key to hell. I beg you both to stop.’

David didn’t know what to do; José’s wife was wiping her hands on a cloth, still at the door to the kitchen. Wiping her hands over and over, full of nerves.

The tension was heightened by a noise. José Garovillo looked up; the scrunch of the gravel outside the house was distinctive.

A red car was pulling up.

Amy had a hand to her mouth.

‘Oh no…’

José was gasping.

‘But no! I told him not to come. I am sorry, I told him you were coming but I asked him to stay away. Barkatu. Barkatu. Fermina!’

The very tall man climbing out of the car was unmistakable: Miguel Garovillo. A second later he was pushing the farmhouse door and was inside the house, tall and wild and glaring – at Amy and David. And gazing at the map in David’s hand. A little twitch in his eye was quite noticeable, likewise a slender scar above his lip.

‘Papa!’ said Miguel, his voice rich with contempt.

The son had his hand raised; for a ghastly moment it looked like he was actually going to clout José, to beat his own father. José flinched. Fermina cried out. Miguel’s black eyes flashed around the room; David saw the dark shape of a holster, under the terrorist’s leather jacket.

Fermina Garovillo was pushing her son away, but Miguel was shouting at his father, and at Amy and David, shouting in Basque, his words unintelligible – the only thing that was obvious was the ferocious anger. José shouted a few words in return – but weakly, unconvincingly.

And then Miguel shouted in English. At David. His deep angry voice vibrated in the air.

‘Get the ffffffuck out of here. You want the whore? Then take her. You take all this shit out of here. Go now.’

David backed away. ‘We’re going…We’re going…’

‘First time I hit you. Next time I shoot you.’

Amy and David turned and ran into the yard and jumped in the car.

But Miguel followed them outside the house. He had taken out his gun, he was holding a black pistol in the air. Holding it – as if to show them. David got the strange jarring sense of something inhuman about him: a giant. A violent jentilak of the forest displaying his strength and anger. The gun was so very black. Glinting in the watery sunlight.

David urgently reversed. He spiralled the wheel – and at last they turned, revving in the mud, and then they rocked down the track, skidding out onto the road.

For half an hour David drove fast and hard, into the green grey foothills, just driving to get away.

When the panic and shock had subsided, David felt a rising anger, and a need to stop and think.

He pulled over. They were halted at the edge of a village, with a timberyard on their left. The distant Pyrenees seemed a lot less pretty now; the pinetops of the forest were laced with an insistent and smothering mist. A church, surrounded by circular gravestones, sat on a hill above them.

Everything was damp, everything around them was faintly, ripely, perceptibly rotting away in the damp.

David cursed.

‘What. The. Fuck.’

Amy tilted her face, apologetically.

‘I know. I’m sorry.’

‘What?’

‘Sorry…’

‘It’s not your fault.’

‘But…’ She shook her head. ‘But it is. Maybe you should go home, David. Miguel is my problem.’

‘No. No way. This is my problem too.’

‘But I told you what he is like. Murderously jealous. He…really will…do something. He might even…’

‘Kill me?’

She winced.

David felt the surge of a rebel spirit.

‘Fuck him. I want to know the answers.’ He started the car and negotiated the road slowly for a few minutes. ‘I want to know it all. My grandfather wouldn’t have sent me here – sent me into all this – unless he had a reason. I want to know why.’

‘The map.’

‘Exactly. The map. You heard what José said, saw how he reacted – there is something – something –’

He was searching for a way to describe the complexity of puzzles; his next words were interrupted.

‘Don’t stop.’

‘What?’

‘Drive on.’

‘What?’

David felt the cold possibility constrict around his heart.

Amy confirmed.

‘Miguel. In the car. Right behind.

9

Her eyes were locked on the mirror. David copied her gaze.

‘Jesus.’ He squinted. ‘Are you sure? Is it the same one?’

‘Numberplate. It’s him.’

The road ahead was narrow, the fog was thickening as they climbed the mountainside.

‘But…’ David gripped the steering wheel tightly. ‘Was he there all along? Following?’

‘Who knows. Maybe he followed us. Or…’

‘What?’

‘He is ETA. This is real ETA territory.’

‘So…’

‘They watch the roads all the time. He has friends and contacts all over. Maybe someone made a phone call. We were just parked there by the village. What do we do?’

The fear was tangible. But David felt the rising defiance – again. He thought of his beloved mother and father: who left him alone. He thought of his loneliness: he’d had to fight his way through college, on his own, with just a distant grandfather in Phoenix. He had made it through all that shit, he had dealt with all that, so he wasn’t going to be frightened off, even by the most demonic of murdering terrorists. Not now. Not when he knew his grandfather’s mystery was linked to his own background, his own identity. This revelation of his Basqueness.

And he didn’t like being hunted.

‘Let’s lose this bastard.’

Pressing the throttle, he accelerated up the narrow, sharply curving road; the noise of the engine was painful as they shot between the stony hedgerows and the muddy slopes. Then he checked the mirror.

The red car was closing.

‘Shit.’

David could taste the savour of alarm; he ignored it, and changed down a gear or two – then he surged on, as fast as he could.

‘David –’

On their left was a sudden cliff-edge. The slope was brutal – a fall of three hundred metres, or more. Just a few metres the wrong way and they would spin helplessly over the precipice.

David steered back to safety – but then – thump.

The red car had smacked into them. The bump from behind was firm, deliberate, and destabilizing. David gripped the wheel desperately, and kept them gripped to the road – then he flicked a frightened glance at the mirror. He couldn’t see for sure, but it felt like their pursuer was…smiling?

‘Don’t worry, it’s alright –’ he said to Amy.

Why was he saying this? He was terrified. And yet he was feeling a rush of fury as well. Not now. Don’t give up now. If he gave up – what had it all been for? All those years of doing nothing, sitting in that sterile office, being a lawyer; struggling to make relationships, so scared that people would leave him – leave him alone, again.

His heart swelled with angry revolt; he was going to save Amy, and save himself – he could do it.

The accelerator crushed to the floor, he raced the car as fast as he dared. He felt a certain confidence as he did this – despite his grinding fears. He’d had to learn to drive when young, to get himself around. He was pretty good.

But this was a different kind of driving: they were skidding madly round bends, higher and higher. And they were being chased.

Then the road began to zigzag, turns getting tighter, until at last it slashed around a sheer rock wall, totally blind – David caught his own breath, his heart thumped, this was it – but the corner was clear.

David scoped the mirror. The red car had slowed for a moment, he’d outpaced their remorseless pursuer. He had a few seconds’ grace.

As they roared along, he tried to think. If they stopped the car and got out and ran, maybe they could hide…but the red car was surely too near. Miguel had a gun, maybe he would chase them across the rocks. Teasing them – then shooting them. A simple execution in the forest.

‘David!’

The red car was speeding towards them. David couldn’t go any faster. They had reached the crisis: the terminal moment. No one would see. They were right above the clouds now; the sun was brilliant and dazzling, shining off clumps of unmelted snow. This was where they would die. A man and a woman in a car. Like his parents. Both dead.

But then David saw a chance. Up ahead was an expanse of bare rock. Three seconds later he slid the car onto a flank of raw limestone and did a squealing handbrake turn. They spun like they were kids in a nightmarish fairground ride, a vicious carousel.

And it worked. The red car shot right past. At once David took off the other way, descending fast and hard.

He was racing vertiginously down the mountain road – he could see the red car turning, in his mirror. But this time he had a plan, as he rounded the sharp rocky corner at eighty miles an hour and they raced into the grey forests. He took a wild right turn up a farm track.

Into the trees.

The track swung this way and that, catapulting them into the dark woodlands. The car bounced and groaned, and after half a mile the track stopped. David parked the car with a jolt, he kicked open the door and jumped out – Amy was already outside and waiting. He grabbed her hand and they fled into the woods, running between the trees and the rocks and leaping over a stream until they found a great boulder.

And then at last they stopped, and crouched down. And waited. Panting and breathing.

David’s heart was a madman clattering his prison bars; Amy’s hand was tight and clammy in his fist.

They crouched there, cold and mute. The forest crackled, under the mournful drizzle. Nothing happened. Wisps of fog drifted between the sombre black larches, like fairytale wraiths.

The low sound of a car engine throbbed in the distance. The red car, presumably – looking for them. The engine seemed to slow, somewhere on the road. Somewhere quite near. David felt Amy’s fingers tighten on his. The agonizing moments marched slowly by, like a funeral parade. They waited to be found, and shot.

Or worse.

The car engine throbbed again. It was going. The red car was taking off, heading downhill maybe. Silence surrounded them. David allowed himself to breathe.

But his relief was aborted by a singular snap: the sound of twigs, broken underfoot.

10

The old women were singing through their noses, a rising carol of weird sounds; the tremulous voice of the dark-suited man at the front – warbling and waving his hands – led and yet followed the intense humming from the choir of ululating women.

They were still in Foula, about three hundred miles from Glasgow.

Simon and Sanderson and Tomasky had spent an uncomfortable night in Foula’s only B&B, waiting for a chance to interview Edith Tait. The B&B owner, a middle-aged widower from Edinburgh, had been all too excited by the influx of glamorous tourists – of new people to talk to – and he had kept them up, over tots of whisky, with bloodcurdling tales of Foula’s weirdness and danger.

He told them of the German birdwatcher who had slipped on some lamb’s afterbirth, banged his head on a rock, and had his brains devoured by Arctic skuas; he mentioned a tourist couple who had gone to the highest cliff, the Kame, and been swept over the precipice when one of them sneezed.

All this Simon absorbed with a suppressed smile; Sanderson was openly sarcastic: ‘So the tourist death rate, is what, about fifty percent?’

But there was one thing the journalist found truly and deeply interesting: the Gaelic heritage of the isle. As the hostel owner explained, Foula was so isolated it had maintained Norse-Gaelic cultural characteristics that had almost disappeared elsewhere. They used their own Gregorian calendar, they celebrated Christmas on January 6th, and some of the locals still spoke authentic Scots Gaelic.

They did this especially at church, where the services were, apparently, some of the very last of their kind: notable for a capella nose singing, known as ‘Dissonant Gaelic Psalmody’, as the B&B owner explained – with loving relish.

So now they were actually in the kirk listening to the Nasal Celtic Heterophony, waiting for a chance to talk to Edith. Simon was distinctly drawn to this authentic, ancient, possibly pagan tradition; DCI Sanderson was less impressed.

‘They sound like a bunch of mad Irish bumblebees in the shower.’

His sidelong remark was loud. One woman turned around and gave the DCI a stare; she was singing through her nonagenarian nostrils, even as she glared.

DCI Sanderson blushed, stood up, and edged along the pew, and bumbled out of the kirk. Feeling exposed and conspicuous, Simon swiftly followed. He found Sanderson dragging on a cigarette by the graveyard.

Sanderson dropped the cigarette, crushed it under his shoe, and gazed at the Sneck o’ da Smaalie, a great ravine hard by the kirk that led all the way down to the roiling sea, which writhed like a fallen epileptic in a blue straitjacket; the earlier rain had dropped and the sky had cleared.

‘Not religious then, Detective?’

‘You guessed?’ Sanderson’s smile was sarcastic. ‘Went to a church school, because my parents were real believers. Guaranteed to put you off.’

Simon nodded. ‘My experience was absolutely the opposite, my folks were…atheists. Scientists and architects.’ An unwarranted thought ran through his mind: das Helium und das Hydrogen. He hurried the conversation along. ‘So they never forced any belief system on me at all. Now I do have…rather vague beliefs.’

‘Nice for you.’ The DCI was glaring at a white shape. A sheep had wandered into the graveyard. ‘Jesus, what a place. All these sheep everywhere. Sheep. What are they about. Stupid woolly fuckers.’

Sanderson put a hand on the journalist’s shoulder, and looked him in the eye.

‘Quinn. There’s something you should know. If you still wanna write up this case.’

‘Yes?’

‘There was another murder. This morning. Heard on the wire. We’re certain it’s related.’ He frowned. ‘So I can tell you.’

‘Where?’

‘Near Windsor. An old man named Jean Mendia. That’s why Tomasky flew home this morning. To do some knock-ups.’

The nasal singing in the church had stopped.

‘Let me guess, the victim is Southern French? Deformed?’

Sanderson shook his head.

‘French Basque, yes. From Gascony. But no, not deformed. And not tortured.’

Before he could ask the obvious question, Sanderson added, ‘The reasons we’re sure it’s connected are: his age, very old; and the fact he was Basque; and there was no robbery. An apparently pointless killing.’

‘So that’s three…’

‘Yep.’

‘Who on earth is doing it? And why?’

‘God knows. So maybe we could ask Him.’ He turned.

The service was concluded. The church door had swung open, and bonneted old ladies were parading out of the kirk into the daylight, chattering in English and Gaelic.

They quickly located Edith Tait. She was spryer than Simon had expected: despite being sixty-seven, she could have passed for fifty. But the twinkle in her eye soon dulled as they told her who they were: and their reason for tracking her down.

Edith actually looked, for a moment, as if she might burst into tears. But then she buttoned her tweed coat even tighter and ushered them back into the empty church, where they sat on a pew and conversed.

She was not the witness they’d hoped for. She admitted she had heard the odd sound on the fateful night – but she couldn’t be sure. She might have heard the whirr of a small boat in the wee small hours – but she couldn’t be sure.

Edith Tait wasn’t sure about anything – but that was hardly her fault. She was doing her best – and the process obviously wasn’t easy for her. At the end of her testimony, Edith emitted a tiny sob, which she hid with her pale hands. Then she unmasked herself, and gazed at the journalist.

‘I am so sorry, I cannae help any more. She was a very good friend to me, you know. My very good friend. I am so sorry, Mister…gentlemen. You have come all this way to see me. But I didnae see what I didnae see.’

Simon swapped a knowing glance with Sanderson. This was a sweet old lady, doing her damnedest, they’d gone almost as far as they could. There was just one more question that maybe needed asking.

‘When and why did Julie come to Foula, Edith? It’s a pretty remote place.’

‘She arrived in the late 1940s, I do believe.’ Edith frowned. ‘Aye. The 1940s. We became friends later, when my mammy died and I inherited the croft next door.’

‘So you don’t know why she emigrated to Foula, of all places, from France?’

‘Noo.’ Edith shook her head. ‘She would never talk about that, so I never asked her. Perhaps there was some family secret. Perhaps she just liked the loneliness and the quiet, just now. Some people do, you know…And now I really must go. My friend is expecting me.’

‘Of course.’

The interview was done. He closed his notebook.

However, as she walked to the exit, Edith slowed, and tilted her head. Engaging with the question.

‘Actually. There is one more thing. One more thing you maybe should know. A wee peculiarity.’

Simon opened the notepad.

‘Yes?’

‘A little while ago…She was being bothered by a young man, a young scientist…She found it most upsetting.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Angus Nairn, he was called.’ The old lady closed her eyes – and opened them once again. ‘That was it. Good Scotsname. Yes. He was bothering her with phone calls, the scientist chappie.’

‘What do you mean, “bothering”?’

‘He wanted to examine her. He said she was a unique case. A Basque, I think. Is that right? I don’t know. Basque maybe. Aye.’

‘And this upset her?’

‘Very much so. Much more than you would expect. She was greeting for a week. That man Nairn truly upset her. There now, my friend is waving.’

Simon pressed on: ‘But Mrs Tait?’

She nodded.

‘When you say this man wanted to use her in a test, what did he mean? What did he want to test?’ Edith calmly replied:

‘Her blood.’

11

David peered over the dripping ferns.

It was a horse. A small, shaggy-maned horse.

‘Pottok,’ said Amy.

The little pony regarded them with an expression of ageing melancholy, then it clobbered away into the woods; mysterious and wild, and ancient and gone.

The relief spread through David’s tensed and aching muscles. He gazed through the trees. The car was surely far down the hill. They were OK. They had escaped. He reached for a rock, to haul himself to his feet.

Amy whispered, fiercely: ‘Wait.’

He felt the jarring fear return.

Amy hissed again. ‘What’s that?’

She was pointing. David squinted, and froze. About five hundred yards away a tall, thin, shadowy figure was treading slowly through the mist, looking this way and that; the drifting fog made it hard to identify, but not impossible.

‘Miguel?’

Her question was surely unnecessary. It was surely Miguel. The black wolf, stalking them through the woods.

He grabbed her hand again. ‘Come on…’

She nodded, saying nothing; together they backed away, slithering into the deeper darkness of the woods; slowly, agonizingly, they retreated and crawled over damp mossy logs, trying not to break the smallest twig or scrunch the tiniest leaf.

David glanced behind but couldn’t be sure what he was witnessing. Was that really Miguel – still hunting them down? The mist shifted in the wind, black figures turned out to be trees, trees bent in the drizzly wind, with a forlorn mewling sound.

He turned and concentrated: searching out a route through the bleak, autumnal maze.

‘Down here –’

David had no idea where he was leading Amy – just away from Miguel. For sixty or seventy minutes they descended; the forest was thick and treacherous. Several times Amy slipped; many times, David felt himself skidding on the leaves and muck. Despite the cold of the dank mountain forests, he was sweating. Amy’s hand was clammy in his. And still he could hear, or he could imagine hearing, the soft, menacing crackle of someone behind them. Or maybe it was just another pottok.

The incline lessened, the black of the crowding wet trees yielded to whiteness – sky and light. They were approaching what looked like a path. An hour of crawling and fear had brought them to civilization.

‘Here…down here.’ He reached for her hand again. They were ducking under an old half-fallen oak. Brambles guarded the route. The rocky path turned and twisted, towards a little valley.

Amy spoke: ‘I know where we are.’

‘Where?’

‘Very near Zugarramurdi.’ She pointed at the clearing mists. ‘A village, it’s just over there, over the hill.’

‘So why are we waiting – let’s do it! We can go to a cafe and –’

‘No. Wait!’ Her voice was sharp, insistent, frightened. ‘He knows these forests…He’ll expect us to go there, to head there. We need…’ She was reaching in her pocket, pulling out her phone. ‘We need to hide,’ she said, ‘until someone can help, can fetch us.’

She clambered a few yards up the damp slope, apparently to improve her signal. He watched her key a number, heard her say Zara and por favor in desperate whispers; he guessed it was her friend the journalist, Zara Garcia. Moments later she pocketed the phone and gave him her attention: ‘OK, she’s coming to the village. It’ll take her half an hour.’

‘But where do we hide…until…?’

‘This way.’

She was already descending with an air of quiet purpose. Bewildered and clumsy, he followed behind, grasping at tree roots to stay upright. Finally the muddy path curved and widened – to reveal a forecourt of natural flagstones. And beyond that, the gasping mouth of a mighty cave.

Amy gestured. ‘The witch’s cave of Zugarramurdi.’

The enormous cavern was open at either end, a natural rock tunnel with a stream running along the bottom – like a trickle of sewer water in an enormous concrete pipe. Dim grey light bounced from the bubbling water, flickering on the elongated cave roof.

‘The what cave?’

Her expression was fixed.

‘The witch’s cave. Zugarramurdi. We can hide here. These cave systems are endless.’

‘Are you sure?’

She didn’t wait to give him an answer; and maybe, David surmised, she was right. Their escape through the woods had been exhausting, he yearned to rest; Amy looked utterly wearied, her face smeared with mud. They needed to hide out for half an hour.

Her careful steps led them along a secondary path that ducked beneath the roof of stone. It fed onto a flat rockshelf overlooking the main cavernous space, the vast echoing tunnel. All around, shadowy recesses ate into the soft white rock, speaking of further tunnels. Amy was correct, they had entered a labyrinth of passages and chambers. Beckoning them deeper inside.

They sat down. The dry warm stone felt like silk after the chilling misery of their escape through the woods.

David rested his head against the rock, exhausted. He closed his eyes. And then he opened them, alert and frightened. He shook the sleepiness from his head and gazed out over the cavern.

‘You said this is the witch’s cave.’

‘Yes.’

‘So, why is it called that?’

She shrugged, bleakly.

‘Quite an alarming story. José told me. He loved telling this story.’

‘And?’

Amy’s smile was replete with tiredness. ‘You always want to know.’

‘I always want to know. Please, tell me something. I don’t want to risk falling asleep.’

‘OK. Well.’ She moued: thinking, and remembering. ‘This cave, and the meadows beyond, this was the akelarre, the place where the Basque witches held their Sabbaths.’

He went to ask a question; she silenced him with a gesture. And explained.

‘About four hundred years ago Zugarramurdi was the centre of a huge witch craze. A French witch hunter, Pierre De Lancre, became convinced that…’ Amy grimaced. ‘He decided that all Basques were essentially witches. Because the Basques were so different, the easily identifiable minority. They were the other.’

‘You mean…like the Jews?’

‘Of course. It began around…1610. A Basque girl who had been working away from home, in Ciboure, near Saint Jean de Luz on the coast, she came back to her village in the hills. To Zugarramurdi.’

The reflected light of the stream bounced off the cavern ceiling. Stalactites pierced the emptiness.

‘The young woman’s name was Maria de Ximildegui. She began to denounce her friends and relatives – as witches. The local priests called in the Inquisition. Children were dragged from their families and interrogated. The kids started to report nightmares, dreams of naked greased-up witches who took them on strange flights, to the Devil’s sabbat.

‘Satan would appear as a huge billygoat, walking on his hind legs. He had intercourse with the women and children. He has, apparently, a very thick and icy black penis. Afterwards he would mark them on the forehead with his claw. The infamous marks of the Devil. Showing that he had possessed them.’

Amy stared at David, deadpan. He didn’t know what to say; whether to laugh or protest. She continued the story, her voice echoing softly in the cavern. ‘And so the craze began. The priests reported their findings, and the witch panic spread down the valley, into Elizondo, Lesaka, San Sebastian. Thousands were arrested, David, literally thousands of women, men, children…And then the priests went to work, putting people to the rack, pricking them for blood, torturing everyone.’

David was trying not to think about her scar. He said: ‘But…they did the same across Europe, right, it wasn’t that unusual? Around that time. It was like Salem, it was just a witch craze. No?’

‘No. Witch crazes were unknown on this scale, it was maybe the worst craze in Europe. They called it the Basque Dream Epidemic. The Inquisition mutilated hundreds. Dozens were lynched by villagers. Five were officially burned to death at Logrono.’

‘And De Lancre?’

Amy was staring into the grey cavern light. ‘De Lancre was even more efficient than the Inquisition. As I said, he was obsessed: he thought that all Basques were witches, an evil race to be exterminated. He burned hundreds, maybe more. It was a holocaust. Just over there, in Iparralde. The land beyond.’

She gestured at the little brook. ‘They still call this the stream of Hell. The irony of it all is that De Lancre was Basque. A self-hater.’

Her words dwindled away. David was about to ask another question, but his half-formed thoughts were crushed. By a very deep voice. Echoing.

‘Epa.’

He swivelled.

Miguel. Standing there. At the entrance to the witch’s cave.

David glanced left and right, rapidly calculating. The only descent from the rockshelf – further into the caves, or towards the light of the entrance – took them directly past Miguel. They were trapped.

‘Epa.’

David knew this one word of Basque. Hello. The terrorist’s smile was languid yet angry; his gun was pointing their way.

‘Euzkaraz badakisu? Ah no. Of course. You Americans only speak one language. Let me explain…in more intimacy.’

The tall Basque paced along the rocky ledge – the gun trained on them all the time. He slowed as he approached – and turned. David realized Miguel had an accomplice: following behind was a short, thickset man. Miguel gestured a request.

‘Enoka? La cuerda…’

The accomplice had a lauburu tattooed on his hand. And the same tattooed hand was carrying a rope. The short man, Enoka, came forward.

David shot a desperate glance at Amy.

They already had a rope? It was like they had been preparing.

The accomplice, Enoka, set to work. Tying Amy and David by the hands, behind their backs – while they sat there, mute and immobile, subdued by the terrorist’s gun. In a few seconds they had been trussed like dumb animals, headed for the slaughterhouse.

Then Miguel spoke, with a sad and frowning passion. His shadow was long on the cave roof, cast by the flickering light off the stream.

‘You know, you drive very well, Martinez. Very good. Very impressive. But you still don’t really understand these hills. You do not understand this place. Our language. You cannot understand that. Hikuntzta ez da nahikoa! Is it not so?’

Miguel half-smiled, and gazed around him at the cavern, his words resonant in the emptiness.

‘I told you what would happen when I found you again. And now I find you. In the witch’s cave! Of all places. The little witch and her big Gascon friend. Appropriate.’ He turned. ‘Remember, Amy? Our marvellous picnic supper?’

He was stooping now, looking very closely at Amy. David realized, with disgust, that he was actually stroking Amy’s face with the muzzle of the gun. Stroking her.

‘Mmm. Amy? Didn’t we? Remember the excellent blood sausage. The tripota. Your sweet marmatiko.’

She said nothing. He persisted.

‘Didn’t we have sex here? Or was that some other cave? It was here, wasn’t it? I forget.’

Her face was averted, but the killer was using the muzzle of the gun to tilt her chin, forcing her to look at him. He was quietly smiling. She was scowling. He was smiling.

And now she was smiling.

David stared, aghast.

Amy was looking up, smilingly, almost lasciviously, as Miguel murmured:

‘You know that I am going to kill him, don’t you?’

She nodded.

‘Yes.’

‘In that case, Amy, shall we have our fun first?’

She nodded again; he leaned very close:

‘Dantzatu nahi al duzu nirekin. Before we kill him.’

‘Yes,’ she agreed. ‘Please yes? Fuck me here. Fuck me like before.’

Miguel laughed. A sad and gluttonous laugh. The terror iced David’s veins with tiny crystals of grief. What was happening?

Again the terrorist traced a line from Amy’s ear, to her lips, with the metal of the gunpoint – like a surgeon practising his incision, or a butcher marking out a fillet. Then he turned to his accomplice, skulking in the shadows.

‘Enoka. Vaya, Adiós!’

The squat little man scuttled away, an expression of relief in his gait. David looked from Miguel to Amy, to Miguel again. Searching their faces. His heart was cold with the horror.

Amy was still smiling, upwards, smiling at the terrorist: submissive, needy and desirous. The twitch in the terrorist’s eye was subtle. More obvious was the erection in Miguel’s khaki trousers.

Fear and disgust suffused David’s thoughts. He didn’t even want to look at Amy. How could she do this? Was it all some terrible joke on him? Was she just saving herself? Or did she really want Miguel? Was this some strange psychosexual game the two of them were playing – and he was the necessary spectator?

His heartbeat juddered with anger – and contempt – and inadequacy.

Enoka had disappeared along the rocky passage. They were alone. Miguel and Amy – and David. The terrorist was unlashing Amy’s hands. Immediately she was free, she reached for Miguel; she was unbelting his trousers, pulling them down, and then tugging at his shirt; she was kissing him under his half shaven chin, and caressing his jawline, like a concubine soliciting a sultan for a night of love. A witch imploring the goat for his favours.

David turned away, nauseated. He didn’t want to watch; he was stuck here, tied up, he would have to listen, but he didn’t have to watch.

A deep voice echoed across. ‘You!’

He opened his eyes.

Miguel was on top of Amy, the great tall figure arched over the small young woman, like a dark roof. But he was looking at David, and the gun was still in his hand.

‘You, Martinez. Watch or I kill you. Watch then I kill you.’

David was filled with a furious nausea. He narrowed his sullen eyes and watched.

Amy was on her back. She was naked from the waist down. Her lips were seeking Miguel’s bare shoulders, kissing him eagerly. David observed with a grisly repulsion – as Miguel entered her. Now they were fucking, now they were really doing it, Amy was kissing him. She was putting her fingers in his mouth and he was sucking, tasting her fingers. Biting and tasting. His hips bucking wildly, thrusting at her; his face in a rictus of pleasure. He was moaning.

‘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.

12

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.

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