The Memory Man Page 8

  ‘Not sure that counts as progress,’ Donatti said as the girl headed back to the kitchen.

  ‘It would have been nice if we could have reduced our pool of suspects by fifty per cent, but beggars can’t be choosers.’

  There wasn’t much to be gained by staying in the cafe, besides calories. They ate the buttery croissants in near silence. Ash watched the heavy black hands of the Deco clock tick around. He finished his coffee then made a call to Laura back in River House.

  She answered on the second ring.

  ‘Hey, Law.’

  ‘Hey yourself, stranger. I take it you’re not coming in today?’ The question was light-hearted but had an edge to it. Probably because there was a better than even chance he was either in a gutter or curled up in bed. He couldn’t blame her. She was a natural worrier.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’m on a case. Sort of.’

  ‘Sort of?’ He heard the rattle of keys as she ran a quick search in the system. ‘You’re not registered on any assignment.’

  ‘Hence the “sort of,”’ he said.

  ‘Go on,’ she said. He could hear the exasperation in her voice, but knew that she was smiling, too. Any case was progress. Christ, getting both legs into his jeans in the morning felt like progress. And there was no getting around the fact that even just a few months ago he would more than likely have hopped on the Eurostar without getting approval. So, the fact he’d actually let someone know that he was leaving the country was progress, too.

  ‘I’m in Paris,’ he said. He could almost hear the sigh that she released.

  ‘Are you now?’

  ‘Arrived last night.’

  ‘Did you now? And why would you run off to Paris, pray tell?’

  ‘I’m helping an old friend from the Vatican try to find a missing bishop.’

  ‘Which sounds like the set-up of a bad joke. So, how on earth have they managed to lose a bishop?’

  ‘A surprisingly difficult question, there, Law. But not through carelessness. It’s connected to Frankie Varg’s murdered politician in Stockholm.’

  ‘I saw that one,’ Laura said. ‘Struck me as an odd case to get flagged by Division.’

  Ash brought her up to speed, careful not to be too explicit with the details given that he had no idea who might be listening. ‘What I need you to do is find a connection between the two men.’

  ‘You make it sound easy.’

  ‘A politician and a priest, a thousand miles apart? Piece of piss. I have faith, Law. If anyone can find a link, it’s you. So, dig. Somewhere their worlds collide, even if it’s something ridiculously random like the fact they attended the same six-year-old’s birthday party. I want to know what that point of intersection is. The note that came with the finger mentioned Bonn. That must mean something. So, start there.’

  ‘This isn’t my first investigation,’ Laura said.

  There were all kinds of databases being compiled that amalgamated all manner of records. The world was focused on data these days. Data farms. Social-media profiles. All those clickbait quizzes. There was a wealth of information out there in the public domain that even a decade ago wouldn’t have been anywhere near online, but it was still pretty fragmentary. Law enforcement had their own systems that focused on criminal behaviour, on crime statistics across the countries and criminal pathologies, building on the networks established by Interpol, but even that was lacking. Some countries just didn’t prioritize the maintenance of electronic records, while others weren’t big on sharing.

  ‘Anything else come in I need to know about?’

  ‘All quiet. Ish. I did hear someone moaning about possible changes in the building.’

  ‘Ah, politics. Fantastic.’

  ‘You’re well out of it,’ she said, and spent a couple of minutes trading grapevine gossip. The fact was no one wanted Ash or the unit in the building, but for some reason they all seemed to forget that Laura was one of ‘them’.

  Ash didn’t give a shit. He either had a job or he didn’t. It wasn’t the end of the world, either way. People would still commit crimes, Brexit or no Brexit. Both Five and Six could get massive budget increases even as the number of beat cops in the capital was sliced brutally because no one could see the wood for the trees. It was all about dealing with the big-picture complications, the kind of things that were election-winning issues, not the minutiae of actually policing the streets. There was never enough money for that.

  Anyway, the one thing he took from the conversation was that it was unlikely he was going to be saddled with a new partner any time soon.

  And he was just fine with that.

  SEVENTEEN

  Frankie put a call into the pathology lab, letting them know a tongue had been found. The odds of two tongues floating around bodiless were slim, so the chances were better than good it was Anglemark’s, but it still wasn’t confirmed. The lab tech didn’t sound particularly interested, or surprised that it had turned up a thousand miles away. It was almost as if they dealt with missing body parts every day.

  ‘It would have been better if it had come to us first, given the profile of the victim.’

  ‘To be honest, my biggest concern was biological over territorial. It’s meat. Meat doesn’t stay fresh for ever. I didn’t want it rotting during transport.’

  ‘We do have such things as refrigeration, Miss Varg. It’s really quite civilized these days. Not to mention the fact that there are several courier services that specialize in the transportation of vital organs.’

  ‘I’m not an idiot. It was a judgement call. I made it.’

  ‘And I have to live with it. But that doesn’t change the fact that you should have sent it to us. Not risked some other idiot screwing up our investigation.’

  His tone made it absolutely obvious there were two idiots in the equation as far as he was concerned, and she was one of them.

  ‘The tongue’s in Paris.’

  ‘Paris?’

  ‘You know, capital of France as opposed to Texas. Big iron tower in the middle.’

  ‘I know where it is. What I’m asking is how the hell it got there?’

  ‘Curious, isn’t it? And that’s just one of the questions I’m trying to answer. My focus is solely on catching the killer. I don’t care about jurisdiction or playing nicely with others. There’s a killer out there who didn’t just end a man’s life, he cut his tongue out and shipped it to a bishop in Paris,’ she said.

  ‘Understood. By the way, we’ve got a name on your burn victim. Stefan Karius. Good old-fashioned police work. The car registration survived the fire. We worked back from there.’

  Fire was a bastard. It would burn away the skin, removing all hope of getting fingerprints. Despite the charring and damage, that was all limited to the surface, so once they had an ID they could work back with DNA tests using the bone marrow against hairbrushes or toothbrushes or other stuff recovered from the home, check medical records for broken bones and other injuries that might show up on the skeleton. It all relied upon knowing who you were looking for, and in finding a name then it was relatively easy to make a positive ID.

  ‘Poor bastard,’ she said. That pretty much summed it up.

  She hung up. She didn’t have space in her head for more corpses. The discovery of the tongue had thrown her. It meant changing how she had been thinking about the politician’s death. The missing priest held the key. Somehow. It didn’t matter that the two men were a thousand miles apart, or that they moved in circles a world apart. There was a link. There had to be.

  But for the time being she was going to have to concentrate on good old-fashioned police work, and that meant returning to the scene of the crime – first physically, then metaphorically. Her morning promised a walk along the riverbanks, familiarizing herself with every inch of the scene without every other agency trying to piss all over the territory like dogs. It promised to be more fun than a fruitless trawl through the CCTV footage. It wasn’t as though the killer would smile up at th
e camera as he dumped Anglemark’s corpse in the water.

  EIGHTEEN

  She showered and dressed and was ready to head out.

  Breakfast consisted of a large latte, to go, and three filter-tipped cigarettes chain-smoked into her lungs for sustenance. It was always the way when she was on a case; a subsistence diet of nicotine and caffeine supplemented by anything she could grab on the run. It wasn’t the usual health-obsessive Scandinavian lifestyle, but then she was hardly the usual blonde-haired blue-eyed Scandinavian. She didn’t even bother lying to herself once a year with any made-up resolution about quitting. She liked smoking. She was a big girl. She got to choose what went into her body. It helped her think. When she dragged deeply on a cigarette that first hit of nicotine fired her synapses in ways that nothing else could.

  She drew in a last lungful of smoke, then flicked the butt sailing away into the waters of Riddarfjärden, the Knight’s Firth. It was a spectacular piece of real estate, but slightly off the beaten track. A few years ago, actually more than a few now, she realized, the city used to host a Water Festival here, with bands from all over the world performing on a stage pretty much exactly where she stood right now. She looked back towards the old church, remembering sitting up in the high banked seats there watching BB King with John Fogerty sat beside her. She couldn’t even remember half of the acts on the bill that day. The Wannadies, Soundtrack of Our Lives, some Britpop band that had vanished without a trace. It was hard to believe it was nearly twenty years ago.

  Most of the time the weird little square here was empty, though there was a small kiosk that opened in the summer to serve coffee. The island afforded a quiet little haven in the heart of the busiest city in Scandinavia. Every summer she took at least one day to come and sit by the water’s edge, dangling her feet in Riddarfjärden and watching the world go by. There was something so peaceful about this spot, with views back onto Södermalm and the distinctive industrial presence of Münchenbryggeriet’s towering chimneys on the distant shore one way, and the golden crowns of the City Hall the other.

  All manner of boats came and went, churning up the surf.

  It wasn’t hard to see where the body had been found. The police tape was in tatters, but several bunches of flowers had been left by the water’s edge. She watched from a distance as a couple of men knelt beside the river, heads bowed, and laid their own wreath with the other offerings. It would be much worse later, when Anglemark’s name was released. Then the public outpouring of grief would be incredible.

  Anglemark was the third major politician to be murdered in thirty years. Swedes had plenty of experience when it came to mourning the men and women who dared to try and change the world.

  The yellow tape fluttered in the breeze where it had been torn away from its anchor points.

  There was no real chance of finding any meaningful evidence here, she knew. And it would only get worse as the mourners made their pilgrimage to see where he had died, which of course wasn’t here. Tidal patterns meant it was far more logical the corpse had been dumped from another one of the islands and this was just where it had washed up.

  Techs back at the lab were already going through the tidal patterns and currents, cross-referencing the charts and recorded movements of the larger boats and ferries. They would come up with a pretty decent estimate as to where the body had been dumped before long, but right now it was still pure guesswork.

  She was dragged from her thoughts by a voice.

  ‘Real tragedy when something like this happens.’

  Frankie turned around to see a middle-aged woman, her business suit finished off with a comfortable pair of trainers. She had a small dog by her side who seemed intent on marking the flowers as his territory.

  ‘It is,’ Frankie said.

  ‘Do you know what happened? I mean beyond a body washing up here?’

  ‘Not really,’ she said, not exactly lying.

  ‘We usually have a few a year. Normally they’re suicides. Poor souls who decide to throw themselves off St Erik’s Bridge. You have to feel for them. Anyone who thinks that is the answer must be in so much pain.’ Frankie nodded. ‘Of course, most of them don’t make it this far along the shoreline. Though, that said, there was one last year, but that one wasn’t a suicide if I recall. Some kid who’d had too much to drink and challenged his friends to a race to the other side. He split his skull open on the concrete footing and was dead before they got to the other side. So, you think this was a suicide?’

  ‘It’s not my place to say,’ Frankie said, again not really lying, but definitely giving the truth a wide berth. ‘Seems a nice place to walk the dog,’ she said, changing the subject.

  ‘He likes it here,’ she said. ‘This square is his little kingdom. He can be a real terror some days if he doesn’t get to walk along the embankment sniffing every little pee-mail left by his friends.’ She smiled at that, like she’d made the best joke. Frankie smiled down at the restless terrier. He seemed intent to sniff every inch of ground, more than once.

  ‘A lot of people walk their dogs around here?’ Frankie had lived in the city for the best part of fifteen years, since she moved down from Sala, a sleepy little village nearly a hundred miles north, but she wasn’t a dog person. She didn’t really pay attention to their walking habits.

  ‘Plenty. As quiet as it is, remember, we’re in the heart of the city. You’re a couple of minutes’ walk from the Old Town. You’re on a direct path over the bridge to Södermalm. This is our favourite place in the whole world, isn’t it, Buster?’ she said to the dog. It looked up at her with big brown eyes, recognizing the sound of its name.

  ‘Even at night?’

  ‘Sure, they need to do their business before they go to sleep, just like us. Winter walks tend to be shorter, but in the summer you can see people strolling along here as late as midnight.’

  The dog gave another tug and the woman ruffled its corn-coloured curls, then said her goodbyes.

  Frankie watched as she was tugged after the terrier, which despite its size was obviously far stronger than it looked. She didn’t know much more than she had when she’d started out, but it had been good to remind herself of the geography of the small square and lock the landscape in her memory again. There was every chance he might have been dumped out the back of the City Hall and left to drift the couple of hundred metres to where she stood. In all probability there were probably a dozen other places the killer might have dumped the body in the water for it to wash up here, and most if not all of them would be isolated.

  The question was, did he know the corpse would wash up at the foot of the old church? Was there a message in it? This was the old monarch’s burial church, home to the Order of the Knights Seraphim. It wasn’t just some old church. It was one of the oldest buildings in the city, and the very first church built on the islands. Was this the killer’s way of signalling a link to the missing bishop?

  NINETEEN

  Tolstoy was scratching at the inside of the heavy old oak door when Father Michael returned.

  He had given Dooley as long as he possibly could, respectful of his wish for solitude, but as ever there were things he needed to do. The parish never slept. He smiled at that, imagining this tiny village being awake at midnight. He checked his watch. Elspeth Moore was no doubt inside already, cleaning the already clean church and arranging fresh flowers.

  He could hear the dog’s discomfort through the timbers.

  Father Michael opened the doors on a frantic bundle of black fur and barking as the dog leapt out, agitated. He tried to calm the animal, but it jumped at him in a constant flurry of motion that belied its age. Tolstoy pressed his paws against his chest and licked at his face, then scuttered back a few steps only to run at him again and repeated that over and over. This wasn’t his usual excitement. Every time he ran away a little further, venturing deeper into the church only to come haring back to the priest.

  ‘What is it, buddy? What do you want to show me?’

&
nbsp; The Labrador didn’t hesitate.

  Tolstoy darted back inside the church, claws skittering on the stone floor as he ran ahead.

  The priest closed the oak doors behind him, noting the amount of damage that the dog had done with his claws.

  The lights were still on inside, which was unlike Dooley.

  ‘Father Dooley?’ he called softly.

  There was no immediate sign of him. Not at the altar or in any of the first rows of the pews, which was where he would usually be found if he was in thought.

  Tolstoy raced backwards and forwards the length of the aisle, then started barking at one of the closed confessional curtains. There was that panic again in the old animal’s bark.

  Father Michael slipped behind the second curtain.

  ‘Father Dooley,’ he said, taking up his usual seat inside the confessional. ‘I hope you haven’t been waiting all this time for me?’ It seemed unlikely, but with the old man anything was possible. ‘Would you like me to hear your confession?’ This last one he asked softly, observing the sanctity of the act and the confessional itself, and when there was no reply he wondered if perhaps the old man had fallen asleep on him, so he repeated it, slightly louder this time. But Dooley falling asleep wouldn’t explain Tolstoy’s strange behaviour. ‘Are you all right in there, Father?’

  Still no answer.

  There was no sign of movement through the screen, but the old man was obviously in there, leaning up against the far wall. Father Michael peered through the screen as he said Dooley’s name again. There was no sign of him stirring.

  As much as he hated having to do it, he had no choice but to break the sacred trust and draw back the curtain to wake him.

  Mumbling a quiet prayer of apology, he pulled back the curtain even as he realized he was standing in something wet. The carpet was sodden beneath his feet.

  It took a moment for his brain to make the connections as the horror of the confessional started to make grotesque sense to his mind. He would never forget what lay behind that curtain for as long as he lived.