Mind/Reader

by Brian Freemantle

  ‘I’m not at liberty to discuss that aspect any further.’

  ‘What about my husband?’

  Toomey shifted uncomfortably. ‘He knew them both.’

  ‘That’s all?’ Claudine exaggerated the head movement, although her disbelief was genuine. ‘That’s incredible!’

  ‘Dr Carter, as I’ve already told you, the reason for my being here is the sensitivity of your position. If there is a trial we need to gauge the extent of any embarrassment if you become involved, through the reference to your husband in Lorimer’s note. And your being in the photographs.’

  ‘There is no embarrassment! That photograph was taken very shortly after I arrived in England. I had only just met Warwick. I have no recollection whatsoever of meeting Bickerstone and certainly I don’t remember meeting him since. Warwick wasn’t gay or a cross-dresser. And he didn’t know anything was going on between Lorimer and Bickerstone, even if anything was going on.’ She ended breathless.

  ‘Are you sure you would have known?’

  The question stopped Claudine. She wouldn’t have known. Not positively. Not if he’d been involved in some ridiculously high-flying financial scheme or dressing up in party gowns at somewhere as absurdly named as the Pink Serpent and fucking men and letting himself be fucked by men. She thought she knew - thought every suggestion was preposterous - but she didn’t know. Yes she did! She’d read the note, the apologetic litany of all his imagined failings and his worry about being passed over for promotion within the Home Office legal department and how much he loved her. It had been a confession. A confession she couldn’t bear the thought of anyone else seeing but only because it proved how she’d failed him rather than the other way round: because it made her feel guilty. If he’d been gay - been involved in blackmail and financial cheating - he would have confessed that, too. She was a psychologist: knew minds, even though she hadn’t recognized Warwick’s despair until it was too late. She was positive he would have admitted it, if there had been anything to admit. She was seized by a thought. ‘Yes, I would have known! And there’s a way you’d know, too. If Warwick had been involved in any financial deceit there’d be a paper trail of the dealings. All you’ve got to do is get my permission to examine all our bank records. Which I’ll happily give you, here and now.’

  Toomey coughed. ‘We’ve already examined them, Dr Carter.’ Seeing the flare of anger suffuse Claudine’s face, he quickly added: ‘We are legally able to under the Financial Services Act of 1986 and the Banking Act of 1987.’

  Claudine curbed her fury at the intrusion, turning it. ‘And?’

  ‘There is no evidence of any financial impropriety whatsoever.’

  ‘You haven’t got any evidence of anything, Mr Toomey. Certainly not anything improper concerning my husband!’

  ‘I must ask you my final, direct question. If there were to be a trial, involving Bickerstone, and you were called in any capacity whatsoever - either for the prosecution or the defence - is there anything that could be produced that would cause the sort of embarrassment that would make your position here in Europol impossible?’

  ‘No,’ insisted Claudine immediately. ‘Absolutely nothing.’

  After Toomey had left, Claudine stood at her office window long enough to see him emerge from the building and cross the courtyard to his waiting taxi. Then she turned and hurried towards the safe.

  From a window two floors above - at the Europol Commission level - there was another observer of Toomey’s departure. Henri Sanglier stood much longer at his window, wondering what the meeting had been about. He had enough uncertainty with Françoise. He couldn’t risk any more: and this, potentially, could make any problems with his wife pale into insignificance.

  That night Claudine picked her way through everything of Warwick’s she had kept and brought with her from London. There were, in fact, the about-to-expire cards for four London jazz clubs but none with the ridiculous name of the Pink Serpent.

  The horror continued in France, following the same time frame and the same pattern. On the Monday of Claudine’s confrontation with the Home Office official a head, again of a teenage Asian girl, was found resting, open-eyed, mouth parted in the near smile of the first victim, on the auctioneer’s desk of the Marseille fish market. The hands, familiarly wired together in a praying gesture, awaited the Tuesday dawn duty priest in the confessional at Aix cathedral: he’d just decided five Hail Marys were sufficient penance for a hotel chambermaid’s admission of masturbation when he realized the fingers pressed together by the grille were not hers. The priest showed commendable control, letting the girl finish her confession and receive absolution, before running from the booth to raise the alarm. In his hurry he forgot to pray for the soul of whoever the hands had belonged to. The torso, with the legs and arms still attached, sat waiting on a bench for the Wednesday morning cleaner at Paris’s Tolbiac métro station The sexual incisions and removal were even more obvious and described in greater detail than before by the discovering cleaner: it was to take several days for the man to confess to police he’d invented his newspaper account of seeing a black-hatted, black-coated, unusually tall man laughing insanely as he fled the scene.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A man tensed for any personal setback, Henri Sanglier tried hard to convince himself that Claudine Carter’s appointment to Europol was an inconceivable coincidence. It couldn’t be anything else. It was official - she was the considered choice of a British government selection board - and she couldn’t have influenced such a decision beyond her unquestionable qualifications for the job, every one of which he knew from her personnel record, just as he knew everything about the Carter family. Nor could she have known of his position in Europe’s FBI until she’d arrived at The Hague, because his nomination to the controlling Commission had been made after she had joined the behavioural science division.

  An amazing fluke then: an accident. But something he didn’t want. Was frightened of.

  What could he do about it?

  Nothing, at this precise moment. Apart from wait. But wait for what? An indication, he supposed: the merest hint. What could he do even then? Still nothing. What if she tried to blackmail him, not openly for money, but by making it clear she expected to be protected by his superior position and influence in the newly born, Europe-spanning organization to which they both belonged? He was a policeman - a good one, deserving every promotion and accolade quite irrespective of the famous family name - and as a policeman he knew that succumbing to it was never the answer to blackmail. Would it really be succumbing to blackmail, to be her protector? Wasn’t Europol - wasn’t all professional life - a layered structure of people supporting and trusting each other in a basic tribal instinct?

  In the solitude of his office, Sanglier positively shook his head against the blackmail speculation. If he acceded just once to pressure it would be he, not Claudine Carter, who would be beholden. And it wasn’t Sanglier’s style - it wasn’t any part of the inherited legend - to be beholden to anyone.

  So what, he demanded of himself again, was he going to do? Wait, he decided, just as repetitively. But not wait and do nothing. Wait and anticipate, as best he could. Keep Claudine Carter under a microscope to determine every nuance and innuendo that might give him a clue whether she were a threat.

  Which brought him back to the pinstriped man whose name he already knew from the security admission log to be Peter Toomey and whom he’d watched an hour earlier hurry across the courtyard to the waiting airport taxi. A British government official from her old department, according to that same log entry. But what sort of official? And what had brought him from London, instead of summoning her to England? It was exasperating, although proof of how fragile Europol’s existence still was, that each country within it occupied its own, closed-off enclave - tribalism again - paying little more than lip service to the much vaunted harmony in which they were all supposed to operate. Peter Toomey’s visit had been to a member of the British contingent, not offi
cially to Europol. So there were only two people from whom he could find the reason. One was Toomey himself. The other was Claudine Carter. And there was no official excuse or reason with which he could approach either.

  Sanglier felt a wash of helpless impotence and hated it.

  Claudine shunned any personal artifice, always observing the ‘know thyself’ dictum, but the encounter with Toomey had bewildered her and despite the fact that every word of it was burned into her mind she retrieved Warwick’s suicide note from the safe before Toomey’s taxi had left the Europol compound.

  It wasn’t, after all, an artificial, unnecessary gesture. It didn’t matter how well she knew the words. She had to read every one again, assess every one again, but not as she’d analysed and tortured herself over them before. She had a new context now: possibly a new and even a more understandable explanation for what Warwick had done, devastatingly different from her initial belief and the finding of the coroner that, suffering a recurrence of his teenage manic depression, Warwick had taken his life under the pressure of criticized and sometimes rejected Home Office legal work.

  Oddly, considering the bombshell suggestion of ambivalent sexuality, Claudine felt better able now to assess what Warwick had written than she had been at the moment of finding his body and the note, or during the disconnected days that followed. She had been disconnected, briefly unable to rationalize despite all her professionalism or rigid self-control. She’d been horrified by his purpled, strangled face, dazed that it should have happened and that she, of all people, hadn’t recognized how close to a total and disastrous breakdown Warwick had obviously been.

  Today was different: objectively different. Today she felt herself able to look at everything dispassionately, professionally. To study the words and literally how they were written. And what they conveyed, not from Warwick, the man she’d known - or thought she’d known - and loved, but as if from someone else, from a stranger. Which, she supposed, Warwick might have been. The correction came immediately, like a slammed-on brake. She wasn’t being dispassionate, as it was always essential - vital - for her to be. Instead, unobjective and unprofessional, she was allowing herself to be affected by entirely unrelated half-facts and unsupported inferences.

  The note then: the note she could quote by heart but maybe hadn’t understood at all. Notebook paper. Edges curled. Dirty. Felt-tipped spider words. A man’s life - a good, kind, sweet man’s life - dismissed on twenty-three lines of ruled paper.

  My dear Claudine. Her full name, which he’d rarely used. Usually Claude. Or Clo. Official, then. Like Dear Sir or Madam. Killing yourself was officials. End of business. Permanent. Which was what Warwick had been doing, cutting himself off from her for ever. Had that been his warped reasoning at that moment, the awful, irrevocable moment of death, with a mottled face and bulging eyes and an elongated neck where he’d wrongly fixed the noose? Or was it an unthinking admission of belated honesty, having closed himself off a long time before? Assessment on three words. She’d told Toomey the impossibility of that.

  I know what I am doing is cowardly. But then you know I am a coward. Tabloid psychology. Suicide, according to some theses, was running away. The ultimate escape, from hurt or responsibility. But not her thesis. To knot a rope - even worse, to knot it wrongly and die in pop-eyed, tongue-protruding agony - and loop it around a beam and kick away a chair wasn’t cowardice. Desperation, for whatever reason. But not an act of physical cowardice. What about mental cowardice? A chasm apart. Far more likely to have been what he meant. Or was it? She was intruding her own attitudes, not Warwick’s. Not professionally dispassionate. Not professional at all to assess piecemeal. An act was the sum of its contributory parts: not another two-thousand-year-old dictum but a platitude of her Sorbonne tutor. So what made up the rest of the sum?

  I am so weak, against your strength. And I cannot go on feeding off that strength. Facile self-pity, on face value of the words, the only criterion she’d applied until today. But still valid, the core to her guilt. The accusation still came like the stinging slap in the face of her first reading. And remained just as hurtful after the innuendo of today’s encounter with the man from London. She’d never consciously been aware of overwhelming Warwick during their courtship. Or during their marriage. Only afterwards - after the suicide and her own mental scourging - had Claudine realized how she had dominated their relationship, always the motivating, decisive partner even after the wedding, the date of which she had decided, just as she’d decided the honeymoon and the house - the Kensington cottage she’d bought before ever knowing Warwick - to which they’d returned. What more was there, then, than her first evaluation? Sex, which might or might not be a factor but was the reason for this re-examination. Putting sex into the equation showed Warwick’s willingness to be dominated, to acquiesce to any demand of the dominant partner. Surely it hadn’t been like that! He’d initiated the lovemaking as often as she had. More so, she imagined, although it was impossible to make a comparison because there’d been no reason until today to produce a tally. No reason, even, to do it at this precise moment. She was isolating a segment again, not judging it as part of a whole.

  You have never truly known me, just as I feel I have never truly known you; perhaps if there had been more time, different circumstances … People don’t know each other. I realize now I never knew someone I thought had no secrets. Easy enough to infer a sexual connotation here. And with Gerald Lorimer. But just as easy not to. They’d only been married for fifteen months. And therefore hadn’t known each other, not properly. If they’d lived together for every minute of those fifteen months - which they hadn’t, because she’d been so determined to prove herself the best practitioner of the new art of forensic and criminal psychology, travelling to any part of Britain to which she was summoned - they still wouldn’t have known each other, let alone experienced love: come closer than a million miles to understanding what love was, however it was manifested.

  I wish I could explain, but I can’t. There is so much, so very much. The passage that had come to her during the confrontation, when Toomey recited Gerald Lorimer’s letter. Similar phrasing to Lorimer’s but that didn’t indicate anything. What did Warwick mean? Possibly something different from her first interpretation, after Toomey’s innuendo. But just as possibly the conclusion she’d first reached: a workload with which he could no longer cope; mistakes he was making because of the pressure.

  I wish there was someone to understand. That there was a special friend, other than the one I thought I had. There was. Or had been. She could have understood - should have understood. Become a special friend, for whatever problem or purpose he’d wanted. It was difficult to avoid the unctuous Toomey’s interpretation. Thank God she’d kept the note secret!

  The following sentence burned into her. But best left unsaid. What had been best left unsaid? An admission that he was overwhelmed by the demands of the Home Office’s legal department? Or the nearest Warwick had been able to come to a personal confession he’d chosen to kill himself rather than make? That would have been Toomey’s reading, coupled with Lorimer’s letter and some meaningless photographs to stir into the circumstantial stew. What was hers? Dispassionately professional, she reminded herself. Doubt, Claudine conceded. Circumstantial, unsubstantiated, unrecognized doubt. But doubt, all the same.

  I am so very sorry. I have loved you so much. Too much. I know I can never ask you to forgive me. Absolve me. More for Toomey to seize upon, given the opportunity. Have loved you, not do love you. An experiment in marriage that hadn’t worked? I tried, I failed, goodbye. A coward’s way out: his own accusation. Supported by what? Ambiguity, emotions badly expressed by a distraught, mentally maladjusted man.

  How can you, someone so strong, forgive someone so weak? Understand? The text with which Claudine found the most difficulty. Another reference to her strength, her dominance. Had she dominated - bullied - Warwick when they’d been together, as he’d been dominated and bullied during his every
working day? Driven him, perhaps, to someone more sympathetic? The one-word accusation echoed, deafeningly, at her. She hadn’t understood whatever it was that had driven Warwick to kill himself. Quickly she corrected herself. Not a failure to understand. A failure to recognize and identify. If she’d done that - shown herself to be the psychologist she was supposed to be - Warwick wouldn’t be dead. It was her vocation, her medically taken vow, to understand. Her failure, not Warwick’s. Her fault. Her guilt. Claudine positively shook herself against the regression. She’d lapsed into her first time guilt, which wasn’t what she was supposed to be examining. So what was new - what changed anything - from what had happened today? Nothing, Claudine determined. She read and judged Warwick’s emotions today exactly as she’d read and judged them the first time, wet-eyed then, dry-eyed now. Tight-chested neither time. He’d been asking her to acknowledge psychological not sexual misunderstandings.

  But forgive me if you can, for the hurt I am causing. I cannot live up to you. Make myself someone you can be proud of, as you need to be proud of a person you’ve chosen to be with. Claudine sat back in her chair, for the first time lifting her eyes from the note. Warwick had known her better than she’d known herself. Admitted to herself, at least. She despised weak people - disregarded them - which is why she had despised and disregarded her father. But she hadn’t, consciously, considered Warwick weak: certainly hadn’t imagined conveying such an impression. Which undoubtedly, from the concluding words in front of her, she had.

  I love you, my darling. You will hate me, for what I am doing. And for what I have done, if it ever emerges. I deserve your hate more than I deserved your love. Possible - more than possible - to be construed in the new context. But again just as possible to remain as she’d first assessed it, a tragic apology from a mentally ill man who’d simply ended the single sheet, torn from an exercise or legal notebook, by writing his name.