by Val McDermid
‘You have put your finger on it precisely. This killer, he is a planner. He is good at what he does, and there is no reason for him to stop until he is caught. Meanwhile, the bureaucrats will be playing their games and the investigators will have their hands tied. It’s frustrating.’
‘It’s more than frustrating. It goes directly against the grain of what your instincts as a cop tell you needs to be done.’
‘Exactly. So, in my shoes, what would you do, Carol?’
The million-pound question, with only one possible answer. ‘Phone a friend,’ she said ironically. Petra frowned. Maybe Who Wants to be a Millionaire hadn’t travelled to Germany, Carol thought. ‘I wouldn’t let it go. I’d do everything I could to progress the investigation myself, and to hell with the official channels. And the first thing I’d do would be to get a profile.’
Petra’s face cleared. ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘I see. You would call Dr Hill?’
‘He’s the best. So yes, I’d call him and try to persuade him to come out of retirement and get back into the game.’
‘He has retired?’ Petra’s disappointment was palpable. ‘I didn’t think he was so old.’
It dawned on Carol that this whole thing had been one long preamble to try and secure Tony’s services for an unofficial serial-killer hunt. Sure, Petra had genuinely needed help with the mechanics of bringing it together in the public domain, but the real agenda was to enlist Carol and Tony on her team. Strangely, she didn’t feel at all used. She was genuinely amused, because she identified the strategy as one she would have cheerfully attempted herself. ‘He’s not old. But he’s not profiling any more. After the Vance case, he decided he didn’t want to be at the sharp end any longer.’
Petra looked dismayed. ‘Shit,’ she said. ‘I thought maybe …’ She shook her head, clearly angry with herself.
‘You thought exactly what I’d have thought in your shoes,’ Carol said gently. She felt for Petra, knowing how discouraged she would have been in the same position. On the spur of the moment, she made a decision. ‘Look, leave this with me. I saw Tony only a few days ago, and I’ve a feeling he just might take the bait. He’s not enjoying the quiet life as much as he’d hoped. This could intrigue him enough to draw him back into combat. Meanwhile, get Marijke to set the official ball rolling. The sooner the better. And I’ll do what I can to help.’
‘I think you have enough to be worried about without this,’ Petra said, half-hearted.
‘It’ll give me something to keep me grounded in who I really am,’ Carol said. ‘Nothing like reality to beat Zelig’s Syndrome.’
So now she had to keep her promise to Petra. She had to find the words that would entice Tony to give his help. She had the feeling she was kicking at a half-open door, but it would still take all her powers of persuasion. Carol walked through to the kitchenette and opened a bottle of red wine. Time for a little Dutch courage. First, she had to e-mail Tony. Then she had to prepare for tomorrow, when she would finally come face to face with Tadeusz Radecki.
20
Tony stretched his arms out, feeling the crack of joints in his neck and shoulders. He was getting too old to spend the evening hunched over a computer screen. But it was as good a way as any to escape from the complicated reaction the news about Vance had provoked in him. He’d unplugged the phone and immersed himself in work, avoiding thought and journalists alike.
He closed down the file he’d been reading, the draft dissertation of one of his graduate students. It wasn’t a bad piece of work, although the theories ran ahead of the evidence in a couple of crucial places. He’d have to take a stern line with her in their next supervision session. She needed to iron out these problems now, before they became too entrenched to unpick easily.
Before he switched off, he crossed to his communications program and flicked the button to send and receive all mail. It was always worth a late-night mailbox check; he might be heading for bed, but much of America was still in the middle of the working day, and he was in regular touch with several friends and colleagues on the other side of the Atlantic.
Tonight, there was a single message. He activated the encryption software that Carol’s brother had sent him and opened her e-mail.
Hi, Tony,
Well, here I am in Berlin. There’s a real buzz here, it feels like a place that’s doing well for itself. Which, as we know, is always a good breeding ground for the more sophisticated sorts of crime!
I’ve not made contact with TR yet – that’s scheduled for tomorrow night, when we see if Petra’s strategy will work or explode in our faces. I know you said you thought it was psychologically sound, but I’m still feeling very nervous about it. Now that it’s so imminent, I’m a basket case. I can’t eat and I know I’m going to struggle to sleep tonight. I’m having a few glasses of wine to take the edge off, but I’m not convinced that’ll make any difference. Petra has been working me intensively, and I suppose that should give me some confidence. I can’t say that it has, however. Although I feel I know TR pretty well, I’m not sure I know who Caroline Jackson is … Let’s hope I don’t fall flat on my face at the first hurdle.
Anyway, talking about this is only making me more nervous. And the real reason I’m writing to you tonight is actually nothing to do with my undercover.
When we saw each other recently, you seemed to be suggesting that you would welcome the chance to use your skills in criminal profiling again, if the right opportunity came along. Well, I think I might have the very thing for you.
The basic scenario: definitely two, possibly three murders that we know of. Two males, one female. All the victims have been psychologists working as university academics. They have all been found lying on their backs, bound hand and foot to their desks. Their clothes have been cut away, leaving them naked. The cause of death was drowning – they had a tube forced into their throats and water was poured down it until they died. And there is an interesting postmortem mutilation: the killer scalped their pubic area. No damage to the genitals, just the removal of hair and skin.
The problem: the first murder that we know of took place in Heidelberg in Germany, the second in Leiden in Holland, the third (the possible) in Germany again, in Bremen. The connection was made because by chance Petra had seen details of the first case, and a friend of hers, Marijke, who is a cop in Holland, told her about the second case and Petra spotted the link. Then, when the third murder of a psychology lecturer was reported, it jumped out at her, even though she hasn’t got enough detail yet to be certain it fits. So, as you will see, there is a jurisdictional nightmare ahead. What’s more, it’s not formally out there yet because we’ve had to work out a way of officially linking the cases without dropping Marijke in the shit for talking out of school. Some time over the next few days, though, it’s going to be shunted through Europol, which should start the wheels moving.
But I don’t have to tell you how it will get bogged down in the machinery of bureaucracy. Petra thinks it’s unlikely that anyone else has made these connections yet, given how little communication there is between German police forces on the ground (sound familiar???). Petra also thinks, and I agree with her, that he’s going to take more victims before a properly constituted international task force can get moving. So she wants to try to short circuit that process with an unofficial investigation.
To a large extent they’re working in the dark. This killer seems to be very good at covering his tracks. There seems to be almost nothing from forensics in either case.
Why has Petra taken the risk of spilling the beans to me? Well, let’s not forget that she’s in intelligence. And she’d done her homework on me. Which led her inexorably to you.
Obviously, what the girls want – no, what they NEED – is a profile. And, like the song says, nobody does it better.
And Petra wants the best.
It’s a chance to get back into the game, Tony. And it would be a safe environment to do it in. Because it would be entirely unofficial, you’d be worki
ng out of the public eye, nobody looking over your shoulder expecting instant results. No stories in the press pressurizing you to come up with the goods. Simply a low-key piece of work that might just save some lives.
Of course, if the girls do manage to pull something off, you’d get the credit, which would maybe open some doors for you in Europe.
Please don’t feel you have to say yes on my account. I’ve told Petra that I don’t hold out great hopes. But I’d like you to say yes on your own account, because I don’t think what you’re doing right now is giving you much sense of satisfaction. And doing what you do best might make you feel happier with yourself.
Think about it.
Take care,
CJ
Tony scrolled back to the top of the message and reread it more slowly, the occasional ironic smile twitching the corners of his mouth. She was good, he had to admit. She’d always been quick, and she’d learned a few neat little tricks along the way. He wondered how long it had taken her to compose something so apparently artless but which was nevertheless clearly calculated to push all his buttons. There was enough information about the cases to whet his appetite, but not enough to allow him to draw the conclusion that they lacked sufficient interest to suck him in.
Oh, and it was very cleverly done. Right down to bait that it would be a black exercise, off the official books, something entirely deniable whether it went right or wrong. ‘And it would be a safe environment to do it in.’ The subtext being, of course, that there would be nobody to see the egg on his face if his skills had gone rusty and he fucked up. He didn’t think Carol believed that would happen, but he understood that she thought he might carry that fear. And she was right, too.
It was tempting. But he wasn’t sure if he was drawn to it for the right reasons. The thought that kept butting its way to the front of his mind was that it would provide him with a legitimate excuse for getting on a plane to Berlin, because naturally he’d have to consult in detail with Petra, who seemed to be in the driving seat of this black operation. And Berlin right now meant Carol. Carol, who could benefit from the support he could offer. Carol, who had never been out of his thoughts since he’d left London.
And that was a dishonest reason for snatching this opportunity. If he went to Berlin for Carol’s sake, his mind wouldn’t be focused on the job he was supposedly there to do. Worse yet, his presence might prove to be the opposite of helpful for Carol. She needed to stay in role as much as possible, and if he kept popping up like a jack-in-the-box, it could damage her ability to maintain Caroline Jackson. Providing insights and reinforcement from a distance was one thing; to be there in person could tempt her to lean too heavily on him. Then if it came to the crunch and she was thrown entirely on her own resources, she might lack the necessary confidence to carry it through.
Still, he thought, it wouldn’t hurt to check it out on the web. He loaded his search engine and typed in, ‘Bremen + murder + psychology + lecturer’, going for the most recent one first. Seconds later, he was looking at a German newspaper report. Luckily, he’d learned German at school and had kept it up so he could read scientific papers. But even if he hadn’t been able to understand it, one thing would have leapt out like a firework in the night sky.
Tony stared at the screen, scarcely able to believe his eyes. There had to be a mistake. His hands clenched into fists and his face closed in a frown. He rubbed his temples with his knuckles, trying to make sense of what he was reading.
There was, however, no room for doubt. There couldn’t be two Margarethe Schillings who were psychologists attached to Bremen University. That was beyond the bounds of credibility. But equally impossible was the idea that Margarethe Schilling was dead at the hands of a serial killer.
He could see her face now. Wide mouth grinning at something someone had said, laughter lines scored in the corners of her eyes. Hard to believe any psychologist could have found enough in the world to laugh at to etch them so deep. Blonde hair loose, impatiently pushed back behind her ears when she was making a point in debate. Lively, intelligent, argumentative to the point of being infuriating.
They had met at a symposium in Hamburg three years before. Tony had been interested in the relationship between religious belief and certain types of serial offender, and Margarethe’s experimental work had intrigued him. He’d listened to her paper and found several points he wanted to discuss with her. So they’d gone off to a bar with a few others and missed the official banquet, so wrapped up had they been in their discussion.
They’d found a lot of common ground, him and Margarethe. So much so that she’d persuaded him to change his flight and come back to Bremen with her for a couple of days so he could see her research results at first hand. It had been a fascinating experience, and the vigorous exchange of information and ideas had exhilarated him. She’d even put him up in the spare room of the charming nineteenth-century barn conversion she shared with her husband Kurt and their son Hartmut in a small village near an artists’ colony a dozen miles from the city.
He hadn’t taken to Kurt, he recalled. He’d made not a virtue but a martyrdom of necessity, complaining about his boring life of childcare following his redundancy from a research post with a pharmaceutical company. ‘Of course, having to look after a child all day means it’s impossible for me to keep my knowledge current,’ he’d moaned over dinner. ‘It’s all right for Margarethe, she can scale the heights of the academic world, but I’m stuck out here in the backwoods with my brain rotting.’
It had become clear to Tony that Kurt was parenting not out of necessity but out of idleness. According to Margarethe, his parents had left them enough money to buy the house with a little left over. Kurt had seized the chance to take redundancy with the intention of assuming the life of a dilettante. As she told the tale, Margarethe had smiled wickedly. ‘The first thing I did when he told me what he’d done was to sack the nanny. He couldn’t argue with me, because it would be like saying he didn’t want to spend time with his son. But he’s never forgiven me for it.’
At the time, Tony had thought it was remarkably bad psychology for someone who made her living out of the labyrinth of the human mind. Unless, of course, she had wanted the marriage to fail. Which had followed with depressing inevitability, as he’d gathered from her Christmas cards and occasional e-mails. What she hadn’t expected was for Kurt to hang on to Hartmut, and he could tell, reading between the lines, that the loss of her son had devastated Margarethe.
And now, if this report was to be believed, Margarethe’s son had lost her in the most final of ways. Tony still couldn’t take it in. There was a terrible element of happenstance in such a death.
It was too late for Margarethe. But it might not be too late for others. Never mind that it suited him to escape the press baying for comments on Jacko Vance. Never mind that he was desperate with boredom in his job. And never mind that he wanted to be near Carol. Saving lives was paramount.
For better or worse, he’d made his choice.
In the half-hour before she could expect to find Marijke in the chat room, Petra browsed the web, dipping in and out of various serial killer sites to see if she could find any correspondences between recorded cases and the particular fetishes of their own killer. But her search proved fruitless. The depraved minds whose activities were recorded in lurid detail hadn’t indulged in death by this sort of drowning, nor could she find cases of pubic scalping, though she did discover that it had a name – gynelophism. Not much help there when it came to attempting to extract some motivation for their killer.
As usual when she was surfing, Petra was surprised to see how quickly the time had gone. Already she was four minutes late for her rendezvous with Marijke. Hastily, she made her way to the discussion room, where she found Marijke trying to avoid being drawn into a debate on European human rights legislation with two gay men and a bisexual woman. She signalled her arrival and double-clicked on Marijke’s name to bring her into a private space.
P: s
orry to keep you waiting, i got lost on the web.
M: No problem. I only just got here myself. So, what is Carol Jordan like?
P: very professional. very smart. she’s very quick to pick things up, and i think she has the nerve to carry off this undercover job.
M: Is she easy to get along with?
P: very easy. you can tell she’s been a proper street cop, not one of the management who sits behind a desk and forgets what life is like for the rest of us. i think we’re going to be a good team. she’s not afraid to listen to advice.
M: I have my fingers crossed for you. Did you get the chance to talk to her about the murders?
P: yes, jordan had a good idea about that. she thinks you should persuade your boss to send the details of this murder to europol with a request for any information about similar cases. then europol will circulate all the other member forces, and i can come up with the heidelberg and bremen connections quite legitimately. what do you say?
