by Val McDermid
But there was nothing that didn’t chime with his understanding of Carol. She was still the person he knew. He stood at the window and gazed down at the old church, incongruous among the modernity of its surroundings. He wasn’t sure he’d done the right thing, coming here like this. Sometimes, however, risks had to be taken. Otherwise, how would he know he was alive?
Carol’s voice cut through his introspection. “Coffee,” she said, placing a cafetiere and two mugs on the low glass table.
He turned to face her and smiled. “Thanks.” He took off his jacket, revealing a black V-necked sweater in fine wool; a more fashionable look than he used to go for, Carol noted. They settled down with their drinks, each on a separate sofa, but close enough at the angle between them to have touched if they’d felt able to. “So,” he said. “Do you want to talk about it?”
Carol tucked her feet under her and cradled her mug in both hands. “I’m dying to talk about it. They’re sending me in deep. Total immersion undercover.”
“This is Europol?” he asked.
“Not exactly. It’s a UK operation. To tell you the truth, the lines are a bit blurred. I’m not sure where Special Branch ends and Customs and Excise begins on this one. And I wouldn’t be surprised if the intelligence services have got a finger in the pie too.” She gave a wry little smile. “All I know for sure is that my own chain of command goes through Superintendent Morgan, who is attached to NCIS. And that’s all I’m supposed to need to know.”
Tony was experienced enough as an interviewer of serial offenders not to let his unease show. But already he didn’t like the sound of this. In his limited experience of British policing, grey areas always heralded deniability. If the time came when someone had to be shot down in flames, the only person visible in the sights would be Carol. That she wasn’t admitting this even to herself was worrying. “What’s the assignment?”
Carol relayed everything Morgan had told her about Tadeusz Radecki. “Morgan said that when he saw my Europol application, he couldn’t believe his eyes,” she continued. “Katerina was dead, but here was her double, applying to work at the sharp end of intelligence. And so he came up with the idea of mounting an operation using me as the bait to sucker Radecki in.”
“You’re going undercover to try to seduce Radecki?” Tony felt the ground shift under his feet. He’d thought the honey trap had died with the Cold War.
“No, no, it’s much more subtle than that. It’s a sting. According to Morgan, Radecki used to have a sweet little deal going with a gangster in Essex, Colin Osborne. Osborne would funnel Radecki’s illegal immigrants in via a couple of clothing sweatshops he ran in the East End. Every few months he’d tip-off a contact in Immigration and get them hustled away to detention centres. Then he’d replace them with the next shipment from Radecki. He managed to keep his own nose clean, because the sweatshops were always set up using false names and credit references.”
“Neat,” Tony said.
“Very. Anyway, Osborne got himself killed in a gangland shooting about six weeks ago. And everybody’s still squabbling over who gets which piece of turf from his nasty little empire. Meanwhile, nobody is providing a convenient refuge for Radecki’s illegals.”
“And that’s where you come in?”
“That’s exactly where I come in.” She grinned. “I turn up in Berlin with a proposition for Radecki. I’m Caroline Jackson.” She gestured with her thumb towards the small office that opened off the living room. “I’ve got a file half an inch thick with Caroline’s back story. Where she went to school, when she lost her virginity, when her parents died and how, where she’s lived over the years, how she’s made a living. Now, she’s a wealthy businesswoman with some very dodgy contacts.”
Tony raised an admonishing finger. “Not ‘she,’ Carol. It has to be ‘I’ from now on.”
Carol pursed her lips in rueful acknowledgement. “I own the lease on a former US airbase in East Anglia. I have a factory producing hand-made wooden toys on the site, as well as the former barracks. I also have a source of forged Italian passports. I knew Colin Osborne and knew he was getting workers from Radecki. And now Colin’s dead, I’m here to take up the slack. I need workers and I can offer them an even better deal than Colin. They work for me for free for a year and they get legal EU papers. And Radecki gets a market for his illegals.”
Tony nodded. “I can see how that would appeal to him. So why do they need the added incentive of someone who looks like his dead girlfriend?”
“Well, Morgan said it wasn’t the first time they’d thought of putting someone in to pull the scam I’m going to be doing. But there were some reservations because the chances were they’d only be able to get evidence on the final stage of the racket. So, although they would probably net Radecki, they might not be able to roll up his networks behind him. Then I came along. The general idea is that he’ll open up further and faster to me than he would to someone else. Assuming I can gain his confidence, I should be able to find out exactly how his operations work. If I play my cards right, we could close down his drug smuggling, his gunrunning and his people trafficking. And that would be a result worth having.”
Her eagerness worried Tony. He knew that to succeed in so difficult an assignment Carol would have to maintain a high level of confidence. She’d be thrown on her own resources for most of the time and, without self-belief, she’d sink like a stone. But it wasn’t like her to be blind to the perils of a task so fraught with jeopardy. “It’s obvious that they’re right, psychologically speaking,” he said. “Radecki’s bound to be attracted to you. And his emotional investment will make it easier for you to maintain your undercover story. He’ll find it hard to be as suspicious of you as he would be of any other stranger. Still, you’re really going to be out there on a limb. If your cover does get blown, he’s going to be far more dangerous to you than if you were just another undercover cop. It won’t be enough to eliminate you. He’ll need to make you suffer. You do know that?”
“It crossed my mind, yes. But you know I don’t like to brood.”
“You need to be aware of the potential pitfalls. I wouldn’t be any use to you if I just sat here uttering anodyne platitudes about how terrific you’re going to be at this. Undercover is the hardest job in policing.” He leaned forward, his face earnest. “You’re never off duty. You can’t afford to be homesick for who you really are. You have to live it, and it’s the loneliest place there is. And you’re going to be in a foreign country, which will only compound that feeling of isolation.”
His words hung in the air between them, the intensity speaking of something beyond their superficial meaning. Carol suddenly understood that he was telling her about himself and the way he had chosen to live. “You sound like you’ve been there,” she said softly.
Passing for human, he thought. This wasn’t the time or the place to get into that one. “Been there so long I gave the T-shirt to Oxfam,” he said, striving for lightness. “Academic life is not my natural habitat.” Carol looked disappointed. She had every right, he thought. She deserved better than that from him. “Nor was Frances,” he added. “But I didn’t come here to talk about me. Will it be possible for us to be in touch?”
“I hope so. Morgan said they’ll find a way of getting me secure e-mail access.”
Tony finished his coffee and topped it up from the cafetiere. “I’d like that. Not that I can be of much practical help, but it’d be good to know you were OK. And you might appreciate a place where you can be Carol Jordan for a few minutes every day. On the other hand, you might find that just disrupts staying in role. So play it as it lays. See how you feel when you’re in there.”
Carol put her mug down on the table and got to her feet. She walked over to the window and looked out. He could see her in profile, a series of planes and angles his memory held constantly clear. Some of the creases round her eyes were a little deeper, but that was the only change since he’d first known her. Now, though the line of her mouth was st
ubborn, determined, her eyes were troubled. “I’m scared, Tony. I’m trying not to be, because I know fear is a bad emotion to run an operation on. But I’m really, really scared.”
“Don’t discount the usefulness of fear,” Tony said. “You’re going to be running on adrenaline for as long as this assignment takes to complete. Fear’s a good provider of that. And it keeps complacency at bay. Whatever you think now, you’re going to have to get to like Radecki. You’ll start off consciously behaving as if you’re drawn to him, but the very act of maintaining that for any length of time tends to make it a reality. It’s a variation on the Stockholm Syndrome, where hostages start to identify with their captors. Like it or not, you’re going to find yourself growing close to him, and probably getting very fond of him. Fear is a good antidote to that.”
Carol rubbed her eyes with finger and thumb. “I want what this could bring me so badly, I’m scared I’ll do whatever it takes. What if I fall for this guy?” She turned back towards him, her face troubled.
“You wouldn’t be the first. And there’s no easy recipe for avoiding it.” He crossed to her and took her hands in his. “If he’s nice to you—and there’s no reason why he wouldn’t be—it’s going to seem very appealing to go with the flow. What you have to do is hold on to one fact about this guy that you find totally abhorrent. I don’t know what that would be for you. But there has to be something in his file that really got to you. Remember what it was, and hold that thought like a mantra.” He squeezed her hands tight, conscious of their coolness against his warm skin, trying not to think what they would feel like on his back.
“That’s easy,” she said. “The callousness. The way he engineers all this without ever getting his hands dirty. I can’t get rid of the image of that dead dealer, lying on the steps of the police station with his brains on the pavement. And Radecki sitting in his expensive Charlottenburg apartment, sealed off from all the shit, listening to Verdi or Mozart, as if it wasn’t connected to him. That’s what gets to me.”
“So every time you feel the tug towards him growing too strong, summon up those two contradictory images. That’ll ground you in what you’re there for.” He dropped her hands and stepped back. “You can do this, Carol. You’re good enough. You’re strong enough. And you’ve got something to come back to.” He held her gaze. For the first time since they’d met, he was making her a promise he thought he just might be able to keep.
If Dr. Margarethe Schilling had known she was experiencing her last afternoon alive, she would probably have chosen to spend it differently. Perhaps a reprise of their favourite woodland walk with her lover. Or perhaps round her kitchen table with her closest friends, good food and wine and conversation flowing freely. Or, most likely, playing a computer game with her eight-year-old son Hartmut. Even her hard-hearted bastard of an ex-husband wouldn’t have refused to vary the conditions of Margarethe’s contact time with her son if he’d known she was about to die.
Instead, unaware of what lay ahead of her, she considered her hours in the university library well spent. Her main academic interests lay in the psychological effects of religious belief systems, and a recent visit to the Roman museum in Köln had triggered off some ideas relating to the effects on the indigenous population of the imposition of Roman gods following their occupation of Germany. She was also intrigued to see if the collision between two contradictory religious systems had had any modifying influence on the Roman occupiers.
Her research was still at the embryonic stage where she had to accumulate information before she could begin to formulate theories. This was the tiring, tedious part of the process; hours spent in dusty archives, following trails that dead-ended as often as not. She had heard of researchers who had actually been infected with ancient illnesses as a result of poking around among materials that had barely been disturbed for centuries, but so far nothing that dramatic had ever happened to her.
The risks she normally ran from her work were quite different. Margarethe had spent years working with live subjects, probing the intersection between their religious beliefs and their personalities. Part of that had involved attempts to undermine those beliefs, and sometimes the results had been unsettling, to say the least. It had provided little comfort to her subjects to remind them that they had given informed consent to the clinical experiments, and she had on several occasions been subjected to strenuous personal abuse. In spite of her training, Margarethe found such confrontations stressful, and she had to admit to herself that the idea of researching the long dead had definite consolations.
She left the library just after four, when her head started to ache from too much close concentration on obscure materials. Emerging into the overcast afternoon had felt like a blessing, even with the humid promise of rain in the air. She didn’t fancy going home to her empty house any sooner than she had to. She still hadn’t grown accustomed to living alone; the rooms seemed too large, the echoes too present in the absence of her son.
For Margarethe the most bitter irony of her divorce was that the very thing that had poisoned her marriage was the single factor that had worked against her when it came to gaining full-time custody of her son. His father was a lazy leech, preferring the excuse of childcare to the demands of a job. Never mind that he didn’t do a hand’s turn in the house, leaving her to fit cooking, cleaning and shopping into the interstices of work and quality time with Hartmut. Never mind that he’d been the one to have an affair while their son was at school. It had left him in the perfect position to argue that he was Hartmut’s primary carer and should therefore continue in that role. It wouldn’t have been so bad if she’d thought he’d done this out of love for the boy. But she suspected it was more about exerting a last vestige of control over her.
So she preferred not to go home of an evening until she had to. She worked late, she dived into the cultural life of the city, she saw friends, she spent time in her lover’s apartment. It was more than a desire not to be at home that took her into the centre of Bremen that day. She always enjoyed strolling in the narrow cobbled streets of the Schnoor, an enclave of gentrified medieval fishermen’s houses, admiring the contents of the antiques shops’ windows, even though she couldn’t afford their prices. While the university where she worked and the suburb where she lived offered little in the way of aesthetic pleasure for the eye, the old town was a significant compensation.
She glanced at her watch. She had a couple of hours to spare before she met the journalist from the new e-zine. It sounded like an interesting venture, and it never hurt to find another outlet for one’s work in these days when professional prowess was no longer measured by how well one taught one’s students. Margarethe walked through the Schnoor and cut down one of the alleys leading to the swollen Weser, whose mud-coloured waters were flowing fast in spring spate. She walked along the river for a few minutes, then turned into the city’s most bizarre street, the Böttcherstrasse, which combined disparate elements of Gothic, Art Nouveau and pure fantasy, a product of the imagination of local artists and architects in the 1920s, funded by the inventor of decaffeinated coffee. It always amused Margarethe to think that such richness of style had come from so bloodless a product.
She turned left at the end of the street and made for her favourite city-centre bar, the Kleiner Ratskeller. A couple of glasses of Bremer Weisse and a steaming plate of their hearty knipe and she’d have recovered her strength, ready for whatever her interviewer had to throw at her.
Those of her fellow diners who noticed her could have had no idea that by morning they’d be witnesses in a murder investigation.
17
His hands moved deftly over the controls of the small crane that lifted his Volkswagen from the rear deck of the Wilhelmina Rosen. This was the moment when he shifted from one life into the other, when he stopped being the respected skipper of a fine-looking Rhineship and turned into a walking death warrant. Tonight, he would be lit up once more, celebrating his latest triumph between the thighs of some Bremen b
itch.
He stretched his arms across his broad chest and hugged himself. If they only knew what they were taking into themselves when they spread their legs for him. He was the one who made light grow out of darkness. He’d transformed his own blackness into something that glowed like a jewel inside him and now he was turning that brightness on the shadowy secrets of the past, making them obvious to the world.
Later rather than sooner, he suspected, someone in law enforcement would realize that all his victims had turned humans into lab rats for their own selfish ends. Once the connection was established, the next step would be inevitable. Police departments were notoriously leaky. It would be all over the media. As soon as people realized the crimes that were being committed in the name of science, the mind fucks would have to stop. There would be a public outcry, things would have to change. He’d be able to stop then.
He wouldn’t mind stopping, because his work would be done. He wasn’t some thrill killer, murdering for kicks. It was true that his revenge had finally lifted the clouds from his mind and allowed him to take his place in the world as a real man, but that was a lucky bonus. If he stopped, he would still be able to fuck, because it wasn’t murder that turned him on. He wasn’t a pervert, he was simply a man with a mission. There was no pleasure for him in the deed itself, merely in what it signified. For him, pleasure was what he felt when he plied the waterways in the Wilhelmina Rosen. His other life was work, nothing more. The boat was what gave him joy.
They’d arrived at their destination right on schedule, reaching the wharf on the Weser with enough time to unload that afternoon. They didn’t have to pick up their next cargo until ten the following morning. It was all going immaculately to plan. They’d moved the Wilhelmina Rosen to the railhead where they were due to load up with coal, and now he was leaving Gunther in charge so that he could conduct his personal business ashore.