The Memory Man

by Steven Savile

  Father Dooley lay slumped in the chair, his head resting against the back wall. There was so much blood. That was all he could see for the longest time. One of Dooley’s hands lay in his lap, while the other hung limply by his side. Blood dripped down his fingers to the floor, though most of it had already bled out of the old man’s veins. A box-cutter lay six inches out of reach. Father Michael stood frozen, unable to reach those few inches to check for a pulse he knew couldn’t be there.

  Tolstoy stepped into the blood, nudging at the old man’s hand with his nose, whining.

  ‘Come away, boy,’ he said and started fumbling inside his cassock for his mobile phone.

  He was shaking as he dialled the emergency services operator.

  ‘Ambulance, please. And police,’ he said, giving the church’s address before the phone slipped from his grip.

  It hit him then, the full savage shock of his friend’s suicide.

  He fell to his knees in prayer, unaware of the blood soaking through his cassock.

  A scream brought him back. Elspeth. She’d arrived to clean the church. It was almost as though a light had been switched on and he could suddenly see what he needed to do; Dooley was beyond his help, but he could comfort her. She needed him. His strength. His support. Father Michael stood up quickly, drawing the curtain to hide the worst of it. Not that it would take the image of the beloved old man out of her head.

  ‘There’s nothing we can do,’ he said, and hated that he was telling the truth. ‘There’s an ambulance on the way.’ Which was pointless unless they could somehow raise the dead. ‘The police, too. Come on, let’s go back to the cottage until they arrive.’ He put a comforting arm around the elderly woman and walked back with her. The dead held no fear for him, but Dooley had committed a mortal sin. How could he have fallen so low?

  The cleaner echoed his thoughts. ‘Why would he do such a thing?’

  He shook his head. He didn’t have an answer for her. Not just why, but why here, in this place? In the confessional.

  TWENTY

  He needed to go back to the beginning.

  What did they have? Really? Apart from an assumption that Monsignor Tournard had gone to meet a man? Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. A big fat zero. There were no CCTV cameras in the vicinity likely to turn up an easy lead – or a difficult one, which he’d have happily taken right about now. London would have been different. The paranoia on his home turf meant pretty much every angle and street corner, every alleyway and green space was heavily surveilled. There were more cameras than rats, last he’d heard. He had no idea whether that was true or not, but if it was it wasn’t because Rentokil were doing a bang-up job.

  The obvious thing to do, like it or not, was enlist the media. Make an appeal for witnesses. The problem was he’d given Donatti his word it would stay under the radar, at least until the situation escalated.

  And that was how he was thinking now, it was only ever about until, not if.

  Until then he was limited to the resources they had at hand, which included the footage from the camera outside the Monsignor’s office and apartment building. And all that gave him was confirmation of which direction he turned as he exited. It was hardly revelatory, but it showed that he was walking rather than waiting for a taxi, and that he turned towards the maze of streets that eventually lead to the cafe. Not exactly massive breaks in the case, but scutwork was important. And with discretion in mind, he couldn’t farm it out to some junior. The more people involved, the more official it became, and the more official it became the sooner the details would leak into the press. It was a pretty simple equation.

  Donatti was more than happy to pull every ecclesiastical string he could, but they both knew that it would fall to Ash to make things happen once the manhunt took them outside the realm of the Church.

  He called in.

  Laura had sourced some traffic-cam footage, and the feed from a couple of public buildings hooked into the city network. The term she used was ‘Better than nothing, but only just.’ Which translated to the unsurprising reality that the Catholic Church’s cameras, assuming they had them and didn’t rely on the fact that their boss saw and heard everything, weren’t connected. What his own trawl had given him was the precise time Tournard had left the building and the direction, which meant he had something for her to work with.

  Next, he called through to one of his opposite numbers in the French side of Division to arrange access to the city’s surveillance network. They made all the usual noises about being stretched thin, about limited resources, lack of manpower and wanting to help, in the end saying as long as he was prepared to do it himself, they were happy enough to provide access. Once the bishop was declared officially missing or turned up dead, different priorities came into play. He knew arse-covering when he ran into it.

  Ash followed in the Monsignor’s footsteps. He walked slowly, head up and looking around like a tourist. He wasn’t sightseeing though, he was scanning shop facades and apartment buildings for tell-tale signs of cameras. It wasn’t so long ago the Batacalan theatre attack had shocked the world, and while the Parisians made a big show of life going on and were back out the next night in their bistros and strolling hand in hand down their boulevards, the truth was it had changed the city for ever. It had become as paranoid as every other major city in the world. And that meant cameras.

  Or at least he hoped it did.

  Of course, logically, there was very little he expected to learn from the exercise. Tournard had reached his destination after all, but Ash was playing a hunch. There was a fair chance the Monsignor had been watched, and more likely than not followed to the cafe. The mysterious stranger wasn’t just going to risk turning up to an empty table and hanging around long enough for people to get a good look at him, was he? Not when it was easy enough to follow someone in a place like this without being seen. Easier still when you knew their destination. And following him took care of another problem, making sure Tournard hadn’t brought the law into this.

  It made sense.

  It’s what he would have done.

  In the absence of any other leads it was worth chasing down at least. Ash walked to the first junction and waited for Laura to call back. A young Parisian girl with an artist’s portfolio balanced under her left arm struggled with lighting a cigarette as she leaned against the wall. A much older woman, one of the city’s grandes dames, wrestled with shopping bags stuffed to overflowing with fruit fresh from a market stall and the other staples of life, nicotine and coffee. A dark-haired kid with his hair shaved into a weird rat’s tail kicked a yellow football along the street, bouncing it off the doors of each house he passed. He had a peculiar déjà vu moment standing there, and realized he’d been here before, a long time ago. His father had brought him here for his tenth birthday. He’d liked to do this little ritual where they visited children’s homes and dropped off gifts on their birthdays. They were never expensive, but that didn’t matter. It was a measure of the man’s good heart. Ash hadn’t taken any birthday gifts in a long while. Not since his dad had died. He would change that this birthday, make a new ritual to honour the old man.

  The phone vibrated in his hand.

  ‘Talk to me,’ he said.

  ‘The priest turned right where you are,’ she said. ‘I scrolled through the next five minutes’ worth of coverage, not sure exactly who I was looking for out of the foot traffic. But eight people turned in the same direction. Eight’s not a huge suspect pool, so I’ve done screen grabs of them which I’m sending over now. Profile shots were the best I could do, though. Sorry. It’s a brisk walk to the next camera. I’m scrubbing the footage at the moment to see which of the eight stayed with him.’

  ‘Good work, Law. Let me know when you have anything.’ He killed the call.

  Ash took his time again, lingering at a couple of shop windows, including an old-fashioned ironmonger’s and a haberdashery with a window full of pin cushions and pinned-up fabrics. He could smell the cinnamon from
the cafe already.

  His phone rang again before he reached it.

  ‘What have you got?’

  ‘Straight on. The original eight became three, but he’s been joined by a couple of newcomers, too. So we’re following five possibles now.’

  ‘Narrowing it down,’ he said appreciatively. ‘How far to the next camera?’

  ‘A couple of hundred metres, but we’ve got two major crossings and at least three minor side streets between where you are. If he’s good, the chances are he’ll break away from pursuit and come around to the cafe from another direction now he knows the old man hasn’t brought in reinforcements. If he does, then we’re out of luck. There are no more cameras on the other approaches between where you are and the cafe.’

  ‘Makes sense. But let’s hope you’re wrong, eh?’

  The boy lost control of the ball and ran out into the path of an oncoming car. The driver hit the horn as hard as he hit the brakes, as the kid stooped to scoop up the ball and then dashed across to the other side. Ash shook his head, but the driver seemed amused. Maybe it was a regular thing? Or maybe the kid would never grow up to be Cantona?

  Back home, Ash might have taken a moment to talk to the kid, point out the physics of soft flesh versus hard metal and all that, but the kid was maybe eleven, meaning his English was going to be worse than Ash’s French, and the whole thing would get very muddled very fast. So, he let it go.

  Laura said, ‘Looks like your man took one of the side streets before the next camera. We don’t see him again.’

  ‘OK,’ Ash said. ‘Not ideal. Please tell me you’ve got better news? Like a guy with a string of garlic around his neck and a big sign saying Le méchant above his head.’

  ‘No signs saying the bad guy, and no shockingly crude stereotypes. But only two of the five following Tournard made it this far. So, three made the turnoff. I’ll process the best screen grabs I can get and get them over to you in a minute.’

  ‘You’re a star. Do you think we could clone you?’

  ‘You couldn’t handle two of me,’ she said. ‘You can always show your appreciation by sending me out on a jolly next time you get a juicy case. Somewhere warm preferably. Think of all the airmiles you’d get.’

  ‘You know I would, if I could, but Division would never sign off on me putting you out in the field. And just imagine they did, and decided to send you to Germany? Can you imagine that lot taking kindly to you telling them how to do their jobs?’

  ‘It isn’t the 1970s, Pete,’ Laura laughed.

  ‘You say that, I say Brexit, m’dear. Take a look at them prejudices. And that as they say is game, set, and match.’

  ‘You’re terrible.’

  The rest of the walk was fruitless.

  He marked a couple of offices that might have some form of system, but their cameras were angled inwards, not interested in the street at all. And for them to be of any use it meant the guy he was looking for would have had to drop into the small convenience store for a packet of cigarettes or a paper or something. Meaning move on, forget about it.

  Ash was still scouting out the area when the images came through from Laura. She tagged them with a short text saying she was running them through Division’s facial-recognition software but didn’t expect to get a match.

  Once he opened the file he understood why.

  He wasn’t sure if their own mothers would recognize any of the three men from the pictures.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Ash showed Donatti the shots.

  ‘Recognize anyone?’

  The Vatican’s man shook his head.

  They had met up again in a much more modern coffee shop this time. The prices were double, the coffees more worried about the art in the foam than the quality of the beans. Of course it looked more Parisian, decorated for the tourists who wouldn’t give the extra euros a second thought. Frothy coffee was probably the only growth industry on the Continent. He couldn’t even remember seeing a coffee shop back home before Friends made them into these cool alternatives to pubs.

  ‘So, you think one of these three men followed the Monsignor from his office?’

  ‘It’s a possibility,’ Ash said, ‘but by no means a certainty. All we know for a fact is that they walked the same streets at the same time before we lost sight of them. But it could be one of them.’

  ‘Or none of them.’

  Ash nodded.

  Donatti studied each profile in turn but betrayed no hint of recognition. Even enhanced they were still relatively indistinct. The youngest of the three was maybe late twenties or early thirties. The oldest was in his sixties. The third man could have fitted anywhere in between. And according to Laura, none of them walked with any sense of urgency. Not like people on the way to or from work, so probably tourists. Meaning a reduced likelihood of being recognized if they canvassed the area.

  ‘We should show them to Blanc, the Monsignor’s secretary. Perhaps he has noticed one of them hanging around recently?’

  Ash shrugged. There were worse ideas. Thinking aloud, he said, ‘If Tournard’s new to the job, there’s a good chance this has to do with some previous appointment, something in Germany given the Remember Bonn message that came with the tongue, it’s more likely his previous secretary would know, surely?’

  ‘Possible,’ Donatti said. ‘I shall reach out. Have copies of the photographs sent to him. Double-checking with Blanc doesn’t hurt, either.’

  Ash nodded. ‘I’ll leave that to you.’

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Need to check with the lab to get the result on the tongue.’

  ‘I still don’t understand what you think that’s going to tell you. Other than confirm that it is your dead politician’s.’

  ‘Never dismiss science, my friend. You might have a god who sees all and knows all,’ Ash’s smile undercut the words, ‘but I’ve got one who deals purely in hard provable data. Maybe between the old and the new we’ll get lucky.’

  ‘The devil is in the details?’

  ‘Most of the time.’

  ‘So, beyond that – what? We wait?’

  ‘It’s difficult without bringing in the local police,’ Ash said. ‘But if Tournard was followed we know whoever he met didn’t have a car. Which means he still has to be local.’

  ‘I am not sure I agree. There are too many variables for your scientific certainty there. One, we could be dealing with two men, an accomplice to drive the car. Two, the kidnapper could have arrived several hours early, parking the car for a convenient getaway, and spent the rest of the early morning familiarizing himself with the area. Three, they could have taken an Uber. Four, taxis exist. Five, they could have walked happily away from the scene together, like old friends, and kept on walking.’

  Ash couldn’t disagree with any of the scenarios. They were all viable possibilities, and he’d considered them all to one degree or another. There could well be someone else; a man or a woman who drove a car to the cafe to collect the two men when they left. It made sense if there was more than one person behind whatever was going on if you factored in the fact the politician in Sweden died maybe twelve hours before Tournard took delivery of his tongue. They were dealing in fine margins.

  The only thing he could think was that Tournard must have gone with the man willingly. It was the only thing that made sense. He said as much.

  ‘Any sort of scuffle or commotion in the cafe, we hear about it. It’s not a big place, and that old man spent most of his morning standing in the doorway glowering at us while his daughter interpreted. He would have seen trouble kicking off. And willingly doesn’t mean he wasn’t afraid. People don’t pay enough attention to social cues being put out by strangers to be able to tell if they are agitated or acting under duress. And if he was genuinely afraid, he’d try to conceal it, wouldn’t he? So, I completely buy him leaving of his own free will.’

  ‘Free will means different things to different people,’ Donatti agreed.

  They wen
t their separate ways.

  The call to the lab was frustrating.

  They emailed through some results, but the language issue meant he was looking largely for any familiar Latin terms he recognized from cases he’d worked back home. He forwarded them on to Frankie with a short note hoping her pathologist was fluent in Google translate.

  Then he stood in the middle of one of the many bridges over the Seine, the spectre of Notre-Dame to one side, the accusing point of the tower in the other, and realized he had nowhere to be and nothing to do. By rights he should have been on the next train back to London. There was nothing he could do here until they went public. And if Donatti had his way that wasn’t going to happen until a body turned up.

  That word again: until.

  The problem was he really didn’t want to go home to the ghosts of London.

  Twenty-four hours.

  He could afford that. He’d give his old friend that much, as a courtesy, then he was escalating the investigation.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Frankie Varg listened while Peter Ash talked. A lot. He talked too much for her liking. Men who talked too much were afraid of silence. People who were afraid of silence were running from their own thoughts. It wasn’t difficult. He talked because he was hiding from the guilt he felt over his partner’s death. You didn’t need advanced degrees in psychology to work this stuff out. There was nothing particularly original about the man.

  She listened as he filled her in on the shortcomings of his Parisian investigation. Walking the bishop’s route was thorough, and she could appreciate the process of elimination behind isolating the three indistinct faces. He might talk too much, but he was at least competent. That was a plus, even if she fundamentally disagreed with him making promises to keep the links to her murder out of the news. Memories were short and got fuzzier by the hour. Someone had seen the bishop in the moments leading up to his disappearance. But if they didn’t know he was gone, how could they come forward to help?