The Memory Man

by Steven Savile

  ‘Fair enough, and yes I did, or do. I’m not sure. There’s something that’s just gnawing away at me. I feel like I’m being played.’

  ‘Well, you know him better than I do. I only know what you’ve told me about him, but I figure at the very least if he is as connected as you say, then he’s going to be expecting a call from you, if only to sort out that drink.’

  ‘True, and now we know it’s Tournard’s finger, there’s no way we can keep things between ourselves. This has to escalate.’

  ‘So, do it that way, fall back on procedure.’

  ‘OK. I’ll do that. Do me a favour, keep Frankie in the loop.’

  ‘Of course. I’ve got a list of people with connections to the foundation, so I need to talk to her anyway.’

  ‘Any other interesting names on there?’

  ‘No one to speak of. No one of the status of Tournard, Anglemark, or Maffrici, to be honest. They’re not exactly out there in the public eye. It’s proving to be a real bastard to find out much about them.’

  ‘Fantastic, keep at it.’

  ‘I’ll try to pretend that you weren’t being just a little patronizing then,’ she said, though she sounded more amused than annoyed. ‘I’ll give Frankie a call first, then let you know if she’s turned up anything interesting at her end. Now, try not to get yourself killed.’

  She hung up before he could respond and he knew she didn’t mean like Mitch, and he knew it was just something to say, something that a month ago wouldn’t have meant anything more than it needed to, but now even such a stupidly obvious sentiment came freighted with other meaning. He tried not to read anything into it, because for a couple of days he’d actually managed to feel relatively normal.

  Donatti answered on the second ring.

  ‘Peter, my friend! I was beginning to give up hope. I have a wonderful vintage brandy here with your name on it.’

  ‘And I fully intend to take you up on it.’

  ‘How did it go with Judge Maffrici?’

  ‘As you’d expect. Like he said when you were there, he didn’t have a lot to tell me, but you already know this.’

  ‘Me? How could I possibly?’

  ‘Because he called you before I was even halfway down the drive, my old friend.’

  Donatti fell silent for a moment.

  It didn’t sound like he was about to admit it, but then he wasn’t denying it either, which was as good as a confirmation.

  Ash knew the next words out of his mouth would be to change the subject.

  He wasn’t disappointed.

  ‘So, tell me, any news on Monsignor Tournard?’

  ‘Sadly, that is the main reason for my call,’ Ash said, then paused for a moment. Ideally this was another face-to-face conversation, because the reaction would be telling. He realized in that moment that the way he thought about Ernesto Donatti was changing.

  ‘You’ve found his body?’

  ‘No, but the finger Maffrici was sent, it was Tournard’s.’

  Donatti cursed in Italian, fast and angry. ‘You’re certain?’

  ‘It’s him. But this means I’m going to have to circulate his disappearance to other agencies now, and there may well be questions about why we have kept it secret up until now.’

  ‘From the press?’

  ‘Interagency. We need their cooperation. That’s how Eurocrimes works. They are going to want to know why we didn’t alert them the moment we realized this was part of a bigger crime. We are conducting an investigation into a serial killer here, like it or not, and we’ve been hiding it from our own people. There are going to be repercussions.’

  ‘Of course, of course. I’m sorry. I know you stuck your neck out for me. I will shoulder the blame.’

  ‘It doesn’t work that way,’ Ash told him. ‘And to be honest, I don’t care. This has always been about the crime, not the protocols. There’s a link between all the victims—’

  ‘You’ve found the connection?’

  Ash caught himself, and deliberately held back. ‘We’ve turned up a few possibilities,’ he said, careful to repeat the same bogus links he’d already shared with Maffrici, guessing that the judge had already fed the deliberate lies back to the Vatican’s man.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  It finally felt like things were coming together. The biggest problem facing Frankie was that the killer was still a shadow. Normally she’d be looking at a profile by now, seeing the forensics slowly tighten the noose, and know that the only thing needed to banish a shadow was the metaphorical single flickering flame. But she felt curiously disconnected from this guy, and it wasn’t just that he seemed to be two steps ahead of her all of the time. Somehow he kept up a punishing schedule of revenge, moving from country to country with such regularity it was next to impossible to track him. This was one of the flaws of the open border policy across Europe. It was possible to leave Sweden, driving over the Öresund’s bridge, take the ferry from Rodby in Denmark to Puttgarden in Germany and disappear into continental Europe without once having to show identification. Those frictionless borders made the notion of tracking passenger manifests for patterns of travel next to useless. The only time the killer’s passport would have been checked, for sure, was when he made the journey from Paris to London, and even then if he’d flown into Dublin first he could have avoided that.

  Even if they had a name, following him would be next to impossible if he knew what he was doing. And the ‘Memory Man’, as she’d started to think of him, knew what he was doing. His vendetta was meticulously planned and ruthlessly executed.

  With the finger identified as the missing monsignor’s, and the next target being in protective custody in Italy, there was at least a grim hope that he’d be forced to improvise now, and when things were out of his control it was the best hope they had of him screwing up.

  One thing she found interesting was Ash’s change towards Donatti. He didn’t say as much, or at least not in so many words, but her British counterpart was obviously starting to think of his erstwhile friend as at least complicit, and at worst guilty. But of what? The actual killings? That was unlikely, to say the least. But a Vatican cover-up? That wasn’t out of the realm of possibility.

  Without concrete evidence that Tournard was dead, the mail-order digit was proof he hadn’t made it into hiding, which meant they couldn’t keep his disappearance off the books. He was at risk. They needed all the resources they could muster for the search. And that meant the media. The problem with that was that once the genie was out of the bottle there was no putting it back in. Reporters weren’t stupid. Most of the crime-beat reporters cultivated good links within the departments. Someone somewhere would mention the link between the monsignor and the politician and they’d be flooded with calls all claiming to know who was behind the abduction and murder. Every crank and nut-job would come crawling out of the woodwork with their crazy conspiracy theories, and all that would do was allow the real killer to go underground.

  Now that they had identified EuropaChild and started digging into the orphanages it had funded, Laura had found another point of interest: both the British priest, Dooley, and the dead Spaniard, Carlos Ramirez, had worked for a while at the same facility. Though as before there was no overlap in their time there, meaning it was more than likely that the pair had never met. It was still an anchor point their lives shared, and in the normal course of things so many people from so many different countries and walks of life shouldn’t have shared so many anchor points, with or without overlap. It couldn’t be coincidental.

  The connections to the other victims remained tenuous at best, and no matter how many stones they turned over, there didn’t seem to be a single anchor point between the judge and anyone else on the Memory Man’s grudge list.

  Maffrici was an outlier.

  So, why had he made the list?

  Carlos Ramirez’s death certificate listed cause of death as natural ventricular failure. He had died at home, but his doctor had been treating him for a hear
t condition for several years, which meant that no one raised so much as an eyebrow at his passing. It was expected.

  But she couldn’t shake the feeling that someone like Ramirez coming into contact with a sociopath demanding he remember some horrible thing they had done, didn’t need a gun put to his temple to die. He had the means of his own end built into his failing body.

  It made a sick sort of sense to her.

  She looked at the card she’d taken from Anglemark’s diary again. It was in a plastic evidence bag. She intended to take it to the lab for testing. She knew the only prints they’d pull from it would belong to the politician himself. But that wasn’t the lead she was looking at. She knew where the Memory Man had lured Anglemark.

  She’d be able to trace his route. She’d be able to build a coherent picture of his last hours. That was how you solved a crime like this – solid policework.

  It didn’t matter how meticulous you were in the planning, there was always going to be a breadcrumb waiting to lead the good guys to you. It didn’t matter if it was a single frame from a CCTV camera, witness testimony, or scene of crime forensics, there was always something left behind. All it took was one little chink in the otherwise flawless armour and they’d have something to work away at. Pull enough at the smallest thread and eventually you were left with a great big hole.

  Anglemark had been missing for over a week before his body was found. He hadn’t been in the water more than a few hours. It was all about the missing time. And she finally felt like she was beginning to get somewhere with that.

  She read Anglemark’s post-mortem report again.

  He had died of suffocation and there was very little water in his lungs, meaning he had been dead before he had gone into the water. In terms of fluid in his lungs, rather than sea water there was a considerable quantity of blood, which confirmed his tongue had been removed perimortem. Deep ligature marks on his wrists indicated that he had been restrained, and dental records proved that two of his teeth had been damaged in the course of the mutilation. Hardly surprising if the man was conscious at the time. She could imagine his horror as he realized what his assailant was doing, and his frantic efforts to stop him.

  Frankie flipped through pages in search of the toxicology report. There were traces of Rohypnol in his system; enough to have made him pliable and less resistant.

  Did the Memory Man lace their drinks at the meeting, and rely upon their almost drunken confusion to steer them back towards wherever he intended to keep them? Because he kept them, didn’t he? That was another parallel between Tournard and Anglemark. They had both been unaccounted for, and for a number of days. The killer had to have a place ready in each of the cities, too. He couldn’t just rely upon finding somewhere quiet on the fly. That was something they should be looking at: land registry for purchases, records for abandoned places, empty industrial units, and such. Places where he could hold his victims without fear of someone accidentally stumbling across them. Find one of them, in any of the cities, and you unlocked a whole host of forensic evidence, because that was the thing about a safe place, somewhere that the killer felt he could let his guard down, that he could prepare the kill and carry it out, there was no way he couldn’t leave behind proof that he’d been there. And that proof would be what locked him up.

  She called Laura.

  ‘The problem is even if the killer rented a place there’s no guarantee that he used his own name, or even the same name every time. Pete’s sure your guy is anal when it comes to the planning. Each abduction nailed down to the last detail.’

  ‘I agree,’ Frankie said. ‘It is the only way he hasn’t been caught. There are too many places where things could go wrong for him not to have worked the details out like some sort of OCD compulsion. Can I ask you something?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You know Peter. Is he coping?’

  ‘You mean with Mitch’s death? Right now, this is the best it’s been in a while. He’s always been driven. It’s his personality. I can’t slow him down. And to be honest, I wouldn’t want to. He is who he is.’

  ‘Please don’t take this the wrong way, but from the outside looking in, I’d say that he’s more than driven. It’s like he believes he’s the only one who can bring our Memory Man in. He needs to remember he’s not alone. Division is a dysfunctional family, but it’s a family all the same. We are in this together.’

  ‘Talk to Pete. Remind him that he can lean on you. Just don’t expect him to actually do any leaning. At least not for a while. The last person he let in ended up … well, you know what happened to Mitch. Everyone does.’

  ‘He’s lucky to have you in his corner,’ she said.

  The other woman laughed at that, a laugh that was so obviously filled with love even from a thousand miles away. ‘You should definitely tell him that.’

  THIRTY-NINE

  The hotel concierge apologized for the budget hire car. It was the kind of thing money-conscious tourists and less well-off locals drove. It fitted in. It was small enough to handle Rome’s labyrinthine streets, and there were so many identical ones on the road there was no way he was going to be marked or remembered. That made it easier to tail someone.

  There was, at least, a relatively new satellite navigation system. He punched in the address he was looking for and followed the voice he didn’t understand telling him to prendi la prossima a destra and andare dritto alla rotonda because he couldn’t work out how to change the language settings.

  Ash drove past the house without glancing at the guard. Even a well-trained bodyguard wouldn’t remember the face of a random driver unless that driver was stupid enough to stop looking at the road and make direct eye contact.

  There were more cars now, but it was still far from busy. The three cars ahead of him were all Fiats of varying colours.

  He drove about eight hundred metres past the safe house, following the flow of the traffic.

  The road bent naturally to the left.

  He followed it until he was safely out of sight of the safe house, then pulled over. He waited a few minutes, the window rolled down, and leaned with his forearm half out of the door. It was hard to enjoy the heat. He turned the radio on. He didn’t recognize the song. It didn’t matter, he was simply changing one of the obviously identifiable aspects of the car. First pass he’d driven in silence. For the return, he rolled the window down and cranked the music up.

  He pulled up outside one of the neighbours and let the music keep playing for a full thirty seconds before he killed the engine.

  He was playing a hunch.

  It was obvious that the judge wasn’t enjoying his confinement and wasn’t the kind of person to sit idly on his hands. Ash had the odds at sixty–forty, but with nothing better to do than stake out Maffrici, those were odds he was happy to take. Maffrici was a loose end. And he’d made a point of telling Ash how many times he’d been threatened, and how even the Mob didn’t scare him. So, maybe those odds were closer to fifty–fifty? Either the judge would head out or he wouldn’t. But if he did, then things got interesting, because there was no way he was just taking a trip to his favourite trattoria. If he broke protective custody it was because he was doing something.

  Ash’s gamble was that that something was either confronting the killer, keeping the meeting he’d failed to make once before, or trying to warn someone he knew was in danger.

  And the more he thought about it, the more likely it felt that Donatti would be the one to help him.

  Not that Ash would have admitted he was baking in a tin can on a hunch with zero evidence to support it.

  The gate guard walked a few steps every now and again, stretching his legs. Ash watched as someone brought him a bottle of water from the house.

  Twenty minutes later he stepped inside the gate and disappeared from a sight.

  Either a shift change or a call of nature.

  A moment later the gate opened and a black town car slid out of the driveway and headed towards t
he city.

  Predictable.

  Which in itself was a bad thing, because if Ash could work out the judge’s personality well enough to guess he’d go walkabout after just one meeting there was no way the killer hadn’t reached the same conclusion.

  Ash started the engine and pulled out of the neighbour’s drive to follow him.

  He kept three or four cars between him and Maffrici’s more out of habit than out of fear that he would be seen. He doubted the judge would even realize he had a tail. He certainly wasn’t taking any evasive measures.

  Ash followed Maffrici until he picked up the autostrada and headed east.

  Less than ten miles later Maffrici indicated and took the turn off into the Colle del Tasso rest area.

  He hadn’t been driving for long enough to need a stop, even with a huge prostate. So this was his final destination.

  It was a good place. Easy access from in and out of town, enough surveillance cameras if things went south and you needed a closer look at the people coming and going later.

  He put a call through to Laura, giving her his GPS coordinates and telling her to move heaven and earth to tap into the live feed.

  FORTY

  Unsurprisingly, the address printed on Anglemark’s summons was only a short distance from his secret apartment.

  The red, white, and green awning announced that it was an Italian restaurant whilst the writing in the window promised genuine stone-baked pizzas. It offered takeaway and delivery as well as the sit-down restaurant. First impressions, it looked too nice for the average Swede’s taste. The Swedish relationship with pizza was weird. It was all about the biggest, thinnest base and the cheapest ingredients. It was basically hangover food. Or had been until a couple of years when all of these fancy pizzerias had started to spring up in Vasastan and down on Söder. Suddenly it was all about artichoke hearts, asparagus, rocket, Parma ham, and parmesan shavings. But this wasn’t the part of town where people would make a pizzeria a destination, no matter how hip and trendy it was.