Mind/Reader

by Brian Freemantle

  ‘Do you know where Ratri is?’

  ‘No.’

  For once Claudine’s professionalism - her ability to suspend herself from feeling or involvement - had deserted her. Her eyes fogged and she had to swallow and cough herself before she could say anything and when she did the only words she could find were: ‘You poor, poor man …’

  The pity brought Shankar Sergeant’s head up. He raised his hands, too, in the supplicating gesture and said: ‘Please help me. Help me get Ratri back … to stop everything …’

  ‘I want you to look at more pictures,’ Claudine said, forcing herself on. ‘I want you to look at the faces now. Tell me if any of the men you see are Mr Cheng or Mr Tan. If there is anyone you know … ?’

  Carefully, giving him several minutes between each examination, she set the Amsterdam surveillance pictures out on the table. He bent studiously over each, brow furrowed in fervent concentration, his face breaking further when he finally looked up. ‘They are Chinese men,’ he said, as if that were sufficient explanation for his difficulty. ‘I have a problem …’

  ‘None of them are Mr Cheng or Mr Tan?’

  ‘No.’ He put his finger to the left side of his face and drew it down. ‘Mr Cheng had a scar, there. Deep. Like the moon, when it is new.’

  ‘You’ve never seen any of them before. At the warehouse … anywhere … ?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  She had the link, the final explanation to complete their jigsaw, and again it couldn’t form part of any legal prosecution. But there was more information that could. ‘Can you show us the house where you were taken when you first arrived in Paris?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘And the warehouse, where you all worked?’

  ‘Of course.’

  It took her less than five minutes to encapsulate the essential things the two French officers needed to be told and before she finished the deputy commander was issuing telephone orders. When Claudine translated to Shankar Sergeant he said: ‘Please. Will you be with me?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Claudine, who hadn’t intended to be.

  She was about to stand when the man said: ‘I will be allowed to stay in France? There was a promise.’

  Claudine sat again, positively, and restarted the recorder the deputy commander had switched off. ‘Ask me again,’ she said.

  Frowning, Shankar Sergeant repeated himself. Claudine, in return, recited the question in French, had the mystified Frenchmen identify themselves, and said, still in French, ‘I guarantee that the amnesty offered by the government will be totally honoured, that no charges will be proffered against you or your family for your illegal entry and that you will be given permission to reside permanently in this country.’

  ‘You have no authority for giving that undertaking,’ protested Leclerc as they crowded into the police car.

  Amusing herself by invoking the name, Claudine said: ‘But Commissioner Sanglier could make a hell of a row if it wasn’t fulfilled, couldn’t he? With your names on a legally sealed tape as evidence.’

  Shankar Sergeant, cringing in the back of the unmarked car, took them directly to the shuttered warehouse in an alley off the rue Gide but it took him almost an hour to identify the house to which the Chinese immigrant smugglers had taken him, months earlier, and even then Claudine suspected he was unsure. Back at the police station and pointedly in front of the two policemen Claudine gave Shankar Sergeant her card and said: ‘This is where you can find me, if anyone says you can’t stay in France. Go to the Indian embassy and get them to contact me. Do you understand?’

  ‘I think so,’ said the man.

  ‘I will warn them. Tell them that the Neuilly station know all about you.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said the man doubtfully. ‘You’ve been very kind to me.’

  ‘I’m surprised you can recognize kindness any more,’ said Claudine.

  Claudine hadn’t anticipated Shankar Sergeant’s plea to accompany him and the two French police officers, nor planned her own attempted protection of the man against the ultimate abuse of being denied the promised residency, but she still left the Neuilly station by midday, with the entire afternoon ahead of her. She didn’t doubt she could have changed her ticket from her early evening reservation, which might even have enabled her to rearrange the meeting with Scott Burrows, which she’d had to cancel that morning.

  Instead, she coupled the emerging prestige of Europol with Sanglier’s name, to get within an hour to Manmohan Singh, the head of protocol at the Indian embassy. She had the man listen to her copy of Shankar Sergeant’s taped interview, which she’d insisted upon having duplicated while they’d toured the Neuilly streets, and suggested the diplomat contact the Neuilly station to pre-empt any difficulty for a man whose life had already been over-burdened by too many. Singh assured her he would, and Claudine left another contact card in case problems arose.

  Still with time to kill she decided to visit the Chanel emporium off the Champs-Élysées. The decision prompted thoughts of the couture bait so hopefully dangled by Françoise Sanglier just as the Algerian taxi driver, chancing that she was a tourist, made a totally unnecessary detour to increase the fare by going over to the Left Bank to drive past the National Assembly. She changed her mind, as well as her destination, and when she got to the national archive building she stood outside for several minutes, unsure why she’d done it. Then she went inside.

  The archivist of national heroes was a fussy man with flyaway hair given to quick, bird-like movements, who talked in breathless spurts with pauses in the wrong places. His odd way of talking became even more disjointed with his exasperation at Claudine’s innocent enquiry about how long it would take to see the Sanglier material, because of her evening plane, until he saw her name on the identity card which had to accompany the written request. His protest stopped at once. To her total bewilderment he smiled, as if they’d met before, and said: ‘Ah, yes, of course. I understand.’

  Claudine wished she did. It took her less than half an hour to do so, enclosed in the darkened solitude of a viewing cubicle before the microfiche screen. Had the Sanglier history not been supplemented with an index Claudine might still have missed the reason for the name recognition, because it was an extensive archive. She scrolled through the index first, knowing she couldn’t read it all and seeking references to obvious highlights.

  And saw, under an appendix listing, ‘Carter, William: Inquiry and Findings.’

  Initially everything rushed in upon her, a jumble of impressions and awarenesses. She comprehended at last the seeming absurdity of the conversation about her father initiated by Sanglier. Much later in the reading she understood why the man had not been more direct - and why her father had been prematurely retired, although not why he hadn’t appealed against the demand, which he’d had the right to do.

  She consciously stopped her mind butterflying from point to point, forcing the logic and the analysis in which she’d been trained, reading the account of the tribunal as she would have studied a scene-of-crime dossier.

  She quickly realized that the tribunal hearing provided as complete an account as possible of the wartime heroism of Marcel Temoine who became Sanglier, the wildly uncatch-able boar. So analytical was Claudine’s fact-retentive mind - and so practised the habit - that she found herself constructing a pattern from the accusations made against her father. And for once a pattern didn’t make sense because it couldn’t make sense. But it was there.

  The true Interpol records that Sanglier had risked his life secretly to maintain and preserve, which had later been accepted as genuine by the organization - with the phoney Nazi attempts at rewriting also kept, for comparison - were matched and corroborated by captured Nazi and Gestapo records. But the material known from captured Nazi files to have existed which her father had been accused of mislaying

  - as he’d also mislaid what should have matched it from Sanglier’s secret Interpol notes - created in almost every case a break in the chro
nology impossible to fill from German records that had survived in Berlin. Specifically, the trial records of the Ruhr cell, of which Sanglier had been the only one to escape capture and execution.

  Momentarily her eyes fogged, blurring the screen, at the abrupt realization that had obviously stunned her father as much as it stunned her. Sanglier hadn’t been part of the Ruhr cell. He had invented his participation, intruding his code-name into the records to make himself appear even more heroic than he had provably been by re-routing the deportation trains in the concluding chaos of the war.

  It was obvious that the majority of the tribunal had accepted the disparities as faulty or careless fact-keeping in the final hysterical months of the collapsing Third Reich. That explained why her father’s censure had been so comparatively light, sufficiently so for him to have appealed. But to have appealed would have risked a more detailed inquiry and the exposure of Sanglier which her father had sacrificed himself to prevent.

  Her father’s evidence had been transcribed verbatim. Despite the flatness of the words, without inflexion or stress, Claudine was caught by the strength and feeling of nearly everything he’d said. There was spirited and coherent praise of Interpol - more coherent than she could ever remember him being in real life, even before the daily intake of pastis - as an international police organization to which he was dedicated and would do nothing to bring into disrepute. He also lauded Sanglier, pleading that a lot of what he was accused of mishandling had never been available in the first place but only assumed to have survived and insisting that the omissions did nothing to detract from Sanglier’s acknowledged heroism or reputation.

  Claudine did not try to access anything more. She stared sightlessly at the flickering screen, confronting another upheaval in an already overturned life.

  She had been away at school during the hearing but been regaled with every detail by her mother, during weekends and vacations. Except there hadn’t been any details. Her father’s total refusal to tell Monique even why he had been summoned before an inquiry had done more to infuriate the woman than any of his other much criticized failings.

  So her mother had speculated. She’d come closest, Claudine now knew, by guessing that he’d made some disastrous mistake and lost an enormous amount of Interpol records. Another suggestion, which upon objective reflection would have been impossible for a man with no association whatsoever with any finance division, was that he’d been caught embezzling and was being tried quietly to avoid a scandal. Excessive drunkenness had been a further theory, although he hadn’t started to drink to any extent until after leaving the organization. The only accusation Claudine could not remember her mother levelling was sexual impropriety, although she’d thought about it. ‘He’s not capable,’ had been the dismissive judgement.

  Knowing her mother’s reverence for the Sanglier legend and the breadth of her contempt for the man she always called William Carter, Claudine did not consider telling her the true facts. Instead, she contemplated her own position, now that she knew what her father was supposed to have done. She’d already dismissed the abstinence from alcohol as a pretension, and thought now that her attitude towards the man had been one, too. Quite apart from whatever had happened at Interpol her father had been unduly weak and her mother was unduly strong. Claudine had allowed Monique’s attitude to be imposed upon her: to be brainwashed, in fact. Know thyself could never again be anything but a mocking taunt.

  She arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport with time to spare before her flight so she called the direct line into the incident room, half expecting to get the answering machine. Instead she reached Yvette, who sounded agitated and at once went off the line.

  ‘You on your way back?’ demanded Rosetti, Yvette’s replacement.

  ‘Yes. Why?’

  ‘All hell’s broken loose. Toomey and a policeman are on their way from London. Winslow thinks they’ve got a warrant for your arrest. There’s a Commission meeting going on at the moment. Sanglier came back from Amsterdam for it. You’re to return directly here.’

  ‘I think I can handle that, don’t you?’ said Claudine, unworried.

  ‘I hope so. I’m not sure. And there’s something else. Foulan, the oncologist, came through here when there wasn’t any reply from your apartment. He wants to talk to you.’

  Claudine tried immediately but the message on Foulan’s office answering machine was that he would not be available until the following morning. She didn’t bother with a message of her own but tried his home number. There was no reply.

  Her mother said she felt fine and that she and Gérard were very happy. The chemotherapy sessions were going well and so far there had been no ill effects.

  Claudine had to run to catch her plane, and was the last to board.

  Back in Paris the bird-like custodian of the archive of heroes, who had reached an arrangement with the man who was becoming practically as famous as his father from his involvement in all these horrific killings, sealed the envelope with the photocopy of Claudine’s access request and put it in the collection basket to be posted to Henri Sanglier.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Claudine tried Andre Foulan’s home again from her office but there was still no reply. She was at the safe when Yvette Fey hurried in, eyes wide behind her heavy spectacles, and said Sanglier was demanding she go at once to his office: there had been orders at the reception desk for him to be told the moment she entered the building and he and others were waiting. Yvette added that Rosetti was at home expecting her call the moment the interview finished.

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’ asked the French girl, her face creased with concern.

  ‘Go home and stop worrying,’ said Claudine. Although there had been nothing he could have done by waiting, she had expected Hugo still to be there when she got back. But what, she asked herself, would have been the point?

  There were two men among the six in Sanglier’s office whom Claudine did not know, although she thought one looked familiar. They were assembled and waiting around an oval conference table that had replaced the normal couch and easy chairs at the side of the room and she wondered why it had been so important for furniture to be moved about to keep everything in Sanglier’s territory: the building was honeycombed with suitable conference chambers. The French commissioner was at the head of the table, flanked on either side by David Winslow and Jan Villiers, the chairman. The man whom Claudine thought she recognized was beside Winslow. Peter Toomey and the other unknown man were on Villiers’ side of the table. There was one empty chair, towards which Sanglier gestured her. As she sat Toomey looked directly at her without attempting to hold back the smirk. His companion remained expressionless. Claudine felt a flicker of impatience at the pointlessness of it all but told herself none of them knew that yet. They would, soon enough. Then she could get back to the apartment to keep telephoning Foulan until she finally got him.

  Sanglier was rigidly straight-faced but it was difficult. He’d heard it all and was euphoric: he’d come dangerously close at one stage to laughing aloud and thought he probably would, later. First he wanted to enjoy what was to come and it was going to come at his pace and at his orchestration. He wanted to share with someone the pleasure he would get from every second of it. He supposed he could tell Françoise, within limitations. She’d be titillated by the idea of two male lovers dying in a suicide pact: probably become even more sexually interested in Claudine Carter.

  Adamant upon every formal propriety - he’d hurried the furniture change to create a tribunal atmosphere - Sanglier indicated the stranger beside Toomey and said: ‘This is Detective Superintendent John Walker, from the United Kingdom Serious Fraud Office. He and Mr Toomey have told us of the serious allegations of which you are a subject. We understand you have several times ignored advice to consult a lawyer.’ He gestured to the familiar man. ‘In view of what we have heard I have asked Michael Harper, the English member of our legal department, to be present at this interview.’

 
‘That’s extremely considerate of you, but I don’t believe I need legal representation,’ said Claudine.

  ‘We don’t think that decision entirely rests with you,’ said Villiers, desperate to avoid any scandal during his period of office. ‘There is the position of Europol to consider.’

  ‘Indeed there is,’ agreed Claudine. ‘And I want at once to state that I have done nothing, nor will do anything, to embarrass this organization.’ She looked towards Toomey. ‘I have already made it clear during two separate interviews that I know nothing about, nor am I in any way connected with, the inquiries being made in England into financial irregularities involving a man named Paul Bickerstone.’ She was unsure why she’d felt the need to be so formal.

  ‘Please,’ interrupted the lawyer, raising his hands. ‘I don’t wish you to say anything more until certain things have been established.’ Turning to Walker, he said: ‘Do you intend to proceed under formal caution?’

  ‘If you so wish,’ offered Walker. He was a square-bodied, burly man.

  ‘Just a moment,’ said Claudine, bringing from her handbag the two tapes she’d earlier retrieved from her office safe. ‘Before this gets on to any formal footing I want you all to listen to these. They are of conversations I have had with Paul Bickerstone, once by telephone and once personally, in my apartment here at The Hague.’