by Val McDermid
Yeah, right, thought Carol, watching with a cynical eye as Frances picked up a pile of school notebooks tucked away round the far side of the sofa.
“I was just going to sneak in and fetch them. But if you were breaking for a cup of coffee, I might as well join you.” Frances turned and fixed Carol with a sharp stare. “Unless I’m interrupting something?”
“We’d just reached a natural break,” Carol said stiffly. She knew she should say something along the lines of how pleased she was to meet Frances, but while she might have what it took to go undercover, she still didn’t feel comfortable lying in a social situation.
“Tony?” Frances called. “I’ll stop for a quick coffee, if that’s OK.”
“Fine,” came the reply from the kitchen. Carol was reassured to hear he sounded as enthusiastic as she felt.
“You’re not at all how I’d imagined you,” Frances said, chilly dismissal in her voice.
Carol felt fourteen again, snagged on the jagged edge of her maths teacher’s sarcasm. “Most people don’t have much idea about what cops are really like. I mean, we’ve all been to school, we know what to expect from teachers. But people tend to rely on TV for their images of police officers.”
“I don’t watch much TV myself,” Frances said. “But from the little that Tony has said about you, I was expecting someone more…mature, I suppose is the word. But look at you. You look more like one of my sixth-year students than a senior police officer.”
Carol was spared from further sparring by Tony’s return. They sat around for twenty minutes making small talk, then Frances gathered up her marking and left them to it. After he saw her out, Tony came back into the room shaking his head ruefully. “Sorry about that,” he said.
“You can’t blame her,” Carol said. “Probably just as well you weren’t showing me the view from the upstairs rooms, though.”
It should have been a cue for laughter. Instead, Tony looked at the carpet and stuffed his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “Shall we get on?” he said.
They’d worked on various role-plays for the rest of the evening, not even stopping over dinner. It was demanding work, taking all Carol’s concentration. By the time the taxi came to take her back to her hotel, she was worn out from the combination of exercising her imagination and exorcising her emotions. They said their farewells on the doorstep, stepping into an awkward hug, his lips brushing the soft skin under her ear. She’d wanted to burst into tears, but had held herself tightly in check. By the time she’d returned to the hotel, she felt only a hollowness in her stomach.
Now, as she stared out across the sea, Carol allowed herself to acknowledge her anger. It wasn’t directed at Tony; she acknowledged he had never held out an unfulfilled promise to her. Her fury was all turned against herself. She had no one else to blame for the emotional heartburn that plagued her.
She knew she had two choices. She could let this rage fester inside her like a wound that could poison her whole system. Or she could finally draw a line under the past and use that energy to drive her forward into the future. She knew what she wanted to do. The only question was whether she could manage it.
* * *
Case Notes
Name: Pieter de Groot
Session Number: 1
Comments: The patient’s lack of affect is notable. He is unwilling to engage and shows a disturbing level of passivity. Nevertheless, he has a high opinion of his own capabilities. The only subject on which he seems willing to discourse is his own intellectual superiority. His self-image is grandiose in the extreme.
His demeanour is not justified by his achievement, which seems best described as mediocre. However, his view of his capacities has been bolstered by a nexus of colleagues who, for unspecified reasons, have demonstrated a lack of willingness to question his own valuation of himself. He cites their failure in this respect as a demonstration of support for his own estimation of his standing in the community.
The patient lacks insight into his own condition.
Therapeutic Action: Altered state therapy initiated.
* * *
8
The laden Rhineship ploughed on towards Rotterdam, its glassy bow wave barely altering as the brown river widened, the Nederrijn imperceptibly becoming the Lek, then taking in the broad flow of the Nieuwe Maas. For most of the morning, he’d been blind to the passing scenery. They’d drifted through small, prosperous towns, with their mixture of tall townhouses and squat industrial buildings, church spires stabbing the flat grey skies, but he couldn’t have described a single one of them, save from memory of previous trips. He’d registered neither the grassy dykes that obscured the lengthy stretches of flat countryside nor the graceful sweeps of road and rail bridges that broke up the long reaches of river.
The pictures he kept seeing were very different. The way Pieter de Groot had crumpled to the floor when he’d hit him on the back of his head with the sap he’d made himself, sewing the soft chamois leather with tight stitches then stuffing it with birdshot. He couldn’t imagine himself ever doing what de Groot had done, trusting a stranger enough to turn his back on him within five minutes of meeting. Anyone that careless of his safety deserved what was coming to him.
More thrilling pictures. The panic in the heartless bastard’s eyes when he’d come round to find himself bound naked to the top of his own desk. Curiously, his terror had subsided when the bargee had spoken. “You’re going to die here,” he’d said. “You deserve it. You’ve played at being God. Well, now I’m going to teach you what happens when somebody plays God with you. You’ve fucked up people’s heads for too long, and now it’s your turn to get fucked up. I can make it fast because, believe me, you don’t want it to be slow. But if you scream when I take the gag out of your mouth, I’m going to hurt you so much you’ll be begging to die.” He’d been surprised by the reaction. His first victim had struggled, refusing to accept it was pointless. That, it seemed to him, was a natural response. It had irritated him, because it had made his work more difficult. But he’d respected it. It was how a man should behave.
The professor in Leiden, though. He’d been different. It was as if he instantly recognized that the person staring down at him was beyond the reach of any argument he could raise against his fate. He’d given up the ghost there and then, his eyes dull with defeat.
Cautiously, he’d taken the gag from the man’s mouth. The psychologist hadn’t even tried to plead. In that moment, he’d felt a terrible kinship with his victim. He didn’t know what had happened in the man’s life to give him this capacity for resignation, but he identified an echo of his own learned behaviour and hated de Groot all the more for it. “Very fucking sensible decision,” he’d said gruffly, turning away to hide his unease.
He didn’t want to think about that moment.
More beautiful pictures. The heaving chest, the convulsive jerking and twitching of a body fighting to stay on the right side of eternity. It made him feel better to replay his newly minted memories like this. He couldn’t remember anything else that had ever made him feel so light-hearted.
And afterwards, the other pleasure he’d discovered, an unforeseen. Now at last he was able to show those whores who was boss. After he’d killed the professor in Heidelberg, he’d been astonished to find, driving back to the boat, that he wanted a woman. He was mistrustful of the urge that had so humiliated him in the past, but he told himself that he was a different man now, he could do what the hell he wanted.
So he’d made a detour to the back streets near the harbour and picked up a whore. She’d had a place to take him to, and he’d paid extra for the privilege of tying her up, spread-eagling her over the stained bed as he’d spread-eagled his victim over his desk. And this time, there had been no mortification. He’d been hard as a rock, he’d fucked her with brutal speed, he’d made her groan and beg for more, but it hadn’t been her he’d seen, it had been the mutilated body he’d left behind. He felt like a god. When he’d finished, he’d untied
her and forced her on to her stomach so he could celebrate his new potency by sodomizing her too. Then he’d left, throwing her a handful of coins to demonstrate his contempt.
He’d driven back to the boat on a high such as he’d never known, not even after he’d killed the old man.
It wasn’t what he’d learned from Heinrich Holtz after the funeral that had lifted the curtain of darkness inside him or helped him to forgive his grandfather. Sometimes he wondered if he possessed the ability to forgive; so many responses that other people took for granted had been squeezed out of him. If they’d ever been there in the first place.
But what he had understood was who he could use to make a new library of memories that would bring him joy and light. For a long time, he had brooded, wondering how he could make his torturers pay. What had finally illuminated the road to his release was the terrible humiliation he’d suffered at the hands of that bitch of a Hungarian whore. It wasn’t the first time he’d been taunted, but it was the first time someone had sounded just like his grandfather. A dizzying blackness had engulfed him, blocking out everything except an insatiable rage. In an instant, he’d had his hands round her throat, so tight her face had turned purple, her tongue poking out like a gargoyle. But in that moment when he had literally held her life in his hands, he’d suddenly realized it wasn’t her he wanted to kill.
He’d fallen away from her, gasping and sweating, but simultaneously clear-headed, his feet set on a new path. He’d staggered into the night, an altered man. Now, he had a mission.
His pleasure in the remembrance of things past was broken by the arrival of Manfred with a steaming mug of coffee. He didn’t begrudge the interruption, however. It was time something brought him back to earth. He’d been steering all morning on automatic pilot, which wasn’t good enough for the stretch of river that lay ahead. The congested waters of Rotterdam were a deathtrap for the inattentive skipper. As the Nieuwe Maas swept through its wide bends towards the various side channels leading to wharves and moorings, tugs and barges and launches were constantly on the move. They could shoot out insouciantly from blind corners at outrageous speed. Avoiding collisions required all his attention to the radar screen as well as to the waters around him. Up in the bows, Gunther scanned the waterway, a second pair of eyes for what lay ahead, where the skipper’s view was often obscured.
For now, he had to concentrate on getting them to safe harbour. The boat was all that mattered, for without the boat he was nothing; his mission would be scuppered. Besides, he was proud of his skills as a Rhine skipper. He had no intention of becoming the butt of dockside laughter.
Later, there would be plenty of time to indulge himself, to let the darkness fold back and bask in the light. While they were unloading, he could return to his memories. And perhaps plan how he would add to his store.
Brigadier Marijke Van Hasselt wrinkled her nose. Not minding the dead was one thing; enduring the assorted stenches and sights of a postmortem was something that required rather more fortitude. The early stages had been fine. Nothing bothered her about the weighing and measuring, the freeing of head and hands from their plastic coverings, the scraping from under each individual fingernail, all meticulously recorded on audio and video tape by Wim de Vries, the pathologist. But she knew what lay ahead, and it wasn’t a prospect for the delicate of stomach.
At least de Vries wasn’t one of those who relished the humiliation of the police officers who had to attend postmortems. He never brandished organs like a gleeful offal butcher. Rather, he was calm and efficient, as respectful of the dead as the disassembling of their physical secrets allowed him to be. And he spoke plainly when he found something the attending officer needed to know. All of which was a relief to Marijke.
Delicately, he continued his external examination. “Some traces of froth in the nostrils,” he said. “Consistent with drowning. But none in the mouth, which surprises me,” he added as he shone a light into de Groot’s mouth. “Wait, though…” He peered more closely, reaching for a magnifying glass. “There’s some bruising at the back of the throat here, and contusions on the insides of the lips and cheeks.”
“What does that mean?” Marijke asked.
“It’s too early to be precise, but it looks as if something was forced into his mouth. We’ll know more later.” Efficiently, he took a series of swabs from the body’s several orifices then began to pay attention to the external injuries.
“The excision of the pubic hair is quite neat,” he said. “Only a few signs of tentative cuts on the navel here.” He pointed with a latex-covered fingertip. “You see? I’ve never seen this before. Pubic scalping, I suppose you’d have to call it. Your perpetrator has been careful not to damage the genitals themselves.”
“Was he still alive when it happened?”
De Vries shrugged. “The scalping was done very close to death itself. He was either just dead or dying when it happened.” He continued to examine the body, pausing at the left side of the head. “Nasty bump here.” His fingers probed the lump. “Slight abrasion of the skin. Blunt force trauma. He took a blow to the head some time before he died.” He nodded to the technician. “Let’s roll him.”
Marijke stared down at the pattern of lividity on de Groot’s back. The hollow of his neck, the small of his back, the thighs above the crook of his knees were stained purple as a bruise with the blood that had drained there, drawn downwards by the inexorable force of gravity. Where he had been pressed against the surface of the desk, the flesh remained a ghastly white; the shoulders, the buttocks, the calves. It reminded Marijke of a strange abstract painting. De Vries pressed a thumb against the shoulder of the corpse. When he withdrew it, there was no change. “So,” he said, “hypostasis is in the second stage. He has been lying dead in this position for at least ten to twelve hours. And he hasn’t been moved after death.”
Now came the part Marijke hated. The body was replaced on its back and the dissection began. She slid her eyes sideways. To the casual observer, it would look as if she was paying close attention to what de Vries was doing, but in reality, she was staring at the tray of instruments as if her life depended on committing them to memory in some perverse version of Kim’s Game. The dissecting knife, for incisions and removal of organs, with its metal two-piece handle and four-inch disposable blades. The brain knife with its fine twelve-inch blade for making thin sections of the delicate tissue. The scissors and scalpels and forceps for things she didn’t want to think about. The oscillating-bladed Stryker saw for cutting bone without destroying the surrounding tissues. The T-shaped chisel called the skull key, for extra leverage when prying apart the bones of the cranium.
So it was she missed the moment when de Vries cracked open the chest and the pale distended lungs ballooned out of the cavity. “I thought so,” he said, satisfaction creeping through his professional demeanour and demanding her attention like a leg-winding cat.
“What’s that?” She dragged her reluctant eyes from the surgical tools.
“Look at the state of the lungs.” He poked a finger into the grey tissue that bulged through the space between the ribs. It left a clear indentation. “He’s been drowned.”
“Drowned?”
De Vries nodded. “No doubt about it.”
“But you said he died in the position where he was found.”
“That’s right.”
Marijke frowned. “But there was no water there. He was tied to his office desk. It’s not like it was a bathroom or a kitchen. How could he be drowned?”
“Very unpleasantly,” de Vries said, his tone neutral, his eyes fixed on the work of his hands. “Judging by the state of the mouth and the windpipe, I think some sort of funnel or tube was forced into his airway and water was poured down it. You said he was tied down, and I can see the marks of the ligatures for myself. He couldn’t have put up much of a struggle.”
Marijke shuddered. “Jesus. That’s cold.”
De Vries shrugged. “That’s your province, not mine.
I just read what the body has to say. Thankfully, I don’t have to deal with the mind behind it.”
But I do, the detective thought. And this is a very nasty one. “So the cause of death would be drowning?” she asked.
“You know I can’t say that for sure at this stage. But it certainly looks that way.” De Vries turned back to the cadaver, slipping his hands into the abdominal cavity and lifting out the mass of the internal organs.
Drowning, she thought. Not something you’d come up with in the heat of the moment. Whoever did this, he planned it very carefully. He came equipped for what he had to do. If this was a crime of passion, it was a very strange passion indeed.
Carol closed the heavy door of her flat and leaned against it, kicking off her shoes. She crossed one leg over the other and bent to massage the liberated toes. She’d spent the whole day tramping around the back streets of Stoke Newington, Dalston and Hackney, looking at the world around her with the eyes of a criminal. It wasn’t so different from the cop’s take on the world. They were both looking for possible escape routes, possible targets of crime, possible gaps in security. But before, she’d been the hunter. Now she had to calculate what the quarry might need.
She’d memorized back alleys, vacant lots, hiding places. She’d checked out pubs with rear exits, kebab shops whose back door might be accessible to someone with quick enough wits and sharp enough elbows, gypsy cab firms whose drivers parked round the corner from the main drag, ready for a swift getaway. She’d learned which houses offered easy access to back gardens that could double as escape routes. She’d spent three days among the traffic fumes, stale cooking smells and cheap perfume of the streets, dressing to blend with the heterogeneous mixture of those hoping they were upwardly mobile and those living with the knowledge they were going nowhere but down. She’d eavesdropped on accents from five continents, checked out who attracted attention as they passed by, who was ignored.
