Tom Knox - The Marks of Cain

A raindrop hit the paper tablecloth, a grey spot next to the phone.

'Well I'm not bloody running away,' David said. 'I need to know what happened to Mum and Dad. If this is all linked…God knows how.' He stared directly into her fine blue eyes. Not unlike his mother's. 'Did he say nothing about my mum and dad, at all?'

She murmured.

'No, he didn't. I'm sorry.'

David sat back with a curt sigh of frustration. They had got as far as they could with Jose, yet Jose surely knew more. Sipping the last of his coffee, David winced at the taste of the dregs, and then he winced again, staring at Amy's phone.

The mobile.

The revelation was a mild electric shock. He reached out, grabbed Amy's cellphone, and looked at her.

'This is it!'

'What?'

'He must be using this. I think Miguel's using mobiles. To find us.'

'What?'

'You can trace mobiles, right? Triangulation. It's easy.'

'How…'

'This is the French Basque Country, you told me yourself. ETA have sympathizers everywhere around here, even in the police force. Maybe in mobile phone companies, too. Telecoms?'

Her gaze was intense.

'I made that phone call outside the witch's cave.'

'Exactly. He knows your number. And now you've called Jose he'll be after us in Mauleon. Probably coming here right now.'

A fresh wind swept over the terrace. David stood up — and opened the phone, and took out the sim card. Then he leaned, and took aim, and span the little card into the river. Amy stared. He snapped the phone shut, and handed it back. 'OK. Let's go. Your bags are packed?'

'They're already in the car, with yours, but why — '

'We can get another sim card! Come on!'

He led the way down the terrace steps to the waiting car. Then they drove away from Mauleon.

He pointed blindly at the map as he motored: already doing ninety kilometres an hour. 'OK. Please…Amy, work out a route. Make it a zigzag, unpredictable. Let's go and see these churches. Right now.'

Obediently she examined the old map, the pattern of blue stars. The forests unfurled as they accelerated. The mountains were coned with snow in the distance: a row of brooding Klansmen.

The town of Savin was easy to find. An hour of fast, anxious driving brought them to its cluster of sloped roofs. Savin was prettily situated on a crest, overlooking the grey farms and vineyards. They parked on a side street, looking up and down. For Miguel. For the red car. The street was empty.

A smell of incense enveloped David as they entered Savin church. A few Americans were taking pictures of a spectacularly ornate organ. David glanced at a rough old font, the pedestal of which comprised a trio of carved stone peasants: holding up the water. The faces of the peasants were sad. Limitlessly sad.

Then David paced around the nave, and through the choir; he peered into the chancels, where the flagstones were striated with soft colour from the stained glass windows. He stepped into a side chapel dedicated to Pope Pius the Tenth. A stern portrait dominated the little chapel. The long-dead Pope glared eternally through the incensed and sepulchral gloom.

There was nothing else in the church. Amy had already given up, she was sitting in a pew. She looked tired.

But he felt curious about something. Or was it nothing? Or was it something?

There was another door, a smaller door, to the side. Why were there were two church doors, one so obviously humbler than the other? He stood and gazed around. He looked back. This little door was tucked away in the corner of the church, the southwest corner; low and modest. Was that significant? How many churches had two doors? Lots, maybe.

Approaching the smaller door, David touched the granite surround: the cold and ancient jamb was worn smooth. The iron handle was rusted and unused. And brutally chiselled into the lintel of the door was a slender, spindly, peculiar arrow, of three lines meeting at the bottom: the arrow was pointing down.

He stepped back, nearly bumping into a priest who was hovering behind.

'Er, je m'excuse…sorry…'

The priest gave him a sharp, wary glance, then paced away down the nave with a swish of nylon vestments.

David stared, transfixed, at the arrow. He was recalling the font in Lesaka. That church had possessed two fonts, and carved into one of them was a similar cruel arrow. Primitive but definite: three carven lines converging at the top: an arrow. That arrow was pointing up.

His thoughts were whirring now, the cogs of the puzzle turning fast. What about the church in Arizkun, that had two doors and two cemeteries. How could he forget that second cemetery? The image of an angel, with a tawny cigarette butt screwed in the eye, was lodged in his memory.

Just like the old woman with the goitre, pointing and cussing.

Shit people, shit people, shit people.

He was closer. How close he didn't know. But he was close and he wanted to keep moving. He signalled to Amy — shall we go? — she smiled in a wan way, and stood. But David kept his thoughts to himself as they retreated to the car. Because some of his thoughts were truly disturbing. Was there some direful link between the markings on the font and the markings…on Amy's scalp? He believed her story about Miguel: the sex game with a knife. Her painful honesty as she admitted this had been all too authentic. But the scars. The scars were odd. The marks made on the foreheads of witches after the Sabbath intercourse with Satan.

It was too much and too headily upsetting, too rich a mix of repellent ideas. David felt faintly nauseous as he walked the car park gravel. A damp grey drizzle was falling. They didn't say a word as they headed for the next town, slaloming across Gascony, trying to throw Miguel off their tracks.

Sixty kilometres of empty road brought them, very slowly, to Luz Saint Sauveur. The winding route ran spectacularly between walls of rock, with occasional side roads rudely blasted through the oppressive chasm walls: they were heading towards the Pyrenees once more. Clouds collared the black, brooding, saturnine mountaintops like white lacy ruffs around Van Dyck grandees.

Turning a final corner they saw their destination nestled in a vivid green valley. The old and sombre heart of Luz Saint Sauveur concealed another ancient clutch of low slung houses surrounding a very old church. They parked right by the church, climbed out, and entered. David just knew he was near to the sobbing heart of the mystery, at least this part of it: what the churches meant. He had no idea what the solution might be, but he could hear the noise of it, the long wailing cry of confession: this is what it all means.

There were two other people inside the eglise parroissial of Luz Saint Sauveur. Sitting on the rear pew with a woman who seemed to be his mother was a young and evidently retarded man. His eyes were rolling, a wet line of spittle ran down his chin, like the track of a slug. His mother's face was prematurely aged, visibly wearied by the necessity of caring for the son. The cretin. David felt a surge of sympathy; he offered the woman a helpless but sincere smile.

Amy had been staring at the altar, and the chancels. Her expression, as she returned, was despairing.

'I don't get it. There's nothing.'

'I'm not so sure…maybe there is something.'

'Sorry?'

He gazed her way.

'Look for two. Two of something. Two doors, two cemeteries, two — '

'Two fonts? I saw two fonts. Over here…'

They walked over, their footsteps echoing in the stony silence.

This church also had two fonts, and one of them was hidden away in a cobwebbed corner, half-concealed, musty. It was small and humble and somehow melancholy.

Just like in Lesaka.

Amy said: 'But…Why two? Why ever should there be two?'