Antman (58 page)

'You're wondering where this connects with the need to apprehend him.'

'I am.' Chris sounded tired. She felt wrung out. She didn't believe in God. But she found herself praying out loud, as a last resort, to the only person outside herself she could think of as remotely able to help: 'Please don't let me be wrong.'

'Bear with me a moment. I've been thinking about masks. I think our killer is adept at using them.'

'You don't mean literally?'

'Metaphorically. He's probably good at disguising himself. In a particular personality, he assumes what we would call a disguise. He would regard it at that point as simply himself.'

There was a sound in the background. Sheila was distracted momentarily.

'Just a moment,' she said. 'Someone at the door. I'll send them away.'

She was back in a few moments.

'You've come across the mask of Demetrios?'

'Remind me,' said Chris, who had only a vague memory of this.

'It's the Janus-faced or two-faced mask widely used as a symbol for dramatic performance.'

'I remember, we printed it on the front of the programmes for our school drama productions.'

'It’s very likely widely used by drama groups. We discussed this on the recent away-day. Think of the characters of the play, with our murderer playing many, possibly all of the parts. Inside the mask there may be not two but any number of different characters. I've seen case studies of more than a dozen. The psychiatrist may try to penetrate the fragmented personae presented by a patient suffering from MPD, without encouraging it. The difficulty often reported is that by recognising and engaging with the symptoms, the questioner reinforces the existence of a particular personality, or encourages new ones to form. Imagine trying to hold a conversation with up to a dozen people at once, possibly more.'

'It sounds a nightmare,' Chris reflected. ‘Walters, Thompsen, or someone else. I'm uncertain which of these is or was our man.'

Sheila took a deep breath. 'That's it, that's MPD. You switch from one identity to the next, sometimes so fast you don't just confuse other people but yourself as well. It's complicated. He's putting the record straight, emotionally speaking. Different fragments from his past and present are triggered by, or trigger, different responses. We're dealing with all these personalities in one. Walters is dead. Part of the time – whether he's Thomsen or somebody else – he wants to communicate with us. He may display other personae, of which we know nothing because they don't have that need, that urge. You're wondering where this leaves us.'

'It does seem pretty hopeless.'

‘
We have to assemble all the information we possibly can, cross-referencing the incidents and constructing the fullest life story.'

'You're joking. There isn't time. We must find the latest people he's abducted, before they – before he –' She couldn't say it.

‘
We must have this information, to maximise the chance of predicting where he is.'

Chris took a deep breath. She had to calm down. 'You mean the killings and,' she hesitated, 'the latest abductions of the two children of Professor Fortius.'

'Yes. It's like identifying a spot on a map, using grid references. We must see where the lines cross and whether there are points of convergence. The next stage –'

Chris clenched her fists. ‘We haven't time. There'll be more victims. He's becoming more desperate. He's accelerating. His personality is fragmenting.'

Sheila spoke with greater emphasis.

'It's the only way to find him. The next stage is to cross-check through the people at that point. We have to be particularly careful over identities. Remember, we're looking for somebody playing more than one role. We may find the person is known by different names in different reference groups. Third, if possible we must avoid interacting with him. That might only lead to further fragmentation of his personality.'

Chris's nerves were worn to the wire. There was no alternative. She wasn't sure she understood, but she knew what she had to do. First she rang Tom's number, intending to ask how the letter was signed. There was no reply, so she left a message on his voicemail.

I need some space
, Chris thought. Some time with Regel was overdue. It had saved time to offer to bring him to Hull, but she couldn't keep the situation going much longer, even though she still hadn't a clear idea how he could help, beyond filling in background details. Well aware that this elderly frail man couldn't be left alone in that strange hotel she had sent Morrison to sit with him. Morrison would be able to chat and might even elicit some useful information.

She rang Morrison. Regel was coping, and according to Morrison had been talking, almost to the point of chattiness. It was as though he was fed up with being on his own and welcomed the stimulus of the stay in the hotel and the investigation going on around him. She instructed Morrison to spend time with Regel, take him out if it would help, and build up a picture of his life from the point where he'd first come into contact with Blatt and his sons.

Having settled Mr Regel into his hotel near the railway station, Morrison became aware of how pent up the old man was about his former stay in the resettlement camp at Hessle, and offered to drive him up there immediately.

'It'll only take us an hour or so,' said Morrison. He would make sure he stopped for a cool drink and sandwich.

'Ooh, I don't think I could stand an hour's driving.'

Morrison laughed. 'Five minutes each way, if it's busy. The rest will be you and me nosing around. You can show me your old haunts.'

They made an incongruous pair, Morrison, youthful and upright, Regel frail and stooping, walking with difficulty, stopping every few paces to catch his breath. An onlooker would have surmised they were grandfather and grandson.

In contrast with his appearance, Regel was becoming more animated by the minute. They walked up the track off Heads Lane in the rural district of Hessle, overlooking the town of Hull three or four miles away.

'This was the entrance to the camp,' said Regel. 'These beech and larch trees look as though they've been here forever, but they must have planted them after we left and they demolished the buildings.'

They walked up the lane and Regel dived into the wood, nearly tripping over some brambles. Morrison lurched forward and rescued him. Regel bent and started scratching with his fingers at a patch of bare soil.

'Hang on,' said Morrison, looking around for an implement. A chunk of metal was lying on the verge. He used this to scrape away the surface material. It was surprisingly loose, composed of rubble and a coarse mixture of grit and soil.

Regel was watching as a flat block of concrete came into view.

'This was the cookhouse.' He brushed his sleeve across his eyes. 'There's one of the hearthstones. Over there were the rows of huts where we lived and slept. They took people from here straight to the docks for repatriation. At about the same time, some of us were discharged for other destinations. You needed documentation to support an application to stay. I travelled south. My longstanding friend Marko offered to put me up and organised an interview for a teaching post. I was successful but a dreadful calamity occurred the day after I gained the position. Marko died of a heart attack. I found out he had no relatives and had left the house and all his personal effects to me. It was only after I began to teach at the school that I found out the war had vanquished the Nazis but not prejudice against Poles resembling German Jews.'

Later, Morrison dropped him back at the hotel. Regel was very excited at the prospect of exploring the town and gentrified docks district.

'He's eaten his way through two brunches and I left him planning his evening meal,' said Morrison when he reached Wawne Road Police Station.

There were smiles all round at this. 'He'll be putting on a couple of stone,' said Chris, 'after years of catering for himself.'

Morrison was moving his balance from one leg to the other. 'I've a problem, boss. I need some information, possibly from the town archives in Hull and certainly from the Imperial War Museum. It's very urgent. Some of the information may be accessible from the Internet. Can I see you in your office?'

When Morrison and Chris emerged, Morrison had three officers to help him with the task.

*  *  *

Graver was busy indoors, quite distracted by the number and complexity of tasks facing him. Sweat bubbled from his brow and ran in copious streams down his blubbery flesh. There was much to do before the police inquiries either intensified, or reached him in the routine course of events.

The police had made a half-baked attempt to find him, to intervene. He judged it pathetic, as pathetic as all police are. His mouth opened and conversation flowed between the beings inhabiting the darker regions of his mind. Many of them were shadowy, too vague and horror-filled to contemplate full-on. He was grateful for the chance to retreat from these.

'It isn't surprising.'

‘
Why is that?'

'Didn't you know, they draw their recruits from the same lower social class as that from which criminals spring. If we're crap, they're the same crap.'

Once, recently, the head officer sent a constable to the farm, on the back of a tip-off, or a whim. The result was a complete farce. Graver was able to hide everything before the fellow arrived. He was able to disguise himself and let the officer search to his heart's content.

He spoke with disdain to the blank wall. 'It proves you're right, they're crap.'

And then, in a different voice: 'They'll never find anything, looking that way.'

He put it down as a near miss. Even though the police did not find any tangible evidence in the house linking him to the murders, the circumstantial evidence was strong. They visited the farmhouse three times, taking him in for questioning twice, the second time holding him for several days on suspicion of abducting someone who'd disappeared. This was all as a result of that stupid bitch. He put her number one on his list for fixing at the next stage.

'Are you on a programme?'

'You have to be. It's the scientist in us. Part of our genetic inheritance. How we learn from the larva through the pupa to the hatched stage, is by experimenting through our senses. We receive information through our seven senses: from our eyes, ears, touch, taste, smell, the proprioceptor system which tells us how our parts relate to each other in the nest and our vestibular system which signals which way up we are in its total underground darkness. All these sources of data are processed in the utter darkness of our brains.'

*  *  *

The truth was that a clash had always been inevitable between Chief Superintendent Bradshaw and Chief Inspector Winchester. It was more than a personality clash. Bradshaw was totally at odds with the style of investigation Chris was used to carrying out. She could live with the constant uncertainty of pursuing several parallel lines of inquiry simultaneously. He needed constant reassurance that resources were being managed, time wasn't being wasted. Over and above this, he would cave in now and again under pressure from top management and on occasions could react off the cuff to the usual probing by the media. This was always going to be dangerous.

Bradshaw was going through one of his bad patches. Today he dilly-dallied around in his office, sitting down to open the mail, standing up, putting on his coat to go out, returning to his desk and folding the coat over his chair. He smacked his fist into the palm of his other hand. 'So close,' he said out loud. ‘We're so damn close.' They might just as well have been in Antarctica for all the difference it made. His head would still be on the block if this investigation stayed unresolved much longer. So many deaths and so many unanswered questions. In the end, he decided to go into the office and press the team for an update on the briefing he'd had an hour ago.

*  *  *

The police questioned Laura closely, asking her if she knew Thompsen the technician. She had quite a clear recollection of him from the few times she had seen him in the department, when she used to hang onto the car and pick Tom up late after he'd had a long day in the lab. There was the college staff party and that after-party binge at Hugh Mackintosh's house, at which most of them had let their hair down and finished up quite drunk without worrying about who was there and what the consequences might be. That was before Thompsen's accident. This was and yet wasn't the Thompsen she had known. Without the trigger memory, she'd never have recognised him at all. Of course, Thompsen had been off sick for ages and she hadn't seen him again. He never returned to work, as far as she knew, though she'd never asked Tom and she couldn't be sure. To think she had sort of fancied him, when things had first been bad between her and Tom. She hardly dared to admit this now. The mere thought of him caused her intense revulsion. That this man could at this moment be near her children, let alone touching them in any way, was too awful a possibility to contemplate. A surge of anger welled up from deep inside her. 'I'll kill you if you harm them at all,' she thought, recoiling at the words. She thought she heard someone else saying them and then realised she had spoken out loud.