Mind/Reader

by Brian Freemantle

  She didn’t express her road check reservation when Poulard called. Nor did she tell him of the Internet idea. Poulard said Giovanni Ponzio appeared to be implementing every suggestion she’d put forward and was cooperating with them far more openly than the Cologne police had done. That evening Hugo Rosetti was taking them to eat Alfredo’s original fettuccine. Claudine said she hoped they enjoyed it.

  She was about to read the updated Cologne file when Scott Burrows shuffled in, engulfed in the smoke and odour of his habitual scented American cigars.

  ‘The glory girl returns from her Italian triumph!’

  Claudine couldn’t decide if it was an amiable or a mocking greeting. ‘It’s a case-book serial killer profile,’ she said. She nodded to Yvette’s raised-eye enquiry about coffee. She didn’t want the intrusion, any more than she wanted the smell of the cigar, but there was no cause to be positively rude.

  ‘My case-book,’ said the American, predictably. He took the chair directly opposite, enveloping Claudine in his smokescreen.

  ‘And a few others.’

  ‘I was right about Cologne being racist, too.’

  ‘Holy shit, Scott! The kid had a swastika carved on to her stomach!’ She was impatient with the man’s constant need for recognition. It was weakness.

  ‘I got it right before you knew about the swastika. And racism is the only message in the others, too.’

  ‘You going to argue there’s a racist element in Rome, as well?’

  ‘Could easily be.’

  ‘I told you it’s a classical serial killer profile. And serial killers always stay within their own culture and colour, like they always stay in an environment in which they feel safe. The Rome killer will be black.’

  ‘Black hates white, white hates black,’ parroted Burrows.

  Yvette’s arrival with the coffee allowed the pause that Claudine wanted anyway, recognizing the sudden reason to concentrate more than she usually did in a conversation with the American. Baiting her trap, Claudine said: ‘How do you account for the rapes?’

  Burrows shrugged. ‘They were going to kill them anyway. Why not get their rocks off every which way?’

  ‘The Turkish girl in Cologne - which was racist - wasn’t raped.’

  ‘Seven out of eight - three with positive semen traces - ain’ t bad.’ He looked around for an ashtray, shrugged, and dropped his cigar ash in his coffee saucer.

  ‘So it’s organized?’

  ‘Seems pretty damned smart to me.’

  ‘One group? Or several, working together?’

  ‘Three will do.’

  ‘What’s your feeling about the body part distribution?’

  ‘Clever!’ said Burrows enthusiastically. ‘It’s new: never come across it before. You’ll be lucky to get a lead before the interception is blown, though.’

  ‘We’re due some luck,’ said Claudine, as satisfied at what she’d learned as she was furious with it.

  ‘You a betting girl?’

  ‘No,’ said Claudine shortly.

  ‘I’ll give you odds I’m right, in every case,’ said the American, undeterred.

  It was hardly revenge but she’d enjoy it. ‘I’ve just changed my mind. What odds?’

  ‘Choose your own.’

  ‘Ten to one. A thousand francs, at ten to one, says you’re not.’

  Burrows blinked at the amount. ‘Wise money always follows form.’

  ‘Or inside information,’ said Claudine, throwing back the metaphor, although with her meaning, not one the man would understand. It had been the black and white, white and black axiom that had registered with her, finally answering the unresolved curiosity she’d felt when Sanglier had paraphrased the same cliche. The bastard was having Burrows check every detail of her profiles, to which only the commissioners and the task force were supposed to have access within Europol. Whose opinion - hers or the American’s - was Sanglier advocating before the Commission? Had Poulard and Siemen been sent to Rome on a counter-argument from Burrows, despite her insistence that it formed no part of the sequences they were investigating? The most important consideration, however, remained, as it had always been, Claudine’s readiness to take the responsibility for her own mistakes but refusal to inherit those of someone else.

  ‘You know what they say about two heads being better than one?’

  ‘I didn’t think psychologists said it.’

  ‘My offer still stands.’

  ‘So does my reason for wanting to work alone.’

  ‘I’m prepared to take the chance.’

  Presented with the opportunity, Claudine said: ‘I’m not.’

  ‘This place has got a long way to go before it’s like the real FBI. But some things are close enough. It’s always useful to have friends.’

  Was he trying to give her a clumsy warning? About what? Or whom? Claudine abruptly halted the slide. She was buggered if she was going to jump into Europol’s paranoia pit along with everyone else. ‘I’ll keep that in mind.’

  ‘You do that.’ The American lumbered to his feet. ‘You keep that very much in mind. Can I give you another piece of advice?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Go on keeping in the background. Only fools draw attention to themselves at press conferences in our business.’

  ‘Scott, I need more than that. You’re talking in riddles.’

  ‘What I’ve said is good enough.’

  ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’

  ‘You don’t need to know,’ said Burrows, shuffling out of the room as flat-footed as he’d entered. ‘You just need to do as I say. Keep in the background.’

  ‘Bastard!’ she called after him, although not angrily.

  He didn’t reply.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Claudine’s profile trapped the Italian killer, although not before he’d killed again and inflicted even more savage mutilation, which Claudine had also predicted.

  An Algerian labourer on the restoration of the Arch of Gallienus remembered an African who’d briefly been employed when the work first began hanging around the Coliseum during the previous month. They’d had a drink together a couple of times. The only name he knew was Ben. The man had said he preferred working as a part-time chauffeur than humping bricks and cement sacks. He’d been intrigued by the African animals the ancient Romans had fought in the arena.

  A lot of the labourers at the Coliseum only worked part time and either weren’t listed or gave false names on the employment records, to avoid tax or detection as illegal immigrants by the authorities. The only record was an exercise-book log they’d had to sign to acknowledge being paid. Sometimes the acknowledgement was a cross. There was certainly no indication of nationality, which had to be guessed from whatever names had been written. Among the sixty possibilities was a badly scrawled signature that looked like B. Aboku.

  All the names were checked against Rome criminal records. A Nigerian named Benjamin Aboku had three convictions for burglary and one for aggravated assault, which fitted Claudine’s guidance. A rape victim had failed to identify Aboku in a police line-up and the case had been dropped, but a sexual crime also featured in Claudine’s escalation warning. Forensic experts were ninety per cent certain that the partial fingerprint lifted from Elia Duphade’s earring matched the right thumb dab on Aboku’s crime sheet, which gave an address on the via del Arco Monte.

  Giovanni Ponzio included Poulard and Siemen in the police command group that sealed off the entire area and then isolated the fetid foreign worker apartment block. An illegal Tunisian immigrant was in bed with the prostitute for whom he was pimping when police smashed the door down. Aboku had moved out six weeks earlier. There was sufficient cocaine in the apartment for an arrest anyway.

  Ponzio cancelled all Rome police leave to swamp taxi and car hire firms in the city. Aboku was identified from police record photographs as one of their night relief drivers by a small car hire firm operating from the via Galla on the day the media finally learned of a
manhunt impossible to keep secret because of the number of police involved. Aboku was named on midday radio and television news bulletins. Afternoon newspapers carried his police file photograph.

  Ponzio tried his best to stay ahead of the press leaks by keeping in protective custody a co-worker in the via Galla who claimed to know Aboku’s new address.

  The Italian police chief completely cordoned off the district roughly between the Tiber and the vias Iclid, Circo Massimo and Della Marmorata. The Temple of Diana square was even more tightly encircled, all road junctions blocked by police cars and officers standing shoulder to shoulder. By the time Ponzio gave the order for the special crisis unit to storm the Marcella apartment block with stun and smoke grenades there was a television helicopter fluttering overhead as well as coverage from the ground. The hostage-and-hijack squad, the most appropriately trained and available to Ponzio, wore body armour but the lead officer foolishly did not lower his face visor and was virtually decapitated by the first shotgun blast as he led the charge into Aboku’s one-roomed hovel. The following officer was blown off his feet by the discharge from the second barrel but uninjured. At the later shared autopsy, Hugo Rosetti recorded twenty-seven machine-pistol and machine-gun wounds to Aboku’s body, seven of them possibly fatal. It was impossible to specify which shot killed the man.

  Poulard and Siemen took part in the search of Aboku’s apartment, although always deferring to the Italian. They found a wide selection of photographs of Elia Duphade, cut from newspapers: in every one showing the ornate tribal rings her smallest fingers were encircled in red marking ink. The decaying fingers themselves, still with the rings on each, were located in a bedside drawer.

  The rented lock-up garage at the rear of the apartment block resembled a charnel house when Ponzio opened it with the key that had been lying next to the severed fingers. The girl’s head had already been cut off and lay in the corner of the garage, horrendously disfigured with nose and ears removed and the cheeks slashed: the escalation of which Claudine had warned. The curved tribal knife that had inflicted the thirty-two stab wounds and slashed her pubic region was still impaled where her left breast had been. The floor was thick with blood, some of which was later proved by DNA analysis to be that of Elia Duphade.

  The second victim was a twenty-eight-year-old Somali girl named Sami Impete who had worked in Rome for two years as a stripper and who had three convictions for prostitution. Her three-year-old son was suffering from malnutrition and dehydration when police found him in her apartment.

  Claudine had a television set moved into the incident room for Yvette and Volker to watch with her the extended press conference at which Ponzio was flanked on either side by Poulard and Siemen. Behind them was a hugely enlarged print of a man barely identifiable against the Borghese Gardens wall as Benjamin Aboku, captured at the scene by the terrified Morton Stills.

  It was Bruno Siemen who spoke first, in halting Italian, on behalf of Europol and he did so extremely well. He described the investigation as a team effort and actually made a reference to Claudine’s profiling, without naming her. There was a simultaneous voice-over translation when Poulard said the combined investigation was an example of what the Europe-wide police organization had been created to achieve and Claudine guessed both men had been rehearsed in telephone conversations with Henri Sanglier.

  ‘Another very public success,’ suggested Volker.

  ‘Without the slightest breakthrough in our major investigations,’ cautioned Claudine. With the case concluded there was nothing to keep Hugo Rosetti in Rome any longer. She refused surprise at the reflection, keeping to her ‘know thyself’ adage. She didn’t want Hugo in Rome. She wanted him back here, in The Hague. And taking far more interest in her than he’d so far done. That self-admission did come close to surprising her. She wasn’t sure how she’d react, if he did.

  Claudine had expected the checks on the food delivery lorries to be revealed in France, where the concentration was greatest, but it wasn’t. The story broke in Austria, with a combined newspaper and television revelation that Vienna was being virtually sealed off between midnight and dawn to incoming heavy lorry traffic. In view of Claudine’s suggested improvement to Sanglier’s original plan for apparently haphazard road blocks, it was the sort of hoped-for luck that no one could have really expected that fifty kilos of high quality, Turkish produced heroin was found that same night on one of the intercepted trucks, en route from Istanbul via Romania and Hungary. That fitted perfectly Claudine’s suggestion that they use a crack-down on drug-trafficking as an excuse for the checks. The Austrians had ignored Sanglier’s guidance but seized the drug interception cover, which the French copied when their night-time, widely spread autoroute closures emerged, within twenty-four hours of the Austrian disclosure, although without being able to produce a convincing drugs haul to support their story.

  Which wasn’t necessary. The explanation was logical and wasn’t challenged by the media, so the hysteria that would have erupted afresh at the idea of dismembered bodies being transported throughout Europe alongside the Union’s food supplies was avoided.

  Claudine was amused at Poulard’s blatant exaggeration of his part in the dramatic conclusion in Rome and guessed from their head-bent, foot-shuffling reaction during the debriefing on the day of their return that Siemen and Rosetti were, too. Claudine couldn’t make up her mind whether Siemen was attempting to mock or to dissociate himself when he said, pointedly, that he had been separated from Poulard during the actual assault upon the Marcella apartment and couldn’t remember a lot of the detail Poulard recounted.

  ‘Which wasn’t part of what we were brought together to investigate,’ said Claudine, repeating the reminder she had earlier given Volker.

  ‘Two months now since there’s been a killing that could fit any of our categories,’ said Rosetti.

  ‘One of which doesn’t exist any more, now that Cologne is over,’ said Siemen. ‘And in which the Celeste killers know their distribution method is cut off, if they’ve got any sense.’

  ‘I don’t believe that would stop them,’ said Claudine.

  ‘That’s ridiculous!’ challenged Poulard. ‘Even if they didn’t think the road blocks were directed at them they wouldn’t take the risk. It would be madness.’

  ‘There’s an arrogance about spreading the bodies around the country,’ insisted Claudine. ‘It’s the arrogance of people believing themselves beyond the law.’

  ‘So why hasn’t there been a killing for two months?’ demanded Poulard, still challenging.

  ‘Like I said, there hasn’t been the need.’

  ‘So all we can do is sit around and wait until there is. And hope this time there’ll be a mistake we can pick up and move on?’ said Siemen.

  ‘Unless anyone has a more productive idea we can work upon,’ said Claudine.

  No one did.

  Sanglier was pleased at the way his objectivity was holding up. Claudine Carter’s drug check idea had been a good one and had worked. And there might be a mistake with which he could undermine her - the first he had been positively able to isolate - in setting up an Internet Web at the same time as relegating Interpol to its messenger function. Sanglier had been particularly careful to associate Claudine by name to the Lyon liaison organization with the Web suggestion.

  The newly discovered objectivity was reflected by his thinking of the woman by name and not mentally trying to demean her as a bitch or a cow, which was juvenile. Sanglier was abruptly caught by the intriguing experiment of putting Claudine together with Françoise, to test Poulard’s theory about the preference of the psychologist. There’d be the additional irony of a practical use for Françoise, as well.

  Sanglier handwrote several drafts of his invitation before formally dictating it. It included Yvette as well as Rosetti and Volker.

  ‘What’s there actually to celebrate?’ frowned Siemen at the door of his office the following day, when the memoranda were distributed.

  ‘Not
hing, I would have thought,’ said Claudine.

  ‘He doesn’t talk about a celebration,’ Rosetti pointed out.

  ‘He calls it an appreciation.’

  ‘With partners!’ said Volker, flattered. ‘Heidi will want something new.’

  Rosetti moved as if to speak but then didn’t and Claudine wondered what he’d been about to say. It would mean rearranging yet again her intended weekend visit to Lyon but she decided she had to go. Attending was, she supposed, one of the political necessities about which they were always being lectured.

  ‘The lawyers are still too bloody clever but the bugger’s worried,’ insisted John Walker. ‘I can smell fear and he stank of it today.’

  ‘What do you suggest now?’ asked Toomey.

  ‘You sure we’re safe?’

  ‘We can put a court order on it, to stop it being opened,’ said Toomey.

  ‘We’ll do that. And then we’ll let Bickerstone sweat. See which way he runs.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  It was an evening of surprise and curiosity for Claudine: she couldn’t have anticipated it if she’d tried, which she hadn’t.

  Sanglier hosted the gathering in a conference room adjoining his office and it was a far larger affair than she had thought it would be. As well as Sanglier, who was accompanied by his wife, Franz Sobell and all the commissioners of the murder-involved countries were there, mostly with their partners. Claudine thought of the wives as a chorus, wondering how many might be high kickers beneath their overly intimidating couture.

  Sanglier moved constantly and solicitously around the room, ensuring everyone knew everyone else. Even more solicitously he spent only seconds with her, just sufficient — but no more - to introduce her to his wife who held her hand just a fraction too long, and who said Claudine should call her Françoise, before moving off, although not subserviently, in Sanglier’s wake.