Mind/Reader Page 19

  ‘Gang rape,’ anticipated Claudine.

  ‘Unquestionably, in my opinion,’ said the pathologist.

  ‘Why remove those parts of the legs showing the bodies had been suspended from meat hooks - a positive, thought-out attempt to defeat an investigation - yet be careless about physical evidence like semen, from which we could get sufficient for an actual conviction?’ asked Poulard. He was stronger-voiced, becoming inured to the horror.

  ‘That’s a good question,’ acknowledged Claudine, not having thought of it herself. She’d allowed herself the cynicism of expecting Poulard to try to embarrass her or Yvette by commenting upon the sexual examinations and was glad he was remaining properly professional.

  Rosetti shrugged. ‘Men rarely use condoms in rape. I’ve never come across victim testimony where they’ve been used at all in a mass assault of the sort I think occurred here. Maybe they didn’t think there’d be any evidence left, after the mutilation. Or, again, that with so many attackers it wouldn’t be possible to isolate an individual string …’ The man paused. ‘Which still might not be possible.’

  Going back to the laboratory report, Rosetti said the boy’s stomach contained the undigested remains of rice and durum wheat, and meat traces from three of the girls’ digestive tracts had been identified as lamb. There was also lentil.

  Continuing to read out the analyses, Rosetti said tests on gum tissue from the mouths of the second French victim and the girls in London and Vienna gave areca catechu extract as the cause of the heightened mouth redness he’d found in each. None of the five had any dental work or unusual mouth or dental formation to justify a dental or orthodontic survey, particularly in view of the noticeable deposits of calculus he’d found in all five, indicating a lack of dental care. Embedded in the gum between the left canine and seventh premolar of the London girl he’d found a minute piece of gold, which he’d extracted for analysis. Frowning as he came to the last forensic conclusion, he said the gold segment was Asian in origin, possibly Indian, and too soft to be used in the West for crowns or bridgework. Rosetti smiled up, briefly. He’d positively confirmed from the lacerations inside the mouths that attempts had been made in each of the five cases to fix the death grimaces into grotesque smiles: from the positioning of the cuts he guessed the gags had been rectangular pieces of wood. He’d failed to find any wood splinters in any of the wounds.

  The bridgework creating a false second left molar between the third and seventh in the mouth of the Turkish girl in Cologne contained non-Asian gold and in the opinion of the German orthodontist he’d asked to examine it the work was recent, within the preceding nine months, and implanted in Germany.

  ‘What about fillings?’ Claudine broke in.

  ‘Two, to the right canine and second premolar.’

  ‘Amalgam or composite?’

  ‘Amalgam,’ confirmed Rosetti. ‘And incidently, it was the second time the police orthodontist had been called in. He’d already carried out an examination for the Cologne force.’

  Claudine didn’t answer Volker’s look. She said: ‘I know.’

  Rosetti waited but when she didn’t say more continued that the Turkish girl, like all the rest, had been well nourished, with no sign of any organic disease. Because a hand-operated, wide-toothed saw had been the only dismembering instrument the external damage was the most extensive of any of the murders they were investigating. It had not, however, destroyed the evidence of her having been strangled: there was certainly no additional bone damage that might have occurred by her throwing herself against her bindings, which were again different from any of the others, narrower in width and breaking the skin on both ankles. From the thin uniformity of the bruising and the skin laceration he thought the girl had been secured by wire. The strangulation, which had crushed the larynx, had also left a regular unbroken mark around the neck, although wider than the wrist or ankle bruising. He guessed the ligature had been a cord and from the uniformity thought it had probably been fashioned into a garrotte. He’d found no evidence of rape and the vaginal mutilation made it impossible for him to say whether or not she had been a virgin. That mutilation had interfered with the effort to carve the swastika on her stomach, making it the last injury inflicted, possibly as an afterthought. The ears were pierced and there were indentations in the lobes showing permanent studs. None had been in her ears. There was also skin discoloration on two fingers of the left hand indicating the regular wearing of rings, one with a cross-piece that had left a discernible mark. They, too, had been missing. The hands were well kept and manicured, unmarked by any sign of manual employment. In the undigested lamb, rice, lentils and yellow peppers recovered from the girl’s stomach there were traceable amounts of cinnamon, cayenne and chilli.

  Rosetti stopped talking, betraying the first signs of tiredness by the way he momentarily rested forward with his hands outstretched against the conference table. He quickly shook his head against Claudine’s suggestion that they take a break but smiled gratefully to Yvette when she produced Perrier, unasked. Glass in hand, Rosetti said he’d been right - fortunately for them - about the Brussels and Amsterdam murders. Both girls, each at least five years older than all the other victims, had been stabbed - in both cases in the heart - before being dismembered and having their breasts removed. The murder weapon had in both cases been a long-shanked knife, one blade 2.3cm wide, the other thicker and 3.1cm wide. The Brussels victim had an unprofessionally imprinted blue-monochrome tattoo to the left of her pubis so nearly destroyed by the genital cutting that it was impossible to decipher the intended depiction. The Amsterdam girl had undergone an abortion. There were also sufficient puncture marks in her left arm and both ankles to indicate she had been an intravenous drug user, although no narcotic had registered in any blood test. There was, however, damage to the septum of the nose consistent with cocaine use. Both showed evidence of torture other than the amputations, which they knew to have occurred after death. There was pre-death lividity to both their faces and to their backs, in addition to after-death puddling to their backs and buttocks.

  Their hands showed no evidence of manual labour but were badly kept and unmanicured. Both were nicotine-stained from extensive cigarette use, the left hand of the girl in Brussels, the right of the other in Amsterdam. The natural hair colouring of both had been auburn but was inexpertly dyed blond, the clearly visible root growth uneven from improper application.

  Although there was no outward indication, neither was well nourished. There was neglected tooth decay of the sort associated with improper diet and unreplaced teeth: the Amsterdam victim was missing the upper right lateral, which would have been obvious whenever she opened her mouth, and the girl in Brussels lacked her entire left range at the rear of her mouth; from the seventh to the third molar. The dietary deficiency was also evident in the stomachs, in neither of which was the residue sufficient to provide a definitive analysis apart from a general finding of unidentifiable meat and corn fibre. The intestine of the Amsterdam girl indicated diverticulitis, despite her young age. The duodenum of the Brussels corpse was already ulcerated.

  Rosetti took a final gulp of water, looking around the table before sitting down. As he did so he said: ‘That’s as much as I could find, although I want to go through my notes again.’ Concentrating upon Claudine, he added: ‘How much further does that take us?’

  ‘A quantum leap,’ she said.

  Claudine had jotted her impressions during Rosetti’s presentation and decided to elaborate her profile on the spot, with everyone still around the table, for it to be a genuinely agreed combined assessment. To reinforce that intention - and avoid the two detectives imagining a staged performance - she invited immediate disagreement and discussion about any opinion she expressed before beginning the dictation to Yvette.

  Nothing, insisted Claudine, substantially altered the points she had stressed in her initial profile. To her conviction that the Celeste five were illegal immigrants of whom an example was being made to conve
y a message, she added that extortion was a factor, although she wasn’t suggesting anything as simple as kidnap in exchange for a ransom. Although there had already been a discussion among them Claudine carefully set out her belief that the five bodies had been kept and then distributed in refrigerated conditions, actually breaking off to establish from Rosetti that she hadn’t omitted anything from what he’d discovered or that they’d discussed earlier to support that theory. He assured her she hadn’t.

  ‘So the killers of our five have access to one or several food packaging centres with cold storage facilities, and access to a fleet of refrigerated delivery lorries,’ declared Claudine. ‘I think the expertise in the dismembering is butchery skill, used in preparation and packing. It means there are a lot of people involved but that the killers are sure they’re not going to be betrayed …’

  She gestured for Yvette to stop taking notes. ‘There was far too much detail included in the first press release. I think there should be a specific warning against disclosure of so much of our thinking in anything further that’s released.’

  ‘I don’t think we need to worry about that, do we?’ said Poulard, showing no signs now of the distress at Rosetti’s presentation.

  ‘I didn’t imagine we’d have to worry about it the first time but we did,’ Claudine said sharply. She waited for the Frenchman to continue the argument but he said nothing further.

  Gesturing for Yvette to resume the note-taking, Claudine said that from Rosetti’s examination of the bodies she thought the five had been members of close-knit, caring Asian families newly arrived in the West and still living in ghetto-type communities maintaining the culture and the habits of the countries from which they’d emigrated. Although it was predominantly a Malay practice the habit of chewing betel nuts, which released the reddening areca catechu stain, was widespread throughout the East. So was retaining calculus or tartar on the teeth, in the belief it prevented decay. The gold fragment too soft to form part of any remedial dental work had probably chipped from the detachable decorative gold coverings with which a lot of Asian girls adorned their teeth: it would not have been lifted from the gum by Western-style brushing because in the East that was not the way teeth were cleaned.

  The stomach contents also indicated each victim’s being part of a traditional family. The boy, and one of the girls, in whom no meat had been found, were conceivably vegetarian Hindus: the other girls probably Muslim. The callouses on the girls’ hands - and upon the boy’s feet - and the fibre particles in the trachea, and lungs could be the result of their working in ethnically closed-off clothing or carpet factories, using hand warp or foot pedal operated looms or sewing machines.

  While the first group of killings were evidently well planned, that in Cologne showed all the signs of being a hurried, snatched-off-the-street affair. Claudine remained convinced it was a racially orientated, nationalistic attack, even to the aping of the Nazi-favoured garrotte method of strangulation. The stomach contents again indicated the girl was part of a family following cultural tradition and supported the initial assumption by the German police that she was Turkish. If she was an immigrant, then her family was wealthy. The bridgework that had been described was expensive. So were white amalgam fillings which matched the natural whiteness of teeth better than the grey composite repair.

  Everything she’d heard from Rosetti endorsed the initial assumption from the removal of the fingertips that the white victims had criminal and even prison records: the sort of monochrome tattoo the examination had discovered was typical of the pin-and-ink designs common in jails. From their physical description and general neglect she thought they had been professional although low-class prostitutes: not trusting that either Poulard or Siemen would accept Volker’s hacking as readily as she had, Claudine avoiding looking at the computer wizard when she said some inquiries already made on that assumption hadn’t produced any identification. She still could not suggest a reason for these two killings, nor why it had been so important for the killers to conceal the victims’ identities.

  She did acknowledge the German computer expert when she suggested a media appeal throughout the six countries in which the bodies had been found, after the death-mask pictures Rosetti had obtained were compared with Volker’s digitalized images to eradicate any visual inconsistencies. She also recommended that photographic checks against criminal record pictures be extended throughout Holland and Belgium and not confined to the national police archives of Amsterdam and Brussels.

  ‘Anything I’ve missed or points to make?’ Claudine invited at the end.

  ‘Of course there’s got to be a comparison but as far as I can see the digitalized pictures don’t need any adjustment or improvement from those I brought back,’ said Rosetti, without any rancour at the duplication. ‘So an appeal makes every sense.’

  ‘It’s worth remembering that some EU countries - Britain certainly - have established a DNA databank,’ offered Volker. ‘It’s extended beyond paedophiles to all sex offenders. So if we get anything from the semen tests it’s a necessary check to run.’

  ‘It’s certainly worth remembering,’ agreed Claudine, conscious of the frown Poulard directed towards the German at what he clearly regarded as an intrusion.

  The Frenchman said: ‘How do you explain the wire binding of the five being made here in Holland, where none of them have been dumped?’

  ‘I can’t,’ admitted Claudine.

  ‘France is where the delivery route pattern is most clearly defined. That’s where our breakthrough is going to come from: where we should concentrate. As I’ve said from the beginning.’

  Why did she always have to appear to be confronting the man? Claudine said: ‘Politics isn’t our primary consideration but we’ve got to keep jurisdiction in mind.’ The differences between investigatory processes of the fifteen countries of the European Union - particularly the common law system of the United Kingdom against the Napoleonic law-based concepts varying throughout the rest - still operationally remained an unresolved difficulty for Europol. The begrudgingly adopted British-insisted compromise had been copied from the original English division between MI5, its internal security service, and the police. Europol had the cross-border power to investigate but at the point of arrest and prosecution that investigation had to be handed over to the police or to investigating magistrates of the country involved.

  The intervention from Bruno Siemen was abrupt. ‘There isn’t a breakthrough yet: there isn’t any factual evidence to suggest there could be, just an intelligent assessment … ’ The German ran out of impetus, giving him the break to take any offence towards Claudine out of his pragmatism. ‘ … more than an intelligent, a brilliant assessment. But let’s take it further, into on-the-ground practicality. How the hell can the police forces of the countries involved possibly bottleneck their major food delivery routes with spot checks on every refrigerated truck - which to be effective they’d have to do, in a lot of cases spoiling the contents as they did so - without it becoming known virtually before it begins?’

  Claudine had been waiting for the objection and wished she had an answer to it. What she hadn’t anticipated was Bruno Siemen’s open praise. ‘I agree it’ll become public knowledge far too soon. But it’s obviously got to be done.’

  ‘It shouldn’t hold up our presentation of the profile to the commissioners,’ argued Rosetti.

  ‘It won’t,’ assured Claudine, surprised at the remark. ‘There’s sufficient at last to mobilize a lot of police forces.’

  ‘Should the wording of our warning against media release details be as strong as suggested?’ queried Poulard.

  It was Siemen, frowning sideways, who answered. ‘Isn’t the danger of premature public awareness exactly what we’re talking about?’

  Poulard flushed. ‘No fresh atrocity came from the first release.’

  ‘There isn’t a time limit,’ reminded Claudine.

  Poulard engrossed himself in Volker’s dossiers and after that the revi
sed profile in order to remain in the incident room long after everyone else had left, so he could respond at once to Sanglier’s anticipated approach. There was no brandy or comfortable sofa this time.

  ‘You understood what I said on the telephone about stupid feuds?’ demanded Sanglier, still anxious to do all he could to promote one. The tape was disconnected, although he remained unsure whether he shouldn’t have run it for this interview.

  ‘It didn’t arise intentionally.’

  ‘If I hadn’t protected you - and Siemen - you’d have ended up looking idiotic by not contacting her. It could have been construed as endangering the whole organization.’

  ‘It was a misunderstanding,’ persisted Poulard.

  ‘Does she accept that?’

  ‘There hasn’t been an opportunity to discuss it since I got back.’ He gestured to the second profile obvious on the desk between them. ‘We worked all day on that.’

  ‘It’s impressive.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Poulard reluctantly.

  ‘Again the work of Dr Carter.’

  ‘It’s a combined assessment: the police organizational suggestions are ours,’ lied the detective.

  ‘Does that include the warnings about what should and should not be included in media releases?’

  Poulard swallowed. ‘I argued against it being worded that way.’

  ‘Dr Carter appears to have gained considerable confidence since her commendation.’

  ‘Everyone was very impressed by her analysis today.’

  ‘She was right, wasn’t she, about the pointlessness of your going to France?’

  ‘It became useful, travelling with Dr Rosetti.’

  ‘Whose appointment was also her idea. Like everything else in this investigation so far.’

  ‘We can begin a positive investigation now.’

  He could disguise the important question, Sanglier decided. ‘How did you get on with Rosetti?’