The Last Temptation

by Val McDermid

  “I’m looking for Gary,” she said. Her nerves were buzzing again. He didn’t look like a cop, but what if this was another trap?

  He pursed his lips then shouted over his shoulder. “Gary, you expecting some bird?”

  A muffled, “Yeah, let her in,” came from the room she’d been in earlier.

  The weightlifter stepped back, opening the door wide. There was nothing in the hall to make her uneasy, so Carol stifled her doubts and walked in. He stepped neatly behind her and slammed the door shut.

  It was obviously a signal. Three men stepped out from the doorways leading off the hall. “Police, stay where you are,” the one who had opened the door shouted.

  “What the fuck?” she managed to get out before they were on her. Hands seized her and half-pushed, half-dragged her into the living room. One of them made a grab for her bag. She clung on grimly, trying for the appearance of indignant innocence. “Get your hands off me,” she shouted.

  They pushed her on to the sofa. “What’s your name?” the weightlifter demanded.

  “Karen Barstow,” she said, using the cover name she’d been given in the brief.

  “Right then, Karen. What’s your business with Gary?”

  She tried for bewildered. “Look, what is this? How do I know you’re the Old Bill?”

  He pulled a wallet out of the pocket of his jogging trousers and flashed a warrant card at her too fast for her to take in a name. But it was the real thing, she knew that. “Satisfied?”

  She nodded. “I still don’t get it. What’s going on? Why are you picking on me?”

  “Don’t play the innocent. We know you’re one of Gary’s mules. You’ve been carrying drugs for him. We know the score.”

  “That’s bullshit. I just came round to give him his winnings. I don’t know nothing about no drugs,” she said defiantly. She thrust her bag at him, relieved she’d ditched the CS gas. “Look. Go on. There’s fuck all in there.”

  He took the bag and unceremoniously dumped the contents on the floor. He went straight for the envelope and ripped it open. He riffled the bundle of notes with his thumb. “There must be a couple of grand here,” he said.

  “I don’t know. I didn’t look. You won’t find my prints on a single one of them notes. All I know is that my mate Linda asked me to drop off Gary’s winnings.”

  “It must have been a helluva bet,” one of the other officers said, leaning indolently against the wall.

  “I don’t know anything about that. You gotta believe me, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t even do drugs, never mind dealing them.”

  “Who said anything about dealing?” the weightlifter asked, shoving the money back into the envelope.

  “Dealing, running, whatever. I don’t have nothing to do with that. I swear on my mother’s grave. All I was doing was bringing Gary his winnings.” She was confident now. They had nothing on her. Nobody had seen her hand over the drugs to her contact, she was clear on that.

  “Gary says he sent you off with a parcel of drugs this morning,” the weightlifter said.

  “I don’t know why he’d say that, because it’s not true.” She was almost sure what he was saying was a bluff. All she had to do was stick to her story. Let them come to her with anything concrete.

  “You went out with the drugs and you were due to come back with the money. And here you are with an envelope full of readies.”

  She shrugged. “I told you, it’s his winnings from the horses. I don’t care what lies Gary’s told you, that’s the truth and you can’t prove any different.”

  “Let’s see about that, shall we? A little trip down to the station, get a female officer to give you the full body search and see if you’re as keen on your bullshit then.”

  Carol almost smiled. At least she was on firmer ground here. She knew her rights. “I’m not going nowhere with you pigs unless you arrest me. And if you arrest me, I’m saying bugger all until I get to see my lawyer.”

  The weightlifter glanced around at his colleagues. That was all she needed to see. They didn’t have anything on her. They had been lying about what Gary had said, because if he really had thrown her to the wolves, it would be enough to arrest her on suspicion. She got to her feet. “So, what’s it to be? Are you going to arrest me, or am I going to walk out that door? With Gary’s money, by the way, because you’ve got no right to that.” She crouched down and started scooping her possessions back into her bag.

  Before anyone could respond, the door opened and Morgan stepped into the room. “Thank you, gentlemen,” he said. “I appreciate your help. But I’ll take it from here.”

  The weightlifter looked as if he wanted to protest, but one of his colleagues put a restraining hand on his arm. The four who had confronted Carol filed out of the door. On his way out, the one who had been lounging against the wall turned back. “For the record, sir, we’re not best pleased with the way this has gone.”

  “Noted,” Morgan said curtly. He winked at Carol and held a finger to his lips till they heard the front door close behind them. Then he smiled. “You have really pissed off the Drugs Squad,” he said.

  “I have?”

  “That was a real deal that went down out there,” he said, crossing to the sofa and sitting down. “The Drugs Squad’s intention was to pick up the bloke you sold the drugs to. You were supposed to have a fairly hairy time but be given the opportunity to escape. Unfortunately, you didn’t play it the way we were all expecting you to. And chummy walked away with a parcel of drugs that was supposed to be back in our hands by bedtime.”

  Carol swallowed hard. This was exactly the kind of fuckup she’d wanted to avoid. “I’m sorry, sir.”

  Morgan shrugged. “Don’t be. Somebody should have had the wit to cover the emergency exit. You, on the other hand, exhibited initiative under pressure. You acted in character throughout. You dealt with those two bruisers from the NCIS football hooligan squad with intelligence and style, you did everything you could to cover your tracks and change your appearance, and you outsmarted the opposition right along the line. We couldn’t have asked for a better display of your talents, DCI Jordan.”

  Carol stood up a little straighter. “Thank you, sir. So, do I get the job?”

  A shadow crossed Morgan’s normally open features. “Oh yes, you get the job.” He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and fished out a card. “My office, tomorrow morning. We’ll give you the full brief then. Right now, I’d suggest you go home and make whatever arrangements are necessary to cover your absence. You’ll be going away for a while. And you won’t be able to go home again until the job’s done.”

  Carol frowned. “I’m not going to Europol?”

  “Not just yet.” He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “Carol, you get this assignment right, and you can more or less write your own ticket.”

  She noted the use of her first name. In her experience, senior officers outside your own team only ever got that informal when the shit was heading for the fan and they hoped you’d be the one standing between it and them. “And if I get it wrong?”

  Morgan shook his head. “Don’t even think about it.”

  13

  There was never any shortage of work for idle hands on board the Wilhelmina Rosen. The old man had set the standard, and he was determined not to fall below it. The crew clearly thought he was obsessive, but he didn’t care. What was the point in having one of the most beautiful Rhineships on the water if you didn’t maintain it to the highest standard? You might as well be piloting one of the modern steel boxes that had as much personality as a cornflake packet.

  Tonight, his task was to restore the brasswork on the bridge to its gleaming patina. He’d been understandably preoccupied with his personal plans, but that morning he’d noticed that it had begun to grow dull. So he’d decided to spend the evening with a bundle of rags and a tin of brass polish, determined to nip his slipshod ways in the bud before they became a new habit.

  Inev
itably, his mind slipped sideways from the repetitious task to the closer concerns of his heart. Tomorrow, they would be heading back down the Rhine, towards the place where all this had begun. Schloss Hochenstein, standing high on a bluff upriver from Bingen, its gothic windows glaring down on the turbulent waters of the Rhine gorge, its grey stone as forbidding as a thundercloud, the legacy of some almost-forgotten medieval robber baron. For years, the Wilhelmina Rosen had motored up and down this stretch of river, his grandfather at the helm never betraying by so much as a sideways glance that the schloss meant anything to him.

  Perhaps if it had been situated in a less demanding stretch of water his studied avoidance of so prominent a landmark would have taken on its own significance. In the Rhine gorge, however, skippers had to concentrate every ounce of their attention on the water. It had always been a severe test of the skills of boatmen, with its sharp twists, its rock-studded banks, its unexpected eddies and whirlpools and the very speed of its flow. These days, it was easier because deep channels had been dug and dredged to control the capricious movement of the water. But it still remained a stretch of water where a tourist making a single trip would have stronger memories of the surrounding scenery than a Rhineship skipper who had made the transit a hundred times. And so he had never noticed his grandfather’s stubborn refusal to let his eyes range over the prospect of Schloss Hochenstein.

  Now he knew the reason for that evasion, he had developed a deep and abiding fascination with the castle. He’d even driven up there one night when they’d been moored a few miles upriver. He’d been too late to buy a ticket and take the tour, but he’d stood outside the ornately carved lintel of the main gateway his grandfather had entered sixty years before. How could anyone look at that grim facade and not sense the horrors those high narrow windows had witnessed? He imagined the stones held captive the screams and cries of hundreds of children. The very walls were a repository of pain and fear. Just looking at it made him sweat, the memories of his own agonies rising sharp and harsh as the day they were inflicted. The schloss should have been razed to the ground, not turned into a tourist attraction. He wondered if any of the guides on the pleasure boats that plied the gorge ever mentioned the recent history that had stained Schloss Hochenstein so indelibly. Somehow, he doubted it. Nobody wanted to be reminded of that part of the past. They wanted to pretend it had never happened. And that was why nobody had ever had to pay for it. Well, he was making the bastards pay now, that was for sure.

  He rubbed away at the brass, his mind replaying the conversation he’d had in the beer garden with Heinrich Holtz. Well, not so much a conversation as a monologue. “We were the ones they called lucky,” he’d said, his rheumy eyes flickering constantly from side to side, never settling on one thing for long. “We survived.”

  “Survived what?” the younger man asked.

  Holtz continued as if he hadn’t heard the question. “Everybody knows about the concentration camps. They all talk about the horrors inflicted on the Jews, the gypsies, the queers. But there were other victims. The forgotten ones. Me and your granddad, we were two of the forgotten ones. That’s because where we ended up was called a hospital, not a camp.

  “Did you know that German psychiatric hospitals held three hundred thousand patients in 1939, but only forty thousand were still alive in 1946? The rest died at the hands of the psychiatrists and the psychologists. And that’s not counting all the children and babies who were slaughtered in the name of racial purity. There was even one so-called hospital where they celebrated the cremation of the ten thousandth mental patient in a special ceremony. Doctors, nurses, attendants, the administrative staff, they all joined in. They all got a free bottle of beer to toast the occasion.

  “But you didn’t have to be mad to end up in their clutches. If you were deaf or blind, retarded or disabled, you had to be got rid of for the sake of the master race. A stammer or a harelip was enough to see you sent off.” He paused and sipped cautiously at his beer, his shoulders hunching closer than seemed possible.

  “Me and your granddad, we weren’t mentally or physically handicapped. We weren’t mad. We were just badly behaved lads. Anti-social, they called us. I was always up to mischief. I’d never do what my mother told me. My dad was dead, and she wasn’t much good at keeping me in order. So I was running wild. Stealing, throwing stones, making fun of the soldiers goose-stepping through the town.” He shook his head. “I was only eight years old. I didn’t know any better.

  “Anyway, one morning a doctor arrived at the house with a couple of men in white coats and SS boots. I fought like a tiger, but they just beat the living shit out of me and threw me into the back of what had been an ambulance. Now, it was more like a police van. They chained me to the wall and we set off. By the end of the day, there were a dozen of us in there, scared out of our wits, sitting in our own piss and shit. Your granddad was one of them. We were sitting next to each other, and that was the beginning of our friendship. I reckon that’s how we survived. We managed to keep some sort of human contact alive between us, in spite of everything that happened.” Holtz finally met the barge skipper’s eyes. “That’s the hardest thing. Remembering you’re human.”

  “Where did they take you?” the skipper inquired. He knew it was probably the least important thing he could ask, but he sensed already that Holtz’s story would be far from pretty. Anything that would derail or even delay it seemed like a good idea.

  “Schloss Hochenstein. I’ll never forget my first sight of it. You only had to look at it to feel the fear rising up and choking you. A great big castle, like something out of a horror film. Inside, it was always dark, always cold. Stone floors, tiny high windows and walls that seemed to sweat damp. You’d lie shivering in your bed at night, wondering if you’d still be alive in the morning. You never cried, though. If you made a fuss, you got injections. And if you got injections, you died. It was like living in a nightmare you can’t wake up from.

  “The government had requisitioned the schloss and turned it into what they called the Institute of Developmental Psychology. You see, they didn’t just want to kill all us kids who didn’t fit the mould. They wanted to use us, alive and dead. The dead had their brains pickled and dissected. The living had their brains fucked with too, only we got to live with the consequences.” Holtz reached into the inside pocket of his overcoat and took out a packet of slim dark cigars. He shook one out of the packet and offered it to the younger man, who declined with a shake of the head and a wave of the hand. Holtz unwrapped it and took his time lighting it.

  “You know how scientists do their experiments with rats and monkeys? Well, in Schloss Hochenstein they used us kids.” Holtz fiddled with his cigar, using it as a prop rather than smoking it.

  “The smart kids, like me and your granddad, we learned quickly. So we survived. But it was a living hell. How do you think the Nazi interrogators learned their skills? They practised on us. We would be deprived of sleep for weeks at a time, till we were hallucinating and so disorientated we could no longer speak our own names. We were given electric shocks to the genitals to see how long we could keep a secret. The girls were raped before and after puberty to explore the emotional effects. Sometimes the boys were forced to take part in the rapes, so their reactions could be observed. They forced rubber tubes down our throats then poured water straight into our lungs. Your grandfather and I, we survived that. God knows how. For days, I couldn’t eat a thing, my gullet felt like one long bruise. But there were a lot who didn’t make it. They drowned.

  “They used to stage exhibitions. They’d bring in doctors from other hospitals, SS officers, local officials. They’d pick some poor fucking imbecile, some kid with Downs syndrome, or a spastic. The doctors would parade them in front of the audience, talking about how they must be exterminated for the benefit of the people. We were seen as a drain on the resources of the state. They’d say things like, ‘A dozen soldiers can be trained for what it costs to keep one of these vegetables in an institu
tion for a month.’

  “And there was no escape. I remember one lad, Ernst, who was brought in with us. His only sin was that his father had been condemned as an enemy of the state for being lazy. Ernst thought he could outsmart them. He tried to win their trust by working as hard as he could. He was always sweeping the floors, cleaning the toilets, making himself useful. One day, he managed to get out of the main building into the courtyard and he made a run for it.” Holtz shuddered at the memory.

  “They caught him, of course. We were in the dining hall, eating the slops they served us for dinner, when they dragged him in by the hair. Then they stripped him naked. Four nurses held him down on a table while two of the doctors beat the soles of his feet with canes, counting out loud all the time. Ernst was screaming like a scalded baby. They kept beating him till his feet were lumps of raw meat, the flesh hanging off the bones and the blood dripping off the table on to the floor. Eventually, he passed out. And the institute director was standing there with a clipboard, noting how many strokes of the canes and how long it had taken to get to that point. Then he turned to us and said, as calmly as if he was announcing what was for dessert, that we should all remember what would happen to any part of our bodies that didn’t behave as it should.” Holtz passed a hand over his face, wiping a thin sheen of sweat from his forehead. “Do you know, that sadistic bastard remained a member of the German Society of Psychiatrists till he died in 1974? Nobody wants to admit what was done to us.

  “The guilt’s too much, you see. It was hard enough for Germany to accept what we did to the Jews. But what was done to us was worse. Because our good German parents let it happen. They let the state take us away, mostly without any protest. They just accepted what they were told, that we needed to be disposed of for the greater good. And afterwards, nobody wanted to hear our voices.