Mind/Reader Page 23

  Rosetti joined them while Claudine was checking and took the newspapers from her, one by one, briefly reading the sensational coverage. He quickly stopped, smiling wryly at Claudine. ‘No woman is safe alone on the streets of Rome,’ he summarized.

  She looked at him seriously. ‘The irony is that it’s absolutely true.’

  They were on their way in Ponzio’s official car to breakfast at the Excelsior when the radio message crackled into the vehicle. At once, at Ponzio’s shout, the driver triggered the siren and the lights and swung around in a violent U-turn to the horn-blasting outrage of other drivers in either direction.

  ‘The hands have been found in St Peter’s Basilica,’ said Rosetti.

  Ponzio twisted from the front passenger seat. ‘I applied to the Vatican to post guards: they hadn’t replied. Now it’s a desecration!’

  By the time they reached the Corse Vittorio Emmanuelle they had been joined by two other klaxon-blaring police cars so they arrived at the Piazza Pio XII in cavalcade. Early morning worshippers and tourists were being shepherded out into the huge, saint-statued circular piazza beyond as Ponzio officiously led the way into the basilica.

  The hands were in the Crucifix Chapel, which Claudine thought was probably appropriate but didn’t say so, on a chair next to the wall and quite close to the Cavallini carving. The same forensic officer as earlier that morning was kneeling before the chair upon which the hands had been placed. Claudine saw, impressed, that he was dusting that chair and several around it on the top and the back, the likeliest places to have been touched by someone moving along the line, although there were no visible smudges. He’d finished taking photographs and was delicately extracting something from between the wire-clenched hands as they approached. It was paper. They watched as he gently spread it out with tweezers on a neighbouring chair and tested it for fingerprints, seeing the disappointed shake of his head. The man glanced up and nodded familiarly when he became aware of their presence.

  ‘There’s something written on it,’ said Claudine. ‘What does it say?’

  ‘It’s badly constructed. Badly written, too.’

  ‘Literally,’ insisted Claudine. ‘Every word as written.’

  ‘I are best than all others,’ translated Rosetti.

  ‘What do you mean by badly written?’ asked Claudine, imagining she could see for herself but wanting the man’s confirmation.

  ‘The individual letters are awkwardly formed, not properly joined in a lot of places.’

  ‘Like a child? Or someone unfamiliar with the language?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The technician backed out through an adjoining row for them to get to the hands. The wire that strapped them tightly together was covered with a green plastic and bound in six strands around the wrists, which again were badly hacked. The little finger of each had been removed, leaving bloody stumps. The nails of the remaining fingers were perfectly manicured, painted a deep red which would have matched the previous day’s smeared lipstick, and unbroken. Nothing was trapped beneath them.

  ‘A very different pattern,’ mused Rosetti.

  ‘One all of its own,’ agreed Claudine. ‘But easy enough to read.’

  Rosetti looked at her sharply. ‘You think so?’

  ‘I wish it weren’t.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’

  ‘That the headlines fit,’ said Claudine. ‘He’s a monster and he needs to be stopped before he kills again. Which he will, very soon.’

  They turned, at noise from the chapel entrance, as the Rome pathologist entered, speaking to Ponzio and Rosetti at the same time.

  Rosetti said: ‘He was on his way here but diverted to the Pantheon when the other call came in.’

  ‘The missing arm?’ anticipated Claudine.

  ‘And the leg,’ said Rosetti. ‘He’s left everything for me to examine. Do you want to come?’

  She should, Claudine supposed. But she didn’t need anything more for her profile. She was tired and the cramps were nagging and she wanted a relaxing, easing bath.

  ‘I’ve got enough, although I’d obviously like to know anything that comes from your mortuary examination …’ To Ponzio she said: ‘I’ll need until this afternoon to get everything together: hopefully to hear the result of your tests. Then I’ll tell you who you’re looking for and how to find him.’

  The bath had helped and she’d dozed in it and afterwards slept properly for two hours on her bed. She’d closely studied the photographic selection from a fresh batch of newspapers, finding what she’d wanted, and by the time she returned to the police headquarters the fingerprint tests had been completed and an excited Giovanni Ponzio was able to announce the photo-analysts believed the shadow was of a man: they’d be positive in another twenty-four hours. Twenty people had responded to the witness appeal and two thought they had seen a man by the wall, in the same place as the shadow picked up on Morton Stills’ film. Marks on the outside of the sacking in which the girl had been carried into the Coliseum had been identified as engine oil and brake fluid and the small particles picked out by Rosetti’s Luma-Lite had mostly been badly dyed cloth fibres. There was a partial fingerprint on the earring in the torn lobe.

  Rosetti had found a single, after-death stab wound to each palm, like a crucifixion mark, when the hands had been parted. There were no binding marks on either the wrists or the ankles. The knife that had killed her, with a single thrust to the heart so forceful it had emerged beneath her left shoulder blade, had a curved, double-edged blade that had to be almost sixty centimetres long, virtually a small sword. The preliminary dental cast showed pronounced protrusion of both left and right central and lateral teeth.

  Claudine had only prepared notes, waiting for all the additional information, and Ponzio summoned a secretary to take an official record. In addition to Rosetti, the Rome pathologist and the forensic experts whom she recognized, there were six men and two women to whom she was not introduced. They assembled in a conference room adjoining Ponzio’s office.

  ‘You’re hunting a man totally out of control, someone conforming in every detail to the classical profile of a serial killer,’ Claudine announced, concentrating everyone’s attention upon her. ‘He isn’t one, yet. But he’ll become one, very soon: a mutilating serial killer whose atrocities are going to get worse every time he kills. There’s enough to catch him …’ she looked directly at Ponzio ‘ … but you’ve got to be very quick.’

  The silence in the room was so total it was possible to hear the scratch of the note-taker’s pen.

  The killer would have a criminal record, Claudine insisted. It would include burglary, possibly escalating to the rape of women he’d found alone in the houses or apartments he’d entered. He would have threatened his victims - controlled them - with a curved, sword-like weapon. He would be foreign, with a limited knowledge of Italian and how to write it. When he was arrested, they’d find souvenirs of every robbery - certainly every rape - he’d committed. That’s what the fingerprinted earring had been intended to be, a souvenir he’d tried to tear off. And the missing little finger from each hand: she suggested they corroborate it with Elia Duphade’s agent or customary photographer but in several newspaper photographs she’d studied the girl had appeared to wear heavily ornamented, perhaps ethnic, rings on each of her smallest fingers. Claudine expected the killer to keep the fingers as well as the rings: possibly the clothes he’d stripped from her, too. They would be his trophies, just as having absolute power over Elia Duphade’s dead body had granted him the trophy bites to her breasts and buttocks. Claudine picked up the forensic orthodontist’s cast of the protruding teeth, turning again to Ponzio.

  ‘Those teeth will be obvious in any photograph in your criminal archive. Concentrate upon men arrested for burglary, robbery and sexual assault, committed separately or together. Run an unconnected fingerprint check, if that partial print lifted from the earring is sufficient …’ She stopped at a sudden snatch of discomfort, wishing she could sit down. Sta
ging another dramatic announcement, she said: ‘But there might be a quicker way of finding him.’

  She thought Elia Duphade might have known her killer. Or trusted him, not from knowing him but because of the job he did. Her perfectly kept nails had been unbroken, with no skin or debris beneath them to indicate she’d tried to fight her killer off. So she hadn’t felt endangered in his presence. Rosetti’s estimate of the girl’s having been dead for thirty-six hours before her torso was found timed her killing during the evening, which fitted the almost complete emptiness of her stomach. Models ate sparingly, rarely more than one meal a day. Claudine thought Elia Duphade had been on her way to dinner, either in a casually hailed taxi or being driven by someone she recognized from a regular hire company she frequently used. Claudine inclined towards a hire company driver using his own vehicle who did his own servicing. He would be a single man with access to a garage or workshop, where he dismembered the girl after killing her with the single thrust to the heart, and the already available cement sack had been stained with engine oil and brake fluid.

  The cement sack was important for several reasons. Claudine suggested questioning every building worker employed on the restoration of the Coliseum’s Arch of Gallienus, particularly any who admitted to a friendship or acquaintanceship with a buck-toothed driver familiar with the opening hours of Rome’s major tourist sites.

  ‘All of which should remain under surveillance,’ Claudine finished.

  ‘Are you telling us he’ll not only strike again but again dump his victims at tourist sites?’ demanded one of the unidentified men in the conference room.

  ‘I’ve no doubt whatsoever he’ll strike again,’ said Claudine. ‘And when he does the mutilation will be terrible. He’ll choose a beautiful girl and literally deface her as much as possible: he chose Elia Duphade because she represented success and beauty and wealth, none of which he knows. A classic characteristic of serial killers is that they stay within their own culture and colour. The man who killed Elia is probably black. But that isn’t my main reason for saying a watch should be kept on the best-known tourist sites, particularly those he’s used already. As a car hire driver his job is to ferry tourists to places like that. He knows them all, intimately. Feels comfortable with them. And that isn’t the only reason. I told you his profile was classic. It’s classic for serial killers to return to the scene, to gloat at police efforts to find them. Power is important to them, in all things. It’s something they don’t have, in their ordinary lives. Certainly this killer hasn’t. So at the places he’s already used you should specifically watch for a loitering, frequent visitor whose teeth stick out like this cast.’

  ‘I’ve studied cases of serial killing,’ said one of the unidentified women. ‘There is the escalation you’re warning about but in everything I’ve read the escalation has been from the first murder. It hasn’t begun with mutilation as horrific as this.’

  ‘No,’ agreed Claudine. ‘I’ve never encountered it either. That’s why I think this man is so dangerous.’

  ‘What made him erupt immediately into this level of violence?’ persisted the woman.

  Claudine hesitated, knowing only Henri Sanglier and the other commissioners he might have told of her protests would understand the significance of her reply. ‘He was able to read and hear on television and radio the details of all the other dismemberment murders we’re investigating. His mind’s twisted it into a personal challenge, the one chance in his ignored, menial life to achieve more than anyone else has achieved: to become famous. That’s the meaning of the message found in the hands today, in the basilica. He’s set out to be the best - or worst - serial killer there’s ever been.’

  Sanglier appeared surprised to hear Claudine intended returning to The Hague. He needed to be persuaded the Rome atrocity, although a pitiful copy, should not become part of the other investigations and that there was nothing more she could contribute towards the Italian investigation. She didn’t argue against Poulard and Siemen’s flying down from Cologne after that day’s press conference to disclose the neo-Nazis’ confession of their copycat murder, which was to be coupled with the final identification of their victim. Her name had emerged to be Sulva Atilla. She was the illegal immigrant daughter of a Turkish Gastarbeiter whom Cologne police suspected of trafficking heroin from Istanbul. He’d disappeared from Cologne the day after the discovery of his daughter’s body and Germany was officially demanding his extradition if he had fled back to Turkey.

  In her hotel room Claudine leapfrogged the television channels to pick up the Cologne press conference. Poulard and Siemen were at the further end of a line of self-satisfied German police officials: the German commentary and question-and-answer exchanges were blurred behind the Italian voice-overs and Claudine had to strain to hear the original. She didn’t detect any reference to Europol and in the edited clip neither man spoke.

  They didn’t, either, on the transmission she watched on English language CNN. She was still watching CNN when Rosetti called to say he had family commitments preventing his eating with her that night. Claudine, relieved, said after the interruptions of the previous night she intended eating in her room and going to bed early.

  ‘Poulard and Siemen are arriving tomorrow but I’m going back to Holland after I’ve seen them. There’s nothing to keep me here,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll stay on for a couple of days, in case he kills again,’ said Rosetti.

  Claudine didn’t see the point but said nothing. She’d have enjoyed travelling back with the Italian, just as she would have enjoyed the restaurant promise for which there hadn’t been time.

  Sanglier didn’t try to suppress the fury. ‘Someone named Ginette called.’

  ‘Wonderful!’ said Françoise. ‘Did she leave a number?’

  ‘She said you had it.’

  ‘I told you about her,’ reminded the woman, putting down her packages. ‘She’s gorgeous.’

  ‘It means she knows this number,’ said Sanglier, as evenly as he could.

  She frowned at him, from the drinks tray. ‘I would have thought that was fairly obvious, if she called it.’

  ‘So she knows me!’

  ‘No she doesn’t,’ said his wife, exasperated. ‘All she has is the number.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She’s special. I wanted her to keep in touch.’

  ‘How will you explain who I am?’

  Françoise walked across the room to sit opposite, grinning broadly. ‘Who would you like to be? My guardian? My gruff-voiced lover? The man who came to fix the drains?’

  ‘I don’t want to be anything. Certainly not your husband.’

  ‘Now don’t be tiresome, Henri. We’ve talked all about that. There’s nothing more to say. Now I’ve got to ring Ginette.’

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  It hadn’t gone - wasn’t going - as Henri Sanglier intended. Unwittingly — which made it even worse - Claudine Carter was eclipsing him.

  Virtually everything Europol appeared to have so far achieved in its first and supremely important operational involvement in European crime had come from her professional expertise. At that day’s meeting Franz Sobell had only just stopped short of proposing another commendation for her profile in the Rome investigation, and David Winslow had made a point of stating for the record how accurate her assessment had been in every respect on the Cologne killing. And all he had been able to do was sit and listen and agree, powerless to steer the conversation to her condemnation of their first press release because he would have appeared to be criticizing one of his own task force personnel. And when he’d recounted how he’d personally briefed the French authorities on the delivery route interceptions - as well as pressing each of the five countries still involved to publish the death mask photographs in a national identification appeal — he’d appeared to be following rather than leading the investigation. Which, he conceded, he was. The most unwelcomed admission of all was that at the moment - and for God knows how much longer - he n
eeded Claudine Carter.

  He had to regain the initiative, Sanglier decided: any initiative. Which meant making an objective, dispassionate re-examination of everything, not just about the woman and what danger she might represent to him but going back to the very beginning, to assess what he knew and didn’t know - but suspected - about his father. And then, if possible, separating one from the other for a total re-evaluation.

  His father first then. And all the publicly accepted parts of the legend that had been glorified in the two films and more soberly established in the books and the rolls of honour and in that most honourable chronicle of all, the French national archives in Paris.

  His father, born Marcel Temoine in Grenoble, the only son of a Customs officer and his waitress wife, had been the deputy director of Interpol’s secretariat in June 1940 when the Nazis overran France and transferred the entire international police liaison organization and its archival treasure trove from the Paris suburb of St Cloud to Berlin. And transported Sanglier’s father with it, forcing the man to maintain Interpol’s Nazi-plundered records while he - just two years old - and his mother remained hostage with relatives in Grenoble. It had been almost three years before they’d even known he was alive and had not died in a labour camp.

  And it was not until his return to France that they - or anyone else - discovered just how much he’d known about labour camps and extermination centres.

  The code-name Sanglier - French for boar - emerged first in captured Gestapo files. They recorded in minute detail the two-year cat-and-mouse SS hunt for the spy whose death warrant was personally approved by Hitler after ‘Sanglier’ was identified as the man isolating the targets for Allied bombing raids in the Ruhr. Everyone else in the Ruhr cell was uncovered, captured and executed. Sanglier never was. The hunt continued after the war, taken up by historians and film-makers unaware of the extent of the story they were pursuing.