by P. R. Black
‘Hey, Becky.’
‘Hey yourself. What’s going on? Are you broadcasting from a cupboard?’
‘Ah, this is kind of my own personal museum. Look at this one – a BBC B Micro, classic of the genre, this.’ He lifted up an ancient beige computer unit with red and black keys.
‘Maybe some other time,’ Becky said quickly.
‘Ah. Sorry.’ He grinned and slid the computer back onto its shelf. ‘Hobbies, you know? I can’t shut up about them, at times. Hey, how’s things going with the dig in Spain?’
‘The dig? You make it sound like fun. A treasure hunt.’
‘I guess it is, in a way.’
‘They’re carrying out tests. Once they find out what they need to know, I’ll have been proved right. And that’s another link in the chain. How about you – did you turn up anything for me about the Romania case?’
‘There was another name – a political assassination, apparently. A family with connections to the Stasi in eastern Germany, and the KGB. Some of them lost their heads. Seems a bit murkier than some lust murder, though.’
Becky sat forward. ‘What was the name?’
‘Rosie’s guy isn’t sure, but he said it’s something like Arkanescu.’ Becky made him spell it out. ‘There’s very little about it online anywhere. That’s the only link. In the entire internet.’
‘You couldn’t find anything?’
‘Not a bit. Dark net, or regular net. Now that in itself is suspicious.’
‘Arkanescu. A political assassination, was this?’
‘Yeah, so they believe. It could be more like kneecappings between gangsters, these things. It dates from roughly the same time as the Kranczr case, within a couple of years, anyway. But I didn’t turn up anything else – even with the help from our contact in the Dupin Collective. Not quite what you’re hoping, I know, but… I got a link to somewhere which might have information about it.’ Bernard pressed a key, and a static image flashed up. ‘A public records office. Doubles as a public library. Like… a place people take books out.’
‘Quaint,’ Becky muttered.
‘Has microfiche, records, old editions of newspapers. Apparently they are going to start a programme of digitisation in the next two or three years.’
‘But nothing’s online yet.’ Becky noted the address; on her phone, she was already searching for the nearest airport, and the next available air tickets.
‘Nope. It’s all analogue, for now. If anyone has extra details about the Kranczr family, or this Arkanescu mob, it’ll be there. Now, you could maybe look into paying someone to check it for you, but…’
‘It’s all right. I think I’ll go myself. My time’s my own.’
‘Okay. But there’s one other thing I wanted to talk to you about.’ He bit his lip; Becky wondered if he was going to ask her on a date. ‘There’s security issues, here.’
‘What do you mean? You’ve set up firewalls, haven’t you?’
‘I have, but… so did Rupert. The same ones I’ve got. And he found Rupert.’
‘We’ll have to do something different, then, Bernard. Landlines? We could go analogue. Difficult to trace.’
‘I’m not so much worried about me, Becky. I’m going to get moving soon and keep moving. He can’t get all of us, can he? Not at one time, anyway. It’s you I’m thinking about. He could trace you. I’d be surprised if he hadn’t already. You must be his priority.’
Becky smiled. ‘Yeah, I meant to talk to you about that. Find a landline or a phone booth, and we’ll go through it. And hey… anyone ever told you that you look like Barack Obama’s hipster brother?’
Bernard scratched the back of his neck, squirming with embarrassment. ‘Aw, we haven’t got time for flirting,’ he mumbled, and cut the connection.
40
The public records building was squat, functional, and almost certainly Soviet era in origin. It was also a public library as well as a records repository, and had only one member of staff, a tiny little woman whose face resembled that of Louis Walsh.
Becky had tried to learn some key phrases in Romanian on the plane, but it had taken on the tones of homework at 9 p.m. on a Sunday night; too much to bother with, with no stomach for a fight with the promise of sleep. She wrote some key phrases down, utterly failing to memorise them. She dozed on the flight – sheer exhaustion overcoming her usual misgivings about unconsciousness in transit.
It took her a while to smooth out the mid-air incident when she saw the killer, in full robes, stood in the aisle beside her seat; when she jerked awake, kneeing her tray seat hard and spraying the remnants of a glass of cola everywhere, she realised that she was in fact confronted with a stewardess who’d been trying to cover her with a blanket.
Once on the ground, in the middle of the night, she spent the rest of the night trying to shut out the thundering jets and sweeping lights which quivered the curtains of her airport hotel.
The next morning, after a taxi ride with a driver whose natural thick black eyelashes she envied on a level that bordered on bigotry, she entered a squat building spiked with barbed wire.
It was more command bunker than library. Parts of it were shuttered, and she feared that it had closed for good sometime since the last update on its modest, poorly-constructed webpage. The cladding on the surrounding apartment blocks was the colour of toast, but radiated no warmth. Becky was reminded of post-war tenements she’d passed on one weekend she’d spent in Glasgow, half of them boarded up and praying for a wrecking ball.
Fortunately, the place was open and comfortably lit, and the linoleum floors were buffed to a high sheen. Becky was reminded of a school on the first day of a new term, and the mix of feelings that sight engendered.
The little Louis Walsh woman had been reading what looked like the latest Dan Brown paperback, and was at first startled to see Becky, then delighted. She began some small talk, and it took Becky a long time to calm the woman down and explain in what she hoped wasn’t a stage Dracula accent that she did not speak Romanian.
The woman’s English was no better than Becky’s Romanian, but she understood what Becky was looking for when she presented the phrase written down in block capitals, carefully copied from the online translator. I am trying to research my family tree; I need to see some microfiche files from 1990.
They still existed, of course, as they did in libraries everywhere. The lady knew precisely where they were kept; canvas was moved, disturbed dust caused them both to sneeze, and finally some beige cases were unearthed, edged with clear brown plastic. Inside were the files, all neatly stored. The woman pointed to a big grey machine with a dark screen in one corner, hidden at the back of neat, thick rows of bookcases. ‘Waiting here all this time,’ Becky said, smirking. ‘Looks like my luck’s in.’
Only one other person came into the library, a stooped old man in a beige anorak who raised a hand in greeting towards the front desk without looking up, and then selected one of the day’s newspapers from a rack.
The microfiche was easy to use, and similar to the ancient files she’d delved into from time to time in her own paper’s archives. The screen whirred as the ancient cooling fan clicked into gear. Text swam into view, pulled into and out of focus by a lever on the right, while with her left hand Becky manipulated the microfiche, moving the image round the screen with the concentration of a bombardier on an attack run.
She started her search a few days before the bodies were found, just to be sure there wasn’t any error or discrepancy with the dates.
The Louis Walsh lady fussed round Becky for a while, trying to get her own family name out of her. Becky toyed with saying ‘Nastase’ or ‘Draculea’, these being the only other Romanian surnames she could call to mind, leaving aside Ceaușescu.
Her instinct was for caution, but on a sudden whim, she decided to tell the librarian the name she was looking for. The woman frowned for a moment, then her face fell, and Becky knew, at that very instant, she was on the right track. Her host made some frantic gestures a
t the screen, then actually tried to cover Becky’s eyes.
‘It’s okay,’ Becky said. ‘Arkanescu, popular name.’ She turned over the printed sheet. ‘I know there was a murder,’ read one of her pre-written phrases.
The woman looked as if she might cross herself; instead she pursed her lips, placed a hand on Becky’s shoulder, and moved off towards her desk on the other side of the bookcases.
Becky let silence settle again. She was aware of the slanted roof, the grey light which intruded through the skylight, and particularly the large, echoey spaces in between the rows of bookcases.
She turned back to the microfiche, moving through the days, amazed at how archaic the fashions and hairstyles were back in those days, a rough period she was just old enough to remember. What she knew from what Bernard had turned up for her was that the Arkanescu family had disappeared in early June 1990, after Ceaușescu ‘s regime fell. It seemed that the bodies had vanished, turning up dumped in a mass grave near – Becky had guessed it – a historic site which had featured a Neolithic settlement, complete with caves, bones, sharpened flint heads and other basic tools.
That tip had been sourced from a translated website run by a ghoul based in Budapest, embedded deep in the dark web, who boasted a striking array of crime scene photographs dating back as far as photography itself.
In contrast, the official files Rupert had dug up on the Europol computer had been sketchy at best, lacking in detail or images, with no sign of the name Arkanescu anywhere.
Becky had tracked down the town where the Arkanescus had been abducted, and taken a leap of faith. Rather than focusing on time, Becky looked at location; this was the most easterly case with a similar MO which fit the pattern that Bernard, and Rupert before him, had been able to find.
She fed in a fresh film, carefully lining up the precious celluloid links, dating from the second day after the family vanished, one day before the bodies were found.
A voice like striking a match on bare rock said: ‘You will not find much about the Arkanescu family in that file.’
Becky hadn’t heard the man approach; she thrust the chair backwards, the casters squeaking, and leapt to her feet.
An older man in a beige anorak held up a hand, amused more than surprised. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, in excellent English. ‘I didn’t mean to frighten you.’
‘What do you want?’
‘I was talking to Hana. She likes to talk.’ He wheezed a smoker’s laugh and stifled a smoker’s cough. He had stark white hair and sparse stubble poking through his cheeks. ‘She said you were looking for the Arkanescu family.’
‘Yes. They used to live here. Did you know them?’
He chuckled. ‘I knew of them. They led very charmed lives. Until someone took them away.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘They were connected to the secret police. Through the son, Nikolai. They wanted for very little, but some of their friends, neighbours and even family sometimes disappeared. That was how things were. This did not happen so long ago.’
‘What do you think happened to the Arkanescus?’
‘Everyone knows what happened to them. They knew too much; they were made to pay the price for being part of the secret police, after Ceaușescu went up against the wall. That was why they were made an example of. Butchered,’ he said. The old man took a particular relish in this, grinning broadly, displaying incongruously white dentures.
‘Where were the bodies found?’
‘Near the caves. The site had been closed off – signs said this was for archaeological work to take place. But there was no archaeological work. Police believe whoever did it had set up the killing ground well in advance. That’s how I knew it was planned by the killers; it was no accident, no random killing, as many people believe.’
‘You said killers – more than one?’
‘Of course. There had to be. The father was a strong man; there were two other strong boys in their twenties… one man couldn’t have handled all three of them, plus the mother and the girl.’ His grin faded. ‘I knew someone who found some of the bodies, someone who worked in the history department on the dig. They never recovered. Life is never the same, after you see something like that.’
‘Some of the bodies? Not all of them?’
‘That is correct. The younger girl’s body was found months later, in the woods. The older boy, Nico, was found a day or so later, miles away. Or what was left of him.’
Becky nodded, scribbling notes down.
‘Well,’ the old man said at length, bowing politely, ‘I hope I’ve been of some help. Anything else you’d like to know?’
‘Just one thing. How did you know the family was connected? To the secret police?’
‘The boy was in the secret police. Nico. He served in the army. They say he travelled to Russia, to train with the KGB. Someone said he was with the Stasi, in Berlin. When he came back, people stayed out of his way. He was wrong, anyone could see it. Not a nice boy. I knew of him, through family. People who went to school with him. A bully, even as a child. The other children lived in terror of him. Even those in his gang. He carried this on into his adult life. This is why they made such a mess of him. They only identified him by his uniform. No one knows why the younger girl was taken away, though. Perhaps it is better not to know.’
‘It is,’ Becky said. ‘Better by far. Thank you.’
The man bowed again and moved off, his soft shoes making the barest squeak on the glassy lake of linoleum. He waved to Hana, the woman behind the counter, then took the exit onto the street.
Becky turned back to the microfiche; she had a compact camera to hand, which she had meant to use to snap images of the local news reports of the case, but the old man had been a stroke of luck.
Then the file ran out, unexpectedly, just on the day that the bodies were found. She frowned, scrolling back and forth, then she removed the microfiche and compared it to the one she’d accessed earlier.
It was shorter. Some frames had been snipped out, cleanly and evenly.
She turned to the next microfiche; it was the correct size, but the date was two weeks later. The one after that was in sequence, then the one after that.
There could be no doubt. Someone had taken the microfiche of the newspapers which covered the crucial dates. Other frames had been directly excised.
Becky frowned. She skirted the rows of books, heading back to the librarian’s counter. On the way, something in the play of the light across the smooth flooring changed, and she noticed four curved trails heading across the linoleum, shiny and stark as a slug’s pathway in the morning. These corresponded to the wheels of the desk unit which contained the clunking microfiche machine.
Already knowing the answer, heart pounding, she gesticulated towards the librarian. She flicked through a phrasebook, and managed to say, gesturing towards the microfiche machine: ‘Someone else? Here?’
The woman nodded.
‘Today?’ Becky asked.
Again, she nodded.
‘Here? Now?’
Hana nodded again and pointed across to the stolid rows of bookshelves. ‘Here,’ she said, nodding vigorously. ‘Now.’
41
Becky took the long way round, not wishing to alarm the woman, or tip off anyone hiding among the shelves that something was wrong. She skirted the end of the far wall, edging past the children’s section. A poster of a grinning tiger, poring over an open book, crept past her shoulder.
She pulled out the pepper spray, took a deep breath, and approached the rows.
The stacks were at least ten feet tall, edging towards the roof. They had been laid out by a madman, surely, edging out into some areas, cutting off others. If shown from above, the closest geometric shape the layout would have corresponded to was a swastika. It was somewhere that left alcoves and corners, the type of place a person could settle down to read, undisturbed… or perhaps to lie in wait for someone to blunder round a corner.
There were also
the tops of the shelves to consider – tall enough and broad enough for a man to lie down on, his weight easily borne by the books below. This was a place she knew she should not go to.
But he was in there.
She filled her lungs, keeping her head and back straight. ‘Bastard,’ she bellowed, in a borrowed voice. ‘I’m talking to you. You in here? Fancy a catch-up?’
Perhaps this would have been the perfect moment for a timid old man to appear, or a crooked old lady with a shopping trolley, knock-kneed and confused, raising their Romanian copy of Jilly Cooper or Jackie Collins. But only silence answered.
And then, the tiniest creak.
Becky took deep breaths and forced her legs to move. The blood was roaring hard enough in her ears to blot out other sounds. She picked one of the stacks and stuck her head round. No one there; it was the western section, ancient Louis L’amours, seemingly dozens of copies of Lonesome Dove, gunfighters drawing on each other, fierce Native Americans with feathers and warpaint.
Alert for any movement, she visualised what she would do. Get very close, pepper-spray his eyes, poke them out if need be… then he would be at her leisure. Her mercy. She did not consider that he might have a gun. It did not seem to be his style.
Becky tiptoed round another corner, an intersection of science fiction, marked by a sign with a rocket ship, and crime, signified by a row of identical, glum-looking skulls. She peered through the gaps between the stacked shelves, sometimes crouching low, alert to anything that might have moved in opposition to the natural parallax view of the books as they scrolled past.
The key thing was not to get trapped; to keep a line of escape clear. If he should appear between her and this route, so much the better.
She padded as silently as she could, and even considered removing her boots before she remembered she might need them to kick with. She visualised it; springing on her heels, scissoring her best foot forward, toe-first, into his throat. It could be moments away, seeing his face at last.
It happened very quickly. With a wild shriek, one of the bookstacks shifted behind her.
