Mind/Reader

by Brian Freemantle

  The dismissiveness had to go! ‘Just one? Or both?’

  Her mother lowered her head towards her right breast, as if looking at something that was not a part of her, which perhaps now was how she regarded it. ‘They say it’s possible these days just to take out the growth itself but at my age what’s the point? I’ve said they might as well take the whole thing off.’

  Claudine recognized the lie, her mother’s effort to prepare her. ‘What about the lymph glands?’

  ‘They might take something away, as a precaution.’

  ‘And the other side?’ pressed Claudine.

  ‘There’s something on the X-ray they want to check, while I am in hospital.’

  ‘When’s that going to be?’

  ‘Next week. I didn’t want you to call and find where I was without my having told you.’

  Independence to the point of hurtfulness, thought Claudine: how much had her unthinking independence - not just her dedication to work - hurt Warwick? She gestured around the near empty room. ‘What’s going to happen here?’

  ‘Gerard,’ said the older woman simply.

  As if responding to a summons, Gerard Lanvin emerged from the kitchen immediately behind the waiter carrying skate for her mother and the clear fish soup for Claudine. He still wore his chef’s whites but no hat. Lanvin had been her mother’s lover long before her father’s death. Like a lot of other people, her father had known it and not objected to being cuckolded, which Claudine had added to all the other reasons for despising him. After his death Claudine had expected Lanvin and her mother to marry: certainly for the man to move into the apartment above the restaurant. But neither had happened. If anything they behaved with more decorum now than they had when her father had been alive. Lanvin maintained the attitude that night, restricting himself to a formal handshake without even polite cheek-kissing before sitting down between them. He added to Monique’s glass before filling his own, gesturing with the bottle to Claudine, prepared for her refusal. He said: ‘This is a bad business.’

  As the next of kin - her mother’s only family - she should see the surgeon to find out just how serious it actually was, Claudine realized. Which she couldn’t if she returned to The Hague the following day. ‘It’s a successful operation in ninety per cent of cases,’ she said, inventing the statistic.

  The older woman looked at her quizzically. ‘I’d like to believe that.’

  Claudine couldn’t remember lying to her mother before. ‘It’s a very common operation.’

  Monique pushed her plate away, the food virtually untouched. ‘Tell me about the new job.’

  Claudine hesitated. Gerard’s arrival prevented what she’d wanted to achieve. Now the need was to take their minds from the only thing about which it was at the moment possible for them to think. She told them of her involvement with the Europol investigation, and added that Henri Sanglier was the commissioner in charge.

  ‘You - my daughter - are working with him?’

  Although she’d known the legend Claudine had underestimated the inherited awe in which the name was held. ‘Yes.’

  ‘What sort of man is he?’

  ‘Impressive. Very tall. Quite elegant.’ What about the suspected uncertainty, at their first meeting? And a lot of the inexplicable conversation? It wasn’t because of Lanvin’s presence that Claudine held back from mentioning Sanglier’s apparent awareness of her father: she knew her mother would not have been impressed even though the reference had come from Sanglier.

  ‘The man himself came into the restaurant in Paris where I trained,’ said Lanvin. ‘I saw him. He was quite old, of course. A small man. I remember wondering how a small man could have been so brave …’ Lanvin paused, clearly recounting one of the highlights of his life. ‘He ate steak: told the patron that for three years during the war he’d never had a single piece of meat so he always ate it afterwards. I prepared the potatoes. Lyonnaise.’

  ‘Can we tell people about what you’re doing?’ asked Monique eagerly.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Claudine.

  ‘Of course not,’ agreed Lanvin, a man entrusted with a secret. He actually came closer across the table towards Claudine. ‘The fish man knows the widow who found the hands here. There were occult symbols cut into the flesh. Witchcraft signs. The way they were held together and left in a cathedral was obviously a mockery of God.’

  The elaboration of which she’d warned Poulard and Siemen, remembered Claudine, knowing there had been no symbols. ‘We’ve only just begun the investigation.’

  ‘So you shouldn’t have come here,’ suggested Monique.

  ‘I intended going back tomorrow. But I don’t think I will. I want to see the surgeon.’

  ‘There’s no point. You can’t affect anything.’

  ‘It’s right that I should,’ insisted Claudine.

  ‘Because it’s the thing to do!’ challenged the older woman. Smiling, to take the sharpness from the remark, she continued: ‘I’m having a mastectomy. It’s one of the most common operations, successful in ninety per cent of cases.’

  ‘We’ll talk about it in the morning,’ said Claudine.

  ‘I must be going,’ said Lanvin, taking his cue. To Monique he said: ‘I’ll do the markets in the morning.’

  Monique did not argue. ‘Yes,’ she said simply.

  Claudine had never known her mother allow somebody else to do that for her. It was a major surrender: an indication of giving up.

  Claudine knew it was psychologically necessary, but she hated herself for forcing her mother to accept the facts: briefly hated, even, the expertise which told her she was doing the right thing.

  It was ingrained in Monique to get up before dawn and it was still only half light when Claudine heard her mother moving around, awake - possibly even dressed - but with nothing to do for hours. Claudine waited until she heard her mother go to the kitchen before she emerged from her room to find the older woman.

  The balcony was only just big enough for them to sit outside with their coffee, but there was the view of the sun-silvered Rhône beneath the clifftop edifice and it would have been where Claudine wanted to sit if her mother hadn’t led the way, unasked. Claudine looked at the cathedral professionally, realizing how carefully it had been chosen for the hideous demonstration over far more easily accessible but just as public places. The conclusion was obvious, although she hadn’t included it in her profile. She made a mental note to check the accessibility of every other location, in every country, in which a body part had been found. It might prove nothing, but it could form an important part of Kurt Volker’s comparison program.

  Monique asked if Claudine was cold, in just a robe. Claudine said she wasn’t. Monique said she wasn’t either. Claudine topped up both their cups, agreeing that the balcony view had to be one of the best in Lyon. Monique said she wasn’t attaching any hope to the rumour but Gerard had heard an unsuspected Guide Michelin inspector had eaten in the restaurant and thought there was the possibility of another rosette. Claudine agreed that would be wonderful, aching for the other woman to unlock the mental door behind which she was cowering.

  ‘Maybe it was fortunate he came before Gerard started buying.’

  Damn the restaurant, thought Claudine: she could use the remark to prompt, though. ‘You know he can do that well enough.’

  ‘Not as well as me.’

  ‘Don’t you intend doing it any more?’

  Monique looked at her sharply. ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘Then there isn’t a problem, is there?’ The words, intentionally brutal, sounded uglier than she’d thought they would.

  Monique didn’t respond immediately. Then she blurted: ‘I am not going to die. I’m going to lose my breasts but I’m not going to die.’

  At last! thought Claudine, relieved. Even more brutally she said: ‘Did the doctor tell you that? Or is that what you’re telling yourself?’

  It took the older woman a long time to answer. ‘It would have been better if I�
�d gone sooner.’

  It was coming now, as it had to. ‘What else did he say?’

  ‘That there was a chance: that it wasn’t too late.’

  ‘You have to lose both breasts? And some glands?’

  ‘Yes.’ All the time Monique was looking out over the city, not at her daughter. ‘I don’t want Gerard to see me afterwards.’

  Claudine sought the best reply. ‘Have you talked to Gerard about it?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘That it wouldn’t make any difference. But he had to say that, didn’t he?’

  ‘No,’ contradicted Claudine. Oddly, she had never wondered about sex between her mother and Gerard. He had to be the younger by at least ten years. And she was only sixty-five.

  ‘Of course he did!’

  ‘He could have said nothing. Don’t you love him?’ Claudine saw nothing odd in asking the question.

  Monique gave one of the shrugs of the previous night but didn’t speak.

  ‘You’re losing your breasts: the symbol of womanhood. You’d be very silly to lose Gerard as well.’ Hypocrite, she thought: how easy it was - clinical it was - to lecture another woman, even her mother, on logic when logic had nothing to do with what they were talking about.

  ‘I don’t want to lose him,’ Monique admitted.

  ‘Then stop talking as if you’re going to. Trust him.’ Had she ever trusted Warwick, in anything? Hadn’t that been why she’d always insisted on doing everything in their marriage: because she’d always thought she could make better judgements?

  ‘He’s asked me to marry him.’

  ‘Are you going to?’

  ‘It’s pity.’

  Claudine was about to speak but then stopped, changing her mind. ‘When did he ask you, before or after the diagnosis?’

  ‘When I found the lump.’

  ‘That wasn’t an answer. Before or after the diagnosis?’

  ‘Before.’

  ‘Would you have married him if it had been benign?’

  ‘That’s not relevant.’

  ‘It’s perfectly relevant.’

  ‘I don’t want him to feel that he’s trapped.’

  ‘Give him the chance to escape, then,’ persisted Claudine remorselessly. ‘Tell him you’re not holding him to the proposal. Give him the choice. Don’t make it yourself, as you’ve made every other choice in your life. Let someone else in, to help.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ said Monique, seeking an escape.

  Which Claudine allowed her. ‘I’m glad I came.’

  ‘But I don’t want you to stay. I want you to go back, as you arranged. What you’re doing - particularly considering the man you’re doing it with - is far too important.’

  ‘It would just be one more day. He’d understand.’

  ‘He wouldn’t, not set against what you’re trying to do. You can’t afford another twenty-four hours.’

  The forensic pathologist would arrive the following day. And her profile - apart from the new speculation about the siting of the cathedral - was waiting to be delivered. ‘I could come immediately after the operation.’

  ‘Come next weekend, if you can. When you can take the time.’

  On the flight back to The Hague that night Claudine decided her mother was as good a natural psychologist as she was a professional one: each had given the other the escape.

  Peter Toomey hadn’t expected the approach from the British commissioner at Europol. Nor welcomed it. He’d behaved quite properly, responding to David Winslow as he had, but he didn’t want to fall foul of higher authority, although he wasn’t sure how important anyone was considered in Europol, even at commissioner level. The inquiry into Claudine Carter had begun, after all, as a concern about possible embarrassment, not an investigation into her complicity. At least, at the very centre of things as he was, he’d know if Winslow took it any further. If he did, Toomey accepted he’d have no alternative but to comply.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  There were no messages on the answering machine and the in-tray was empty so she’d missed nothing by being away. But there was a downside to the relief. It meant there had still been no contact from either Poulard or Siemen. Nor a single response from any force from which the complete murder dossiers had been demanded. Claudine decided against calling the Paris hotel again but to hold to her already determined end-of-day timetable before presenting her preliminary profile. That would, at least, give a few hours for some of the local murder reports to arrive. If they didn’t she’d complain to Sanglier in a separate memorandum.

  She was at Kurt Volker’s shoulder, directly dictating the brief addition that had occurred to her on the Lyon balcony, when a solemn-faced man entered the incident room and hesitated briefly to make a leadership choice from among the people there before saying to Yvette: ‘You asked for a forensic pathologist. My name is Hugo Rosetti.’

  As she crossed the room to introduce herself Claudine hoped his medical judgement was better: whom would he have selected if Poulard or Siemen had been in the incident room? Rosetti didn’t appear disconcerted by his mistake. As she led him towards the photographic display Claudine explained the problem of inadequate evidence, making the autopsy reports virtually useless, and apologized in advance for asking him to give opinions based on other pathologists’ photographs. ‘I don’t like trying to create profiles from other people’s material, even when it’s complete.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ promised the man. ‘And if I can’t reach a conclusion I’ll tell you. I won’t mislead you by pretending.’

  Claudine was impressed. She didn’t list any of her own conclusions, wanting a totally independent and unprompted opinion from a qualified medical examiner. She was not uncertain of her assessments, just determined that they should be as complete - and therefore as useful - as possible. Unasked, she offered Rosetti the magnifying glass, at once moving away to give him room to work but at the same time studying the man as he went from frame to frame. He was quite small and slightly built with very black, tightly curled wiry hair and the olive complexion of a southern Italian. Coincidentally his sports jacket and dark grey trousers were very similar to those Poulard had worn the day before going to France. But the effect was totally different. Poulard made a conscious effort at urbane elegance to attract the attention he sought: Rosetti’s ambience was natural and unassuming, the attitude of a man who didn’t have - or didn’t want - to try to create any impression.

  Rosetti worked with such absolute concentration that Claudine was sure the man was oblivious of her or anyone else in the room. Occasionally he grunted and several times uttered aloud words in Italian, in private discussion with himself. There were several sighs, either of impatience or frustration.

  It was over an hour before he finally turned back to her, blinking as if he’d forgotten someone else was with him. He said: ‘None of it will be scientifically justified, you understand?’

  ‘I understand.’

  Rosetti nodded. ‘How do you want to work, back and forth exchanges or my impressions, all at once?’

  So he’d worked tandem with a profiler before. ‘Back and forth. It could give a direction neither of us have thought of following.’ She had to lead, Claudine supposed. ‘I think sex is a factor but I don’t think this is sadism: no one got sexual satisfaction from this torture.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Rosetti at once. ‘Is there any indication in any of the pathology reports you’ve got - inadequate though they might be - of rape?’

  Claudine frowned, gesturing towards the display of genital mutilations. ‘You surely couldn’t prove rape?’

  ‘I could,’ said Rosetti simply. ‘Perhaps not to the satisfaction of a court but accurately enough to contribute to your profile. It’s conceivably possible, although I must admit unlikely, that I could get a DNA trace from any semen deposit, too. In which case it could form court evidence.’

  There was no apparent resentment that he might be adding to her reputation m
ore than his own. ‘You think the genital wounding might be an attempt to conceal rape?’

  ‘No. Part of it: part of the humiliation.’

  ‘Which would make it sadistic.’

  ‘Not by additionally removing the limbs and the head,’ he argued. ‘This is different.’

  ‘Rendering them helpless, defenceless, you mean?’ said Claudine.

  ‘Part of it again.’

  ‘So we’re talking domination?’

  ‘Let’s stick with helplessness. I try to avoid obvious labels as much as possible.’

  It fitted the original reason for asking for a medical opinion to support the presentation to Sanglier: she’d delay drawing attention to the body marks, to see if Rosetti had noticed them. ‘Why is there no blood on the French bodies? Or the girl in London? Or on the Chinese girl in Vienna? The girl in Vienna had less than a pint of blood in her body when she was examined. Would there be that much loss through dismemberment?’

  ‘Possibly. There are too many factors I’d need to consider before giving a positive opinion on that. The cleanliness intrigues me more. And the sharpness of the lacerations on the French victims.’

  ‘A scalpel?’ suggested Claudine.

  The man shook his head. ‘They aren’t medical incisions. There is some expertise but it isn’t medical. What about some religious connotations?’

  Claudine shook her head in return. ‘One of the girls in France was obviously sub-continent Indian, the other possibly from Bangladesh. The features of the girl in London could be from northern Thailand or even Sri Lanka. And the Vienna victim was Chinese.’

  ‘Not their religions,’ qualified Rosetti. ‘Have you considered a religious cult, preying upon them?’

  Claudine regarded the man seriously for several moments. ‘Human sacrifices? Blood-drinking?’

  ‘It’s bizarre, I know. And I’m not suggesting it should be put at the top of any list …’ Now he gestured to the photographs. ‘But that is bizarre. And whoever did it - certainly in the French cases - tried to make gargoyle faces.’

  ‘Gargoyle faces!’