Mind/Reader

by Brian Freemantle

  Claudine was prepared for a bad day and it became one from the beginning. She overslept, which she rarely did, and could actually see the nail that had punctured her front off-side tyre. She decided against delaying herself further by changing it but it took longer than she expected to get a taxi and she missed her intended airport train. The next one only just got her there in time. She didn’t have to use her inhaler but it took several minutes for her breathing to settle after belting herself in.

  Andre Foulan was waiting as arranged when she arrived at the oncologist’s office and the gravity of his expression told her before she heard the words.

  ‘Beyond the pancreas, even. There’s a tumour in the small intestine, as well. I can control the pain for the moment.’

  ‘Does Gerard know?’

  ‘I have asked your mother to tell him.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘A month. Two. Or it could be next week.’

  ‘Is there any point in going on with the treatment?’

  ‘I never believe in giving up until the very end. There’s always hope. And God. Miracles sometimes occur.’

  Claudine didn’t welcome the religious reference. ‘But the liver cancer will be painless?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is there a chance she’ll die from that, before the other things get worse?’

  Foulan gave an uncertain shoulder movement. ‘No one can say.’

  ‘I don’t want my mother in agony,’ declared Claudine flatly.

  ‘I understand. I promise you I’ll make her as comfortable as I can.’

  ‘My mother is a very proud woman. I don’t want her eaten away into a shell, so that she doesn’t have any dignity left, either.’

  The man looked steadily at Claudine for several moments. ‘I understand that, too.’

  ‘How well do you understand what I am saying?’ Claudine asked, as directly as she felt able.

  ‘I promise I’ll make her as comfortable as I can,’ Foulan repeated.

  ‘And enable her to maintain her dignity? Not to become hollowed out?’

  Foulan straightened in his chair. ‘I don’t think I can give you any stronger assurances than I have.’

  Claudine wanted more. ‘Despite everything you can do, she’ll suffer?’

  ‘If the abdominal or pancreatic growths become dominant.’

  ‘I’m asking for positive help, doctor.’

  ‘I know what you are asking for.’

  Claudine waited. The silence lasted a very long time. Finally Foulan broke the gaze and said: ‘As a doctor I took an oath to preserve and maintain life for as long as possible. Out of my respect for your mother I have already gone beyond what could be considered ethical in meeting you like this, without her knowledge. I think now that might have been a mistake.’

  Claudine later regretted leaving the surgery without thanking the man, at the time not believing she had anything to thank him for.

  Claudine was shocked when she got to the rue Grenette, for totally opposite reasons from those she’d prepared herself for. Her mother looked healthier than she had on her wedding day, frequently getting up from what was now her permanent table to bustle among the tables and bully the waiters: several times she briefly took up her old station, greeting arriving customers. From the finger-touching, shoulder-caressing way things were between the older woman and Gerard, Claudine knew at once her mother had not told the man of the new cancers.

  Monique maintained the pretence in the upstairs apartment during the afternoon break between lunch and dinner, insisting she’d never felt better and was blissfully happy with Gerard and didn’t expect to need much more chemotherapy. Her excitement at Rosetti’s visit quickly became irritation at Claudine’s inability to answer all her questions about the man. Finally she erupted: ‘How can you have a relationship with a man you know so little about?’

  ‘I told you we’re not having a relationship,’ Claudine reminded her.

  Rosetti telephoned with his time of arrival and Claudine went to the station to meet the TGV, abandoning the intention to spend every possible moment with her mother to relieve the strain on the older woman of having to maintain the constant artificial ebullience.

  She was early and again, briefly, felt the skin prickle of being looked at. She imagined she actually saw a Chinese on the furthest platform, but didn’t admit it to Rosetti when he arrived. He insisted upon detouring to the Sunday flower market which gave her the opportunity to tell him of the cancer spread. He didn’t search for words. He put his arms around her shoulders and held her very tight and momentarily, curious at how much she needed the comfort, Claudine thought she was going to break down. She didn’t and was glad. Rosetti helped by talking briskly of the Marseille murder, announcing that yet again he’d recovered three different DNA strings from what had evidently been a gang rape.

  Claudine was nervous her mother would pepper Rosetti with the questions about himself she hadn’t been able to answer, but instead Monique adopted the role of grande dame and Rosetti played up to the performance, paying respectful homage. Claudine discerned the immediate approval. Her mother had never behaved like this with Warwick: had barely accepted him, even.

  Gerard personally prepared the meal of quail in a sharp berry sauce and then joined them to eat it at Monique’s special table. What the woman wanted to know emerged naturally in conversation. There was instant rapport with Gerard when Rosetti said that his father had been a chef, and from the conversation that ensued Claudine understood how the Italian had learned to cook so well. There was a family villa in Tuscany that his brother occupied and a family legend that a grandfather had been a Mafia don, which he didn’t believe because tradition would have demanded his father be one too and initiate him into the society. In the feudal region of Tuscany it did no harm, however, to keep the legend alive when dealing with officialdom. Claudine was reminded of how long she had lived away from home when her mother talked of enjoying opera, which Claudine had forgotten, and conducted an appreciative conversation with Rosetti, who was manifestly even more knowledgeable.

  ‘Her husband liked jazz: made her like it too,’ protested Monique, as if the hobby equated with bare-breasted mud wrestling.

  ‘I promise to educate her,’ laughed Rosetti.

  The open acknowledgement of a relationship came quite naturally and embarrassed no one, but Claudine wondered if her mother believed she and Rosetti were lovers. She wasn’t any more worried about the misunderstanding than she had been in front of the smirking Poulard in London.

  As they were leaving for the airport Monique invited him to come again soon and stay longer and Rosetti said it would be difficult because he returned most weekends to Rome. In the taxi Claudine said: ‘Would you have talked about Flavia, if she’d asked?’

  ‘Of course,’ he frowned. ‘You’ve told her I’m married, haven’t you?’

  ‘Yes. I told her we weren’t lovers, too.’

  ‘Do you think she believes you?’

  ‘I’m not sure, after today. Thank you for being as kind as you were.’

  As they settled themselves on board the plane, Claudine said: ‘It’s difficult to believe she’s as ill as she is, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m told that’s the way it is.’

  ‘It won’t last, though, will it?’ She turned, so she could look at him.

  ‘No,’ he said, looking back.

  ‘I don’t want her to suffer. To be reduced to a freak by everything they do to keep her alive.’

  ‘There’s morphine. Heroin. We talked about it before.’

  Claudine paused, refusing to speak over the engine sound as the aircraft lifted off. When the shuttle began to level out she said: ‘Foulan says there’ll still be pain. But it won’t just. be the pain. Worse, for her, will be what she becomes.’

  ‘Did you discuss it with Foulan?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘That his oath was to preserve life.’

  ‘It is.
’

  ‘Did you take the Hippocratic oath?’

  Rosetti held her eyes, not replying. Eventually he said: ‘I qualified as a doctor.’

  ‘I thought you would have done.’

  ‘I don’t like this conversation, Claudine.’

  ‘I’m not asking you to do anything. Just help me to do it. All I need is something in the hypnotic drug range. And then some potassium. There would not be a post-mortem, upon someone as ill as she is: someone expected to die.’

  ‘Stop it.’

  ‘Please!’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘I’m begging you, Hugo.’

  ‘Don’t.’

  ‘Think about it! Do you imagine that’s how she’ll want to be, for me and for Gerard?’

  ‘Don’t you imagine I haven’t thought like this about Flavia?’

  ‘It’s not a comparison and you know it. Flavia could recover. Still damaged, possibly. But she could recover. My mother can’t.’

  ‘I don’t believe you could do it, when the moment came.’

  ‘I could,’ said Claudine. ‘I love her enough to do it.’ Rosetti turned positively away. ‘I’m sorry you asked me.’

  ‘So am I.’

  ‘Let’s not make it worse by fighting about it.’

  ‘I don’t intend to.’

  Nevertheless, she pulled away, looking unseeing through the aircraft window, and he in turn drew himself towards the aisle, so there was a physical space between them. She walked slightly ahead when they disembarked at Schiphol and stayed ahead on the escalator taking them down to the rail platform level for the train link to The Hague. He allowed her the space, needing it himself. It wasn’t, in fact, easily achieved. The platform was crowded, people jostling into them at the end of a weekend, and he was glad of the echoing announcement of the train’s arrival.

  So was Claudine. She’d apologize on the train. She’d been wrong - taken too much for granted - asking him as bluntly as she had: stupidly expected him not to have a moral problem when she’d known too well of another far less understandable morality holding back their relationship.

  She became conscious of the approaching train at the same moment as she heard Rosetti shout ‘Claudine!’ but then everything happened too fast to distinguish. She felt herself shoved sideways and turned at Rosetti’s yell of pain and saw a spray of blood and then, terrified, a huge outstretched knife and a lurching Chinese trying to change direction towards her.

  She instinctively put her arm up and felt the burn as the blade cut completely along her arm, from wrist to shoulder. Rosetti hit out, not a proper punch but in a warding-off gesture. It caught the stumbling man on the shoulder, pushing him further off balance towards the platform edge. He turned and seemed to reach out with his free hand, as if expecting someone to pull him back, but instead he continued to fall backwards, mouth opening in a shout Claudine didn’t hear, directly beneath the wheels of the train.

  She only vaguely heard the screams of the people around her beneath the screech of the train brakes, and then the man vanished beneath the train. All three carriages passed completely over him, severing him in two. Incredibly his features were completely unmarked. Claudine stared at the face, down the left-hand side of which was a deep, half-moon scar.

  She turned to Rosetti and calmly said: ‘The name he used was Cheng. We should check his DNA with what you got from Ratri. Indira, too.’

  Then she stared at her blood-drenched arm, feeling the pain for the first time, and the shock hit her. She screamed and fainted.

  It was an hour later in the very centre of Amsterdam that another door closed, quite literally, in the overlapping investigations.

  The Amsterdam vice squad had diligently maintained their surveillance on the house in Roomen Straat identified by the Polish prostitute and an all-unit mobilization went out the moment the Warsaw-registered Mercedes turned into the street: by the time Karel Kaczmarek stopped vehicles were in place at either end to block it. Kaczmarek was filmed urging three girls - one of whom later emerged to be just ten years old - out of the car and into the building. Police did not move until everyone was inside. Then, having had time to prepare, they completely surrounded the house, actually entering the narrow garden at the rear, before the inspector in charge hammered on the front door and identified himself through an amplified loud hailer. Kaczmarek and the three girls ran straight into the rear garden ambush.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Neither wound was life-threatening in itself but both Hugo Rosetti and Claudine Carter almost died. Like any professional assassin the man only ever known as Cheng had treated the bayonet knife he’d wielded to cause infection if the injury he inflicted wasn’t fatal: forensic tests on Cheng’s knife showed the blade had been smeared with his own excreta.

  Claudine’s poisoning was made more severe by the allergy link with her asthma. For more than a week she slipped in and out of consciousness, breathing by ventilator, fed by drip and drained by catheter. Her blood was completely changed.

  Her first unsteady visitor in the second week, after she’d come off the ventilator, was Rosetti, still a patient on the next floor: his left arm was strapped across his chest and her first horrified thought at seeing the limp dressing gown sleeve was that it had been amputated.

  ‘It almost was,’ grinned Rosetti. From police interviews with witnesses he’d been the unintended victim. There were accounts of Cheng suddenly emerging from the rear of the platform crowd with the knife extended like a lance, which was Rosetti’s first recollection. If he hadn’t pushed her aside she would have been impaled in the very centre of her back. Instead the knife had gone into his arm, deeply cutting the muscle. But it didn’t embed itself, which was why Cheng had still been able to slash Claudine as badly as he had. Rosetti’s wound, although deep, only needed ten stitches. Claudine’s required forty, finishing with skin edges taped together where the cut only penetrated just beneath the surface. He warned her the infection would have widened her wound, still tightly bound, as it had his but said plastic surgery could virtually eradicate any trace.

  ‘I’m going to keep mine like a war wound,’ he said.

  ‘So you saved my life?’

  the papers called me a hero. Makes a change from you getting all the publicity! But don’t get jealous. You still got your share.’ He made a vague gesture beyond the door. ‘We’re so famous we’ve got police guards.’

  ‘Thank you for saving me.’

  Although he was sitting, Rosetti gave a mock bow. ‘You’re very welcome.’

  She recognized the forced humour. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I spoke to Gerard yesterday. Your mother didn’t feel well enough to go down to the restaurant.’

  ‘I’ll go today,’ said Claudine. She actually tried to push herself up in the bed, to swing her legs out, forgetting the drip and the catheter. Dizziness engulfed her and she couldn’t stop herself falling back on to the pillows.

  ‘You know you can’t. It’s not necessary yet, anyway. According to Gerard, Foulan thinks it’s temporary. It happens. There’s definitely no pain.’

  The oncologist confirmed it when Claudine immediately spoke to him from the bedside telephone upon which Rosetti had to dial the number. Her mother had already improved since the previous day’s conversation with Gerard. She was to recover fully herself before even contemplating a trip to Lyon. He didn’t think it was necessary but of course she could call daily if she wished. He’d always be available.

  Outside visitors were not permitted until the third week. Sanglier was the first, with David Winslow and Jorge Ortega: the Commission chairmanship had switched to Spain. The police guard would remain while she was in hospital, Ortega promised. She could have permanent protection when she was discharged. Europol would also install security cameras and an alarm system in her apartment. And she could also, of course, carry a weapon.

  ‘It all seems rather dramatic.’

  ‘Someone tried to kill you. Almost succeeded,’ said Ortega.<
br />
  ‘An instant revenge attempt. I don’t think I’m under permanent threat.’

  ‘You can’t be sure of that,’ said Sanglier, feeling it necessary to join in the concern. ‘We did destroy a major criminal enterprise run by the biggest Triad organization in Asia. And you’re publicly associated with having done it.’

  ‘You’re just as publicly associated,’ Claudine pointed out. ‘Do you have all this protection?’

  Instead of answering the man opened his jacket to show the Beretta in its shoulder holster beneath his left arm. Claudine thought the gesture and the gun ridiculous.

  ‘We don’t think you should disregard the danger,’ said Winslow.

  ‘We’ll discuss it when I get out,’ she said. ‘I’d rather talk about what’s happened since I’ve been in here.’

  ‘A lot,’ said Winslow quickly, anxious to be the storyteller. ‘We’ve got fifteen positive DNA traces, including Woon and Li Jian and Zhu Peiyuan here in Amsterdam. And Cheng matched the samples taken from Ratri: Li was positive with her sister.’

  ‘So we’ve got murder charges?’ said Claudine.

  ‘Unchallengeable,’ assured Ortega.

  Into Claudine’s mind came the memory of a cowed, nervously shaking Indian in the Neuilly police station. She’d kept her promise, she thought: the men who’d killed his daughters - been part of it, at least - were going to be punished. She said: ‘What about the amnesty?’

  ‘The families in England and Austria have come forward,’ said Winslow. ‘And another in France.’

  ‘There’ve been votes of appreciation in eight parliaments in the EU,’ said Ortega, as if he personally deserved the praise. ‘Europol’s established.’

  ‘There’s something else you might - or might not - like to know,’ offered Winslow. ‘There isn’t going to be a prosecution against Paul Bickerstone. The Crown Prosecution Service didn’t think Lorimer’s statement was sufficient by itself. Some problem about establishing legal proof, apparently.’

  ‘So the bastard got away with it?’