The Marks of Cain

13

In his study, overlooking the small lawn of his little house in the North London suburbs, Simon was trying to work. But his four-year-old son Conor kept running in, to show his dad a spider, and ask him what sheep liked to eat, and insist the world watch his Thomas the Tank Engine DVD.

The father found it hard to resist his son's demands; he knew he was an indulgent parent, perhaps because he had come to parenthood late: thirty-six. But he was also indulgent simply because he adored his son: the lad's trusting eyes of distant blue, the way he upbraided a recalcitrant football with a stick. Conor was a force of nature. And he could make his parents laugh at anything.

But Simon had to work. His first two Telegraph articles, on the linked and bizarre murders, had caused a mild stir, and his editor wanted more. Much more. Consequently he'd had to do some research, all this week, and more today.

Placating Conor with an organic raspberry drink snatched from the kitchen cupboard, he returned to his study, shut the door firmly, and let the au-pair-they-could-barely-afford deal with Thomas the Tank Engine. Sitting once more at his computer he glanced for a second out of the window at the endless suburbia, at a fat housewife hanging up her washing.

Then he started Googling.

Syndactyly.

The problem was there wasn't that much to learn. Half an hour's searching told him what his doctor wife had already explained: the deformation was moderately common, it was linked to various genetic syndromes: ensembles of ailments and afflictions, in turn linked to specific chromosomal abnormalities. The syndromes had quite resonant names: Aarskog Syndrome, Lemli Opitz Syndrome, Cornelia de Lange Syndrome.

Simon blinked at the glaring computer screen. He read the names twice. He picked up a pen and wrote the names on a pad.

Something chimed. Many of the names were French: Bardet-Biedl Syndrome. Apert Syndrome.

French?

Twenty minutes of more encouraging computer time told him why. Many of the syndromes were caused by inbreeding: 'consanguineous unions', as one website quaintly phrased it. And this inbreeding was very common in isolated mountain communities.

Such as the Alps and the Pyrenees.

That's why so many French doctors had been the first to notice the disorders, and to vaingloriously label these disorders with their own surnames. The syndromes were common in the mountains of France.

Simon stared at the pulsing words onscreen. The Pyrenees. The South of France. The Basque Pyrenees. Picking up his pen again, he wrote the word Pyrenees, fairly pointlessly, on his pad. Then he stared at the pad. He could hear his son's happy giggle in the background somewhere, but it was very much in the background. Simon was focussed. Clear headed.

Back to the screen. He quickly typed in 'Pyrenees' and 'deformity'. He scanned a few sites. Goitres were mentioned. Psychotic illnesses. Congenital ailments caused by incest, or lack of iodine, or other dietary deficiencies. And then something else flashed up, something which he wasn't expecting at all.

Up until the eighteenth century, in the Pyrenees as elsewhere, deformity was often seen as a sign of damnation, or of witchcraft.

As one flamboyant website put it: 'During the great witch craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, hundreds of innocent victims were tortured, mutilated or burned at the stake merely for the misfortune of being born with an extra finger, or a third nipple; people were literally crushed under stones because of their congenital cretinism.'

Tortured. Crushed and burned. His mind flashed back to the vile photos of the Primrose Hill victim. She was knotted. Was that witch torture?

It took four seconds. There. He wondered if his heartbeat was audible.

'Knotting. Common through the seventeenth century, this form of torture involved tying a stick into the condemned witch's hair and twisting it tighter and tighter. When the Inquisitor no longer had the strength to twist, he would grasp the victim's head or fasten it in a holding device until burly men could take over the chore. The scalp would often be ripped away.'

Simon wondered why the cops hadn't found this out themselves. Tomasky had already researched knotting, according to Sanderson. The police were being inept — or concealing things from him. Keeping elements of the case to themselves. It was hardly unknown.

He leaned to his left and wrote a little note in his pad. A reminder. Then he gazed back at the screen. What about the woman on Foula? With her face slashed into ribbons? Simon paged through a list of witch tortures: the sheer horror of them gave him pause. The Spanish Spider, squassation, the Judas chair, the shinvice, quartering by horses, the Bootikens, the Pear of Anguish — the Pear of Anguish? — and then, at last, he found it.

Cutting.

The reason he hadn't instantly found this torture was because it wasn't called cutting. The torture inflicted on the Foula victim was apparently termed 'scoring round the mouth'. And it was simply described: the witch was methodically slashed around the lips and cheek with a knife, until the face was 'a mass of appalling cuts; the skin shredded from the facial bones; the pain of this superbly cruel torture was sometimes sufficient to render the victim unconscious.'

Simon reached for his coffee, but it was undrinkably cold, so he sat for several minutes in the quietness of his study wondering what he had discovered this morning. He wasn't quite sure.

Because it didn't compute; nothing computed. The three murders had happened in different corners of the country, yet all three of the lonely people were of Basque Pyrenean origin; two of the murders involved elements of witch torture. But there was no evidence that these lonesome souls were actually 'witches' — whatever that might mean.

Moreover, the two tortured victims had also suffered a deformity: syndactyly, a malformation of the fingers and toes common in isolated inbred mountain communities — such as the Pyrenees. In the South of France.

Simon felt like a small child looking at a bright TV, too close to the screen: he could see the colours of the pixels, the details were implied, but he was too near to the crackling glass to get a sense of the overall image.

So he needed to sit back. Take a more objective position.

He went through the other facts that they possessed.

The manner of the murders was clinical and efficient, despite the lurid elements of torture. The killer or killers on Foula must have been very well equipped and no one had seen them come or go, by some kind of dinghy perhaps. They had presumably arrived by boat in the darkness, gone straight to Julie Charpentier's house, and tortured and killed her. Then they left the island, quitting the scene before sunrise.

The Primrose Hill case showed similar proficiency and forethought, and, likewise, a clinical garrotting followed the most extreme torture. There had been no torture involved in the slaying in Windsor, but the murder had been equally efficient. These killings were, therefore, not being perpetrated by teenage Goths high on glue, that was pretty certain. It was someone, or some agency — with a definite plan of action.

And then there was the third complicating circumstance. A truly interesting circumstance. One of the women had recently been pestered by a young geneticist named Angus Nairn who was trying to carry out blood tests.

And this geneticist had recently disappeared.

That was the most eye-opening result of Simon's research earlier in the week. He'd Googled 'Angus Nairn' as soon as he'd got back from Scotland and it turned out this man, Nairn, was himself the subject of a mystery. Eight weeks ago he had vanished.

Nairn had been working at a private London research institute called GenoMap, a research organization dedicated to the study of 'genomic diversity'. The laboratory had closed in some controversy about three months back, and soon afterwards Nairn had just…disappeared. No one knew where he was. His parents, his ex colleagues at the lab, his friends. Nobody.

Of course it was possible that the Nairn disappearance was an entire coincidence. Maybe his involvement with Charpentier was just a thing. And yet something said this was surely not the case: the links were half-formed, but a link was faintly detectable. Genetics, deformity, the Pyrenees, the Basques, blood tests…He just needed time out to grasp the entire chain.

Checking his watch, Simon grabbed his jacket. It was noon and he had a fairly ghastly appointment, an onerous duty to fulfil.

Throwing himself in the car, he headed for the far outskirts of London where the orbital motorways met the first scruffy farms and the closely mowed golf courses. And the acres of plush greenery that surrounded the St Hilary Mental Health Institution.

Forty minutes after leaving his home, the journalist was watching a team of schizophrenics play football.

If Simon had not known what he was seeing — madmen kicking a ball — then he might never have guessed what was happening. It was only when he got close, right to the touchline, that it became evident that there was something strange about this kickabout. Many of the players had a notable stiffness in their movements. The goalkeeper was crawling across the penalty area for no apparent reason. And a defender was arguing, vehemently and poignantly, with the corner flag.

'Simon!'

Doctor Fanthorpe, the deputy clinical psychiatrist, waved Simon's way and ran across the pitch to say hello.

The 'football cure' was Fanthorpe's pet project. Bill Fanthorpe's idea was that it helped to socialize seriously detached psychotics — to play as a team — and it gave them a reward when they scored a goal, helping with low self-esteem. Moreover, the exercise kept down the weight of the patients: so many of the mentally ill were fat.

'Hi, Bill.'

The doctor smiled; he was wearing shorts maybe three sizes too large.

'I saw your articles in the Telegraph. Extraordinary story. The Basque murders!'

'Yes…It is rather odd. Anyway, ah, how's Tim, is he…?'

Bill was still panting from the football.

'He's…OK. We had some fitting last week but this week it's not been so bad. Not so bad at all. Tackle that man!'

The psychiatrist tutted as the opposing forward slipped a ridiculously poor tackle, and slotted an easy goal. The goal was an easy score because the goalkeeper was sitting on the ground with his eyes shut.

Simon repressed the desire to laugh. But if he didn't laugh he might cry. That was his brother out there: the plump schizophrenic in his early forties mumbling in the corner, by the flag. The knife-attacker. There was a security guard loitering at the far end of the pitch. Simon guessed he was probably armed — this was a secure asylum.

The referee blew his whistle.

'Three-two!' said Bill, excitedly. 'That's great, good good. Let me go and get Tim.'

Half of Simon wanted to slip away right now. He'd done his duty and seen Tim — if only from a distance — and he could say his brother was alive and now he could quit, and go back to his son and the au pair and his wife and pretend that Tim didn't exist, pretend that Simon's whole family didn't have this same mad blood in their genes, pretend that the father didn't look briefly at the son at least once a day and think…Do you? Will you? What have you inherited?

'Simon?'

Tim looked very pleased to see his sibling; Simon hugged his brother. Tim's heavy white thighs looked oddly vulnerable in his blue nylon soccer shorts.

'You look good, Timothy. How are you?'

'Oh, good, good good, excellent game, isn't it!' Tim was grinning impetuously.

Simon checked his brother's face; the hair was greyer, the cheeks were even fatter and yet Tim never seemed to really age. Did madness keep you young? Or maybe it was his image of Tim that was frozen in his own mind: the image of Tim with a knife in his hand, hacking at Mum, in the bedroom. All the blood. Pints of blood.

'You played very well,' said the journalist again, trying not to hate his older brother. It's not his fault.

'Oh yes. Very good sporting chances. Are you here long there is a…yes. Ah yes doubtless. Yes.'

They both made a proper effort to chat, but sentences defeated Tim at every turn, and within a few minutes the dialogue had dwindled. Tim's attention had wandered elsewhere: gone a-blackberrying. Simon knew the distracted and pained expression all too well: his brother was hearing his voices. There were little roils of anxiety about his features, tics and blinks. Tim was trying to keep smiling but he was hearing things, all those confusing orders.

The pity welled in his brotherly heart, pity and hatred and love all at once. The sadness was drenching. He wanted to go; Tim would be here the rest of his life.

'OK, Tim, I have to go now.'

Tim offered a reproachful stare.

'Not long then? Didn't stay too long we must be busy. Busy as ever. Yes busy until…'

'Tim?'

'I'm busy too working of course. Excellent…inside the system.'

'Tim, listen. Dad sends his love.'

Tim's eyes seemed to mist with grief, standing here in the mild autumn sun by the lunatic asylum. Was his brother, appallingly, going to cry?

'Simon…?'

'Tim.'

'Rather, you know, doubtless, Mother and Father in South Africa. Simon. I…I…I made something. For you.'

'Sorry?'

Bill Fanthorpe had wandered over and was observing them from a couple of yards away.

Tim reached in the pocket of his nylon shorts. And pulled out a small object, crudely carved from wood.

'Gusty. Awfully fun. Remember Gusty remember him? I made a dog hope you like it.'

The younger brother examined the miniature wooden toy. He understood now. When they were kids, the family had owned a springer spaniel, Augustus — 'Gusty'. Simon and Tim had spent hours and days, entire holidays, playing with Gusty, going for rambles on the Heath. Running down sunny beaches.

It was a symbol of happier times, before the darkness of Tim's schizophrenia.

'Thank you, Tim. Thank you…very much.'

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

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

'Yes,' said Simon. 'It's lovely. Thanks.'

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

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

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

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

It was Edith Tait.

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

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

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

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

'Go on. How much?'

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

'Edith?'

The Scots lady drew a breath, then answered.

'Julie left me half a million pounds.'

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