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.