03.The Last Temptation

by Val McDermid

  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 wi
th 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 w
ere 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 …?’