The Handshaker (9 page)

The UNWE was one of the newest universities in the country, established only 10 years previously to meet industry’s rising demand for better-educated employees. To Croft, whose own memories of university were comparatively fresh in his mind, it was a waste of taxpayers’ money even if it did keep him in a well-paid job. Industry, he had long ago advised the CEO of a Scandinavian oil conglomerate, did not need graduate canteen employees, or degree level drill operatives. It needed hard working, well-paid, highly skilled staff who knew how to do the job they were paid to do.

The kettle automatically snapping off as it came to the boil brought him back to his room with its atmospheric throwbacks to earlier generations. He poured water into two mugs, retrieved a carton of milk from the fridge, stirred some into each cup, and put it back before turning to his guest.

Passing a beaker to Millie, he waved her into one of the armchairs and, tossing his equipment from the other onto the floor, took the seat for himself. Sipping at his tea, Croft luxuriated a moment in the taste and stretched out a foot to switch on the electric fire. The bars glowed a dull red, throwing out minimal heat.

He turned his attention on Millie. “So, Millie, where to begin. Suppose you throw a few questions at me and we’ll take it from there?”

Millie, too, sipped at her tea and approved. She reached forward and put the cup on the occasional table. “You told us this morning that this note hinted at what you called The Heidelberg Case. I followed it up and I couldn’t find any reference to it on the Internet, other than yours, and there are no records of it in Interpol’s files.”

Croft cradled his beaker between his hands and stared up at the polystyrene ceiling tiles, a frown etched into his clear brow. An idle thought intruded. Those ceiling tiles were totally at odds with the rest of his possessions. He would see the bursar about having a plasterer come in and ‘age’ the room.

He forced his agile mind back to the proposition at hand. “I did tell you that the case is comparatively unknown.” Putting his beaker down, he moved behind the desk and switched the computer on. “I have a précis of it stored on the hard drive. It’ll take a minute or two to boot up, and then I’ll print a copy for you.” He returned to his armchair and picked up his beaker. “According to contemporary accounts, Ludwig Meyer’s case notes ran to something like a thousand pages, but they’re lost. The only English translation that I know of is Dr Hammerschlag’s and that’s only twenty pages or so in a much longer work.” He injected a little more gravity into his words. “The case demonstrated that abuse under hypnosis, which all the experts say can’t be done, is not only possible but extremely dangerous.”

“You also said there was a paranormal angle to it. I’m a copper and I don’t believe in telepathy, ghost, goblins and mind control.”

Croft noticed that her features had taken on an almost impish look, as if she were teasing him. He was perfectly used to it. Most people believed his work was no more than an esoteric hobby, a distraction for a rich man with too much time on his hands. He knew different. He knew he was deadly serious about it.

This, however, was not the time to get into discussions on parapsychology.

“Most accounts of the case come from works on the paranormal,” he said, “and most of them are written by non-professional people; people like me. When you look into it, however, there is nothing supernatural about it. Basically, Franz Walter first met Mrs E on a train on the way to Heidelberg. When it stopped to take on water, he invited her to join him for a cup of coffee. As the waiter served the coffee, Walter took her hand and stared into her eyes. He never said a word, but from that moment on, Mrs E was hypnotised and under his complete control.”

Millie stared, wide eyed. “He just took her hand and that was it?”

Croft nodded. “Almost like shaking hands. Just like The Handshaker.”

10

Croft returned to the computer and opened the
My Documents
folder. A list of several hundred files appeared and he made a mental note to create new folders to categorise them properly … one of these days … when he could find time.

He found the file, named simply
Heidelberg
, right clicked it, and sent an instruction to print it out. Moments later, three sheets of A4 reeled from a laser printer on the desk corner. He collected them, fastened them together with a paperclip, and rejoined Matthews by the fire, handing the sheets over.

“That’s an overview of the case,” he said, “and what Walter did with her after their initial meeting. It puts a little meat on the bare bones.”

She gave them a glance, folded them in half and half again, and tucked them into her bag. “Hypnosis,” she said, bringing her own agenda to the fore. “If it’s so easy to overpower a person with it, how come more rapists, sex offenders, and killers don’t use it?”

“Because it’s not easy.”

“You said it was,” she argued. “When you were talking about your volunteer in the lecture room.”

“Only because I’ve done it so many times before with him,” Croft reminded her. “In fact, it’s incredibly difficult and notoriously unreliable.”

“This Walter guy did it,” Millie pointed out, and Croft noticed that she pronounced the word as if it were English, not German.

“It’s
Valter
with a ‘V’, not a ‘W’,” he corrected her with a smile. He sipped more tea. “This induction business, grabbing her hand and saying nothing, is the piece of The Heidelberg Case the paranormal groupies latch onto. They see it as mind control. Zepelli, one of the true masters of hypnotism, called it The Deep Secret. The ability to hypnotise a subject instantly, without words, simply by touching them.”

“Zepelli?” Millie asked.

“The Great Zepelli,” Croft replied. “A stage hypnotist of the fifties and sixties. A master hypnotist, by all accounts. I first came across The Heidelberg Case in his autobiography. He’d made an extensive study of it, and claimed to have met Walter’s acolyte, Julius Reiniger.”

Millie took a mouthful of tea, and Croft recognised it as a physical semicolon; a deliberate pause to ensure he understood the implications of what she was about stress. “Mind control. You research the paranormal. Do you believe it?”

With an amused twitch of his lips, he shook his head. “No, I don’t. Just because I look into those areas conventional science cannot explain, doesn’t mean I’m gullible. In fact, when you think about it, Mrs E’s missing induction is not difficult to explain. Hammerschlag tells us the train stopped for coffee. Mrs E reported that Walter took her hand and that was all. I believe Walter slipped a palliative drug, or possibly a hallucinogenic into her coffee. Nowadays we read a lot about the spiking of women’s drinks with Flunitrazepam, the technical name for the date rape drug Rohypnol, but similar substances have been in use for centuries. I believe that Walter dropped something like that in the coffee, she drank, he gave it a few minutes for the drug to take effect, and then took her hand, and I also believe he said something. I don’t know what, but he will have used to strong, command tone of the stage hypnotist. And once he had Mrs E under his control, he used standard hypnotic techniques to deepen her state and give him the control he needed to carry out his abuse.”

As he continued to speak, Croft became more and more enthusiastic, thoroughly embroiled in his subject matter.

“You see, Millie, hypnosis is a strange phenomenon. Deep hypnosis often produces spontaneous amnesia. The conscious mind and short-term memory, which we work with all the time, are by-passed and everything goes straight to long-term memory, which is the domain of the subconscious. I believe that Walter drugged the coffee and that despite all of Ludwig Meyer’s work, Mrs E never recalled anything beyond the waiter serving them and Walter grabbing her hand.” He frowned. “Having said all that, if you’ve never found traces of drugs in any of The Handshaker’s victims, it means he’s been working with them for a long time because it takes a long time to get someone into such a deep state that they completely forget it ever happened.”

Millie remained silent for a moment and Croft guessed that she was mulling over the information. “So someone like Ernie Shannon, a control freak, would be incredibly difficult to hypnotise?”

Croft laughed with genuine warmth. “You’ve just confirmed my assessment of your boss.” He subdued the laughter with another swallow of tea. “No, he would not be impossible to hypnotise. You can’t make sweeping generalisations like that. Given the right hypnotist, given the right circumstances, we can
all
be hypnotised because we are all suggestible to some degree.”

Again he was greeted with silence, and he approved. Even though he found it hard to believe that they were having this conversation, at least she did not dismiss him.

As if to dispute that, Millie’s next question was cautious. “It means then, that our man has been raping them for a lot longer than we – or any of them – knew. But we checked the victims out thoroughly. There is no link between them.”

Croft shook his head. “What you mean is you’ve never found a link.”

That irked her. Her pleasant features diminished with irritation. “All right, so we never found a link. For obvious reasons we never asked any of the victims’ families whether they had been hypnotised, but Ernie will be getting onto that as we speak.”

Silence hung over the room like a cloud. Croft was completely lost for any direction, and he guessed Millie was in the same position. He needed a sounding board and Trish was the best, but she was still unavailable. Millie sounded as if she would be an adequate replacement, but she was too close to The Handshaker to be of any objective use. He finished his tea, stood, crossed the room to the sink, swilled the beaker under the cold tap, and placed it upside down on the drainer. He moved behind the desk, shut down his laptop, made a great fuss of closing the lid, and then came back to his chair.

“Tell me what you know about The Handshaker,” he invited.

“It isn’t much more than you read in the press,” Millie admitted. “We know that after abducting his victims, he keeps them somewhere for anything up to three or four days before taking them out during the night and hanging them. We know that some victims have been taken in broad daylight. We even have CCTV coverage of one victim, talking to a man on Scarbeck market just minutes before she disappeared. We never did track him down, but if he was The Handshaker, he certainly didn’t use drugs on her. There is no connection between the victims. Believe me, we checked everything, right down to star signs and numerology – adding up the numbers created by the letters in their name. The man is ultra careful. He has never made a mistake. There is no fuss when he takes the women, no struggle. It’s almost as if they go voluntarily with him.”

“Again hinting that they are hypnotised,” Croft pointed out.

“Possibly.”

Croft shook his head, and in contrast to the doubts he may privately entertain, spoke with absolute conviction. “Definitely. I said earlier that deep hypnosis produces spontaneous amnesia. If you take that natural memory loss and strengthen it with instructions not to remember, then it means he has hypnotised them at some time in the past, spent many sessions getting them into a deep state and ordering them to forget everything. Then, when he decides it’s time to hang them, he gives the command that triggers the post hypnotic suggestion and at the same time, he shakes hands with them. The way I did with Danny. That would explain why family members could not confirm they had ever been hypnotised. The victims would never remember it and so had never mentioned it.” He paused, adding emphasis to his next words. “You now know more about The Handshaker than you ever did. This morning should have convinced you that the man is a hypnotist of remarkable ability and he’s been using his skills on victims he’s had access to for a long time.”

Croft’s mobile phone, set on vibrate only, buzzed in his pocket. Thinking it may be from Trish, he took it, read the menu window, saw that it was a student, and cut the call. When Millie did not respond to his previous announcement, he put the phone down and said, “Let’s be honest about this. With today’s victim, The Handshaker has committed eight murders and you haven’t made an ounce of progress.”

She went on the defensive. “I wouldn’t say that. We have a mass of forensic evidence from every attack, and none of it is contradictory. We have enough DNA to start our own research facility, and enough fingerprints to keep the police academy happy for the next century.”

“Yet the man eludes you,” Croft pointed out. “All that forensic material would be fine if you had a suspect, but you haven’t, and the fact that you haven’t indicates that this man is snow white. He’s never put a foot wrong in his life? I assume you’ve checked medical DNA databases as well as your own criminal ones.”

Millie nodded grimly. “We went further than that. We picked up latent prints on most of the bodies usually from the vagina or breasts. We checked with the FBI to see if they had him on file as a visitor to the States. Since 9/11 everyone who wishes to visit the USA has to be fingerprinted.”

It was not a question but Croft nodded anyway. “You drew a blank?”

“We have examined every possible avenue,” Millie admitted, “including old DNA files from the days when the testing companies called for volunteers to help set up the databases. Nothing. Not a damn thing. We can tell you the kind of man we’re looking for, we can even give you his approximate height, which we originally gauged from the depths of a footprint at one of the murder scenes. That gave us his approximate weight, and we guessed his height from his shoe size. Later, we got the CCTV image I mentioned, and the man in that picture fits our height profile. A six-footer. The shoe print told us what kind of shoes he wears and we even have an idea who made them, but they’re cheap and tacky and sold literally by the thousand.” She puffed out her breath. “I tell you, Felix, I have almost fifteen years service as a police officer, and this is the first serial killer I’ve come across. I hope it’s the last. He’s come closer to pushing me into traffic control than any other villain I’ve dealt with.”