Mind/Reader

by Brian Freemantle

  The echoing sound of Jones tapping his microphone to test its sound level partially silenced the noise, which grew even quieter when he began reading from a prepared statement. The room abruptly whitened under the glare of camera lights. The media director welcomed them to the first press conference of the first investigation in which Europol had become involved. Europol believed it had already made important and useful contributions to its initial assignment and was confident it would make more. With the expectation that this would initiate a continuing and fruitful relationship between Europol and the media, he introduced Poulard and Siemen as ‘the two senior officers in charge of the combined investigation’.

  Poulard took the microphone, obviously by prearrangement against which Claudine was sure Siemen hadn’t argued. The Frenchman began confidently, obviously well prepared, informative-sounding words not immediately obvious as generalities. Their overview of the crimes spread throughout the EU had enabled them to suggest valuable lines of inquiry. They expected early identification of the tragic victims if the countries involved accepted their amnesty suggestion. Establishing a Europol Web site on the Internet was an innovation in criminal investigation they expected to make full use of not just in this case but in other inquiries and to be copied beyond the European Union to become standard police procedure worldwide.

  In front of her Claudine was aware of shifts of impatience throughout the room. The press officer on the stage was fidgeting too. She was ready for the challenge when it came, within seconds of the conference’s being opened for questions, from a swarthy, dark-haired Frenchman who wanted to know precisely what progress had been made towards solving the murders in his country. Claudine only just prevented herself from wincing when Poulard repeated his valuable lines of inquiry assurance.

  ‘What are they?’ demanded the questioner.

  ‘Obviously I don’t want to endanger inquiries being conducted by national forces by disclosing operational details,’ tried Poulard.

  ‘Are you satisfied with the progress of inquiries conducted by national forces?’ called another Frenchman close to the first speaker.

  Poulard’s hesitation was sufficient answer, before his attempted evasion. ‘These are not easy investigations.’

  ‘Is it not a fact that Europol is trying to force its amnesty proposal upon the countries in which killings have occurred?’ asked a third.

  ‘No, that is not the case,’ intruded Walter Jones, with attempted forcefulness.

  ‘So the idea was put to each country prior to this conference?’ demanded the first man.

  Again it was the press officer who replied, grabbing an imagined escape. ‘Each country was advised by its respective Europol commissioner.’

  ‘When?’ The demand came in a chorus from at least four different parts of the room.

  The fat man blinked, trapped. ‘I don’t know, precisely.’

  ‘Isn’t it a fact that no approach was made until yesterday: in some cases as late as last night!’

  All the questioners were French, Claudine realized: she recognized two from among the group clustered around Sanglier earlier, which she found curious. Even more curious was why he - or any of the other commissioners - wasn’t breaking in to block the attack with the obvious justification for an amnesty.

  Jones was saying, ‘The question was whether countries were informed before this conference. They were.’

  ‘Would you accept that cooperation between Europol and national forces is bad and that the investigation is being hampered because of it?’ demanded the swarthy man.

  ‘No,’ replied Poulard. ‘Any difficulties there might have been in the beginning were totally understandable. Europol was a new organization. A working system of liaison didn’t exist until these cases.’

  ‘Now it does?’ demanded someone quite close to where Claudine sat.

  ‘Yes,’ said Poulard shortly.

  ‘Europol’s contribution was totally unnecessary in solving the Cologne murder, wasn’t it?’ The question came, in German, from a bald man near the front.

  Both Jones and Poulard looked to Siemen, glad of the respite. Siemen said: ‘We suggested a line of inquiry upon which Cologne were already working: our guidance speeded up their case.’

  ‘That’s not what Cologne says,’ insisted the man.

  ‘I was not aware of any disagreement when I was there for the arrests and arraignment.’

  ‘Did Cologne tell you of their line of inquiry, before you suggested it?’ asked another German.

  ‘There was no confusion to cause any delay in the arrests,’ tried Siemen.

  ‘So they didn’t!’ said the questioner.

  ‘It was not a problem, merely a difficulty of establishing a system to which my colleague has already referred.’

  The stone-faced commissioners on the dais reminded Claudine of funfair targets, waiting to be shot down. This was degenerating into the last thing they must have wanted or expected and they only had themselves to blame. Poulard and Siemen couldn’t be coached in an hour or two to confront trained questioners who had been much more thoroughly briefed by irritated or even hostile sources. Or had the sources been irritated and hostile? she wondered, remembering again the group around Sanglier. Was it conceivable that what she was uncomfortably witnessing had been initiated far closer to home, in this very building? It was the sort of paranoid question she despised from others within Europol but it fitted quite a few other inexplicable things that seemed to happen around Henri Sanglier. Impatiently she thrust it aside but not out of mind.

  In front of her an Indian journalist was on his feet and Claudine began concentrating upon the questioning again as the man demanded: ‘Why was it not thought necessary to advise my government before creating this Internet Web site of which Europol appear so proud?’

  Claudine didn’t expect Siemen to take the question but was glad that he did. The German said: ‘Our role - Europol’s role - is to do all we can to help local police forces solve a dreadful spate of crimes. We are not treating any country with disrespect. We are trying to work as quickly and as effectively as possible. The quickest and most effective way of alerting the Asian countries from which the victims came of the Net appeal was through the well established and accepted information system provided by Interpol.’

  For a few brief moments the attack was stemmed. Then, quite unnecessarily, Poulard added: ‘From the lines of inquiry I have already spoken about, from the amnesty proposal and the Internet Web, we have every reason to expect an early breakthrough.’

  Briefly Claudine closed her eyes in despair and thought Jesus fucking Christ! When she opened them four journalists were on their feet, vying for Walter Jones’ eye. Before he nominated a questioner the first French journalist in the front shouted over the noise: ‘How early? Hours, days, weeks?’

  ‘I don’t want to be specific,’ said the panicked detective.

  ‘But there’s going to be an arrest?’ shouted someone else.

  ‘A development,’ said Poulard.

  ‘Which country?’ yelled the bald-headed German.

  ‘We can’t disclose that,’ said Siemen, trying to help.

  It had to stop, thought Claudine desperately. Why didn’t the bloody press director step in and do something? As the thought came to her she saw Sanglier lean forward to attract the attention of the fat man, who stretched backwards for the whispered exchange. Over the hubbub, the man came back against the smaller table and said: ‘I am asked by Commissioner Sanglier, who is in overall charge of the Europol task force, to assure you that the moment the breakthrough occurs it will be announced by the country and the force concerned.’

  Claudine wasn’t sure if it had been Sanglier’s intention to be identified as the unit controller but the intervention was brilliant: the man’s name immediately drew the pack away from the beleaguered detectives.

  The uproar of questions increased and Walter Jones had actually to stand, waving his arms for attention and shouting that he would cancel t
he conference unless some order was restored. Before that happened there was a flurry of movement among the commissioners and Claudine saw Sanglier moving his chair forward to the front table.

  When they settled again Sanglier simply held up an autocratic hand and the hall fell into virtual silence. It would, he knew, look perfect on television but beneath the outward calm he bubbled with several furies, predominantly at Poulard for his inept promise of a breakthrough but also at himself, the rest of the commissioners and the media division for not anticipating the press hysteria, which they should have done since that very hysteria had brought them into the investigation in the first place. He was also annoyed at being identified as the head of the task force before there was an absolutely safe headline-grabbing development for which he could take the unreserved credit.

  The questioning was still dominated by the French press but with much greater respect than had been shown to the two detectives. Knowing that it was ridiculous to attempt it - deciding instead to turn the accusations back upon Europol’s accusers - Sanglier didn’t deny the existence of ill feeling from national forces. Instead he said it was entirely an attitude directed towards Europol, which those within the organization greatly regretted and did not in any way reciprocate. Conscious of the uncomfortable shifting of the commissioners behind him, Sanglier added that he and his colleagues hoped the current investigation would lead to the early disappearance of such attitudes. Europol did not consider itself in competition with any national force. It was an organization with every modern policing technique and technology, as they had been shown that morning. Indeed, Europol’s major contribution in these cases had been its accurate profiles. Here he hesitated, turning from the questioner who’d prompted his response to the bald-headed German in the front to suggest, if there was any doubt about the help Europol had given in the German case, that he directly challenge the Cologne police to produce Europol’s specific profile.

  ‘It was brilliant,’ he insisted, anxious to make the point for which the conference had virtually been staged. ‘Both the amnesty and the Internet Web were profiling suggestions.’

  Claudine tensed for the questions the profiling revelation might bring, but almost at once Sanglier picked up an amnesty query, producing the explanation Poulard should have given but had forgotten: that as any legal dispensation would apply only to victims’ families it was not a sudden opening of borders to illegal immigrants.

  Claudine was actually deciding, admiringly, that it was a remarkable performance when the question she thought had been overlooked was posed. It came from the men whom Scott Burrows had identified as Newsweek correspondents and was, inevitably, how much an FBI profiler seconded from Washington had helped create the murder profiles.

  Sanglier concentrated upon the questioner, looking at neither Burrows nor Claudine, when he said that for operational reasons he did not want to disclose such details. And with the impotent anger burning through her Claudine realized everyone in the room would take the absence of a denial as confirmation that the psychological guidance had come from an unnamed American, not anyone else.

  From the look Burrows directed at her from across the room it was obvious he thought so, too.

  At the other end of the hall Henri Sanglier was gripped by a new and greater fury than all the others at recognizing, too late, what he had done.

  Needing physical action to vent her anger Claudine thrust out of the hall before the conference ended. Her initial thought was to quit the building altogether but just as quickly she recognized the petulance and was embarrassed by it. Instead, to calm down, she took the longer route around the building to get to the incident room. Yvette said nothing had come in during the afternoon and Rosetti and Volker had both left for the evening. Claudine waited almost an hour, long after she knew the press briefing was over, but neither Poulard nor Siemen returned.

  It was dark by the time she got home. The message light was blinking and when she played the answering machine back she heard Bickerstone protesting that she hadn’t called and saying that he was probably making the Paris trip in the next two or three days, so could she get back to him.

  The replay ended as the telephone rang again.

  ‘Claudine!’ said a voice she knew at once. ‘Henri wants you to come to dinner. So do I, very much! Let’s make plans!’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  So successfully did things appear to be going in his favour that, once again, Henri Sanglier suspected the mediation of divine intervention.

  Within just five hours of the digitalized photographs and descriptions being put into the Web the white victim in Brussels was named as Inka Obenski and the girl in Amsterdam identified as Anna Zockowski. Both had extensive police records for prostitution and theft in their native Warsaw, where the computer enthusiast superintendent in charge of vice had accessed the Europol appeal site the moment it came on line and - initially for his own interest - run a manual comparison through their uncomputerized criminal records. And got a perfect match. His excited response came directly on to Volker’s screen. Claudine, Poulard and Siemen crowded behind him, watching the information materialize in front of them with the barely controlled excitement of prospectors seeing the first dull glint in a washing sieve.

  To Poulard it really was gold. He broke away as soon as he assessed its significance - his escape from any censure - to make the first contact with Henri Sanglier.

  It prompted an entirely different thought from Claudine, although she showed no immediate reaction. She needed to think it through thoroughly to find any flaws for herself before discussing it with Kurt Volker.

  Poulard’s call reached Sanglier an hour before the commissioners’ meeting convened overnight to review the complete video of the previous day’s conference. Sanglier had already watched it privately himself before turning on the television news and reading a wide selection of European newspapers that morning.

  The coverage was far beyond his expectations. Nowhere in anything he saw, heard or read was there any serious criticism or condemnation of Europol. Instead, national police forces and even governments were pilloried for obstructing the investigation: three German newspapers took up Sanglier’s demand that the Cologne police produce, in full, Europol’s profile describing ahead of their arrest who the murderers of Sulva Atilla were most likely to be.

  Most satisfying of all - wiping away the very last residue of regret at coming forward as he had been forced to do - were several newspaper and television comparisons, some even with archival photographs, between Sanglier and his father. La Monde carried the phrase he liked best, the lion son of a lion father.

  Sanglier decided the unintended episode marked the beginning of his political career.

  The only smudge on an otherwise unclouded horizon was the suggestion of American involvement - intrusion, a Belgian newspaper called it - in the preparation of the profiles, but so overwhelmingly favourable was the coverage that it did not concern Sanglier as much as it might otherwise have done. More worrying - although something momentarily to be put aside - was Francoise’s account of her strained telephone conversation with Claudine Carter the previous night. And Scott Burrows’ written request, which lay before him, for a meeting. Buoyed as he was by everything else, Sanglier was sure both were setbacks that could be overcome. Considering how bad it could have been - and almost was - the escape had been miraculous.

  He scheduled separate meetings with the American and Claudine for the afternoon, leaving the morning clear for the emergency gathering of commissioners. He intentionally arrived last to avoid prior contact with any of them. They were, in fact, all seated when he entered the room. They looked expectantly at him, waiting for his lead, and Sanglier decided their automatic deference gave the revolving chairmanship little purpose beyond political necessity. He was in charge whoever occupied the position. He proved it, to his own satisfaction, by at once demanding they watch the video without any prior discussion. No one objected.

  At its end Villi
ers said: ‘I think we should congratulate our colleague on a masterly performance.’

  There were mutterings of agreement from around the table. Quickly, Sanglier announced the Internet identification of the Dutch and Belgian victims. And then sat savouring the realization settling among the group.

  ‘But that means—’ started Villiers, only to be cut off by Sanglier.

  ‘—that in less than thirty-six hours we’ve got the promised breakthrough. And the announcement can be made by Europol. It does, of course, totally justify the Web site and vindicate, if indeed any further vindication is necessary after yesterday, linking an amnesty to the continuing identification appeal for the other victims.’ Sanglier was quite relaxed, moving his attention from one commissioner to another as he talked: if he ordered it, most of them would jump backwards through a blazing hoop, he thought. He went on: ‘In our announcement we shall, of course, acknowledge the vigilance of the Polish authorities. Name the officer even.’

  ‘What about Brussels and Amsterdam?’ demanded Villiers, with a personal as well as professional interest.

  Sanglier looked unnecessarily at his watch. ‘Both were fully advised an hour ago. By which I mean not just told of the identification but faxed copies of the crime sheets we received from Warsaw on both women. Poulard and Siemen are already on their way to Amsterdam, to work with the vice division there. I’m expecting the invitation from Brussels before the day is out. Depending upon what Poulard tells me I shall decide whether it’s necessary to draft more of our people into either city. Quite clearly the profile was right: these two killings were quite separate from the other five, so my feeling is that extra manpower from here will be unnecessary.’ He knew he sounded authoritative, on top of the situation, and he was pleased.

  ‘Had there been any contact from Warsaw before yesterday’s conference?’ asked Holland’s Hans Maes, the other personally involved commissioner.

  ‘There is a sex trade from East to West. It was a logical line of inquiry. I understand there has been frequent contact between my officers not just with Poland but Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Romania …’ Sanglier hesitated, considering whether to extend the lie. Unable to foresee any danger, he said: ‘I understand the speed with which we were informed today resulted from those earlier contacts.’