All she could think was that they were both looking at the list in the wrong way. Not that she knew what the right way was.
One thing that niggled Frankie was that one of the names on that far smaller list had died before they’d even realized that there was anything happening. And what that made her think was that it was possible that the Memory Man had been on the hunt for much longer than they thought. Just because they hadn’t found other victims didn’t mean there weren’t other victims.
They’d discounted the dead, because they were looking for future victims.
But couldn’t there be other victims within the deceased?
Was it unreasonable to think that way?
Or entirely reasonable?
She was going out of her mind, going round and round in logical circles.
Frankie stood up and stretched, working the muscles in her lower back and shoulders. It was possible, wasn’t it?
She collected a mug of coffee from the pot on the hot plate in the break room and returned to her desk.
She called up the list of connections Laura had already identified as deceased. There were a lot of them.
She eliminated anyone who had died more than a year before.
That narrowed it down.
Only three people on the list had died within the last twelve months.
One of them had been almost eighty. Laura’s two-word note alongside her name was BREAST CANCER.
The second name on the list lacked any concrete detail. There was nothing about the cause of death. She made a note to check with Laura to see what avenues were still to be explored.
The third and final name on the list felt strangely familiar, but for the moment she couldn’t place it. The detail that Laura had entered beside it listed cause of death as AUTOMOTIVE DEATH. He hadn’t been a young man and could easily have been contacted by the killer in the lead up to the accident.
She needed to know more about the accident.
The name gnawed at the back of her mind.
It didn’t take long to realize that the dead man had lived in the southern suburbs of Stockholm, close to her.
The date of the deaths had only been recorded with the month and year, but Frankie was sure that she knew exactly what date he had died on. And she knew where it had happened, because it had been no accident, she was sure of that.
She’d seen it.
The guy in that car had burned alive.
She needed to see the post-mortem report, but she remembered the raging heat inside the burning car as she’d tried to get to Stefan Karius. Would the coroner even be able to tell there was a missing body part, or would the man’s corpse have been so badly charred it was basically incinerated?
She filed a request in the system, asking for a copy of Karius’s post-mortem, but then grabbed her jacket from the back of the chair.
This was something she needed to check out for herself.
SIXTY-TWO
‘What the hell is that?’ Laura asked, as the forensic technician teased open the package.
Ash didn’t need to ask.
He knew.
The forensics man was painstakingly methodical in his work, doing everything possible to retain the integrity of the packaging and not compromise any potential evidence inside. It wasn’t exactly pass-the-parcel, but Ash wished the guy would just rip the packaging off and get down to the meat of it.
Meat.
‘Did you go to a convent?’ the technician asked.
‘Is that—?’
‘It’s Danilo’s penis,’ Ash said.
But it was not Danilo’s severed genitals that interested him, it was the note that came with the shrivelled meat.
Everyone else had got a note.
‘Is there anything else in there?’
The technician nodded, teasing out a small card with a pair of tweezers that he slipped into a plastic evidence bag.
Ash read it.
‘Si vis veritatem cognoscere Bonn’ followed by the name of a bar in Paris.
Ash only had a smattering of Latin, most of it gleaned from movies, like Carpe Diem, but he knew what it meant: If you want to know the truth about Bonn. The only reason he had any idea what it meant was because Veritatem cognoscere was the motto of the CIA.
‘I can make it if I leave now.’
‘I’ll call Etienne Reynard, get you some backup in place.’ She was already reaching for the phone. She saw the look on his face and cut him off. ‘I don’t want to hear you say you can handle it on your own.’
‘I have an advantage, though. I know what he looks like.’
‘Big help that is,’ she said.
‘Book me on the next Eurostar.’ He didn’t wait around to argue. He was already on his way for the door. ‘I’m not going to take any risks.’
‘That’s what Mitch always used to say.’ She cut him down with those seven words. He stopped in the doorway.
‘I’m coming back. I promise.’
‘You better,’ she said.
A ping on his phone confirmed receipt of his booking before he pulled away.
The killer had allowed him enough time to get to Paris, barely. He was going to be travelling for the best part of six hours. A flight would be quicker in theory, but with travel to Heathrow, sitting around a couple of hours before take-off, and all the rigmarole of passport control and security, the train was just easier.
SIXTY-THREE
Frankie had probably driven along this street a thousand times. More. She’d even looked at an apartment around there when she first moved to the city.
They had been a little out of her price range then and were more than three times that now. Property prices inside the city had exploded over the last decade or so. Older people who’d bought into the area before the turn of the millennium were sitting on a gold mine.
The address that Laura had entered in the log was a maisonette in a house that had been divided between the five floors. His was the penthouse, top floor and attic. The developer had gone upwards rather than down in terms of trying to squeeze value out of the property.
Unlike Anglemark’s bolthole this place was beautifully maintained, the gardens outside the door manicured, the interior freshly painted. It was a proper character place. The penthouse apartment had flower boxes that brimmed over the top of what looked like a large terrace.
Each of the apartments had a separate entrance off the main hallway, and there was a wire-caged elevator that ran up to the top floor. Even that looked well maintained. She didn’t go inside. Instead she went around the side. She knew what she was looking for. The rear of the building took her out of the view of the street, but there were still central gardens overlooking the courtyard.
Frankie climbed the fire escape up the side of the building, intending to go in through the terrace.
It was a long climb, meaning plenty of time for someone to see her. At the top, more than fifteen metres from the ground, she clambered over the flower boxes and dropped down onto the terrace. There was a large plate-glass window, and a door. The entire length of the terrace was looked out on by that window, meaning she could see into the whole of the apartment from out here.
It reeked of money.
Serious money.
Frankie tried the handle tentatively, knowing it would be locked. The window was a single sheet of plate glass, triple-thick. She wasn’t going to be able to break it.
She took her jacket off, wrapping it around her fist, then punched out the glass around the door handle. It made a terrible racket that echoed what felt like miles because of the height, but the reality was even if someone heard it on the street they wouldn’t have been able to place it.
She opened the door, breaking into the dead man’s house.
Beyond looking for next of kin, there was no reason for the beat cops to come traipsing through the place. The place was a huge open-plan area with iron stairs that curled up towards bedrooms in the eaves. The place must have been worth ten million kroner,
easily. More. The furniture was styled, designer. The art cost more than a year’s salary. There was no television, she realized, then saw the recessed projector in the ceiling which, she assumed, would turn one entire wall into a cinema screen for viewing. Nothing about the place looked lived in.
The only phone was actually for the intercom system. This was the modern life. People didn’t have landlines any more, it was all cellular. It also meant the owner was unlikely to have a physical address book for them to go through for points of intersection with Laura’s list.
Upstairs she found a wet room and a vast bedroom.
There was one other door up on this level. She pushed it open. It held a single unmade bed pushed up against the wall, and a small bedside cabinet with a lamp on it.
Behind the door was a cheap desk and chair, the kind she’d expect to find in a kid’s bedroom. It was completely at odds with the lavish decor of the rest of the apartment.
There was a whiteboard on the wall above it.
It took a moment for her to realize what she was looking at, a moment for her brain to take it in and make sense of it all.
What she saw changed everything.
Frankie felt a mixture of anger, shock, and elation at her discovery as she fumbled in her pocket for her phone.
She was taking a picture of the board when she heard the groan of floorboards and turned to face the barrel of the gun aimed squarely at her face.
SIXTY-FOUR
Before he arrived in Paris the call came through that Tournard’s corpse had been fished out of the Seine.
There was symmetry in that. Like Anglemark. The killer liked to dump his bodies in water.
Ash didn’t know if that was going to help him, but every little detail helped build an understanding of the man he was going to meet.
He reached the bar with barely twenty minutes to spare.
He had had a moment of clarity on the Eurostar; the killer knew where he lived and must have known who he was even before he set foot in Caligula’s, looking to trap him.
But how could that be?
The bar was dimly lit, most of the tables occupied by couples. It was an intimate environment for the killer to choose.
Patterns of behaviour.
Did that mean he had access to a place nearby?
Was he expecting Ash to willingly walk out of here with him and sit there happily whilst he cut his cock off?
‘Not happening,’ Ash said to himself.
He’d parked the hire car in a multi-storey car park five minutes away. He had considered getting a taxi, but he didn’t want to be stuck chasing the guy if he bolted.
Only three of the tables had single occupants.
Ash walked straight up to the third table as the man pushed out the chair opposite him with his foot.
‘Peter Ash.’
‘You have me at a disadvantage,’ Ash said as he sat down. He took a good look at the man this time, locking in everything about him. The lines of skin around his mouth and eyes said sixties, but he had the muscular physique of someone much younger. He was tanned. With dark, close-cropped hair.
‘You can call me Michael if you like,’ the man said and pushed one of the two glasses of beer already on the table in his direction.
Ash had no intention of drinking it.
He called a waiter over and ordered a bottle of Evian.
‘The beer not to your taste?’
‘I’m on duty,’ he said.
The man shrugged and took a long draw on his own then pulled the other towards him. ‘Waste not, want not.’
‘So, Michael, what’s so important that you had to drag me over here rather than just meet in London? It can’t be the beer.’
‘What I need to show you is here, not in London.’
‘Why not just tell me in Rome? I could have saved some air miles.’
Michael laughed. ‘So perhaps you aren’t useless, after all. I wasn’t sure you would remember me.’
‘So, you’re not denying that you killed Danilo?’
The man took another drink. ‘Why would I deny anything? If you’re half as good at your job as you seem to think you are I’m sure that you have a wealth of evidence – more than enough to arrest me. But I don’t think that’s why you are here.’
‘Why not?’
‘If you wanted to arrest me you would have turned up here with a posse in tow.’
‘How do you know that I didn’t?’
‘I know people.’
‘That’s a big risk to be taking, Michael. Because right now there’s so much shit going on inside my head I don’t even know what I’m going to do next.’
‘And yet you still came alone.’
‘I did. So, in your head, what happens next? When you’ve showed me whatever you need me to see, what happens then?’
‘Then I’ll just slip away and you never hear from me again.’
‘What makes you think I won’t stop you?’
‘It doesn’t matter if you do, Peter. There’s nothing you can do to me that God hasn’t already. I’m dying. I’ll be long gone before any trial.’
‘Sucks to be you,’ Ash said, not sure if he believed him. Maybe it was true. Using your remaining time to exact revenge on people who had crossed you was a strong motivation. As strong as any.
His phone rang.
‘It could be important,’ he said, but didn’t reach for it.
‘Not more important than talking to me,’ Michael said.
‘I guess not. So, how about you show me yours, Michael.’
SIXTY-FIVE
Frankie stared at the screen of her phone for a moment.
Her call had rung through to voicemail.
It had taken her a good sixty seconds of fast talking to steady the trigger finger of the nervous young cop who’d found her inside Karius’s apartment. She explained, and explained again, telling him she was taking out her ID, showing him it, telling him he could call into Division, or contact Henrik Frys, he would explain, and eventually he’d lowered the weapon.
He took her identification from her and called through to dispatch on his radio.
A second officer stepped into the room and watched her as she made her own call. He didn’t stop her. His sole role was to make sure that she didn’t bolt.
‘How did you know I was here?’
‘A neighbour called it in. She knew the place was empty because the owner died recently. You shouldn’t have broken in. Not without a warrant. The law has to apply to all of us.’
‘Good in theory,’ she said, ‘shit in practice. Sometimes you do what you have to do. Believe me, if I could tell you more, I would, and you’d understand.’
‘Try me.’
But before she could, the other officer returned and handed her badge and ID back. ‘We’re to help you with whatever you need.’ The sudden acquiescence earned him a quizzical look from his partner. ‘That’s all they said.’
The two men waited for her to tell them what she wanted them to do.
‘What are we looking at?’ the first officer said, joining her to look at the whiteboard.
‘Looks like a list of dates, times, and places,’ the other said. ‘What does at all mean?’
Frankie told them. ‘These dates match the dates of a number of disappearances. Two of them,’ she pointed at the corresponding dates on the board, ‘have already turned up dead.’
‘Maybe he was just following the case in the news? Plenty of weirdos do that. Get obsessed with true-crime stories.’
His partner didn’t disagree with him.
Frankie didn’t want to make these two men feel stupid, but it looked like she was going to have to. She didn’t have to. His partner saw the discrepancy.
‘Hold on, Jens. Look at that one, and that one. Some of these dates, the guy who owned this place was dead by then.’
‘Then how could he have known? Psychic? I don’t fucking think so.’
The answer was obvious, because there was only one answ
er it could be. When you come right down to it, the obvious answer was always the best. Strip away convoluted theories about accomplices and psychics and you got the only reasonable solution. Whoever she’d seen burn in that car hadn’t been Stefan Karius.
Karius wasn’t dead.
‘I want you to tear this place apart. You’re looking for proof. Anything at all. Computer, notebook, diary, anything. Got that?’
They nodded.
They couldn’t all search this small room, so she sent one to the master bedroom and the other back downstairs.
An hour later she was beginning to doubt herself.
Half an hour after that she was resigned to the point of giving up when it hit her:
Why hadn’t he wiped the whiteboard clean?
He’d left proof right there in plain sight.
That was unlike the Memory Man in every other regard.
That was his mistake. It linked him to this place, this name.
They’d pulled open the drawers and turned them out to check the liners, they’d rifled the wardrobes and everything else. They’d double- and triple-checked them.
It was only when she went around behind them, putting things back in their places, that she found she couldn’t close one of the small drawers. Something was stopping it from closing flush, which left the front protruding by a few extra millimetres, but in an apartment so immaculately designed this singular lack of attention to the perfection in the details was jarring.
Instead of trying to force it closed, Frankie pulled the drawer all the way out.
And there it was, stuffed into the back; a loose-leaf binder.
She flicked through pages of handwritten notes, photographs, schedules, and itineraries.
When she saw Jonas Anglemark in one of the pictures she knew that she’d got him.
The two officers came into the room and saw her on her knees, going through the file.
‘We’ve got him,’ she said.
She needed to speak to Ash and she needed to do it quickly.
His phone went straight to voicemail again.
The Memory Man Page 26