The Memory Man

by Steven Savile

  ‘You’ve missed him. He left a couple of hours ago. Took a taxi. We had a chat. I live a couple of doors down the street. He told me he was leaving town for a few days. Going to visit his sister. He had a lot of luggage for a couple of days.’

  ‘I don’t suppose you know where she lives?’ Ash asked, knowing the answer was going to be no. Danilo was running. He’d left the Renault because it identified him. The fact Ash had used it to track him had spooked the guy enough. His mobile phone and anything else that might be used in this modern inter-connected world to hunt him down was probably on the kitchen table, abandoned.

  The man shrugged. ‘Sorry. Maybe Milan? I’m sure he mentioned Milan once.’

  ‘Thanks anyway,’ Ash said, cursing himself as he walked back to the car.

  Leaning against the side of the Fiat he called Laura.

  ‘Do me a favour, Law.’

  ‘I shall use my copious amounts of free time to do your bidding, master.’

  ‘Ha. Just get me an address for Danilo’s sister.’

  ‘You got a name?’

  ‘Nope. Honestly, I’m not even sure she exists. I think he’s made a break for it. He took a taxi from home, so either the station or the airport. I figure he just told the neighbour he was visiting family to shut him up.’

  Twenty minutes later he was driving back towards his hotel, frustrated. The phone rang.

  ‘I’m not sure you’re going to want to hear this,’ she said.

  FIFTY-EIGHT

  ‘He’s quite the trusting soul,’ Michael said when he turned on the lamp again.

  It felt as though he had been gone for hours. The darkness lied like that. It could just as easily have been twenty minutes. Time passed differently in the dark. Danilo had no idea whether it was day or night, never mind what time it was.

  His mouth was parched, his tongue furred and swollen. All he could think about was the bottle of water on the table, inches away from where he sat. It might as well have been a mile away. Without the use of his hands he couldn’t take it.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Your friend, Peter Ash.’

  ‘Ash? I’ve told you, he’s no friend of mine.’

  ‘I just had a nice little chat with him. He seems quite concerned about your wellbeing. Of course, he now believes you are visiting your sister.’

  ‘I haven’t got a sister.’

  ‘You learn something new every day,’ Michael smirked.

  ‘He’ll find out, he’ll check. He’ll work it out.’

  ‘Oh, I do hope so.’

  He didn’t say anything for fear that panic would creep into his voice. Once you showed fear you were beaten. The weak always gave in. They didn’t have the backbone. But he was afraid.

  ‘You still think I’m going to kill you? I’m disappointed by just how banal your mind is, Pietro. If I wanted you dead I could have poisoned you in the bar, or in the cafe. I could have slit your throat from the back seat of your car or opened an artery after I taped your wrists to the arms of the chair. I could just stand behind you now, reach around to grip your jaw and break your neck. I don’t need to do all of this.’

  ‘But that’s not you, is it?’ he said, finding courage he didn’t know was there. ‘That’s not what you did to Anglemark though. There is no easy death here.’

  ‘Very good,’ Michael said. ‘You are right, there is no easy death here. But we are both men of the world, Pietro. We have done things,’ and the way he said it made it absolutely clear that in his mind their crimes were far from equal. ‘I am neither judge, jury, nor executioner.’ Michael laughed. ‘I chose this name for a reason. Did you ever think that? Michael. I am the avenging angel.’

  The man was crazy.

  There was no reasoning with a mad man.

  And there was no way of getting free of bonds tying him to the chair. He was helpless; completely helpless.

  And that frightened him more than anything.

  More than the dark.

  More than the memories that lurked there, waiting for him.

  Michael produced a packing knife and a hypodermic needle.

  Danilo strained against the electrical tape, muscles trembling as the edges rolled and thickened, tearing the hairs form his forearms.

  He screamed, not caring that it would only be heard by the avenging angel.

  And he prayed.

  He prayed that whatever was in the needle would work before Michael began to use the knife.

  FIFTY-NINE

  ‘You were right.’

  ‘And you didn’t think I’d want to hear that?’

  ‘No sister. I’ve gone through everything. There isn’t a single reference to a sister. There was a brother but he’s dead.’

  ‘Sister-in-law?’

  ‘Nope. The brother died in his teens. So, like I said, you were right. He’s laying down a false trail.’

  ‘Is he though?’ Ash said, realizing that he might just have fucked up more spectacularly than he had last night.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Why tell a lie that can’t possibly be true? He knows it’ll take two minutes to check on his family and realize that there isn’t one. Why not say he’s off to visit an old friend, or say anything? Play the conversation through in your own head, “Hey, going somewhere nice?” asks the neighbour, it doesn’t need any specifics, does it? You answer, “Just taking a break,” or “Oh yes, beach here I come. Do me a favour, keep an eye on the house, would you?” and that’s it. You can run the conversation a hundred ways without needing to add lies.’

  ‘Maybe the neighbour got creative? Told you something you wanted to hear?’

  ‘Or maybe the neighbour doesn’t know Danilo has no family. Maybe the lie wasn’t to protect Danilo. Maybe he’s lying to protect himself.’

  ‘You’ve lost me, Pete.’

  He was kicking himself. He should have seen it, but because the guy came from the opposite direction, playing nosy neighbour, he just took him at face value. ‘I think I might have just had a cosy chat with Frankie’s Memory Man.’

  ‘Jesus, that’s a leap.’

  ‘I dunno. Stick with me. He left Danilo in the house, alive or dead, while he went for a walk. He knew we’d be coming. He parked the car out front to lure us there. We took the bait.’

  ‘It’s still a stretch,’ Laura said. ‘But that doesn’t mean you’re wrong.’

  He fell silent for a moment, the implications filtering through his brain.

  The signs had been there.

  It was obvious in retrospect.

  The guy had played him for a fool.

  He’d walked right up to him, let him have a good look at his identification, and the man hadn’t blinked at the obscure division or questioned what trouble Danilo might be in or ticked any of the usual nosy neighbour boxes. All he’d done was spun Ash a line and he had swallowed it whole.

  ‘He spoke to me in English,’ he said. ‘Fucker. Spoke to me in English and I didn’t get it. Christ.’

  ‘That’s not unusual is it, even in Italy?’

  ‘It is when you don’t know someone. You don’t call out in a foreign language. Fucker knew who I was. He made me in Caligula’s so he knew my face. And he knows I’m English because he knows I’m hunting him. I fucked up, Law.’

  ‘But so did he, you got a look at his face.’

  He thought about it. He hadn’t locked in the guy’s features, thinking he’d be doing that to Ash from the end of the driveway. But he could sit down with a sketch artist, they’d get something.

  He slammed the steering wheel hard, but it didn’t make him feel any better. Danilo was no innocent, but he had let him down twice now. He had a hard time believing there would be a third.

  Ash turned on the radio to the first song he’d recognized in this country; AC/DC’s ‘Night Prowler’. The song thundered in the compact car. Ash caught himself driving to the rhythm of the lead guitar, pushing the little Fiat as fast as it would go.

  The drive back to th
e house took less than half the time.

  But it was still more than half an hour since he had driven away. Danilo’s racing-green Renault was still parked in the driveway. There was no sign of the neighbour, or the girl with the ball or the mum picking apples. There wasn’t a soul to be seen.

  Cities have souls, he’d read that somewhere, some philosopher or other. If it was true, then this little place on the outskirts of Rome knew. It knew what was waiting in Danilo’s house. It knew the evil that had walked casually up to Ash with a newspaper tucked under his arm and lied a man’s life away. It knew. And it had hidden from the moment of discovery, not wanting to witness it.

  Ash walked back up to the door but didn’t waste time knocking. He tried the handle. Locked. He headed around the side of the property, peering in through the side windows first. There was nothing immediately wrong inside that he could see. He reached the side door.

  It was wide open.

  Ash went in.

  He moved cautiously, keeping his steps light, so as not to make a sound. The house was silent as the grave, save for the single steady drip, drip, drip of water.

  He followed the sound to a downstairs shower room. The air inside was still moist and a couple of damp towels had been discarded on the tiled floor.

  That wasn’t Danilo.

  The man was a fastidious prick.

  Beads of water dripped from the head into the tiled shower tray. They added to the sheen of pink-stained water.

  Blood.

  He moved back into the hallway.

  The downstairs was silent.

  The killer had moved on, the blood in the shower meaning he’d done what he came here to do. The doorways led into a dining room, a lounge with a large wall-mounted television, and a smaller study with an antique desk. Everything was neatly arranged, scrupulously tidy. There wasn’t a single thing out of place save for those two towels. He walked through the entire downstairs, the only sound that of his own breathing.

  Another door opened beneath the stairs, he thought it was going to be a toilet, but instead was to another flight of stairs, leading down.

  The descent was cramped, and the space below shrouded in complete darkness. He fumbled with his left hand and found a switch, flooding the stairwell with light from the bare bulb hanging from the ceiling.

  He was only halfway down when he realized there was someone down there, sitting in a chair. Bound and the ankles and wrists. Naked.

  Danilo.

  Blood pooled around the dead man’s feet.

  Ash saw the look of abject terror on his face. He’d never seen a death’s rictus like it, and with good reason.

  Between his flaccid thighs there was a bloody hole where his penis should have been.

  Ash felt his gorge rise, but stopped himself from vomiting. He was about to walk away with the meaning of the faint dribble of blood registered. Blood only pumped out when there was a pulse to drive it.

  He stepped forward into the blood and reached for the Danilo’s neck, feeling the faintest flutter of a heartbeat fading. But for a moment longer at least it was still there.

  Danilo’s eyes flickered open. There was no sense in them. No clarity. He was blind to the world, lost in pain. But his lips twitched, a sound barely coming from them.

  Ash recognized the word even though he still had no idea what it signified.

  Bonn.

  SIXTY

  Ash spent far too many hours in a police station until someone finally made the right call.

  He’d radioed in for an ambulance, knowing it couldn’t possibly make it because even with the damp towels from the bathroom and the improvised tourniquet he fashioned with his belt, Pietro Danilo was done. Even if he’d wanted to fight on, his body couldn’t stand the shock of blood loss and went into cardiac arrest long before it arrived. And it was a mercy that he did.

  Ash had seen some truly horrible things, but the Memory Man had stripped Danilo naked and cut off his genitals while he was conscious. It was a level of sickness that was well across the border of psychotic. He’d taken the time to have a shower to remove the blood before calmly walking out of the back door. Who could do that?

  Reading the scene, the discarded hypodermic at least suggested Danilo had been out of it on morphine or some other opiate pain med, but not enough to render him unconscious. The killer wanted him awake enough to know what was being done to him.

  He’d told the Italian boys in Division, who had liaised with the Carabinieri to ensure the forensic team were there with the first responders. He admitted to his own prints in the middle of the blood, and had taken his shoes off to prevent spreading more tracks around the house and waited for them to bring him in. He played it all by the book, though at one point he did feel like they were treating him like a suspect, which in their place he might have. But finally, Division dispatched their men to vouch for him and he was released, with the proviso that he wasn’t to leave the country. He made no such promises.

  It was mid-afternoon by the time he returned to his hotel to check out, and almost midnight before he was back in his flat in London, breaking the promise he hadn’t made almost immediately.

  He kicked off his blood-stained shoes on the doormat and went through to the lounge to put on some music. He was old school, or had reverted to old school, to be more honest about it, and preferred vinyl over CD, so sat in front of the album collection for a moment looking for something to suit his frame of mind. He ended up settling on R.E.M.’s Eponymous. He sat in the chair and listened through the first side before he did anything else. The music helped him disconnect, and that dissociative state helped him think. The fact that the first side was only twenty-one minutes long meant he couldn’t get lost down that rabbit hole, either.

  The killer moved quickly from country to country.

  There was no telling where he was now. Not Italy. He’d moved from Spain to Scandinavia and on to Paris and then England before Italy. He didn’t stay in one place long.

  They didn’t even have a name they could use to try to track him; it wasn’t as if the airlines would be able to pull up a search for the Memory Man. Though he must have had official paperwork, or at least a convincing enough forgery to open an account in the name of a dead footballer. It felt like they knew less about the guy than when they started, but that wasn’t true. He’d looked into his eyes. He’d heard his voice.

  He went back through to the hall to pick up the mail that had gathered while he was away.

  Bills and junk mail. No one sent real letters any more.

  Ash put on side two before he stepped out of his clothes. He could just hear the music above the spray of the water as he scrubbed the Memory Man out of his skin, then towelled himself off, and went back through for a nightcap.

  He poured two fingers of decent whisky, and sat on the couch. He didn’t want to sit in silence, so, remembering the only song he’d recognized in Italy, decided to sit back and listen to the soundtrack of his future, ‘Highway to Hell’.

  Bon Scott’s vocal was as blistering as it had ever been. There was so much prophecy in it. When the needle followed the groove into ‘Night Prowler’, a song about one of the US’s most famous serial killers, it hit him. Bonn. It didn’t have to be the German city, did it? Bon Scott wasn’t born Bon, his name was Ronald. It could be a nickname, couldn’t it?

  He fell asleep in the chair, wrestling with his demons.

  His sleep that night was fitful.

  His dreams were punctuated by glimpses of Danilo bleeding to death in the chair. Mitch visited him, too, standing behind the cockless man, saying in that laconic way of his that Ash should have saved him, though whether his guilt meant Danilo or his partner his dream state mind couldn’t decipher.

  It was almost nine when he woke to a knock at the door.

  He couldn’t remember the last time anyone had done that.

  Anyone not living in the block needed to use the buzzer downstairs.

  He opened the door a fraction, ha
lf-expecting it to be Ethel, his septuagenarian neighbour, bearing leftover lasagne and tutting about how he’d never get a nice lady if he didn’t put some meat on his bones.

  There was no one there.

  He opened the door wider. The landing was empty. He assumed it was the kids from upstairs playing knock-down ginger, then wondered if kids still played that.

  He was about to close the door when he saw the package on the floor outside his door.

  He knew what it was before he opened.

  The package was identical to the one Jacques Tournard had received in Paris, Jonas Anglemark in Stockholm, Dooley, Maffrici, and Danilo. His heart raced, blood surging through his temples as he reached down with trembling hands.

  No.

  He stopped himself, and ran down the stairs and out of the front door into the street, trying to see where his mysterious mail man had gone. There were half a dozen people out there, heads down as they hustled towards bus stops and the Underground station four streets away. A dozen more came around both corners and others queued at the lights waiting for the green man.

  He couldn’t see anyone out there who didn’t look like they belonged.

  He gave up and went back inside.

  He picked up the package and carried it into the flat.

  Why him? Why send one of the trophies to him? Was the Memory Man telling him that he’d made himself a target? Or was it a parting gift to say it was done now, ended with Danilo, and Ash had failed?

  The temptation was to tear it open.

  The smart thing to do was bag it and take it to River House and get someone to test it.

  He rang Laura and told her he was coming in, and what he was bringing with him.

  SIXTY-ONE

  Frankie had been at her desk for a couple of hours.

  She hated this kind of grunt work. It wasn’t why she became a cop.

  She wanted to be out there, hunting the killer, not in here hunting a name.

  Laura had set up a database, names along with whatever information they had on them, but no matter how she tried to sort and re-sort the stuff into any sort of order she couldn’t see anything that the other woman hadn’t already flagged and dismissed.