The Last Temptation

by Val McDermid

  “Never mind. Inspiration doesn’t always arrive on cue. I’ll suggest to Petra and Marijke that they have a look for public or professional criticism of the victims’ work.” He put his arm round her.

  “Oh, this is so comfortable,” Carol sighed. “I wish I didn’t have to drag myself back upstairs.”

  Tony swallowed hard. “You don’t have to.”

  “I think I do. We’ve waited so long to get here. I don’t want our first time to have the shadow of Radecki hanging over it. I want it to be just you and me, to be special.” She turned her face up to his. “I can wait a little bit longer.”

  He leaned down and gave her a soft kiss on the lips. “You’re determined to give me no excuse for failure, huh?” he said, hiding his anxiety behind a jokey smile.

  “Stop right there,” she said, putting a warning finger to his lips. “I’m not worried, and neither should you be.” She disentangled herself. “And now I’m going to bed. We both have too much responsibility to miss out on our sleep right now.” She got to her feet. “I’ll see myself out. And I’ll see you soon.”

  He watched her walk across the room, amazed at the warm glow of contentment he felt. Maybe, just maybe they could make it work.

  Krasic arrived at Tadeusz’s apartment shortly after eight with a bag of fresh pastries from the Turkish bakery on the corner of Karl Marx Allex nearest to his apartment. While his boss brewed the coffee, he tipped the contents of the bag on to a plate and absently picked up the crumbs on the tip of a licked forefinger. ‘She’s a dark horse,” this Caroline Jackson,’ he said. ‘Nobody seems to know much about her. They’ve heard the name, but not many people have ever met her face to face. I talked again to that dealer that Kramer put you on to. He says he met her first about six years ago, when she was doing some dodgy property dealing in Norwich.’

  “What sort of dodgy property dealing?” Tadeusz poured the coffee into cups and carried them across to the table. “Stop eating the crumbs, Darko, you’re not a peasant any more,” he added affectionately.

  Krasic sat down and took a gulp of the scalding coffee. The heat didn’t seem to bother him. “She got a tip about a planned supermarket development that involved knocking down some old houses. Some of the owners didn’t want to sell to her at the rock bottom prices she was offering, so she used the traditional methods to persuade them.”

  “Violence?” Tadeusz asked, reaching for a crescent studded with toasted sesame seeds.

  “Only as a last resort. More general domestic terrorism. You know. Break the car windows. Dogshit through the letter box. Funeral wreaths on the doorstep. Taxis arriving every twenty minutes all through the night. She was extremely imaginative, by all accounts. Anyway, they all sold in the end except for one old lady who was adamant that she’d been born there and she was going to die there. Well, she was adamant until she came home from the shops one day and found her cat nailed to the front door.”

  Tadeusz sucked his breath in through his teeth. “Ruthless. I like that in a woman,” he said, grinning. “I take it she made a killing selling the land to the supermarket?”

  “Kramer’s mate reckons she must have cleared about quarter of a mil. She used it as seed money for more property deals. She always keeps her own hands clean, though. Does everything at one remove, he says. And she’s not involved in the drugs trade at all. He offered to cut her in on a deal once, but she said she didn’t like being in hock to the kind of gangsters he was hanging with. He’s heard she’s got something going up on an old American base out in the middle of nowhere, but he’s got no idea what it is.”

  “Well, that checks out.” Tadeusz brushed the crumbs from his mouth with a linen napkin and reached across the table for his cigar case. “What about personally? What’s her background?”

  “The stuff you told me looks kosher. You remember that geezer we paid to hack into the Customs’ computer last year? Hansi the hacker? Well, I slipped him a bundle of readies to check out all he could about Jackson. She was born where she said, when she said. Went to university in Warwick. She’s lived at the same place, some fucking manor house in Suffolk, for the last three years. Pays her taxes. The taxman thinks she’s a freelance planning consultant, whatever the hell that is. Looks a citizen on paper. Got no criminal record, though she was charged once with conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. But they never got it to court.”

  “What about boyfriends? Husband? Lover?”

  “Nothing. Kramer’s mate calls her the Ice Queen. He’s never seen her with anybody. Could be a lesbian for all he knows.”

  Tadeusz shook his head, a knowing smile on his face. “She’s not a lesbian, Darko.”

  Krasic looked momentarily panicked. “You’ve not shagged her?” he demanded, outrage mixing with incredulity.

  Tadeusz closed his eyes and breathed out smoke. “Do you always have to be so crude?” he said sharply.

  Krasic shrugged. “She’s not Katerina, Tadzio. She’s another villain, just like us.”

  Tadeusz glared at him. “I’m perfectly aware that she’s not Katerina. But you treat her with respect all the same, Darko. It’s twice as hard for a woman to make it on our side of the law, and she’s proved herself. So you don’t talk about her as if she’s some street-corner slag. Is that clear?”

  Krasic knew better than to argue with the suppressed anger in his boss’s tone. “Whatever you say,” he muttered.

  “For the record, there is nothing between me and Caroline,” Tadeusz continued, his voice tight and distant. “I enjoy her company. Being with her, I feel more like myself than I have for a while now. I’d have thought you would welcome that, since you seem to have been concerned about my focus recently.” He pushed his chair back and stood up dismissively. “Is everything secure with Marlene’s kid, by the way?”

  “Yeah, I called my cousin last night. He’s not seen any strangers around the place. He says the kid whinges about being bored all the time, but what can you expect when she’s shut up in the house all day?”

  “At least she’s safely out of the way. Now, why don’t you go and talk to your Chinese friends and see when they want to send us another shipment? We should be set up to deal with it by the end of the month.”

  “You’re going to do business with her?”

  “I think so. She wants to see something of the way we do things before she commits herself. So make sure everything is running smoothly, OK?”

  Krasic tried to hide the dismay he felt. “You’re going to let an outsider into our business?”

  “She’s not going to be an outsider, is she? She’s going to be on the inside. We’ve been checking her out, haven’t we? Well, now she wants to check us out. And at least she’s doing it up front, not being underhand like us.”

  Krasic shook his head dubiously. “I don’t know, we’ve always kept things tight, and it’s worked for us.”

  Tadeusz put a hand on his arm. “Look, Darko, I know you’re uneasy about her. But I’ve spent a lot of time with her in the past couple of days. And my instincts say she’s one of us. She can be trusted. So now you have to trust me. OK?”

  Krasic pretended to accept the olive branch. “If you say so, boss. I better be on my way. I’ve got things to see to.”

  Tadeusz watched him leave, a speculative look on his face. Having Darko so mistrustful around Caroline was no bad thing, he thought. He was well aware that she had crawled under his defences. Who knew what might be going on in his blind spot? Just as well Darko was there to keep an eye on things. Because, if Tadeusz was wrong, someone would have to clear up the mess.

  Carol lay back on the sauna bench and felt the sweat trickle down her temples and tickle the skin above her ears. “This has got to be the best meeting venue ever,” she groaned.

  Petra grinned. Her eyes were on a level with Carol’s breasts. “It has its good points, I have to admit.”

  Carol arched her spine, feeling the satisfying crunch of vertebrae realigning themselves. “Oh God, I am so out of co
ndition,” she complained. “By the way, I think Radecki’s got someone on my tail. I noticed a young guy outside the apartment this morning, and I thought I spotted him yesterday. So, on my way here, I did a double-take as I passed a shop window. You know the kind of thing? Walk past, then turn back as if you’ve just realized what caught your eye?”

  “Sure. The kind of thing us empty-headed girls do all the time.”

  “Exactly. Anyway, I caught him out of the corner of my peripheral vision. Dodging behind a car, trying to look as if he was crossing the road. Fairly professional, but not good enough to fool anyone who’s looking for a tail.”

  “Are you worried about it?”

  “Not really. They’d be sloppy if they weren’t keeping an eye on me. It’s not as if I’m doing anything to make them worry. At least I know now what my tail looks like if the occasion arises when I do need to shake him.”

  Petra nodded approvingly. “Good thinking. By the way, I read your overnight report. I have to say, you handled Radecki well on the boat. You seem to be making real progress.”

  “I’m cautiously pleased myself. But yesterday afternoon was a real warning to me not to get over-confident.”

  Petra stood up and dripped some citrus oil on the coals. The sharp intensity of the fumes seemed to shift her brain up a gear. “It’s working because you look like Katerina. However much his conscious mind wants to distrust you, his emotions are dragging him in the opposite direction. I’m surprised he hasn’t made a move on you yet.”

  “Are you? I’m not. He had Katerina on a pedestal. She was his angel, his goddess. He’s not going to jump on someone who reminds him that strongly of her. He’s going to court me,” she said. “Tony and I talked about this beforehand, and he reckoned that was what would happen. And, speaking of Tony, he told me about the murder in Köln.”

  Petra groaned. “It’s terrible. I get so angry because it feels like the whole investigation is snarled up in bureaucratic nonsense. Apparently, Heidelberg have got on their high horse. They’re insisting on being the lead investigators because theirs was the first case. This is the same bunch of fuckwits who tried to hand it off to my unit because they couldn’t solve it.”

  “I thought everything was going through Europol?”

  “They’re exchanging information, but there’s a mountain of case notes and nobody really to take an overview except Tony. It’s very frustrating. But I thought his profile came up with some interesting leads. At least the lead detective in Köln seems to have half a brain. He cottoned on right away to the idea of having a computer expert look at the victim’s hard drive, just like Marijke’s doing. But that could take days, weeks even, to produce results. Marijke has also asked the German teams to check out your idea about a campaign of academic criticism.”

  Carol shook her head. “It’s not my finest idea. I hope they don’t waste too much time on it.”

  “It might just be the lead they need,” Petra said. “God, I hate not being able to be involved in the investigation.” She stood up. “Time for a shower. Then I better get back to the office.”

  Carol groaned. “And I have to tour Radecki’s video shops and try to look interested.”

  “Rather you than me,” Petra said as she walked out of the sauna cabin. “You take care, Carol.”

  Yeah, right. Like that’s an option, Carol thought wryly. If taking care was her first priority, she’d never have accepted this assignment. Taking risks was the name of the game. That and survival. And she was determined to survive.

  28

  Mostly, Darko Krasic enjoyed his work. He had a taste for power and a profound disregard for suffering. He understood his limitations and had no ambitions to take over Tadeusz Radecki’s empire for himself. Why should he? He was already making more money than he could spend, and he wasn’t so vain as to think he was smarter than his boss.

  But even Krasic occasionally found elements of his work distasteful. Take this, for example. Pawing through a woman’s underwear was no job for a man like him. A pervert might get off on it, but Krasic was no pervert. If he ever reached the point where the only way he could get off was by fumbling with lingerie, he thought he would simply pick up one of his handguns and blow his brains out.

  Still, it had to be done. Tadzio was carrying his brains in his boxer shorts right now, and somebody had to take care of business. When he’d left the apartment, Krasic had called Rado, his second cousin and the young man he’d assigned to keep an eye on Caroline Jackson. “Where is she?” he’d asked.

  “She’s just gone into that fancy women’s health club on Giesebrechtstrasse,” Rado told him. “She was carrying a gym bag.”

  If Caroline Jackson could afford temporary membership there, Krasic thought, she was clearly not short of cash, nor was she afraid to spend it. She’d be at least an hour, he reckoned. “Call me when she leaves,” he told Rado.

  He’d stopped off at a florist and bought a bouquet of flowers. Getting in to the block then had been a piece of cake. He’d simply rung bells until he got a reply, then said he had a delivery for that apartment number. In the lift, he’d scribbled something illegible on the card and handed them over to a slightly bemused Dutch businessman. He knew Caroline Jackson’s apartment number, because the car had picked her up there for dinner the previous evening. The lock was pathetic, in his opinion. It took him less than five minutes to pick it, and then he was inside.

  Krasic made a quick sortie before he began his search. Bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, living room. No serious hiding places. Not even a safe for valuables.

  He began with the living room. There was a laptop on a small escritoire by the window. He switched it on and left it to boot up while he looked around. A handful of paperbacks sat on a shelf beside a blue rubber radio. He flicked through the books. Nothing. A stack of English newspapers on the coffee table revealed nothing more than that Jackson liked to do the crosswords and was good at them. The notepad by the phone contained nothing except a note of her arrangement to meet Tadzio at the boat. A briefcase held surprisingly little; estate agent’s details of a couple of properties in Ipswich with some scribbled notes in the margins relating to their suitability; a printer’s proof copy of a catalogue of hand-made wooden toys with a post office box in Norwich as the ordering address; a sheet of paper with what looked like a series of financial calculations; and a statement for a current account at a bank in Bury St. Edmunds. Krasic copied down the details of the account then replaced everything as he had found it.

  He turned his attention to the laptop. She didn’t even have it password protected, he noted contemptuously. He opened up her comms programme, his heart sinking as he saw a couple of hundred e-mails in the in-box. He opened a few at random and found nothing of any significance. They seemed mostly to be from friends or business contacts, generally concerning arrangements for meetings or the exchange of gossip. Ideally, he could use a few hours alone with it to go through everything in more detail, but that wasn’t going to happen.

  Next, Krasic opened her word processing software. There was a folder of letters, many of which seemed to be concerned with the lease of a former US airbase in East Anglia and applications for its change of use to light industrial units and residential accommodation for the workforce. Other letters dealt with property sales and purchases, none of which meant anything to him. He opened another folder called “project EA.” His heart leapt when he saw among the file list one labelled “Radecki.” Eagerly, he opened it.

  Tadeusz Radecki. 38. Polish background, based in Berlin. Supplied migrant workers to Colin Osborne. According to J, Radecki has extensive business interest’s with Charlie and Horse. Key player in central Germany, with substantial export element. Also deals in live product. Apparently started out dealing in hardware in the Balkans. Owns a chain of video stores. Said to be scrupulous in delivery but takes no shit. Second in command, according to CO, “ruthless mad bastard Serb” Darko Krasic, muscle who lets TR keep his hands clean. TR lives in expensive apartm
ent in Charlottenburg. Is driven around in a big black Merc. Likes to travel, mostly to European cities. Interests: opera, hunting, eating out, making money, photography. Has a box at the Staatsoper, goes there alone. Best chance to make initial contact away from possible interference from the Serb?

  She’d done her homework, though she hadn’t left many clues as to where her information came from. He didn’t like it that an outsider could know even this much about them. And now she wanted to probe further into their business. He didn’t like it one little bit. Not from someone this smart.

  He closed the word processing software and tried to open the accounts program. This time, he came up against the brick wall of a demand for a password. He didn’t blame her; he’d have done the same in her shoes. It showed she understood what was really dangerous and what wasn’t.

  Krasic glanced at his watch. He’d been inside for thirty-five minutes. He’d better close down the laptop now. He wasn’t going to learn anything more from it, and it wouldn’t do for Jackson to come back and find it still warm from use.

  He turned his attention to the bedroom. Clothes hung in the wardrobe; an Armani business suit; a couple of evening dresses with designer names he’d never heard of; a couple of pairs of Armani jeans; a pair of Paul Costello trousers; half a dozen tops with more designer labels. Three pairs of shoes were sprawled on the floor—Bally, Fly and Manolo Blahnik, he noticed. They all looked fairly new; he could still easily read the manufacturers’ names inside them. Another Imelda Marcos, he thought negligently.

  Finally, the drawers. Her underwear was nothing special. She obviously preferred to spend on what could be seen and stick to the chain stores for what went unnoticed. It was an interesting insight into her the way her mind worked, but it didn’t take him any further in his attempts to find out if she really was who she claimed to be. Irritated by the fruitlessness of his search, he slammed the drawer shut and headed for the bathroom. He had just opened the cabinet above the washbasin when his mobile rang.