03.The Last Temptation

by Val McDermid

  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.

  Now he knew the reason for that evasion, he had developed a deep and abiding fascination with the castle. He’d even driven up there one night when they’d been moored a few miles upriver. He’d been too late to buy a ticket and take the tour, but he’d stood outside the ornately carved lintel of the main gateway his grandfather had entered sixty years before. How could anyone look at that grim facade and not sense the horrors those high narrow windows had witnessed? He imagined the stones held captive the screams and cries of hundreds of children. The very walls were a repository of pain and fear. Just looking at it made him sweat, the memories of his own agonies rising sharp and harsh as the day they were inflicted. The schloss should have been razed to the ground, not turned into a tourist attraction. He wondered if any of the guides on the pleasure boats that plied the gorge ever mentioned the recent history that had stained Schloss Hochenstein so indelibly. Somehow, he doubted it. Nobody wanted to be reminded of that part of the past. They wanted to pretend it had never happened. And that was why nobody had ever had to pay for it. Well, he was making the bastards pay now, that was for sure.

  He rubbed away at the brass, his mind replaying the conversation he’d had in the beer garden with Heinrich Holtz. Well, not so much a conversation as a monologue. ‘We were the ones they called lucky,’ he’d said, his rheumy eyes flickering constantly from side to side, never settling on one thing for long. ‘We survived.’

  ‘Survived what?’ the younger man asked.

  Holtz continued as if he hadn’t heard the question. ‘Everybody knows about the concentration camps. They all talk about the horrors inflicted on the Jews, the gypsies, the queers. But there were other victims. The forgotten ones. Me and your granddad, we were two of the forgotten ones. That’s because where we ended up was called a hospital, not a camp.

  ‘Did you know that German psychiatric hospitals held three hundred thousand patients in 1939, but only forty thousand were still alive in 1946? The rest died at the hands of the psychiatrists and the psychologists. And that’s not counting all the children and babies who were slaughtered in the name of racial purity. There was even one so-called hospital where they celebrated the cremation of the ten thousandth mental patient in a special ceremony. Doctors, nurses, attendants, the administrative staff, they all joined in. They all got a free bottle of beer to toast the occasion.

  ‘But you didn’t have to be mad to end up in their clutches. If you were deaf or blind, retarded or disabled, you had to be got rid of for the sake of the master race. A stammer or a harelip was enough to see you sent off.’ He paused and sipped cautiously at his beer, his shoulders hunching closer than seemed possible.

  ‘Me and your granddad, we weren’t mentally or physically handicapped. We weren’t mad. We were just badly behaved lads. Anti-social, they called us. I was always up to mischief. I’d never do what my mother told me. My dad was dead, and she wasn’t much good at keeping me in order. So I was running wild. Stealing, throwing stones, making fun of the soldiers goose-stepping through the town.’ He shook his head. ‘I was only eight years old. I didn’t know any better.

  ‘Anyway, one morning a doctor arrived at the house with a couple of men in white coats and SS boots. I fought like a tiger, but they just beat the living shit out of me and threw me into the back of what had been an ambulance. Now, it was more like a police van. They chained me to the wall and we set off. By the end of the day, there were a dozen of us in there, scared out of our wits, sitting in our own piss and shit. Your granddad was one of them. We were sitting next to each other, and that was the beginning of our friendship. I reckon that’s how we survived. We managed to keep some sort of human contact alive between us, in spite of everything that happened.’ Holtz finally met the barge skipper’s eyes. ‘That’s the hardest thing. Remembering you’re human.’

  ‘Where did they take you?’ the skipper inquired. He knew it was probably the least important thing he could ask, but he sensed already that Holtz’s story would be far from pretty. Anything that would derail or even delay it seemed like a good idea.

  ‘Schloss Hochenstein. I’ll never forget my first sight of it. You only had to look at it to feel the fear rising up and choking you. A great big castle, like something out of a horror film. Inside, it was always dark, always cold. Stone floors, tiny high windows and walls that seemed to sweat damp. You’d lie shivering in your bed at night, wondering if you’d still be alive in the morning. You never cried, though. If you made a fuss, you got injections. And if you got injections, you died. It was like living in a nightmare you can’t wake up from.

  The government had requisitioned the schloss and turned it into what they called the Institute of Developmental Psychology. You see, they didn’t just want to kill all us kids who didn’t fit the mould. They wanted to use us, alive and dead. The dead had their brains pickled and dissected. The living had their brains fucked with too, only we got to live with the consequences.’ Holtz reached into the inside pocket of his overcoat and took out a packet of slim dark cigars. He shook one out of the packet and offered it to the younger man, who declined with a shake of the head and a wave of the hand. Holtz unwrapped it and took his time lighting it.

  ‘You know how scientists do their experiments with rats and monkeys? Well, in Schloss Hochenstein they used us kids.’ Holtz fiddled with his cigar, using it as a prop rather than smoking it.

  ‘The smart kids, like me and your granddad, we learned quickly. So we survived. But it was a living hell. How do you think the Nazi interrogators learned their skills? They practised on us. We would be deprived of sleep for weeks at a time, till we were hallucinating and so disorientated we could no longer speak our own names. We were given electric shocks to the genitals to see how long we could keep a secret. The girls were raped before and after puberty to explore the emotional effects. Sometimes the boys were forced to take part in the rapes, so their reactions could be observed. They forced rubber tubes down our throats then poured water straight into our lungs. Your grandfather and I, we survived that. God knows how. For days, I couldn’t eat a thing, my gullet felt like one long bruise. But there were a lot who didn’t make it. They drowned.

  ‘They used to stage exhibitions. They’d bring in doctors from other hospitals, SS off
icers, local officials. They’d pick some poor fucking imbecile, some kid with Down’s syndrome, or a spastic. The doctors would parade them in front of the audience, talking about how they must be exterminated for the benefit of the people. We were seen as a drain on the resources of the state. They’d say things like, “A dozen soldiers can be trained for what it costs to keep one of these vegetables in an institution for a month.”

  ‘And there was no escape. I remember one lad, Ernst, who was brought in with us. His only sin was that his father had been condemned as an enemy of the state for being lazy. Ernst thought he could outsmart them. He tried to win their trust by working as hard as he could. He was always sweeping the floors, cleaning the toilets, making himself useful. One day, he managed to get out of the main building into the courtyard and he made a run for it.’ Holtz shuddered at the memory.

  ‘They caught him, of course. We were in the dining hall, eating the slops they served us for dinner, when they dragged him in by the hair. Then they stripped him naked. Four nurses held him down on a table while two of the doctors beat the soles of his feet with canes, counting out loud all the time. Ernst was screaming like a scalded baby. They kept beating him till his feet were lumps of raw meat, the flesh hanging off the bones and the blood dripping off the table on to the floor. Eventually, he passed out. And the institute director was standing there with a clipboard, noting how many strokes of the canes and how long it had taken to get to that point. Then he turned to us and said, as calmly as if he was announcing what was for dessert, that we should all remember what would happen to any part of our bodies that didn’t behave as it should.’ Holtz passed a hand over his face, wiping a thin sheen of sweat from his forehead. ‘Do you know, that sadistic bastard remained a member of the German Society of Psychiatrists till he died in 1974? Nobody wants to admit what was done to us.

  ‘The guilt’s too much, you see. It was hard enough for Germany to accept what we did to the Jews. But what was done to us was worse. Because our good German parents let it happen. They let the state take us away, mostly without any protest. They just accepted what they were told, that we needed to be disposed of for the greater good. And afterwards, nobody wanted to hear our voices.

  ‘To tell you the truth, I’ve made myself forget a lot of what happened back there. That’s how I’ve coped. The scars are still there though, deep down.’

  There was a long silence. Finally, the young skipper drained his beer and said, ‘Why are you telling me this?’

  ‘Because I know your granddad didn’t. We used to meet up for a drink now and then, and he admitted that he’d never told you. I thought he was wrong. I think you deserved to know what made him the man he was.’ Holtz reached out with his bony fingers and covered the other man’s hand with his. ‘I don’t know for sure, but I expect it was not easy being brought up by him. But you have to know that, if he was harsh to you, he did it for your own protection. He didn’t want to risk you turning into the kind of boy he was, with all the consequences that could bring with it.

  ‘Men like me and your granddad, we might know with our heads that the Nazis aren’t coming back, that nobody is going to do to our children and grand-children what was done to us. But deep down, we’re still terrified that there are bastards out there who would do the same thing to the people we love. Those doctors, they didn’t come out of nowhere. The monsters weren’t just there for one generation. They never paid the price for what they did, you know. They carried on, respected and well rewarded, climbing to the top of their so-called profession, using what they’d learned to train the ones who came after them. There are still monsters out there, only they’re better hidden now. Or they’re somewhere else. So, you should know that whatever he did to you that might have seemed cruel or heartless, it was done with the best of motives. He was trying to save you.’

  He had pulled his hand back then. He couldn’t bear the dry papery feel of old skin against his own. His head hurt, a dull ache starting at the base of his skull and spreading outwards like steel fingers squeezing his brain. He felt the familiar blackness rising inside him, swallowing all his pleasure in saying a last farewell to his grandfather. He didn’t know how to deal with what he’d just been told, and physical contact with this ruined old man wasn’t helping. ‘I have to go,’ he said. ‘My crew. They’re waiting.’

  Holtz stared down at the table. ‘I understand,’ he said.

  On the drive back to town, they sat in silence, each staring out at the road ahead. When they reached the outskirts, Holtz said, ‘You can let me out here. I can catch a bus. I don’t want to put you out.’ He reached into his pocket and took out a slip of paper. ‘I wrote down my address and phone number. If you want to talk some more about this, call me.’

  Holtz got out in the gathering gloom of the afternoon and walked off without a backward glance. They both knew they’d never meet again.

  He rubbed his temples, trying to replace his bleak thoughts with the joy he’d felt when he’d pushed the old man into the water. But it wasn’t working. He put the old Ford in gear and headed back to the docks. He’d always known there must be a reason for what had happened to him. The brutality, the segregation from other kids, the refusal to let him have anything more than a basic education because cleverness got you into trouble; that all had to have come from somewhere. But whatever he had imagined, it hadn’t been this. Now at last, he had someone to blame.

  Tony pulled up in the drive of Frances’s semi-detached house. Everything about it was squared off and neat. Built before developers started putting flourishes on their executive homes, it was entirely plain in its appearance and, unlike several of her neighbours, Frances had steadfastly avoided anything that would break up the straight lines of doors and windows, gable end and garden. No fake Georgian bottle-glass window panes for her, no elaborate front door with panels and mouldings. No island beds or wishing wells in the garden, just neat rectangular borders with roses pruned to within a bud of their lives. At first, Tony had liked the orderliness of it all, a contrast to the blurred edges and confusion of his own life.

  But now he acknowledged that there were good reasons why he had chosen an old cottage without a single wall that was plumb, and a patch of garden filled with rambling geraniums and overgrown hebes. As he had come to know Frances better, he had been reminded that those who impose such regimented order on their surroundings are also inclined to hedge in their internal lives with restrictions and barriers for fear their unruly souls might burst forth and create an unmanageable chaos.

  There were times when he longed for chaos.

  This evening they were due to play bridge with some acquaintances over in Cupar. Frances, he knew, would have dinner cooking, ready to serve within minutes of his arrival so that they would be sure of getting to Cupar in good time. He wanted to speak to Carol, to find out how her undercover day had gone, but he knew that there would be no chance later. He’d tried to call her before he left the office, but she hadn’t been home. Maybe in the ten minutes it had taken him to drive across St Andrews she’d have returned.

  He keyed her number into his mobile and waited. Three rings and he was connected to her machine. ‘Hi, Carol, it’s Tony. I was wondering how …’

  ‘Tony? I just walked through the door. Hang on.’

  He heard the electronic beep of the machine being turned off. Then her voice again. ‘How lovely of you to call.’

  ‘Put it down to professional curiosity. I was interested to hear how it had gone.’

  ‘I was going to e-mail you later, but this is better still.’

  Even several hundred miles away, he could hear the elation in her voice. ‘You sound like you’re on a real high. How was it?’

  Her low chuckle was infectious. He could feel the smile spreading across his face. ‘I suppose that depends on your point of view.’

  ‘Start with your point of view.’

  ‘Brilliant. There were a couple of moments where I was absolutely bricking it, but I never felt as
if it was slipping out of my control. All the work we did together made me feel confident I could handle whatever they threw at me, and I did.’

  ‘I’m glad,’ he said. ‘So, who didn’t think it was brilliant?’

  ‘Oh God,’ she groaned. ‘I am numero uno on the Drugs Squad shit list tonight.’

  ‘Why? What happened?’

  Laughter bubbled up in Carol’s voice as she outlined the fiasco to Tony. ‘I know I should be mortified, but I’m too busy being pleased with myself.’

  ‘I can’t believe they had so little confidence in you,’ Tony said. ‘They should have realized you’re smart enough to spot a surveillance. You’ve set up enough of them over the years. From there, it’s not a big step to working out that you’d come up with some way to evade the take-down. So, what else did they throw at you?’ He settled back in the driving seat and let Carol take him through the day. When she finally ran out of steam, he said, ‘Hey, you should be proud of yourself. One day on the streets and already you’ve stopped thinking like the hunter and begun to think like the prey. I’m impressed.’

  ‘I couldn’t have done it without you.’

  He smiled. ‘You’ve no idea how much of a kick I got from feeling I was back in the game again, however peripherally. My life is so predictable these days, it was great fun to sit down and work with you again. In fact, it was even better than before, because there were no lives at stake this time.’

  ‘Maybe you should think about getting back into harness,’ Carol said.

  Tony sighed. ‘There’s no place for people like me in today’s offender-profiling strategy.’

  ‘It wouldn’t have to be front line. You could train. Think about it, Tony. If the Home Office don’t want to take a chance, maybe you should think about Europe. All those intelligence officers in Europol need to learn how to profile crimes and criminals, so they can determine what’s connected. There must be a place for someone with your talents,’ Carol said insistently.