03.The Last Temptation

by Val McDermid

  ‘It’s still far too risky,’ Marijke said.

  ‘What choice do we have? Do we just sit back and let him kill again?’ Now Tony sounded angry. ‘I came into this business because I wanted to save lives. I can’t do nothing while a serial killer is left at liberty to take more victims,’ he said vehemently.

  ‘Marijke’s right. It’s insane,’ Petra insisted.

  Tony shook his head. ‘One of two things is going to happen here. Either the police are going to help me, or I’m going to do it alone. So, which is it to be?’

  Every day, he was growing stronger. Because at first he had thought what he did with Calvet was a weakness, he had nearly let it destroy him. There had been days and nights when he feared he’d never chase the darkness away again. But he’d gradually come to see that his first reaction had been the correct one. Making her his had been the ultimate demonstration of his power. It took a special sort of person to carry a plan like this to the limit, and he knew now that fucking her hadn’t tainted his mission. The realization had brought peace, and with the peace came a lightening of his spirit that was all the confirmation he needed. The headaches disappeared, and he felt released.

  As if mirroring his personal relief, he heard the news that the river would be open again the next day. He would be able to continue his work. He’d been scanning the papers and the internet, and nobody seemed to have realized that he had crossed borders and killed in Holland. He had to believe that, there, his victims would still be oblivious to risk. He couldn’t afford to think otherwise, or the fear would eat into his soul and make it impossible to act.

  With the news that life would soon return to normal, he had e-mailed his next target and rearranged their appointment. He’d have to be cautious, just in case the police were trying to trap him by deliberately keeping de Groot’s death out of the picture. He would have to make sure he wasn’t walking into an ambush. But in three days’ time, he felt confident that he would be knocking on a door in Utrecht. Professor Paul Muller would have to pay the price for what he’d had no right to inflict on others.

  He leaned on the stern rail, watching the mourning pennant flutter in the gentle breeze. It was the fifth one he’d hung there since the death of his grandfather, a constant reminder of what he had achieved. It was pleasant to contemplate what he was going to do to Muller. Just the thought of it made his blood pump faster in his veins. Tonight, he’d go ashore and find a woman to fuck, fuelled by the fantasy of what Utrecht promised. He really had made progress. Now he could use their bodies for rehearsal as well as release.

  Carol stared out of the window at the fat russet buds on the tree outside. She had no idea what kind of tree it was, nor did she care. All she knew was that there was something profoundly restful about gazing at it. Every now and again, the counsellor would ask her something in an attempt to provoke some response, but she’d found that it wasn’t hard to ignore the banal questions.

  She wanted her life back. She wanted to be where she was before, in a place where betrayal was not a common currency used as cavalierly by those who claimed to have right on their side as it was by those who knew they were the bad guys. She wanted to be somewhere she could escape the conviction that her own side had treated her worse than the enemy.

  Radecki had raped her. But that was something she could survive, because in a sense that had been a legitimate act of war. She had done everything in her power to destroy him; the risk she had taken was that he would fight back.

  What Morgan had done was infinitely worse. He was supposed to be on her side. In her book, that meant he owed her a duty of care. Or, at the very least, honesty. But he had thrown her to the wolves in an act of cold-blooded calculation. He had set her up as surely as he had set up Radecki.

  She knew now that Radecki had been telling nothing less than the truth when he had accused her of being part of a conspiracy whose first act had been to murder his lover. She knew because on that first morning in Den Haag, she had sat in the briefing room and refused to say one word about what had happened until Morgan had answered her questions.

  She hadn’t spent a single night in Berlin. Morgan had accompanied her to the hospital and stood over her while a harried doctor had reset her nose. He’d had the decency to leave her alone while they gave her an internal examination and confirmed that she had sustained no lasting physical damage in spite of the brutality of Radecki’s attack. Then he’d insisted she be discharged into his care. She hadn’t had the energy to argue. There had been a car waiting to take them to the airport and a private plane to carry them on to Den Haag.

  Then they’d left her in peace in a silent room inside the Europol complex for twenty-four hours, the only interruptions being from a blessedly uncommunicative doctor who regularly checked she wasn’t suffering from concussion. The following morning, Gandle had appeared, telling her Morgan was waiting. She’d demanded time to shower and dress, then she’d walked into the briefing room.

  Morgan had stood up, wreathed in smiles. ‘Carol, how are you feeling? I can’t tell you how sorry I am about the way this turned out.’

  She’d ignored his proffered hand and sat down opposite him, saying nothing.

  ‘I realize you must be feeling terrible. But I want you to know that whatever support you need, it’s there for you. We’ve set up counselling sessions for you, and you must tell us whenever you get tired during these debriefs so we can take a break.’ Morgan sat down, not in the least disconcerted by her apparent rudeness.

  Carol maintained her silence, her grey eyes cool and level amid the puffy purple bruising that surrounded them. Let her face be his reproach, she thought.

  ‘We need to go through your reports in detail. But first, I’m afraid we’re going to have to ask you about what happened between you and Radecki at the end. Is that OK?’

  Carol shook her head. ‘I have some questions first.’

  Morgan looked surprised. ‘Well, fire away, Carol.’

  ‘Were you responsible for murdering Katerina Basler?’

  Morgan’s eyes widened, though the rest of his face remained immobile. ‘I don’t know where you got that idea from,’ he said.

  ‘The bike that caused the accident that killed Katerina was registered to the National Crime Squad,’ Carol said flatly. ‘Radecki knows that. It’s not much of a step from there to the assumption that you were behind her death.’

  Morgan tried an indulgent smile. ‘None of this has anything to do with what happened the other night. So why don’t we just concentrate on that?’

  ‘You don’t get it, do you? I’m not saying a word until you answer my questions. And if you won’t answer them, I’ll keep on asking them until I find someone who will.’

  Morgan recognized steel when he saw it. ‘Radecki was a cancer that was spreading through Europe. When you find cancer, you cut it out. And sometimes that means you cut away healthy tissue too.’

  ‘So you did kill Katerina?’

  ‘Katerina was collateral damage. For the sake of the greater good,’ Morgan said cautiously.

  ‘And what about Colin Osborne? Was he collateral damage too?’

  Morgan shook his head. ‘Osborne was no innocent abroad. You lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas. He hitched his wagon to Radecki, he paid the price.’

  ‘But you had him killed too?’

  Morgan raised his eyebrows. ‘Carol, this isn’t playschool. These people are responsible for untold amounts of human misery. You can’t tell me you’re losing sleep over a piece of scum like Colin Osborne.’

  ‘You’re right. I don’t particularly care about some Essex gangster who traded in people’s lives. But I care about my life. I care that you set this whole black operation up because somebody somewhere told you there was an ambitious detective in the Met who was the spitting image of Katerina Basler. And you thought that was too good a chance to let it go by. You set me up for this. You wound me up and let me go, and all the time you knew there was a bomb underneath me waiting to go off
.’ Carol’s voice was infused with cold rage.

  Morgan stared down at the table. ‘I’m ashamed that you had to go through that, Carol. But if you’re asking me whether that’s an unacceptable trade-off for putting Radecki away and winding up his rackets, I’d have to say no.’

  ‘You bastard,’ she said quietly.

  He looked up and met her eyes. ‘You’re a cop, Carol. It’s bred in the bone with you, just as it is with me. If our roles had been reversed, you’d have done exactly the same. And that’s what’s killing you right now. It’s not that I betrayed you. It’s that you know you’d wouldn’t have done anything different if you’d been calling the shots.’

  40

  Every day, he was growing stronger. Tony could feel the vigour returning to his body as bone and muscle gradually healed. He was a long way from full fitness, but he no longer felt the debilitation of the first couple of days following his beating at the hands of Radecki and Krasic. He still moved stiffly and awkwardly, but at least he could walk around without feeling his body was about to fall to pieces.

  And he had to admit that there was something very healing about being on the water, especially after the bruising encounters he’d endured. He had insisted on accompanying Marijke to the summit meeting in Köln to put his case for confronting Mann. But while the German police had been grateful for his profiling advice, they remained adamant that they wouldn’t support such an unorthodox operation. Senior officers had argued that it would be seen by their courts as entrapment, and refused to risk any potential trial by going along with Tony’s proposal. He’d argued as persuasively as he knew how, but they’d remained obdurate. All they were prepared to do was to maintain surveillance on Mann and his boat.

  After the meeting, Marijke had grabbed him and hustled him off to a quiet bar near the police headquarters. ‘I didn’t agree with you at first,’ she’d admitted. ‘But I listened to you today, and I think maybe yours is the only way to put a stop to this.’

  Tony stared at the table, knowing that if Marijke understood why he was so keen to confront Mann she would withdraw her support. There was nothing more dangerous in a police operation than personal feelings that spilled over into professional actions. He felt as if all he’d achieved since he’d arrived in Germany was to make things infinitely worse for someone he loved, and he desperately needed to do something that would feel like an atonement. Keeping these thoughts to himself, he’d simply replied that what they needed now was a plan. ‘The academic community is going to be buzzing with rumours,’ he added. ‘Like I said in the meeting, either he’s going to go to ground until the fuss dies down, or the chances are anyone he targets now will refuse to have anything to do with him. There’s no telling what he’ll do if he’s thwarted like that. I know they talked today about trying to set up a sting, but there are just too many potential targets for that to be practical, especially if he changes the way he makes his rendezvous with victims. I understand why the police are reluctant to endorse me going head to head with Mann, but there’s no other way. So how do we persuade your people to back me?’

  So they’d tossed suggestions back and forth until finally they came up with something that had the feel of possibility to it. Marijke, who was flavour of the month with Maartens, had managed to convince her boss that she should take part in the pursuit. She had hired a twenty-nine-foot leisure cruiser with a couple of berths, a tiny galley and a pungent chemical toilet. The idea was to maintain visual contact with the Wilhelmina Rosen as she made her way up the Rhine towards Holland. If Mann appeared to be targeting another victim en route, the German police would do what was necessary. But if they made it over the Dutch border without incident, Tony would attempt to confront Mann and extract evidence from him, with Marijke’s team providing back-up. It had taken all Marijke’s powers of persuasion, but she’d eventually convinced Maartens to go along with the stratagem. The temptation of being the man who would succeed where the Germans had failed had proved too much in the end. Petra had supplied them with a state-of-the-art surveillance kit: a tiny radio microphone embedded in a pen whose signal could be picked up on a remote unit by Marijke. As soon as Tony had elicited enough evidence, Marijke and her colleagues would play the cavalry and come riding to the rescue.

  It was a strategy fraught with risk, but Tony had been as resolute as Marijke that Mann’s killing spree had to be brought to an end. ‘With the last killing, the level of violence leapt dramatically. Now he’s overtly sexualizing his murders, he’s going to want to enjoy them more often. There’s no reason why he should confine himself to Germany and Holland either. When it gets too hot for him in one place, he can simply cross a border and begin again. We can’t hang back and wait till he finally makes a mistake that provides something harder than circumstantial evidence. I won’t sit on my hands while a whole community is staked out like a sacrificial lamb,’ he’d said to her as they’d boarded their boat.

  And so they had spent the past two days meandering up the Rhine, sometimes ahead of the Wilhelmina Rosen, sometimes far in her wake, one or other of them in the cockpit with a pair of powerful binoculars, watching the movements of the three men on board. Every couple of hours or so, Karpf and Marijke would exchange phone calls, keeping each other up to date with the movements of the barge. The first night, it had motored until midnight, then anchored offshore, out of the shipping channel. Marijke and Tony had had to carry on downriver for another mile or so before they found a wharf where they could tie up. Marijke had insisted on sleeping for no more than four hours, lest they miss their target. ‘I’m beginning to think the German police had a point about the difficulties of maintaining surveillance on a boat,’ she’d said wryly as she zipped herself into her sleeping bag.

  ‘At least we know he’s not murdering anyone tonight,’ Tony said. ‘He can’t get the car ashore from there.’

  Marijke had been huddled in the cockpit over a steaming cup of tea when the Wilhelmina Rosen had passed them just after six. She called to Tony to take the helm while she cast off, and they were soon back on the trail. The day’s journey brought them to the Dutch border, and the barge made its way into the first commercial harbour on Dutch territory, Vluchthaven Lobith-Tolkamer. ‘What do we do now?’ Tony asked.

  ‘It’s an hour since I put my team on stand-by. They should be able to get here very quickly. Now, according to the chart, we can use this harbour too,’ Marijke said, turning the helm. ‘We watch where the Wilhelmina Rosen moors up, I put you ashore, then I go and find a yacht mooring, no?’

  It was easier said than done. They managed to keep their objective in sight, but there was no easy way for Tony to go ashore nearby. The only possibility would have involved climbing a dozen feet up an iron ladder set into the harbour wall, and Tony had to acknowledge that was far beyond his present capabilities. Eventually, Marijke found a pontoon where he could scramble on to dry land, but by then they were both in a ferment of frustration and anxiety.

  Tony hurried back to where they’d last seen the Wilhelmina Rosen, a task that was easier in theory than in practice because of the pontoons and moles that stuck out at apparently random angles to the main wharves. Eventually, he found himself at one end of a long jetty. Towards the end of it, he could see the Wilhelmina Rosen. With a sense of relief, he saw that the Golf still sat on the stern roof.

  There was, however, no easy vantage point from which to keep an eye on the barge. This wasn’t the sort of place where people went for an evening out to sit around watching the water traffic. It was a working harbour where men went about their business. The only advantage he had was that it was already almost dark. In half an hour or so, nobody would notice him standing in the shadows of the low brick building at the landward end of the wharf. He tried to look like a man who is waiting to meet someone, pacing to and fro and looking at his watch.

  Twenty minutes passed and the night gathered around him, broken by pools of harsh light from the lamps that illuminated the wharves and the softer hazes of bright
ness from the boats themselves. He was so intent on his surveillance that he didn’t notice Marijke’s arrival until she was right next to him. ‘I spoke to the team. They’ll be here in about twenty minutes. Anything happen?’ she asked.

  ‘No sign of life.’

  ‘So, now we wait till my people get here.’

  ‘We have to wait anyway. I need to get him alone.’

  ‘OK, but we should be ready for when the others arrive.’ Marijke fiddled with the radio equipment, clipping the pen to Tony’s jacket pocket and inserting her earphone. ‘Walk down the jetty and talk to me,’ she said, readying the minidisk recorder that completed the system.

  He set off, nerves jangling, forcing himself to walk at the right speed. Too slow and he’d look incongruously like a tourist; too fast and he’d draw attention to himself. Already his mind was racing ahead to the encounter with Mann, and he tried to calm himself by focusing on his surroundings. The evening air had a cool bite to it, counteracting the heavy stink of diesel fumes and the odd whiff of cooking food that came from the barges moored alongside. But Tony felt hot and clammy, perspiration making his shirt cling with all the discomfort of a wetsuit on dry land.

  He was halfway along the wharf when two figures appeared at the wheelhouse of the Wilhelmina Rosen. ‘Oh shit,’ he said softly. ‘Marijke, we have activity. Two men, can’t see if either of them is Mann.’ Heart racing, he carried on walking as the pair came down the gangplank and headed towards him. They drew closer and he could see that neither was his target. They passed him without so much as a curious glance and Tony muttered, ‘Negative. I think he’s on board alone now. I’m going to turn round. If you can hear me, step forward into the light and wave to me.’ He turned to face the direction he’d come from and saw Marijke emerge into a cone of light. She raised one hand and let it fall.