Table of Contents
Title Page
PREFACE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY – FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ALSO BY BRIAN FREEMANTLE
Copyright Page
For Norma and John,
with love
PREFACE
The initial horror unfolded in a single week, in early May. No one knew - risked thinking - on that first Monday it was only the beginning.
The severed head of the Asian girl was mounted like a figurehead on the very prow of the bateau mouche, one of the glass-topped pleasure boats that ply the Seine. It was only as he finished arranging the outside seating that the deckhand realized the head was human and not an intended decoration he hadn’t noticed before.
He vomited, uncontrollably.
It wouldn’t have mattered because the vessel had to be taken out of service, but he swabbed up the mess before the police arrived, destroying what forensic evidence there might have been. It was the first of far too many problems and flaws in an investigation hindered and obstructed by increasingly panicked desperation. The name of the boat was Céleste. Predictably it was what newspapers christened the unidentified girl in what they labelled ‘La Cause Céleste’.
A newly bereaved widow, anxious to be close to the communion rail for Mass, mentally to make her intended recriminations against God and His wisdom, found the hands early on the Tuesday, beside the font of Lyon’s Notre-Dame de Fourviere cathedral. Enough of the wrists remained for them to be wired together as if in prayer. The widow wasn’t sick, just further confused about God’s mysterious ways. She later stopped being such a regular communicant.
The naked torso was propped against the railed prow of a second bateau mouche, although far further south than the first, on one of the boats that take tourists through the canal system of medieval Strasbourg. The crewman was stronger-stomached than his Paris colleague. He studied the corpse long and intently enough later to describe to journalists in graphic detail the extent of the obscene sexual mutilation, which fuelled the media frenzy to even greater intensity. Because Strasbourg is one of the alternating capitals of the European Union, with a large concentration of resident foreign journalists, the story was now picked up by newspapers beyond France. It was the Thursday of that initial week and the first time a reference was made to France’s own Jack (or Jacques) the Ripper. England’s Scotland Yard was later to confirm that the genital disfigurement was, in fact, very similar to the injuries recorded in its Black Museum files on the nineteenth-century Whitechapel killer. The second bateau mouche was named the Hortense but Celeste remained the newspaper favourite for the girl, whose identity remained unknown despite the widespread, hysterical coverage.
Only one leg was ever recovered. The resident caretaker at Toulouse town hall drowsily answered the repeatedly pressed tradesmen’s bell on Friday to confront the right limb, lying across his doorway. He thought it was some macabre joke until he touched human flesh. His bladder collapsed. He lied to the police about not seeing or hearing anything in the street outside, because he’d read all about La Cause Céleste and in terror slammed the door without looking or listening for anything, leaving the leg where it lay. It was only when he detected the police sirens that he risked opening the door again and by then there was nothing to see or hear apart from the welcome arrival of the gendarmerie. He had, of course, changed into dry trousers and underwear and even managed to shave, in preparation for the interviews and the cameras.
So ended the first week of a continuing terror that was to stupefy France.
CHAPTER ONE
Claudine Carter wasn’t worried. There was no reason to be. No one else knew about the note, Or ever would. So there was no possibility of embarrassment. Which was all it would have seemed anyway: the thoughtless impulse of someone not supposed to make mistakes - definitely not to be thoughtless - but perfectly understandable in the circumstances.
All right, she was a highly specialized psychologist - the best in her particular discipline, which was why she’d got this new appointment - but that didn’t make her Superwoman. She was allowed personal feelings and personal mistakes. What she’d done didn’t reflect upon her ability to perform her job. And the job was all that mattered.
The sudden announcement from London of a meeting without any given reason or agenda was intriguing, though. There could be a dozen explanations, none of them connected with Warwick’s death. But why was someone coming to her? Why wasn’t she being asked to go there? Because, she supposed, she wasn’t officially part of an English government department any more. She was working - although working was hardly the description - for a European organization governed by European directorship, with whatever responsibility she had to London entwined in the upper labyrinths of European Union politics and diplomacy. There was, of course, no reason why she shouldn’t ask London what it was all about. Logical that she should, even. But she held back from doing so. Psychologically it was better to leave things as they were, with someone coming to her. It put her in control of the encounter.
Claudine acknowledged that she’d been stupid about the note. She hadn’t understood it all - although enough to feel the guilt and the failure - and it had been instinctive to keep something so private to herself. But she shouldn’t have done it. Or lied to the police about its existence. But she had and that was that. It was over. Done with. She’d actually put it out of her mind - except perhaps the guilt - until the London message. And there couldn’t be any connection, so she had to put it out of her mind again. It was intrusive, confusing, and Claudine didn’t professionally like confusion. She liked things logically compartmented. And at the moment there were too many conflicting, overlapping stray ends.
She had a lot to get into proper order. Her whole future, in fact. A new life in a new country, the old one closed for ever: even reverting to her maiden name.
It wouldn’t be a problem to be on her own again. It hadn’t been before Warwick and it wouldn’t be now. Claudine Carter had never felt lonely when she was alone: never known the need for anyone else. Of course she’d loved Warwick, if love was deciding to be with someone for the rest of her life and trusting him completely and thinking of him as her best friend and enjoying the sex: she wouldn’t have married him if there hadn’t been all of those things.
But she’d never surrendered herself absolutely. Maybe not ever, sexually. There’d always been a part Claudine had kept back. Her part, an inner knowledge that despite being joined to someone else she remained an independent person, needing no one else, relying on no one else. She’d actually, positively, thought about
it while Warwick was alive: wanted to re-assert her personal definition from her own objective self-analysis. The teaching that remained constant in her mind from all the psychology lectures and all the bizarre professional experiences that followed was Plato’s creed to know oneself. And there was no one whom Claudine Carter believed she knew more completely and more successfully than herself. Or had believed. Now she wanted to regain the belief. To feel absolutely sure of herself again. More than that, even. Become what she’d been before her marriage, a complete, contained, confidently functioning independent person. She wanted to think - to believe - that she’d never stopped being that.
But most of all she was determined to be the supreme professional. That’s how - and why - she’d got this appointment. She deserved it and without conceit knew no one could do it better, this job she’d worked so single-mindedly - perhaps too single-mindedly - to achieve. She couldn’t allow any personal doubt about that.
She’d been the youngest ever professor - just thirty-three - to get the Chair in forensic and criminal psychology at London University, and the Home Office’s first choice after the British government officially acknowledged the science of profiling - identifying a criminal mind before traditional investigators found a face or a name - as a qualified branch of criminal investigation.
And she was here, now, in The Hague, Britain’s officially appointed forensic and criminal psychologist to Europol, the European Union’s FBI.
About which, Claudine uncomfortably admitted to herself, she was far more uncertain than she was about a sad suicide note safely locked in the safe on the other side of the office in which she now sat. She was a consummate professional but not at this moment, allowing too many competing thoughts at one time.
Europol appeared to have everything. The nations of the European Union had each seconded their investigators and specialists, creating a crime-fighting capability as extensive as - maybe even more extensive than - the copied American Federal Bureau of Investigation. They had state-of-the-art headquarters here at The Hague, with state-of-the-art forensic and photographic laboratories and unrivalled computer facilities: to Claudine’s bemusement there was even, in her own discipline, a visiting American criminal psychologist from the Behavioral Science Unit of the FBI’s violent crime analysis centre at Quantico, Virginia.
What no one had anticipated - or rather, what everyone refused to anticipate - was the degree of political and professional opposition to a pan-European organization legally able to cross any national border and take over an investigation from that country’s police force. Opposition which, from what she understood so far, was total.
Which did nothing to help her personally. Until there was a complete change in political will or a crime so awesome it overwhelmed national capability - and she managed to become involved in it - Claudine felt herself in limbo, still too occupied by the past. And Claudine Carter didn’t want to live there any more. It was over, a compartment that had to be permanently sealed.
Without any conscious thought she got up and made her way across the room towards the safe.
Ironically it was at the end of the week in which the terror began that Claudine Carter moved into her permanent apartment: it was more expensive than she’d budgeted for but there was a distant view of the Vijver lake which the agent had considered a vital selling point.
It might have been wiser if she hadn’t carried the new-life philosophy to the extreme of disposing of so much of her life with Warwick. The only thing that could be considered furniture - but wasn’t - was the incredible spread of electronic equipment filigreed along one entire wall, which hadn’t yet been rigged through the necessary transformer, together with Warwick’s even more incredible lifetime collection of jazz memorabilia, records and CDs.
Apart from that there were just personal, intimate things. Their marriage certificate and wedding photograph; his sheaf of academic honours: his proudly smirking graduation pictures; the membership cards to various jazz clubs in London and a lot of tickets to concerts and festivals they’d been to; a pot of keys, few of which she could identify or remember now why she’d kept at all; a broken keyring with the Cambridge motif. Hesitantly she picked out the wedding photograph, setting it up on a shelf close to where she intended the stereo equipment to go. But as she worked, moving back and forth arranging and re-arranging everything, the photograph seemed, irrationally, to dominate the room, her only focus of attention, and towards the end of the Sunday evening she took it down and put it away in a bureau drawer along with all the other hidden things.
An entirely new life, she decided. Unless, that is, there was a difficulty she couldn’t anticipate from the following day’s encounter with the man from London.
CHAPTER TWO
Peter Toomey was the sort of man who sat in the corner seat of the 8.10 every morning, his season ticket in a plastic holder ready for the collector who would know him anyway. He wore a precise grey suit and a precise short haircut and a precise moustache. He hadn’t carried one when he entered her office but Claudine was sure he’d have a bowler hat and a tightly furled umbrella to complete his Whitehall uniform. He certainly carried that most essential accoutrement, the government monogrammed briefcase. She guessed at weekends … Claudine abruptly stopped herself, irritated. What the hell was she doing! This wasn’t profiling. This was caricaturing, making a parody of her art and what she did, an unamusing joke against herself. Worse, she risked underestimating the man, which was stupid until she knew why he’d travelled all the way from London to see her. Unnecessary, even then.
Toomey accepted coffee - tapping in his own sweeteners from a plastic dispenser - and thanked her for seeing him and hoped he wouldn’t keep her too long from her other work, which he was sure was very pressing and Claudine thought she recognized the signs, difficult though it was to imagine. ‘I suppose that depends upon what you want to see me about,’ she invited. ‘Your message didn’t say.’
‘It didn’t,’ he agreed. ‘It’s important, of course.’
Obtuse? Or a trained questioner employing a technique she also thought she recognized? The offered card hadn’t designated any department, merely his name and an extension off the main Home Office switchboard. ‘You’d have hardly come personally from London if it hadn’t been.’
‘Quite so.’
A questioning technique, Claudine decided: being attempted by someone who thought he could draw people out. Which was sometimes part of her job. She felt vaguely uneasy.
‘I’m afraid it’s personal: possibly upsetting.’
About Warwick! That wasn’t possible: couldn’t be possible. But what else was there, apart from Warwick, that could be personally upsetting? ‘Concerning my husband?’
‘Perhaps.’
‘You’re not making sense!’ The irritation was positive anger now, at the fatuous wordplay in which she didn’t intend to take part. The first asthmatic tug snatched at her.
‘You know Gerald Lorimer?’
Claudine frowned. ‘Of course I know Gerald Lorimer: he was our best man … my husband’s best man.’ Why had she qualified it, as if she might have wanted to distance herself?
‘So you’re friends?’
‘He was more Warwick’s friend than mine. They were at Cambridge together.’ Qualification again. But it was true: she didn’t know Lorimer well.
‘I’m sorry,’ said the man. ‘I should have asked before. Would you mind if I took some notes? A tape recording?’
Very definitely a ploy to disorientate her, Claudine accepted. So what the hell was Toomey’s wordgame all about? ‘Of course not. But you still haven’t told me why you’re here.’
Toomey unlocked the monogrammed briefcase with a key attached to a chain looped through his waistcoat. The notebook was new, the sort she’d seen policemen use at the beginning of an investigation, later to be introduced as court evidence. He seemed unsure how to use the recorder. Instead of answering her, the man said: ‘When was the last time you saw Gerald Lorimer?
Spoke with him?’
‘What is this about?’ demanded Claudine, intentionally loud-voiced, careless of any rudeness. Whatever it was it had to be something demanding an inquiry. To go on blindly answering questions indicated that she knew something about whatever it was.
‘You were aware he worked at the Treasury?’
‘I asked you what this was about,’ repeated Claudine.
‘You don’t know that he’s dead?’
‘Dead!’ Some coffee spilled in the awkwardness with which she put her cup down. She ignored it. She wanted her inhaler but ignored that, too. ‘How? When?’
Toomey stared intently at her. ‘Three weeks ago. Suicide. He hanged himself.’
‘Oh my God!’
‘You sound shocked.’
‘Of course I’m shocked! Isn’t it obvious that I would be? And why?’
‘Why?’
Claudine bit back the immediate response. This didn’t have anything to do with her concealing a suicide note. It was obviously something more sinister - something that she didn’t know anything about - but she had to remain utterly in control to avoid giving the impression that she did have some knowledge. ‘That’s a crass question! You know damned well my husband committed suicide four months ago. By hanging himself. And you ask me why I’m shocked that his friend - his best friend, his best man! - has done the same. Don’t be bloody ridiculous!’
‘I’m sorry. It was unthinking of me.’ Toomey didn’t look embarrassed. Or sorry.
Determinedly, trying to suppress both the anger and the tightening band around her chest, Claudine said: ‘Why have you travelled all the way from London to talk to me about a friend of my husband’s who’s killed himself?’
‘It’s a strange coincidence, their both committing suicide the same way, don’t you think?’
‘A distressing one.’
‘Quite so.’
‘Who are you?’ Claudine decided she was being patronized. She didn’t like it and certainly didn’t intend to endure it.
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