The Memory Man

by Steven Savile

  He was sitting on a chair, bound in place with electrical tape wrapped round his wrists and the armrests, his ankles, and the chair legs.

  ‘Where am I?’

  ‘Of all the questions you could have asked, that is not the first one I would have expected. Open your eyes, Pietro. Take a look around. Think. Cast your mind back. You might recognize it.’

  The only light came from a small table lamp perched on a packing case. The electrical cable snaked away into the shadows beyond the bare bulb’s reach.

  Danilo blinked again, trying to clear the crust matting his eyelashes. It hurt to look into the light. He began to make sense of what he was seeing around him. How could he not? He was in his own home. The basement.

  ‘You have to love technology. I simply set the satellite navigation to take you home and here we are.’

  ‘What do you want from me?’

  ‘See, now, that’s a much better question than where am I. In your place it would have been much higher up my list. But then I’m not you. Like I told you, I don’t want anything from you. Well, that’s not strictly true. I want you to recognize what you did and then to pray, truly and repentantly, for forgiveness.’

  ‘Forgiveness? But I did nothing. You know that. You said so. So said I wasn’t on your list.’

  ‘I did, didn’t I? But you’re right. You did nothing. You did nothing to stop them. You accommodated them, you turned a blind eye to the pleas and begging for help. You were complicit. And maybe you were worse than that? I look at this house and wonder how you could possibly afford it on the money you made at the group home, and I know. I know where your money came from, Pietro. You sold us. One by one. You sold us.’

  ‘That’s not true. I worked hard all my life,’ Danilo said. ‘Everything I have, I earned.’

  ‘I’m sure you did, but the things you learn from dying men … they talk because they think you might spare them some ounce of pain. You sold us, and that makes you no better than Anglemark. You might not have fucked us, but you fucked us.’

  Danilo strained against the tape, but there was no give in it. The fibres dug into his flesh as he struggled against his bonds, but they weren’t breaking.

  ‘It’s horrible being helpless, isn’t it?’

  He said nothing.

  ‘It’s the worst feeling in the world, knowing that you’re next, that the next time the door opens they’re coming for you. Knowing what happens when you try and fight back. They enjoy that. They enjoy breaking your body and your spirit. It adds to their pleasure.’

  ‘I die because I didn’t stop them? Is that my punishment?’

  ‘Ah, Pietro, I already told you what was going to happen. Don’t you listen? I’m going to give you the chance to repent your sins. I am going to give you time for reflection. To see if you can find clarity. I suggest you use it to make peace with God. Who knows, perhaps it will help you remember people you had thought long forgotten?’

  Michael reached out and turned off the lamp, leaving the cellar in total darkness.

  He turned on the torch in his mobile phone and made his way to the stairs. Danilo heard his footsteps on the wooden stairs followed by the closing door.

  Danilo was alone in the dark.

  FIFTY-FOUR

  It was barely 6 a.m. when Frankie picked up the voice memo from Peter Ash.

  She saw the time stamp on it, and realized he must have been up most of the night running this stuff over and over. Given his last words, less than an hour ago, were, ‘Now I’m going to try and get some sleep,’ she didn’t call back.

  Even if she was an early bird it would still be a couple of hours before Laura got in to River House.

  Ash had made a mistake and he knew that.

  What happened next would define him; right now he was in the crucible of grief and anger and either it shattered him or he came out, tempered, like steel. She couldn’t do it for him, but that didn’t mean he was alone.

  Despite the fact they’d never met they were in this together, so the question was: what could she do to make things right? She might not be able to carry the guilt or unburden him of the grief, but there were still practical things she could do to take the weight. She thought about heading down to Rome, but his message seemed to indicate he was heading back to London. He’d hit on something in his rambling night-long memo: they should be looking at the children, not just the adults. It made sense. The chronology was such that anyone who had been a child then would be in their thirties or forties now, young enough and fit enough to exact this sort of elaborate scheme. The problem, as far as she could discern, was that Laura was having trouble getting a comprehensive list of children who had passed through the system. The Romanians had burned a lot of the records they’d kept and hadn’t kept great records in the first place.

  She had convinced herself a lot of them had been destroyed to hide the ugly truth of what went on in those places.

  She showered, had a breakfast of hard bread and cheese, and was out of the door half an hour later when her phone rang.

  Henrik Frys.

  ‘Francesca? I was hoping you might have some progress to report?’

  Frankie sketched out where her enquiries had taken her, confirming that the tongue had turned up in Paris, and what she’d turned up with the secret apartment, all of which she knew he already knew. What he didn’t know was that she’d found the basement room where Anglemark had been tortured. And then, to fill in the silence, she explained about Ramirez in Seville.

  ‘You think his death is connected to others? That it is a grand conspiracy?’

  ‘If we just look at the facts, we have Dooley, a suicide just outside of London, Ramirez, a heart attack in Spain, Tournard, an abduction in Paris, Maffrici, a judge in protective custody in Rome, and Pietro Danilo, currently missing. All of these men have received body parts in the mail along with the same warning Anglemark did. These men are all linked, and it is our working hypothesis that they were involved in a charitable trust that operated orphanages in Eastern Europe, notably Romania during the fall of the Ceaușescu regime, and that something must have happened there.’

  ‘All well and good, but your priority has to be closing the Anglemark aspect of this, and as quickly and quietly as possible.’

  ‘With all due respect, sir, that’s not the priority. The priority is to stop the killer before he can claim any more lives.’

  ‘Well, yes, of course. I am just thinking about Anglemark’s family. He was a good man. The world doesn’t benefit from raking over the fine details of his personal life. Secret apartments, dead lovers. It’s all very salacious, but all it serves to do is detract from his legacy.’

  ‘Sir, can I just clarify, are you telling me to brush this under the carpet?’

  ‘No. I’m asking you to make it go away. Find the killer. We cannot allow this to become another Palme. And do it without destroying a good man’s reputation.’

  ‘What if he wasn’t a good man?’

  ‘I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that, Miss Varg. And I suggest very strongly you don’t repeat it. I would hate for anything to impact on your very promising career.’

  ‘Why call me in? In the first place, I mean, if you didn’t want me investigating it properly?’

  ‘No one has said that, have they? I most certainly haven’t.’

  The only reason she could think of, which she wasn’t about to give voice to, was that someone higher up the chain had decided she was disposable. It was always good to have a sacrifice to hand.

  ‘I hope we understand each other,’ Frys said.

  ‘Oh, I understand you, sir.’

  ‘Good. Very good. Well, that’s all. I do wish you the very best of luck, officer. I look forward to your call telling me you’ve got your man and we can all rest well in our beds.’

  ‘I’m glad you can sleep at night, sir,’ she said, and hung up on him.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  Ash woke to his phone ringing.

  He didn’t answ
er it. Eventually it stopped. He gave it another minute or so before he reached over to check who had been trying to call him.

  The display said 8:59.

  He’d missed three calls from Laura and one from Frankie.

  He listened to the voicemails. Frankie’s was only two words, ‘Call me.’ Laura’s were a little longer and grew more insistent with each one.

  He called Laura first.

  ‘When I call you pick up your fucking phone,’ Laura said, no hello. ‘I thought … I … don’t do that to me again.’

  ‘Do what? Sorry.’

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’

  ‘Asleep.’

  ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you for over an hour and you were asleep? I thought you were in trouble. I was about to call Division and then get the Italian stallions dispatched to check on you. I know what you’ve been like. I know what losing Mitch did to you …’ She didn’t finish the thought. She didn’t need to.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, and he meant it. ‘I didn’t think.’

  ‘Famous last words. Well, as long as you’re all right I guess there’s no harm done.’

  ‘I’m fine. So, what have you got for me?’

  ‘I found Danilo’s car.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The most obvious place. It’s in the driveway outside his house.’

  ‘You’re shitting me.’

  ‘Nope. Satellite imagery confirmed it was still there as of five minutes ago. I can tell you that you were right, there were two men in the car, but because the Memory Man was in the back seat we haven’t got a decent facial image.’

  ‘The who?’

  ‘That’s what Frankie’s been calling him, the Memory Man. I kinda like it.’

  ‘I don’t. It sounds like something the Sun would dream up.’

  It didn’t make sense. If Danilo had given the guy the slip there was no way he’d go home. He would have run for the seven hills around Rome and then kept on running.

  He said as much.

  ‘And yet there he is – or at least his car,’ Laura said.

  ‘Have you spoken to Frankie?’

  ‘Next on my To Do list.’

  ‘She called me when she couldn’t get hold of you. She has some ideas about breaking down the list. We’ve started working on it.’

  ‘Excellent.’

  ‘Go and check out the house. I’ll let Frankie know that you’re actually alive.’

  ‘I’ll check in later.’

  Her heard the start of her making another joke at his expense but ended the call before she had the chance to finish it.

  It was only as he headed down to his hire car that Ash realized what the killer’s presence here in Rome meant: Tournard was dead.

  FIFTY-SIX

  Time lost all meaning.

  Pietro Danilo was consumed by the darkness.

  At first, he had actually thought about his sins, and felt guilt, then anger and frustration that he was the one suffering. He wasn’t part of this. He hadn’t touched the children. He was a good man. He had tried to help them. That was where the money had come from. He hadn’t sold access to their bodies, he’d taken payments to facilitate adoptions. But he’d only ever taken money from good homes. He was helping those children to get a new life. A better life. He wasn’t the monster here, he was the hero.

  He heard something scuttling not far away from him, claws scratching against the concrete floor.

  Mouse or rat. It didn’t matter.

  There was no point wasting his breath crying out for help. The only person who would be able to hear him was the liar who called himself Michael.

  He tried to reconstruct the layout of the cellar in his mind’s eye, picturing the boxes and shelves scattered around the room, and once he had a very basic memory of the layout, tried to remember what was inside each of them.

  Not that he’d be able to wriggle or squirm his way out of the tape that secured him, but it gave his mind something to cling on to.

  Perhaps Michael would make a mistake.

  It was possible, wasn’t it?

  There had to be a chance.

  It couldn’t end like this.

  Eventually he heard the door open as Michael returned. The other man walked slowly down the wooden steps, shining the way with the torch from his phone once more.

  ‘There’s a light switch just inside the door,’ Danilo said. He wasn’t sure why he said it. He was already forgetting what Michael looked like; the features he thought had been burned on his brain during their time in the cafe had become indistinct, the face he remembered now had been moulded and remoulded by fat fingers in Plasticine because of the drugs.

  ‘The darkness is better for you,’ Michael assured him. ‘You don’t want to remember my face when Ash asks you to describe me. It would be a pity if you did. For you.’

  ‘You think he’ll come here?’

  ‘Oh yes. He should already be on his way. The car in the driveway is a nice touch. He might even think you’ve escaped.’

  ‘Then what? He knocks on the door, do you kill him? He’s not part of this. Let me talk to him. I can tell him everything’s fine. He has no idea who you are. You can still walk out of here.’

  ‘Have you repented yet?’

  ‘You know I’m sorry.’

  ‘I am here to take your confession. Don’t you remember how you made us do that?’

  ‘You were one of the children at the orphanage?’ He seemed so clear, so rational, and yet he was obviously broken.

  He could almost hear the curl of Michael’s lips as he told him, ‘You made us go into the confessional with one damned priest after another, do you remember? The problem was we didn’t have anything to confess, and they didn’t want to hear anything but the sucking slurp of our lips on them.’

  ‘But I had no idea … I swear. I didn’t know until later. If I could go back … If I could change things …’

  ‘Then what? You’d save us somehow? Please don’t insult me. You knew what you were doing when you led us down into the cellar. You knew exactly what was waiting for us as you pushed us stumbling forward into the darkness. You knew about the links, shadows and pain, darkness and light. You knew that and denied us the light, giving us up to the shadows. It didn’t matter if we begged. I know, because I did. I begged you as you closed that door and left me alone in the freezing cold with no light, no food, no water, and no idea of how long I would be down there. Do you remember me now?’

  Danilo hung his head, not in shame, not in regret. The weight of his actions was coming back to haunt him and he couldn’t shoulder the burden.

  The children had been difficult. They had behaved like wild animals. They deserved what they got. They needed to be broken, for their own good, or no good family would want to save them. But how could he make Michael understand that everything he had done to them he had done for them? He hadn’t made them scream. Not when they down there. The darkness broke them, but only so he could put them back together again, like the nursery rhyme.

  Was that what Michael was trying to do now? Break him so he could put him back together again?

  He wasn’t a child. He was a survivor. There was a cockroach’s heart beating in his chest. He would do whatever he had to, say whatever he had to, to survive.

  Michael produced a bottle of water.

  He unscrewed the cap and offered it to Danilo, holding it close to his mouth.

  He kept his lips closed, even as a little liquid dribbled down his chin.

  He turned his head away.

  ‘You don’t want it? I’m being generous, Pietro, more generous than you ever were. Or are you frightened I will drug you again? I don’t want to poison you. I don’t want to kill you. You saw me break the seal. It’s clean. You can drink it. But it’s your choice.’

  Michael screwed the cap back on and put the bottle down beside the lamp. He wasn’t about to let the man know just how much he did want it. ‘It’s there if you want it,’ Michael said, shak
ing his head as though he couldn’t quite believe how stubbornly stupid his prisoner was. He turned the lamp off again. ‘Now, I think you should take the next few hours to reflect,’ he said. ‘If nothing else, it is good for the soul. Isn’t that what you used to tell us, Pietro?’

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  Ash saw the racing-green Renault parked alongside Danilo’s house. He parked across the street and watched for a moment. A few hundred metres away a man was walking towards him with a newspaper tucked under his arm. He saw a boy and his dog, and a girl bouncing a tennis ball off the kerb while her mother plucked apples from the trees in the garden. On the other side of the street another man trimmed his hedge. It was a postcard scene. It was a moment of Italian life captured through his car window.

  It was hard to imagine anything truly evil flourishing in such a banal landscape of normal suburban life.

  But then it was hard to imagine someone receiving a tongue through the mail, or a toe, or a finger or an eye.

  He got out of the car just as the same woman that he had encountered the day before walked past with her dog. This time she at least gave him a slight smile before walking on. The dog didn’t even pay him that much attention. Perhaps after even one visit he was no longer thought of as a stranger. He smiled to himself and headed up the driveway.

  He walked up to the door and hammered on the wood.

  No response from inside.

  He hammered on the door again, using the side of his fist. He rang the bell, too, then beat on the door a third time.

  No answer.

  He didn’t like it.

  The car was wrong. The silence was wrong. Every instinct screamed danger.

  He backed away from the door, peering up at the windows for signs of life inside. He couldn’t see any. Ash was about to go around the back when the man with the newspaper under his arm appeared at the gate and called out to him.

  ‘Are you looking for Pietro?’

  Ash shielded his eyes from the sun. ‘Yes,’ he said, walking towards the stranger. He produced his Division ID. The man barely looked at it, accepting the fact it looked official.