03.The Last Temptation

by Val McDermid

  Carol started to turn to the next picture in the file. ‘Hang on,’ Morgan said. It wasn’t a tone to argue with. She dropped her hand. ‘He’s a big player, then?’ she asked.

  ‘One of the biggest. He had the capital to get in on the ground floor. And he already had the infrastructure set up. If you’re bribing bureaucrats to move your drugs around with impunity, it doesn’t take a lot more to get them to turn a blind eye to truck-loads of human flotsam. He’s bringing them in from China, from the Middle East, from the Balkans, from Afghanistan. As long as they’ve got the cash or the drugs to pay their way, he’ll take them where they want to go. And where most of them want to go is here.’

  ‘What happens to them when they get here? Does he link in to some organized network? Or are they just dumped and left to get on with it?’

  Morgan smiled. ‘Good question. We think it depends on how much money they can come up with. For a price, they get papers and some even get a job. But if they don’t have enough money to pay for that, they get dumped somewhere that’s already overloaded with asylum seekers and they just join the rest of the crowd.’

  ‘I suppose it would be naive to ask why the German police haven’t arrested Radecki?’

  ‘The usual reason. Lack of evidence. Like I said, he keeps his distance. There are firewalls between him and the business at street level. And the video shops make a great money laundry for a sizeable chunk of the proceeds. So he’s got an apparently legitimate source for living very high on the hog. The German organized crime squad have been trying to get a line on Krasic and Radecki for a long time, but they’ve never been able to make anything stick. There’s probably only a handful of people who could actually tie Radecki to any of this, and they’re too scared to talk. Take a look at the next shot.’

  Carol turned over to the next picture. It showed the corpse of a man lying on a short flight of stone steps. Most of his head was missing. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

  ‘That was one of the people the Germans thought might be able to put Radecki in the frame. They arrested him two days ago on the grounds that he was the supplier of a dodgy batch of smack that killed off half a dozen addicts. He got a bullet through the brain right on the steps of the police station. That’s how fearless these guys are.’

  Carol felt the strange mixture of apprehension and excitement that always came with the prospect of the chase. She had no idea what Morgan had in store for her, but whatever it was, it was clearly going to take her into the big time. ‘So where do I come in?’

  Morgan suddenly found the contents of his cup deeply interesting. ‘Radecki had a lover. Katerina Basler. They’d been together four years. If he had a chink in his armour, it was Katerina.’ He met Carol’s eyes. ‘By all accounts, he was besotted with her.’

  ‘Was?’

  ‘Katerina died two months ago in a car crash. Radecki was devastated. Still is, we hear. After she died, he went to pieces. Shut himself away in his fancy apartment, let Krasic deal with the day-to-day running of the operation. But now he’s back. And that’s where you come in. Take a look at the next photograph.’

  Carol obediently turned the page. The skin on her arms turned to gooseflesh as she stared down at her mirror image. The woman in the photograph had long hair, but, that apart, on first impressions she could have been looking at her twin. Coming face to face with her doppelgänger in a police file was one of the most unsettling things that had ever happened to her. Her hands felt clammy and she realized she was holding her breath. Discreetly she exhaled, as if the release of spent air might blow the illusion away. ‘Jesus,’ she said, her tone a protest against this apparent violation of her uniqueness.

  ‘It’s uncanny, isn’t it?’

  Carol studied the picture more intently. Now, she could see differences. Katerina’s eyes were a couple of shades darker. Their mouths were distinct in shape. Her chin was stronger than Katerina’s. Side by side, you could have told them apart without any difficulty. Yet that first impression of identity lingered on for Carol. ‘It’s weird to think there’s someone else out there with the same face. What a bizarre coincidence.’

  ‘They do sometimes happen,’ Morgan said. ‘You can imagine how gobsmacked I was when I saw your face looking up at me from an application form. That’s when we had the idea for this operation.’

  Carol shook her head in wonder. ‘She could be my sister.’

  Morgan’s smile reminded Carol of a lion’s yawn. ‘Let’s hope Tadzio thinks so.’

  15

  The Wilhelmina Rosen was under way, carving a passage through the murky waters. It was a stretch without locks or complex navigation, so Gunther was at the helm, leaving him free to settle down in the cabin with a stack of paperwork. Bills of lading, receipts for fuel, payroll accounts all sat waiting for his attention. But his mind kept slipping away from the task.

  Heinrich Holtz’s story had opened up so many questions. His fellow crewmen might think him simple and straightforward, but there had always been much more going on behind his eyes than he’d revealed. He’d always had to live in his head, starved as he had been of the company of his contemporaries. The only thing that had kept the inner darkness at bay had been reading, though his grandfather had tried to deny him even that. As a teenager, he’d become adept at smuggling books on board, battered paperbacks bought from charity shops and market stalls. He’d read late at night in the privacy of his tiny berth in the bows, devouring violent adventure novels, biographies and true crime, dropping them overboard once he’d finished with them, lest the old man catch him in something that would at the very least be scorned as a waste of time. It had taught him to look beyond the surface to what lay beneath.

  So the revelation of the secret of Schloss Hochenstein was the key that had unlocked the closed mansion of his past. He still had to wander down the corridors and explore the rooms before he could have any understanding of what really lay within. Some of those rooms remained obstinately dark, with no possibility of illumination. His grandmother, for example. She had been dead before he was born. He had no idea if she had borne the brunt of his grandfather’s sadism or if her love had been enough to calm his rage while she lived. There was no way of telling.

  He knew almost nothing of his mother. His grandfather had only ever referred to her as a whore, or a bitch who had fouled her own doorstep. There wasn’t even a photograph of her among the old man’s personal effects. He might have passed her a hundred times on the street and he would never have known. He liked to think that the electric current of his hatred would alert him to the bitch’s presence, but he knew that was wishful thinking.

  From his birth certificate, he had gleaned a few facts. She was called Inge. She had been nineteen at the time of his birth, her occupation listed as a secretary. Where his father’s name should have been, there was a blank. Either she hadn’t known who he was, or she had had her own reasons for keeping silent. Perhaps he was a married man. Perhaps he was a callow fool she didn’t want to be tied to for the rest of her life. Perhaps she was trying to protect him from the wrath of her own father. All these options were equally possible, given that he knew nothing of the kind of person she had been, or whether she had been as brutally oppressed by the old man as he had. It didn’t stop him despising her for leaving him to face the fate she had escaped.

  After the old man’s funeral, he had asked the crew what they knew of his mother. They’d never have dared open their mouths while the old man was alive, but with him safely despatched, Gunther had told what little he knew.

  Inge had been brought up very strictly. Her mother had kept her close, forcing her into the mould of proper German womanhood. But when she had died, Inge had seized her chance. Whenever the old man came home, she was demure as ever, putting his meals on the table, making sure the apartment was clean and neat, dressing modestly and speaking only when she was spoken to. While the Wilhelmina Rosen was out of port, however, it was a different story.

  Gunther had heard from other boatmen t
hat Inge was regularly seen in the dockside bars, drinking with sailors until the early hours. Naturally, there were boyfriends, enough to earn her the reputation of a good-time girl, if not quite a slut.

  She must have known she was dancing with the devil, he thought. Watermen have a strong sense of community and a confined world; word of her indiscretions was bound to make its way back to her father’s ears. But before that could happen, she’d fallen pregnant. What surprised him, now he came to think about it, was that she hadn’t got rid of him. It wasn’t that hard to come by an abortion in Hamburg in the mid-1970s. She must have wanted to keep him very badly if she was prepared to withstand the wrath of her father.

  According to Gunther, she managed to hide the pregnancy for the first five or six months, swaddled in baggy sweaters. When her father had found out, he had been enraged almost beyond speech. Life on board had been hell for a few weeks, the old man in the foulest of tempers and the crew unable to do right for doing wrong. He could imagine only too well what it must have been like, and felt grateful to have missed it.

  There followed an ominous silence for a couple of months. Then one morning, after a three-day lie-over in Hamburg, the old man had arrived at the quayside in a laden car. The crew had watched open-mouthed as he had calmly unloaded a crib with two full sets of bedding, several carrier bags of baby clothes and a box containing bottles, formula and sterilizing tablets. Finally, the old man had wheeled a pram up the gangplank. It contained a baby.

  No one had the nerve to ask the old man what had become of Inge, and they’d sailed before rumours could reach them. But when they’d next hit their home port, Gunther had made a beeline for the bars to garner what gossip he could. As he’d suspected, the old man had come home to find Inge ensconced with the baby. He’d thrown her bodily out of the apartment, tossing her clothes down the stairs after her. He’d changed the locks and set about bringing up baby himself.

  Inge, it was reported, had left town. One of her ex-boyfriends worked on a cruise ship and he’d found her a job on board, waitressing. When the ship came back to Hamburg, Inge was gone. She’d handed in her notice in Bergen and walked off into the Norwegian night without a forwarding address. That was the last anyone in Hamburg had heard of her, as far as he could tell.

  He wondered what had become of her, but in a remote, unemotional way. Even as a child, he had never entertained fantasies of rescue. It had never occurred to him to dream that his mother would sweep on board, wrapped in mink and dripping with diamonds, to take him away from his personal hell and envelop him in the lap of luxury.

  These days, when he thought of her, he imagined she had probably ended up selling herself in one way or another, either formally as a prostitute or informally as the wife of someone she could see as a protector. It was, he thought, a damn sight more than she deserved.

  But Heinrich Holtz’s story had made him realize there was no point in blaming his mother or his grandfather. Might as well blame the bullet or the gun for killing. The finger that had pulled the trigger on his own particular fate hadn’t been the old man. It had been the psychologists who thought that people were a legitimate resource for their experiments.

  Everybody acted as if all that had ended with the Nazi era. He knew better. He’d done his research. He’d learned from his experience at the hands of his grandfather that there was no point in rushing to vengeance. It was necessary to know the enemy, to study their strengths as well as their weaknesses. After the funeral, he’d made it his business to read everything he could find about the theory and practice of psychology. At first, it had been like reading a foreign language. He’d had to read and reread till the words blurred and his head ached, but he’d struggled on. Now, he could use their own weapons against them. Now, he knew their truths almost as well as he knew his own. He could wrap up his ideas in their secret jargon. Which of them would have believed that a mere boatman could infiltrate their world?

  He knew they were still using people as their guinea pigs. They were still fucking with the heads of their victims, still hiding behind the guise of professional scientific curiosity to wreak damage. Even when they were supposed to be helping, they just made things worse. While they were still out there, his would not be a unique fate. Other poor sods would be as crippled as he had been. His task was clear. He had to send out a message that could not be ignored.

  There was no point in making an example of one or two. He had to cut a swathe through their ranks. He’d chosen his victims meticulously, plodding through reams of published papers in the journals of experimental psychology. He was only interested in those who might be regarded as the legitimate professional descendants of his persecutors – the Germans, of course, and their treacherous collaborators, the French, the Belgians, the Austrians and the Dutch. He’d ignored anyone who experimented on animals, looking instead for those evil bastards who not only used humans as the stepping stones for their own advancement, but who boasted of it in print. It was sickening, the way they detailed how they manipulated their subjects, twisting their minds and their behaviour. He’d been surprised that there weren’t more of them, but he supposed that not all of them were stupid enough to expose their own cruelties. It took a while, but finally he had a list of twenty names. He’d chosen to start with the ones who were based nearest the waterways, but if the need arose he could travel further afield later in his campaign.

  Now, he had to be very, very careful. He had to plan every move with the precision of a military operation. And, so far, it had paid off handsomely.

  He looked out of the porthole at the brown water surging past. Bremen would be next. The jar was ready and waiting.

  Petra Becker was as cross as a cat whose mouse has been taken from it by a squeamish human. She’d had another frustrating day trying to prove a negative. They’d tracked down the man that Marlene Krebs was sleeping with, but he’d given them nothing useful. Marlene was a free agent, he’d shrugged. Yes, he’d heard she’d been seeing Danni, but he didn’t care so long as she practised safe sex, which she always did with him. You didn’t want to take chances with junkies, he’d added self-righteously.

  Danni’s girlfriend had denied any knowledge of his supposed affair with Marlene, but they hadn’t lived together and she couldn’t say for sure where he’d been on the nights he hadn’t been with her.

  Between them, Petra and the Shark had found three people who claimed to have known about the affair. The KriPo detectives were satisfied with that, but Petra wasn’t. One of the three had convictions for minor dealing, another worked in one of Radecki’s video stores. And the third owed so much to the local loan sharks that he’d have admitted to sleeping with the Chancellor if the price had been right. She didn’t believe any of them. But that was a long way from being able to disprove the story that Marlene still stuck so doggedly to.

  She’d come back to the office determined to get the next phase of her strategy off the ground. None of her usual sources had been able to give her any leads on Marlene’s daughter’s whereabouts. All she’d been able to establish was that Tanja had been picked up from school on the day of the shooting in a big black Mercedes. Nobody had noticed who was driving the car, or anything useful like the number plate. She could be anywhere by now. Given Radecki’s network, she might not even be in Germany.

  But they had to try. So she’d marched into Hanna Plesch’s office and laid out her idea. Plesch had heard her out, frowning. Then she’d shaken her auburn head. ‘It’s too risky,’ she said.

  ‘It’s the only way. If we run it big as a missing child, we’re bound to get a response. Wherever she’s being held, someone must have seen her. Or, at the very least, noticed something a bit suspicious. We need to find the girl so we can make it safe for Marlene to tell us what she knows.’

  ‘And what if they decide to cut their losses and kill the kid? What do we say to the media then? Do you really think Krebs will give you the time of day if she thinks you’re the one who got her daughter killed?’ Plesch
stared her down. She was clearly as determined as Petra was.

  ‘We don’t have any other choice,’ Petra said obstinately.

  ‘Petra, we’re getting nowhere with this. We might have to accept it’s another dead end. We’ll keep working the case, but I won’t put a child’s life at risk.’

  ‘The child’s already at risk.’

  ‘Krebs knows that. And she knows what she has to do to keep her child alive. You’re not going to change that. Petra, you might have to let this one go. There’ll be other chances.’

  Petra glared at her boss. ‘Not from what I hear.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘The word is that there’s going to be a big operation mounted against Radecki. And it’s not going to be ours. Boss, I’ve worked my arse off for years trying to build a case against that bastard, and if this is going to be our last chance to put him away, I don’t want to leave any stone unturned.’

  Plesch looked away. ‘This job is not personal, Petra. You don’t have some sort of divine right to be the one who finally cracks Radecki’s organization. It doesn’t matter who closes him down, as long as somebody does.’

  ‘You’re confirming there is something going down? Something that takes it away from us?’ Now her blood was up and she didn’t care that she was overstepping the mark. Her eyes were narrowed and there were patches of colour on her cheeks and neck.

  ‘Don’t push me,’ Plesch said, getting to her feet. ‘Just go out there and do your job. We need to talk about this some more, but not now. Listen to me, Petra. We’ve worked together long enough for you to understand that there are times when you have to trust me. This is not a good time for you to rock the boat. Don’t go down the high-risk road. It’s not necessary and it’s not desirable.’ She forced a smile. ‘That’s an order, by the way. You don’t expose the child.’

  Petra had walked out fuming, her hands clenched into fists at her side. Only later, when her initial anger had subsided, had she analysed what Plesch had said to her. She had verified, albeit indirectly, that something major was going to change in the Radecki investigation. But she seemed to be suggesting that there would be a role for Petra if she kept her nose clean. It was a long way from a promise, but it made her feel slightly less raw about Plesch’s dismissal of her plan.