The Memory Man

by Steven Savile

  ‘I think that someone sent it to him,’ Ash said, putting the other man out of his misery.

  ‘Who would do such a thing?’ O’Hare’s hand went instinctively to his mouth. His face blanched. ‘Why?’

  ‘That, I’m afraid, I don’t know. Perhaps there’s something in the house that might shed some light upon it? I understand that he was the parish priest here for a number of years.’

  ‘Oh yes, many years. He dedicated his life to this church. Even after I took over from him, most of the parishioners would still seek out his wisdom. He was a good man.’

  ‘I’m sure he was. You can’t dedicate your life to helping others and not be. Do you know anything about where he was before he came to Langley Vale?’

  ‘Not really. Our conversations revolved around the everyday life of the parish.’

  It came as no surprise that they would talk about the commonalities of the lives they lived and how they ran parallel to each other, even if they only overlapped for a relatively short time. Going back before that, trading stories of life already lived, that needed friendship. This was a man who believed in the sanctity of the confessional, the act as opposed to the place, and that extended beyond death.

  ‘I have to ask this, and please don’t take it the wrong way, but can you think of anything out of the ordinary that he might have been involved with?’

  ‘What are you suggesting, Dooley was mixed up in some kind of criminal activity? He was an old man, not some criminal mastermind.’

  Ash held up a placating hand. ‘I know, I know. I’m not saying that at all. But I’m trying to work out who sent him that eye, and why, because I think it was intended as a threat, or a warning.’

  The man said nothing for a moment, pausing at the end of a short garden path no more than fifty metres from the church. ‘Here we are,’ he said, meaning the cottage. ‘All I ask is that you won’t upset Mrs Moore any more than she has been. As you can imagine, first she has had to cope with the death of her friend, and then in gathering his things she found the eyeball in the Father’s desk.’

  ‘It was a good thing she did,’ he said. And it really was. Without it this would just be a tragic case of an old man who couldn’t wait for his allotted time. Because Elspeth Moore had gone rooting through his personal effects looking for the papers she would need for the registrar they had a link to two other murders half a continent away. Today was actually a good day. Just not for Dooley.

  TWENTY-SIX

  The first thing Peter Ash noticed was that the roll-top desk was closed. One corner of the small study was stacked with boxes filled with a lifetime of sermons no longer needed and untouched since Dooley had switched the vicarage for this small house across the road. Langley Vale was basically four streets in a natural dip on the far side of the famous racecourse with a farm behind it.

  The roll top was locked.

  He looked at her without needing to ask the question.

  Mrs Moore took a deep death and let it out as a heavy sigh before she retrieved the key from its hiding place in the Toby jug on the mantelpiece.

  ‘Would the Father usually lock his desk?’ Ash asked her. He fitted the small brass key into the lock and turned it. There was a hollow click.

  ‘What would be the point of having a key if you don’t use it?’

  Ash shrugged. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever had a drawer that locked, even at work.’ He rolled the wooden lid back to reveal a jumble of papers. A cursory glanced revealed no obvious order to them.

  ‘He’d never let me tidy in there,’ she said.

  ‘Every man needs his secrets, I suppose,’ Ash said, without really thinking about it. ‘My father used to say that and keep anything he considered precious in the shed, which was a no-go area for me. People are strange. You found the box yesterday?’

  She nodded. ‘I knew he kept his birth certificate and other important papers in there, things Father Michael would need to take to the registrar … but I was looking for his address book when I found it. There were people I needed to tell … for him … you understand? People who cared about him. I didn’t want them learning about what had happened from the newspapers.’

  He nodded. ‘Any idea who his next of kin was?’

  ‘There’s a cousin, but she’s never been here. I don’t remember him ever visiting her.’

  ‘And the police took it away with them?’

  She nodded. ‘The book, and the box with that thing in it.’

  ‘Did they take anything else?’

  ‘What else would they take?’

  ‘I know it feels like a horrible invasion of your friend’s privacy, Mrs Moore, but I promise you I’m not trying to make things worse, either for you or for Father Dooley.’

  ‘I don’t see how things could get worse for him,’ she said, with a surprising edge of bitterness behind her words.

  ‘Well, yes. But …’ He stopped rifling through the papers to look at the woman, properly look at her, and offered a sad smile. ‘When you look at me, what do you see?’ He didn’t let her answer. ‘A man. A cop. Maybe a tired-looking man. A troubled man. Someone looking for answers. But I’ll tell you what you’re really looking at, Elspeth, you’re looking at a man who has given his life to be an advocate of the dead. Everything I do, I do to try and bring some sense of closure and comfort to those left behind. I do it for the victims. Some cops don’t, some do it for justice, to catch the bad guys. But that’s not how I think about it. Something horrible happened here, and it goes beyond a man taking his own life. I just want to find the truth.’

  ‘And if that doesn’t help?’

  ‘Then I’ve let everyone down. So, can you talk me through it. You found the box?’

  ‘Yes. It was a small Tupperware container, you know the sort of thing you keep leftovers in?’ He nodded. ‘I opened it and saw … I saw … the eye looking back at me. I dropped the box.’ The memory was genuinely distressing. ‘When I picked it up I saw the card that lay on top of the envelope.’

  ‘Can you remember what was written on the card?’

  She nodded. ‘It was a strange message. Only two words. Memini Bonn. And then there was a time and an address down in town, like an invitation.’

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Laura had already arranged for the box and its contents to be delivered to their lab for processing.

  The local cops had Dooley’s address book but were happy for evidence transfer as they had traced the cousin and didn’t see any need for them to hold on to it any longer.

  Ash rang through. The conversation was short and sweet.

  ‘The coroner’s ruled Dooley’s death a suicide. We’ve got a suicide note and there’s no evidence of anyone else’s involvement. It’s about as open and shut as we get. And put bluntly, we just don’t investigate why someone feels like they have nothing left worth living for. But there is the eye—’

  ‘Which is the heart of my investigation,’ Ash assured the other man, resisting the weird compulsion to say tongue or eyeball in place of heart.

  ‘And I’m happy for you to take over. I can courier it over?’

  ‘It’s fine, I’m in the area. I’ll drop in and collect it.’

  ‘You do that.’

  The book was with the desk sergeant when he arrived fifteen minutes later. The station had gone through several facelifts over the last thirty years, sloughing off the square functionalism of the seventies for gradually more and more progressive and modern facades until it resembled a Holiday Inn. Despite Epsom itself being considerably bigger than the village on the hill above it, the station wasn’t anywhere near as busy as it might have been. But then, the place reeked of entitlement not homelessness and criminal desperation.

  He signed the evidence out and called Laura when he was done.

  ‘Got it,’ he said. He resisted looking inside it until he was well away from the desk sergeant, and even then he was surreptitious about it, flicking through the pages without taking the address book all the way out of the e
nvelope. The first names he checked for were the most obvious, Jacques Tournard and Jonas Anglemark. Neither were in there.

  ‘Many names?’ she asked.

  ‘Considerably more than in mine,’ Ash told her. ‘But then I’ve been a practising misanthrope for quite a while now.’

  ‘You like to pretend, anyway.’

  ‘Looks like he’s been collecting names since the dawn of time. I bet there’s people in here who have been dead for a decade.’

  ‘It’s kind of sweet,’ Laura said. ‘I haven’t written down a telephone number in years. If my mobile died I’d be screwed.’

  ‘You’re such modern girl,’ Ash said.

  ‘Woman,’ Laura corrected.

  ‘It’s like playing six degrees of Kevin Bacon. We add them to the mix and start to see the overlaps between clusters of them that shouldn’t be there given the geographical and social disparity of the victims. There has to be an overlap. Find that intersection, we find our murderous Kevin Bacon.’

  ‘Or another dead Bacon,’ he finished for her.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  ‘We’ve got something.’

  Laura was at her desk, one hand gripping the wooden edge, the other holding on to the mouse. The cursor hovered over a box on the screen.

  ‘What am I looking at?’

  ‘It’s tenuous, but it’s a connection. Tournard was involved in setting up an orphanage in Poland shortly after the war.’ Ash nodded. ‘There were a lot of children who needed looking after, we’d made a lot of orphans. And far too many slipped through the cracks.’

  ‘I can’t even begin to imagine,’ but that wasn’t strictly true. He’d done a lot of imagining over the years. How could he not when his father was himself an orphan, and as far as Pete’s family tree went every root and branch dead-ended in one of those places? His dad didn’t talk about it much. Pete didn’t press him about it, either. He figured there were some things best left forgotten. Now, of course, they weren’t just forgotten, they were lost. It was strange not knowing anything about where you came from, but that sense of rootlessness was very much a part of what made him who he was. ‘But doing something, that makes Tournard a good man.’

  ‘You’d like to think so,’ she said, but the way she said it made him wonder if she disagreed. ‘But sometimes hope is worse than not being able to help at all.’

  ‘I think I’d always rather hope,’ he said. ‘So, what’s the connection with the other two?’

  ‘Dooley spent six months volunteering there before he was given his first parish.’

  ‘OK, that’s a solid link. That feels like we’re getting somewhere. What about the Swede, Anglemark? Where does he fit in?’

  ‘Like I said, it’s tenuous. Don’t get your hopes up. But before he first ran for office he was a reasonably successful entrepreneur. He had several business interests in the construction industry, one of which was involved in a project to renovate and extend the building.’

  ‘Please tell me they were there at the same time.’

  Laura shook her head. ‘Not even within a year of each other. I told you, sometimes hope is worse. It could just be a coincidence.’

  ‘It’s hard to believe we can find a definite connection linking all three and it’s not the one we’re looking for. This was definitely Poland, not Germany?’

  ‘Definitely Poland.’

  ‘OK.’ He was thinking on his feet. ‘Maybe the connection’s not the orphanage but the charity that ran it? Maybe that’s where the links go back to Bonn? Some dark secret that was going on there, and the three of them knew about it?’

  ‘That’s a lot of maybes.’

  ‘It is.’ Another thought occurred to him, though he wasn’t sure how relevant it might be. ‘Do me a favour, Law. Check if this is the only orphanage that the charity ran. Maybe there were others?’

  ‘In different countries? I like the way your mind works. I’ll see what I can turn up,’ Laura promised, turning back to her screen. ‘Once you cross my lips with caffeine.’

  ‘Consider it sorted.’

  ‘I’ll wait while you make the pilgrimage to the home of the coffee gods.’

  ‘Anything else happening?’

  ‘Nothing devastating. Looks like your new friend just updated the system a couple of minutes ago, so you never know.’

  ‘I’ll check it out once I’ve taken care of your brew,’ Ash said.

  ‘Nice to know you’ve got your priorities right,’ she grinned.

  The truth was, without her there would be no point. It was already hard enough to carry on without Mitch Greer. They’d been in this thing together from the start, the Three Musketeers. She was the heart of the team, though she preferred to call herself the brains. It amounted to the same thing. She thought in terms of data and how to use it; how to connect and to eliminate the strands. He couldn’t think like that, as much as he tried to. His mind worked on the principle of osmosis. He just soaked and soaked and soaked stuff up until it all bubbled out of him. Of course, sometimes it just felt like he was drowning.

  But even then, even as the tides threatened to sweep him away, she was always there, his rock. Though she wouldn’t have appreciated being called a big lump of stone at the best of times, even if he tried to explain the analogy of life being a rushing river full of whitecaps and her being the only thing for him to cling on to.

  ‘I do love you, you know,’ he said, not looking at her.

  ‘Of course you do,’ she said. ‘I’m loveable. Now go and fetch that coffee, there’s a good boy.’

  TWENTY-NINE

  ‘We might have found something,’ Ash said.

  ‘Might?’ Frankie asked.

  ‘It’s a stretch at best, but it’s something concrete, and it links all three men.’

  She listened as he filled her in. Realistically, it was more than she could have hoped for. ‘I could kiss you,’ she said. The other end of the long-distance connection stayed quiet. ‘Obviously I don’t have to.’ This time her words were greeted by laughter.

  ‘Sorry,’ Ash said. ‘I just keep thinking about what it doesn’t tell us, rather than what it helps us with.’

  ‘I get that,’ she said. ‘And it might ask as many questions as it answers, but it’s a genuine intersection. These lives crossed. We know that for sure now. This old man in London, our gay politician in Stockholm, and our missing cleric in Paris. Their lives touched, even if only geographically, and never at the same time. It’s a real connection. That’s—’

  ‘Got nothing to with Bonn,’ he finished for her. ‘I’ve got Laura digging into the charity. Let’s see if she can unearth any links to Bonn. A conference, maybe, something about at-risk kids across Europe post-war. Anything like that. Because it’s there. It has to be.’

  ‘All roads lead to Bonn,’ she said. And then she wanted to kick herself. ‘Hold on, hold on, hold on … The body. Was there anything missing?’

  ‘The priest’s post-mortem is scheduled for this afternoon, but no one has mentioned any missing body parts. It was a suicide. He didn’t answer the summons. He killed himself rather than go.’

  ‘Meaning the killer has no new body part to send on to their next victim.’

  ‘Assuming that it doesn’t just end here?’

  She thought about it. ‘It doesn’t.’ She was sure of it. Serial killers didn’t just stop killing. And that’s what they were dealing with, a cross-border killing spree. The pattern was escalating. And fast. They already had two bodies, but there had to be a third to account for the eye, and that meant a fourth victim they didn’t know about, and if the pattern held and one of Dooley’s organs or extremities was meant to go to the next, that meant a fifth possible intersection of lives. There was still so much they didn’t understand about what was happening, but today was going to be the day it all changed, because Jonas Anglemark’s death was about to hit the wire. ‘We need to confirm whose eye it is.’

  ‘Hold on,’ Ash said, and then cupped his hand over the headset so all she
could hear was muffled voices, as a woman talked to him.

  Laura.

  ‘You still there?’ he asked almost a full minute later. ‘Laura’s got some more on the charity, and why our original searches dead-ended. It opened several orphanages in Eastern Europe in the late 1980s.’

  ‘So well after the initial post-war effort.’

  ‘Children always need helping. And it isn’t like we just suddenly stopped killing each other. We make orphans all the time. We’re doing it right now somewhere in the world.’

  ‘True,’ she agreed, thinking of the horrors of Aleppo.

  ‘And the reason we didn’t turn up these other orphanages immediately?’

  ‘The charity rebranded. Changed its name. That’s why I kept hitting a brick wall.’

  ‘How often does that happen?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Not often, I’d guess. But if they were a global concern, maybe they were looking for something that translated across national boundaries? It doesn’t have to be a sinister reason,’ she said, despite the fact they were looking for exactly that, some sinister reason that might explain the trail of bodies. ‘They’re called The EuropaChild Foundation, registered office is in Rome. It might be worth one of us paying them a visit.’

  ‘It’s on the list,’ he said. ‘Dooley left behind an address book with almost eight hundred names in it. Laura’s going through them one at a time looking for any that link back to the charity. Any one of them could be a potential target.’

  ‘Or killer,’ she said.

  ‘That’s my regular little ray of Swedish sunshine,’ Ash said. ‘I’m going to see if Donatti can get a look at the Monsignor’s address book, assuming Blanc maintained one for him.’

  ‘And you think they’ll help?’

  ‘Right up until the moment Tournard’s body turns up, then they’ll batten down the hatches.’

  ‘Then we better hope the eyeball isn’t confirmed as his,’ she said.

  ‘It’s not. Wrong colour,’ Ash replied.