The Handshaker

by David Robinson

  This, however, was not the time to get into discussions on parapsychology.

  “Most accounts of the case come from works on the paranormal,” he said, “and most of them are written by non-professional people; people like me. When you look into it, however, there is nothing supernatural about it. Basically, Franz Walter first met Mrs E on a train on the way to Heidelberg. When it stopped to take on water, he invited her to join him for a cup of coffee. As the waiter served the coffee, Walter took her hand and stared into her eyes. He never said a word, but from that moment on, Mrs E was hypnotised and under his complete control.”

  Millie stared, wide eyed. “He just took her hand and that was it?”

  Croft nodded. “Almost like shaking hands. Just like The Handshaker.”

  10

  Croft returned to the computer and opened the My Documents folder. A list of several hundred files appeared and he made a mental note to create new folders to categorise them properly … one of these days … when he could find time.

  He found the file, named simply Heidelberg, right clicked it, and sent an instruction to print it out. Moments later, three sheets of A4 reeled from a laser printer on the desk corner. He collected them, fastened them together with a paperclip, and rejoined Matthews by the fire, handing the sheets over.

  “That’s an overview of the case,” he said, “and what Walter did with her after their initial meeting. It puts a little meat on the bare bones.”

  She gave them a glance, folded them in half and half again, and tucked them into her bag. “Hypnosis,” she said, bringing her own agenda to the fore. “If it’s so easy to overpower a person with it, how come more rapists, sex offenders, and killers don’t use it?”

  “Because it’s not easy.”

  “You said it was,” she argued. “When you were talking about your volunteer in the lecture room.”

  “Only because I’ve done it so many times before with him,” Croft reminded her. “In fact, it’s incredibly difficult and notoriously unreliable.”

  “This Walter guy did it,” Millie pointed out, and Croft noticed that she pronounced the word as if it were English, not German.

  “It’s Valter with a ‘V’, not a ‘W’,” he corrected her with a smile. He sipped more tea. “This induction business, grabbing her hand and saying nothing, is the piece of The Heidelberg Case the paranormal groupies latch onto. They see it as mind control. Zepelli, one of the true masters of hypnotism, called it The Deep Secret. The ability to hypnotise a subject instantly, without words, simply by touching them.”

  “Zepelli?” Millie asked.

  “The Great Zepelli,” Croft replied. “A stage hypnotist of the fifties and sixties. A master hypnotist, by all accounts. I first came across The Heidelberg Case in his autobiography. He’d made an extensive study of it, and claimed to have met Walter’s acolyte, Julius Reiniger.”

  Millie took a mouthful of tea, and Croft recognised it as a physical semicolon; a deliberate pause to ensure he understood the implications of what she was about stress. “Mind control. You research the paranormal. Do you believe it?”

  With an amused twitch of his lips, he shook his head. “No, I don’t. Just because I look into those areas conventional science cannot explain, doesn’t mean I’m gullible. In fact, when you think about it, Mrs E’s missing induction is not difficult to explain. Hammerschlag tells us the train stopped for coffee. Mrs E reported that Walter took her hand and that was all. I believe Walter slipped a palliative drug, or possibly a hallucinogenic into her coffee. Nowadays we read a lot about the spiking of women’s drinks with Flunitrazepam, the technical name for the date rape drug Rohypnol, but similar substances have been in use for centuries. I believe that Walter dropped something like that in the coffee, she drank, he gave it a few minutes for the drug to take effect, and then took her hand, and I also believe he said something. I don’t know what, but he will have used to strong, command tone of the stage hypnotist. And once he had Mrs E under his control, he used standard hypnotic techniques to deepen her state and give him the control he needed to carry out his abuse.”

  As he continued to speak, Croft became more and more enthusiastic, thoroughly embroiled in his subject matter.

  “You see, Millie, hypnosis is a strange phenomenon. Deep hypnosis often produces spontaneous amnesia. The conscious mind and short-term memory, which we work with all the time, are by-passed and everything goes straight to long-term memory, which is the domain of the subconscious. I believe that Walter drugged the coffee and that despite all of Ludwig Meyer’s work, Mrs E never recalled anything beyond the waiter serving them and Walter grabbing her hand.” He frowned. “Having said all that, if you’ve never found traces of drugs in any of The Handshaker’s victims, it means he’s been working with them for a long time because it takes a long time to get someone into such a deep state that they completely forget it ever happened.”

  Millie remained silent for a moment and Croft guessed that she was mulling over the information. “So someone like Ernie Shannon, a control freak, would be incredibly difficult to hypnotise?”

  Croft laughed with genuine warmth. “You’ve just confirmed my assessment of your boss.” He subdued the laughter with another swallow of tea. “No, he would not be impossible to hypnotise. You can’t make sweeping generalisations like that. Given the right hypnotist, given the right circumstances, we can all be hypnotised because we are all suggestible to some degree.”

  Again he was greeted with silence, and he approved. Even though he found it hard to believe that they were having this conversation, at least she did not dismiss him.

  As if to dispute that, Millie’s next question was cautious. “It means then, that our man has been raping them for a lot longer than we – or any of them – knew. But we checked the victims out thoroughly. There is no link between them.”

  Croft shook his head. “What you mean is you’ve never found a link.”

  That irked her. Her pleasant features diminished with irritation. “All right, so we never found a link. For obvious reasons we never asked any of the victims’ families whether they had been hypnotised, but Ernie will be getting onto that as we speak.”

  Silence hung over the room like a cloud. Croft was completely lost for any direction, and he guessed Millie was in the same position. He needed a sounding board and Trish was the best, but she was still unavailable. Millie sounded as if she would be an adequate replacement, but she was too close to The Handshaker to be of any objective use. He finished his tea, stood, crossed the room to the sink, swilled the beaker under the cold tap, and placed it upside down on the drainer. He moved behind the desk, shut down his laptop, made a great fuss of closing the lid, and then came back to his chair.

  “Tell me what you know about The Handshaker,” he invited.

  “It isn’t much more than you read in the press,” Millie admitted. “We know that after abducting his victims, he keeps them somewhere for anything up to three or four days before taking them out during the night and hanging them. We know that some victims have been taken in broad daylight. We even have CCTV coverage of one victim, talking to a man on Scarbeck market just minutes before she disappeared. We never did track him down, but if he was The Handshaker, he certainly didn’t use drugs on her. There is no connection between the victims. Believe me, we checked everything, right down to star signs and numerology – adding up the numbers created by the letters in their name. The man is ultra careful. He has never made a mistake. There is no fuss when he takes the women, no struggle. It’s almost as if they go voluntarily with him.”

  “Again hinting that they are hypnotised,” Croft pointed out.

  “Possibly.”

  Croft shook his head, and in contrast to the doubts he may privately entertain, spoke with absolute conviction. “Definitely. I said earlier that deep hypnosis produces spontaneous amnesia. If you take that natural memory loss and strengthen it with instructions not to remember, then it means he has hypnotised them at some time in the
past, spent many sessions getting them into a deep state and ordering them to forget everything. Then, when he decides it’s time to hang them, he gives the command that triggers the post hypnotic suggestion and at the same time, he shakes hands with them. The way I did with Danny. That would explain why family members could not confirm they had ever been hypnotised. The victims would never remember it and so had never mentioned it.” He paused, adding emphasis to his next words. “You now know more about The Handshaker than you ever did. This morning should have convinced you that the man is a hypnotist of remarkable ability and he’s been using his skills on victims he’s had access to for a long time.”

  Croft’s mobile phone, set on vibrate only, buzzed in his pocket. Thinking it may be from Trish, he took it, read the menu window, saw that it was a student, and cut the call. When Millie did not respond to his previous announcement, he put the phone down and said, “Let’s be honest about this. With today’s victim, The Handshaker has committed eight murders and you haven’t made an ounce of progress.”

  She went on the defensive. “I wouldn’t say that. We have a mass of forensic evidence from every attack, and none of it is contradictory. We have enough DNA to start our own research facility, and enough fingerprints to keep the police academy happy for the next century.”

  “Yet the man eludes you,” Croft pointed out. “All that forensic material would be fine if you had a suspect, but you haven’t, and the fact that you haven’t indicates that this man is snow white. He’s never put a foot wrong in his life? I assume you’ve checked medical DNA databases as well as your own criminal ones.”

  Millie nodded grimly. “We went further than that. We picked up latent prints on most of the bodies usually from the vagina or breasts. We checked with the FBI to see if they had him on file as a visitor to the States. Since 9/11 everyone who wishes to visit the USA has to be fingerprinted.”

  It was not a question but Croft nodded anyway. “You drew a blank?”

  “We have examined every possible avenue,” Millie admitted, “including old DNA files from the days when the testing companies called for volunteers to help set up the databases. Nothing. Not a damn thing. We can tell you the kind of man we’re looking for, we can even give you his approximate height, which we originally gauged from the depths of a footprint at one of the murder scenes. That gave us his approximate weight, and we guessed his height from his shoe size. Later, we got the CCTV image I mentioned, and the man in that picture fits our height profile. A six-footer. The shoe print told us what kind of shoes he wears and we even have an idea who made them, but they’re cheap and tacky and sold literally by the thousand.” She puffed out her breath. “I tell you, Felix, I have almost fifteen years service as a police officer, and this is the first serial killer I’ve come across. I hope it’s the last. He’s come closer to pushing me into traffic control than any other villain I’ve dealt with.”

  She fell into a brooding silence. Alongside her, Croft allowed it and waited to see where she would go next. At length, she faced him again.

  “Tell me something; he’s led us a merry dance for two years now. He’s the very reason I was posted to Scarbeck. He has us beaten and I don’t think we’ll ever catch him unless he makes a mistake. Do you think that in writing to you it’s the old story of a murderer always seeking to be caught?”

  Croft shook his head. “No. I’m no psychologist but I think that theory is so much nonsense. I think I was right this morning and that he’s signing his work. I also think that we’re in a passive position. We have to wait for developments.”

  “Hmm, maybe not.” Millie opened her bag and began to root through it again. As she did so, she said, “You asked this morning if you could see the other notes we’d had from him. Our guys never made much sense of them, but you may be able to. Now where the hell… ah, here they are.” She came out with a small wad of A4 sheets. “The words appear nonsensical and our linguists have been able to do no more than translate them into clear English. They haven’t made anything of that. Would you mind giving them the once over?”

  He took them from her. “Gladly.”

  “I’ve included background notes with each sheet, covering the relevant killing.” She levelled a candid eye on him. “One last thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “Ernie refused to let you see them,” she reminded him. “I asked again, and he denied me permission. Fortunately, at my level, I can amend or even override orders when I have good reason. But for Christ’s sake keep it under your hat. If he finds out I’ve disobeyed him, he’ll have my backside fried on toast for breakfast.”

  11

  The Handshaker yawned. What was the woman doing? It was risky enough taking her on a petrol station forecourt, without having to hang about so long.

  He glanced over his shoulder again to the tyre pressure gauge on the wall. There was actually nothing wrong with his tyres, but he had to be seen to be doing something to account for the length of time he had been there after he followed her in the place.

  Life, he reflected, must have been so much simpler in 1930s Heidelberg. People were simpler back then. There was no suspicion of everyone and everything. They did not ask the same questions as they did these days.

  He looked up straight into the prying eye of the forecourt camera above the shop. They didn’t have intrusive CCTV everywhere, either.

  Not that he was worried about it. The hood of his old parka, aside from keeping off the interminable rain, kept his face hidden from its lens and it wouldn’t be the first time they’d had him on security cameras. His picture had been all over the Scarbeck Reporter when he picked up Janice Turner from the market, but the photograph was indistinct and grainy, and no police officer had ever knocked on his door.

  Janice was one of the early ones. It was thanks to her that he had coined the nickname The Handshaker, after the camera caught him shaking hands with her. If only they knew about that handshake… well, after today’s note to Croft, they probably did know. Even a thickhead like Croft should be able to put it together with such a blatant hint, and if that did not work, it would certainly be rammed home by the early evening.

  To lend verisimilitude to inflating his tyres, he moved to the rear, nearside and fiddled with the dust cap.

  It had been a good day. A successful abduction early in the morning, a couple of enjoyable fucks with her, and later, he had watched Croft leave the Lumbs’ place, then later still stood by the windows when Alf Lumb wandered back from the pub.

  Lumb was a bully. A huge bear of a man, well over six feet tall, broad shouldered, with a large belly, massive arms and fists which he was only too ready to bring into play. A crook too, always willing to handle stolen goods from the Winridge Inn, quick to steal from the warehouse where he worked. If anyone deserved a brutal death it was Alf Lumb.

  The Handshaker’s contemptuous grimace had turned to one of puzzlement as he watched the half drunken Alf meander along the street. How did his employers feel when he turned up for work at ten in the evening, full of beer?

  Alf had had some serious arguments with Croft. Once, he had actually threatened to beat the living daylights out of the hypnotist. Croft wouldn’t be intimidated: he was a public schoolboy, and despite what many people thought of privately educated men, they were tough. The Handshaker would love to have seen a scrap between the pair of them, watch them fight over Sandra Lumb’s problems, each accusing the other, neither aware of the real cause.

  Sandra was a simple, waif-like creature, small, slender and pretty, the butt of much of Alf’s bullying, yet utterly devoted to him. Simple as she was, she had other advantages. She was highly suggestible, easily hypnotised, she was possessed of a lovely tight snatch, she was brilliant on her back, and tomorrow she would become the shining star in the world of hypnotic abuse. Tomorrow, she would do what everyone said could not be done.

  The Handshaker turned his attention from the anticipation of tomorrow back to the here and now as Victoria came out of the shop. About
time too.

  He watched her walk briskly across to her car, putting her credit card back in her purse. He left his car at the airline, she unlocked her passenger door and dropped a bag of shopping on the seat. She closed the door and he stood at her shoulder. She turned, slightly alarmed at his presence and appearance. Then she recognised him.

  “Oh hello. Long time no see.”

  He offered his hand. She took it.

  “Combarus,” he ordered and her eyes glazed.

  He spent a brief moment studying her, making certain, then ordered, “Come with me.”

  They crossed to his car, she got into the passenger seat, he climbed behind the wheel, and as he drove her away, the driver of the car waiting to get onto the pump now blocked by her car, half climbed out of his seat to protest.

  Driving off into the late afternoon, The Handshaker ignored the protests and in the passenger seat, Victoria Reid never heard them.

  12

  While Millie was still there, Croft looked over the notes she had given him and spotted that all but the first two ended with a typewritten signature, ‘The Handshaker’, and he rejoiced in his intellectual victory over the police.

  “I was right, wasn’t I?” he gloated. “That’s why you won’t tell the press and public how you thought of his nickname because you didn’t. He did.”

  Millie was not prepared to let him celebrate his victory. When she replied, it was in tones of a teacher reminding a student of something already drilled into him. “I told you. On this kind of case, we get any number of cranks ringing in to confess and if they can’t tell us where the nickname came from, we know we haven’t got our man.”

  “Why did he sign them from the third letter? Why not the first two?”