03.The Last Temptation

by Val McDermid

  Before he could do anything else, the phone rang again. This time, he ignored it. He wondered how long he’d be able to carry on doing that before some bright spark from the university press office decided that what they really needed was the sort of high profile that an interview with Tony Hill could bring. He jumped to his feet and made for the door. Time to go into hiding.

  Sometimes there were distinct advantages in having a brother who was a computer expert. Carol had learned enough from Michael to recognize what a program file looked like, which meant she’d been able to identify the encryption software on the secondary hard disk that Gandle had given her. It had been the work of a few minutes to transmit the program on to her brother in Manchester, asking him to forward it to Tony, complete with instructions on how to install it. As a result, they were now exchanging e-mails in complete security. Of course, it was all highly irregular – a breach of the Official Secrets Act at the very least. She’d had a moment of doubt, understanding only too well how her apparent cavalier regard for security might be interpreted by someone who didn’t know Tony. But it had only been a moment. She knew nobody more committed to confidentiality than Tony, nor anyone who could be more help at the sharp end of a complicated investigation. And Carol had always trusted her maverick streak to do what was best. She had warned Michael on pain of death not to spread the software any further, and she felt sure she could trust him. If it ever came to light, she would plead Morgan’s orders that she should do whatever it took to make her feel secure.

  This evening, more than ever, she was glad their line of communication was open. For she had something in her possession that might just tempt Tony out of his self-imposed retirement. More than that, it might bring him to her side. Carol frowned at the computer screen. She needed to get this one absolutely right. Impatiently, she pushed the chair back from the desk and paced the room, trying to gather her thoughts.

  The apartment in Berlin was everything Petra had promised. Comfortable without attempting opulence, quiet and secure, its anonymity was somehow less impersonal than that of a hotel room. Caroline Jackson would relish those same qualities, she felt sure. The few personal items in the room marked it out as the territory of her alter ego. She’d never have chosen those books, that photograph frame, those extravagantly ostentatious flowers for herself. But for this evening she needed to remind herself that she was Carol Jordan. Caroline Jackson would be no help whatsoever in composing the finely balanced e-mail she needed to send; for that, she needed all her own qualities of mind.

  The past few days had been a whirlwind of mental activity. She’d been astonished by how much information Petra Becker had on Tadeusz Radecki, and she could well imagine how frustrated her German contact had become with her team’s apparent inability to close down his operations and put him behind bars. He seemed to operate with complete impunity, largely because he had never made the mistake of most criminals, who eventually came to believe in their own invincibility. It was that hubris that brought most of them to disaster, Carol knew from her own experience. But Radecki had never lost the habit of constant caution. His was a recipe for success; he trusted few people, he understood the difference between turning a good profit and greed, and he apparently never breached the firewalls between his deceptively immaculate public persona and the dirty businesses that kept him in style. The icing on this perfect cake was Krasic, a man who had cultivated a reputation for brutal ruthlessness with apparent glee.

  But although Radecki had managed to stay beyond the reach of legal sanction, it hadn’t rendered him immune from the relentless probing of Petra Becker. The dossier she had assembled on him was remarkable. Everything from his taste in music to the shops where he bought his clothes was documented. Assimilating this had been Carol’s first task, and it brought with it a genuine taste of the undercover life. She had to retain as much of this information as she possibly could while simultaneously shunting it to the back of her mind. Caroline Jackson would know almost nothing of Radecki’s life and tastes, and Carol found the necessity of splitting her mind in two profoundly dislocating. That was when she had decided, to hell with protocol, she needed a conduit to Tony.

  If she’d had any doubts about the wisdom of her course of action, they vanished in the course of the second evening she spent in the company of Petra Becker. They had used the morning to go over everything Petra knew about Radecki’s criminal network, and the afternoon had been devoted to working with Carol’s cover story, pushing to see where the cracks might appear, trying to identify possible danger zones and letting her explore the personality she would be living inside for the foreseeable future. Finally, Petra had stubbed out the twentieth cigarette of the day and leaned back in her chair. ‘I think it’s time to unwind a little,’ she said. ‘We can’t be seen out together once we get back to Berlin, so we should make the most of our anonymity and have dinner out somewhere nice to celebrate the successful completion of phase one.’

  Carol stretched her cramped back with a groan. ‘I’ll drink to that.’

  Half an hour later, they were sitting in a quiet booth in a dimly lit Indonesian restaurant. In the centre of the room, brightly illuminated under heat lamps, an extensive rice table buffet was laid out. But for now they were happy to sit with their drinks and unwind. Carol took a healthy swig of her gin and tonic and Petra raised her glass. ‘It’s been a pleasure working with you these past few days, Carol,’ she said. ‘I must admit, I had some very negative feelings about this operation, but you’ve reassured me.’

  ‘Why did you feel so negative about it? Did you think I wouldn’t be up to it?’

  Toying with the stem of her margarita, Petra studied the liquid as it slid up and down the side of the glass. ‘That was part of it. But mostly it was because I felt we’d worked our guts out trying to nail Radecki and it wasn’t fair to take it away from us.’

  ‘I can understand that. I’d have felt exactly the same in your shoes. When you spend so long on a case, it feels very personal.’

  Petra flicked a considering glance up at Carol. Then, coming to a decision, she leaned her elbows on the table and moved closer. ‘Was that how you felt about Jacko Vance? And before that, the Queer Killer in Bradfield?’

  Carol’s relaxed expression was replaced instantly by wariness. ‘You’ve done your homework,’ she said, the distance in her voice shattering the intimacy they’d built in the past two days.

  Petra held up her hands, palms out towards Carol, in a placatory gesture. ‘Of course I’ve done my homework. I wouldn’t be much of an intelligence officer if I hadn’t. But I didn’t bring up those cases out of some prurient curiosity. I have a genuine reason for mentioning them.’

  Carol wasn’t so easily mollified. ‘I don’t talk about those cases,’ she said repressively. Talk about them? I try not to even think about them. I wish I didn’t dream about them either. She drank back the rest of her gin and signalled to the waitress for a refill.

  ‘That’s cool. I don’t want the gory details. I’m not some sensation seeker. But you are the only cop I’ve ever met who has so much experience in tracking down serial killers. And I need your advice.’

  Carol wondered wearily if she would ever leave that part of her past behind her. She had thought she was coming to a place where all anybody would care about was her performance in the here and now. ‘Look, Petra, I’m not an expert. The first time, I just happened to be a CID officer in a city where a serial murderer was operating. And the second time was … well, I suppose you’d have to call it a favour to a friend.’

  ‘That would be Dr Tony Hill?’ Petra wasn’t giving up.

  Carol massaged her forehead with thumb and forefinger, shielding her eyes with the rest of her hand. ‘That would be Tony Hill, yes,’ she said, sounding exasperated. She dropped her hand and gave Petra a cold, defiant stare. It was as if she was challenging the other woman to make something of it.

  Petra could sense that her mention of Tony’s name had stirred something deep inside
Carol, but she had no way of telling whether that was positive or negative. ‘I’m sorry, Carol. I don’t mean to offend you by asking you about these cases. I realize they must have been tough to work. I really don’t mean to bring back bad memories. But if I can explain …?’

  Carol shrugged. She was going to have to work with Petra on the toughest assignment of her career. Already, she liked and respected her and she knew she needed that to continue. It wouldn’t hurt to hear what she had to say. ‘I’m listening,’ she said as the waitress arrived with her second drink. ‘You might want another drink?’

  Petra shook her head. ‘Later. OK. First thing is, I’m a dyke.’

  Carol had wondered, but it wasn’t a big enough deal for her to have wondered much. ‘Makes no difference to me.’

  ‘I didn’t think it would, but that’s not why I’m telling you. I’m trying to explain how this all started. I hang out on a private website for gay and lesbian cops in the EU, and that’s where I met Marijke. She’s a brigadier in the Dutch police, based in Leiden. We talk three or four times a week in a private chat room, and we’ve got close over a period of time.’ Petra’s smile was crooked, self-mocking. ‘Yes, I know what they say about meeting people over the net, but it’s clear that she is who she says she is, not some impostor fishing for information or a cop junkie who gets off on pretending to be one of us. So, me and Marijke, we each found in the other the sounding board we lacked in our everyday lives.’

  ‘Doesn’t make you a sad bastard,’ Carol said with a smile of reassurance.

  ‘No. Anyway, Marijke and I have the habit of being confidential with each other. Just over a week ago, she had a murder in Leiden. She told me about it because it was such a strange case, with no obvious suspect or line of inquiry. The dead man, Pieter de Groot, was a professor of psychology at the university there. He was found naked, tied across the top of his desk. The killer had forced some sort of tube into his throat and poured water down it until he drowned.’

  Carol shivered. ‘That’s seriously nasty.’

  ‘There’s more. The killer also scalped his victim. But not the head. The pubic hair.’

  Carol could feel the hair on the back of her neck bristling erect. She knew enough about psychopaths to recognize the work of a disordered personality when she came up against it. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it sounds as though it has some of the elements of a sexual homicide. Which means your man has quite possibly killed before and is likely to kill again.’

  ‘Both, I think. When Marijke told me about the case, it rang a distant bell at the back of my mind. And I found the murder of Dr Walter Neumann.’ Petra explained briefly what she’d discovered about the Heidelberg case. ‘So I began to think that we might be looking at a serial killer operating across national boundaries.’ She looked at Carol for a response.

  ‘A reasonable conclusion. From what you’ve told me, these crimes contain signature elements.’ She gave Petra a questioning glance, to see whether she needed to explain herself.

  Petra nodded confidently. ‘OK, so I figured we had a big problem on our hands. As you know, there’s no formal operational liaison between national police forces in the EU, in spite of Europol and Interpol. Oh, we’re supposed to swap information and work jointly on transnational crime, and that sometimes works, like with what we’re doing against Radecki. But we both know how jealously cops guard their territory. Something as glamorous as a serial killer, nobody is going to want to mount an operation that might take the credit away from them. Getting them to share will be harder than pulling teeth.’

  It smacked of cynicism, but Carol knew Petra was right. She also suspected that the greater glory of Petra Becker might be an element in the equation, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. She knew herself she tended to be more committed to cases that would make her look good. It wasn’t something she was proud of, but she had to acknowledge it as a reality. ‘So you decided to sit on it and do some investigating of your own?’

  Petra looked slightly uncomfortable. ‘I don’t know that I’d got as far as making a decision,’ she admitted. ‘It’s true that I wanted to be the one to break the news, and so I asked Marijke to send me the full details of her case. Because, if I was right, he started killing in Germany, which would give us some claim to be the primary investigators.’ Petra stopped abruptly and reached for her cigarettes. ‘But then, a couple of days ago, there was a third murder. I haven’t been able to get much detail yet, but it appears that a Dr Margarethe Schilling from Bremen University has also fallen victim to the same killer.’

  ‘Surely other people are going to pick up on it now?’ Carol said.

  Petra shrugged. ‘Not necessarily. The police forces in the different länder don’t have any formal liaison. There’s no central clearing house for information on crimes like murder, only for organized crime. We’re a big country and, frankly, most cops are too busy with their own workload to be bothered about what’s happening in other cities hundreds of miles away. And it’s not like America, where serial killing is almost part of the culture. Here, in Europe, we still don’t expect it to happen outside books and movies. No, Carol, the only way anybody’s going to make this link is if some detective like me picks up on it. And who’s going to connect the murder of a man in Heidelberg and a woman in Bremen, just because they were psychology lecturers?’

  ‘So you’re going to have to make it official now,’ Carol said.

  ‘Oh, I know,’ Petra said, blowing smoke down her nostrils. ‘It’s awkward, though. The first German case was never directly mine, and if I submit a report to Europol asking them to help co-ordinate an investigation, I will have to explain that Marijke broke her own duty of confidentiality when she told me about the Leiden case. And that is going to drop her right in the shit with her bosses.’

  ‘I see your point,’ Carol said thoughtfully. ‘Is there any way you could have read about the Leiden case and noticed similarities to the one you’d seen from Heidelberg, then connected those to Bremen?’

  Petra shook her head. ‘There wasn’t much detail in the media. Not enough to mark it out as something that would have jogged my memory.’

  ‘I don’t suppose Marijke put out a search notice through Europol, to see if there were any other similar cases?’

  ‘I doubt it was even considered. Most cops, especially provincial cops, really don’t think of Europol as something that affects them. It’s not been up and running in an operational sense long enough to have become part of their automatic thought processes. I would think of it, of course, because my work is intelligence-based. But for someone like Marijke’s boss, it wouldn’t even cross his mind.’

  ‘Well, if you’re serious about wanting to protect Marijke, that might be the way to go. Get her to send a search request to The Hague, on the basis that this case has the hallmarks of the kind of killer who is likely to be a repeat offender and may be operating elsewhere in the EU. That would go out with the regular Europol bulletin, which I presume you see routinely?’

  Petra nodded. ‘I think my team is one of the few departments that actually reads what comes out of Den Haag,’ she said wryly.

  ‘Perfect. Then you can weigh in with your recollection of the Heidelberg case. And bring in the Bremen case as a possibility.’

  Petra stared off into the middle distance, examining what Carol had suggested from every possible angle. It would play, she thought. She wouldn’t make quite as big a splash as she had hoped, but still, she’d get the credit for picking up on the first known case. And she might even end up as the officer in charge of co-ordinating the inquiry, since it could then be claimed as a German case and nobody would want to leave it in the hands of the woodentops in Heidelberg. But though they might not be overly smart in Heidelberg, they weren’t completely stupid. ‘There’s only one problem,’ she said.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘I asked for the Heidelberg case details to be resent to me last week. If there’s a new investigation opened up, they’re likely to re
member that.’

  ‘Bugger,’ Carol said. ‘You’re right, they won’t have forgotten that. Look, let’s get some food and have a think. Maybe a solution will come to us once we’ve woken up our taste buds.’

  They made their way to the buffet and loaded up their plates with an assortment of starters. For a while, they ate in virtual silence, breaking it only to comment on the quality of the food. Halfway through a chicken satay stick, Petra suddenly beamed. I’ve got it, I think. They sent that case to us originally because they thought it might be connected to organized crime. Now, Radecki’s network extends as far as the Rhine and the Neckar. I could say that, in preparation for this operation, I was pulling in everything that might have a possible link to Radecki. ‘I’m notoriously obsessed with this case. Nobody will think twice about me grasping at straws.’

  Carol thought it over. It was thin, but it wasn’t as if it would have to stand up to detailed scrutiny. Once a serial killer investigation was mooted, nobody would be seriously wondering how the show got on the road in the first place. ‘It’ll do,’ she said. One corner of her mouth lifted in a sardonic smile. ‘Somehow, I have the sense that you’re not bad at blagging your way past your bosses.’

  Petra frowned. ‘Blagging? I don’t understand this word.’

  ‘Talking your way out of a tight spot.’

  ‘I’ve had lots of practice. Thank you for your help with this.’

  Carol shrugged. ‘No big deal. You’re welcome. You needed a fresh eye on the situation, that’s all.’

  Petra pushed her empty plate to one side. ‘There’s one other thing about this killer that is bothering me.’

  Smart woman, Carol thought. In your shoes, I’d be going crazy, not just feeling bothered. She nodded. ‘He’s not going to stop. You see this slipping away into some no-man’s-land of turf wars and arguments over the chain of command. Meanwhile, this bastard is free to carry on killing.’ As she saw recognition on Petra’s face, Carol realized with a sense of wonder that she was talking like Tony, stepping inside someone else’s head and articulating her fears.