The Memory Man

by Steven Savile

  And every hour he was gone was an hour closer to the inevitable.

  Silence helped no one. But, considering Jonas Anglemark’s name was yet to hit the news-stands, understandable. She’d fielded a couple of calls from TT, the news service, asking for comment, about the fact the politician hadn’t been seen in some time.

  ‘What are your plans now’

  ‘Logically, head back to London tomorrow, coordinate things from there. Or if a body turns up, hand it all over to Division for the French to run with. It’s not like I’m far away.’

  ‘We can always use an extra body over here,’ she said, the offer out of her mouth before any of the many reasons why it was a bad idea reached her brain.

  ‘I’d love to,’ he said, and her stomach lurched, ‘but I can’t see Division giving approval when I’m the only active agent in the UK.’

  ‘Ah, yes, permission. But they were happy for you to go to Paris?’

  ‘I think they’re easing me back into things gently. I’m sure Laura’s shielding me from the politics. She knows how it all gives me a brain ache.’

  ‘Laura? Is that your new partner?’

  Ash laughed. ‘Much worse. She’s the boss. She runs the London office.’

  ‘Ah, yes. Of course.’

  She’d been to London several times. She’d hear Skånska slang and the Noll-åtta dialect on Oxford Street and in Covent Garden more often than she’d hear English. It always amused her how her fellow countrymen called Stockholmers after the city’s phone code. It wasn’t exactly a cutting-edge insult. She’d done the usual tourist things and almost melted her credit card in the process. It was always different experiencing a city through the eyes of a local, though. His London was no doubt very different to hers, and not merely because he spent his time rooting around in the filth and hunting the kind of people who lived in it.

  ‘Any luck with finding a connection between my man and yours? Or with Germany?’

  ‘You know how it is,’ Ash said. ‘We need more data to narrow the search parameters.’ Which was an easy thing to say and a considerably harder thing to do. Reliable information could not simply be conjured out of thin air because you needed it.

  And even if the bishop turned up dead, that wasn’t going to add to their knowledge pool. At least not immediately.

  Her watchword had to be procedure, because the moment the news broke, the press would be swarming all over her and the chance of taking a breath before she drowned beneath all the attention was minimal. Procedure. Doing things the right way. Don’t hope for a lucky break. Follow protocols. And that meant following Ash’s example, and quite literally trying to walk a mile in Jonas Anglemark’s shoes.

  ‘I’ll loop you in if Law turns anything up. We’re in this together, after all.’

  She wished she could say the same thing about the other inter-agencies she was forced to interact with; with each wanting to cling on to their precious knowledge in fear of someone else getting the glory for cracking a case.

  And that, of course, perpetuated the cycle of mistrust and made her reluctant to share her own discoveries. This one was different though; on the back of Palme and Lindh, the whole nation was going to be demanding justice for Anglemark’s murder, and very public justice at that. There would be no time to worry about treading on toes or putting noses out of joint. She wasn’t doing this for the man, she as doing it for the whole of Sweden, and that made it different from any case she’d been involved in. How did you carry the weight of a nation on your shoulders? Where did you even begin to start?

  It was time to try those dead man’s shoes on for size.

  TWENTY-THREE

  In the end he followed the siren song back to London, intending to clear his head, catch up on sleep and do some thinking away from the case that wasn’t quite a case.

  Donatti had his back. He told his old friend he’d return in twenty-four hours, but it wouldn’t end up being that long.

  ‘There’s been another one.’

  He heard the words, but couldn’t place the voice, and without that recognition that one could have been anything. ‘Sorry?’

  ‘There’s been another one,’ the woman said patiently. This time he recognized the voice; it was Frankie Varg.

  ‘Body or body part?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  Things had just become interesting. Not that he was about to say that out loud, but another body, and more body parts, meant more opportunities for the killer to screw up. He glanced across at the clock. He could be in either Paris or Stockholm before lunch.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Your way. A village in Surrey, retired priest, Catholic, decided to end his own life in the confessional of his old church.’

  ‘Priest suicide? Unusual, but there could be a lot of reasons for an old man of the cloth to kill himself,’ he said, not needing to elaborate.

  ‘He received a package that morning. There was a card with it, just like the other two.’

  ‘Bonn again?’

  ‘Remember Bonn,’ she agreed. ‘An eyeball this time.’

  ‘Tournard’s?’ It was the logical assumption; even though the bishop’s body hadn’t been found, he was out of the first forty-eight hours, which meant the chances of him turning up alive were greatly reduced.

  ‘It’s possible,’ she said. ‘Whatever happened in Bonn he couldn’t live with it.’

  ‘No other corpses turned up sans eyeballs?’

  ‘None so far. Not in Sweden, and not in Paris according to Etienne Reynard.’ Reynard ran the Paris Division. He was the epitome of the permanently harried French cop who looked like he had just stepped out of a François Truffaut movie. They’d worked together a few times. The man had chain-smoked his way through sixty Gauloises a day for the duration of the investigations. He drove a battered old 2CV that changed gears on what looked like the indicator stick. The man was a proper throwback. He even did that thing where he’d pause on the threshold of walking out of an interrogation and look back to say, ‘Oh, this is probably nothing, but …’ and that but was never nothing. Ash liked the guy, even at the risk of proximal lung cancer. ‘I’ve got feelers out to other offices, especially Germany. Not turned up anything yet.’

  ‘I’ll get Laura to trawl through local and international reports. If it’s there to be found, she’ll find it.’

  ‘You think she’ll be OK if we coordinate everything through her? I’d rather not risk some nosy reporter over here stumbling on what we’re dealing with before we go public. And if we’re going to be working this together it makes sense.’

  ‘She’ll love it. Give it a week and she’ll be asking to move up your way, assuming you don’t have polar bears?’

  ‘We don’t.’

  ‘Great, let me sell it to her.’

  ‘Of course. I completely understand. I wouldn’t want an outsider putting extra work on one of my team, either.’

  ‘We’re on the same wavelength. OK, I’ll head into the office. I’ll take a look at our dead priest while I’m there, but give me the cheat sheet: what do you know about the guy? Any obvious link to Anglemark or Tournard?’

  ‘The Church?’

  ‘Was your politician Catholic?’

  ‘I don’t believe so. We are not very Catholic here. The Church of Sweden is Lutheran. Unofficial estimates put the number of Catholics here at between one and one and a half per cent of the population. Improbable, but not impossible. It would be foolish of us to become fixated with the religious aspect of this, I think. Remember Bonn. That points us to a place, if not a time. That is the true point of connection, not the fact they believe in the same version of God. Are you a Catholic, Peter? May I ask?’

  The question caught him off-guard.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because our personal beliefs influence the way we consider the evidence, even if only subconsciously.’

  He shook his head, even though she couldn’t see him. ‘It won’t affect me.’
/>
  ‘So, you are?’

  ‘I was,’ Ash said. ‘Altar boy. I feasted on the body of Christ and got drunk the first time on his blood. But that was all a very long time ago. I have a seriously low bullshit threshold these days. Christ, if anything I’d love to find a connection back to the Church. There’s so much wrong with organized religion.’

  ‘So your beliefs – or lack of – might make it easier to blame the Church rather than trying to shift the blame away from it,’ she said, touching a nerve.

  ‘Let’s just say that I don’t like being told what to do.’

  ‘Ah, a rebel. But good to hear.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yes,’ she assured him. ‘If you find it easy to condemn the Church the chances are you’ll challenge the evidence rather than just accept it at face value, whatever they say, however close you might be to one of them. We can’t afford to let them close ranks if this points back to some past horrors they’ve buried.’

  ‘I agree,’ he said. ‘The evidence speaks for itself. We don’t put words in its mouth.’

  ‘I like that,’ Frankie said.

  ‘Then I guess it’s you and me,’ he said.

  ‘Always and for ever,’ she said and then laughed into the ensuing silence. ‘It’s a song,’ Frankie promised him, ‘not a proposal.’

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Laura arrived back at the office ten minutes after he did.

  River House was humming with activity. If ever there was a place that didn’t sleep, this was it. Every hour of the day. The demands of keeping the country safe didn’t let up. They earned the nickname Spooks for good reason.

  She slipped her jacket over the back of her chair and dropped her bag beside it.

  ‘Coffee?’ he asked.

  She held up a takeaway cup that he hadn’t noticed her carrying. ‘One of the few perks of civilized living,’ she said. ‘So …?’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So Frankie?’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘Let’s just say there’s a definite change in inflection when you mention her.’

  ‘All in your head,’ he laughed.

  ‘Is it now?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘You looking for a new partner?’ She didn’t need to say to replace Mitch.

  He shook his head. ‘Nope, nothing long term. A marriage of convenience. We’re looped into the same case, that’s it. We break this, make the arrests, and go our separate ways.’

  ‘If you say so,’ Laura said. She sat in her chair and raised her coffee to her lips, obviously enjoying teasing him a little too much. ‘I assume she’s the reason I’ve been graced with your presence, too? Which, hold on, I’m having a psychic moment, yes, I can feel it coming through from the other side … yes … it means more work for me.’

  ‘The psychic hotline is on fire,’ he said.

  ‘That, or Division called through an hour ago, asking if I’d be willing to act as coordinator for the pair of you.’

  ‘Ha. Sorry about that. I wanted you to hear it from me.’

  ‘Hence the impromptu visit. You should have called.’

  ‘Favours demand face-to-face begging.’

  ‘You mean so I can’t say no?’

  ‘Would you ever? Think of it as something fun to sink your teeth into. And maybe there’s a jolly to Sweden in it for you.’

  ‘Hmmmm,’ she said, then her face cracked into a grin.

  It took a moment for Ash to realize that he’d been played.

  He took it on the chin.

  ‘So, what are you actually doing back here?’

  ‘Catching up on the information that came in overnight.’

  ‘Frankie hasn’t filled you in already?’ The playfulness lasted one more second, then disappeared; and it was all business.

  ‘She called me this morning,’ he said. ‘Gave me the heads up that we’ve got a new body, and another random body part, meaning we’ve gone from two killings to a serial pattern. I wanted to check what we’d got in the system before I head out.’

  ‘You’re going to the scene?’

  He nodded. ‘It’s a lot closer to home,’ close being Langley Vale, a small village of maybe two hundred people on the Downs just outside Epsom. It didn’t get much closer to home for him. An hour and a half’s drive at most, even with traffic. ‘I’ve already talked to the first officers on the scene, and they’re happy it’s a straightforward suicide. They confirmed the message on the note and the eyeball and were more than happy to slope their shoulders and let us take over.’

  ‘Definitely suicide?’

  He nodded. ‘But the arrival of an eyeball in the post and the implicit threat of the accompanying card was enough to make him choose death over whatever else was on the table. Meaning he jumped rather than waiting to be pushed. So he remembered Bonn and he couldn’t live with those memories.’

  ‘Poor man.’

  ‘Possibly,’ Ash agreed. ‘Now, somehow, we’ve got to find what links a retired priest seeing out his days in his comfortable little parish here, a missing bishop in Paris and a dead politician in Sweden. Because something does connect all three of them.’

  ‘I’m going to add Father Dooley to the search parameters, see if it narrows things down. If you want to make yourself useful while you wait, you can pick me up another cup of the good stuff.’ She held up the takeaway.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  There was little to be learned in the church itself, and Father Michael O’Hare, the new priest, was obviously uncomfortable in the place where his predecessor had committed a mortal sin, even with the body removed. No amount of scrubbing would get the blood out of the carpet and the inside of the confessional was for ever tainted.

  ‘The bishop is coming tomorrow,’ O’Hare said. ‘He’ll know what to do.’ It was obvious that he didn’t. ‘I’ve lost people, of course. And buried a boy who hanged himself in his bedroom just last year. There is incredible sadness to it every time, but there is a distance, too. They are your parishioners. Your flock. You tend to them as best you can. But he was my friend. I can’t begin to imagine his pain, that he could be so troubled as to think the only answer was death. How does it happen, officer? From your side. How do people break like this?’ He didn’t wait for an answer from Ash. ‘I thought he was happy. He was enjoying his retirement. Not that he wanted to retire. But we had an arrangement. He could come and go as he pleased and this would always be his church. I was only ever looking after it for him.’

  ‘We can never know what is going on inside someone else’s skin, Father. Pain isn’t something we wear on the outside like bruises. If only it was. That would save a lot of people from suffering in silence. All we can do is listen if they want us to hear.’

  The priest nodded. ‘That is the part I am having the most difficulty with. Father …’ He struggled to say the dead man’s name. There was a sense of complete loss about him as if he was unable to think for himself any longer. ‘Father Dooley. He didn’t think that he could talk to me?’

  Both the loss and the manner of its discovery had damaged something in the other man, and from bitter experience Ash knew it would never fix, not fully. It would linger in his mind and come back to hurt him again and again. The only sense of healing was that given time it would haunt him less frequently, and the pain of it would dim because of the distance. The soul built calluses over raw wounds until they became bearable. But no amount of time would change the fact that every time he came into this place he would see Patrick Dooley lying there in the confessional, wrists slashed, his dog walking through his friend’s lifeblood. He couldn’t imagine the priest would ever become so dulled to the memory that he would feel at home in this place again.

  ‘I understand that there was a note,’ he said, leading the man back outside into the glorious daylight. The bright blue sky might have been painted in by a child, so incredibly blue was it. There were no traffic sounds; despite the fact that there were maybe two hundred houses in the village it was
suitably removed from the busier roads that ran from Epsom proper up the Downs to Tattenham Corner.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ the man said, glad of something else to think about. The change in his demeanour was obvious the moment they stepped over the threshold. In the most basic of ways it was as though he had left his troubles behind. ‘The police took it with them.’

  ‘Can you remember what it said?’ Ash already knew but was looking for a way to keep the man talking. If there was something inside he needed to say, he’d need to find the words and nine times out of ten they were hidden within others and the only way to get to them was just to keep talking. That was the similarity of their jobs, both traded on the human need for confession.

  ‘Just that he was sorry, that he couldn’t carry the burden any longer. He explained that he had chosen the church as he didn’t want Elspeth, his housekeeper, to find his body.’ O’Hare breathed deeply, nostrils flaring as he sniffed back emotions halfway between anger and sadness. ‘He thought I would be better able to deal with it.’ He shook his head. ‘I’m not sure that he was right.’

  ‘Could you take me to his home?’

  ‘Of course,’ he priest said. ‘I have to admit that I don’t really know what I am doing. We don’t have many dealings with law enforcement here, despite the odd crime prevention seminar in the Church Hall and neighbourhood watch meetings. I don’t mean to sound callous, but is this liable to take a long time? For them to release his body for burial, I mean. Father Dooley was much loved by the people here. They will want the chance to mourn him.’

  ‘Honestly, I don’t know. But I should be out of your hair pretty soon, then you’ll be called to the Coroner’s court. A few days, maybe?’

  ‘You aren’t here to investigate his death, though, are you? This is about that thing they found in his desk.’

  ‘You have to admit, it is unusual.’

  ‘Horrible. It’s horrible. I can’t imagine why he would have something like that. Was he in trouble? I don’t … I mean … Where would he get an eye from?’ The priest’s hands were shaking. ‘I mean … was he …? Did he …?’