by P. R. Black
‘He’s not going to start killing again, surely,’ Rosie said. ‘Those days are over.’
‘Apart from Rupert,’ Bernard said, through a mouthful of pastry.
‘Who’s Rupert?’
‘Rupert is… one of Bernard’s colleagues,’ Becky said. ‘He died.’
‘I should bloody say he did,’ Bernard said cheerfully. ‘Here, I’ll show you.’ He brought out a smartphone.
‘Don’t show her that,’ Becky said, clutching his wrist.
Rosie frowned. ‘This Rupert, who died. You mean, our guy killed him? This was recently?’
‘Yes.’
‘How?’
‘Chopped his head off,’ Bernard said. ‘Live, on air. Right in front of Becky. Used his mask and everything.’
Rosie looked shocked. ‘And you didn’t think to tell me? What have the police done about this?’
‘Nothing,’ Becky said quietly. ‘It’s been palmed off as some kind of drug turf war.’
‘But… you saw it? This happened where, online? Bernard’s got footage? What more proof do you need?’
‘I didn’t record it. He did – and it’s been edited and overdubbed to look like some kind of drugs execution. Our guy must have made Rupert read out another script. Then he cut in the actual execution, pardon the expression, minus the mask details, before posting it online.’
Rosie clutched her throat. ‘Someone’s dead? Because of what we’re doing? And this guy’s out there, on the loose?’
‘Rosie, there’s nothing we can do about that, now. The police know about it, trust me. Again, there’s no reason for them to link it to my case. They don’t believe me.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me? Someone got fucking executed on camera, on your behalf, and you didn’t think to say?’
‘What difference would it have made?’
Rosie stabbed a finger at her. ‘You’re withholding things. From everyone. What else do you know that you aren’t sharing with us?’
‘Relax. I’m going to tell you everything. And I’ll tell you how we’re going to catch him. Red-handed.’
55
Becky leaned her head against the train window. The vibrations soothed her – even the jolts were like being rocked by a harsh mother.
‘Remember when you thought travel was glamorous?’ she asked, fuzzily.
‘Don’t sleep on us now,’ Rosie said. She’d been perked up by a nice lunch, but her fires still smouldered. ‘You were going to explain everything.’
Becky straightened up. ‘Okay. We’ll go right from the start. Rupert used some contacts in Russia to dig some stuff out – the stuff our guy couldn’t get rid of by hand.
‘The guy we’re looking for is called Nicolai Arkanescu, AKA the Black Angel. There’s your book title. Bernard? Exhibit A.’
Bernard fiddled with a tablet computer. He showed Rosie a fuzzy black and white image of a young man no older than 20 in a military cap. The image had been blown up and had lost definition as a result. The face had a long, square jaw and his eyes were shaded by a deep, dark brow.
‘He was born in Bucharest in 1954. He served in the army for a while, then was recruited by the Romanian secret police. He disappeared for a number of years, possibly to the Soviet Union. We suspect this was for a spot of higher education. Exhibit B, Bernard. Now, brace yourself.’
The next image was in black and white, of hog-tied bodies. They were missing their heads; the blood looked oily in the flashbulb’s sudden flare.
‘He gained a reputation for carrying out political assassinations. His calling card was to remove the victims’ heads. He was encouraged in this; there’s some suggestion he was deployed across the former Eastern bloc to carry these out. He was an instrument of terror, often used for rogue elements within official circles. The line between police and criminality was blurred. He seemed to have been feared even within official circles. His record shows he was a known sexual sadist and rapist, who had taken to torturing his victims before killing them. This was passed off as a brutal tactic to extract information, but it tied in with his natural inclinations. A busman’s holiday, you could say.
‘The assassinations stopped sometime in the early eighties – and that’s when Nicolai Arkanescu and his family were shot and burned, along with their house. Exhibit C, Bernard.’
Next came an indistinct colour image, a blackened shell of a room. Rosie had to squint to see the bones.
‘I take it he didn’t really die?’
‘That’s the theory. The long-standing rumour was that Arkanescu killed his own family after a birthday party and left a surrogate body behind. Faked his own death; probably he’d annoyed the wrong person higher up, or was fearful of someone taking revenge for his handiwork. He used this cover to defect, years before the Berlin Wall came down and Ceaușescu was shot. There were some tell-tale signs at the scene – the heads were removed, that’s the big giveaway. He is known to have hated his family. He was a bullied child, with few friends at school. There are some suggestions he was abused, perhaps by his father.’
‘This is quite a leap,’ Rosie said.
‘I agree. Sounds speculative. Until we look at the pattern of murders which started in the west, round about the eighties. We have a map of the ones we know; these include my family, the Spanish family, the family in Orkney, one in Ireland, one in Sweden, three in Germany. And now, the Gursky case in Russia. Some of these were officially solved and people were jailed, but they show a pattern that fits with what Arkanescu did in Romania in his killer kindergarten days. Torture, humiliation, death by stabbing or cut throat, or decapitation. There was also a family home torched, as was the case with the Sloan family in Orkney, with the husband made to look as if he’d done it then killed himself. The western cases were all linked to organised crime or dirty politics – because he had been hired by the gangsters involved to kill them.’
‘And he went from there to somehow working with the police?’
‘He did. In Germany first of all. He even solved one of his own cases, while he worked as a detective in Dusseldorf – pinned it on another maniac, beautifully. He has an eye for opportunity – he also studied computer science back when computers still had punch cards, and set up early databases. He was commended for it.
‘He moved with the times, too; at Interpol he was one of the go-to guys for IT, a father figure for the young ones, something of a legend. Then he went off-grid; then he reappeared as Nicholas Arthur, brand new building, brand new colleagues, sat in an office by himself, in a lower-level job, with no one any the wiser that the guy sat at the desk isn’t actually him. His time is his own – he’s wealthy enough by now to be able to set up a sock-puppet worker connected to the entire European police network, giving him all the access he could ever need to cover up what he’s done. Meanwhile, he can travel round Europe, doing whatever the hell he likes.’
‘So this let him cover his tracks,’ Rosie said. ‘Hence all the missing evidence, case files. He made it all disappear, switched some evidence round, and he answered to no one. There’s nothing linking him physically with these crimes.’
‘Correct. And who knows what else he messed with? He must surely have corrupted physical evidence as well as digital records. DNA samples might have gone missing or got switched… once you convert hard science to data, or once you can access archive samples and you know where they’re kept, the rest is easy. He might even be thinking ahead to future court cases. If evidence is corrupted or tampered with, it’s inadmissible. Perhaps he had an even larger plan, something we can’t see yet. We can only guess.’
‘So he just toured Europe, for a spot of rape and murder?’
‘Yes. At first. But then it gets even murkier. In several cases, it seems that the families were targeted deliberately. He put his earlier skills to good use – he worked as an assassin. The Black Angel was the name he went by, according to some information he allowed to lie on file at Interpol. I reckon he was proud of that. It seems that he mingled business a
nd pleasure, eventually. Soon it wasn’t just his targets who were being killed – it was their families, too. He has a thing for families.
‘In lots of cases – the Irish family; the family in Orkney; the Spanish family, and now the Gurskys – they were connected with organised crime. Rivals ordered the hit. This allowed the Black Angel – our guy, Arkanescu – to carry on doing what he enjoyed doing, and get paid well for it. The fact that these were gangland hits also helped muddy the waters. Police were more interested in the paymasters, not necessarily the assassin. When he moved into the 1990s, he was doing lots of these killings for fun, and his professional services weren’t required. But he still carried out the odd hit. Including my family.’
Rosie’s jaw dropped. ‘You’re kidding.’
‘Nope. You had it right – you and the Dupin Collective. Through a family connection my dad got mixed up with the wrong person – the brother of his best friend – a former copper called Angus Tullington. An unhappy accident, you could say. Tullington a bent copper, resigned from the force with a bad reputation, then went into property – or organised crime, as many of us call it. My dad got involved in a deal Angus Tullington set up in the South of France, but the whole thing was crooked. Dirty money, tax dodges, money-laundering, and some very nasty people who wouldn’t want to draw the attention of the police. My dad got cold feet and wanted out – and was considering going to the police. He also saw some other land that he liked and was considering buying it. So he mixed business with pleasure. He took us all on holiday to check it out. Term-time holiday too, I might add. And that’s when Arkanescu carried out his contract on us, twenty years ago.’
‘Except you got away.’
‘That’s right. I was a loose end. And usually he snaps those off. But for some reason, he didn’t get involved. Until I did.’
‘He likes toying with you. He is a sadist, after all.’
‘That’s true. He did say as much, to be fair.’
‘You’ve spoken to him? Since Bernard’s friend was killed?’
‘More than once. He’s tried to kill me twice. He’s been trailing me, as surely as I’ve been trailing him.’
Rosie snapped: ‘More bloody revelations! You might have told me!’
‘I warned you when you got involved in the first place – this is a very dangerous thing you’re doing. I also warned you he might come after you. You told me I was being paranoid. I said you were in this of your own free will and could get out of it any time. That’s still the case. Is there any part of that you don’t understand?’
Rosie was silent a moment. She gazed out of the window at the blurred countryside. ‘So where are we going now?’
‘We’re going to a little gathering of like-minded souls.’
‘The January men,’ Bernard said, rattling his tongue over the consonants.
‘The January Orchestra, actually,’ Becky said.
‘The sex group you found out about,’ Rosie said. ‘The one Edwin Galbraith was involved with.’
‘He was indeed. Among other groups. He was in the Billy Goats Gruff online forum, which quite enjoys doing things to young girls dressed in school uniforms, often while they’re tied up. January was something else. What, we’re not quite sure. There’s one reference we’ve been able to find. Tied to a stone circle, in northern Italy.’
‘Two women got butchered there,’ Bernard said. ‘The most recent case.’ He flashed another image up; Rosie shielded it with her hand, and turned away, sickened.
‘The police were interested in the details and wondered if it was linked to my family’s case, but, surprise surprise, some of the evidence gathered didn’t fit. The big giveaway, as ever, is that the data on this case is sketchy; files removed, evidence missing, testimony expunged. It’s all very familiar. But this involved a lot of people, not just one. This had the look of a mass ritual. Our guy’s involved with the January Orchestra. He is probably paid to set it up; he’s an administrator by nature, so it fits. It’s a better, more discreet way of keeping his hand in, without having contact with gangsters.’
‘It’s a sex ring?’
‘Sex and murder. The ultimate elite group for sex killers. High end dining, as they say in the Sunday supplements.’
‘First we had gangsters and hitmen… Now we’ve got elites carrying out murder? Too far, this,’ Rosie said.
‘Oh, it happens,’ Becky said. ‘You’ve worked the crime desk. You know about swingers, doggers, rapists, abusers. Incest, ritual murder… stuff done by the proper, one-percenter weirdos. Speak to social workers and family lawyers – they’ll open your eyes, if they still need opening. They’ll tell you what goes on, and how often, in every part of the country. Then think about child sex rings, dirty politicians, bent coppers, you name it. Think about all the opportunities of the internet. If you can think about something depraved, you can bet it’ll be online. It happens. They’re out there, we all know it. It’s happening somewhere, right now. And people co-operate with it. They enjoy it. And they cover it up.’
‘Why do they do it, man?’ Bernard said. ‘Too risky, surely? Nowadays, with surveillance culture, DNA, forensics, technology… it’s hard to get away with this stuff, now.’
‘Maybe that’s the juice, for them. The power. The secrecy. And it helps to have a man on the inside, covering for you. It’s probably made our guy extremely rich, the connections he has. As for the rest of the January Orchestra… maybe it just works as an elaborate set of bribes, an old boys’ club you wouldn’t keep the old school tie for. Maybe it’s like the Masons, or the little clubs you get in the blue-chip universities. Shagging pigs’ heads, funny handshakes, that sort of behaviour. That sort of tribalism. Once you take a vow in these kinds of societies, you’re stuck with them. And if you’re a powerful person, you can expect a leg-up from people into the same stuff in the authorities. Or a rolled-up trouser leg, at least. Power creates perversion.’
‘What about Edwin Galbraith?’ Rosie asked.
‘It seems Edwin Galbraith was too high-profile to be allowed to live. He was news – too much of a risk. I’m almost certain our guy snuffed him. But his wife was kind enough to pass something on to me.’ Becky held up the January Orchestra concert bill.
Rosie studied it. ‘I don’t see any details. What does it all mean?’
‘Took a while to crack it. Bernard figured it out.’
Bernard saluted, then pointed to a line of embossed figures on the bill, difficult to see unless the card was slanted a certain way, catching the light. ‘These numbers are co-ordinates. I spotted the latitude/longitude line of figures straight away. But that latitude reference is more than 90 degrees – so it’s nonsense. When I tried fuzzy logic, the nearest I could get was the middle of the ocean.’
Rosie folded her arms. ‘So the theory was nonsense.’
‘Not quite,’ Becky said. ‘There was something else I noticed when I went over the paper with a microscope. Hold it up to the light again, Bernard.’
The ticket was made of thick, expensive-looking creamy paper. Rosie studied it for a while, then pointed to the top left-hand corner. ‘There’s a watermark. A cross?’
‘Yes. A cross. But these guys don’t seem like the church-going type.’ Becky turned it upside down. ‘Now it’s a headless cross.’
‘Devil worship,’ Bernard said, with a wicked gleam in his eyes. ‘Everything’s inverted.’
‘That being the case, we spun the co-ordinates round, fed them in again. And we found… what Exhibit are we up to, Bernard?’
‘E,’ Bernard said, and showed a picture of a set of menhir, lodged into the earth. They were coloured by a weird shade of lichen, more yellow than green, like a late summer sunset.
‘Standing stones,’ Rosie said. ‘In France. But further north, in the Grand Massif. Where we’re going, in other words.’
‘That’s right. Standing stones is what he likes. I know from experience. Maybe it’s a ritual thing, some evil practice that pre-dates him. Maybe it’s some
thing personal. Maybe January is an ancient club. Linked to druidic sacrifice; I don’t know. But we do know that there’s going to be a meeting of the club. And he’ll most likely be there. I also think he might be holding a teenage girl hostage, maybe for use in the ritual – the daughter of my therapist.’
‘Seriously?’
‘Seriously. He somehow tracked me down and tried to get my therapist to implant false memories while he was trying to hypnotise me. I’m not that great a hypnosis subject. I knew it was bullshit from the start. I knew what he was doing… I just didn’t know why.’
Rosie turned the ticket the right way up. ‘This looks like a date – 6th January?’
Bernard grinned. His lips didn’t seem to know what to do when he gave a full, unguarded grin, twitching across his teeth. ‘So, turn the date into numbers, spin it round, and…?’
‘Oh six, oh one… that becomes oh one, oh six… that’s 1st June. That’s next week.’
‘Exactly right. So whatever January, and our friend Mr Arkanescu – or Mr Arthur, as he’s now known – have in store, we can steal a few yards, set up a shitload of surveillance, and catch them all.’
‘For god’s sake, Becky… I know how badly you want this guy, but… why not tell the police?’
‘He is the police,’ Becky said, curtly. ‘I admit, there’s nothing to tie him to our case. And they’ve done little or nothing with the rest of the information I’ve given them. Plus, he can make it all disappear if he really wants to. And – bearing in mind he’s wired right into the system – if he gets wind of an operation, he’ll get spooked, and they’ll crash the whole thing, emergency pull-out. This,’ she said, raising the ticket, ‘will just go back to being gobbledegook, a sheet of paper which only proves I’m paranoid, and nothing will happen at the standing stones, there will be no reference to January anywhere, and I’ll look like even more of a lunatic than I already do. No, we’ll have to catch them red-handed. This is a chance; we have to take it. On the day, I’ll live-stream it right to the police. Bernard’s going to set this up. That’s where we’re going now.’
