03.The Last Temptation

by Val McDermid

  Whatever the answer to that question, the change of venue demonstrated that Geronimo was flexible in certain elements of his crimes. But the rape and the attempted strangulation weren’t markers of adaptability. They indicated something quite different. He pulled the laptop towards him and began to type.

  Following the murder of Dr Calvet in Köln, he will be in a state of considerable agitation. The first three murders are apparently lacking in any obvious element of sexuality. However, there is invariably a link between serial homicide with ritualistic elements and erotic satisfaction for the killer. That there was no overt indicator of this in the earlier crimes would suggest to me that he was in denial about the sexual component in his actions. The rape of Dr Calvet should not, strictly speaking, be seen as an escalation in his activities. In practical terms, it represents the surfacing of a motivation that has been there from the beginning, albeit suppressed.

  What is more significant is that he has allowed this breach in his self-control to occur. I believe this may have come about in part because he was disturbed mid-murder in Bremen. This must have unsettled him to a considerable degree, making him much more nervous when approaching Dr Calvet. I believe he will have shocked himself with his actions in Köln. To maintain his earlier level of denial about the erotic nature of what he was doing, he probably convinced himself he had some kind of altruistic mission. But now he has descended to rape, it will be harder for him to maintain the integrity of that delusion.

  What does this mean for detection and prevention?

  I believe he will try to kill again very soon, perhaps within a matter of days. He has to restore his vision of himself as some sort of avenging angel or righter of wrongs, to erase this momentary lapse into the behaviour of what he may well see as an ‘ordinary’ criminal.

  If I am right that he is somehow connected to the waterways, then his options may be limited to quite a small geographical area. I believe the time has come when his potential targets should be informed of the risks. I would urge that this be done in a low-key manner to avoid alerting the killer. Officers should identify university departments with an experimental psychology specialism and make personal visits to the campuses. They should stress the importance of maintaining confidentiality if they are to have the best chance of capturing the killer, and they should invite co-operation. Lecturers who have been contacted about interviews for a new on-line magazine should be identified. This could allow a sting to be set up. If this is done quickly, it may prevent a fifth killing.

  Tony read over what he’d written, then sent it to Marijke and Petra, with a copy to Carol. From what Marijke had told him, it looked as if the cases were already getting bogged down in red tape, with everything being routed through a secure area in the Europol computing centre at Den Haag. He hoped that, between them, they could inject a sense of urgency into the investigation. Otherwise, they were all going to end up with more blood on their hands.

  Tadeusz walked Carol to the door of the apartment block. ‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘It’s been an interesting evening.’

  He took her hand and bowed deeply over it, planting a kiss on the back of her hand. ‘Thank you for coming. I’ll call you, yes?’

  Relieved that he wasn’t angling to come up for coffee, Carol nodded. ‘I’ll look forward to it. Good night.’

  She took the lift to the third floor and let herself into her apartment. If he was standing in the street below watching, he’d see that she’d gone straight home. As she walked through to the bedroom, Carol unzipped her dress and let it fall to the floor. She wanted to see Tony, but she didn’t want to go to him in Caroline Jackson’s clothes that held a whisper of Tadeusz’s cigar smoke. She grabbed a clean T-shirt and a pair of jeans and hastily dressed, then walked down the two flights of stairs to his apartment, taking care to check the hallway was empty before she stepped out of the stairwell.

  He looked strained, she thought, as he opened the door. But then, he had spent the day probing the murder of a friend. It would have been more strange if he’d greeted her with a cheerful grin. She stepped towards him and kissed him on the cheek. He responded with a tight hug. ‘It’s good to see you,’ he said. ‘How did it go today?’

  ‘Interesting,’ Carol said. ‘As in, “May you live in interesting times.”’

  Tony led the way back through to the living room where the curtains were already drawn, and they settled down at opposite ends of the sofa, both still more than a little tentative about the new shape of their relationship. ‘Tell me about it,’ he said, pouring her a glass of red wine from the open bottle on the table.

  Carol filled him in on the events of the day. He listened attentively, head cocked to one side. Finally, he said, ‘It had to happen. There had to come a moment where he suddenly freaked about the resemblance between you and Katerina and got suspicious.’

  ‘Well, even though it wasn’t entirely unexpected, it still threw me. For a moment, I couldn’t think how I should react.’

  ‘You ran with your instincts, which in your case is always a good way to go. You’ve got good gut reactions, Carol, and they worked to your advantage this afternoon. You didn’t cave in, you turned it around on to him, which was the best possible way to distract him from what was niggling away at him. But don’t be surprised if something like this comes up again.’

  ‘So what do I do next time? Take umbrage again?’

  Tony ran a hand through his hair. ‘I don’t have all the answers, Carol. Tell you the truth, I’ve seldom felt less infallible than I do tonight.’

  Carol’s eyebrows rose. ‘Hey, you were the one who said you wanted to help me with this,’ she protested.

  ‘I know, but I’m not sure I want to feel accountable if I suggest something that turns sour,’ Tony said with a weary smile.

  Carol unconsciously drew away from him. ‘You could give guilt seminars to Catholics, you know. Look, Tony, I’m just asking for advice here. I take responsibility for my own actions.’

  He cursed himself silently for striking the wrong note yet again. ‘You want advice?’ he said sharply. ‘OK, entirely without prejudice, I’d say that if Radecki asks you again, you should tell him you didn’t kill Osborne and that you don’t know who did. And that you’re as uncomfortable with the resemblance to Katerina as he is. That you don’t want people thinking you’re the sort of person who would exploit his private grief for business advantage. And frankly, it would be easier for you to walk away from this whole deal, because it’s not like it’s hard to find a source of illegal labour.’

  Carol nodded. ‘Thank you. I’ll give it some thought,’ she said formally.

  Tony shook his head. ‘Shall I go out and come in again? Then we can start fresh? Look, we’re both tired and scratchy, let’s not take it out on each other.’ He reached for her hand and laced her warm fingers through his. ‘Tell me how you’re feeling.’

  Carol shrugged. ‘It’s hard to describe. A mixture of exhilaration, because I feel like I’m doing better than I had any right to hope, and absolute terror because I know I don’t have a safety net if I screw up. I’m living on adrenaline, and it’s exhausting. So take my mind off me and tell me about your day.’

  ‘It’s not exactly uplifting material. There’s been a fourth murder.’

  Her eyes widened in shock. ‘So soon? That’s very close.’

  ‘And he’s losing control.’ Briefly, he outlined what he’d learned from Marijke earlier that evening. ‘Do you want to see my draft profile?’

  ‘If you don’t mind letting me see it.’

  He got up, crossed to his briefcase, and extracted a few sheets of paper. ‘Here you go,’ he said, passing it to her. ‘Would you like some coffee?’

  ‘Mmm, please,’ Carol said, already reading the familiar opening disclaimer. While he brewed up, she gave her attention to the short report. Tony kept out of the way until she’d finished, then returned with the coffee.

  ‘So, what do you think?’ he asked. ‘I think it’s a bit thin,
myself. I don’t feel that I’ve come up with anything that really moves the investigation much further forward.’

  ‘Given how little you had to work with, I’d say you’ve done a good job,’ Carol said reassuringly. ‘The most important thing is obviously your theory that he’s a boatman.’

  ‘Yes, but have you any idea how much commercial traffic there is on the waterways of Holland and Germany? There must be thousands of craft on the rivers, and our man could be on any of them. I don’t even know if there’s any record kept of their movements. I spoke to Marijke briefly this evening, and she seemed to think that boats have to register when they go through locks or tie up at wharves, but that still doesn’t narrow it down much, and ploughing through all that material could take months. We haven’t got months, Carol.’

  ‘And even if they warn potential victims, it might not be any help in catching him,’ Carol said.

  ‘That’s right. It’s possible he might just go to ground temporarily and resurface with a new strategy for cornering his victims.’

  ‘If he’s on-line, might there be any mileage in checking with the internet booksellers to see who’s bought a wide range of psychology textbooks?’ Carol asked.

  Tony shrugged. ‘If he lives on a boat, it would be easier for him to buy his books in a shop rather than have them sent to an address he might not get to for a few weeks.’

  ‘I suppose,’ she said, trying not to sound too dejected. ‘What about the Stasi angle?’

  ‘Petra has arranged for me to talk to a historian tomorrow. But again, I think we’re going to be doing needle-in-a-haystack stuff.’

  ‘I’m interested in what he thinks he’s doing here,’ Carol mused. ‘If you’re right, and he thinks his life has been screwed up because somebody close to him was a victim of mental torture, what’s his goal here? Is it vengeance, pure and simple? Or is he trying to send a wider message?’

  ‘Well, it depends on whether we’re talking conscious or subconscious motives here,’ Tony said. I’d say that subconsciously he’s trying to get his own back. But that’s too personal, too petty for him to acknowledge as his primary motive. I think he sees himself as cleaning the Augean stables of psychology. ‘He’s sending a message out – if you mess with people’s heads directly, you deserve to die.’

  Carol frowned and fiddled with her coffee cup. ‘I know this is going to sound off the wall, but do you think he sees what he’s doing as a kind of cure? A form of ultimate therapy? Now you won’t indulge your horrible destructive habit any more?’

  This was what Tony loved about working with Carol. Her mind sloped off laterally and came up with ideas that he would either never have or would have dismissed as too improbable for consideration. She’d done it before, and she’d been right when he’d been wrong. ‘You know, that’s not a bad idea,’ he said slowly. ‘But where are you going with this?’

  ‘I’m not sure …’ Carol stared at the wall opposite her, trying to put into words the idea that was lurking at the corner of her mind. ‘If he sees himself as an instrument of vengeance, couldn’t it be that he chooses to humiliate them further, using the tools of their trade? What if he’s written to academic journals denouncing them or criticizing their work? It might be an idea to do an on-line trawl as well, given that he’s apparently posing as an e-zine journalist.’

  Tony nodded. ‘It’s possible. Worth looking at, anyway.’

  ‘Or maybe writing to their departments complaining about their academic failings?’ Carol had a faraway look in her eyes now. ‘Maybe he sees their final encounter as a sort of therapeutic session?’

  ‘You mean, he thinks they’re the patients and he’s the one with the cure?’

  ‘Exactly. What do you think?’

  ‘It’s possible. And?’ Tony added, pushing to see where Carol might take this idea.

  She slid along the sofa and leaned into him. ‘And nothing. Sorry, that’s my lot.’

  ‘Never mind. Inspiration doesn’t always arrive on cue. I’ll suggest to Petra and Marijke that they have a look for public or professional criticism of the victims’ work.’ He put his arm round her.

  ‘Oh, this is so comfortable,’ Carol sighed. ‘I wish I didn’t have to drag myself back upstairs.’

  Tony swallowed hard. ‘You don’t have to.’

  ‘I think I do. We’ve waited so long to get here. I don’t want our first time to have the shadow of Radecki hanging over it. I want it to be just you and me, to be special.’ She turned her face up to his. ‘I can wait a little bit longer.’

  He leaned down and gave her a soft kiss on the lips. ‘You’re determined to give me no excuse for failure, huh?’ he said, hiding his anxiety behind a jokey smile.

  ‘Stop right there,’ she said, putting a warning finger to his lips. ‘I’m not worried, and neither should you be.’ She disentangled herself. ‘And now I’m going to bed. We both have too much responsibility to miss out on our sleep right now.’ She got to her feet. ‘I’ll see myself out. And I’ll see you soon.’

  He watched her walk across the room, amazed at the warm glow of contentment he felt. Maybe, just maybe they could make it work.

  * * *

  Krasic arrived at Tadeusz’s apartment shortly after eight with a bag of fresh pastries from the Turkish bakery on the corner of Karl Marx Allee nearest to his apartment. While his boss brewed the coffee, he tipped the contents of the bag on to a plate and absently picked up the crumbs on the tip of a licked forefinger. ‘She’s a dark horse, this Caroline Jackson,’ he said. ‘Nobody seems to know much about her. They’ve heard the name, but not many people have ever met her face to face. I talked again to that dealer that Kramer put you on to. He says he met her first about six years ago, when she was doing some dodgy property dealing in Norwich.’

  ‘What sort of dodgy property dealing?’ Tadeusz poured the coffee into cups and carried them across to the table. ‘Stop eating the crumbs, Darko, you’re not a peasant any more,’ he added affectionately.

  Krasic sat down and took a gulp of the scalding coffee. The heat didn’t seem to bother him. ‘She got a tip about a planned supermarket development that involved knocking down some old houses. Some of the owners didn’t want to sell to her at the rock-bottom prices she was offering, so she used the traditional methods to persuade them.’

  ‘Violence?’ Tadeusz asked, reaching for a crescent studded with toasted sesame seeds.

  ‘Only as a last resort. More general domestic terrorism. You know. Break the car windows. Dogshit through the letter box. Funeral wreaths on the doorstep. Taxis arriving every twenty minutes all through the night. She was extremely imaginative, by all accounts. Anyway, they all sold in the end except for one old lady who was adamant that she’d been born there and she was going to die there. Well, she was adamant until she came home from the shops one day and found her cat nailed to the front door.’

  Tadeusz sucked his breath in through his teeth. ‘Ruthless. I like that in a woman,’ he said, grinning. ‘I take it she made a killing selling the land to the supermarket?’

  ‘Kramer’s mate reckons she must have cleared about a quarter of a mil. She used it as seed money for more property deals. She always keeps her own hands clean, though. Does everything at one remove, he says. And she’s not involved in the drugs trade at all. He offered to cut her in on a deal once, but she said she didn’t like being in hock to the kind of gangsters he was hanging with. He’s heard she’s got something going up on an old American base out in the middle of nowhere, but he’s got no idea what it is.’

  ‘Well, that checks out.’ Tadeusz brushed the crumbs from his mouth with a linen napkin and reached across the table for his cigar case. ‘What about personally? What’s her background?’

  ‘The stuff you told me looks kosher. You remember that geezer we paid to hack into the Customs’ computer last year? Hansi the hacker? Well, I slipped him a bundle of readies to check out all he could about Jackson. She was born where she said, when she said. Went to university in
Warwick. She’s lived at the same place, some fucking manor house in Suffolk, for the last three years. Pays her taxes. The taxman thinks she’s a freelance planning consultant, whatever the hell that is. Looks a citizen on paper. Got no criminal record, though she was charged once with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. But they never got it to court.’

  ‘What about boyfriends? Husband? Lover?’

  ‘Nothing. Kramer’s mate calls her the Ice Queen. He’s never seen her with anybody. Could be a lesbian for all he knows.’

  Tadeusz shook his head, a knowing smile on his face. ‘She’s not a lesbian, Darko.’

  Krasic looked momentarily panicked. ‘You’ve not shagged her?’ he demanded, outrage mixing with incredulity.

  Tadeusz closed his eyes and breathed out smoke. ‘Do you always have to be so crude?’ he said sharply.

  Krasic shrugged. ‘She’s not Katerina, Tadzio. She’s another villain, just like us.’

  Tadeusz glared at him. ‘I’m perfectly aware that she’s not Katerina. But you treat her with respect all the same, Darko. It’s twice as hard for a woman to make it on our side of the law, and she’s proved herself. So you don’t talk about her as if she’s some street-corner slag. Is that clear?’

  Krasic knew better than to argue with the suppressed anger in his boss’s tone. ‘Whatever you say,’ he muttered.

  ‘For the record, there is nothing between me and Caroline,’ Tadeusz continued, his voice tight and distant. ‘I enjoy her company. Being with her, I feel more like myself than I have for a while now. I’d have thought you would welcome that, since you seem to have been concerned about my focus recently.’ He pushed his chair back and stood up dismissively. ‘Is everything secure with Marlene’s kid, by the way?’

  ‘Yeah, I called my cousin last night. He’s not seen any strangers around the place. He says the kid whinges about being bored all the time, but what can you expect when she’s shut up in the house all day?’