by Val McDermid
“I don’t understand this word, eidetic.”
“I have total recall of whatever I hear. I can transcribe a conversation verbatim, as long as I do it within a few days of it taking place. I don’t need to be wired, because I can remember everything.” Seeing Petra’s dubious look, Carol continued. “It’s been scientifically tested. This is no party trick, it’s for real.” She closed her eyes. “‘You know, they told me you looked like Basler,’” she said in an approximation of Petra’s accent, “‘and it’s true, your photograph does resemble her. But in the flesh, it’s uncanny. You could be her twin sister. You are going to blow Radecki away. I swear to God, he is going to be freaked out when he sees you.’
“‘Let’s hope it’s in a good way,” she continued in her own voice. Then back to Petra’s tones. “‘Oh, I think so. I don’t see how he could resist.’”
Petra wiped clear the sweat that threatened to overflow the dam of her eyebrows and frowned. “How can this be possible?”
Carol shrugged. “There’s some quirk in my brain that lets me replay conversations word for word. I don’t know why. No one else in the family can do it. Just me.”
“That’s an amazing gift for a cop,” Petra said.
“It does come in handy,” Carol admitted. “So you see, there’s never any fear that I’m going to be exposed wearing a wire. Because I don’t need one.”
“I thought your written report was very comprehensive,” Petra said.
“Only trouble is, it takes forever to transcribe.” Carol rolled over on to her stomach. “Thanks for sorting out an apartment for Tony in my building.”
“It was the least I could do after you arranged for him to come over and help us. He doesn’t waste any time, does he?”
Carol smiled. “He’s very driven. When he commits to something, he sleeps, eats and breathes it.”
“I just hope that together we can come up with something before he kills again.” Petra clenched her hands into fists. “I’m starting to take this very personally.”
Krasic walked into the Einstein Café just off Unter den Linden and scanned the room. He saw Tadeusz sitting alone in one of the wooden booths beyond the bar counter. He shouldered his way past staff and customers and slid in opposite his boss. Tadeusz looked up and gave him a preoccupied smile. “Hi, Darko,” he said. “How was the trip?”
The noise level in the café was high enough to make their booth as private as Tadeusz’s sitting room. Krasic shrugged out of his overcoat and made a circle with the thumb and forefinger of his right hand. “Sweet,” he said. “I don’t know, you’d think every fucker in the Balkans who wanted a gun would have half a dozen by now, but their appetite’s endless.” The waiter approached and Krasic ordered a black coffee and a large Jack Daniels. “There are a couple of nutters looking for something more serious. I said I’d see what we could do.”
“We’ve got that shipment coming in from our friends in the east next week. There should be something there to satisfy them,” Tadeusz said. “Nice work, Darko.”
“Oh, and I checked with my cousin—Marlene’s kid is still tucked up tight. No sign of anyone looking for her out there. Everything quiet at this end?” the Serb asked, wondering what was on his boss’s mind, hoping nothing else had gone up in smoke in his absence.
“Yes, no problems at all.” Tadeusz stirred his hot chocolate, the lines between his eyebrows deepening. “But something very strange happened to me last night.”
Krasic was suddenly on the alert, like a guard dog who senses the air has changed. “What’s that?”
“I was at the opera. And a woman came to my box at the first interval.”
“Most blokes would see that as a welcome distraction from all that screaming.”
“I don’t think this is grounds for humour, Darko,” Tadeusz chided him. “This woman was English. Her name is Caroline Jackson. She claims to have known Colin Osborne. She says she was about to do some business with him when he was killed. She also says she can step into his shoes and do a better job of dealing with our illegals at that end.”
“Sounds like good news to me, if she is who she says she is. Did you get enough details to check her out?”
“I made a couple of calls last night, and she seems to be on the level. And I met her again today and got a lot more out of her. But I want her turned over top to bottom before we even think about doing any business with her.”
“You don’t trust her?” Krasic scowled.
“I trust her far too much, Darko. That’s the dangerous thing.”
Krasic looked bemused. “I don’t get it.”
Tadeusz opened the silver case sitting in front of him and drew out a cigar. He took his time clipping and lighting it. Krasic waited, the years having taught him that his boss couldn’t be budged until he was good and ready. An unreadable expression crossed Tadeusz’s face, then he said, “She’s Katerina’s double.”
The waiter arrived with Krasic’s order, temporarily silencing him. He took a mouthful of Jack Daniels while he wondered how to react. Had his boss finally lost it? “What do you mean?” he stalled.
“Exactly what I say. She could be Katerina’s twin. I nearly had a heart attack when she walked into my box last night. I thought I was seeing a ghost till she opened her mouth and this English voice came out. So you see, Darko, I can’t be responsible for making any decisions about whether we trust this woman or not. Because every time I look at her, my heart stops.”
“Shit.” Krasic poured the rest of his drink into his coffee and drained half of it in one. “You sure you’re not suffering from some kind of delusion?”
“No. That’s why I arranged to see her again today, to confirm that I wasn’t dreaming. But it’s not just me she freaks out. I saw the way people’s heads were turning last night outside the Staatsoper and today at lunch. Like they couldn’t believe their eyes. It’s a complete mind-fuck, Darko.”
“So you want me to check her out?”
“Till the pips squeak.” Tadeusz reached into his inside pocket and drew out an envelope. “Inside here, there’s an Italian passport she gave me as proof that she can do the business. Also, her address in Berlin. I got the car to take her home last night. And I’ve made a note of everything I can remember that she told me about herself. I want you to find out all you can about her. Either this is the weirdest fucking coincidence or else there’s something very dangerous going on here. Find out which one it is, Darko.”
“I’m on it already, boss.” Krasic finished his drink and slid to the edge of the booth, gathering his coat as he went. “If she’s dodgy, we’ll nail her. Don’t you worry about it.”
Tadeusz nodded, satisfied. He watched Krasic leave, butting through the crowd like a bull with a destiny. Darko would sort it out. Either Caroline Jackson was up to something shady. Or else she was possibly, just possibly his salvation.
The Rhine was in spate. The skipper of the Wilhelmina Rosen stood on the massive steps of the Deutsches Eck monument at the confluence of the Rhine and the Mosel and glared at the racing brown flood tide, now closed to commercial traffic. If he was honest, he’d been expecting it. These days, it was a regular spring occurrence, not like in his youth. Global warming, he supposed. But it felt like another element in a giant conspiracy to thwart him.
He’d planned to get as far as Köln that afternoon and moor up in the basin just off the main river. Instead they were stuck here at Koblenz. For the first time in his life, he felt oppressed by living at close quarters with two other men. He’d suggested to Manfred and Gunther that they might as well go home for a few days, since the river showed no sign of falling and there was nothing useful for them to do on board. He’d even offered to pay them for the days they were gone. But neither had felt like taking him up on his proposal.
Gunther kept pointing out monotonously that it was a bloody long way from Koblenz to Hamburg and by the time they got there, it would be time to come back, and none of this would have happened if they’d be
en working the Oder and the Elbe, where they’d have practically been on their own doorstep.
Manfred didn’t want to go because he was enjoying himself too much. With so many boats marooned there, he was in his element. He could sit around in bars all day and half the night, swapping stories with other boatmen. His capacity for drink was legendary, and he didn’t often get the chance to indulge it like this, his wife being a woman who believed that when her man was in his home port, home was where he should be.
So he was stuck with the pair of them, driving him mad with their conversations as they compared notes about where they’d been, who they’d seen, what gossip they’d picked up and where they were going next. All he wanted was peace and quiet, the chance to restore his equilibrium after Bremen. He wanted to be alone so nobody would ask him why he was buying all the papers every day and scanning their columns for details of one story in particular. With Gunther and Manfred underfoot, the only way he could search the news to see if he’d been seen and described was to read the papers on-line. Once his crewmen had realized he wasn’t spending his time on the internet looking at porn, they’d lost all interest.
Even with this access to the news, he still worried. Sometimes stories didn’t make it into the on-line editions. Sometimes only an abbreviated version of the story was published electronically. And even if he was getting all that was available in the public domain, it didn’t mean that they weren’t looking for him. Only that they hadn’t made it public. They might be combing the country with his description. At the very least, they must know what car he was driving. He wondered if he should sell the Golf immediately, trade it in for another make and model. But if there was a search out for a black VW Golf with Hamburg plates, he would only be drawing attention to himself by getting rid of it.
He was in a dreadful state. He couldn’t sleep for more than half an hour at a time. Food stuck in his throat. The incident in Bremen had been petrifying, not least because he had never seriously considered the prospect of being caught. He had outsmarted those clever bastards with their degrees and diplomas, he had shown them he was master. He couldn’t believe he’d so nearly been snared.
He’d been so careful. Everything had been planned, right down to the last detail. After all, if his campaign were to be cut short, his message would be lost and it would all have been wasted. That stupid woman had almost destroyed everything because she hadn’t told her boyfriend to stay away. Stupid fucking bitch. Probably wanted to show off the fact that she could still get a man at her age. The cow had nearly ruined everything, and he had no idea whether he was in the clear or not.
In his good moments, he reassured himself that there was nothing the boyfriend could have told the police that would lead them to him. He was sure he hadn’t been seen, and there must be hundreds of thousands of black VW Golfs all over Germany, even supposing the boyfriend had remembered what kind of car had been sitting in the whore’s drive.
But in his bad moments, he lay on his bunk, his body secreting the rancid sweat of pure fear. It wasn’t prison he was afraid of. Nothing that could happen to him there could be worse than what had already happened to him.
What he was afraid of was the things failure would tell him about himself.
And so, in order to combat the terror that was eating him from the inside, he refused to allow himself to use the river as an excuse. He had made an appointment in the usual way with Dr. Marie-Thérèse Calvet, flattering her in e-mail and stressing her importance to the reputation of his e-zine: Your work on the manipulation of memory using deep hypnotic suggestion is unrivalled in Europe. Your 1999 study on the alteration of recollection of early sexual experience was groundbreaking. I’d be fascinated to hear about your follow-up studies. It would make a terrific special feature for our launch edition. No, it hadn’t taken much persuasion to get her to agree to be interviewed. Like all of them, she was infested with narcissism, a trait he could use as a weapon against her.
But now he had to make a success of tonight’s business. Dr. Marie-Thérèse Calvet had wanted to meet in a restaurant, perhaps because she was reluctant to allow a strange man into the privacy of her home, or perhaps because she just wanted to screw a free meal out of him, he thought cynically. They had compromised with an agreement to conduct the interview in her office at the university, thanks to his argument that she might want to be in a position to refer to her research materials. It wasn’t ideal, but at least in the evening there wouldn’t be many people around to notice him.
The one thing he was worried about was the water supply. The chances were that Dr. Calvet wouldn’t have a sink in her office. And he couldn’t really wander through a university department with buckets of water. He knew from experience, however, that it took remarkably little to drown his victims. So he had packed four one-and-a-half-litre bottles of Spa in his holdall. It made it heavy to carry, but years of hard physical labour had made him strong. And he’d asked Dr. Calvet about parking. She’d told him that at that time in the evening, he could easily park on either of the streets that flanked the Psychology Institute. It shouldn’t be too arduous.
The journey passed more quickly than he would have believed possible. Running over his plans always shrank time, he’d found that out in the past few months. The images of what he would do to Marie-Thérèse Calvet were better distraction by far than any kind of in-car entertainment. Before he knew it, he was on the outskirts of Köln, the main artery from Koblenz delivering him right to the inner ring road, a short distance from the university. He checked his street map and navigated his way to Robert Koch Strasse. From there, it took him only a couple of minutes to reach the institute building. Luckily, Calvet had been efficient with her directions, and he didn’t have to stop and ask anyone the way to her office.
The corridor wasn’t quite empty. A couple of students were walking towards him, deep in conversation. With the self-absorption of the young, they didn’t even glance at him as he passed, his head angled down and away from them to minimize the chances of them being able to describe him afterwards. After Bremen, even so casual an encounter was enough to set his pulse fluttering and quicken his breath.
He counted the doors. Fourth on the left, she’d said. He stopped outside the plain wooden door and read the name-plate: DR. M-T CALVET. He took a deep breath and held it, trying to force his previous state of calm to return. He raised his hand and knocked once, firmly. “Come in,” he heard, the high pitch of the voice slightly muffled.
He opened the door and led with his head, his smile stretched to breaking point. “Dr. Calvet? I’m Hans Hochenstein.” He continued into the room, fixing his eyes on the woman emerging from behind the desk. She was tiny. She couldn’t have been more than five feet tall, with a fine-boned gamine face. Her chestnut hair was cut close to her head. Combined with her outfit of smartly casual top and capri pants, which he recognized from the old movies Gunther loved to watch as an homage to Audrey Hepburn. Unfortunately, he thought, she didn’t have the eyes to carry it off. Dr. Calvet’s dark eyes were small, set close against the narrow bridge of her nose, making her look slightly cross rather than carefree and vulnerable. She held out a slim, bony hand to him, and he took it gently, enveloping it in what suddenly felt like an excess of damp, sweaty flesh.
“I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. Hochenstein. Please, take a seat.” She gestured towards a pair of armchairs on either side of a wall-mounted gas fire.
He would have to move fast because there was no knowing how long they would be left alone. In order to get behind her, he stepped to one side and gave a courteous bow. “After you, doctor.”
Her mouth and eyebrows quirked in an ironic smile and she passed in front of him. His hand flashed in and out of his jacket pocket, emerging with the heavy cosh. She must have registered some movement, for she half-turned as his arm descended in a swift arc towards her head. He had meant to hit her firmly on the back of the head, but caught her on the temple. She staggered and moaned, but didn’t go down. Instead, she
stumbled towards him. Panicked, he raised the sap again and smashed it down on the crown of her head. This time, she crumpled in an awkward heap at his feet. He gasped in relief, his head swimming. After what had happened with Schilling, even the slightest glitch was enough to provoke the momentary clutch of terror in his chest. But it was fine, he told himself. Everything was fine.
He crossed to the door and flipped the catch, locking them in. Then he hurried to the desk and swept all the books and papers to the floor in an untidy heap. He turned to Dr. Calvet and bent to pick her up. She was light as a child in his arms, which was a welcome change from his first three victims. He laid her on her back on the desk and took the cords from his holdall. It was the work of moments to fasten her wrists and ankles tightly to the metal feet. He flicked up an eyelid with his thumb. She was still out cold. No need to gag her. He was back in control.
He took his grandfather’s cut-throat razor from its case and painstakingly cut her clothes away. There was scarcely a scrap of flesh on her bones. If he’d felt inclined, he could have run his fingers over her ribs like the beads on an abacus. He stepped back for a moment, savouring her exposed defencelessness.
Suddenly he felt desire well up inside him, a richness in his blood that made him almost dizzy. Until now, he’d always refused to acknowledge that the surge of adrenaline-fuelled urgency that swept through him when confronted with his victims had anything to do with sex. There was no place for carnal desire here. Sex was for afterwards.
But perhaps he’d been wrong. He took a deep breath, noticing the citrus tang of her perfume overlaying the more human scent of her naked flesh. Why settle for low-life whores when he could take what he wanted from his victims? Didn’t they deserve that final humiliation, to be fucked over like they’d fucked over their own victims?
His hand crept to his fly, his fingers hesitant on the zip. Suddenly, his grandfather’s voice was loud in his head, his taunts blocking every other thought. “Call yourself a man? What’s keeping you, little boy? Scared of a woman who can’t even fight back? All you’re good for is dockside whores like your mother.” He bit back a sob. Now his desire was insistent, impossible to ignore. He’d show the old man. He reached inside his jacket and pulled out the packet of condoms he’d been saving for later. Eagerly, he ripped open the foil package. He smoothed the latex over his erection, his craving making him ham-fisted. Then he was on top of her, thrusting clumsily against her dryness.