by Maynard Sims
“Hi, Harry. Sorry I missed you at the office, but it’s been a hell of a day. I mentioned Erik Strasser to Rob, but he hasn’t heard of him either. Sorry. See you in the morning.”
“Message two received today at 8.22 p.m.” Beep. “Harry, it’s Martin. Your Mr. Strasser is something of an enigma. I can track him back to 1998, but before that nothing. No birth or school records. It’s as if he appeared on the German business scene fully formed. But it wasn’t long before he started making a name for himself by buying up struggling software companies. In ten years he’d built himself quite a successful portfolio of different brands. He was so successful that he attracted the attention of the software giant Hematite. They bought him out in 2003 for a cool half a billion euros. They gave him the post of CEO until last year. I still can’t get to the bottom of why he was ousted, but I have a contact in Dusseldorf who’s looking into it for me. Check with me tomorrow and I’ll tell you if we’ve uncovered anything else. Night.” “End of messages.”
Harry walked through to the kitchenette and switched on the kettle. A few minutes later he was sitting on his overstuffed armchair, shoes kicked off and a mug of Colombian in his hand. He switched on the small TV that sat on a battered Ikea bookcase, to watch the late-night news headlines. The newsreader had just launched into the first story when the telephone rang. He let the machine pick it up.
“Harry? It’s Vi. Are you there? Are you still up?” He hauled himself off the couch and went to pick up the phone.
“Hello, Vi.”
“Oh, you are there. I thought you would be. Stephanie just called me and told me you left her over an hour ago. How did it go?”
“Didn’t she tell you?”
“She told me you were very kind and understanding, but didn’t tell me much else.”
“Well, there’s not much else to tell really. I promised her I’d do everything I could to get Alice to go home. Nothing more to say.”
“Well, I can tell you something that, perhaps, you don’t know,” Violet said.
“Fire away.”
“Erik Strasser is not his real name.”
Chapter Nine
“So, what’s his real name, Vi?”
“Anton Markos. He isn’t even German. He’s—”
“Greek,” Harry finished for her.
“Yes.”
“That probably explains Alice’s fascination for him. The girl’s obsessed with the country. Ancient Greece, Greek mythology. He must have told her the truth about himself once he discovered her obsession. How did you find out?”
“I have a friend, Ellen, lives on the island of Kefalonia. She saw the picture on my blog page, recognized him and emailed me this evening.”
“You have a blog page?”
“Don’t sound so surprised. It’s part of my network. How else do you think I get hold of this stuff? I lifted a picture from the Hematite Software online brochure and reposted it on my page, bracketed with question marks.”
“Tell me more.”
“He’s the youngest son of the Markos family. They own large plantations of olive trees in the Chalcedon region in northern Greece. Made millions from the production of olive oil.”
“How did your friend get to hear about him?”
“The family were hit by a sex scandal in the late nineties, a scandal that centered on the then twenty-year-old Anton. It was fairly big news at the time. It made the national press and TV. That was where Ellen remembered him from.”
“Details?”
“Sketchy. She’s going to dig out the relevant newspaper reports, scan them and email them through to me in the next few days. But, broadly, it involved the abduction and false imprisonment of several young women. Sound familiar?”
“Leopards and spots come to mind. So why isn’t he languishing in some Greek jail?”
“As I said, the Markos family are wealthy, especially the father, Denes. Ellen believes Denes Markos paid out a small fortune to make the charges go away. Believe it or not, the rich can sometimes do that,” she said with a cynical laugh. “Anyway, once all the fuss died down, Anton Markos disappeared from view, like he dropped off the planet.”
“Only to resurface in Germany in 1998 as Erik Strasser,” Harry said. “Any more, Vi?”
“Not just yet. I’ll see what Ellen sends through to me and forward it on to you. Do you have an email address?”
“Don’t be silly.”
“Luddite. No matter. I pass everything on to Jason. He’ll see you get it.”
“Marvelous. Good night, Vi.”
“Sleep well, Harry.”
Kerry shivered.
She still didn’t know where she was, but there was a draft blowing from somewhere and it was chilling her body and raising goose bumps on her skin. “Why are you doing this? What do you want from me?” she called out, but no one responded. Trying to move her head was too painful, and all she could do was to stare up at the ceiling, high above her.
There were lights hanging from the ceiling: industrial-looking lights with wide, white metal shades, each one holding a single bulb. She could see six from where she was lying, but she assumed there were more, because the bulbs were weak—she could stare directly at them without blinding herself—but the place she was being held in seemed quite well illuminated, so there had to be more than six. Just how big was this place?
She called out again, “Hey!” She still got no reply, but this time she heard the faint echo of her voice. The place had to be big. “Fin,” she called. “Let me go, Fin. Untie me.”
Away in the distance she heard voices, faint. They seemed to be in conversation, a soft susurration of sound, persistent but difficult to pin down. And then she heard footsteps and the occasional scrape of a shoe. Many feet walking over…what…concrete? In her mind’s eye she could picture people entering the space, a crowd gathering. For what? To watch her? To watch her lying naked on what felt to her like a block of stone?
“Hey, help me!” she called again. And then she heard something that made her stomach feel hollow and brought the tears stinging back to her eyes. Someone laughed.
Harry finished his coffee and lay back in his seat, threading his hands behind his head and closing his eyes. He should go to bed, but the armchair was comfortable, and his mind was still thrumming from Martin’s phone call.
It was unusual for Martin not to come up with anything new. He was very good at his job—the best in the country—and he’d had all day to work something up, but there was nothing, not even to corroborate the information in Violet’s file. It bothered him. Maybe he’d be able to turn up more tomorrow.
He switched track and replayed the conversation with Violet in his head. Strasser was not German but Greek. Arrested on abduction and false imprisonment charges. Nothing more on his coven, nothing related to witchcraft at all. Something seemed wrong.
He trusted Violet Bulmer, trusted her instincts, but nothing he had seen or heard so far gelled with her insistence that Strasser/Markos was involved with something paranormal. He might be a pervert, might even be psychopathic, but that didn’t make him a supernatural threat. There was the dead nurse and doctor, but nothing to say their deaths, coincidental as they were, were anything other than natural.
He had gone out on a limb in persuading Simon Crozier to involve the department, and, if he was honest with himself, he had traded on his and Crozier’s longstanding friendship. Now he was beginning to think the limb he had stranded himself on was perilously thin—barely strong enough to support his weight, never mind the weight of a full Department 18 investigation.
He sat up abruptly and rubbed his eyes. “Damn it to hell, Vi, what have you gotten me into?” He stood up and stomped through to the bedroom.
Someone moved into Kerry’s sight: the older man, tall and handsome, who was probably in his late thirties. Beside him a young woman, wearing a y
ellow silk blouse, blonde, almost white hair hanging straight down over her shoulders. She was looking straight ahead, her eyes glazed, not really registering what was happening.
Kerry stared her, her eyes pleading, but the girl seemed oblivious to her and continued to look ahead, her gaze fixed on a point Kerry couldn’t see.
Kerry looked up again at the man. There was something about his eyes, and the way he seemed to regard her as something less than human, that escalated her fear and stopped her speaking. And then she saw a knife with a strange, odd-looking blade, long and gleaming, as he raised it above his head and brought it arcing down, plunging it into her chest, slicing into her aorta. The last thing she saw and heard was the blonde girl screaming, “No!” and then her vision dimmed and the world went black.
Harry awoke abruptly, flicked on the bedside lamp and checked his watch. Four o’clock. Shit! He really needed a good night’s sleep, but, as was so often the case, the contrary alarm clock in his brain had kicked in. He lay there in the darkness, sleep just a memory and something he wouldn’t revisit for another twenty or so hours.
At five thirty, with the sky beginning to lighten to a steely gray, he hauled himself from the bed and went through to the kitchen and ran himself a glass of water. He left the tap running, took the glassful in two long swallows, cupped his hand under the running water, splashed his face and turned on the television to watch the morning news.
He was still sitting, staring at the screen and not taking a word of it in, when Violet called him.
“It’s six o’clock. Vi, what do you want?”
“I woke to find another email from Ellen, my friend in Kefalonia.”
“I know who Ellen is.”
“You sound tetchy.”
“Bad night. What did the email say?”
“She managed to find a report about one of Anton Markos’s victims.”
“What did it say?”
“Not a lot, really. Stuff about how she was kept chained to a bed in a darkened room, how he got her hooked on heroin and fed her addiction daily, how she was so grateful when the police rescued her.”
“So apart from the fact he’s moved on from heroin to methamphetamine, how does this help us?”
“In essence, not a lot. But the article had a photo of the girl. Ellen scanned it and attached it to the email. Harry, I could be looking at a photograph of Alice.”
“What do you mean?”
“Young, pretty, long blonde hair. It could be her twin sister. Don’t you find it strange?”
Harry sighed. “Not really, Vi. All it displays is a preference. Pretty blondes obviously get his rocks off. It’s quite common for a psychopath to target a type. They’re usually a surrogate for the person the killer or abductor has in their own life—ex-wife or girlfriend, maybe even the mother.”
“Elena Markos, Anton’s mother, is a Mediterranean beauty—raven hair, olive skin, flashing brown eyes—and Markos was young, unmarried.”
“An ex-lover then?”
“Reports suggest he was single and a virgin.”
“Well, there’s probably someone who fits Alice’s and this other girl’s description, locked away in his psyche somewhere.”
“But it gives us an insight into his mind, and shows that Alice wasn’t just some random target. He went after her specifically.”
“I agree,” Harry said. “I’m not sure it moves us any further forward in hunting him down.”
Violet was silent for a few seconds, and then she said, “Harry, are you cooling on this?”
“No,” he lied. “I said I’d help you find her, and I will. I just think we need to concentrate on Markos, or Erik Strasser, and not Alice’s resemblance to one of his victims. It’s just not significant enough.”
Violet sniffed, her disappointment evident. “Ellen’s going to track down his other victims. I wouldn’t mind betting, here and now, they’ll all be a similar type.”
“You’re probably right. I just wouldn’t read too much into it. As I said, he might just have a thing for pretty blondes.”
“Right, Harry, I’ll be in touch.”
He heard the phone slam down at the other end of the line.
“Great,” he said sourly. “Now I’ve pissed her off.” He switched off his phone, dropped it on the couch and went to take a long, hot shower.
Chapter Ten
Detective Inspector Susan Tyler picked her way carefully down the slime-covered stone steps. This part of the Thames riverbank was thick mud, and her boots squelched through it as she made her way across to the small group near the water’s edge. Away to her right, a steady stream of commuter traffic made its laborious progress over Waterloo Bridge. A stiff breeze whipped her bobbed hair across her face, until she reached in her pocket for a black hair scrunchy and tied it back.
There were four people in the group. DC Brian Witherspoon, DS Jake Bartlett and a uniformed PC she didn’t recognize, who looked like he should still be at school. The fourth member of the group was a woman in late middle age, with short silver hair and pointed features. Miriam Jackley was the police doctor on duty when the call came in of a body left stranded in the mud at low tide. She crouched over the naked body, examining it carefully and speaking her thoughts into a small digital recorder.
There were three other figures, dressed in white coveralls, examining the riverbank. Forensic. Another was standing to one side of the body, taking photographs.
“What have we got, Miriam?” Susan said as she reached them.
Miriam glanced up briefly and then went back to her examination. “Young woman, cause of death looks to be a single stab wound the chest.”
Susan stared down at the body of a woman with short black hair, numerous facial piercings, tattoos on her arms and neck, with a reddish black hole through her left breast.
“How long has she been dead?” Susan asked, but didn’t really expect an accurate answer.
“The body’s cold,” Miriam said. “But then it’s been immersed in water. I would say for at least four hours, judging from the lividity of her skin tone. No damage from wildlife, so not that long.”
Susan stared out at the muddy brown water “I wouldn’t have thought wildlife would be that much of problem.”
“You’re kidding,” Miriam said. “That might have been true a few decades back, but now the Thames is teeming with life. It’s one of the least polluted metropolitan rivers in the world. Mitten crabs are my biggest problem. Voracious little buggers, they are. A floater like this is a banquet to them. And eels, they love a bit of dead meat.”
Susan shuddered at the thought.
“But there’s nothing on our lady here to suggest they had a go at her. All the marks on the body appear to be man-made. Ligature marks on the wrists and ankles, suggesting she’s been restrained, and marks on either side of her head, at her temples, and this,” she pointed to a red wheal across the young woman’s brow, “that suggests her head was also restrained, possibly by some kind of strapping. We’ll know more when the pathologist gets her to the lab. Ah, there he is.” She nodded to a short, overweight, balding man making his way down the stone steps.
He waddled across to them. “Good morning, Miriam, Inspector Tyler. What have we got here?” Professor Duncan McBride looked down at the dead body and made a clicking noise with his tongue. “Oh dear. Poor girl. Your opinion, Miriam?”
“She’s dead,” Miriam said with a smile.
“Thanks for that insight,” McBride said. “Very…er…insightful. What do you think killed her?”
“Apart from the hole in her chest, I really couldn’t say. I’ll leave that to you.”
Susan was used to their banter and let them get on with it. She thought they secretly fancied each other and their apparent antagonism was a smokescreen. She turned to Witherspoon and Bartlett. “Who called it in?”
“He d
idn’t leave a name, but the prat used his cell phone, so we’re tracing him now.”
“Well, you two get back to the station. I’ll take it from here.”
McBride was now hunched over the body, nearly head-to-head with Miriam. Susan could tell from their murmured asides that the banter was ongoing.
“Get a room, you two,” she said. “Give me something I can use.”
They both turned to look at her. “You can’t rush science,” McBride said. “I think Miriam and I are agreed, we’ll know more after the postmortem.”
“Great,” Susan said.
“One thing,” Miriam said. “I don’t know what it signifies, but it might mean something to you. Someone has carved a small crescent shape in her lower abdomen, just above and to the side of the pubic bone.”
“And she’s had a two-pound coin in her mouth,” McBride added. “Placed under her tongue.”
“What?”
McBride beckoned her over. He had the girl’s mouth open. Gently he lifted her tongue. “See?”
“Yeah,” Susan said. She saw, but she didn’t understand.
Jason tapped on Harry’s open door and stepped into the office. “Morning.”
“Good morning, Jason,” Harry said, looking at him from over the top of the newspaper he was reading.
“I called in at Vi’s on the way here. She asked me to give you this.” He handed Harry a slim cardboard folder. Harry took it from him and laid it down on the desk.
“Aren’t you going to open it?”
Harry drummed his fingers on the folder. “Soon.”
“Vi said it’s important,” Jason said.
Harry continued drumming. “Soon,” he said again. “How long have you known Vi, Jason?”
“About five years.”
Harry nodded. “How does she seem to you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Is she behaving differently to the Vi you obviously know well?”
