The Memory Man

by Steven Savile

  The houses on the opposite side of the road were old, but not so old that they had the hollowed out into the bedrock basements of the really old places in Gamla Stan. There were places there that literally had been cells for fifteenth- and sixteenth-century criminals that were now wine cellars and coffee vaults. Like so many of the buildings, what once was a Hanseatic merchant’s townhouse had been divided into apartments, probably a century or more ago. The real estate was just too valuable for the old houses to remain that way.

  On her side were a row of shops, but even those had three and four storeys of apartments above their hoardings. What she didn’t see was anything obviously derelict. She walked the length of the street, to the corner where the block was under renovation. Scaffolding had been set up outside, and plastic sheeting covered most of the facade. A sign advertised the contractors doing the work, and said they specialized in replacing old pipes. That was common enough; lots of these older places had the same rusted and rotten pipes in them from the forties and fifties that needed to be stripped out and replaced with modern materials. That was the thing about Stockholm, ever since the voracious culling of buildings with any real history to make way for those Functionalist monstrosities, people had become fixated with preserving what remained, so even when old buildings were essentially dead inside it was about patching them up not replacing them.

  A couple of the buildings had HSB and SKB logos on the side, meaning they were owned by the massive letting companies, both of which had decades-long waiting lists for tenants, so she immediately discounted them. Too much paperwork, even if they were being rented out second hand. Condo boards kept records and voted on allowing sublets. Everything was listed in the minutes and filed with the tax authorities. So none of those would work. It needed to be privately owned.

  Somewhere that had a decent turnover of people on short-term leases. A place where the owner didn’t look too closely at the paperwork, preferring cold hard cash to the letter of the law. And the owner of that kind of place wasn’t going to live there.

  A door-to-door search would take hours, and Swedes didn’t answer their doors to strangers. She could stand hammering on a door for a good ten minutes and the occupant would cheerfully ignore her. It was a part of the Swedish psyche that she’d never understood. Her own apartment building was a classic example; it had a door code to allow access, but after 9 p.m. the code was disabled and the only way you were getting into the building was with a key, even if you were an invited guest. Swedes, Stockholmers especially, didn’t like visitors. She’d lived in her place for the best part of a decade and she’d yet to say hello to the neighbours who shared her landing and wouldn’t recognize them in the street. One of them, she was sure, watched through the spyhole until she was gone before they risked opening the door because they didn’t want to face a few seconds of awkward social interaction. But that was just city life. Or at least Scandinavian city life.

  It did mean that provided the screams were kept to a minimum, pretty much any old building with thick stone walls would work for the killer’s purposes.

  She had to narrow it down though.

  She crossed the street and walked the length of it again in the opposite direction. As she suspected, nearly all of the houses had cellars, several of which had been converted into laundry rooms, though some offered additional accommodation, squeezing out every drop of profit from the building. Most had only internal access, but a few offered street entry down a short flight of steps. Those had more in the way of isolation, curiously, as the steps added a layer of distance from the pavement that the other buildings didn’t have.

  The door to the nearest of the apartments below street level opened and a moment later a young woman emerged, struggling with a small child in a buggy. There was a neat concrete ramp built into the short flight of stairs, allowing wheelchair – and in this case pushchair – access.

  The best intelligence was always local.

  ‘Need a hand?’ Frankie called down.

  ‘No need,’ the woman said, as she turned her back and negotiated the ramp backwards. The baby giggled away in its seat.

  ‘Mind if I ask you a couple of questions?’

  Immediately suspicious, the woman started to push her child away, but Frankie showed her ID and her manner thawed.

  ‘Have you lived here long?’

  ‘Nearly six months. My boyfriend and I broke up. I needed to find somewhere. It’s nearly impossible to get a first-hand contract in the city, and with this little guy on the way I was just happy to find a roof. We’ve got a new place over there.’ She pointed in the general direction of the apartment where Frankie had found Dahlberg’s corpse. The odds of it being the same place were next to none, but she wouldn’t put anything beyond the gods of fate and real estate.

  ‘Nice,’ Frankie said.

  ‘Not sure I’d go that far, but it’s mine, and I won’t have to worry about the lease running out.’

  ‘I hope it works out for you.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Do you know if there are any other basement flats available around here? Only recently rented, but it’s come available again?’

  ‘Maybe number 75,’ the woman said, pointing along the street. ‘It was empty for a while. Then I started seeing lights on in there. Didn’t see a moving van, though. Haven’t noticed any lights for the last week. Not that I’m looking all the time, you know? It’s just that the little one keeps me up at night and we like to go out for a walk, don’t we?’ She said the last bit to the baby in the buggy, who gurgled like he actually understood.

  ‘I don’t suppose you actually saw the guy?’

  ‘Sorry, no. You know how it is.’

  ‘It’s fine, thanks. Have a good day.’

  ‘You too.’

  Frankie watched the woman walk away, slowing every now and then to talk to her baby.

  She was going to need a warrant before she could check out the man’s hideaway. It didn’t matter that the place was empty again, or that the killer would most probably have bleached the place clean, it felt like she was one step closer to catching him.

  She crossed the street and she started down the dozen stairs to the basement courtyard, intending to peer in through the window, when she saw a small sign declaring the apartment was available to let, and offering a number to call.

  She tried the doorbell and waited.

  There was no response.

  She tried again, this time pressing her ear to the door. There was no answering ring from the buzzer inside. She gave three hard raps on the door instead, banging loudly enough to wake any day sleeper.

  She dialled the mobile number on the To Let sign.

  There was no business name, so it fitted the profile she’d expected, a small private lease, no doubt undeclared income. A nice little side-earner.

  That would make things easier at least, sparing her the backwards and forwards trying to get approval for entry. All she had to do was convince the letting agent to show her around. Easy.

  He answered straight away.

  ‘Good afternoon, my name is Francesca Varg. I work with the Eurocrimes Division of the European Union. I am currently standing outside one of your properties in Stockholm. I need you to get yourself down here.’

  ‘Do you now? Why the hell should I do that?’

  ‘Because I have reason to believe that there has been a serious crime committed inside.’

  ‘This is a wind-up, right? Who put you up to this?’

  ‘No one.’

  ‘Then if you’re serious, get a fucking warrant.’

  ‘I can have a warrant here in thirty minutes. But if I do that, we break the door down. It’s your choice, of course, but I thought I would do you the courtesy of informing you so that you didn’t have to pay for a new door and locks.’

  ‘This is shit,’ he said, obviously unhappy with having his day ruined.

  ‘I only need a few minutes inside,’ she assured him.

  ‘I really don’t
care, it’s bullshit. You have no right.’

  ‘Look, I’m not interested in you, or who you let your properties to, in general. I’m not with the tax office, and I’m not about to make life shit for you, I just want a few minutes inside this apartment. That’s all. It’s better this way, believe me. The last thing you want is a couple of marked cars with blue flashing lights pulling up outside the block, am I right?’

  She gave him the address.

  ‘Ground floor or basement? They’re both vacant. Same guy rented them.’

  ‘Basement,’ she said, realizing the vacant ground-floor flat offered insulation against Anglemark’s screams.

  ‘I’ll be there in a couple of minutes.’

  He ended the call.

  Frankie couldn’t help but smile as she pressed her face up against the window. She used her hand to shield her eyes from the sunlight that caught the window. The curtains were closed but there was a narrow gap that offered a glimpse of the inside.

  She could see a dining chair on its side in the middle of the room. As far as she could tell it was the only furniture in the room.

  It felt right.

  It felt like the kind of place the Memory Man could have holed up in for a week without anyone really noticing him, allowing him to come and go at will. There was no obvious view into the apartment from street level. Little in the way of foot traffic, but enough that him coming and going wouldn’t stand out as unusual. Everything about it fitted the ideal needs of a man looking to hold someone prisoner. The fact that the tenant had taken the flat directly above, air-gapping the basement from the next set of tenants, convinced her she was right.

  It was the kind of place where a man could scream and keep screaming long after his tormentor had cut his tongue out while the world walked by past his window none the wiser.

  FORTY-THREE

  A red-veined fat man waddled around the corner. He huffed and puffed, but there was no way he had the lung capacity to blow anyone’s house down.

  Frankie knew that this was who she had been waiting for; everything about him screamed slum landlord. She despised the sort. A roll of pale flesh hung over a belt that had no right reaching around his middle.

  She perched on the low wall in front of the building. Her evidence bag was on the floor between her feet.

  The man looked like he was trying to hurry, arms and legs moving frantically but with very little in the way of forward motion going on. He covered the distance slowly. She watched him every step of the way.

  By the time he reached her his face was beetroot-red and coated with a sheen of sweat. He leaned on the wall for a moment, struggling to catch his breath before he spoke. In the end he didn’t bother with wasting words, and instead held up a key like it was the Holy Grail.

  ‘Stay outside,’ she said, not asking permission.

  He nodded and waved her away, rubbing the palm of his meaty hand across his face.

  She opened the door and knew without setting foot over the threshold the place was empty. There was something about places that weren’t lived in, they had a sound and a smell all of their own.

  The air was stale.

  Breathing deeply, it was immediately obvious no doors or windows had been opened in a long time. The door led into a cramped area where people could kick off their shoes, before opening into the room she’d been able to see through the curtain. There were no shoes or coats on the rack, though she noticed plenty of scuff marks along the woodwork.

  This was the right place.

  Anglemark had been tied to the wooden chair in the middle of the room. The wood was stained where the blood had pooled around the chair legs. It was a lot of blood. The kind of blood she’d expect from someone having their tongue cut out of their mouth.

  The mixture of odours was unmistakable.

  She’d been around enough corpses for it to be imprinted on her brain – the twin reeks of bladder and bowels spilled. They were smells that lingered.

  The three together, blood, piss, and shit, turned it into a death room.

  She didn’t walk deeper into the room, not wanting to contaminate the scene. There was no life to be saved here, only trace evidence of the lost.

  She took her phone out and put in a call to the dispatcher to get a forensics team on site.

  She put the evidence bag down on the floor just inside the door and retrieved a pair of blue plastic shoe covers, slipping them over her shoes before skirting the room so that she could check out the rest of the apartment.

  She kept close to the wall.

  The kitchen was spotless. It reeked of ammonia. Every surface had been bleached. There was not so much as a cup on the draining board. She checked the fridge. It was empty, the door ajar, the power off. There was no food in any of the cupboards, either.

  Likewise, the bathroom smelled of bleach.

  There were no towels, no soaps or toiletries in the shower.

  The bedroom was positively monastic. There was a single bed stripped to the blue mattress. There was a built-in wardrobe, which held a couple of misshapen wire coat hangers.

  The place had been scrubbed top to bottom.

  Everywhere apart from the lounge where the politician’s blood had been left to crust and soak into the floor until the last of his life was absorbed.

  She heard the front door open.

  She headed back to see the fat man on the threshold.

  ‘What the fuck is that smell?’

  ‘Out, now,’ she demanded. No please. No polite request.

  But it was too late.

  He wasn’t hearing her.

  He had pushed passed her into the room and was staring at the blood on the floorboards. At the broken zip ties. At the dark shape of the torturer’s chair deeper into the room. He started to heave.

  Frankie couldn’t get him outside before he vomited.

  FORTY-FOUR

  ‘Looks like we’ve hit pay dirt,’ Laura said when she called him back. ‘The car’s registered to one Pietro Danilo. Cross-referenced the photo on his driver’s licence and passport. He’s aged hard over the last few years, but it’s your guy. The STA hit turned up his home address. He’s going nowhere, so enjoy the Roman traffic jam.’

  ‘I’d enjoy it more with air conditioning,’ Ash said. ‘What do we know about Danilo?’

  ‘Well, for one, he was already on my list. He managed a group home in Romania funded by the first incarnation of EuropaChild during the turmoil of the Ceauşescu regime.’

  ‘Hallelujah.’

  ‘Let’s keep an open mind, but one thing we can be sure of is that Danilo has reasons to be afraid. Maybe he’s next on the list, and would have received part of Maffrici, maybe he’s already received something. You need to make contact.’

  ‘Makes sense.’

  ‘I’ll text you his address.’

  ‘Thanks. And make sure Frankie knows about the link. We’re getting there.’

  ‘I should charge you a membership fee.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘My dating site services.’

  She hung up before he could get his response in.

  It was good that she was getting back to normal, too. That was the thing she hadn’t realized, or maybe she had and just faked it better than he did, but Mitch Greer’s death had messed with her, too. She used to be this sarcastic, humorous flirt on the end of the phone, always giving them crap over their crappy love lives, always teasing them about the dumb things the boys did, but always with so much affection. And that had changed with Mitch’s death. She treated him with kid gloves. Probably because she was frightened he’d break – with good reason – but not realizing that those kid gloves made things so much weirder than they needed to be. He just wanted to get back to normal. Whatever the new normal was.

  His phone pinged.

  He keyed it into the satnav and spent another few minutes wrestling with the settings to change the language to English.

  ‘Twenty-eight minutes to destination,’ a woman’
s voice that sounded like it doubled as a phone-sex operator told him.

  Ash leaned out of the window, peering down the line of unmoving traffic and told her, ‘That’s a bit optimistic.’

  He killed the engine, no choice but to sit it out.

  His phone rang again.

  It was Frankie this time.

  ‘I thought you’d like to know we’ve had a breakthrough this end. I’m waiting for forensics to arrive, but we’ve found the place where Anglemark was held. It’s a rented basement apartment not far from his love nest. The landlord managed to puke his guts up all over the scene, so that’s fun, fun, fun.’

  ‘Nice. I think.’

  ‘I’m taking him over the road for a coffee and a chat to calm his nerves when forensics get here. See what he knows about the guy who rented the place.’

  ‘This is good. Really good.’

  ‘Call when you’ve spoken to your orphanage guy. We’ll talk properly.’

  ‘Will do.’

  The traffic up ahead started to move again, one by one the cars coming to life and edging forward until finally it was his turn to gun the engine.

  FORTY-FIVE

  ‘We got off to a bad start,’ Frankie said, as she steered the fat man towards a threadbare armchair in what passed for a boho chic cafe where the lights were far too dim and the coffee was far too expensive. It was only a couple of minutes’ walk from the apartment, and a lot more comfortable than trying to interrogate the guy in the street. After the vomit he no longer saw her as the enemy. He couldn’t have been more effusive or happier to get absolutely everything he knew about his tenant off his enormous chest. ‘I didn’t get your name.’

  She had no idea how long it would take for forensics to go over the place thoroughly beyond a basic concept of hours. So they had plenty of time. The lead investigator had promised to call her with his findings as soon as they were through.

  ‘Galanos. Belen Galanos.’

  ‘Greek?’

  ‘My father was, but the name is all I ever got from him. It means arrow.’ There was an unmistakable bitterness in his voice, a raw nerve even after all these years. Apologizing wouldn’t help, and might make things worse.