The Marks of Cain. Tom Knox

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       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.

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