by Val McDermid
It wasn’t anywhere near enough, but it would have to do. Tomorrow she would spend polishing her performance, then it would be time for the real thing.
9
It was like picking a scab. The agony was exquisite, but the activity was irresistible. Tadeusz sat at the polished slab of burl oak that served as the desk in his home office, sorting through his photographs of Katerina. There were the public shots; the pair of them arriving at a film premiere, her radiant looks causing the snappers to take her for some minor starlet; a charity dinner, Katerina feeding him a piece of lobster with her fingers; Katerina at the formal opening of the day-care centre she’d helped raise funds for. There was a series of studio portraits that he’d persuaded her was the only birthday present he wanted from her. That the camera had loved her was clear from their sensuous quality.
Then there were the dozens of snaps he’d taken of her, some casual, others painstakingly set up. Katerina in Paris, posed with her head at an angle so the Eiffel Tower was reflected in her mirrored shades; Katerina in Prague, Wenceslas Square the dramatic backdrop; Katerina in the market place in Florence, rubbing the gleaming bronze nose of the wild boar statue for luck; and Katerina in a bikini sprawled on a sun lounger, one leg cocked at the knee, reading a trashy airport novel. He couldn’t even remember if that last one had been taken on Capri or Grand Cayman. For some reason, it had ended up out of sequence among the Prague photographs. So much for every picture telling a story.
He’d always meant to put the photographs into albums, but there had never been time while she’d still been alive, while he’d been adding to the archive constantly. Now, he had all the time in the world to arrange the images of Katerina in whatever sequence he desired. Tadeusz sighed and reached for one of the leather-bound albums he’d chosen himself earlier that week from a photographic supplies wholesaler. He flipped open another wallet of snapshots and began to trawl through, discarding the images of landscapes and interesting architectural details, winnowing out the best shots of Katerina and arranging the first three on the page. Painstakingly, he mounted them, then wrote next to them in his neat hand, “Katerina, Amsterdam. Our first weekend together.” He’d have to check the exact date in his diary, a realization that angered him. It seemed wrong that every detail wasn’t carved in memory, a small token of disrespect that Katerina didn’t deserve.
The buzz of the video entryphone interrupted him and he closed the album, getting to his feet and crossing the hall to the small screen sunk discreetly into the wall by the apartment door. Darko Krasic stood outside, half-turned towards the avenue, his eyes shifting back and forth in a constant surveillance. Even here in the respectable streets of Charlottenburg, his lieutenant didn’t take his safety for granted. Krasic always quoted his father, a fisherman. “One hand for the boat, one hand for yourself.” Tadeusz didn’t mind what some might have seen as paranoia; as far as he was concerned, it was directed towards keeping him safe as much as Krasic, and therefore a bonus rather than a cause for concern.
He buzzed Krasic in at the ground floor, putting the apartment door on the latch and heading through to the kitchen to make a pot of coffee. He’d barely taken the beans from the freezer when Krasic strode in, head down and shoulders wide, a man looking for somewhere to put his belligerence. He knew better than to direct it at his boss, however. “We’ve got trouble,” he said in a surprisingly calm voice.
Tadeusz nodded. “I heard the radio news earlier. Another two dead junkies in some shitty nightclub in Oranienstrasse.”
“That makes seven, counting the one who died in intensive care.” Krasic unbuttoned his overcoat and took a cigar case from his inside pocket.
“I know.” He dumped the beans in the grinder and killed all prospect of conversation for a few seconds. “I can count, Darko.”
“So can the media. They’re kicking up a real stink, Tadzio. This isn’t going to go away. The cops are under a lot of pressure.”
“That’s what we’re paying them for, isn’t it? To take the pressure and leave our people alone?” He tipped the ground coffee into a cafetiere and poured the hot water over it.
“Some things they can’t ignore. Seven dead, for example.”
Tadeusz frowned. “What are you saying, Darko?”
“It’s gone past the point where our normal protection can take care of things. They’re going to arrest Kamal tonight. We’ve had our card marked, that’s as far as our man can stick his neck out right now.” He lit his cigar and puffed luxuriously.
“Fuck. Can we control what happens?”
Krasic shrugged. “It depends. If he’s looking at seven murder charges, Kamal might think it’s worth taking the risk of giving me up. Or even you. If they offer him immunity, he might decide his best chance is to take us off the streets. Give himself a breathing space and trust to the witness protection programme.”
Tadeusz pressed the plunger down slowly, his mind flipping through the options. “We’re not going to let it go that far,” he said. “Time for the pawn sacrifice, Darko.”
Darko allowed himself a thin smile. Tadzio hadn’t lost it. “You want me to make sure he never gets as far as the police station?”
“I want you to do whatever it takes. But make it look good, Darko. Give the press something to take their minds off all those dead wasters.” He poured two cups of coffee, pushing one towards the Serb.
“I’ve already got one or two ideas on that score.” He raised his cup in a toast. “Leave it with me. You won’t be disappointed.”
“No,” Tadeusz said firmly. “I won’t be. Now, losing Kamal leaves us with a gap. Who’s going to fill it, Darko? Who’s got what it takes to walk in a dead man’s shoes?”
It had been a long day, but Brigadier Marijke van Hasselt was too wired for sleep. She’d delivered the results of the postmortem—death by drowning, as de Vries had tentatively predicted early on in the autopsy—at a briefing with her boss, Maartens, and her opposite number, Tom Brucke. Though none of them had said it in so many words, they really didn’t have a single lead.
They’d masked the insecurity this inevitably produced with the familiar police routines that they all knew in their bones. Briskly, Maartens had outlined the ground rules for the investigation, assigning tasks to one team or the other, acting as if this was a directed inquiry that already had its terms of reference clearly mapped out. But they all knew they were groping in the dark for Pieter de Groot’s killer.
Most murders were easy. They fell into one of three broad categories: domestic disputes jacked up one step too far; drunken brawls that escalated beyond the initial intent; or the incidentals of other criminal activity, usually connected to drugs or violent robbery. The Leiden killing didn’t fit any of these categories. Nobody in the victim’s immediate circle had an obvious motive, nor was this the kind of murder that arose from the engorged or embittered passions of domestic relationships. Besides, the ex-wife and the current girlfriend both had alibis, the one at home with her children, the other visiting her sister in Maastricht.
Maartens had remarked that they needed to take a look at his professional life. He couldn’t imagine that anyone at the university would have turned to murder to solve some scholastic dispute, but with so few threads to grasp, they had to be sure they weren’t missing the obvious. He’d heard that passions could run high in the rarefied atmosphere of academic research, and there were some very strange people around in higher education, especially in areas like psychology.
Marijke had said nothing, unwilling to provoke further her boss’s prejudice against university graduates like herself. Although Maartens was every bit as clued in about modern policing as any of his colleagues, he still clung to some of the old-school attitudes of his youth, and she didn’t want what was an already complicated investigation made any more awkward. She’d acknowledged his assignment of the university connection to her team with a quick nod. It would almost certainly be a complete waste of time, and it would have to wait until after the weekend
, but she’d make sure the job was done thoroughly.
Tom Brucke’s team had begun their canvass of the neighbourhood, but so far they’d drawn a blank. Nobody had seen or heard anything that had any apparent relevance to the murder. It wasn’t the sort of area where a strange car would immediately be noticed by the neighbours, and few people paid attention to individual pedestrians on a street where there was regular foot traffic. Whoever had killed Pieter de Groot, he hadn’t drawn attention to himself.
Marijke had spent the rest of the day supervising a search of de Groot’s home, to see if there was anything that might be construed as a clue to the bizarre scenario that had been played out in the upstairs room. But there was nothing. She wondered about what was missing, however. There was no sign of a diary, desk calendar or personal organizer in the office. She couldn’t believe a man like de Groot wouldn’t have some sort of aide memoire for his appointments in his home office. She’d even had one of the technicians check over his computer to see if he kept an electronic diary, but that had drawn a blank too.
But sometimes absences held their own clues. To Marijke, this lack said that whoever had killed Pieter de Groot was no casual caller. He’d been expected, and he’d taken care to remove all trace of that appointment. If she was right, there was a chance that there might be a duplicate note of the arrangement in de Groot’s diary at the university. She made a note to herself to make sure she was there when they entered his office, and set one of her officers the task of getting them admission first thing in the morning.
Eventually, she grudgingly accepted there was nothing more for her to do. Her team was busy with the tedious routine of sifting material and information that would probably prove useless. They didn’t need her. The best way she could serve the inquiry now was to go home and let her mind turn over what little they knew. Sleep, she always found, was the best possible state in which to uncover new angles of approach.
But sleep wasn’t going to come any time soon, Marijke knew. She poured herself a glass of wine and settled herself down in front of her computer. Some months previously, she’d become a subscriber to an on-line newsgroup for gay police officers. Not that there was any problem with being a lesbian and a Dutch police officer, nor did she have a ghetto mentality. But sometimes it was helpful to have what she thought of as a room of one’s own and, via the newsgroup, she’d developed close friendships with a handful of other officers whose take on the world chimed comfortingly with her own. More than that, she’d formed a bond of particular intimacy with a German colleague. Petra Becker was a criminal intelligence officer in Berlin and, like Marijke, senior enough not to be entirely comfortable with close confiding relationships with her colleagues. Like Marijke, Petra was also single, another damaged survivor of the attrition of their career on relationships. They’d been cautious with each other at first, escaping from the newsgroup into private live chat rooms where they could write more openly about thoughts and feelings. They were both aware that each had found some special connection to the other, but they were equally reluctant to push for a face-to-face encounter in case it shattered what they valued.
And so they had developed the habit of spending an hour or so in each other’s virtual company several nights a week. Tonight there was no prior arrangement in place, but Marijke knew that if Petra was at home and awake, she’d be in one of the public chat rooms on the gay police site, and that she’d be able to tempt her away from the crowd into private discussion.
She connected to the website and clicked on the
Petra: hello, love. how are you tonight?
Marijke: I just got in. We caught a murder today.
P: that’s never fun.
M: No. And this was a really nasty one.
P: domestic? street?
M: Neither. The worst kind. Ritualistic, organized, no obvious suspects. Clearly personal, but in an impersonal sort of way, if you see what I mean.
P: who’s the victim?
M: A professor at the university in Leiden. Pieter de Groot. His cleaner found the body. He was in his study at home, staked out naked on his desk. He’d been drowned by having a funnel or a pipe shoved down his throat, then water poured through it.
P: very nasty. was he one of those scientists who do animal experiments?
M: He was an experimental psychologist. I don’t know much detail about what he did. But I don’t think this is about animal rights. I think this was a one-on-one. There’s more, you see. Whoever did this, they didn’t stop at killing. There’s mutilation as well.
P: genital?
M: Yes and no. The killer left his prick and balls intact, but scalped his pubic hair. I’ve never seen anything like it. It was almost worse than if he’d been castrated. That would have made more sense, more typical of what the sexually motivated killer would do.
P: you know, this is ringing bells with me. some bulletin i glanced at. not one of ours, a cry for help from another force.
M: You mean there’s been a case like this in Germany?
P: can’t say for certain. but something’s niggling at the back of my mind. i’ll do a computer trawl in the office.
M: I don’t deserve you, do I?
P: no, you deserve much better. so, now we got the shop talk out of the way, you want to get personal?
Marijke smiled. Already, Petra had reminded her that there was more to life than murder. At last, she could see a route that might take her to sleep.
10
The Wilhelmina Rosen sat unusually high in the water. She’d discharged her cargo that morning, but someone at the shipping agency had screwed up, and the load that should have been stowed that afternoon had been delayed till the following day. He wasn’t unduly anxious. He could probably make up the day once they were under way, even if it meant bending the rules about how long their watches should be. And the crew were happy enough. They weren’t going to complain about a night ashore in Rotterdam, since it wasn’t a delay that would put a dent in their pay.
Alone in his cabin, he unlocked a small brass-bound chest that had belonged to his grandfather and contemplated its contents. The two jars had originally contained pickled gherkins, but what floated inside now was infinitely more grisly. Preserved in formalin he’d stolen from a funeral parlour, the skin had lost its flesh tints and assumed the colour of tinned tuna. Fragments of the small muscles were darker, standing out against the skin like a cross-section of tuna steak grilled rare. The hair remained curled, though now it had the harsh dullness of a bad wig. Still, there could be no doubting what he was looking at.
When he had first fantasized about this, he’d known he would need some souvenir to remind himself how well he’d done. He had read books about murderers who had excised breasts, removed genitalia, stripped the skin from their victims to clothe themselves. None of this seemed right. They were weirdos and perverts, whereas he was driven by a motive far more pure. But he wanted something, and he needed it to hold meaning for him alone.
He ranged over the indignities he’d been forced to suffer at the hands of the old man. There was no blurring at the edges of his memory. Even commonly repeated tortures failed to merge into one big picture. Every detail of every mortification was pinprick sharp. What could he take that would keep his purpose fresh, clear and meaningful?
Then he’d remembered the shaving. It had happened soon after his twelfth birthday, a day unmarke
d by gifts or cards. The only reason he knew it was his birthday was that he’d caught a glimpse of his birth certificate a few months before when the old man had been sorting through some papers. Until then, he’d had no date to call his own. He’d never had so much as a birthday card, never mind presents, cakes and parties. But who could have been invited to any party of his? He had no friends, he had no wider family. As far as he was aware, the only people who even knew his name were the crew of the Wilhelmina Rosen.
He’d known he was born some time in the autumn, because around the turning of the leaves, the litany of rage that poured into his ears would alter. Instead of, “You’re eight years old, but you still act like a baby,” the old man would snarl, “You’re nine now, time you learned what it is to take some responsibility.”
Around the time he turned twelve, he’d noticed the changes. He’d grown taller, his shoulders straining the seams of his flannel work shirts. His voice had become unreliable, shifting registers as if he were possessed by a demon. And around his cock, dark wiry hairs had started to sprout. He’d imagined this would happen eventually. He’d spent too long living in close confinement with three adult males not to have grasped that at some point his body was going to duplicate theirs. But the reality was simply another source of anxiety. He was leaving childhood behind, without any clear idea of how he could ever become a man.
His grandfather had noticed the changes too. It was hard to imagine how he could be more brutal, yet he seemed to regard it as a challenge to find fresh sources of humiliation. Things had reached a new level of horror when a hawser snapped one morning as they were docking in Hamburg. It had been one of those things that was nobody’s fault, but the old man had decided that someone had to pay the price.
