Mind/Reader

by Brian Freemantle

  Rosetti made contact during the morning, guessing he’d be back in The Hague by midweek. On the same call he passed the telephone to Poulard, who said they’d decided to stay with the pathologist: he would be able to travel more quickly in the Europol plane and they could go through everything with the investigating officers in each city while Rosetti carried out his medical examinations. Things were coming together very well. Claudine didn’t bother to ask the Frenchman what that meant - knowing it didn’t mean anything - but wondered if she’d detected a note of annoyance in Rosetti’s voice at the claustrophobia of the detective’s presence. She wasn’t surprised that Poulard and to a lesser extent Siemen had attached themselves to the Italian; they had some misjudgements to disguise. But there was going to be a hiatus until the man returned before she could improve her own profile with his findings.

  There was still sufficient to occupy Claudine until then. All the requested hand-binding wire had arrived and she dictated a detailed request to Europol’s forensic division on what she hoped to learn from their tests. With as much if not more concentration than she’d devoted to the original disorganized murder files she studied the minutely categorized guides Volker had built up, not to verify the computer expert’s data assembly but to confirm her own.

  And there was time to consider her personal difficulties, which in view of David Winslow’s apparent awareness - curiosity at least - were hardly personal any more but infringed upon Europol and her position in it. Or did they? The core of her several uncertainties remained whether officially to inform the commissioner, particularly knowing, as she did, that Winslow had made an inquiry to Peter Toomey. But not, it appeared, an official approach. Which didn’t help a decision. If the inquiry had been official, then so should the response have been. But not from her: from the British Home Office. And it hadn’t reached - or been taken to - that level. Unofficial then. And if it was unofficial, there was no reason to make it otherwise. At once the mental debate during the flight to London came back to her, confused by an additional conundrum. Why had the British commissioner approached London but not her when he’d been rebuffed, as Toomey claimed to have rebuffed the man? That didn’t make any more sense than a lot of other things, chief among them Winslow’s assertion that he’d learned of Toomey’s visit to The Hague from the visitors’ security log.

  The fact remained that she wasn’t guilty of anything. So there wasn’t any reason not to tell Winslow, complicated though an explanation might be. Or was there? Not from the criteria of honesty and fact. But what about in the sort of hard-nosed, court-manipulated reality she knew so well? In that reality she was under what appeared to be the most microscopic of investigations which had uncovered her receipt of large sums of money for which there was officially no satisfactory explanation or provable source. And it was unthinkable to ask someone as sick as her mother to confirm the cash transactions in a court of law. For the older woman to do so - even in a statement prior to any court hearing - would expose her to investigation herself by the French tax authorities. And not just her mother. Although her acceptance of tax evasion money had been quite unwitting Claudine acknowledged that legally she had received it. Which either made her an accomplice and therefore liable to French prosecution and demands for repayment or, even more ridiculous, a tax authority witness against her own mother. But still with a tax and repayment liability.

  And Toomey wasn’t going to conclude his investigation. If anything the London meeting, which objectively hadn’t been helped by her aggressive ridicule, had ended with the man being more determined than ever to prove her a knowing part of whatever scam Gerald Lorimer and Paul Bickerstone had been running, for God knows how long.

  She didn’t know what to do, Claudine recognized, hating the admission of failure even to herself. She’d always known what to do, always been in control, always had the right answer. Suddenly not to know wasn’t acceptable: not acceptable at all. She definitely needed a lawyer, someone with a different viewpoint and better legal knowledge than she had: someone to tell her what to do. Not tell. Advise. A lawyer wouldn’t have advised her to keep Warwick’s note. She wouldn’t tell him about that. Wouldn’t have to. It had no relevance. Did Warwick’s passport have the relevance Toomey clearly implied, the passport she’d recovered from among Warwick’s personal possessions within an hour of her weekend return to The Hague and was now in the office safe, together with the suicide note?

  No, she decided, feeling a physical sink in her stomach. European Union passports weren’t stamped on journeys between member countries, not even on re-entry into Britain which retained its border controls. Toomey should have known that. Would have known that, just as he would have known he could have got Warwick’s travel dates from the Home Office’s travel records, from which he’d got the details of her absences from London.

  It had been a trick demand and she hadn’t realized it. And to have responded as she had would have conveyed the impression she had something to hide, which she didn’t. Circumstantial, as so much else was circumstantial. But damning, as so much else was damning. And the bastard had tricked her: beaten her.

  In the end, still undecided, Claudine did nothing, which was as alien to her as not knowing what to do because she regarded both as weakness.

  During the working day she was mostly able to concentrate upon the investigation in which she was a leader, not a suspect. At Claudine’s suggestion Rosetti addressed to her the specimen shipments he wanted tested, ensuring detailed records were established by the diligent Yvette from which Claudine was able to pressure Europol forensic scientists to have their results and findings waiting for the pathologist’s return. Apart from just one, they all were, together with copies of Kurt Volker’s dossiers.

  Rosetti entered the incident room flanked by Poulard and Siemen, as if they were guarding an asset.

  It only took Rosetti an hour to go through the forensic examinations, after which he announced: ‘Right! I’m ready.’

  He addressed the remark to Claudine, as the person in authority, and she knew the two detectives would have seen it the same way.

  ‘We are, too,’ said Poulard.

  For the first time they used the larger conference table, because Claudine included Volker in the presentation. She carefully placed herself with him on one side, while the two detectives sat on the other and Rosetti dominated at the head. Claudine thought that for someone who had carried out so many operations in such a short time Rosetti looked remarkably relaxed and alert. The other two men, by contrast, looked strained and tired. It was the first time she’d seen Poulard in clothes crumpled by uninterrupted wear: oddly, the Frenchman appeared more dishevelled than Volker.

  ‘I’ve taken the examinations some way beyond what we knew in any of the cases,’ began Rosetti. ‘It’s for you to decide whether it helps strengthen the profile …’ he went from Claudine to the detectives ‘ … or carries the investigation in any forward direction.’

  From the way the Italian phrased his opening it appeared to Claudine as if he hadn’t yet talked his findings through in any detail with the other men, despite travelling with them. She said: ‘If you’ve discovered more, I’m sure it will.’

  Neither detective spoke. Poulard was affecting nonchalance.

  Rosetti extended the hesitation. ‘I hope you’re prepared from the photographs.’

  ‘We’ve all investigated murders before,’ said Poulard impatiently.

  ‘Not murders like these,’ said the pathologist.

  ‘Why don’t we get on?’

  Rosetti refused to react, setting out in readiness before him yet more photographs to illustrate what he intended to recount. There was no possible doubt about three different killers or methods of killing, he began. So he’d divided them into their respective categories. He set out the first of the photographs as he talked. The genital disfigurement of the five had been carried out with a cutting instrument far sharper than any used on the other two groups. That same instrument had in every
case begun the dismemberment with a bone-cut made by a fine-toothed blade. The bones had then been separated neatly, he thought by an electric rather than a hand-held saw. Saws had also been used on the girl in Cologne and the two white girls, in Brussels and Amsterdam. The cutting on the two white girls had again been started by a single knife-like instrument, much blunter than in Céleste’s case, causing extensive after-death bruising. There’d been no knife or cutting instrument used before the saw in Cologne, so the flesh had been extensively ripped. The bone damage in these three cases was consistent with the use of a hand-held saw. Only the five in the first group had any bone damage additional to that to be expected where the limbs had been amputated and the head severed. There were fractures to ankles, forearms and in two cases to ribs. It confirmed, in his opinion, that the amputations had been carried out without anaesthetic and while the victims were fully conscious. That would be consistent with the breaks having been caused by the violence of the convulsions with which, in agony difficult to conceive, the victims had strained and thrown themselves against whatever secured them. There was an element of expertise in the dismemberment of the five, although it wasn’t medical. There was no expertise in the other cases. All three had been hacked and slashed.

  Around the table went more photographs. Able visually to examine and measure every part of every body, Rosetti had discovered that in none of the first, five-body group did the limbs match up as they should have done with the torsos, quite apart from the one leg that had never been recovered. In each case, with each leg, there was about eight centimetres missing. He didn’t think, either, that one leg found against the Drake statue in England belonged to the rest of the body that had been recovered in England: he’d taken flesh and hair follicle samples for a DNA match which would take at least another week to confirm: the DNA requests he’d made were the outstanding tests still to be completed by the forensic laboratory. He couldn’t explain the blood loss, which was not only the result of the amputations. On the buttocks and backs

  - or on the front, depending upon how the torsos were left after the dismemberment - there should have been post-death lividity, the appearance of bruising where the blood had puddled within the body. There was no such marking on any torso.

  ‘Which isn’t the biggest mystery about these five: or what I believe to have been a factor in all five, although I can’t prove it,’ apologized Rosetti. ‘I can only establish it in three instances and wouldn’t have investigated it at all if the English pathologist hadn’t insisted he’d discovered it during his original autopsy and included it in his report. The doctor who carried out the examination on the first French victim and the Austrian pathologist in Vienna both admitted leaving out the same findings because there was no logical explanation apart from mortuary error …’

  ‘What?’ demanded Poulard.

  The exasperation was over-stressed and Claudine was sure the Frenchman was paler now than he had been when Rosetti started his presentation.

  ‘There were ice splinters in the blood: blood taken before the bodies went into mortuary refrigeration. Body temperatures were taken at the scenes where the torsos were found - that’s standard procedure - and all the torsos were colder than the medical examiners expected, even in the cases where no ice splintering in the blood was recorded …’ Yet again Rosetti looked at Claudine. ‘I guess that compounds our problems: it’s a factor, definitely, in three out of those five murders but I don’t know how it’s going to help.’

  Claudine smiled. ‘It helps a great deal.’

  ‘What?’ repeated the ashen Poulard, convincing Claudine that the Italian had waited until now to detail his examination.

  ‘They were deep frozen,’ said Claudine simply. ‘It explains so very much else.’

  Rosetti nodded doubtfully. ‘It would explain the body cleanliness. Ice would form, externally. And clean the skin when it was sponged off when it melted as the bodies thawed. But blood pooling would have been much more obvious. And I’ve already told you there isn’t any.’

  ‘But there are missing leg parts,’ reminded Claudine in her turn, conscious of the bewildered looks between the two detectives and Kurt Volker. Deciding the guess was justified, she said: ‘All these five bodies are marked by three parallel lacerations, in the case of the girls down the stomach into the genital area, with the boy down his back towards his anus. Is there anything specific about those incisions?’

  Rosetti looked at Claudine with his head to one side, smiling curiously. ‘Like what?’

  ‘Uniformity of measurement?’

  He shook his head, apologetic again. ‘There are variations, in every case.’

  ‘You’ve got the measurements?’

  ‘Of course,’ said the pathologist, turning to his own notes.

  ‘There are three downward parallel cuts,’ Claudine pointed out, leading everyone around the table to their individual copies of Volker’s files and turning to the reprinted photographs. ‘But look at them again. They’re not the same. The central laceration, in every case, is formed by the genital or anal mutilation: by the knife or whatever sharp cutting instrument was used. Ignore it. Concentrate upon the outer two. And what Kurt’s computers prove. In each of the five cases those outer two lines are forty-five centimetres apart and measure precisely the same. And look where those lines would continue …’

  ‘The legs,’ said Rosetti, nodding as he began to understand.

  The other three men were blank-faced.

  ‘The legs,’ agreed Claudine. ‘The very tops of which, where they would join the torso, are missing in every case.’

  ‘Hooks!’ declared the pathologist.

  ‘Hooks,’ agreed Claudine again. ‘The sort used to suspend meat carcases in cold storage. These five were slaughtered, just like animals. Cut up, like animals. And then hung on racks sometime before each was ferried around the country to be displayed. That’s how the blood drained from them from the amputations, without leaving any trace of lividity. And why those eight or so centimetres of the legs in which the hooks were embedded were removed, to prevent its being obvious …’

  Claudine looked around the assembled group. No one spoke. Only Rosetti smiled.

  ‘I had some forensic tests carried out,’ admitted Claudine, alert for the sharp look from Poulard at her ignoring the working arrangements they’d reached before the men’s departure to France. Going to the report which had arrived for her with Rosetti’s tests she said: ‘The wire which secured the hands of our five victims is of a malleable type extensively used in the food packaging industry …’ She looked up. ‘Holland is the country of manufacture. Yet it was not the type used to secure the hands of the girls found in Amsterdam and Brussels …’ They all looked at her expectantly. ‘That comes from somewhere in the East: it hasn’t yet been possible to specify which country, although the restoration of the iron, steel and metal industries was one of the first efforts to revitalize the economy of East Germany after reunification.’

  ‘What about the wire that secured the girl in Cologne?’ demanded Rosetti.

  ‘East German.’ Claudine waited for the point about the food industry to be recognized by the two detectives. When it wasn’t, she instructed: ‘Go to the maps Kurt has marked. And see how he’s connected where the parts of these five bodies were found, particularly in France …’ She waited while they located the section. ‘Every line parallels a major highway, an autoroute or a motorway or an autobahn - the main delivery routes in every country. The bodies were moved around each country without the slightest risk of discovery in the refrigerated delivery trucks into which they were transferred from refrigerated storage …’

  ‘Food delivery lorries?’ demanded Siemen, his face twisted in disgust.

  ‘The sort of food delivery lorries that go up and down those roads every hour and every day,’ nodded Claudine. ‘But more importantly, every hour of every night. Look at the times when the remains were found. Always first thing in the morning. They were delivered, overnight
. Look at another graph comparison: the Celeste parts have always been found in the same sequence - head, hands, torso, legs, always beginning on a Monday and finishing on a Friday. A full delivery week.’

  ‘Good God!’ exclaimed Poulard. The disgust had been Siemen’s but the revulsion was the Frenchman’s. He only just managed to turn the retch into a strangled cough. Quickly recovering, he said: ‘A way forward at last for a proper investigation!’

  ‘Two ways forward,’ corrected Claudine, spelling out the significance of the wire analysis the detectives had missed. ‘It could be a long process of elimination but the manufacturer of the wire could be established by a process of scientific elimination, in Holland and in the East. From manufacturers it could eventually be narrowed down to purchasers.’

  ‘It does fit!’ said Rosetti enthusiastically. ‘All of it fits.’

  ‘Let’s see what else fits,’ prompted Claudine.

  All of the five upon which they were concentrating were well nourished, resumed Rosetti. None showed any sign of organic disease, although the trachea and lungs of one of the French victims contained minute particles of cloth fibre. In two cases the heels of the right hands were substantially calloused. There were also odd callouses to the feet of the boy, between his big and second toe and beneath each heel.

  Reading aloud the forensic results on his submitted specimens, the pathologist said that although there was not at that moment a confirmed recovery, the laboratory was confident of extracting DNA strings from the semen deposits from the boy, both girls in France and the Chinese girl in Vienna.

  Coming up from the laboratory notes, Rosetti said: ‘The semen deposits in each of these cases was considerable, like the internal bruising. There was actually some anal membrane splitting with the boy. And although I recovered no semen from the other girl there was again substantial bruising at the base of the vaginal introitus …’