VAL McDERMID
The Last Temptation

Copyright

Harper

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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Hammersmith, London W6 8JB

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers in 2002

Copyright © Val McDermid 2002

Val McDermid asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Extract from Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot (published by Faber and Faber Ltd) reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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Source ISBN: 9780007344710

Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2014 ISBN: 9780007327621

Version: 2014-09-28

Map

Dedication

For Cameron Joseph McDermid Baillie:

not much of a gift by comparison,

but the best I can do.

Epigraph

The last temptation is the greatest treason:

To do the right deed for the wrong reason.

Murder in the Cathedral T. S. Eliot

Only when it is responsible for providing psychological diagnoses for state purposes does psychology really become important.

Max Simoneit, scientific director of

Wehrmacht Psychology, 1938

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Map

Dedication

Epigraph

Part 1

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Part 2

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Part 3

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Part 4

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Part 5

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Epilogue

Keep Reading

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Other Books By

About the Publisher

Case Notes

Name: Walter Neumann

Session Number: 1

Comments: The patient has clearly been troubled for some time with an overweening sense of his own infallibility. He presents with a disturbing level of overconfidence in his own abilities. He has a grandiose self-image and is reluctant to concede the possibility that he might be subject to valid criticism.

When challenged, he appears offended and clearly has difficulty masking his indignation. He sees no need to defend himself, regarding it as self-evident that he is right, in spite of all evidence to the contrary. His capacity for self-analysis is clearly limited. A typical response to a question is to deflect it with a question of his own. He shows a marked reluctance to examine his own behaviour or the consequences of his actions.

He lacks insight and the concept of a wider responsibility. He has mastered the appearance of affect, but it is unlikely that this is more than a convenient mask.

Therapeutic Action: Altered state therapy initiated.

1

Blue is one colour the Danube never manages. Slate grey, muddy brown, dirty rust, sweat-stained khaki; all of these and most of the intermediate shades sabotage the dreams of any romantic who stands on her banks. Occasionally, where boats gather, she achieves a kind of oily radiance as the sun shimmers on a skin of spilled fuel, turning the river the iridescent hues of a pigeon’s throat. On a dark night when clouds obscure the stars, she’s as black as the Styx. But there, in central Europe at the turning of the new millennium, it cost rather more than a penny to pay the ferryman.

From both land and water, the place looked like a deserted, rundown boat repair yard. The rotting ribs of a couple of barges and corroded components from old machinery, their former functions a mystery, were all that could be glimpsed through the gaps in the planks of the tall gates. Anyone curious enough to have stopped their car on the quiet back road and peered into the yard would have been satisfied that they were looking at yet another graveyard for a dead communist enterprise.

But there was no apparent reason for anybody to harbour idle curiosity about this particular backwater. The only mystery was why, even in those illogical totalitarian days, it had ever been thought there was any point in opening a business there. There was no significant population centre for a dozen miles in any direction. The few farms that occupied the hinterland had always required more work to make them profitable than their occupants could provide; no spare hands there. When this boatyard was in operation, the workers had been bussed fifteen miles to get to work. Its only advantage was its position on the river, sheltered from the main flow by a long sandbar covered in scrubby bushes and a few straggling trees leaning in the direction of the prevailing wind.

That remained its signal selling point to those who covertly used this evidently decaying example of industrial architecture from the bad old days. For this place was not what it seemed. Far from being a ruin, it was a vital staging post on a journey. If anyone had taken the trouble to give the place a closer look, they would have started to notice incongruities. The perimeter fence, for example, made of sheets of prefabricated reinforced concrete. It was in surprisingly good repair. The razor wire that ran along the top looked far more recent than the fall of communism. Not much to go on, in truth, but clues that were there to be read by those who are fluent in the language of deviousness.

If such a person had mounted surveillance on the apparently deserted boatyard that night, they would have been rewarded. But when the sleek black Mercedes purred along the back road, there were no curious eyes to see. The car halted short of the gates and the driver climbed out, shivering momentarily as cold damp air replaced the climate-controlled environment. He fumbled in the pockets of his leather jacket, coming out with a bunch of keys. It took him a couple of minutes to work his way through the four unfamiliar padlocks, then the gates swung silently open under his touch. He pushed them all the way back, then hurried back to the car and drove inside.

As the driver closed the gates behind the Mercedes, two men emerged from the back of the saloon. Tadeusz Radecki stretched his long legs, shaking the creases out of his Armani suit and reaching back into the car for his long sable coat. He’d felt the cold as never before lately, and it was a raw night, his breath emerging from his nostrils in filmy plumes. He pulled the fur close around him and surveyed the scene. He’d lost weight recently, and in the pale gloom cast by the car’s headlamps the strong bones of his face were a reminder of the skull beneath the skin, his darting hazel eyes the only sign of the vitality within.

Darko Krasic strolled round to stand beside him, angling his wrist up so he could see the dial of his chunky gold watch. ‘Half past eleven. The truck should be here any minute now.’

Tadeusz inclined his head slightly. ‘I think we’ll take the package ourselves.’

Krasic frowned. ‘Tadzio, that’s not a good idea. Everything’s set up. There’s no need for you to get so close to the merchandise.’

‘You think not?’ Tadeusz’s tone was deceptively negligent. Krasic knew better than to argue. The way his boss had been acting lately, not even his closest associates were prepared to risk the flare of his anger by crossing him.

Krasic held his hands up in a placatory gesture. ‘Whatever,’ he said.

Tadeusz stepped away from the car and began to prowl the boatyard, his eyes adjusting to the gloom. Krasic was right in one sense. There was no need for him to involve himself directly in any aspect of his business. But nothing was to be taken for granted just now. His mindset had been shaped by his grandmother, who, in spite of the noble blood she insisted flowed in her veins, had been as superstitious as any of the peasants she’d so despised. But she’d dressed up her irrational convictions in the fancy clothes of literary allusion. So, rather than teach the boy that troubles come in threes, she’d enlisted Shakespeare’s adage that ‘When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions’.

Katerina’s death should have been sorrow enough. Tadeusz prided himself on never allowing his face to give him away, either in business or in personal relationships. But that news had transformed his face into a howling mask of grief, tears flooding his eyes as a silent scream tore through him. He’d always known he’d loved her; he just hadn’t grasped how much.

What made it worse was that it had been so ridiculous. So very Katerina. She’d been driving her Mercedes SLK with the top down. She’d just left the Berlin ring road at the Ku’damm exit, so she’d probably still been going too fast when a motorbike shot out from a side street in front of her. Desperate to avoid hitting the careless rider, she’d swerved towards the pavement, lost control of the powerful roadster and careered into a newspaper kiosk. She’d died in the arms of a paramedic, her head injuries too appalling to comprehend.

The biker was long gone, unaware of the carnage he’d left in his wake. And mechanical examination had discovered a fault in the circuit that controlled the anti-lock braking in the Merc. That, at any rate, was the official version.

But once his initial grief had receded to the point where he could function again, Tadeusz had begun to wonder. Krasic, ever the loyal lieutenant, had reported that in Tadeusz’s temporary absence there had been a couple of more or less subtle attempts to move in on his business. Krasic, who had stoically refused to be distracted by his boss’s bereavement, had dealt ruthlessly with the threats, but as soon as Tadeusz showed signs of life again, he had laid out the full story before him.

Now, the word was out. Tadeusz wanted the biker. The police officers on his payroll had been little help; information from witnesses was scant. It had all happened so fast. It had just started to rain, so passing pedestrians had their heads down against the weather. There were no surveillance cameras in the immediate area.

The private investigator Tadeusz had hired to re-interview the witnesses had come up with a little more. One teenage boy had been enough of a wannabe rider himself to have noticed that the machine was a BMW. Now, Tadeusz was waiting impatiently for his police contacts to provide a list of possible candidates. One way or another, whether her death had been an accident or a more cruel design, someone was going to pay for it.

While he waited, Tadeusz knew he had to keep himself occupied. Usually, he left the planning on the ground to Krasic and the competent cadre of organizers they’d built around them over the years. He dealt in the big picture and the details were not his concern. But he was edgy. There were threats out there in the shadows, and it was time to make sure that all the links in the chain were still as sound as they had been when the systems were set up.

And it did no harm now and again to remind the peons who was in charge.

He walked over to the water’s edge, gazing down the river. He could just make out the leading lights of a huge Rhineship, the grumble of its engine drifting across the water. As he watched, the barge angled into the narrow, deep channel that would bring it alongside the boatyard wharf. Behind him, Tadeusz heard the gates opening again.

He turned to see a battered van drive in. The van cut away to one side, over by the Mercedes. Moments later, he heard the electronic beep of a reversing warning. A large container lorry backed into the boatyard. Three men jumped out of the van. Two made their way towards the wharf, while the third, dressed in the uniform of a Romanian customs officer, headed for the back of the truck, where he was joined by the truck driver. Between them, they removed the customs seal from the container, unfastened the locks and let the doors swing open.

Inside the container were stacked cases of canned cherries. Tadeusz curled his lip at the sight. Who in their right mind would contemplate eating Romanian canned cherries, never mind importing them by the truckload? As he looked on, the customs man and the driver started to unload the boxes. Meanwhile, behind him, the barge glided up to the wharf, where the two men expertly helped it moor.

Swiftly, a narrow passage between the cardboard boxes appeared. There was a moment’s pause then, suddenly, bodies surged through the gap and leapt to the ground. Bewildered Chinese faces gleamed sweating in the dim lights that glowed from vehicles and the barge. The stream of humanity slowed, then stopped. Around forty Chinese men huddled tight together, bundles and backpacks clutched to their chests, their frightened eyes flickering to and fro across the alien boatyard like horses who smell the taint of blood. They were shivering in the sudden cold, their thin clothes no protection against the chill of the river air. Their uneasy silence was more unsettling than any amount of chatter could have been.

A whisper of a breeze gusted a waft of stale air from the back of the lorry towards Tadeusz. His nose wrinkled in distaste at the mingled smells of sweat, urine, and shit, all overlaid with a faint chemical tang. You’d have to be desperate to choose this way to travel. It was a desperation that had made a significant contribution to his personal wealth, and he had a certain grudging respect for those with courage enough to take the path to freedom he offered.

Swiftly, the truck driver, the two men from the van and the barge crew organized their cargo. A couple of the Chinese spoke enough German to act as interpreters and the illegals were readily pressed into service. First they emptied the truck of its cherries and chemical toilets, then hosed down the interior. Once it was clean, they formed a human chain and transferred boxes of canned fruit from a container on the barge to the lorry. Finally, the Chinese climbed aboard the barge and, without any apparent reluctance, made their way into the now empty container. Tadeusz’s crew built a single layer of boxes between the illegals and the container doors, then the customs official affixed seals identical to the ones he’d removed earlier.

It was a smooth operation, Tadeusz noted with a certain amount of pride. The Chinese had come into Budapest on tourist visas. They’d been met by one of Krasic’s men and taken to a warehouse where they’d been moved into the container lorry. A couple of days before, the barge had been loaded under the eyes of customs officials near Bucharest with an entirely legal cargo. Here, in the middle of nowhere, they’d rendezvoused and been swapped. The barge would take far longer than the lorry to reach Rotterdam, but it was much less likely to be searched, given its documentation and customs seals. Any nosy official with serious doubts could be referred to the local customs who had supervised the loading. And the lorry, which was far more likely to be stopped and searched, would continue to its destination with an unimpeachable cargo. If anyone had seen anything suspicious enough at the airport or the warehouse to alert the authorities, all they would find would be a truckload of canned cherries. If officials noted the Hungarian customs seals had been interfered with, the driver could easily shrug it off as vandalism or an attempt at theft.

As the customs official crossed back to the truck, Tadeusz intercepted him. ‘A moment, please. Where is the parcel for Berlin?’

Krasic frowned. He’d almost begun to think that his boss had had sensible second thoughts about the Chinese heroin the illegals had brought with them to pay part of their passage. There was no reason for Tadzio to change the systems that Krasic had so punctiliously set up. No reason other than the foolish superstitions he’d been prey to since Katerina’s death.

The customs man shrugged. ‘Better ask the driver,’ he said with a nervous grin. He’d never seen the big boss before, and it was a privilege he could well have done without. Krasic’s ruthlessness in Tadeusz’s name was a legend among the corrupt of Central Europe.

Tadeusz cocked an eyebrow at the driver.

‘I keep it in the casing of my CB radio,’ the driver said. He led Tadeusz round to the lorry cab and pulled the radio free of its housing. It left a gap large enough to hold four sealed cakes of compressed brown powder.

‘Thank you,’ Tadeusz said. ‘There’s no need for you to be troubled with that on this trip.’ He reached inside and extracted the packages. ‘You’ll still get your money, of course.’

Krasic watched, feeling the hair on the back of his neck stand up. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d crossed a frontier with so much as a joint of cannabis. Driving across Europe with four kilos of heroin seemed like insanity. His boss might be suffering from a death wish, but Krasic didn’t want to join the party. Muttering a prayer to the Virgin, he followed Tadeusz back to the limo.

2

Carol Jordan grinned into the mirror in the women’s toilet and punched the air in a silent cheer. She couldn’t have had a better interview if she’d scripted it herself. She’d known her stuff, and she’d been asked the kind of questions that let her show it. The panel – two men and a woman – had nodded and smiled approval more often than she could have hoped for in her wildest dreams.

She’d worked for this afternoon for two years. She’d moved from her job running the CID in the Seaford division of East Yorkshire Police back to the Met so she’d be best placed to step sideways into the elite corps of the National Criminal Intelligence Service, NCIS. She’d taken every available course on criminal intelligence analysis, sacrificing most of her off-duty time to background reading and research. She’d even used a week of her annual leave working as an intern with a private software company in Canada that specialized in crime linkage computer programs. Carol didn’t mind that her social life was minimal; she loved what she was doing and she’d disciplined herself not to want more. She reckoned there couldn’t be a detective chief inspector anywhere in the country who had a better grasp of the subject. And now she was ready for the move.

Her references, she knew, would have been impeccable. Her former chief constable, John Brandon, had been urging her for a long time to move away from the sharp end of policing into the strategic area of intelligence and analysis. Initially, she had resisted, because although her early forays into the area had given her a significantly enhanced professional reputation, they’d left her emotions in confusion, her self-esteem at an all-time low. Just thinking about it now wiped the grin from her face. She gazed into her serious blue eyes and wondered how long it would be before she could think about Tony Hill without the accompanying feeling of emptiness in her stomach.

She’d been instrumental in bringing two serial killers to justice. But the unique alliance she’d formed with Tony, a psychological profiler with more than enough twists in his own psyche to confound the most devious of minds, had breached all the personal defences she’d constructed over a dozen years as a police officer. She’d made the cardinal error of letting herself love someone who couldn’t let himself love her.

His decision to quit the front line of profiling and retreat to academic life had felt like a liberation for Carol. At last she was free to follow her talent and her desire and focus on the kind of work she was best suited to without the distraction of Tony’s presence.

Except that he was always present, his voice in her head, his way of looking at the world shaping her thoughts.

Carol ran a frustrated hand through her shaggy blonde hair. ‘Fuck it,’ she said out loud. ‘This is my world now, Tony.’

She raked around in her bag and found her lipstick. She did a quick repair job then smiled at her reflection again, this time with more than a hint of defiance. The interview panel had asked her to return in an hour for their verdict. She decided to head down to the first-floor canteen and have the lunch she’d been too nervous to manage earlier.

She walked out of the toilet with a bounce in her stride. Ahead of her, further down the corridor, the lift pinged. The doors slid open and a tall man in dress uniform stepped out and turned to his right without looking in her direction. Carol slowed down, recognizing Commander Paul Bishop. She wondered what he was doing here at NCIS. The last she’d heard, he’d been seconded to a Home Office policy unit. After the dramatic, anarchic and embarrassing debut of the National Offender Profiling Task Force that he’d headed up, no one in authority wanted Bishop in a post anywhere near the public eye. To her astonishment, Bishop walked straight into the interview room she’d left ten minutes before.

What the hell was going on? Why were they talking to Bishop about her? He had never been her commanding officer. She’d resisted a transfer to the nascent profiling task force, principally because it was Tony’s personal fiefdom and she had wanted to avoid working closely with him for a second time. But in spite of her best intentions, she’d been sucked into an investigation that should never have needed to happen, and in the process had broken rules and crossed boundaries that she didn’t want to think too closely about. She certainly didn’t want the interviewers who were considering her for a senior analyst’s post to be confronted by Paul Bishop’s dissection of her past conduct. He’d never liked her, and as Carol had been the most senior officer involved in the capture of Britain’s highest profile serial killer, he’d reserved most of his anger about the maverick operation for her.

She supposed she’d have done the same in his shoes. But that didn’t make her feel any happier with the notion that Paul Bishop had just walked into the room where her future was being decided. All of a sudden, Carol had lost her appetite.

‘We were right. She’s perfect,’ Morgan said, tapping his pencil end to end on his pad, a measured gesture that emphasized the status he believed he held among his fellow officers.

Thorson frowned. She was all too aware of how many things could go wrong when unfathomable emotions were dragged into play in an operation. ‘What makes you think she’s got what it takes?’

Morgan shrugged. ‘We won’t know for sure till we see her in action. But I’m telling you, we couldn’t have found a better match if we’d gone looking.’ He pushed his shirtsleeves up over his muscular forearms in a businesslike way.

There was a knock at the door. Surtees got up and opened it to admit Commander Paul Bishop. His colleagues didn’t even glance up from their intense discussion.

‘Just as well. We’d have looked bloody stupid if we’d come this far and then had to admit we didn’t have a credible operative. But it’s still very dangerous,’ Thorson said.

Surtees gestured to Bishop that he should take the chair Carol had recently vacated. He sat, pinching the creases in his trousers between finger and thumb to free them from his knees.

‘She’s been in dangerous places before. Let’s not forget the Jacko Vance business,’ Morgan reminded Thorson, his jaw jutting stubbornly.

‘Colleagues, Commander Bishop is here,’ Surtees said forcibly.

Paul Bishop cleared his throat. ‘Since you’ve brought it up … If I could just say something about the Vance operation?’

Morgan nodded. ‘Sorry, Commander, I didn’t mean to be so rude. Tell us what you remember. That’s why we asked you to come along.’

Bishop inclined his handsome head gracefully. ‘When an operation is perceived as having reached a successful conclusion, it’s easy to sweep under the carpet all the things that went wrong. But by any objective analysis, the pursuit and ultimate capture of Jacko Vance was a policing nightmare. I would have to characterize it as a renegade action. Frankly, it made the Dirty Dozen look like a well-disciplined fighting unit. It was unauthorized, it ran roughshod over police hierarchies, it crossed force boundaries with cavalier lack of respect, and it’s nothing short of a miracle that we managed to salvage such a favourable outcome. If Carol Jordan had been one of my officers, she would have faced an internal inquiry and I have no doubt that she would have been demoted. I’ve never understood why John Brandon failed to discipline her.’ He leaned back in his chair, his heart warmed by the soft glow of righteous revenge. Jordan and her bunch of vigilantes had cost him dear, and this was the first real chance he’d had for payback. It was a pleasure.

But to his surprise, the interview panel seemed singularly unimpressed. Morgan was actually smiling. ‘You’re saying that, when she’s in a tight corner, Jordan cuts through the crap and does her own thing? That she doesn’t have a problem showing initiative and dealing with the unexpected?’

Bishop frowned slightly. ‘That’s not quite how I would have put it. More that she seems to think the rules don’t necessarily apply to her.’

‘Did her actions endanger either herself or her fellow officers?’ Thorson asked.

Bishop shrugged elegantly. ‘It’s hard to say. To be honest, the officers involved were less than candid about some aspects of their investigation.’

Surtees, the third member of the panel, looked up, his pale face almost luminous in the fading afternoon light. ‘If I may summarize? Just to check we’re on the right track here? Vance hid behind the facade of his public celebrity as a television personality to murder at least eight teenage girls. His activities went entirely unsuspected by the authorities until a classroom exercise by the National Offender Profiling Task Force threw up a puzzling cluster of possibly connected cases. And still no one outside the group took the case seriously, even after one of their number was savagely killed. I’m right in saying that DCI Jordan had no involvement in the case until after Vance killed outside his target group? Until it was clear that unless some action was taken to stop him, he would almost certainly kill again?’

Bishop looked slightly uncomfortable. ‘That’s one way of putting it. But by the time she came on board, West Yorkshire were already investigating that case. They were taking appropriate measures and conducting a proper inquiry. If Jordan had wanted to make a contribution, that would have been the correct channel to go through.’

Morgan smiled again. ‘But it was Jordan and her motley crew that got the result,’ he said mildly. ‘Do you think Jordan displayed strength of character in the way she acted in the Jacko Vance investigation?’

Bishop raised his eyebrows. ‘There’s no doubt that she was stubborn.’

‘Tenacious,’ Morgan said.

‘I suppose.’

‘And courageous?’ Thorson interjected.

‘I’m not sure whether I’d characterize it as courage or bloodymindedness,’ Bishop said. ‘Look, why exactly have you asked me here? This isn’t normal procedure for appointing an NCIS officer, even at senior rank.’

Morgan said nothing. He studied his pencil on its rotating journey. Bishop hadn’t asked why he was here when he thought there was an opportunity for putting the shaft in on Jordan. It was only when he realized that he was talking to people who didn’t share his managerial view that he’d pushed for an answer. In Morgan’s book, that meant he didn’t deserve one.

Surtees bridged the gap. ‘We’re considering DCI Jordan for a very demanding role in a key operation. It’s highly confidential, so you’ll understand why we’re not able to provide you with details. But what you have told us has been very helpful.’

It was a dismissal. He couldn’t believe he’d been dragged across London for this. Bishop got to his feet. ‘If that’s all … ?’

‘Do her junior officers like her?’ Thorson caught him on the back foot.

‘Like her?’ Bishop seemed genuinely puzzled.

‘Would you say she has charm? Charisma?’ she persisted.

‘I couldn’t say from personal experience. But she certainly had my officers on the profiling task force eating out of her hand. They followed where she led them.’ Now the edge of bitterness was impossible to disguise. ‘Whatever feminine wiles she used, it was enough to get them to forget their training, forget their loyalties and chase off all over the country at her bidding.’

‘Thank you, Commander. You’ve been very helpful,’ Surtees said. The panel sat in silence while Bishop left the room.

Morgan shook his head, grinning. ‘She really got under his skin, didn’t she?’

‘But we learned what we needed to know. She’s got guts, she shows initiative and she can charm the birds off the trees.’ Surtees was scribbling notes on his pad. ‘And she’s not afraid to confront danger head-on.’

‘But nothing like this. We’d have to cover her back in ways we’ve never considered before. For example, she couldn’t be wired. We couldn’t risk that. So any product is going to be compromised for lack of corroboration,’ Thorson objected.

Surtees shrugged. ‘She has an eidetic memory for aural stimulus. It’s in the notes. She’s been independently tested. Anything she’s heard, she can recall verbatim. Her reports are probably going to be even more accurate than the muffled crap we get from half the surveillances we mount.’

Morgan smiled triumphantly. ‘Like I said, she’s perfect. The target won’t be able to resist.’

Thorson pursed her lips. ‘For all our sakes, I hope not. But before we make a final decision, I want to see her in action. Agreed?’

The two men looked at each other. Morgan nodded. ‘Agreed. Let’s see how she performs under pressure.’

3

The sun was slanting at an awkward angle as Tony Hill drove up the long hill out of St Andrews. He pulled the sun visor down and glanced in the rear-view mirror. Behind him, the green of the Tentsmuir Forest contrasted with the blue sparkle of the Firth of Tay and the North Sea beyond it. He glimpsed the jagged grey skyline of the town, ruins cheek by jowl with imposing nineteenth-century architecture, each indistinguishable from the other at this distance. It had become a familiar sight over the past eighteen months since he’d taken up his post as Reader in Behavioural Psychology at the university, but he still enjoyed the tranquillity of the view. Distance lent enchantment, turning the skeletons of St Regulus Tower and the cathedral into gothic Disney fantasies. Best of all, from a distance he didn’t have to deal with colleagues or students.

Although his professor had acted as if acquiring someone with his reputation had been a major enhancement of their departmental prospectus, Tony wasn’t sure he’d lived up to expectations. He’d always known he wasn’t really suited to the academic life. He was bad at politics, and lecturing still left him sweaty-palmed and panicky. But at the time he’d been offered the job, it had seemed a better option than continuing with work he no longer felt fit for. He’d started out as a clinical psychologist, working at the sharp end in a secure mental hospital, dealing with serial offenders. When the Home Office had started taking an interest in the effectiveness of offender profiling in police investigations, he’d been one of the obvious candidates to run the feasibility study.

It had helped his reputation almost as much as it had damaged his psyche that in the course of the study, he’d been directly caught up in the capture of a psychopathic killer who had been targeting young men. In the process, his own vulnerabilities had come close to destroying him. The degree of his involvement still gave him screaming nightmares from which he woke drenched in sweat, his body racked with echoes of past pain.

When the profiling task force was set up according to the recommendations he’d made, he’d been the inevitable choice to take charge of training a handpicked team of young police officers in psychological profiling techniques. It should have been a straightforward assignment, but it had turned into an excursion into hell for Tony and his charges. For a second time, he had been forced to confound the rules that said his should be an arm’s-length role. For a second time, he had ended up with blood on his hands. And the absolute certainty that he didn’t want to have to do any of it ever again.

His participation in the shadow world of offender profiling had cost him more than he cared to tot up. Two years later, and he was still never free of the past. Every day, when he went through the motions of a professional life he didn’t really believe in, he couldn’t help thinking of what he had walked away from. He’d been good at it, he knew. But in the end, that hadn’t been enough.

Impatient with himself, he ejected the Philip Glass cassette. Music gave him too much space for idle speculation. Words, that’s what he needed to divert him from his pointless introversion. He listened to the tail end of a discussion about the emergence of new viruses in sub-Saharan Africa, his eyes on the road that wound through the picturesque scenery of the East Neuk. As he turned off towards the fishing village of Cellardyke, the familiar pips announced the four o’clock news.

The comforting voice of the newsreader began the bulletin. ‘The convicted serial killer and former TV chat show host Jacko Vance has begun his appeal against conviction. Vance, who once held the British record for the javelin, was given a life sentence at his trial eighteen months ago for the murder of a police officer. The appeal is expected to last for two days.

‘Police appealed for calm in Northern Ireland tonight …’ The words continued, but Tony wasn’t listening any longer. One last hurdle and then it would finally be over. One more anxiety would, he hoped fervently, be laid to rest. Intellectually, he knew there was no chance of Vance’s appeal succeeding. But while it was pending, there would always be that niggle of uncertainty. He’d helped put Vance away, but the arrogant killer had always maintained he would find a loophole that would set him free. Tony hoped the road to freedom was only a figment of Vance’s imagination.

As the car wound down the hill towards the seafront cottage Tony had bought a year ago, he wondered if Carol knew about the appeal. He’d e-mail her tonight to make sure. Thank God for electronic communication. It avoided so many of the occasions for awkwardness that seemed to occur when they were face to face, or even talking on the phone. He was conscious of having failed Carol, and, in the process, himself. She was never far from his thoughts, but to tell her that would have been a kind of betrayal he couldn’t bring himself to perform.

Tony pulled up in the narrow street outside his cottage, parking the car half on the kerb. There was a light on in the living room. Once, such a sight would have set the cold hand of fear clutching his heart. But his world had changed in more ways than he could ever have dreamed of. Now, he wanted everything to stay the same; clear, manageable, boxed off.

It wasn’t perfect, not by a long way. But it was better than bearable. And for Tony, better than bearable was as good as it had ever been.

The throb of the engines soothed him, as it always had. Bad things had never happened to him on the water. For as long as he could remember, boats had protected him. There were rules of life on board, rules that had always been clear and simple, rules that existed for good and logical reasons. But even when he’d been too young to understand, when he’d inadvertently done things he shouldn’t have, the punishment had never descended on him until they went ashore. He’d known it was coming, but he had always managed to hold the fear at bay while the engines rumbled and the mingled smells of men’s unwashed bodies, stale cooking fat and diesel fumes filled his nostrils.

The pain had only ever been visited on him when they left their life on the water behind and returned to the stinking apartment by the fish docks in Hamburg where his grandfather demonstrated the power he held over the young boy in his care. While he was still staggering to recover his land legs, the punishments would begin.

Even now when he thought about it, the air in his lungs seemed to condense. His skin felt as if it were writhing over his flesh. For years, he’d tried not to think about it because it made him feel so fractured, so fragile. But slowly he had come to understand that this was no escape. It was merely a postponement. So now he made himself remember, almost treasuring the terrible physical sensations because they proved he was strong enough to defeat his past.

Small transgressions had meant he would be forced to crouch in a corner of the kitchen while his grandfather fried up a hash of sausage, onions and potatoes on the stove. It smelled better than anything the cook on the barge ever served up on the boat. He never knew if it tasted better, because when the time came to eat, he would have to wait in his corner and watch while his grandfather tucked into a steaming plate of fried food. Drenched in the appetizing aroma, his stomach would clench with hunger, his mouth become a reservoir of eager saliva.

The old man would gorge his meal like a hunting dog home in his kennel, his eyes sliding over to the boy in the corner with a contemptuous glare. When he finished, he would wipe his plate clean with a hunk of rye bread. Then he’d take out his bargee’s clasp knife and cut more bread into chunks. He’d take a can of dog food from the cupboard and tip it into a bowl, mixing the bread into the meat. Then he’d put the bowl in front of the boy. ‘You’re the son of a bitch. This is what you deserve until you start to learn how to behave like a man. I’ve had dogs that learned faster than you. I am your master, and you live your life as I tell you.’

Shaking with anxiety, the boy would have to get down on all fours and eat the food without touching it with his hands. He’d learned that the hard way too. Every time his hands came off the floor and moved towards dish or food, his grandfather would plant a steel-capped boot in his ribs. That was one lesson he’d taken to heart very quickly.

If his misdemeanours had been minor, he might be allowed to sleep on the camp bed in the hall between his grand-father’s bedroom and the squalid cold-water bathroom. But if he’d been judged unworthy of such luxury, he’d have to sleep on the kitchen floor on a filthy blanket that still smelled of the last dog his grandfather had owned, a bull terrier who’d suffered from incontinence for the last few days of its life. Cowering in a ball, he’d often been too scared to sleep, the demons of bewilderment keeping him edgy and uneasy.

If his unintentional sins had been on a more serious scale still, he would be made to spend the night standing in a corner of his grandfather’s bedroom, with the glare of a 150-watt bulb directed into his face in a narrow beam. The light that leaked into the room didn’t seem to bother his grandfather, who snored like a pig through the night. But if the boy sank exhausted to his knees or slumped in standing sleep against the wall, some sixth sense always woke the old man. After that had happened a couple of times, the boy had learned to force himself to stay awake. Anything to avoid a repetition of that excruciating pain in his groin.

If he had been judged as wantonly wicked, some childish game a contravention of protocol that he should have instinctively understood, then he’d face an even worse punishment. He would be sent to stand in the toilet bowl. Naked and shivering, he’d struggle to find a position that didn’t send shooting cramps up his legs. His grandfather would walk into the bathroom as if the boy were invisible, unbutton his trousers and empty his bladder in a stinking hot stream over his legs. He’d shake himself, then turn and walk out, never flushing after himself. The boy would have to balance himself, one foot in the bottom of the pan, soaking in the mixture of water and urine, the other bracing on the sloping side of the porcelain.

The first time it had happened, he had wanted to vomit. He didn’t think it could get any worse than this. But it did, of course. The next time his grandfather had come in, he’d dropped his trousers and sat down to empty his bowels. The boy was trapped, the edge of the seat cutting into the soft swell of his calves, his back pressed against the chill wall of the bathroom, his grandfather’s warm buttocks alien against his shins. The thin, acrid smell rose from the gaps between their flesh, making him gag. But still his grandfather behaved as if he were nothing more substantial than a phantom. He finished, wiped himself and walked out, leaving the boy to wallow in his sewage. The message was loud and clear. He was worthless.

In the morning, his grandfather would walk into the bathroom, run a tub of cold water, and, still ignoring the boy, he’d finally flush the toilet. Then, as if seeing his grandson for the first time, he would order him to clean his filthy flesh, picking him up bodily and throwing him into the bath.

It was no wonder that as soon as he’d been able to count, he’d measured off the hours until they returned to the barge. They were never ashore for more than three days, but when his grandfather was displeased with him, it could feel like three separate lifetimes of humiliation, discomfort and misery. Yet he never complained to any of the crewmen. He never realized there was anything to complain about. Isolated from other lives, he had no option but to believe that this was how everyone lived.

The understanding that his was not the only truth had come slowly. But when it came, it arrived with the force of a tidal wave, leaving him with a formless craving that hungered for satisfaction.

Only on the water did he ever feel calm. Here, he was in command, both of himself and the world around him. But it wasn’t enough. He knew there was more, and he wanted more. Before he could take his place in the world, he knew he had to escape the pall that his past threw over every single day. Other people seemed to manage happiness without trying. For most of his life, all he had known was the tight clamp of fear shutting out any other possibilities. Even when there was nothing concrete to cause trepidation, the faint flutter of anxiety was never far away.

Slowly, he was learning how to change that. He had a mission now. He didn’t know how long it would take him to complete. He wasn’t even sure how he would know he had completed it, except that he would probably be able to think about his childhood without shuddering like an overstrained engine block. But what he was doing was necessary, and it was possible. He had taken the first step on the journey. And already he felt better for it.

Now, as the boat ploughed up the Rhine towards the Dutch border, it was time to firm up the plans for the second stage. Alone in the cockpit, he reached for his cellphone and dialled a number in Leiden.

4

Carol looked at the three interviewers in blank incomprehension. ‘You want me to do a role-play for you?’ she said, trying not to sound as incredulous as she felt.

Morgan tugged the lobe of his ear. ‘I know it seems a little … unusual.’

Carol couldn’t stop her eyebrows rising. ‘I was under the impression that I was being interviewed for the job I applied for. Europol Liaison Officer with NCIS. Now, I’m not sure what’s going on.’

Thorson nodded understandingly. ‘I appreciate your confusion, Carol. But we need to evaluate your undercover capabilities.’

Morgan interrupted her. ‘We have an ongoing intelligence-gathering operation that crosses European frontiers. We believe you have a unique contribution to make to that operation. But we need to be sure that you have what it takes to carry it through. That you can walk in someone else’s shoes without tripping yourself up.’

Carol frowned. ‘I’m sorry, sir, but that doesn’t sound much like an ELO’s job to me. I thought my role would be essentially analytical, not operational.’

Morgan glanced at Surtees, who nodded and picked up the conversational baton. ‘Carol, there is no doubt in this room that you will make a terrific ELO. But in the process of dealing with your application, it’s become clear to all of us that there is something very specific that you and you alone can provide in the context of this single, complex operation. For that reason, we would like you to consider undertaking a day-long undercover role-play so we can observe your reactions under pressure. Whatever the outcome of that, I can promise that it will not adversely affect our decision about your fitness to join NCIS as an ELO.’

Carol swiftly processed what Surtees had said. It sounded to her as if they were saying the job was hers regardless. They were telling her she had nothing to lose by playing along with their eccentric suggestion. ‘What exactly are you asking me to do?’ she said, her face guarded, her voice neutral.

Thorson took the lead. ‘Tomorrow, you will receive a full brief on the role you are to assume. On the appointed day, you will go where you’ve been told and do your best to achieve the goals set out in your brief. You must remain in character from the moment you leave home until one of us tells you the role-play is over. Is that clear?’

‘Will I have to deal with members of the public, or will it just be other officers?’ Carol asked.

Morgan’s ruddy face broke into a grin. ‘I’m sorry, we can’t tell you any more right now. You’ll get your brief in the morning. And as of now, you’re on leave. We’ve cleared that with your management team. You’ll need that time to do some research and prepare yourself for your role. Any more questions?’

Carol fixed him with the cool grey stare that had worked so often in police interview rooms. ‘Did I get the job?’

Morgan smiled. ‘You got a job, DCI Jordan. It may not be the one you expected, but I think it’s fair to say you’re not going to be a Met officer for very much longer.’

Driving back to her Barbican flat, Carol was barely conscious of the traffic that flowed around her. Although she liked to think that, professionally, she always expected the unexpected, the course of the afternoon’s proceedings had caught her completely unawares. First, the appearance out of the blue of Paul Bishop. Then the bizarre turn the interview had taken.

Somewhere around the elevated section of the Westway, Carol’s bewilderment started to develop an edge of irritation. Something stank. An ELO’s job wasn’t operational. It was analytical. It wasn’t a field job; she’d be flying a desk, sifting and sorting intelligence from a wide variety of sources across the European Union. Organized crime, drugs, the smuggling of illegal immigrants, that’s what she’d be focusing on. An ELO was the person with the computer skills and the investigative nous to make connections, to filter out the background noise and come up with the clearest possible map of criminal activity that could have an impact on the UK. The nearest an ELO should ever come to primary sources was to cultivate officers from other countries, to build the kind of contacts that ensured the information that made it through to her was both accurate and comprehensive.

So why did they want her to do something she’d never done before? They must have known from her file that she’d never worked undercover, not even when she was a junior detective. There was nothing in her background to indicate she’d have any aptitude for taking on someone else’s life.

In the stop-start traffic of the Marylebone Road, it dawned on her that this was what troubled her most. She didn’t know whether she could do this. And if there was one thing Carol hated even more than being blindsided, it was the thought of failure.

If she was going to beat this challenge, she was going to have to do some serious research. And she was going to have to do it fast.

Frances was chopping vegetables when Tony walked in, Radio 4 voices laying down their authoritative counterpoint to the sound of the knife on the wooden board. He paused on the threshold to appreciate something so ordinary, so comfortable, so relatively unfamiliar in his life as a woman preparing dinner in his kitchen. Frances Mackay, thirty-seven, a teacher of French and Spanish at the high school in St Andrews. The blue-black hair, sapphire blue eyes and pale skin of a particular Hebridean genetic strain, the trim figure of a golfer, the sharp, sly humour of a cynic. They’d met when he’d joined the local bridge club. Tony hadn’t played since he’d been an undergraduate, but it was something he knew he could pick up again, an accessible part of his past that would allow him to build another course of brickwork in his perpetual facade; what, in his own mind, he called passing for human.

Her playing partner had moved to a new job in Aberdeen and, like him, she needed someone regular with whom she could construct a bidding understanding. Right from the start, they’d been in tune across the green baize. Bridge parties had followed, away from the club, then an invitation to dinner to plan some refinements to their system before a tournament. Within weeks, they’d visited the Byre Theatre, eaten pub lunches all along the East Neuk, walked the West Sands under the whip of a northeast wind. He was fond, but not in love, and that was what had made the next step possible.

The physiological cure for the impotence that had plagued most of his adult life had been at hand for some time. Tony had resisted the pull of Viagra, reluctant to use a pharmacological remedy for a psychological problem. But if he was serious about making a new life, then there was no logical reason to hang on to the shibboleths of the old. So he’d taken the tablets.

The very fact of being able to get into bed with a woman and not have the dismal spectre of failure climb in alongside was novel. Freed from the worst of his anxiety, he’d escaped the tentative awkwardness he’d always experienced during foreplay, already dreading the fiasco to come. He’d felt self-assured, able to ask what she needed and confident that he could provide. She certainly seemed to have enjoyed it, enough to demand more. And he’d understood for the first time the macho pride of the strutting male who has satisfied his woman.

And yet, and yet. In spite of the physical delight, he couldn’t shake off the knowledge that his solution was cosmetic rather than remedial. He hadn’t even treated the symptoms; he’d simply disguised them. All he’d done was find a new and better mask to cover his human inadequacy.

It might have been different if sex with Frances had been charged with an emotional resonance. But love was for other people. Love was for people who had something to offer in return, something more than damage and need. He’d schooled himself not to consider love an option. No point in yearning for the impossible. The grammar of love was a language beyond him, and no amount of pining would ever change that. So he buried his angst along with his functional impotence and found a kind of peace with Frances.

He’d even learned to take it for granted. Moments like this, where he stood back and analysed the situation, had become increasingly rare in the circumspect life they had built together. He was, he thought, like a toddler taking his first clumsy steps. Initially, it required enormous concentration and carried its own burden of bruises and unexpected knocks. But gradually the body forgets that each time it steps forward successfully it is an aborted tumble. It becomes possible to walk without considering it a small miracle.

So it was in his relationship with Frances. She had kept her own modern semi-detached house on the outskirts of St Andrews. Most weeks, they would spend a couple of nights at her place, a couple of nights at his and the remainder apart. It was a rhythm that suited them both in a life with remarkably little friction. When he thought about it, he considered that calm was probably a direct result of the absence of the sort of passion that burns as consuming as it does fierce.

Now, she looked up from the peppers her small hands were neatly dicing. ‘Had a good day?’ she asked.

He shrugged, moving across the room and giving her a friendly hug. ‘Not bad. You?’

She pulled a face. ‘It’s always horrible at this time of year. Spring sets their teenage hormones raging and the prospect of exams fills the air with the smell of neurosis. It’s like trying to teach a barrel of broody monkeys. I made the mistake of setting my Higher Spanish class an essay on “My Perfect Sunday”. Half the girls turned in the sort of soppy romantic fiction that makes Barbara Cartland sound hard-boiled. And the lads all wrote about football.’

Tony laughed. ‘It’s a miracle the species ever manages to reproduce, given how little teenagers have in common with the opposite sex.’

‘I don’t know who was more intent on counting the minutes till the bell at the end of the last period, them or me. I sometimes think this is no way for an intelligent adult to earn a living. You knock your pan in trying to open up the wonders of a foreign language to them, then someone translates coup de grâce as a lawnmower.’

‘You’re making that up,’ he said, picking up half a mushroom and chewing it.

‘I wish I was. By the way, the phone rang just as I came in, but I had a couple of bags of shopping so I let the machine pick it up.’

‘I’ll see who it is. What’s for dinner?’ he added, as he walked towards his office, a tiny room at the front of the cottage.

‘Maiale con latte with roast vegetables,’ Frances called after him. ‘That’s pork cooked in milk to you.’

‘Sounds interesting,’ he shouted back, pressing the play button on the answering machine. There was a long bleep. Then he heard her voice.

‘Hi, Tony.’ A long moment of uncertainty. Two years of literal silence, their only communication irregular flurries of e-mail. But three short syllables were all it took to penetrate the shell that he’d grown round his emotions.

‘It’s Carol.’ Three more syllables, these ones entirely unnecessary. He’d know her voice through a sea of static. She must have heard the news about Vance.

‘I need to talk to you,’ she continued, sounding more confident. Professional, then, not personal after all. ‘I’ve got an assignment that I really need your help with.’ His stomach felt leaden. Why was she doing this to him? She knew the reasons he’d drawn a line under profiling. She of all people should grant him more grace than this.

‘It’s nothing to do with profiling,’ she added, the words falling over each other in her haste to correct the false assumption she’d feared, the one he’d so readily made.

‘It’s for me. It’s something I’ve got to do and I don’t know how to do it. And I thought you would be able to help me. I’d have e-mailed, but it just seemed easier to talk. Can you call me, please? Thanks.’

Tony stood motionless, staring out of the window at the blank faces of the houses that opened straight on to the pavement on the other side of the street. He’d never really believed Carol was consigned to his past.

‘Do you want a glass of wine?’ Frances’s voice from the kitchen cut across his reverie.

He walked back into the kitchen. ‘I’ll get them,’ he said, squeezing past her to get to the fridge.

‘Who was it?’ Frances asked casually, more polite than curious.

‘Someone I used to work with.’ Tony hid his face in the process of pulling the cork and pouring wine into a couple of glasses. He cleared his throat. ‘Carol Jordan. A cop.’

Frances frowned in concern. ‘Isn’t she the one … ?’

‘She’s the one I worked with on the two serial killer cases, yes.’ His tone told Frances it wasn’t a subject for discussion. She knew the bare bones of his history, had always sensed there was something unspoken between him and his former colleague. Now at last this might be the chance to turn over the stone and see what crept out.

‘You were really close, weren’t you?’ she probed.

‘Working on cases like that always brings colleagues close together for the duration. You’ve got a common purpose. Then afterwards you can’t bear their company because it reminds you of things you want to wipe off the face of your memory.’ It was an answer that gave nothing away.

‘Was she calling about that bastard Vance?’ Frances asked, conscious that she’d been headed off at the pass.

Tony placed her glass by the side of the chopping board. ‘You heard about that?’

‘It was on the news.’

‘You didn’t mention it.’

Frances took a sip of the cool, crisp wine. ‘It’s your business, Tony. I thought you’d get round to it in your own good time if you wanted to talk about it. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t.’

His smile was wry. ‘I think you’re the only woman I’ve ever known who didn’t have the nosy gene.’

‘Oh, I can be as nosy as the next person. But I’ve learned the hard way that poking my nose in where it’s not wanted is a great recipe for screwing up a relationship.’ The allusion to her failed marriage was as oblique as Tony’s occasional reference to his profiling experiences, but he picked it up loud and clear.

‘I’ll give her a quick ring back while you’re finishing off in here,’ he said.

Frances stopped what she was doing and watched him walk away. She had a feeling tonight would be one of those nights when she was wakened in the chill hours before dawn by Tony shouting in his sleep and thrashing around beneath the bedclothes. She’d never complained to him; she’d read enough about serial killers to have an idea what terrors were lodged in his consciousness. She enjoyed what they shared, but that didn’t mean she wanted to partake of his demons.

She couldn’t have known how very different that made her from Carol Jordan.

5

Carol leaned back on the sofa, one hand clutching the phone, the other kneading the fur of her black cat, Nelson. ‘You’re sure you don’t mind?’ she asked, knowing it was a formality. Tony never offered anything he didn’t mean.

‘If you want my help, I’ll need to see whatever brief they give you. It makes much more sense for you to bring it with you so we can go through it together,’ Tony said, sounding matter of fact.

‘I really appreciate this.’

‘It’s not a problem. Compared to what we’ve worked through in the past, it’ll be a pleasure.’

Carol shuddered. Someone walking across her grave. ‘You heard about Vance’s appeal?’

‘It was on the radio news,’ he said.

‘He’s not going to succeed, you know,’ she said, more confidently than she felt. ‘He’s just another guest of Her Majesty, thanks to us. He tried every trick in the book and a few others besides at the trial, and we still managed to convince a jury that was predisposed to love him. He’s not going to get past three law lords.’ Nelson protested as her fingers dug too deeply into his flesh.

‘I’d like to think so. But I’ve always had a bad feeling about Vance.’

‘Enough of that. I’ll head straight out to the airport tomorrow as soon as the brief arrives and get a flight to Edinburgh. I can pick up a hire car there. I’ll call you when I have a better idea of my ETA.’

‘OK. You’re … you’re welcome to stay at my place,’ he said. Over the phone, it was hard to sift diffidence from reluctance.

Much as she wanted to see where two years apart would have brought them, Carol knew it made sense to leave herself a back door. ‘Thanks, but I’m putting you to enough trouble. Book me in at a local hotel, or a bed and breakfast place. Whatever’s most convenient.’

There was a short pause. Then he said, ‘I’ve heard good reports of a couple of places. I’ll sort it out in the morning. But if you change your mind …’

‘I’ll let you know.’ It was an empty promise; the impetus would have to come from him.

‘I’m really looking forward to seeing you, Carol.’

‘Me too. It’s been too long.’

She heard a soft chuckle. ‘Probably not. It’s probably been just about right. Till tomorrow, then.’

‘Good night, Tony. And thanks.’

‘Least I can do. Bye, Carol.’

She heard the click of the line going dead and cut off her own handset, letting it fall to the rug. Scooping Nelson up in her arms, she walked across to the wall of windows that looked out across the old stone church, incongruously preserved in the heart of the modern concrete complex that had become home. Only this morning, she’d looked across the piazza with a sense of elegiac farewell, imagining herself packing up and moving to Den Haag to take up her post as a brand-new ELO. It had all seemed very clear, a visualization that held the power to bring itself into being. Now, it was hard to picture what her future would hold beyond sleep and breakfast.

The Wilhelmina Rosen had passed Arnhem and moored for the night. The wharf he always used when they tied up on the Nederrijn was popular with the two crewmen he employed; there was a village with an excellent bar and restaurant less than five minutes’ walk away. They’d done their chores in record time and left him alone on the big barge within half an hour of tying up. They hadn’t bothered asking if he wanted to accompany them; in all the years they’d been working together, he’d only once joined them on a night’s drinking, when Manfred’s wife had given birth. The engineer had insisted that their captain should wet the baby’s head with him and Gunther. He remembered it with loathing. They’d been down near Regensburg, drinking in a series of bars that were familiar with the needs of boatmen. Too much beer, too much schnapps, too much noise, too many sluts taunting him with their bodies.

Much better to stay on board, where he could savour his secrets without fear of interruption. Besides, there was always work to be done, maintaining the old Rhineship in peak condition. He had to keep the brasswork gleaming, the paint smart and unblistered. The old mahogany of the wheelhouse and his cabin shone with the lustre of years of polishing, his hands following a tradition passed down the generations. He’d inherited the boat from his grandfather, the one good thing the bastard had done for him.

He’d never forget the liberation of the old man’s accident. None of them had even known about it till morning. His grandfather had gone ashore to spend the evening in a bar, as he did from time to time. He never drank with the crew, always preferring to take himself off to a quiet corner in some bier keller far away from the other bargees. He acted as if he was too good for the rest of them, though his grandson thought it was probably more likely that he’d pissed off every other skipper on the river with his bloodyminded self-righteousness.

In the morning, there had been no sign of the old man on board. That in itself was remarkable, for his regularity of habit was unshakeable. No illness had ever been permitted to fell him, no self-indulgence to keep him in his berth a minute after six. Winter and summer, the old man was washed, shaved and dressed by six twenty, the cover of the engines open as he inspected them suspiciously to make sure nothing evil had befallen them in the night. But that morning, silence hung ominous over the barge.

He’d kept his head down, busying himself in the bilges, stripping down a pump. It occupied his hands, avoiding any possibility of showing nervousness that might be remarked on later if anyone had become suspicious. But all the while, he’d been lit up by the inner glow that came from having taken his future into his own hands. At last, he was going to be the master of his own destiny. Millions of people wanted to liberate themselves as he had done, but only a handful ever had the courage to do anything about it. He was, he realized with a rare burst of pride, more special than anyone had ever given him credit for, especially the old man.

Gunther, busy cooking breakfast in the galley, had noticed nothing amiss. His routine was, perforce, as regular as his skipper’s. It had been Manfred, the engineer, who had raised the alarm. Concerned at the old man’s silence, he’d dared to crack open the door to his cabin. The bed was empty, the covers so tightly tucked in that a five-mark piece would have trampolined to the ceiling off them. Anxiously, he’d made his way out on deck and begun to search. The hold was empty, awaiting that morning’s load of roadstone. Manfred rolled back a corner of the tarpaulin and climbed down the ladder to check it from stem to stern, worried that the old man might have decided to make one of his periodic late-night tours of the barge and either fallen or been taken ill. But the hold was empty.

Manfred had started to have a very bad feeling. Back up on deck, he edged his way round the perimeter, staring down into the water. Up near the bows, he saw what he was afraid of. Jammed between the hull and the pilings of the wharf, the old man floated face down.

The inference was obvious. The old man had had too much to drink and tripped over one of the hawsers that held the barge fast against the wharf. According to the postmortem, he’d banged his head on the way down, probably knocking himself unconscious in the process. Even if he’d only been stunned, the combination of alcohol and concussion had combined to make drowning a foregone conclusion. The official finding had been accidental death. Nobody doubted it for a minute.

Just as he’d planned it. He’d sweated it till the verdict was in, but it had all turned out the way he’d dreamed it. He’d been bewildered to discover what joy felt like.

It was his first taste of power, and it felt as luxurious as silk against his skin, as warming as brandy in the throat. He’d finally found a tiny flicker of strength that his grandfather’s constant and brutal humiliations had failed to extinguish, and he’d fed it the kindling of fantasy, then more of the hot-burning fuel of hatred and self-loathing until it flared bright enough to fire him into action. He’d finally shown the sadistic old bastard who the real man was.

He’d felt no remorse, neither in the immediate aftermath nor later, when attention had turned away from his grandfather’s death to the latest gossip of the rivermen. Thinking about what he’d done filled him with a lightness he’d never known before. The craving for more of it burned fierce inside him, but he had no idea how to satisfy it.

Improbably, the answer had come at the funeral, a gratifyingly small gathering. The old man had been a bargee all his adult life, but he had never had any talent for friendship. Nobody cared enough to give up a cargo to pay their last respects at the crematorium service. The new master of the Wilhelmina Rosen recognized most of the mourners as retired deckhands and skippers who had nothing better to do with their days.

But as they filed out at the end of the impersonal service, an elderly man he’d never seen before plucked at his sleeve. ‘I knew your grandfather,’ he said. ‘I’d like to buy you a drink.’

He didn’t know what people said to get out of social obligations they didn’t want. He’d so seldom been invited anywhere, he’d never had to learn. ‘All right,’ he’d said, and followed the man from the austere funeral suite.

‘Do you have a car?’ the elderly man said. ‘I came in a taxi.’

He nodded, and led the way to his grandfather’s old Ford. That was something he planned to change, just as soon as the lawyers gave him the go-ahead to start spending the old man’s money. In the car, his passenger directed him away from the city and out into the countryside. They ended up at an inn that sat at a crossroads. The elderly man bought a couple of beers and pointed him to the beer garden.

They’d sat down in a sheltered corner, the watery spring sunshine barely warm enough for outside drinking. ‘I’m Heinrich Holtz.’ The introduction came with a quizzical look. ‘Did he ever mention me? Heini?’

He shook his head. ‘No, never.’

Holtz exhaled slowly. ‘I can’t say I’m surprised. What we shared, it wasn’t something any of us like to talk about.’ He sipped his beer with the fastidiousness of the occasional drinker.

Whoever Holtz was, he clearly wasn’t from the world of commercial barge traffic. He was a small, shrivelled man, his narrow shoulders hunched in on themselves as if he found himself perpetually in a cold wind. His watery grey eyes peered out from nests of wrinkles, his look sidelong rather than direct.

‘How did you know my grandfather?’ he asked.

The answer, and the story that came with it, changed his life. Finally, he understood why his childhood had been made hell. But it was rage that welled up inside him, not forgiveness. At last, he could see where the light was. At last, he had a mission that would shatter the glacial grip of fear that had paralysed him for so long and stripped him of everything that other people took for granted.

That night in Heidelberg had simply been the next stage in that project. He’d planned scrupulously, and since he was still at liberty, he’d clearly made no mistakes that mattered. But he’d learned a lot from that first execution, and there were a couple of things he’d do differently in future.

He was planning a long future.

He powered up the small crane that lifted his shiny Volkswagen Golf from the rear deck of the Wilhelmina Rosen on to the dock. Then he checked that everything was in his bag as it should be: notepad, pen, scalpel, spare blades, adhesive tape, thin cord and a funnel. The small jar containing formalin, tightly screwed shut. All present and correct. He checked his watch. Plenty of time to get to Leiden for his appointment. He tucked his cellphone into his jacket pocket and began to attach the car to the crane.

6

The applause broke in waves over Daniel Barenboim’s head as he turned back to the orchestra, gesturing to them to rise. Nothing quite like Mozart to provoke goodwill to all men, Tadeusz mused, clapping soundlessly in his lonely box. Katerina had loved opera, almost as much as she loved dressing up for a night out in their box at the Staatsoper. Who cared where the money came from? It was how you spent it that counted. And Katerina had understood about spending with style, spending in ways that made life feel special for everyone around her. The prime seats at the opera had been her idea, though it had seemed entirely fitting to him. Coming tonight had felt like a rite of passage, but he hadn’t wanted to share his space, least of all with any of the several preening women who had made a point of offering their condolences in the foyer ahead of the performance.

He waited till most of the audience had filed out, gazing unseeing at the fire curtain that shut off the stage. Then he stood up, shaking the creases out of his conservatively tailored dinner jacket. He slipped into his sable coat, reaching inside a pocket to turn his phone back on. Finally, he walked out of the opera house into the starry spring night. He brushed past the chattering groups and turned on to Unter den Linden, walking towards the spotlit spectacle of the Brandenburg Gate, the new Reichstag gleaming over to the right. It was a couple of miles to his apartment in Charlottenburg, but tonight he preferred to be out on the Berlin streets rather than sealed off inside his car. Like a vampire, he needed a transfusion of life. He couldn’t stand to play the social game yet, but there was an energy abroad in the city at night that fed him.

He had just passed the Soviet War Memorial at the start of the Tiergarten when his phone vibrated against his hip. Impatiently, he pulled it out. ‘Hello?’

‘Boss?’

He recognized Krasic’s deep bass. ‘Yes?’ he replied. No names on a cellphone; there were too many nerds out there with nothing better to do than scan the airwaves for stray conversations. Not to mention the various agencies of the state, constantly monitoring their citizens as assiduously as they ever had when the Red Menace still surrounded them.

‘We have a problem,’ Krasic said. ‘We need to talk. Where will I find you?’

‘I’m walking home. I’ll be at Siegessäule in about five minutes.’

‘I’ll pick you up there.’ Krasic ended the call abruptly.

Tadeusz groaned. He stopped for a moment, staring up at the sky through the budding branches of the trees. ‘Katerina,’ he said softly, as if addressing a present lover. At moments like this, he wondered if the bleak emptiness that was her legacy would ever dissipate. Right now, it seemed to grow worse with every passing day.

He squared his shoulders and strode out for the towering monument to Prussia’s military successes that Hitler had moved from its original site to form a traffic island, emphasizing its domineering height. The gilded winged victory that crowned the Siegessäule gleamed like a beacon in the city lights, facing France in defiant denial of the past century’s defeats. Tadeusz paused at the corner. There was no sign of Krasic yet, and he didn’t want to loiter there looking obvious. Caution was, in his experience, its own reward. He crossed the road to the monument itself and strolled around the base, pretending to study the elaborate mosaics showing the reunification of the German people. My grandmother’s Polish heart would shrivel in her breast if she could see me here, he thought. I can hear her now. ‘I didn’t raise you to become the Prince of Charlottenburg,’ she’d be screaming at me. At the thought, his lips curled in a sardonic smile.

A dark Mercedes pulled up at the kerb and discreetly flashed its lights. Tadeusz crossed the roundabout and climbed in the open door. ‘Sorry to spoil your evening, Tadzio,’ Krasic said. ‘But, like I told you, we’ve got a problem.’

‘It’s OK,’ Tadeusz said, leaning back against the seat and unbuttoning his coat as the car moved off down Bismarckstrasse. ‘My evening was spoiled by a bastard on a BMW, not by you. So, what’s this problem?’

‘Normally, I wouldn’t bother about something like this, but … That package of brown we brought up from the Chinese? You remember?’

‘I’m not likely to forget. I haven’t had my hands on the product for so long, it’s not as if I could confuse it. What about it?’

‘It looks like there’s some sort of crap in it. There’s four junkies dead in S036, and according to what I hear, there’s another seven in hospital in intensive care.’

Tadeusz raised his eyebrows. East Kreuzberg, known locally by its old GDR postal code, was the heart of the city’s youth culture. Bars, clubs, live-music joints kept the area round Oranienstrasse buzzing towards dawn every night. It was also home to many of the city’s Turks, but there were probably more vendors of street drugs than of kebabs in the scruffy, edgy suburb. ‘Since when have you given a shit about dead junkies, Darko?’ he asked.

Krasic shifted his shoulders impatiently. ‘I don’t give a shit about them. There’ll be four more tomorrow queuing up to take their place. Thing is, Tadzio, nobody pays any attention to one dead junkie. But even the cops have to sit up a bit when there are four bodies on the slab and it looks like there are more to come.’

‘How can you be sure it’s our junk that’s killing them? We’re not the only firm on the streets.’

‘I made some inquiries. All of the dead ones used dealers who get their supplies from our chain. There’s going to be heat on this.’

‘We’ve had heat before,’ Tadeusz said mildly. ‘What makes this so special?’

Krasic made an impatient noise. ‘Because it didn’t come in the usual way. Remember? You handed it over to Kamal yourself.’

Tadeusz frowned. The hollow feeling in his stomach had returned. He recalled the bad feeling he’d had about this deal, the unease that had stolen up on him in the Danube boatyard. He’d tried to avoid the fates by changing the routine, but it seemed that the measures he’d taken to sidestep trouble had simply brought it to his door by a more direct route. ‘Kamal’s a long way from the street dealers,’ he pointed out.

‘Maybe not far enough,’ Krasic growled. ‘There have always been cut-outs between you and Kamal before. He’s never been able to say, “Tadeusz Radecki personally supplied me with this heroin,” before. We don’t know how much the cops know. They might be just a step or two away from him. And if he’s looking at a deal that will save him too much hard time, he might just think about giving you up.’

Now Tadeusz was really paying attention, his languid disinterest a distant memory. ‘I thought Kamal was solid.’

‘Nobody’s solid if the price is right.’

Tadeusz turned in his seat and fixed Krasic with his sharp blue eyes. ‘Not even you, Darko?’

‘Tadzio, I’m solid because nobody can afford my price,’ Krasic said, clamping a beefy hand on his boss’s knee.

‘So, what are you saying?’ Tadeusz moved his leg away from Krasic, unconsciously making physical the distance he knew existed between them.

Krasic shifted in his seat, turning to stare out of the window past Tadeusz. ‘We could afford to lose Kamal.’

Two months ago, Tadeusz would simply have nodded and said something like, ‘Do whatever it takes.’ But two months ago Katerina had still been alive. He hadn’t yet had to revise his understanding of loss. It wasn’t that he harboured some sentimental notion that Kamal could be to someone what Katerina had been to him; he knew Kamal, knew his venality, his power games, his pathetic strutting attempts at being someone worth reckoning with. But his experience of the wrench of sudden death had opened up a channel for empathy in quite unexpected directions. The idea of having Kamal killed on the off-chance that it might be for his personal benefit sat uncomfortably with Tadeusz now. Side by side with this was the consciousness that he could not afford to reveal what Krasic would surely see as a weakness. One would be very foolish indeed to show too much of the soft underbelly to a man like Krasic, however loyal he had always been. All this flashed through Tadeusz’s head in an instant. ‘Let’s wait and see,’ he said. ‘Getting rid of Kamal right away would only draw the cops’ attention in that direction. But if there’s any sign that they’re moving towards him … you know what to do, Darko.’

Krasic nodded, satisfied. ‘Leave it with me. I’ll make some calls.’

The car swept past Schloss Charlottenburg and turned into the quiet side street where Tadeusz lived. ‘Talk to me in the morning,’ he said, opening the door and closing it behind him with quiet finality. He walked into the apartment building without a backward glance.

Even though the sky outside was grey and overcast, Carol’s eyes still took a few moments to adjust to the gloomy interior of the little quayside pub where Tony had suggested they meet. She blinked rapidly as she registered the quiet country music playing in the background. The barman looked up from his paper and gave her a quick smile. She glanced around, taking in the fishing nets draped from the ceiling, their brightly coloured floats dulled by years of cigarette smoke. Watercolours of East Neuk fishing harbours dotted the wood panelling of the walls. The only other customers appeared to be a couple of elderly men, their attention firmly on their game of dominoes. There was no sign of Tony.

‘What can I get you?’ the barman asked as she approached.

‘Do you do coffee?’

‘Aye.’ He turned away and switched on a kettle that perched incongruously among the bottles of liqueurs and aperitifs below the gantry of spirits.

Behind her, the door opened. Carol turned her head and felt a tightening in her chest. ‘Hi,’ she said.

Tony crossed the few yards to the bar, a slow smile spreading. He looked as out of place in the bar as he always had everywhere outside his own rooms. ‘Sorry I’m late. The phone just wouldn’t stop ringing.’ There was a moment’s hesitation, then Carol turned to face him and they hugged, her fingers remembering the familiar feel of his well-worn tweed jacket. The couple of inches he had on her made him a good fit for her five feet and six inches. ‘It’s good to see you,’ he said softly, his breath whispering against her ear.

They parted and sized each other up. His hair had started to thread with silver round the temples, she noted. The wrinkles round his dark blue eyes had deepened, but the ghosts that had always flickered in his gaze seemed to be finally at rest. He looked healthier than she’d ever seen him. He remained slim and wiry, but he felt firmer in the hug, as if his compact frame had built a subtle layer of muscle. ‘You look well,’ she said.

‘It’s all this fresh sea air,’ he said. ‘But you – you look terrific. You’ve changed your hair? It’s different somehow.’

She shrugged. ‘New hairdresser. That’s all. He styles it a bit more sharply, I think.’ I can’t believe I’m talking about hairdressing, she thought incredulously. Two years since we’ve seen each other, and we’re talking as if there had never been more between us than casual acquaintance.

‘Whatever, it looks great.’

‘What can I get you?’ the barman interrupted, placing a single cup with an individual coffee filter in front of Carol. ‘Milk and sugar in the basket at the end of the bar,’ he added.

‘A pint of eighty shilling,’ Tony said, reaching for his wallet. ‘I’ll get these.’

Carol picked up her coffee and looked around. ‘Anywhere in particular?’ she asked.

‘That table in the far corner, over by the window,’ he said, paying for the drinks and following her to a spot where a high-backed settle cut them off from the rest of the room.

Carol took her time stirring her coffee, knowing he would recognize the displacement activity with his usual cool detachment, but unable to stop herself. When she looked up, she was surprised to see he was staring just as intently at his beer. Some time in the past two years he had absorbed something new into his behaviour; he’d learned to give people a break from his analytical eye. ‘I appreciate you taking the time for this,’ she said.

He looked up and smiled. ‘Carol, if this is what it takes to get you to come and visit, all I can say is it’s a small price to pay. E-mail’s all very well, but it’s also a good way to hide.’

‘For both of us.’

‘I wouldn’t deny it. But time passes.’

She returned his smile. ‘So, do you want to hear my Mission Impossible?’

‘Straight to the point, as always. Listen, what I thought, if it’s OK with you, is that we could get you settled in at your hotel then go back to my place to discuss what they’ve got lined up for you. It’s more private than a pub. I only suggested meeting here because it’s easier to find than my cottage.’

There was something more that he wasn’t saying. She could still read him, she was relieved to find. ‘Fine by me. I’d like to see where you’re living. I’ve never been here before – it’s amazingly picturesque.’

‘Oh, it’s picturesque, all right. Almost too picturesque. It’s very easy to forget that passions run as high in picture postcard fishing villages as they do on the mean streets.’

Carol sipped her coffee. It was surprisingly good. ‘An ideal place to recuperate, then?’

‘In more ways than one.’ He looked away for a moment, then turned back to face her, his mouth a straight line of resolve. She had a shrewd idea what was coming and steeled herself to show nothing but happiness. ‘I’m … I’ve been seeing someone,’ he said.

Carol was aware of every muscle it took to smile. ‘I’m pleased for you,’ she said, willing the stone in her stomach to dissolve.

Tony’s eyebrows quirked in a question. ‘Thank you,’ he said.

‘No, I mean it. I’m glad.’ Her eyes dropped to the gloomy brown of her coffee. ‘You deserve it.’ She looked up, forcing a brightness into her tone. ‘So, what’s she like?’

‘Her name’s Frances. She’s a teacher. She’s very calm, very smart. Very kind. I met her at the bridge club in St Andrews. I meant to tell you. But I didn’t want to say anything until I was sure something was going to come of it. And then … well, like I said, e-mail is a good place to hide.’ He spread his hands in apology.

‘It’s OK. You don’t owe me anything.’ Their eyes locked. They both knew it was a lie. She wanted to ask if he loved this Frances, but didn’t want to hear the wrong answer. ‘So, do I get to meet her?’

‘I told her we’d be working this evening, so she’s not coming over. But I could call her, ask if she’d like to join us for dinner if you’d like?’ He looked dubious.

‘I don’t think so. I really do need to pick your brains, and I have to go back tomorrow.’ Carol drained her coffee. Picking up her cue, Tony finished his drink and stood up.

‘It’s really good to see you, you know,’ he said, his voice softer than before. ‘I missed you, Carol.’

Not enough, she thought. ‘I missed you too,’ was what she said. ‘Come on, we’ve got work to do.’

7

All violent death is shocking. But somehow murder in a beautiful nineteenth-century house overlooking a tranquil canal, a medieval seat of learning and an impressive church spire provoked a deeper sense of outrage in Hoofdinspecteur Kees Maartens than the same event in a Rotterdam back street ever had. He’d come up the ranks in the North Sea port before finally managing a transfer back to Regio Hollands Midden, and so far his return to his childhood stamping grounds had lived up to his dreams of a quieter life. Not that there was no crime in this part of Holland; far from it. But there was less violence in the university town of Leiden, that was for sure.

Or so he’d thought until today. He was no stranger to the abuse that one human – or several combining in the same blind fury – could inflict on another. Dockside brawls, pub fights where insults real and imaginary had provoked clashes out of all proportion, assaults and even murders that turned sex workers into victims were all part of a day’s work on the Rotterdam serious crimes beat, and Maartens reckoned he had grown a second skin over years of exposure to the ravages of rage. He’d decided he was impervious to horror. But he’d been wrong about that too.

Nothing in his twenty-three years at the sharp end had prepared him for anything like this. It was indecent, rendered all the more so by the incongruity of the setting. Maartens stood on the threshold of a room that looked as if it had been fundamentally unchanged since the house had been built. The walls were covered from floor to ceiling with mahogany shelving, its ornate beading warm with the muted gleam of generations of polishing. Books and box files filled every shelf, though he couldn’t see much detail from here. The floor was burnished parquet, with a couple of rugs that looked worn and dull to Maartens. Not something I would have chosen in so dark a room, he thought, conscious that he was avoiding the central focus of the room with all his mental energy. Two tall windows looked out across the Maresingel to the historic town centre beyond. The sky was a washed-out blue, thin strips of cloud apparently hanging motionless, as if time had stopped.

It had certainly stopped for the man who occupied the hub of this scholar’s study. There was no question that he was dead. He lay on his back on the wide mahogany desk that stood in the middle of the floor. Each wrist and ankle was tied to one of the desk’s bulbous feet with thin cord, spread-eagling the dead man across its surface. It looked as if his killer had tied him down fully dressed, then cut his clothes away from his body, exposing the lightly tanned skin with its paler ghost of swimming trunks.

That would have been bad enough, a profanation Maartens hoped his middle-aged body would be spared. But what turned indignity into obscenity was the clotted red mess below the belly, an ugly wound from which rivulets of dried blood meandered across the white flesh and dripped on to the desk. Maartens closed his eyes momentarily, trying not to think about it.

He heard footsteps on the stairs behind him. A tall woman in a tailored navy suit, honey blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, appeared on the landing. Her round face was serious in repose, her blue eyes shadowed beneath straight dark brows. She was pretty in an unremarkable way, her understated make-up deliberately making her appear even more bland and unthreatening. Maartens turned to face Brigadier Marijke van Hasselt, one of his two team co-ordinators. ‘What’s the story, Marijke?’ he asked.

She produced a notebook from the pocket of her jacket. ‘The owner of the house is Dr Pieter de Groot. He’s attached to the university. Lectures in experimental psychology. Divorced three years ago, lives alone. His teenage kids come to visit every other weekend. They live just outside Den Haag with the ex-wife. The body was discovered this morning by his cleaner. She let herself in as usual, saw nothing out of the ordinary, did the ground floor then came on up here. She glanced in the study door and saw that –’ Marijke gestured with her thumb at the doorway. ‘She says she took a couple of steps inside the room, then ran downstairs and called us.’

‘That’s the woman who was waiting on the doorstep with the uniformed officer when we got here?’

‘That’s right. She wouldn’t stay in the house. Can’t say I blame her. I had to talk to her in the car. Tom’s rounded up some of our team and set them on door-to-door inquiries.’

Maartens nodded approval of her fellow coordinator’s action. ‘Later, you can go over to the university, see what they can tell you about Dr de Groot. Is the scene-of-crime team here yet?’

Marijke nodded. ‘Outside with the pathologist. They’re waiting for the word from you.’

Maartens turned away. ‘Better let them in. There’s bugger all else we can do here till they’ve done their stuff.’

Marijke looked past him as he moved towards the staircase. ‘Any idea on the cause of death?’ she asked.

‘There’s only one wound that I can see.’

‘I know. But it just seems …’ Marijke paused.

Maartens nodded. ‘Not enough blood. He must have been castrated around the time of death. We’ll see what the pathologist has to say. But for now, we’re definitely looking at a suspicious death.’

Marijke checked her boss’s dour face to see if he was being ironic. But she could see no trace of levity. In two years of working with Maartens, she seldom had. Other cops protected themselves with black humour, an instinct that sat comfortably with her. But comfort was the one thing that Maartens seemed inclined to prevent his team ever experiencing. Something told her they were going to need more than Maartens’s austerity to get them through a murder as horrible as this. She watched him descend, her heart as heavy as his tread.

Marijke crossed the threshold of the crime scene. The recherche bijstandsteam had a fixed system, even though murders didn’t happen often enough on their patch to be routine occurrences. Her role while Maartens briefed the forensic team and the pathologist was to make certain the crime scene remained secure. She took latex gloves and plastic shoe covers out of the leather satchel she always carried with her and put them on. Then she walked in a straight line from the door to the desk, which brought her level with the dead man’s head. This study of the dead was her job, the one Maartens always avoided. She was never sure if he was squeamish or simply aware that he was better occupied elsewhere. He was good at putting people to tasks that suited them, and she had never flinched at the sight of the dead. She suspected it was something to do with being a farm girl. She’d been accustomed to dead livestock since early childhood. Marijke really didn’t care how much noise the lambs made.

What she cared about was what this body could teach her about victim and killer. She had ambition; she didn’t intend to end her career as a brigadier in Hollands Midden. Every case was a potential stepping stone to one of the elite units in Amsterdam or Den Haag, and Marijke was determined to shine whenever she got the chance.

She stared down at the corpse of Pieter de Groot with a clinical eye, one fingertip straying to touch the distended abdomen. Cool. He’d been dead for a while, then. She frowned as she looked down. There was a circular stain on the polished surface of the desk, forming a nimbus round the head as if something had been spilled there. Marijke made a mental note to point it out to the scene-of-crime team. Anything out of the ordinary had to be checked out.

In spite of her intention to scan methodically every inch of the body and its surroundings, her eyes were irresistibly drawn to the crusted blood surrounding the raw wound. The exposed flesh looked like meat left unwrapped overnight on a kitchen counter. As she realized what she was seeing, Marijke’s stomach gave an unexpected lurch. From a distance, she’d made the same assumption as Maartens. But de Groot hadn’t been castrated. His genitals were still attached to his body, albeit smeared grotesquely with blood. She sucked in a mouthful of air.

Whoever had killed the psychologist hadn’t removed his sexual organs. His murderer had scalped his pubic hair.

Carol leaned on the window sill, the steam from her coffee making a misty patch on the glass. The weather had closed in overnight, and the Firth of Forth was a rumpled sheet of grey silk with slubs of white where the occasional wave broke far from shore. She longed for her familiar London skyline.

It had been a mistake to come here. Whatever she’d gained professionally from the trip was more than cancelled out by the rawness of the emotion that Tony’s presence had stirred up in her. Bitterly, she acknowledged to herself that she had still been clinging to a sliver of hope that their relationship might finally catch fire after an appropriate gap of time and space. The hope had crumbled like a sandcastle in the sun with his revelation that he had moved forward, just as she had always hoped he would. Except that she wasn’t the companion he had chosen to share the journey with.

She hoped she hadn’t let the depth of her disappointment show as they’d left the pub, forcing her face to smile the congratulation of a friend. Then she’d turned away, letting the sharp north-easterly wind give her an excuse for smarting eyes. She’d followed his car up the hill away from the picture-postcard harbour to the small hotel where he’d arranged a room for her. She’d taken a defiant ten minutes to repair her make-up and arrange her hair to its best advantage. And to change out of her jeans into a tight skirt that revealed more than anyone in the Met had ever seen. She might have lost the battle, but that didn’t mean she had to beat a bedraggled retreat. Let him see what he’s missing, she thought, throwing down a gauntlet to herself as much as to him.

Driving back to his cottage, they’d said little of consequence, making small talk about life in a small town. The cottage itself was much as Carol had expected. Whatever this woman meant to Tony, she hadn’t stamped her identity over his space. She recognized most of the furniture, the pictures on the wall, the books lined up on shelves along the study wall. Even the answering machine, she thought with a faint shudder, ambushed by memory.

‘Looks like you’ve settled in,’ was all she said.

He shrugged. ‘I’m not much of a homemaker. I went through it with a bucket of white paint then moved all the old stuff in. Luckily most of it fitted.’

Once they were settled in the study with mugs of coffee, present constraints somehow slipped away and the old ease that had existed between them reasserted itself. So while Tony read the brief that Morgan had couriered to Carol that morning, she curled up in a battered armchair and browsed an eclectic pile of magazines ranging from New Scientist to Marie Claire. He’d always read a strange assortment of publications, she remembered fondly. She’d never been stuck for something to read in his house.

As he read, Tony made occasional notes on a pad propped on the arm of his chair. His eyebrows furrowed from time to time, and occasionally his mouth quirked in a question that he never enunciated. It wasn’t a long brief, but he read it slowly and meticulously, flipping back to the beginning and skimming it again after he’d first reached the end. Finally, he looked up. ‘I must admit, I’m puzzled,’ he said.

‘By what, in particular?’

‘By the fact that they’re asking you to do something like this. It’s so far outside your field of experience.’

‘That’s what I thought. I have to assume there’s some aspect of my experience or my skills that overrides my lack of direct undercover work.’

Tony pushed his hair back from his forehead in a familiar gesture. ‘That would be my guess. The brief itself is more or less straightforward. Pick up the drugs from your source, exchange the parcel of drugs for cash and return it to your first contact. Of course, I’m assuming they’ll throw spanners in the works along the way. There wouldn’t be any point in it otherwise.’

‘It’s supposed to be a test of my abilities, so I think it’s fair to expect the unexpected.’ Carol dropped the magazine she was reading and tucked her legs underneath her. ‘So how do I do it?’

Tony glanced at his notes. ‘There’s two aspects to this – the practical and the psychological. What are your thoughts?’

‘The practical side’s easy. I’ve got four days to go at this. I know the address for the cash pick-up and I know the general area where I’m going to be doing the handover. So I’m going to check out the house where I’ve got to go for the money. Then I’m going to get to know the various routes from A to B like the back of my hand. I need to be able to adjust to any contingencies that crop up, and that means knowing the terrain well enough to change my plans without having to think twice. I need to think about what I’m going to wear and how easily I can adapt my appearance to confuse anyone who’s watching me.’

He nodded, agreeing. ‘But of course, some of the practicalities are conditional on the psychological aspects.’

‘And that’s the bit I don’t have a handle on. Which is why I’m here. Consulting the oracle.’ Carol gave a mock salute.

His smile was self-mocking. ‘I wish my students had the same respect for my abilities.’

‘They’ve not seen you in action. They’d change their tune then.’

His mouth narrowed in a grim line and she saw a shadow in his eyes that had been missing before. ‘Yeah, right,’ he said after a short pause. ‘Sign up with me and see circles of hell that Dante could never have imagined.’

‘It goes with the territory,’ Carol said.

‘Which is why I don’t live there any more.’ He looked away, his eyes focused on the street beyond the window. He took a deep breath. ‘So. You need to know how to walk in someone else’s shoes, right?’ He turned back to face her, a forced expression of geniality on his face.

‘And under their skin.’

‘OK. Here’s where we start from. We measure people by how they look, what they do and what they say. All our assessments are based on those things. Body language, clothes, actions and reactions. Speech and silence. When we encounter someone, our brain enters into a negotiation between what it’s registering and what it has stored in its memory banks. Mostly, we only use what we’ve got locked up there as a control to judge new encounters. But we can also use it as a sampler on which to base new ways of acting.’

‘You’re saying I already know what I need to know?’ Carol looked dubious.

‘If you don’t, even someone as smart as you isn’t going to learn it between now and next week. The first thing I want you to do is to think about someone you’ve encountered who would be relatively comfortable in this scenario.’ He tapped the papers with his pen. ‘Not over-confident, just reasonably at home with it.’

Carol frowned as she flicked back through her memories of criminals she’d gone head to head with over the years. She’d never worked with the Drugs Squad, but she’d encountered both dealers and mules more often than she could count when she’d been running the CID in the North Sea port of Seaford. None of them seemed to fit. The dealers were too cocky or too fucked up by their own product, the mules too lacking in initiative. Then she remembered Janine. ‘I think I’ve got someone,’ she said. ‘Janine Jerrold.’

‘Tell me about her.’

‘She started out as one of the hookers down at the docks. She was unusual, because she never had a pimp. She worked for herself, out of an upstairs room in a pub run by her aunt. By the time I came across her, she’d moved on to something a bit more lucrative and less physically dangerous. She ran a team of organized shoplifters. Occasionally, we’d lift one of the girls, but we never got our hands on Janine. Everybody knew she was behind it. But none of her girls would grass her up, because she always looked after them. She’d turn up to court to pay their fines, cash on the nail. And if they got sent down, she made sure their kids were looked after. She was smart, and she had so much bottle.’

Tony smiled. ‘OK, now we’ve got Janine in our sights. That’s the easy bit. What you have to do now is construct Janine for yourself. You need to mull over everything you’ve seen her do and say, and work out what ingredients went into the mix to make her the woman she is now.’

‘In four days?’

‘Obviously, it’s going to be a rough draft, but you can work something up in that time. Then comes the really hard bit. You’ve got to shed Carol Jordan and assume Janine Jerrold.’

Carol looked worried. ‘You think I’m up to it?’

He cocked his head on one side, considering. ‘Oh, I think so, Carol. I think you’re up to just about anything you set your mind to.’

There was a moment of silence, electric and pregnant. Then Tony jumped to his feet and said, ‘More coffee. I need more coffee. And then we need to plan what we’re going to do next.’

‘Next?’ Carol said, following him into the hall.

‘Yes. We haven’t got much time. We need to start role-playing right away.’

Before Carol could answer, there was the unmistakable sound of a key turning in the lock. They both swivelled round to face the front door, their faces rigid with surprise. The door swung open to reveal a trim woman in her late thirties. She pulled her key out of the lock, giving them both a smile whose warmth evaded her eyes. ‘Hi, you must be Carol,’ Frances said, pushing the door to behind her, stuffing her keys into her pocket and holding out her hand. Her eyes were scanning Carol from head to toe, taking in the short skirt with a slight raise of the eyebrows.

Carol shook it automatically.

‘Carol, this is Frances,’ Tony gabbled.

‘Why on earth are you hanging around in the hall?’ Frances asked.

‘We were going to make more coffee,’ Tony said, backing into the kitchen doorway.

‘I’m sorry to butt in,’ Frances said, steering Carol into the living room. ‘I feel so stupid about this. But I left a pile of fourth-year jotters that I was marking last night. I was in such a rush, I clean forgot them this morning. And I need to give them their essays back tomorrow.’

Yeah, right, thought Carol, watching with a cynical eye as Frances picked up a pile of school notebooks tucked away round the far side of the sofa.

‘I was just going to sneak in and fetch them. But if you were breaking for a cup of coffee, I might as well join you.’ Frances turned and fixed Carol with a sharp stare. ‘Unless I’m interrupting something?’

‘We’d just reached a natural break,’ Carol said stiffly. She knew she should say something along the lines of how pleased she was to meet Frances, but while she might have what it took to go undercover, she still didn’t feel comfortable lying in a social situation.

‘Tony?’ Frances called. ‘I’ll stop for a quick coffee, if that’s OK.’

‘Fine,’ came the reply from the kitchen. Carol was reassured to hear he sounded as enthusiastic as she felt.

‘You’re not at all how I’d imagined you,’ Frances said, chilly dismissal in her voice.

Carol felt fourteen again, snagged on the jagged edge of her maths teacher’s sarcasm. ‘Most people don’t have much idea about what cops are really like. I mean, we’ve all been to school, we know what to expect from teachers. But people tend to rely on TV for their images of police officers.’

‘I don’t watch much TV myself,’ Frances said. ‘But from the little that Tony has said about you, I was expecting someone more … mature, I suppose is the word. But look at you. You look more like one of my sixth-year students than a senior police officer.’

Carol was spared from further sparring by Tony’s return. They sat around for twenty minutes making small talk, then Frances gathered up her marking and left them to it. After he saw her out, Tony came back into the room shaking his head ruefully. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said.

‘You can’t blame her,’ Carol said. ‘Probably just as well you weren’t showing me the view from the upstairs rooms, though.’

It should have been a cue for laughter. Instead, Tony looked at the carpet and stuffed his hands in the pockets of his jeans. ‘Shall we get on?’ he said.

They’d worked on various role-plays for the rest of the evening, not even stopping over dinner. It was demanding work, taking all Carol’s concentration. By the time the taxi came to take her back to her hotel, she was worn out from the combination of exercising her imagination and exorcizing her emotions. They said their farewells on the doorstep, stepping into an awkward hug, his lips brushing the soft skin under her ear. She’d wanted to burst into tears, but had held herself tightly in check. By the time she’d returned to the hotel, she felt only a hollowness in her stomach.

Now, as she stared out across the sea, Carol allowed herself to acknowledge her anger. It wasn’t directed at Tony; she acknowledged he had never held out an unfulfilled promise to her. Her fury was all turned against herself. She had no one else to blame for the emotional heartburn that plagued her.

She knew she had two choices. She could let this rage fester inside her like a wound that could poison her whole system. Or she could finally draw a line under the past and use that energy to drive her forward into the future. She knew what she wanted to do. The only question was whether she could manage it.

Case Notes

Name: Pieter de Groot

Session Number: 1

Comments: The patient’s lack of affect is notable. He is unwilling to engage and shows a disturbing level of passivity. Nevertheless, he has a high opinion of his own capabilities. The only subject on which he seems willing to discourse is his own intellectual superiority. His self-image is grandiose in the extreme.

His demeanour is not justified by his achievement, which seems best described as mediocre. However, his view of his capacities has been bolstered by a nexus of colleagues who, for unspecified reasons, have demonstrated a lack of willingness to question his own valuation of himself. He cites their failure in this respect as a demonstration of support for his own estimation of his standing in the community.

The patient lacks insight into his own condition.

Therapeutic Action: Altered state therapy initiated.

8

The laden Rhineship ploughed on towards Rotterdam, its glassy bow wave barely altering as the brown river widened, the Nederrijn imperceptibly becoming the Lek, then taking in the broad flow of the Nieuwe Maas. For most of the morning, he’d been blind to the passing scenery. They’d drifted through small, prosperous towns, with their mixture of tall townhouses and squat industrial buildings, church spires stabbing the flat grey skies, but he couldn’t have described a single one of them, save from memory of previous trips. He’d registered neither the grassy dykes that obscured the lengthy stretches of flat countryside nor the graceful sweeps of road and rail bridges that broke up the long reaches of river.

The pictures he kept seeing were very different. The way Pieter de Groot had crumpled to the floor when he’d hit him on the back of his head with the sap he’d made himself, sewing the soft chamois leather with tight stitches then stuffing it with bird-shot. He couldn’t imagine himself ever doing what de Groot had done, trusting a stranger enough to turn his back on him within five minutes of meeting. Anyone that careless of his safety deserved what was coming to him.

More thrilling pictures. The panic in the heartless bastard’s eyes when he’d come round to find himself bound naked to the top of his own desk. Curiously, his terror had subsided when the bargee had spoken. ‘You’re going to die here,’ he’d said. ‘You deserve it. You’ve played at being God. Well, now I’m going to teach you what happens when somebody plays God with you. You’ve fucked up people’s heads for too long, and now it’s your turn to get fucked up. I can make it fast because, believe me, you don’t want it to be slow. But if you scream when I take the gag out of your mouth, I’m going to hurt you so much you’ll be begging to die.’ He’d been surprised by the reaction. His first victim had struggled, refusing to accept it was pointless. That, it seemed to him, was a natural response. It had irritated him, because it had made his work more difficult. But he’d respected it. It was how a man should behave.

The professor in Leiden, though. He’d been different. It was as if he instantly recognized that the person staring down at him was beyond the reach of any argument he could raise against his fate. He’d given up the ghost there and then, his eyes dull with defeat.

Cautiously, he’d taken the gag from the man’s mouth. The psychologist hadn’t even tried to plead. In that moment, he’d felt a terrible kinship with his victim. He didn’t know what had happened in the man’s life to give him this capacity for resignation, but he identifed an echo of his own learned behaviour and hated de Groot all the more for it. ‘Very fucking sensible decision,’ he’d said gruffly, turning away to hide his unease.

He didn’t want to think about that moment.

More beautiful pictures. The heaving chest, the convulsive jerking and twitching of a body fighting to stay on the right side of eternity. It made him feel better to replay his newly minted memories like this. He couldn’t remember anything else that had ever made him feel so light-hearted.

And afterwards, the other pleasure he’d discovered, an unforeseen. Now at last he was able to show those whores who was boss. After he’d killed the professor in Heidelberg, he’d been astonished to find, driving back to the boat, that he wanted a woman. He was mistrustful of the urge that had so humiliated him in the past, but he told himself that he was a different man now, he could do what the hell he wanted.

So he’d made a detour to the back streets near the harbour and picked up a whore. She’d had a place to take him to, and he’d paid extra for the privilege of tying her up, spread-eagling her over the stained bed as he’d spread-eagled his victim over his desk. And this time, there had been no mortification. He’d been hard as a rock, he’d fucked her with brutal speed, he’d made her groan and beg for more, but it hadn’t been her he’d seen, it had been the mutilated body he’d left behind. He felt like a god. When he’d finished, he’d untied her and forced her on to her stomach so he could celebrate his new potency by sodomizing her too. Then he’d left, throwing her a handful of coins to demonstrate his contempt.

He’d driven back to the boat on a high such as he’d never known, not even after he’d killed the old man.

It wasn’t what he’d learned from Heinrich Holtz after the funeral that had lifted the curtain of darkness inside him or helped him to forgive his grandfather. Sometimes he wondered if he possessed the ability to forgive; so many responses that other people took for granted had been squeezed out of him. If they’d ever been there in the first place.

But what he had understood was who he could use to make a new library of memories that would bring him joy and light. For a long time, he had brooded, wondering how he could make his torturers pay. What had finally illuminated the road to his release was the terrible humiliation he’d suffered at the hands of that bitch of a Hungarian whore. It wasn’t the first time he’d been taunted, but it was the first time someone had sounded just like his grandfather. A dizzying blackness had engulfed him, blocking out everything except an insatiable rage. In an instant, he’d had his hands round her throat, so tight her face had turned purple, her tongue poking out like a gargoyle. But in that moment when he had literally held her life in his hands, he’d suddenly realized it wasn’t her he wanted to kill.

He’d fallen away from her, gasping and sweating, but simultaneously clear-headed, his feet set on a new path. He’d staggered into the night, an altered man. Now, he had a mission.

His pleasure in the remembrance of things past was broken by the arrival of Manfred with a steaming mug of coffee. He didn’t begrudge the interruption, however. It was time something brought him back to earth. He’d been steering all morning on automatic pilot, which wasn’t good enough for the stretch of river that lay ahead. The congested waters of Rotterdam were a deathtrap for the inattentive skipper. As the Nieuwe Maas swept through its wide bends towards the various side channels leading to wharves and moorings, tugs and barges and launches were constantly on the move. They could shoot out insouciantly from blind corners at outrageous speed. Avoiding collisions required all his attention to the radar screen as well as to the waters around him. Up in the bows, Gunther scanned the waterway, a second pair of eyes for what lay ahead, where the skipper’s view was often obscured.

For now, he had to concentrate on getting them to safe harbour. The boat was all that mattered, for without the boat he was nothing; his mission would be scuppered. Besides, he was proud of his skills as a Rhine skipper. He had no intention of becoming the butt of dockside laughter.

Later, there would be plenty of time to indulge himself, to let the darkness fold back and bask in the light. While they were unloading, he could return to his memories. And perhaps plan how he would add to his store.

Brigadier Marijke van Hasselt wrinkled her nose. Not minding the dead was one thing; enduring the assorted stenches and sights of a postmortem was something that required rather more fortitude. The early stages had been fine. Nothing bothered her about the weighing and measuring, the freeing of head and hands from their plastic coverings, the scraping from under each individual fingernail, all meticulously recorded on audio and video tape by Wim de Vries, the pathologist. But she knew what lay ahead, and it wasn’t a prospect for the delicate of stomach.

At least de Vries wasn’t one of those who relished the humiliation of the police officers who had to attend postmortems. He never brandished organs like a gleeful offal butcher. Rather, he was calm and efficient, as respectful of the dead as the disassembling of their physical secrets allowed him to be. And he spoke plainly when he found something the attending officer needed to know. All of which was a relief to Marijke.

Delicately, he continued his external examination. ‘Some traces of froth in the nostrils,’ he said. ‘Consistent with drowning. But none in the mouth, which surprises me,’ he added as he shone a light into de Groot’s mouth. ‘Wait, though …’ He peered more closely, reaching for a magnifying glass. ‘There’s some bruising at the back of the throat here, and contusions on the insides of the lips and cheeks.’

‘What does that mean?’ Marijke asked.

‘It’s too early to be precise, but it looks as if something was forced into his mouth. We’ll know more later.’ Efficiently, he took a series of swabs from the body’s several orifices then began to pay attention to the external injuries.

‘The excision of the pubic hair is quite neat,’ he said. ‘Only a few signs of tentative cuts on the navel here.’ He pointed with a latex-covered fingertip. ‘You see? I’ve never seen this before. Pubic scalping, I suppose you’d have to call it. Your perpetrator has been careful not to damage the genitals themselves.’

‘Was he still alive when it happened?’

De Vries shrugged. ‘The scalping was done very close to death itself. He was either just dead or dying when it happened.’ He continued to examine the body, pausing at the left side of the head. ‘Nasty bump here.’ His fingers probed the lump. ‘Slight abrasion of the skin. Blunt force trauma. He took a blow to the head some time before he died.’ He nodded to the technician. ‘Let’s roll him.’

Marijke stared down at the pattern of lividity on de Groot’s back. The hollow of his neck, the small of his back, the thighs above the crook of his knees were stained purple as a bruise with the blood that had drained there, drawn downwards by the inexorable force of gravity. Where he had been pressed against the surface of the desk, the flesh remained a ghastly white; the shoulders, the buttocks, the calves. It reminded Marijke of a strange abstract painting. De Vries pressed a thumb against the shoulder of the corpse. When he withdrew it, there was no change. ‘So,’ he said, ‘hypostasis is in the second stage. He has been lying dead in this position for at least ten to twelve hours. And he hasn’t been moved after death.’

Now came the part Marijke hated. The body was replaced on its back and the dissection began. She slid her eyes sideways. To the casual observer, it would look as if she was paying close attention to what de Vries was doing, but in reality, she was staring at the tray of instruments as if her life depended on committing them to memory in some perverse version of Kim’s Game. The dissecting knife, for incisions and removal of organs, with its metal two-piece handle and four-inch disposable blades. The brain knife with its fine twelve-inch blade for making thin sections of the delicate tissue. The scissors and scalpels and forceps for things she didn’t want to think about. The oscillating-bladed Stryker saw for cutting bone without destroying the surrounding tissues. The T-shaped chisel called the skull key, for extra leverage when prying apart the bones of the cranium.

So it was she missed the moment when de Vries cracked open the chest and the pale distended lungs ballooned out of the cavity. ‘I thought so,’ he said, satisfaction creeping through his professional demeanour and demanding her attention like a leg-winding cat.

‘What’s that?’ She dragged her reluctant eyes from the surgical tools.

‘Look at the state of the lungs.’ He poked a finger into the grey tissue that bulged through the space between the ribs. It left a clear indentation. ‘He’s been drowned.’

‘Drowned?’

De Vries nodded. ‘No doubt about it.’

‘But you said he died in the position where he was found.’

‘That’s right.’

Marijke frowned. ‘But there was no water there. He was tied to his office desk. It’s not like it was a bathroom or a kitchen. How could he be drowned?’

‘Very unpleasantly,’ de Vries said, his tone neutral, his eyes fixed on the work of his hands. ‘Judging by the state of the mouth and the windpipe, I think some sort of funnel or tube was forced into his airway and water was poured down it. You said he was tied down, and I can see the marks of the ligatures for myself. He couldn’t have put up much of a struggle.’

Marijke shuddered. ‘Jesus. That’s cold.’

De Vries shrugged. ‘That’s your province, not mine. I just read what the body has to say. Thankfully, I don’t have to deal with the mind behind it.’

But I do, the detective thought. And this is a very nasty one. ‘So the cause of death would be drowning?’ she asked.

‘You know I can’t say that for sure at this stage. But it certainly looks that way.’ De Vries turned back to the cadaver, slipping his hands into the abdominal cavity and lifting out the mass of the internal organs.

Drowning, she thought. Not something you’d come up with in the heat of the moment. Whoever did this, he planned it very carefully. He came equipped for what he had to do. If this was a crime of passion, it was a very strange passion indeed.

Carol closed the heavy door of her flat and leaned against it, kicking off her shoes. She crossed one leg over the other and bent to massage the liberated toes. She’d spent the whole day tramping around the back streets of Stoke Newington, Dalston and Hackney, looking at the world around her with the eyes of a criminal. It wasn’t so different from the cop’s take on the world. They were both looking for possible escape routes, possible targets of crime, possible gaps in security. But before, she’d been the hunter. Now she had to calculate what the quarry might need.

She’d memorized back alleys, vacant lots, hiding places. She’d checked out pubs with rear exits, kebab shops whose back door might be accessible to someone with quick enough wits and sharp enough elbows, gypsy cab firms whose drivers parked round the corner from the main drag, ready for a swift getaway. She’d learned which houses offered easy access to back gardens that could double as escape routes. She’d spent three days among the traffic fumes, stale cooking smells and cheap perfume of the streets, dressing to blend with the heterogeneous mixture of those hoping they were upwardly mobile and those living with the knowledge they were going nowhere but down. She’d eavesdropped on accents from five continents, checked out who attracted attention as they passed by, who was ignored.

It wasn’t anywhere near enough, but it would have to do. Tomorrow she would spend polishing her performance, then it would be time for the real thing.

9

It was like picking a scab. The agony was exquisite, but the activity was irresistible. Tadeusz sat at the polished slab of burl oak that served as the desk in his home office, sorting through his photographs of Katerina. There were the public shots; the pair of them arriving at a film premiere, her radiant looks causing the snappers to take her for some minor starlet; a charity dinner, Katerina feeding him a piece of lobster with her fingers; Katerina at the formal opening of the day-care centre she’d helped raise funds for. There was a series of studio portraits that he’d persuaded her was the only birthday present he wanted from her. That the camera had loved her was clear from their sensuous quality.

Then there were the dozens of snaps he’d taken of her, some casual, others painstakingly set up. Katerina in Paris, posed with her head at an angle so the Eiffel Tower was reflected in her mirrored shades; Katerina in Prague, Wenceslas Square the dramatic backdrop; Katerina in the market place in Florence, rubbing the gleaming bronze nose of the wild boar statue for luck; and Katerina in a bikini sprawled on a sun lounger, one leg cocked at the knee, reading a trashy airport novel. He couldn’t even remember if that last one had been taken on Capri or Grand Cayman. For some reason, it had ended up out of sequence among the Prague photographs. So much for every picture telling a story.

He’d always meant to put the photographs into albums, but there had never been time while she’d still been alive, while he’d been adding to the archive constantly. Now, he had all the time in the world to arrange the images of Katerina in whatever sequence he desired. Tadeusz sighed and reached for one of the leather-bound albums he’d chosen himself earlier that week from a photographic supplies wholesaler. He flipped open another wallet of snapshots and began to trawl through, discarding the images of landscapes and interesting architectural details, winnowing out the best shots of Katerina and arranging the first three on the page. Painstakingly, he mounted them, then wrote next to them in his neat hand, ‘Katerina, Amsterdam. Our first weekend together.’ He’d have to check the exact date in his diary, a realization that angered him. It seemed wrong that every detail wasn’t carved in memory, a small token of disrespect that Katerina didn’t deserve.

The buzz of the video entryphone interrupted him and he closed the album, getting to his feet and crossing the hall to the small screen sunk discreetly into the wall by the apartment door. Darko Krasic stood outside, half-turned towards the avenue, his eyes shifting back and forth in a constant surveillance. Even here in the respectable streets of Charlottenburg, his lieutenant didn’t take his safety for granted. Krasic always quoted his father, a fisherman. ‘One hand for the boat, one hand for yourself.’ Tadeusz didn’t mind what some might have seen as paranoia; as far as he was concerned, it was directed towards keeping him safe as much as Krasic, and therefore a bonus rather than a cause for concern.

He buzzed Krasic in at the ground floor, putting the apartment door on the latch and heading through to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. He’d barely taken the beans from the freezer when Krasic strode in, head down and shoulders wide, a man looking for somewhere to put his belligerence. He knew better than to direct it at his boss, however. ‘We’ve got trouble,’ he said in a surprisingly calm voice.

Tadeusz nodded. ‘I heard the radio news earlier. Another two dead junkies in some shitty nightclub in Oranienstrasse.’

‘That makes seven, counting the one who died in intensive care.’ Krasic unbuttoned his overcoat and took a cigar case from his inside pocket.

‘I know.’ He dumped the beans in the grinder and killed all prospect of conversation for a few seconds. ‘I can count, Darko.’

‘So can the media. They’re kicking up a real stink, Tadzio. This isn’t going to go away. The cops are under a lot of pressure.’

‘That’s what we’re paying them for, isn’t it? To take the pressure and leave our people alone?’ He tipped the ground coffee into a cafetiere and poured the hot water over it.

‘Some things they can’t ignore. Seven dead, for example.’

Tadeusz frowned. ‘What are you saying, Darko?’

‘It’s gone past the point where our normal protection can take care of things. They’re going to arrest Kamal tonight. We’ve had our card marked, that’s as far as our man can stick his neck out right now.’ He lit his cigar and puffed luxuriously.

‘Fuck. Can we control what happens?’

Krasic shrugged. ‘It depends. If he’s looking at seven murder charges, Kamal might think it’s worth taking the risk of giving me up. Or even you. If they offer him immunity, he might decide his best chance is to take us off the streets. Give himself a breathing space and trust to the witness protection programme.’

Tadeusz pressed the plunger down slowly, his mind flipping through the options. ‘We’re not going to let it go that far,’ he said. ‘Time for the pawn sacrifice, Darko.’

Darko allowed himself a thin smile. Tadzio hadn’t lost it. ‘You want me to make sure he never gets as far as the police station?’

‘I want you to do whatever it takes. But make it look good, Darko. Give the press something to take their minds off all those dead wasters.’ He poured two cups of coffee, pushing one towards the Serb.

‘I’ve already got one or two ideas on that score.’ He raised his cup in a toast. ‘Leave it with me. You won’t be disappointed.’

‘No,’ Tadeusz said firmly. ‘I won’t be. Now, losing Kamal leaves us with a gap. Who’s going to fill it, Darko? Who’s got what it takes to walk in a dead man’s shoes?’

It had been a long day, but Brigadier Marijke van Hasselt was too wired for sleep. She’d delivered the results of the postmortem – death by drowning, as de Vries had tentatively predicted early on in the autopsy – at a briefing with her boss, Maartens, and her opposite number, Tom Brucke. Though none of them had said it in so many words, they really didn’t have a single lead.

They’d masked the insecurity this inevitably produced with the familiar police routines that they all knew in their bones. Briskly, Maartens had outlined the ground rules for the investigation, assigning tasks to one team or the other, acting as if this was a directed inquiry that already had its terms of reference clearly mapped out. But they all knew they were groping in the dark for Pieter de Groot’s killer.

Most murders were easy. They fell into one of three broad categories: domestic disputes jacked up one step too far; drunken brawls that escalated beyond the initial intent; or the incidentals of other criminal activity, usually connected to drugs or violent robbery. The Leiden killing didn’t fit any of these categories. Nobody in the victim’s immediate circle had an obvious motive, nor was this the kind of murder that arose from the engorged or embittered passions of domestic relationships. Besides, the ex-wife and the current girlfriend both had alibis, the one at home with her children, the other visiting her sister in Maastricht.

Maartens had remarked that they needed to take a look at his professional life. He couldn’t imagine that anyone at the university would have turned to murder to solve some scholastic dispute, but with so few threads to grasp, they had to be sure they weren’t missing the obvious. He’d heard that passions could run high in the rarefied atmosphere of academic research, and there were some very strange people around in higher education, especially in areas like psychology.

Marijke had said nothing, unwilling to provoke further her boss’s prejudice against university graduates like herself. Although Maartens was every bit as clued in about modern policing as any of his colleagues, he still clung to some of the old-school attitudes of his youth, and she didn’t want what was an already complicated investigation made any more awkward. She’d acknowledged his assignment of the university connection to her team with a quick nod. It would almost certainly be a complete waste of time, and it would have to wait until after the weekend, but she’d make sure the job was done thoroughly.

Tom Brucke’s team had begun their canvass of the neighbourhood, but so far they’d drawn a blank. Nobody had seen or heard anything that had any apparent relevance to the murder. It wasn’t the sort of area where a strange car would immediately be noticed by the neighbours, and few people paid attention to individual pedestrians on a street where there was regular foot traffic. Whoever had killed Pieter de Groot, he hadn’t drawn attention to himself.

Marijke had spent the rest of the day supervising a search of de Groot’s home, to see if there was anything that might be construed as a clue to the bizarre scenario that had been played out in the upstairs room. But there was nothing. She wondered about what was missing, however. There was no sign of a diary, desk calendar or personal organizer in the office. She couldn’t believe a man like de Groot wouldn’t have some sort of aide memoire for his appointments in his home office. She’d even had one of the technicians check over his computer to see if he kept an electronic diary, but that had drawn a blank too.

But sometimes absences held their own clues. To Marijke, this lack said that whoever had killed Pieter de Groot was no casual caller. He’d been expected, and he’d taken care to remove all trace of that appointment. If she was right, there was a chance that there might be a duplicate note of the arrangement in de Groot’s diary at the university. She made a note to herself to make sure she was there when they entered his office, and set one of her officers the task of getting them admission first thing in the morning.

Eventually, she grudgingly accepted there was nothing more for her to do. Her team was busy with the tedious routine of sifting material and information that would probably prove useless. They didn’t need her. The best way she could serve the inquiry now was to go home and let her mind turn over what little they knew. Sleep, she always found, was the best possible state in which to uncover new angles of approach.

But sleep wasn’t going to come any time soon, Marijke knew. She poured herself a glass of wine and settled herself down in front of her computer. Some months previously, she’d become a subscriber to an on-line newsgroup for gay police officers. Not that there was any problem with being a lesbian and a Dutch police officer, nor did she have a ghetto mentality. But sometimes it was helpful to have what she thought of as a room of one’s own and, via the newsgroup, she’d developed close friendships with a handful of other officers whose take on the world chimed comfortingly with her own. More than that, she’d formed a bond of particular intimacy with a German colleague. Petra Becker was a criminal intelligence officer in Berlin and, like Marijke, senior enough not to be entirely comfortable with close confiding relationships with her colleagues. Like Marijke, Petra was also single, another damaged survivor of the attrition of their career on relationships. They’d been cautious with each other at first, escaping from the newsgroup into private live chat rooms where they could write more openly about thoughts and feelings. They were both aware that each had found some special connection to the other, but they were equally reluctant to push for a face-to-face encounter in case it shattered what they valued.

And so they had developed the habit of spending an hour or so in each other’s virtual company several nights a week. Tonight there was no prior arrangement in place, but Marijke knew that if Petra was at home and awake, she’d be in one of the public chat rooms on the gay police site, and that she’d be able to tempt her away from the crowd into private discussion.

She connected to the website and clicked on the <chat> icon. There was a list of public discussion areas, and she went straight to the Debating Forum, a room where people tended to talk about policy and its impact on their work. Half a dozen people were engaged in a heated argument about undercover operations, opinions flying as fast as fingers could type, but Petra wasn’t one of them. Marijke exited and entered the Lesbian Issues area. This time, she was lucky. Petra was one of three women rehashing a recent Danish case of alleged lesbian rape, but as soon as she saw Marijke’s name on her screen, she escaped and took her into a private area where they could exchange on-screen messages without anyone eavesdropping.

Petra: hello, love. how are you tonight?

Marijke: I just got in. We caught a murder today.

P: that’s never fun.

M: No. And this was a really nasty one.

P: domestic? street?

M: Neither. The worst kind. Ritualistic, organized, no obvious suspects. Clearly personal, but in an impersonal sort of way, if you see what I mean.

P: who’s the victim?

M: A professor at the university in Leiden. Pieter de Groot. His cleaner found the body. He was in his study at home, staked out naked on his desk. He’d been drowned by having a funnel or a pipe shoved down his throat, then water poured through it.

P: very nasty. was he one of those scientists who do animal experiments?

M: He was an experimental psychologist. I don’t know much detail about what he did. But I don’t think this is about animal rights. I think this was a one-on-one. There’s more, you see. Whoever did this, they didn’t stop at killing. There’s mutilation as well.

P: genital?

M: Yes and no. The killer left his prick and balls intact, but scalped his pubic hair. I’ve never seen anything like it. It was almost worse than if he’d been castrated. That would have made more sense, more typical of what the sexually motivated killer would do.

P: you know, this is ringing bells with me. some bulletin i glanced at. not one of ours, a cry for help from another force.

M: You mean there’s been a case like this in Germany?

P: can’t say for certain. but something’s niggling at the back of my mind. i’ll do a computer trawl in the office.

M: I don’t deserve you, do I?

P: no, you deserve much better. so, now we got the shop talk out of the way, you want to get personal?

Marijke smiled. Already, Petra had reminded her that there was more to life than murder. At last, she could see a route that might take her to sleep.

10

The Wilhelmina Rosen sat unusually high in the water. She’d discharged her cargo that morning, but someone at the shipping agency had screwed up, and the load that should have been stowed that afternoon had been delayed till the following day. He wasn’t unduly anxious. He could probably make up the day once they were under way, even if it meant bending the rules about how long their watches should be. And the crew were happy enough. They weren’t going to complain about a night ashore in Rotterdam, since it wasn’t a delay that would put a dent in their pay.

Alone in his cabin, he unlocked a small brass-bound chest that had belonged to his grandfather and contemplated its contents. The two jars had originally contained pickled gherkins, but what floated inside now was infinitely more grisly. Preserved in formalin he’d stolen from a funeral parlour, the skin had lost its flesh tints and assumed the colour of tinned tuna. Fragments of the small muscles were darker, standing out against the skin like a cross-section of tuna steak grilled rare. The hair remained curled, though now it had the harsh dullness of a bad wig. Still, there could be no doubting what he was looking at.

When he had first fantasized about this, he’d known he would need some souvenir to remind himself how well he’d done. He had read books about murderers who had excised breasts, removed genitalia, stripped the skin from their victims to clothe themselves. None of this seemed right. They were weirdos and perverts, whereas he was driven by a motive far more pure. But he wanted something, and he needed it to hold meaning for him alone.

He ranged over the indignities he’d been forced to suffer at the hands of the old man. There was no blurring at the edges of his memory. Even commonly repeated tortures failed to merge into one big picture. Every detail of every mortification was pinprick sharp. What could he take that would keep his purpose fresh, clear and meaningful?

Then he’d remembered the shaving. It had happened soon after his twelfth birthday, a day unmarked by gifts or cards. The only reason he knew it was his birthday was that he’d caught a glimpse of his birth certificate a few months before when the old man had been sorting through some papers. Until then, he’d had no date to call his own. He’d never had so much as a birthday card, never mind presents, cakes and parties. But who could have been invited to any party of his? He had no friends, he had no wider family. As far as he was aware, the only people who even knew his name were the crew of the Wilhelmina Rosen.

He’d known he was born some time in the autumn, because around the turning of the leaves, the litany of rage that poured into his ears would alter. Instead of, ‘You’re eight years old, but you still act like a baby,’ the old man would snarl, ‘You’re nine now, time you learned what it is to take some responsibility.’

Around the time he turned twelve, he’d noticed the changes. He’d grown taller, his shoulders straining the seams of his flannel work shirts. His voice had become unreliable, shifting registers as if he were possessed by a demon. And around his cock, dark wiry hairs had started to sprout. He’d imagined this would happen eventually. He’d spent too long living in close confinement with three adult males not to have grasped that at some point his body was going to duplicate theirs. But the reality was simply another source of anxiety. He was leaving childhood behind, without any clear idea of how he could ever become a man.

His grandfather had noticed the changes too. It was hard to imagine how he could be more brutal, yet he seemed to regard it as a challenge to find fresh sources of humiliation. Things had reached a new level of horror when a hawser snapped one morning as they were docking in Hamburg. It had been one of those things that was nobody’s fault, but the old man had decided that someone had to pay the price.

When they’d got back to the apartment, he had ordered the boy to strip. He’d stood shivering in the kitchen, wondering which of the familiar agonies awaited him, while his grandfather had raged through to the bathroom, swearing and insulting him. When the old man had returned, he was carrying his cutthroat razor, the blade open and gleaming like silver in the dimness of the afternoon light. Terror had risen like bile in his throat. Convinced he was going to be castrated at the very least, he’d sprung at the old man, fists flying, desperate to escape whatever lay ahead.

He hadn’t even seen the punch that hit the side of his head like a mallet. All he knew was a moment of crushing pain, then oblivion. When he’d opened his eyes, it was dark. There was a dribble of dried vomit running from his cheek to the floor and a burning pain in his groin that was sufficiently frightening to render insignificant the dull throb in his head. He lay for long minutes, curled on the cold linoleum, afraid to allow his hands to explore for fear of what they might find.

Eventually, he dared. His fingers crept down his stomach, tentative and slow. At first, he encountered only the cold, smooth flesh of his stomach. Then, just above the pubic bone, there was a sudden change in texture and a jagged stab of pain that made him suck his breath in sharply. He clenched his jaw and pushed himself up on one elbow. It was too dark to see anything, but he decided he’d risk turning on a light. It might bring even more wrath down on his head, but he couldn’t bear not knowing what had happened to him.

Almost crying with the several pains that movement brought, he managed to get to his knees, where he paused to let a nauseating dizziness pass. Using the table as a prop, he dragged himself to his feet and tottered the few steps to the kitchen light switch. He leaned against the wall and flicked the switch with trembling fingers. Dim yellow light filled the dingy room, and he steeled himself for a glance.

The skin around his genitals was red raw. Every trace of pubic hair had been erased, along with the top layer of skin. There were pinprick scabs of blood where the razor had gone deeper still, but the cruel scraping of the tender skin was the source of the burning pain that coursed through his groin. He’d been more than shaved, he’d been skinned. He’d been reminded forcibly that he wasn’t fit to think of himself as a man. He hated himself then, contempt swallowing him like a black tide.

Looking back now, he realized his panicky rebellion had been a turning point. From then on, his grandfather had been less ready to inflict his tortures. The old man began to keep his distance, relying on the verbal flaying that could still reduce the teenage boy to quivering incompetence. He thought about running away, but where would he run to? The Wilhelmina Rosen was his only world and he doubted his ability to survive in any other. Gradually, as he had emerged into his twenties, he comprehended that there might be another way to gain freedom. It had been a painfully slow process, and in the end, he had won.

But that victory still hadn’t been enough. He’d known that before Heinrich Holtz had told his story in the beer garden. What Holtz had given him was a glimpse of how he could finally get his own back. He’d given him a way to be a man.

He picked up one of the jars and swirled it round, watching the contents move in a slow danse macabre. He smiled as he unzipped his jeans.

Tadeusz Radecki was far too smart to be nothing more than a gangster. He’d built a legitimate business empire of video-rental stores that provided him not only with a justifiable income to keep the tax authorities happy, but also allowed enough leeway in its accounting procedures to permit a serious amount of money laundering. If his business rivals had ever seen his company’s books, they’d have wondered how he could achieve such high rental levels per video and probably fired their own marketing teams out of pique. But that wasn’t going to happen. Tadeusz made sure his public business was above reproach. Not for him the shady back-street video stores with their under-the-counter hardcore, or the wraps of drugs that changed hands in the video boxes. It might be his wares they were peddling, but there was no way he wanted any official connection to them.

That afternoon, he’d been visiting his flagship store at the top of the Ku’damm, where they did as much business selling videos as they did renting them out. He’d gone to check out the revamp that the most stylish shopfitters in the city had been carrying out, and he’d been impressed with the result. Clean lines, moody lighting and a coffee bar in the middle of the shop floor came together to produce the perfect ambience for browsing and spending.

After the tour of the shop, the manager had taken him up to his office for a celebratory glass of wine. As they’d entered, the TV screen had been showing a news channel. A reporter stood in a street Tadeusz recognized immediately as Friesenstrasse in Kreuzberg. Behind him was the unmistakable four-storey building that housed the GeSa, the detention centre where all newly arrested criminals were brought. It wasn’t somewhere Tadeusz was personally familiar with; he knew the street principally because he always bought his reading material at the Hammett crime bookshop there.

The reporter’s mouth was opening and closing soundlessly, his frowning face indicating the seriousness of what he was revealing to the waiting world. Then the picture changed to amateur video footage of a man being hustled out of a car towards the heavy grey door of the GeSa, a uniformed officer on either side of him. Suddenly, a woman ducked under the barrier that prevented cars from driving straight into the yard from the street. The officers on duty in the guard post were caught unawares, only emerging from their booth as the woman ran up behind the prisoner and his escort, waving something in front of her. She stopped a couple of yards away from them, directly behind the prisoner. In an instant, his head blossomed scarlet, like a blob of spaghetti sauce splattered on a kitchen surface. The police officers peeled away from him as he crumpled. They hit the deck with their pale faces turning towards the woman. Even at that range, it was possible to see their eyes stretching wide in panic.

Tadeusz stared at the screen, appalled. He’d only seen the sniper’s victim for a few seconds, and then only in three-quarter profile. But he knew who the dead man was. He was aware of the shop manager saying something and he turned away from the screen. ‘Sorry?’ he said.

‘I said, it’s funny how real-life shootings never look half as dramatic as the ones we sell.’ He reached for the open bottle of red wine on his desk and poured two glasses.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a real-life shooting before,’ Tadeusz lied. ‘I’m quite shocked they’re showing it in all its glory on the early evening news.’

The manager laughed as he handed a glass to his boss. ‘I’m sure the moral guardians of the nation’s youth will be clogging the TV station switchboard with complaints as we speak. Cheers, Tadeusz. Good decision to choose those guys. They’ve made a great job of the shop floor.’

Tadeusz raised his glass mechanically, reaching for his mobile with his other hand. ‘Yes. Now I need to find a way to justify the expense of doing up the rest of the chain. Excuse me.’ He touched a couple of keys to speed-dial Krasic. ‘It’s me,’ he said. ‘We need a meeting. I’ll see you at my place in half an hour.’ He ended the call without waiting for Krasic’s response, then sipped his wine. ‘Lovely stuff, Jurgen, but I’m afraid I’ve got to run. Empires to build, new worlds to conquer – you know how it is.’

Twenty minutes later, he was pacing the floor in front of his TV screen, flipping channels to see if he could find a local news station that was running the footage of Kamal’s assassination. Finally, he caught the tail end of the video and immediately raised the volume. The studio anchorman took up the story. ‘The dead man, whose name has not yet been released, had been arrested in connection with the seven heroin deaths in the city in the past week. Sources close to the investigation say that the woman who fired the fatal shot was the girlfriend of one of the addicts who died after shooting up with contaminated drugs. Already, there are calls for an inquiry into how the woman found out about the arrest before the prisoner had even been taken into formal custody.’ He glanced down at his papers. ‘And now over to our correspondent at the Reichstag, where representatives have been debating new measures to combat the spread of BSE …’

Tadeusz hit the mute button. He’d heard all he needed to know. When Krasic finally arrived five minutes late, complaining about the traffic, he launched straight in. ‘What the hell are you playing at?’

‘What do you mean, Tadzio?’ Krasic stalled. It was clear from the troubled look in his eyes that he knew exactly what his boss meant.

‘Fuck it, Darko, don’t play stupid games with me. What possessed you? Having Kamal taken out on the steps of the fucking police station? I thought we were trying to take the limelight off this investigation, not turn it into the lead story across the country? Jesus, you couldn’t have gone for a more public display.’

‘What else was I supposed to do? There wasn’t enough time to stage a convenient road accident …’ His voice tailed off as he realized what he’d said.

The colour drained from Tadeusz’s face. He looked terrifying in the shadows cast by the subtle lighting of the room. ‘You insensitive bastard,’ he snarled. ‘Don’t think you can divert me away from this fiasco by reminding me of Katerina.’

Krasic turned away and scowled. ‘That’s not what I meant. I just meant that I didn’t have enough time to set something up that would look accidental. So I reckoned if it was going to end up looking like murder, it needed to look like a domestic, not something to do with the business. So I got Marlene to do the dirty. She’s been working for us, shifting product in Mitte for the past couple of years. She’s not a user herself. And she’s smart enough to play the distraught girlfriend, deranged with grief. She’ll get away with next to nothing when it comes to court. And she won’t grass us up. She’s got a six-year-old girl I’ve promised we’ll take care of. She knows me well enough to understand what that means. One word out of place and the kid gets taken care of, though not in the way she wants. Boss, it was the only way. It had to be done, and it had to be done like this.’ There was no plea in Krasic’s voice, just a convinced finality.

Tadeusz glared at him. ‘It’s all going to shit,’ he complained. ‘This was supposed to go away. Instead, Kamal’s whole life is going to come under the microscope.’

‘No, boss, you’re wrong. It’s Marlene they’re going to be looking at. Before we’re done, we’ll have turned her into the heroine who rid the city of some vile drug-dealing scum. Like I told you, she’s not a user. Her life looks clean. And we can put up plenty of people who’ll make her sound like Mother fucking Teresa. Photographs of the six-year-old looking lost. Stuff about how she was trying to get her boyfriend off the junk. Besides, now they’ve seen how we dealt with Kamal, nobody else is going to say a thing to the cops. Trust me, Tadzio, it’s for the best.’

‘It had better be, Darko. Because if it all goes to shit, I know exactly who to blame.’

11

Tony glanced at the clock as he left the seminar room. Five past eleven. Carol would almost certainly have embarked on her quest by now. He wondered where she was, how she was doing, what she was feeling. Her visit had unsettled him more than he cared to admit. It wasn’t just that she had disturbed him on a personal level; he’d been expecting that and had done what he could to armour himself against the turbulent currents he knew would be swirling beneath the surface of any encounter between the pair of them.

What he hadn’t anticipated was how she would stir him up on a professional level. The pleasure he’d taken in the preparation they’d done had been the mental equivalent of a cold shower. It had snapped his synapses to attention in a way that no interaction with undergraduates had ever done. It had reminded him that he was operating at about half his capacity here at the university, and while that might have been sensible as a kind of convalescence from the harrowing he’d undergone at the hands of Jacko Vance, it was no way to spend the rest of his life. If he’d needed further reinforcement, it had just fallen into his lap.

He’d always feared this moment. Deep down, he’d known the siren call of what he did best might rise again to waken him from the slumberous existence he’d chosen. And he’d done everything in his power to guard against that moment. But the combination of the news of Jacko Vance’s appeal and the return of Carol Jordan had been too strong for his fortifications.

Things had changed since he’d last been in the front line, he knew that. Quietly, privately, the Home Office had taken a sideways step from using professional psychologists as consultants on complex serial murder investigations. The publicity that had been generated by their earlier policy had given them too many sweaty-palmed moments for them to be willing to continue it indefinitely. Not everyone was as talented as Tony; and few were as close-mouthed. Although there were still a handful of experts who were called in on an ad hoc basis, the police had been busy behind the scenes building their own skills base at the National Crime Faculty at Bramshill. Now there was a new breed of criminal analyst, officers trained in an impressive mixture of psychological skills and computer navigation. Like the FBI and the Canadian RCMP, the Home Office had decided that it was better to rely on police officers trained in specialist areas than to call on the sometimes questionable skills of clinicians and academics who, after all, had no direct experience of what it took to catch a criminal. So, in one sense, there was no longer a place for Tony doing what he believed he had a unique talent for. And after the last debacle there was no way any politician would agree to give him any training or developmental role.

But perhaps there was something else he could offer. Perhaps he could find a niche that would allow him occasionally to flex his analytical muscles in pursuit of the profoundly disturbed minds who committed the most unreadable of crimes.

And perhaps this time, with Carol almost certainly moving to some new role in Europol, he could escape the turmoil that had accompanied his last two excursions into the minds of serial killers. It was certainly worth thinking about.

The only question now was who he could reach out to in a tentative approach. The Vance appeal would have reminded people of his existence. Maybe this was the perfect time to jog their memories a little more, to persuade them that he alone had something to throw into the ring that nobody else had. Not only did he understand how the mind of the serial offender worked; he was one of the few people on the planet who had actually been responsible for putting some of them where they could do no more harm.

It wouldn’t hurt to try.

That Monday morning in Berlin, Petra Becker was also thinking about serial offenders. It would be a terrific boost to her career if she managed to be the person who made the links that demonstrated there was a serial killer working across European borders.

But first she had to find the case she’d been reminded of. Petra sat and frowned at her computer, the severity of her expression a sharp contrast to the spiky exuberance of her short dark hair. Parallel lines furrowed her broad forehead and her eyebrows shadowed her blue eyes, turning them navy. She knew she’d read about it relatively recently, but she’d dismissed it as being of no interest. Petra worked in intelligence. Her team were responsible for gathering information on organized crime, building a basic case, then passing it on to the appropriate law enforcement bodies. With European borders allowing free passage to the criminal as well as the law-abiding following the Schengen Agreement, that frequently meant colleagues in other countries, often using Europol as a conduit. In the past three years, Petra had investigated areas as diverse as product tampering, drug running, credit-card fraud and human trafficking. Murder wasn’t normally on her beat, except when the investigating officers thought there might be a connection to organized crime. It was, she thought cynically, a way of handing off any difficult case that looked remotely like a scum-on-scum killing, the sort of scuzzy case that most police forces didn’t lose any sleep over if they couldn’t nail a culprit.

So the case she was looking for would have come in as a possible gangland killing. But if it had been tossed aside because it didn’t fit any of their parameters, it wouldn’t be in any of the holding files on the computer. It might even have been deleted from the main system, on the basis that it was just clutter.

Petra, however, was too anally retentive to dump case information without a trace. You never knew when something written off by everyone else might just feed into a subsequent investigation. So she’d developed the habit of taking brief notes even on the apparently irrelevant. That way, she could always go back to the original investigating officers and pull the details again.

She called up the folder that contained her notes and checked the recent files. There were four murder cases from the past seven weeks. She dismissed a drive-by shooting in a small town between Dresden and the Polish border and the murder of a Turk in Stuttgart. He’d bled to death following the amputation by machete of both hands. Petra had thought it was probably more to do with some domestic settling of scores than any organized criminal activity, since the local cops hadn’t come up with a single thing to connect the dead man to anything more illegal than an expired visa.

That left two cases. A very strange murder in Heidelberg and the crucifixion of a known drug dealer in Hamburg. Her notes said nothing about pubic scalping, but she seemed to recall it had featured in one or other of those cases. She checked the reference numbers and sent e-mails to both police divisions involved. With luck, she’d have an answer by the end of the day.

Petra headed for the coffee machine, feeling very pleased with herself. She was emptying a sachet of sugar into her cup when her boss, Hanna Plesch, joined her. ‘You’re looking cheerful,’ she said.

‘And you’re going to put a stop to that, right?’ She cocked an eyebrow at her.

‘That shooting over at the GeSa on Friesenstrasse – I want you to do a bit of digging, see what you can come up with.’ Plesch leaned past her and pressed the button for a black coffee.

Petra stirred her coffee thoughtfully. ‘It’s hardly our area, is it? I heard it was being written up as a personal thing. The shooter was the girlfriend of one of the doctored heroin victims, wasn’t she?’

Plesch gave a sardonic smile. ‘That’s the official line. Me, I think it stinks. She’s on our files, you know, the woman who did the shooting. Marlene Krebs. We had intelligence that she was dealing in Mitte. Small fry, so we left her alone. But we heard she’s tied in to Darko Krasic.’

‘Which means she might be a way through to Radecki,’ Petra continued. ‘So you want me to talk to her?’

Plesch nodded. ‘It could be worth our while. She probably thinks she’s looking at a light sentence if she plays the sympathy card – woman insane with grief takes revenge on the evil drug pusher who destroyed her lover. If we can persuade her that’s not going to happen …’

‘She might just give us something we can use to build a case against Krasic and Radecki.’ Petra sipped her coffee, wincing at the heat.

‘Exactly.’

‘Leave it with me,’ she said. ‘I reckon as soon as she finds out who I am and what I know about her, she’ll realize she hasn’t got a cat in hell’s chance of making the deranged lover defence work. Can you let me have whatever we’ve got on her?’

‘It’s already on your desk.’ Plesch began to move away.

‘Oh, and Hanna … ?’

She paused and glanced over her shoulder. ‘You want something else.’ It was a statement, not a question.

‘Someone else. I need someone out on the street in Mitte. We need to establish that the dead guy really wasn’t Marlene’s man.’

‘Hard to prove a negative.’

‘Maybe so. But if we can nail down who Marlene has been shagging, it might rule out a connection to the dead guy. Likewise, if we can establish whether he was involved with anyone on a long-term basis …’

Plesch shrugged. ‘Probably worth a try. The Shark’s got nothing pressing on his plate. Send him out for some red meat.’

Petra’s heart sank as she walked back to her desk. The Shark was an ironic nickname for the most junior member of the squad. He’d earned it because he had no taste for blood and was incapable of moving backwards to reassess new data in the light of experience. Nobody thought he would last long on the squad. He wasn’t the person she would have chosen to trawl the bars and cafés of Mitte, probing their sources to find out what was to be learned about Marlene Krebs. It showed what a waste of time Plesch thought that was. Still, it was better than nothing. And she could always head out there herself that evening if she’d not managed to pry something useful out of Krebs in exchange for a deal on her sentence.

It wasn’t as if she had anything better to do.

Even though it was a raw, damp day, Carol was sweating. She’d carried out the first part of her assignment without a hitch, but she knew she was a long way off being home and dry. The detailed brief had arrived by courier just after seven. She’d ripped open the thin envelope, almost tearing the contents in her haste. There was a single sheet of paper inside. It informed her that she should be at the address she had previously been given by ten a.m. There, she would be provided with the rest of her instructions.

Her first instinct was to arrive right on time at the rendezvous, an anonymous terraced house in Stoke Newington. But that might be the first test in itself. Perhaps she was supposed not to do what was expected of her. Hurriedly, she showered and dressed in the clothes she’d decided Janine Jerrold would have worn for such an assignment. A short black lycra skirt, a white T-shirt with long sleeves and a scoop neck under a fitted fake leather jacket. In her shoulder bag she carried everything she needed to change her look. A baseball cap, aviator frames with clear glass lenses, a pair of denim leggings and a lightweight waterproof kagoule in a nasty shade of pale blue. Also in the shoulder bag was an illegal CS gas spray and a metal comb with a sharpened tail. They were both relics of her days in CID in the port of Seaford, items she’d confiscated and never got round to handing in. She wasn’t quite sure how her watchers would react if she had to resort to them, but she was supposed to be showing initiative and acting like a real drugs courier. She could always argue the point afterwards.

Having decided to arrive early, Carol set out from her flat just after eight. She took a circuitous route to her destination. There would, she was sure, be followers, but she had no intention of making it easy for them. Taking advantage of the rush-hour commuters would be one way of improving her edge. Even so, she still jumped off the tube at the last possible moment, doubling back three stops before emerging at street level and catching a bus.

When she turned into the quiet side street, there was no one on her heels. But that didn’t mean there weren’t keen eyes on her. She climbed the three steps to the front door she’d been directed to. The paintwork was filthy with London grime, but it looked in reasonably good condition. She pressed the doorbell and waited. Long seconds passed, then the door opened a couple of inches. A pale face smudged with stubble and topped with a spiky crest of black hair peered at her. ‘I’m looking for Gary,’ she said, as instructed.

‘Who are you?’

‘Jason’s friend.’ Again, following her orders.

The door swung open, the man taking care to stay out of sight of the street as he let her in. ‘I’m Gary,’ he said, leading the way into the front room. He was barefoot, wearing faded 501s and a surprisingly clean white T-shirt. Dingy net curtains hung at the window, obscuring the street. The carpet was an indeterminate shade between brown and grey, worn almost to the backing in front of a sagging sofa that faced a wide-screen NICAM TV complete with DVD player. ‘Take a seat,’ Gary said, waving a hand at the sofa. It wasn’t an appetizing prospect. ‘I’ll be right back.’

He left her alone with the home entertainment centre. There was a stack of DVDs by the player, but that was the only personal touch in the room, which otherwise was about as welcoming as a police interview room. Judging by the titles, Gary was a fan of violent action movies. There wasn’t a single movie Carol would have paid money to see, and several she’d have parted with hard cash to avoid.

Gary was gone less than a minute. He returned with a plastic-wrapped package of white powder in one hand and a roll-up trailing a streamer of unmistakable dope smoke in the other. ‘This is the merchandise,’ he said, tossing the package towards her. Carol grabbed it without thinking, then realized this meant her fingerprints were now all over it. She made a mental note to wipe the surface as soon as she got the chance. She had no idea whether she’d be carrying the real thing, although she doubted it. But the last thing she needed was to get a tug from some eager copper who wasn’t part of the operation and be nailed with a half-kilo of cocaine with her prints all over it.

‘So where am I supposed to deliver it?’

Gary perched on the arm of the sofa and took a deep drag from the skinny joint. Carol studied his narrow face, itemizing the features as she habitually did. Just in case. Thin, long nose; hollow cheeks. Deep-set brown eyes. A plain silver ring through the left eyebrow. A jutting jaw with a definite overbite. ‘There’s a café-bar in Dean Street,’ he said. ‘Damocles, it’s called. The guy you’re meeting will be at the corner table at the back by the toilets. You hand over the package and he’ll give you a wad. You bring the cash back here to me. That clear?’

‘How will I know it’s the right guy? I mean, what if he can’t get that table.’

Gary rolled his eyes. ‘He’ll be reading Q magazine. And he smokes Gitanes. That enough? Or do you want his inside leg measurement?’

‘A description would help.’

‘Dream on.’

‘Or a name?’

Gary’s grin was crooked, revealing even teeth stained ivory. ‘Yeah, right, that’ll happen. Look, just do it, huh? I’ll be expecting you back here by two.’

Carol tucked the drugs away in her shoulder bag, placing the package between the folds of the denim leggings then rubbing the surface clean through the cloth. She didn’t care if Gary saw her. It wouldn’t hurt to have a witness to her prudence if he was, as she suspected, one of Morgan’s watchers. ‘See you later, then,’ she said, trying not to show the antagonism she felt. After all, there was no point. He was almost certainly someone like her, a cop thrust into an alien role for some purpose neither of them was allowed to know.

She returned to the street and shivered as a chill gust of wind cut through her thin clothes. The quickest way to Soho would mean turning left and heading back to the main road where she could pick up a bus. Which would be what they were expecting her to do. So she turned right and walked briskly towards the end of the street. From her earlier reconnaissance, Carol knew she could cut through the warren of back streets to a short alley between some shops that would bring her out on the other side of Stoke Newington, from where she could catch a train. They wouldn’t be expecting that, she reckoned.

At the corner, she quickened her pace to a trot, hoping to make the next corner before whoever was on her tail could catch up with her. She crossed into the next street, pulling the kagoule out of her bag as she went. Her next turning was almost upon her, and she swung quickly into a gateway, pulling the kagoule over her head and jamming the baseball cap over her blonde hair. Then she walked back into the street, this time adopting a slow, swaggering walk, as if she had all the time in the world.

When she reached the junction, she glanced over her shoulder. Nobody in sight apart from an elderly man clutching a supermarket carrier bag and shuffling down the opposite side of the street. Which meant nothing, she knew. She couldn’t allow herself to act as if she’d shaken off her pursuit.

Now the entrance to the alley was in sight. It was a narrow passage between high brick walls, easy to miss if you didn’t know it was there. With the adrenaline surge of relief, Carol turned into its gloomy mouth.

She was about a third of the way down when she realized she’d made a bad mistake. Heading towards her were two young men. There wasn’t quite enough room for them to walk side by side, but they were so close together she couldn’t possibly pass them. They looked like thugs; but these days, most men in their late teens and early twenties did. Carol found herself wondering, idiotically, when exactly it had become fashionable for respectable lads to look like potential muggers. This pair fit the identikit mould perfectly. Heads shaved to stubble, waterproof Nike jackets over football shirts, chinos and Doc Martens. There was nothing to distinguish them from thousands of others. Maybe that’s the point, she thought as they approached inexorably.

She desperately wanted to look behind her, to check her avenue of escape, but knew that would instantly be seen as a sign of weakness. The gap between her and the two men closed by the second and she could see their gait change almost imperceptibly. Now they were moving more cautiously on the balls of their feet, a pair of predators sizing up the prey. She had to assume they were part of the game. Which meant they’d stop short of doing her serious damage. To think otherwise was too disturbing. Carol was far too accustomed to being a woman in control of her environment to contemplate how easily she’d turned herself into a potential victim.

Suddenly they were upon her, jostling her from either side, backing her into the wall. ‘What have we got here, then?’ the taller of the two said, his voice a guttural North London taunt.

‘Yeah, what’s your name, darlin’?’ the other leered.

Carol chanced a look at the far end of the alley. It was clear. There were only the two of them.

Her moment’s inattention had given them their chance. The taller one grabbed at her bag. ‘Give it up,’ he demanded. ‘Save yourself a beating.’

Carol clung on grimly, leaning against the wall and adjusting her weight. Her left leg shot out in a savage kick, catching him on the inside of the kneecap. He howled in pain and rage, stumbling back and away from her, releasing the bag strap to grab his knee as he crumpled to the ground.

‘Fucking cunt,’ the other one said in a low voice that was far more frightening than a shout. He sprang towards her, right arm pulling back for a punch. Carol saw it all with slow-motion clarity. As he brought his fist towards her, she let herself drop and his momentum carried him forward into the wall.

It gave her a couple of precious seconds to grab the gas canister from her bag. As her first assailant scrambled to his feet, she let him have the CS gas straight in the face. Now he was really howling, screaming like an animal in a trap.

His mate swung round, ready for a second attack. When he saw her grinning like a madwoman, the spray can at arm’s length, pointing straight at him, he raised both hands, palms facing her, in the universal gesture of surrender. ‘Fucking take it easy, bitch,’ he shouted.

‘Get out of my fucking way,’ Carol snarled.

Obediently, he flattened himself against the wall. She edged past him, careful to keep the spray pointing at him all the time. His friend was still yelling, his eyes streaming and his mouth contorted in pain. Carol walked backwards in the direction of the street, never taking her eyes off them. The one who had punched the wall had his arm round the other now, and they were staggering towards the far end of the alley, all the bravado knocked out of them like the air from a punctured balloon. She allowed herself a small, private smile. If that was the best Morgan could throw at her, she was going to come out of this with flying colours.

She turned her back on her assailants and walked out into the busy street. It was hard to believe that only a matter of yards from this mid-morning bustle of shoppers and strollers she’d stared physical danger in the face. As the adrenaline surge receded, she became aware of the state she was in. Her upper body was drenched, the double skin of the vinyl jacket and the kagoule acting like a sweatbox on her skin. Her hair under the baseball cap felt plastered to her head. And she was starving. If she was going to complete this mission, she’d be crazy to ignore her body’s messages.

Up ahead, she saw the golden arches of a McDonald’s. She could get something to eat then use the toilet to clean herself up and switch from the skirt into her denim leggings. With luck it would have a functioning hot-air hand drier. She could maybe even alter her hairstyle, thanks to the sweat of panic.

Twenty minutes later, Carol was back on the street. Her hair was off her face, slicked back with a smear of hair wax. The aviator frames subtly altered the shape of her face. The jacket was zipped up, hiding the T-shirt underneath. She looked different enough from the woman who had rung Gary’s doorbell to confuse most casual observers. She knew it wasn’t enough to fool the sort of scrutiny she expected to be under, but it might be sufficient to buy her a few extra seconds when it counted.

She took her time getting to the station, browsing shop windows as if she was just another idle shopper wondering what to buy for dinner. But once there, she trotted up the steps to the platform just in time to catch the train. Good thing I checked out the timetable, she congratulated herself as she slumped into a corner seat in a carriage that smelled of dust. It was a breathing space. Time to figure out what came next.

12

Petra walked into the squad room of the GeSa. It was as depressing as every other one she’d been in. The net curtains that blurred the bars over the three windows were the dirty yellow of second-hand nicotine, the walls and floor the same graded shades of grey that characterized the rest of the GeSa. That fascinating gamut from dove to anthracite, Petra thought wryly. The Wachpolizisten stationed at the GeSa had tried to brighten up the room with the usual kitsch array of postcards, cartoons and photographs of their pets. A couple of tired plants struggled to cope with the absence of any direct sunlight. It only served to make the place even more depressing.

The room was empty except for a solitary female WaPo who was putting a plastic box full of a prisoner’s personal effects on one of the shelves. She turned as Petra leaned on the counter and cleared her throat. ‘I’m Petra Becker from Criminal Intelligence. I’m here to see Marlene Krebs,’ Petra said. ‘You’ve still got her, right?’

The WaPo nodded. ‘She’s due to see the judge in a couple of hours, then she’ll be transferred, I guess. Don’t you want to wait till then?’

‘I need to talk to her now. I can use the lawyer’s room, yeah?’

The WaPo looked uncertain. ‘You better talk to the boss. He’s in the report room.’

‘That’s down at the end of the cell block, right?’

‘Behind the fingerprint room, yes. You’ll need to leave your gun here.’

Petra took her pistol from its holster in the small of her back and locked it into one of the lockers for visiting officers. Then she headed out of the squad room towards the cell corridor. She glanced up at the electronic alert system the cops sarcastically called the room-service board. None of the alarm lamps was lit; for once the prisoners were being well-be-haved, not driving the GeSa team crazy with constant summonses.

The cell block itself was surprisingly sterile and modern. The usual linoleum gave way to red brick tiles on floor and walls. Most of the doors were closed, indicating that they were occupied. A couple were open, revealing a small vestibule, beyond which wall-to-wall bars enclosed four square metres of cell equipped with a bed and a rectangular hole in the floor covered with a chrome grid in case the inmates decided not to ring for a toilet visit and just fouled the cell. It was a mistake most of them made only once; the cost of cleaning the cell after such acts of defiance was billed directly to the prisoners.

Petra wondered which door concealed Marlene Krebs, and how she was coping. Badly, she hoped. It would make her job that much easier.

She found the shift commander in the Schreibzimmer, frowning at one of the Berliner Modell computers. She explained her mission, and he asked her to wait while he organized an interview. ‘We shouldn’t really have her here,’ he grumbled. ‘She should have gone straight to KriPo, but since it happened on our doorstep, they told us to hang on to her.’

‘It is only for twenty-four hours max,’ Petra pointed out.

‘That’s about twenty-three too many for me. She’s been bleating since she arrived. She wants a lawyer, she wants to use the toilet, she wants a drink. She seems to think this is a hotel, not a detention centre. She acts like we should be treating her like a hero instead of a criminal.’ He pushed himself to his feet and made for the door. ‘I’ll send someone for you in a few minutes. You can take a look at the paperwork – it’s in the tray over there.’ He gestured with his thumb to a pile of files stacked high above the edges of a filing tray.

He was as good as his word. Within ten minutes, she was sitting in the Anwaltsraum, facing Marlene Krebs across a table bolted to the floor. Krebs could have been any age between thirty and forty, though Petra knew from the report she’d read that the woman was only twenty-eight. Her hair was dyed a harsh black, tousled from a night in the cells. Her make-up was smudged, presumably from the same cause. Krebs had the puffy face and hands of a drinker, and the whites of her pale green eyes were tinged with yellow. However, she also possessed the sleepy sensuality of a woman who is attractive to men and who knows it.

‘Marlene, I’m Petra Becker from Criminal Intelligence.’ Petra sat back and let the words sink in.

Krebs’ face revealed nothing. ‘Have you got any cigarettes?’ she asked.

Petra took a half-empty pack from her pocket and pushed it towards Krebs. She snatched at it and thrust a cigarette between full lips. ‘What about a light, then?’ she demanded.

‘The cigarette was free. The light will cost you.’

Krebs scowled. ‘Bitch,’ she said.

Petra shook her head. ‘Not a good start.’

‘What’s this about, anyway? What have I got to do with Criminal Intelligence?’

‘It’s a bit late to be asking that, Marlene. That really should have been your first question.’

Krebs took the cigarette from her mouth and flicked the tip as if there was ash to be deposited. ‘Look, I admit I shot that dope-dealing bastard Kamal.’

‘It’s not like there’s much room for doubt.’

‘But I had good reason. He sold my Danni the junk that killed him. What can I say? I was crazy with grief.’

Petra slowly shook her head. ‘You’re never going to cut it as an actress, Marlene. That routine needs a lot of work before you go in front of a judge. Look, we both know your story is bullshit. Why don’t we cut the crap and see what I can do for you?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. I told you. Kamal killed Danni. I loved Danni. Something in me snapped when I heard Kamal had been arrested and I wanted to take revenge for what he had taken from me.’

Petra smiled. It was the lizard smile of a predator who smells the first hint of blood. ‘See, Marlene, there’s the first problem. The guys who brought Kamal in, they didn’t hang around. They went straight to his restaurant, they pulled him out of the front door and into their car. Then they drove here. I’ve seen the logs. There was barely enough time for you to hear about the arrest, never mind get hold of a gun and get to Friesenstrasse in time to put a bullet in his head.’ Petra let Marlene think about that. ‘Unless of course someone tipped you the wink that the arrest was about to go down. Why would anyone do that, unless they wanted Kamal dead? So, how did you hear about Kamal’s arrest?’

‘I don’t have to answer you.’

‘No, you don’t. But you do need to listen to me, because everything I’m saying to you is a stick of dynamite blowing a hole in your mitigation. Marlene, this isn’t going to play the way whoever set you up for it said it would. Your story is going to fall to bits as soon as the KriPo start poking around. Now, I know you think they’re not going to bother too much with this because it’s saved them the hassle of a difficult prosecution with Kamal, not to mention one less scuzzy middle-ranking dealer on the streets. But me, you see, I’m bothered. Because I’m interested in the people above Kamal.’

‘You’re not making any sense,’ Krebs said obstinately. ‘Are you going to light this fucking cigarette or what?’

‘I told you. Not for free. Come on, Marlene. Face it, you’re going away for a very long time. This wasn’t a crime of passion, it was an assassination. And we’re going to prove it. You’re going to be a grandmother before you see freedom again.’

For the first time, there was a flicker of something behind Krebs’ cold eyes. ‘You can’t prove what isn’t true.’

Petra laughed out loud. ‘Oh, please, Marlene. I thought your sort believed that’s what us cops do all the time? OK, proving what isn’t true can sometimes be … demanding. But compared to that, proving what we know to be true is a piece of piss. I know you were put up to this. And I know the people who did that gambled on us not caring too much about who took Kamal down or why. But they weren’t gambling with their own stake. They were using you for chips. So, we already have a hole in your story about time. I think the next hole will be where you got the gun from.’

‘It was Danni’s gun,’ she said quickly. ‘He left it in my apartment.’

‘Which is about ten minutes drive from Kamal’s restaurant and a good twenty-minute drive from here. But the cops only took thirteen minutes to get here from Kamal’s. You couldn’t possibly have made it here in time, even if someone had called you the minute the cops took Kamal into custody. So calling it Danni’s gun makes a second hole in your story.’ Petra picked up the cigarette packet and put it back in her pocket.

‘Right now,’ she continued, ‘I’ve got a team out in Mitte talking to everybody who knows you and who knew Danni. I’d put money on us not finding a single person who can put you and him together. Well, maybe we’ll get one or two. But I’d put money on the fact that they’ll be tied in as closely to Darko Krasic as you are.’

At the sound of Krasic’s name, Krebs reacted. Her thumb flicked the end of the cigarette so hard she broke the filter tip clean off. For one brief moment, something sparked in her eyes. Inside, Petra rejoiced. The first crack had appeared. Now for the crowbar.

‘Give him up, Marlene. He’s thrown you to the wolves. You talk to me, you can save yourself. You can watch your kid grow up.’

Something shifted behind Krebs’ gaze and Petra realized she’d lost her. The mention of her daughter, that’s what had done it. Of course, she thought. Krasic has the kid under wraps. That’s his insurance policy. Before she could break Krebs, they’d have to find the daughter. Still, it was worth one last throw of the dice. ‘You’ll be going in front of the judge soon,’ she said. ‘You’ll be remanded in custody. No matter how smart-mouthed your lawyer is, no matter how many times he plays the card that you’re no risk to the public, they’re not going to bail you. Because I’m going to tell the prosecutor we’ve got you on our books as someone with links to organized crime. You’re going into the general prison population. Do you have any idea how easy it will be for me to make it look like you’re co-operating with us? And do you have any idea how little time it will take Darko Krasic to make sure you never talk to anyone else again? I mean, think about it, Marlene. How long did it take him to set up Kamal?’ Petra got to her feet. ‘Think about it.’ She crossed to the door and knocked to indicate that the meeting was over.

As the WaPo outside opened up, Petra looked back over her shoulder. Marlene Krebs was leaning forward, her loose hair shrouding her face. ‘I’ll be calling on you, Marlene.’

Krebs looked up. Hate blared across the room at Petra. ‘Fuck you,’ she said.

I’ll take that as a yes, Petra thought triumphantly as she walked back to the Wachte for her gun. She had finally lit a low flame under Darko Krasic that might eventually cook Tadeusz Radecki.

Carol had always enjoyed the ambience of Soho. She’d seen it shift from the seediness of the porn industry’s hub to the stylish, gay-orientated café society it had become in the 1990s, but there had never been a time when she hadn’t found it fascinating. Chinatown rubbed shoulders with theatreland, leather men shared the pavements with shifty-eyed prostitute’s punters, media gurus battled wannabe gangstas for taxis. Although she’d never policed its narrow, traffic-choked streets, she’d spent a lot of time there, much of it in a drinking club on Beak Street where one of her oldest friends, now a literary journalist, was a founding member.

Today, everything was different. She was looking at the world through a different lens. From the perspective of a drugs courier, nothing was quite the same. Every face on the street was a potential cause for concern. Every dodgy doorway could pose some unnamed threat. To walk down Old Compton Street was to tiptoe into the danger zone, antennae bristling and every sense quivering with alertness. She wondered how criminals coped with these levels of adrenaline. Just one morning and she was jittery at some deep level, her stomach clenched and her skin clammy. Simply trying to keep her pace down to a stroll took every ounce of effort she had to give.

She turned into Dean Street, her eyes scanning the pavements and the roadway, constantly checking to see if anyone was taking an interest in her. Something tricky was bound to be lying in wait for her, and she wanted a sense of what that might be.

Carol spotted Damocles up ahead of her on the opposite side of the street. It looked like a typical Soho café-bar, all designer chairs and marble tables, exotic flower arrangements visible through the smoked-glass window. She kept on walking till she reached the next corner, then circled the block so that she came back down Dean Street in the opposite direction.

She was almost level with them when she saw them. She’d never worked Drugs, but she was familiar with the plain clothes cars they used. This one looked like a bog-standard Ford Mondeo, but what gave it away were the twin tail pipes of the exhaust. This had a lot more under the bonnet than the standard engine. The stubby radio aerial sticking out of the rear window was confirmation enough if she’d needed it. The driver sat behind the wheel, ostensibly reading the paper, a baseball cap pulled down to shield the top half of his face.

Where there was one, there would be more. Now she had a better idea of what she was looking for, Carol carried on ambling down the street. There was another car she was fairly sure was Drugs Squad, again with the driver in place behind his newspaper. Directly opposite Damocles, two men were making a very thorough job of cleaning the window of a newsagent’s. A third man was bending over a bike, pumping up the rear tyre very slowly, checking the pressure with his fingers every few seconds.

Two car loads, she thought. That meant six or eight officers. She’d clocked five, which meant there were probably another three she hadn’t spotted. If she was their target, the chances were that the others were already inside the café. Fine. So be it.

Time for a little improvisation.

What Carol hadn’t registered was the battered white van parked behind the Mondeo. Inside, it was fitted out with state-of-the-art surveillance kit. Morgan, Thorson and Surtees perched on swivel chairs, headsets clamped to their ears. ‘That’s her, isn’t it?’ Thorson said. ‘She’s changed the way she looks, but it’s her.’

‘You can always tell by the walk,’ Surtees said, reaching across her to snag a Thermos he’d had filled with café latte from his favourite Old Compton Street bar. ‘The one thing it’s almost impossible to disguise.’

Morgan stared intently into one of the video monitors. ‘She’s carrying on to the corner. That’s two passes. She’ll go in next time.’

‘She handled those two thugs well,’ Surtees said, pouring out his coffee and pointedly not offering any to his colleagues. Morgan, he knew, would have his inevitable bottle of San Pellegrino stashed somewhere. Thorson he’d never liked enough to want to share anything with.

Thorson glared at him as the rich aroma of the coffee hit. She never seemed to manage to be as prepared for things as that anally retentive bastard Surtees. He always made her feel inadequate. She suspected that Morgan knew that, and that it was one of the reasons he kept them working together. He always liked to keep people on their toes. It meant he got results, but she couldn’t help feeling that it was sometimes at the expense of the nervous systems of his team members. She craned her neck to look at the monitor over Morgan’s shoulder. ‘All units in place, target entering,’ she heard through the crackle in her headset. ‘On my word, not before.’

Carol had come back into sight, this time moving with a determined stride towards the heavy glass and chrome doors of Damocles. Morgan clicked the mouse linked to the video display and the picture changed to the inside of the café. Another click and the screen split into two images. One showed the whole of the interior, the other focused on the man sitting reading and smoking at a table in the rear. They watched as Carol walked in and made straight for the bar. She chose a stool towards the back of the room, a little distance from the man she’d been told was her contact. But she made no attempt to catch his attention. She said something to the barista, who supplied her with a mineral water.

‘A pity we couldn’t get audio in place,’ Surtees said.

‘There’s far too much background noise,’ Thorson said. ‘We tried a mike under the table, but the marble blocked out anything worth hearing.’

Carol reached into her bag and pulled out a packet of cigarettes. She took one out and put it between her lips.

‘I didn’t think she smoked,’ Thorson said.

‘She doesn’t.’ Morgan frowned at the screen. ‘What is she up to?’

Carol made a show of searching in her bag and pulling a face in disgust. She looked around her and her eyes lit on the man at the corner table. She hitched herself off the stool, leaving her bag on the bar, and walked across to him. Now her body was between the man and the camera and they couldn’t see what was happening. She bent down, then eventually stood up, the lit cigarette between her fingers. ‘A long time to light a fag,’ Morgan said, suspicion in his voice. ‘She’s not following the script.’

‘Good for her,’ Thorson said softly as Carol returned to her bar stool. She sipped her drink and toyed with the cigarette, stubbing it out before it had burned halfway down. Then she was on her feet in a blur of movement, grabbing her bag and heading for the toilets. As she opened the door, her contact jumped to his feet, leaving his magazine, and followed her.

‘Oh shit,’ Morgan said. ‘Is there an exit out there?’

Surtees shrugged. ‘I’ve no idea. It was Mary who checked the place out.’

Thorson coloured. ‘There’s a fire exit. It’s alarmed …’

As she spoke, the peal of a security siren screamed. At the same moment, all hell broke loose in their ears.

Carol ran down the narrow service alley between the tall buildings. She didn’t have to look over her shoulder to check her contact was behind her; she could hear his heavy footfalls closing on her with every step. They emerged on a narrow side street, the pavements busy with people returning to their offices after lunch. Carol slowed to a brisk walk, her contact falling into step beside her. ‘Fucking hell,’ he said. ‘You trying to kill me?’

‘I spotted a geezer from the Drugs Squad sitting outside the café in a car,’ she said, still firmly in character. ‘Him and his storm troopers turned over a mate of mine’s place a couple of months back. They didn’t get anything then, and I’m fucked if I was going to let them get anything now.’ A nearby police siren swirled through the air. ‘We’ve got to get off the street.’

‘My motor’s over in Greek Street,’ he said.

‘They might have clocked that an’ all,’ Carol said impatiently. She jinked across the road between the traffic-jammed cars, heading for a dingy corner pub. She pushed open the doors. It was still busy from the lunchtime crowd and she squirmed her way to the rear of the room, checking he was still with her. They squeezed into the angle between the bar and the back wall. Carol’s hand was in her bag. ‘Have you got the money?’

His hand was inside his jacket pocket. He came out with an envelope folded to the size of a twenty-pound note, thick as a London A-Z. Their hands were low, his body blocking them from any curious eyes. Carol passed him the drugs and took the money. ‘Nice doing business,’ she said wryly, then pushed past him. She looked around for the ladies’ toilet, made her way through the throng and dived into a cubicle. She sat on the toilet, head in her hands, shaking. What the hell sort of assignment did they have lined up for her if this was their idea of an exercise?

Gradually, she got her breathing and her heart rate under control. She stood up and wondered if there was any point in trying to change her look again. She pulled off the leggings and replaced them with the skirt, then jammed the baseball cap down over her hair. She might as well give it a try. Now all she had to do was get back to Stoke Newington in one piece. That shouldn’t be beyond her, she thought grimly.

Out on the street, there was no sign of pursuit. She made her way by a circuitous route to the Tottenham Court Road underground station and tried not to think about what could still go wrong. At least now she didn’t have any drugs on her. Money was always explicable. The only dodgy thing in her possession was the CS gas canister. When nobody was looking, she pushed it into the gap between the seat and the bulkhead of the tube. Not the most responsible thing she’d ever done, but she wasn’t thinking like Carol Jordan any longer. She was thinking like Janine Jerrold, one hundred per cent.

Three-quarters of an hour later, she turned back into the street where the day’s mission had begun. There was no sign of anything out of place. It was funny how, in just a few hours, normal could seem so rife with potential threat. But at least now the end was in sight. She took a deep breath and marched up to the front door.

It wasn’t Gary who answered the door this time. The man on the doorstep had the bulky upper torso of a weightlifter. His reddish hair was cropped close to his head and the glare from his prominent pale blue eyes was unnerving. ‘Yeah? What do you want?’ he asked belligerently.

‘I’m looking for Gary,’ she said. Her nerves were buzzing again. He didn’t look like a cop, but what if this was another trap?

He pursed his lips then shouted over his shoulder. ‘Gary, you expecting some bird?’

A muffled, ‘Yeah, let her in,’ came from the room she’d been in earlier.

The weightlifter stepped back, opening the door wide. There was nothing in the hall to make her uneasy, so Carol stifled her doubts and walked in. He stepped neatly behind her and slammed the door shut.

It was obviously a signal. Three men stepped out from the doorways leading off the hall. ‘Police, stay where you are,’ the one who had opened the door shouted.

‘What the fuck?’ she managed to get out before they were on her. Hands seized her and half-pushed, half-dragged her into the living room. One of them made a grab for her bag. She clung on grimly, trying for the appearance of indignant innocence. ‘Get your hands off me,’ she shouted.

They pushed her on to the sofa. ‘What’s your name?’ the weightlifter demanded.

‘Karen Barstow,’ she said, using the cover name she’d been given in the brief.

‘Right then, Karen. What’s your business with Gary?’

She tried for bewildered. ‘Look, what is this? How do I know you’re the Old Bill?’

He pulled a wallet out of the pocket of his jogging trousers and flashed a warrant card at her too fast for her to take in a name. But it was the real thing, she knew that. ‘Satisfied?’

She nodded. ‘I still don’t get it. What’s going on? Why are you picking on me?’

‘Don’t play the innocent. We know you’re one of Gary’s mules. You’ve been carrying drugs for him. We know the score.’

‘That’s bullshit. I just came round to give him his winnings. I don’t know nothing about no drugs,’ she said defiantly. She thrust her bag at him, relieved she’d ditched the CS gas. ‘Look. Go on. There’s fuck all in there.’

He took the bag and unceremoniously dumped the contents on the floor. He went straight for the envelope and ripped it open. He riffled the bundle of notes with his thumb. ‘There must be a couple of grand here,’ he said.

‘I don’t know. I didn’t look. You won’t find my prints on a single one of them notes. All I know is that my mate Linda asked me to drop off Gary’s winnings.’

‘It must have been a helluva bet,’ one of the other officers said, leaning indolently against the wall.

‘I don’t know anything about that. You gotta believe me, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t even do drugs, never mind dealing them.’

‘Who said anything about dealing?’ the weightlifter asked, shoving the money back into the envelope.

‘Dealing, running, whatever. I don’t have nothing to do with that. I swear on my mother’s grave. All I was doing was bringing Gary his winnings.’ She was confident now. They had nothing on her. Nobody had seen her hand over the drugs to her contact, she was clear on that.

‘Gary says he sent you off with a parcel of drugs this morning,’ the weightlifter said.

‘I don’t know why he’d say that, because it’s not true.’ She was almost sure what he was saying was a bluff. All she had to do was stick to her story. Let them come to her with anything concrete.

‘You went out with the drugs and you were due to come back with the money. And here you are with an envelope full of readies.’

She shrugged. ‘I told you, it’s his winnings from the horses. I don’t care what lies Gary’s told you, that’s the truth and you can’t prove any different.’

‘Let’s see about that, shall we? A little trip down to the station, get a female officer to give you the full body search and see if you’re as keen on your bullshit then.’

Carol almost smiled. At least she was on firmer ground here. She knew her rights. ‘I’m not going nowhere with you pigs unless you arrest me. And if you arrest me, I’m saying bugger all until I get to see my lawyer.’

The weightlifter glanced around at his colleagues. That was all she needed to see. They didn’t have anything on her. They had been lying about what Gary had said, because if he really had thrown her to the wolves, it would be enough to arrest her on suspicion. She got to her feet. ‘So, what’s it to be? Are you going to arrest me, or am I going to walk out that door? With Gary’s money, by the way, because you’ve got no right to that.’ She crouched down and started scooping her possessions back into her bag.

Before anyone could respond, the door opened and Morgan stepped into the room. ‘Thank you, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘I appreciate your help. But I’ll take it from here.’

The weightlifter looked as if he wanted to protest, but one of his colleagues put a restraining hand on his arm. The four who had confronted Carol filed out of the door. On his way out, the one who had been lounging against the wall turned back. ‘For the record, sir, we’re not best pleased with the way this has gone.’

‘Noted,’ Morgan said curtly. He winked at Carol and held a finger to his lips till they heard the front door close behind them. Then he smiled. ‘You have really pissed off the Drugs Squad,’ he said.

‘I have?’

‘That was a real deal that went down out there,’ he said, crossing to the sofa and sitting down. ‘The Drugs Squad’s intention was to pick up the bloke you sold the drugs to. You were supposed to have a fairly hairy time but be given the opportunity to escape. Unfortunately, you didn’t play it the way we were all expecting you to. And chummy walked away with a parcel of drugs that was supposed to be back in our hands by bedtime.’

Carol swallowed hard. This was exactly the kind of fuck-up she’d wanted to avoid. ‘I’m sorry, sir.’

Morgan shrugged. ‘Don’t be. Somebody should have had the wit to cover the emergency exit. You, on the other hand, exhibited initiative under pressure. You acted in character throughout. You dealt with those two bruisers from the NCIS football hooligan squad with intelligence and style, you did everything you could to cover your tracks and change your appearance, and you outsmarted the opposition right along the line. We couldn’t have asked for a better display of your talents, DCI Jordan.’

Carol stood up a little straighter. ‘Thank you, sir. So, do I get the job?’

A shadow crossed Morgan’s normally open features. ‘Oh yes, you get the job.’ He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and fished out a card. ‘My office, tomorrow morning. We’ll give you the full brief then. Right now, I’d suggest you go home and make whatever arrangements are necessary to cover your absence. You’ll be going away for a while. And you won’t be able to go home again until the job’s done.’

Carol frowned. ‘I’m not going to Europol?’

‘Not just yet.’ He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. ‘Carol, you get this assignment right, and you can more or less write your own ticket.’

She noted the use of her first name. In her experience, senior officers outside your own team only ever got that informal when the shit was heading for the fan and they hoped you’d be the one standing between it and them. ‘And if I get it wrong?’

Morgan shook his head. ‘Don’t even think about it.’

13

There was never any shortage of work for idle hands on board the Wilhelmina Rosen. The old man had set the standard, and he was determined not to fall below it. The crew clearly thought he was obsessive, but he didn’t care. What was the point in having one of the most beautiful Rhineships on the water if you didn’t maintain it to the highest standard? You might as well be piloting one of the modern steel boxes that had as much personality as a cornflake packet.

Tonight, his task was to restore the brasswork on the bridge to its gleaming patina. He’d been understandably preoccupied with his personal plans, but that morning he’d noticed that it had begun to grow dull. So he’d decided to spend the evening with a bundle of rags and a tin of brass polish, determined to nip his slipshod ways in the bud before they became a new habit.

Inevitably, his mind slipped sideways from the repetitious task to the closer concerns of his heart. Tomorrow, they would be heading back down the Rhine, towards the place where all this had begun. Schloss Hochenstein, standing high on a bluff upriver from Bingen, its gothic windows glaring down on the turbulent waters of the Rhine gorge, its grey stone as forbidding as a thundercloud, the legacy of some almost-forgotten medieval robber baron. For years, the Wilhelmina Rosen had motored up and down this stretch of river, his grandfather at the helm never betraying by so much as a sideways glance that the schloss meant anything to him.

Perhaps if it had been situated in a less demanding stretch of water his studied avoidance of so prominent a landmark would have taken on its own significance. In the Rhine gorge, however, skippers had to concentrate every ounce of their attention on the water. It had always been a severe test of the skills of boatmen, with its sharp twists, its rock-studded banks, its unexpected eddies and whirlpools and the very speed of its flow. These days, it was easier because deep channels had been dug and dredged to control the capricious movement of the water. But it still remained a stretch of water where a tourist making a single trip would have stronger memories of the surrounding scenery than a Rhineship skipper who had made the transit a hundred times. And so he had never noticed his grandfather’s stubborn refusal to let his eyes range over the prospect of Schloss Hochenstein.

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