by Val McDermid
The private investigator Tadeusz had hired to reinterview 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 over-laid 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 le
ft 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 in to 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 shirt-sleeves 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 whethe
r I’d characterize it as courage or bloody-mindedness,” 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.”
