by Val McDermid
“It’s really good to see you, you know,” he said, his voice softer than before. “I missed you, Carol.”
Not enough, she thought. “I missed you too,” was what she said. “Come on, we’ve got work to do.”
7
All violent death is shocking. But somehow murder in a beautiful nineteenth-century house overlooking a tranquil canal, a medieval seat of learning and an impressive church spire provoked a deeper sense of outrage in Hoofdinspecteur Kees Maartens than the same event in a Rotterdam back street ever had. He’d come up the ranks in the North Sea port before finally managing a transfer back to Regio Hollands Midden, and so far his return to his childhood stamping grounds had lived up to his dreams of a quieter life. Not that there was no crime in this part of Holland; far from it. But there was less violence in the university town of Leiden, that was for sure.
Or so he’d thought until today. He was no stranger to the abuse that one human—or several combining in the same blind fury—could inflict on another. Dockside brawls, pub fights where insults real and imaginary had provoked clashes out of all proportion, assaults and even murders that turned sex workers into victims were all part of a day’s work on the Rotterdam serious crimes beat, and Maartens reckoned he had grown a second skin over years of exposure to the ravages of rage. He’d decided he was impervious to horror. But he’d been wrong about that too.
Nothing in his twenty-three years at the sharp end had prepared him for anything like this. It was indecent, rendered all the more so by the incongruity of the setting. Maartens stood on the threshold of a room that looked as if it had been fundamentally unchanged since the house had been built. The walls were covered from floor to ceiling with mahogany shelving, its ornate beading warm with the muted gleam of generations of polishing. Books and box files filled every shelf, though he couldn’t see much detail from here. The floor was burnished parquet, with a couple of rugs that looked worn and dull to Maartens. Not something I would have chosen in so dark a room, he thought, conscious that he was avoiding the central focus of the room with all his mental energy. Two tall windows looked out across the Maresingel to the historic town centre beyond. The sky was a washed-out blue, thin strips of cloud apparently hanging motionless, as if time had stopped.
It had certainly stopped for the man who occupied the hub of this scholar’s study. There was no question that he was dead. He lay on his back on the wide mahogany desk that stood in the middle of the floor. Each wrist and ankle was tied to one of the desk’s bulbous feet with thin cord, spread-eagling the dead man across its surface. It looked as if his killer had tied him down fully dressed, then cut his clothes away from his body, exposing the lightly tanned skin with its paler ghost of swimming trunks.
That would have been bad enough, a profanation Maartens hoped his middle-aged body would be spared. But what turned indignity into obscenity was the clotted red mess below the belly, an ugly wound from which rivulets of dried blood meandered across the white flesh and dripped on to the desk. Maartens closed his eyes momentarily, trying not to think about it.
He heard footsteps on the stairs behind him. A tall woman in a tailored navy suit, honey blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, appeared on the landing. Her round face was serious in repose, her blue eyes shadowed beneath straight dark brows. She was pretty in an unremarkable way, her understated make-up deliberately making her appear even more bland and unthreatening. Maartens turned to face Brigadier Marijke van Hasselt, one of his two team coordinators. “What’s the story, Marijke?” he asked.
She produced a notebook from the pocket of her jacket. “The owner of the house is Dr. Pieter de Groot. He’s attached to the university. Lectures in experimental psychology. Divorced three years ago, lives alone. His teenage kids come to visit every other weekend. They live just outside Den Haag with the ex-wife. The body was discovered this morning by his cleaner. She let herself in as usual, saw nothing out of the ordinary, did the ground floor then came on up here. She glanced in the study door and saw that—Marijke gestured with her thumb at the doorway. “She says she took a couple of steps inside the room, then ran downstairs and called us.”
“That’s the woman who was waiting on the doorstep with the uniformed officer when we got here?”
“That’s right. She wouldn’t stay in the house. Can’t say I blame her. I had to talk to her in the car. Tom’s rounded up some of our team and set them on door-to-door inquiries.”
Maartens nodded approval of her fellow co-ordinator’s action. “Later, you can go over to the university, see what they can tell you about Dr. de Groot. Is the scene-of-crime team here yet?”
Marijke nodded. “Outside with the pathologist. They’re waiting for the word from you.”
Maartens turned away. “Better let them in. There’s bugger all else we can do here till they’ve done their stuff.”
Marijke looked past him as he moved towards the staircase. “Any idea on the cause of death?” she asked.
“There’s only one wound that I can see.”
“I know. But it just seems…” Marijke paused.
Maartens nodded. “Not enough blood. He must have been castrated around the time of death. We’ll see what the pathologist has to say. But for now, we’re definitely looking at a suspicious death.”
Marijke checked her boss’s dour face to see if he was being ironic. But she could see no trace of levity. In two years of working with Maartens, she seldom had. Other cops protected themselves with black humour, an instinct that sat comfortably with her. But comfort was the one thing that Maartens seemed inclined to prevent his team ever experiencing. Something told her they were going to need more than Maartens’s austerity to get them through a murder as horrible as this. She watched him descend, her heart as heavy as his tread.
Marijke crossed the threshold of the crime scene. The recherche bijstandsteam had a fixed system, even though murders didn’t happen often enough on their patch to be routine occurrences. Her role while Maartens briefed the forensic team and the pathologist was to make certain the crime scene remained secure. She took latex gloves and plastic shoe covers out of the leather satchel she always carried with her and put them on. Then she walked in a straight line from the door to the desk, which brought her level with the dead man’s head. This study of the dead was her job, the one Maartens always avoided. She was never sure if he was squeamish or simply aware that he was better occupied elsewhere. He was good at putting people to tasks that suited them, and she had never flinched at the sight of the dead. She suspected it was something to do with being a farm girl. She’d been accustomed to dead livestock since early childhood. Marijke really didn’t care how much noise the lambs made.
What she cared about was what this body could teach her about victim and killer. She had ambition; she didn’t intend to end her career as a brigadier in Hollands Midden. Every case was a potential stepping stone to one of the elite units in Amsterdam or Den Haag, and Marijke was determined to shine whenever she got the chance.
She stared down at the corpse of Pieter de Groot with a clinical eye, one fingertip straying to touch the distended abdomen. Cool. He’d been dead for a while, then. She frowned as she looked down. There was a circular stain on the polished surface of the desk, forming a nimbus round the head as if something had been spilled there. Marijke made a mental note to point it out to the scene-of-crime team. Anything out of the ordinary had to be checked out.
In spite of her intention to scan methodically every inch of the body and its surroundings, her eyes were irresistibly drawn to the crusted blood surrounding the raw wound. The exposed flesh looked like meat left unwrapped overnight on a kitchen counter. As she realized what she was seeing, Marijke’s stomach gave an unexpected lurch. From a distance, she’d made the same assumption as Maartens. But de Groot hadn’t been castrated. His genitals were still attached to his body, albeit smeared grotesquely with blood. She sucked in a mouthful of air.
Whoever had killed the psychologist hadn’t remove
d his sexual organs. His murderer had scalped his pubic hair.
Carol leaned on the window sill, the steam from her coffee making a misty patch on the glass. The weather had closed in overnight, and the Firth of Forth was a rumpled sheet of grey silk with slubs of white where the occasional wave broke far from shore. She longed for her familiar London skyline.
It had been a mistake to come here. Whatever she’d gained professionally from the trip was more than cancelled out by the rawness of the emotion that Tony’s presence had stirred up in her. Bitterly, she acknowledged to herself that she had still been clinging to a sliver of hope that their relationship might finally catch fire after an appropriate gap of time and space. The hope had crumbled like a sandcastle in the sun with his revelation that he had moved forward, just as she had always hoped he would. Except that she wasn’t the companion he had chosen to share the journey with.
She hoped she hadn’t let the depth of her disappointment show as they’d left the pub, forcing her face to smile the congratulation of a friend. Then she’d turned away, letting the sharp north-easterly wind give her an excuse for smarting eyes. She’d followed his car up the hill away from the picture-postcard harbour to the small hotel where he’d arranged a room for her. She’d taken a defiant ten minutes to repair her make-up and arrange her hair to its best advantage. And to change out of her jeans into a tight skirt that revealed more than anyone in the Met had ever seen. She might have lost the battle, but that didn’t mean she had to beat a bedraggled retreat. Let him see what he’s missing, she thought, throwing down a gauntlet to herself as much as to him.
Driving back to his cottage, they’d said little of consequence, making small talk about life in a small town. The cottage itself was much as Carol had expected. Whatever this woman meant to Tony, she hadn’t stamped her identity over his space. She recognized most of the furniture, the pictures on the wall, the books lined up on shelves along the study wall. Even the answering machine, she thought with a faint shudder, ambushed by memory.
“Looks like you’ve settled in,” was all she said.
He shrugged. “I’m not much of a homemaker. I went through it with a bucket of white paint then moved all the old stuff in. Luckily most of it fitted.”
Once they were settled in the study with mugs of coffee, present constraints somehow slipped away and the old ease that had existed between them reasserted itself. So while Tony read the brief that Morgan had couriered to Carol that morning, she curled up in a battered armchair and browsed an eclectic pile of magazines ranging from New Scientist to Marie Claire. He’d always read a strange assortment of publications, she remembered fondly. She’d never been stuck for something to read in his house.
As he read, Tony made occasional notes on a pad propped on the arm of his chair. His eyebrows furrowed from time to time, and occasionally his mouth quirked in a question that he never enunciated. It wasn’t a long brief, but he read it slowly and meticulously, flipping back to the beginning and skimming it again after he’d first reached the end. Finally, he looked up. “I must admit, I’m puzzled,” he said.
“By what, in particular?”
“By the fact that they’re asking you to do something like this. It’s so far outside your field of experience.”
“That’s what I thought. I have to assume there’s some aspect of my experience or my skills that overrides my lack of direct undercover work.”
Tony pushed his hair back from his forehead in a familiar gesture. “That would be my guess. The brief itself is more or less straightforward. Pick up the drugs from your source, exchange the parcel of drugs for cash and return it to your first contact. Of course, I’m assuming they’ll throw spanners in the works along the way. There wouldn’t be any point in it otherwise.”
“It’s supposed to be a test of my abilities, so I think it’s fair to expect the unexpected.” Carol dropped the magazine she was reading and tucked her legs underneath her. “So how do I do it?”
Tony glanced at his notes. “There’s two aspects to this—the practical and the psychological. What are your thoughts?”
“The practical side’s easy. I’ve got four days to go at this. I know the address for the cash pick-up and I know the general area where I’m going to be doing the handover. So I’m going to check out the house where I’ve got to go for the money. Then I’m going to get to know the various routes from A to B like the back of my hand. I need to be able to adjust to any contingencies that crop up, and that means knowing the terrain well enough to change my plans without having to think twice. I need to think about what I’m going to wear and how easily I can adapt my appearance to confuse anyone who’s watching me.”
He nodded, agreeing. “But of course, some of the practicalities are conditional on the psychological aspects.”
“And that’s the bit I don’t have a handle on. Which is why I’m here. Consulting the oracle.” Carol gave a mock salute.
His smile was self-mocking. “I wish my students had the same respect for my abilities.”
“They’ve not seen you in action. They’d change their tune then.”
His mouth narrowed in a grim line and she saw a shadow in his eyes that had been missing before. “Yeah, right,” he said after a short pause. “Sign up with me and see circles of hell that Dante could never have imagined.”
“It goes with the territory,” Carol said.
“Which is why I don’t live there any more.” He looked away, his eyes focused on the street beyond the window. He took a deep breath. “So. You need to know how to walk in someone else’s shoes, right?” He turned back to face her, a forced expression of geniality on his face.
“And under their skin.”
“OK. Here’s where we start from. We measure people by how they look, what they do and what they say. All our assessments are based on those things. Body language, clothes, actions and reactions. Speech and silence. When we encounter someone, our brain enters into a negotiation between what it’s registering and what it has stored in its memory banks. Mostly, we only use what we’ve got locked up there as a control to judge new encounters. But we can also use it as a sampler on which to base new ways of acting.”
“You’re saying I already know what I need to know?” Carol looked dubious.
“If you don’t, even someone as smart as you isn’t going to learn it between now and next week. The first thing I want you to do is to think about someone you’ve encountered who would be relatively comfortable in this scenario.” He tapped the papers with his pen. “Not over-confident, just reasonably at home with it.”
Carol frowned as she flicked back through her memories of criminals she’d gone head to head with over the years. She’d never worked with the Drugs Squad, but she’d encountered both dealers and mules more often than she could count when she’d been running the CID in the North Sea port of Seaford. None of them seemed to fit. The dealers were too cocky or too fucked-up by their own product, the mules too lacking in initiative. Then she remembered Janine. “I think I’ve got someone,” she said. “Janine Jerrold.”
“Tell me about her.”
“She started out as one of the hookers down at the docks. She was unusual, because she never had a pimp. She worked for herself, out of an upstairs room in a pub run by her aunt. By the time I came across her, she’d moved on to something a bit more lucrative and less physically dangerous. She ran a team of organized shoplifters. Occasionally, we’d lift one of the girls, but we never got our hands on Janine. Everybody knew she was behind it. But none of her girls would grass her up, because she always looked after them. She’d turn up to court to pay their fines, cash on the nail. And if they got sent down, she made sure their kids were looked after. She was smart, and she had so much bottle.”
Tony smiled. “OK, now we’ve got Janine in our sights. That’s the easy bit. What you have to do now is construct Janine for yourself. You need to mull over everything you’ve seen her do and say, and work out what ingredients went into the mix to ma
ke her the woman she is now.”
“In four days?”
“Obviously, it’s going to be a rough draft, but you can work something up in that time. Then comes the really hard bit. You’ve got to shed Carol Jordan and assume Janine Jerrold.”
Carol looked worried. “You think I’m up to it?”
He cocked his head on one side, considering. “Oh, I think so, Carol. I think you’re up to just about anything you set your mind to.”
There was a moment of silence, electric and pregnant. Then Tony jumped to his feet and said, “More coffee. I need more coffee. And then we need to plan what we’re going to do next.”
“Next?” Carol said, following him into the hall.
“Yes. We haven’t got much time. We need to start role-playing right away.”
Before Carol could answer, there was the unmistakable sound of a key turning in the lock. They both swivelled round to face the front door, their faces rigid with surprise. The door swung open to reveal a trim woman in her late thirties. She pulled her key out of the lock, giving them both a smile whose warmth evaded her eyes. “Hi, you must be Carol,” Frances said, pushing the door to behind her, stuffing her keys into her pocket and holding out her hand. Her eyes were scanning Carol from head to toe, taking in the short skirt with a slight raise of the eyebrows.
Carol shook it automatically.
“Carol, this is Frances,” Tony gabbled.
“Why on earth are you hanging around in the hall?” Frances asked.
“We were going to make more coffee,” Tony said, backing into the kitchen doorway.
“I’m sorry to butt in,” Frances said, steering Carol into the living room. “I feel so stupid about this. But I left a pile of fourth-year jotters that I was marking last night. I was in such a rush, I clean forgot them this morning. And I need to give them their essays back tomorrow.”