The Last Temptation (21 page)

‘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

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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. aro no n

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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 hardhearted 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 Koln 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

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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 confron- | tations 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 gaming 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

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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. ru fai

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 Bottcherstrasse, which combined disparate elements of Gothic, Art Nouveau and pure fantasy, a product of the imagination of local artists and architects in the 19208, 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

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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.

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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 bitch.

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

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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.

He gently lowered the car on to the dockside and released the grabs. Tm off now,’ he said to Gunther.

‘Going anywhere interesting?’ Gunther said, not even looking up from his dog-eared paperback.

‘I need to see a couple of shipping agents. I wouldn’t mind a bit more work up this way.’

Gunther made a noncommittal sound. ‘We don’t get home enough these days.’

‘What’s in Hamburg that’s so special? You’re divorced, you never see your kids even when we are in port.’

Gunther looked up from his book. ‘My mates are in Hamburg.’

‘You’ve got mates everywhere,’ he said, walking off the bridge. He didn’t want to lose Gunther, but finding a new crew member wasn’t the hardest thing in the world. If

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Gunther didn’t like the routes his mission had thrust upon them, he didn’t have to stay. Of course, there weren’t that many good jobs on the barges these days. Somehow, he didn’t think he’d be looking for a replacement any time soon. But he wished Gunther hadn’t started on about Hamburg now. It was too much like a hook pulling him back into the past, when he was so intent on moving forward into his future.

Now, that future lay here in Bremen, a few miles away. His was a good cover story, he had to admit. He had worked long and hard on it. At first, he had thought of posing as a colleague, but realized that he would be too easily found out. Academics were always meeting at conferences and conventions; there was a high risk his victim might actually know the person he was pretending to be. And in these days of easy email communication, it would be too easy to check. But what else would make them agree to a meeting?

Vanity, that was the key. They all loved to talk about themselves and their work. They were so sure of themselves, convinced they knew best about everything. But how to exploit that?

The answer had to lie in the new technology. It was easy to wear a mask there. They already had a computer on board, of course; so many of their consignments and movement orders arrived that way these days. He was intrigued by its potential for assisting him in his mission. So, he’d sent the boys back to Hamburg, laid the barge up for a week, bought a laptop computer and taken a crash course in the internet and website design. He’d registered the domain name of psychodialogue.com and created a website announcing the imminent arrival of PsychoDialogue, a new on-line magazine dedicated to the dissemination of current thinking in experimental psychology. He’d culled enough jargon from his own victim research to make it look like the real thing, he thought.

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Then he had business cards printed up announcing himself as Hans Hochenstein, managing editor of PsychoDialogue. He had emailed his victims to arrange appointments to talk about their work, and the rest had fallen beautifully into place. One of the tutors on the computer course, a self-confessed former hacker, had even shown him how to send emails containing a logic bomb that would make them automatically erase themselves from the host computer after a predetermined period of time had elapsed. So even that potential fragment of evidence was gone. “*Ł

Tonight, Dr Margarethe Schilling would pay for her cruelty and her vanity. He checked the directions she’d given him, savouring the irony of her willing contribution to her own downfall. Then he set off.

The street where she lived was on the outskirts of the city. Here, fingers of countryside clung on to the land with an arthritic grip, a stranded straggle of trees and scrubby grass the only reminders of what used to be there. These last remnants of nature formed divisions between the housing developments, giving their owners an illusion of being country dwellers. They could look out at the darkling woods and imagine themselves lords of all they surveyed, ignoring the fact of their ugly square houses with their two reception rooms, three bedrooms, one and a half bathrooms and a fitted kitchen replicated Like some grotesque multiple birth all along the street. He couldn’t see the attraction. He’d rather live in a tiny apartment in the heart of the city than reproduce ugli-ft ness along with space. Better still, to be cabined on a boat, a moving world that travelled with you and allowed you to change your view on a daily basis.

He drove slowly along the street, lights on against the gloomy drizzle of the evening, checking the house numbers. There was nothing to distinguish Margarethe Schilling’s home |

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from those of her neighbours. Although the colours of doors and the patterns of curtains varied, somehow they all merged into one amorphous identikit. Her car was parked in front of the garage door, he noticed. He wondered if his own car would be too conspicuous, left on the street when every other vehicle was garaged or on a drive. There was room for the Golf behind her elderly Audi, so he decided to park there.

He walked up to the front door, bag in hand, hoping suburban eyes would be too busy with their own concerns to notice him. Not that they’d remember someone so insignificant. It was only on the inside that he was remarkable. He rang the doorbell and waited. The door opened to reveal a woman of medium height and build. Not too heavy to lift, he thought with satisfaction. Her greying blonde hair was pulled back in a ponytail from a face that looked tired and careworn. Mascara was slightly smudged round her eyes, as if she’d rubbed them without thinking. She wdre tailored charcoal slacks and a maroon chenille sweater that effectively disguised her figure. ‘Herr Hochenstein?’ she said.

He inclined his head. ‘Dr Schilling, it’s a pleasure to meet you.’

She stepped back and gestured to him to enter. ‘Straight ahead,’ she said. ‘I hope you don’t mind us talking in the kitchen, but it’s the most comfortable room in the house.’