luck was that Fazackerly’s powerful cellphone could get a signal inside a metal box.
And yet. It still seemed like a grotesque medieval torture to Simon – being boiled alive in a microwave. Your blood plasma literally boiling in your veins.
He shut down the emails with a heartfelt sigh. The thought of blood reminded him of his brother; the memory of his brother was perturbing and yet energizing. Right this minute, his brother was locked away. Simon was therefore the only Quinn with offspring and a future. He had a responsibility. To earn and work and pass on his name.
And now Simon felt a surge of returning pride, self-esteem – even anger.
To hell with this. He needed to shape up: Fazackerly’s death wasn’t his fault. So his articles may have pointed the killers in the direction of the professor; equally, they may not. Whatever the case: he, the journalist, was just doing his job, being a hack. Following the lead. His soul agonized for the danger to his family – but how else was he meant to feed them?
There was no other means: this was his career. But that still left the practical problem. How was he going to feed his family now? He was a freelancer, who lived off stories – but he’d been kicked off his best ever story. And now he had nothing else to do, nothing to write. No other commissions. What was he supposed to do today, tomorrow, next week? Go back to writing accounts of petty crime?
Idly, he Googled ‘witch murders’, just to see if there were any developments. Just in case.
The news this morning was subdued, compared to the furore that had greeted Fazackerly’s murder last week: just one or two follow-up pieces. An American website was rehashing the entire chain of bizarre events for the delectation of its more prurient readers. Simon noted this American journalist had actually stolen some of Simon’s lines, and shamelessly used Simon’s quotes from Fazackerly.
Bastards.
He sipped water. And then he had an idea. Quite a fetching idea. There was nothing to stop him following the clues, chasing up leads, even if he actually wrote zero. He could still write, and research – if only for his own satisfaction. And even if he was barred from daily journalism on the story, at the end he could…do a book? Yes! If he had all the notes he could still write a book. And then he could make some real money, when it was all over. He could do a job and feed his wife and son and pay his debt to his conscience, and the bank, without annoying his editor, or the cops.
Simon flexed his fingers. Then he attacked the search engines.
The trick he deployed was one of his favourites when he was on a complex investigative story and he needed new leads: he would throw randomly associated phrases into the internet and online newsfeeds, juggling quote marks, seeing what came out.
For two hours he toyed with words. He tried various combinations of Scottish and Killing and Nairn, GenoMap and Fazackerly and Basque.
Nothing.
He tried some more.
Syndactyly, Witch, Cagot, Inheritance, Murder, Canaan…
Nothing.
He tried one more time, a whole host of words: Scoring, French, Nazi, Burning, Deformity, Torture, Genetic, Homicide, Gascony, Bequest…
And…There! Yes. He’d lucked out: two possibly related news items. Two.
The first was a murder in Quebec. A Canadian news website gave a brief resume. A very old woman had been killed three weeks ago in her house just outside Montreal. The woman had been shot, for no apparent reason. It was the very last line of the report that really made him pay attention: the woman was apparently Basque, and as a young girl she had been interned in a Nazi concentration camp. In Gurs. The French Basque Country. The murder was a total mystery, as nothing had been stolen, despite the victim’s wealth.
This had to be linked. Had to. Even if it wasn’t, it needed more investigating. He wrote down the details on his pad, then turned to the next news item. The article had been carried by a couple of newsfeeds a few weeks ago.
The headline was: ‘Bizarre Bequest Leads to Million Dollar Basque Mystery’
A thirty-something man called David Martinez was staring out of a photo: he was holding a map. Martinez had an awkward grin in the photo, as he brandished the map, a kind of uncomfortable smile. The article said the map showed places in the Basque Country. Moreover it said the young man’s grandfather had