The Memory Man

by Steven Savile

  SIXTY-SIX

  Ash had walked out of there willingly with Michael.

  Michael had been insistent that he drive. His car. Not Ash’s. He went along with it. He wasn’t happy about it. But he still felt in control, though he heard Laura’s voice nagging away at the back of his mind reminding him that that was how Danilo and Tournard and everyone else had felt, too.

  ‘What I’m going to show you, the evidence I’m going to show you, is bigger than any crime you’ve faced in your career. It deserves the attention of the world. The understanding. And that only happens with you, because of who you are. Otherwise it will just be cleaned up.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘Because that’s what they do. All of them.’

  ‘Who is “all” supposed to be, Michael? I want to understand.’

  ‘Politicians, judges, the Church. They all watch each other’s back. Everything gets cleaned up. Sanitized. They live a life of lies.’

  ‘So, tell me about it, you can trust me.’

  ‘Can I? Or are you trying to control the situation? What do they call it, hostage management? If you had realized who I was when we met in Rome you would have arrested me, wouldn’t you? You would have chosen to save Danilo over exposing the true crimes of him and his kind, even if I had told you. You wouldn’t have listened. Because it doesn’t fit your narrative. And then they would have made me disappear to make absolutely sure the truth didn’t come out.’

  ‘How much further?’ Ash said.

  The light was starting to fade.

  ‘Not far. Once upon a time you would have been able to see it from here.’

  ‘See it? See what?’

  ‘The orphanage where I grew up.’

  ‘And these people, the ones you killed, they were all connected with it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Not Romania?’

  ‘No. Not Romania. The foundation grew considerably over a relatively short period of time. Romania was Danilo’s reward for running such a profitable institution here.’

  The car slowed and came to a halt in front of a sign that warned people to keep out.

  In the fading light Ash could just make out the outlines of a large building’s foundation in the overgrown landscape, where weeds ran riot, nature reclaiming the place for its own. He had the weirdest sense of déjà vu upon seeing the place.

  ‘This is it,’ Michael said, killing the engine. ‘Come on.’ He climbed out of the car. Ash did likewise.

  ‘What happened to it?’

  ‘Demolished. To hide the secrets that they wanted to keep hidden.’

  ‘And this is what you wanted to show me?’ He gesticulated towards the dark outline of what might have been a scullery wall or a bedroom or the refectory, or just about anywhere else within the huge orphanage when it had still been standing.

  Michael moved to the rear of the car and opened the boot. ‘You’ll need these,’ he said, nodded toward the spade and torch that were inside. ‘It’s going to be dark before you’ve seen enough.’

  Ash didn’t ask any more questions.

  Michael slammed the boot and led the way though a gap in the wire fence. There were lights on in a house further up the road, more than half a mile distant. There were no other lights to be seen. They had well and truly left the city behind. And he’d been so wrapped up in trying to unravel the conflicting threads in his head that he’d barely noticed it.

  Flickers of long-buried memories struggled to the surface of his mind.

  He had no idea of where he was.

  ‘Why not wait until morning?’ he called, following Michael, deeper into the wasteland.

  ‘The ghosts deserve to be at peace,’ Michael said. It wasn’t any kind of answer. Ash followed in the man’s wake, allowing him to stay a few steps ahead of him. The was an eerie familiarity about the shadows. Michael paused every now and then to check his bearings. Remembering. ‘It has changed a lot since I was last here. The trees are so much bigger now. It is as though the land has tried to purge the evil, swallowing it whole. It is barely recognizable.’

  ‘How long since you were last here?’

  ‘Almost fifty years.’

  ‘It’s hardly surprising that things have changed, then. Why come back now?’

  ‘A chat with an old friend and his son.’

  He stopped walking and turned, looking back at the building to get his bearings, before he pointed at one of the trees. It was a great oak, dominating the garden. Pete had seen that tree before. He was sure he had. But that made no sense.

  ‘It was much smaller in my memory, but this is the place,’ Michael said

  ‘Are you going to tell me what I’m looking for?’

  ‘Just dig, you’ll know when you find it.’

  ‘And you’re sure this is the right place?’

  ‘All around here is the right place, trust me.’

  ‘And I’m not just digging my own grave?’

  ‘Just dig,’ Michael said again. He shone the torch at a patch of dark ground. ‘There will do.’

  The quickest way to find the truth was to do as he was told. It was also the quickest way to ending up six feet under. Still, Ash took his jacket off and handed it to Michael before he used the spade to mark out a shape in the grass. He lifted the turf to expose a patch of worm-filled earth a metre square.

  ‘Here?’

  Michael nodded.

  He dug, driving the blade of the spade into the black earth, and worked it free, tossing it aside. He repeated the motion again, and again. It took him two minutes to dig down deep enough that he hit something hard. His first thought was that it was a stone, but Michael shone the torch into the hole.

  ‘Look,’ he said.

  Ash crouched down, reaching to the hole with his hands to scrape away some of the earth that had fallen from the sides to backfill the hole.

  He was wrong.

  It wasn’t a stone, it was a bone.

  He clawed away at the earth, scooping handfuls out of the hole as he widened it, to expose more. A clavicle. A pelvis. Both under-developed; a child’s bones. He scrambled frantically, digging out more and more of the earth with his bare hands, tearing at his fingernails as he clawed up fistfuls of the stuff. Within five minutes he’d exposed three more skulls.

  Michael shone the torchlight across the patch of land. ‘They’re all along here.’

  ‘Who are they?’ Ash asked, though he already knew the answer.

  ‘Keep digging, you need to see.’

  ‘I need to call this in. We need a full forensics team here to take this place apart. With every handful of earth I’m destroying the scene.’

  ‘Not yet. They’ve been here all this time, that can wait until morning for their justice. I need you to dig. You will understand. I promise. I need you to see what happened here so that you believe me.’

  ‘I don’t need any more convincing,’ Ash said.

  ‘You do,’ Michael contradicted him.

  There was no way he’d stumbled upon the only bones here, not from memory over fifty years old. Michael had already told him, they were everywhere. All around here was the right place.

  He believed him.

  Ash bent his back and started to clear another patch of damp earth.

  He found another bone, and another.

  Michael shone the light down on them. Like he needed to see them. All of them. Two could never be enough. He needed to shine a light upon them all.

  ‘There,’ Michael said, pointing at another patch of dark earth. ‘Dig there now.’

  Ash did as he was told.

  It took longer this time find strike the first bone, the body was buried deeper.

  It was backbreaking work. But it was necessary. Good, even. These poor children. They needed someone to speak for them.

  He could understand what had driven Michael to such extremes.

  He could see himself doing the same thing, and that placed a chill deep in his gut, because, but for the gr
ace of God, there went Peter Ash.

  He straightened up, kneading the small of his back.

  He ached.

  A sudden sharp pain lanced through his shoulder.

  Ash reached up, caught more by the surprise than actual pain, and found the hypodermic still sticking in his flesh.

  He fumbled, trying to pull it out, but the plunger was already depressed, the drug working its way into his system. The fine motor control fled from his fingers as the world turned black.

  He fell.

  SIXTY-SEVEN

  Frankie sat in her car and flicked through the file, willing Peter to either pick up the phone or return her call.

  She’d called him twelve times and stopped herself from calling a thirteenth. Not out of any sort of superstition, more because she felt like a fool.

  He’d call her back.

  His phone was off. It rang straight through to voicemail. His battery was probably dead. For all the good these new smartphones delivered, the sheer lack of battery life was a constant frustration.

  She recognized several of the names in there, but there were many more that weren’t on Laura’s list.

  Each page had a photograph or a cutting from a newspaper pasted to it, an address, a telephone number, a proposed meeting place, like a twisted scrapbook. It was a dossier on the foundation, the orphanages it ran, and so much more. It was Karius’s hit list. It detailed all manner of details about the targets, intimate stuff that demanded surveillance and time.

  She worked through the pages, seeing Tournard and Danilo and Anglemark and others she didn’t recognize. Men who had means, men who supported the charity with substantial donations. Men, she realized sickly, who paid for access to those vulnerable children.

  One of them, she realized, was the face of the man she’d watched burn.

  She brought up the photograph of the whiteboard she’d taken, checked the name and date against those in the dossier, and took a photograph that she attached to an email for the coroner, along with a two-line explanation to run his details against the corpse they’d assumed was Karius.

  Frankie turned the final page and saw a much younger face staring at her. The man in the photograph must have been twenty or thirty years younger than anyone else in the dossier. The name written out painstakingly in neat block capitals was PETER ASH. Beside it was all sorts of personal information. It was all there, job, address, even down to habits like his preferred coffee shop along the Thames, his routine walk to work, his dead partner, even details about a one-night stand including where the woman had picked him up and his drink of habit. The inference was obvious, not only had Karius been watching Ash, he had been interfering with his life for months.

  She needed to talk to Ash. To warn him. This was personal for the killer, and it ended with Ash. She had no idea why, but he was right in the middle of this.

  She did the only thing she could: she rang Laura.

  ‘Have you talked to Ash? I can’t reach him.’

  ‘He’s in Paris,’ Laura replied.

  ‘Paris?’

  She listened as Laura told her about the package and the rendezvous.

  ‘And he went? You didn’t stop him?’

  ‘There was no stopping him.’

  ‘He’s in trouble,’ she said.

  ‘All I’ve got is the address for the meet.’

  ‘When is it supposed to happen?’

  There was a moment’s pause before Laura replied. ‘An hour ago.’

  Frankie’s mind raced. There was no way they were still in the bar, but that was the only reference point they had. ‘Give me the number, I need to call the bar. If he’s there he can’t leave. Not with the man.’

  ‘What’s going on?’

  Frankie told her about the dossier, and the last target. She took photographs of each page and sent them through to Division, including the link to Karius, the man she’d thought she’d seen burn to death. Laura’s fingers were already flying across the keyboard as she ran all sorts of searches around that name.

  ‘Why Peter?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Frankie said.

  ‘I can’t lose him, too,’ the other woman said. Frankie understood. She knew what she needed to say, but she wasn’t in the habit of making promises she couldn’t keep.

  ‘Contact Reynard. Pull every resource we have. He’s not alone.’

  ‘Already on it,’ Laura said.

  She hung up and called the bar. It took a while for anyone to answer. It was loud and hard to hear.

  ‘I need to talk to a customer,’ she said.

  ‘Impossible. Sorry.’

  ‘It’s not. You’re going to make it happen. This is a matter of urgency. I am with the Eurocrimes Division of the European Union, you’re going to find out if there is an Englishman in your bar. His name is Peter Ash. I don’t care if you have to walk around every single table and ask each man their name, you’re going to find out if Ash is still there.’

  ‘Is this some kind of joke?’

  ‘No. I don’t have time to argue with you. Just do it, unless you want to face charges of aiding and abetting in the act of murder.’

  That one word did it.

  The woman on the other end of the line cupped her hand over the phone as she lowered the music. Frankie heard her ask in French if there was a Peter Ash in the bar, and then again in English. The babble of voices returned, the music right behind them.

  ‘You heard me ask,’ the girl said. ‘There’s no one here by that name.’

  She hung up before Frankie could ask if anyone remembered seeing Ash or anyone who matched his description.

  She had the photograph of Peter Ash staring back at her.

  ‘I won’t let you down,’ she told it.

  She was banking on Laura coming through with everything she could find on Karius, and fast. She needed to see his photograph, either via the Passport Office records or from the driver’s licence.

  Why Ash?

  Why was he in that dossier?

  What had he done to Karius? All of the men in there had failed the Memory Man in some way or other. How had Ash failed him? How had he earned his place on Karius’s grudge list?

  Her only hope lay in the fact that he had an established pattern. He wouldn’t just kill Peter. He’d hold him somewhere first, like Anglemark and Tournard. He’d held Danilo, even if only for twelve hours. There was something he wanted from Peter. There had to be. That was the only thing that could account for the time the others spent in captivity. The longer they held out, refusing to give Karius whatever it was he wanted, the longer they lived.

  He was English. That had to count for something, didn’t it? Every Englishman she’d ever met had been a stubborn bastard.

  She prayed that he didn’t break the rule.

  ‘Where are you? Where would he take you?’ she asked the photograph, then started flicking back through the pages of the dossier, hoping there might be something in there that would give her a clue.

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  Ash woke in agony.

  His shoulders screamed with a pain his brain could not understand.

  He remembered the needle.

  He remembered trying to pull it out of the muscle and his legs betraying him. He remembered very little after that. Fragments of sound. The sensation of hands on him. That was it.

  He opened his eyes.

  Coloured rays of light streamed in through a stained-glass window. Meaning it was morning. He didn’t recognize the place, but it had to be a church or a chapel. It smelled cold and damp. Unused.

  Somehow, he was upright. How could he be standing? The angles were wrong. He was higher than the pulpit, looking down. He realized why his shoulders burned so desperately; his arms were outstretched and his ankles were tied together with electrical tape. Symbolically at least, he was being crucified.

  ‘Ah, Peter, you are awake, good,’ Michael said, rising from one of the pews. ‘I was beginning to worry that I had given you too much of the sedative and
that you might never wake. That would have been a pity.’

  ‘You could have just killed me and saved yourself a lot of waiting,’ he said.

  ‘No, no, no. You still don’t get it, do you? I promised that you would learn the truth.’

  ‘I thought you showed me that last night.’

  ‘Dear boy, that was only a fraction of it.’

  ‘Then tell me, unburden yourself, and we can get this over with. I don’t feel like hanging around,’ Ash said.

  ‘You’re a funny man, Peter. I didn’t expect that. I did expect the death wish though. So few people can face so much personal tragedy and hold themselves together. They put on a mask to face the day, but underneath that mask, that’s where their pain lives. I understand you. I know you. Better than you know yourself.’

  ‘You talk a lot for a man who isn’t saying much,’ Ash said, goading Michael. It was the exact opposite of the hostage-negotiation playbook. He should have been placating the man, listening to him, making deals.

  But if he was going to die, he was damned if he was going to go meekly into that endless winter. Fuck it, rage, and all that. No one was going to save him. No one even knew where he was to do any white-knight saving.

  ‘You are very predictable, Peter. There’s so much anger in you. You should let it out. Cleanse yourself. Go to your final meeting with your namesake pure,’ Michael said.

  ‘Hate to break it to you, Michael, but there is no God.’

  ‘You say that too easily. But you are right. And this place and what happened here is proof of it. You must know that already.’

  ‘I’ve seen the bones of children in the grounds. You tell me it was an orphanage. How do I know it wasn’t some alms hospice or a battle ground, or hell the scene of some horrible Nazi war crime? I don’t know anything.’

  ‘We lived in fear, all of us, boys and girls. It didn’t matter. They didn’t care. They didn’t differentiate. We were meat. We knew what happened to the kids who didn’t do what they were told, and we were promised that the good kids, the ones who did, they were adopted. They found new families. Some were reunited with long-lost relatives. We were told they were getting the fairy tale. They were being saved. But we knew the truth.’