The Last Temptation (29 page)

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the war of instinct and interest flickering in his uncertain eyes.

‘I don’t think so,’ he said.

Carol gave an exasperated sigh. ‘Look, Tadzio, stop pretending. You need me.’

He looked shocked. His mouth opened, but no words emerged. ‘Colin was doing a good job for you,’ she continued. ‘But Colin’s history. You need someone to take your illegals off your hands once they get to the UK. I can do that. Can we stop pussyfooting around and talk straight? Naturally you’re nervous about discussing this with a total stranger, but, right now, I suspect I’m the only show in town when it comes to getting you off a very awkward hook. What do I need to do to prove to you that I’m trustworthy?’

‘I still don’t know what you’re talking about.’ There was a stubborn set to his jaw now. ‘Illegals? What do you mean? We don’t sell blue movies in my stores. We certainly don’t import them into the UK.’

Carol smiled again, genuinely delighted that she was having to stretch for this. If it had been too easy at the start, she would have had to work harder later on. This way, she was getting into her stride, feeling her way through Caroline Jackson’s skin to an argument that would open him up to her. ‘Oh please,’ she said, injecting a little steel into her voice. ‘That line is getting rather tired. Look, I know what you and Colin had going for you. I can give you the addresses of his factories in Essex where the illegal immigrants ended up working for a pittance. I can tell you how many of your imports he handled in the last year. I know where Colin lived, who he drank with, who he was sleeping with - and, before you jump to any conclusions, it wasn’t me. I know who killed him and I’ve got a fair idea why, and luckily it was nothing to do with you or your line of business.’

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He started to say something, but she steamrollered over him. ‘You’ll get your turn. Tadzio, I’m not here to cause you problems, I’m here to help you solve them. If you’d rather keep your problems, if you like things to be difficult, fine. I’m out of here. But I don’t think that’s what you want. From what I hear, you’re desperate to sort something out on my side of the water. So why don’t we sit and listen to Act Two while you think about what I’ve said?’

He looked at her as if he couldn’t take in what she’d said. ‘Who sent you?’ he asked.

Carol frowned. ‘Nobody sent me. I don’t work for anybody but myself. If we make a deal, I won’t be working for you either. We’ll be working together. You better be straight about that from the beginning.’

There was a thin sheen of sweat on his forehead. ‘Perhaps you would like to stay for Act Two?’ he said.

Carol patted the seat next to her and smiled pertly. ‘I thought you’d never ask,’ she said.

Petra seemed to embody the clichŁ of German efficiency, Tony thought as he surveyed the neatly labelled boxes on the living room floor. The three cases were arranged in order, although the amount of material varied enormously, with almost nothing in the third box.

Before he could even contemplate a profile of the killer, he first had to profile the victims. They might apparently be selected at random, but there was rhyme and reason behind their deaths. To the outside world, egged on by hysterical headlines, people who preyed on stranger after stranger were insane maniacs. But Tony knew otherwise. Organized serial killers operated to their own logic, men with a mission marching to a drum only they could hear. It was Tony’s job to worm his way inside the victims’ lives in the hope that he

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would then start to hear the faint reverberations of that beat. Only by uncovering that secret rhythm of the killer’s progress could he start to understand why these crimes had meaning for the murderer. If he could put himself inside the killer’s head and rearrange the world in terms that made sense to him, Tony could hope to reach out and grasp enough key elements of the killer’s life to make it possible to track him down.

One of the first things he always did was to give the killer a nickname, to personalize him. It was one step along the road to giving him a human face, behind which there existed a psyche that functioned according to its own particular rules. ‘You’re killing people who are obsessed with the workings of the mind,’ Tony said softly. ‘This is about mind games. You’re drowning them. Is that literal or metaphorical? You’re scalping their pubic area, but leaving their genitals alone. You think this isn’t about sex. But of course it is. You’re just in denial about it. You think there’s some higher purpose here. You’re waging a war. You’re leading the battle. You’re Geronimo, aren’t you?’ He remembered a curiously apposite echo of a line from Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy. ‘Hieronimo’s mad againe.’

‘Geronimo it is,’ Tony said. Now he had a name, he could build a dialogue between them. He could ease into his target’s shoes, working out his steps and learning his gait. He could chart his progress and explore his fantasies. For this type of killing was always about fantasies. Geronimo, like so many others before him, could find no satisfaction in reality. For whatever reason, he had never learned to fit in. He had never matured into a rounded individual, however dysfunctional. He had become stuck at the point where the universe revolved around him and where fantasies could fulfil the desires that the real world refused to.

Tony understood that psychological state only too well. He

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had spent his own adult life feeling out of place in the world. He had lived with a sense of worthlessness that made it impossible to love, for loving carried implicit within it the conviction that one deserved to be loved in return. And he had never been able to believe that about himself. He had constructed his own series of masks, an empathetic sequence of facades that allowed him to blend in. Passing for human. If his circumstances had been different, he had always believed he might have ended up a predator himself, instead of a hunter. It was that awareness that underpinned all he did. It made him supremely good at unpicking the minds of the deranged and depraved.

It also made him supremely bad at forging relationships that penetrated beyond the superficial. Mostly, he had accepted that as a price worth paying for having in his grasp so useful and beneficial a skill. Carol Jordan was the only person who had ever made him feel that this was just another lie he told himself.

H He knew he didn’t deserve her. But the harder he tried to

pull away from her, the stronger the tug towards her grew. One of these days he was going to have to take the chance of losing what he did best in the attempt to become what he had never understood how to be. Being a man instead of acting a part might alter him so profoundly that he could no longer navigate the labyrinth of messy minds.

But that was for another day. Tony gave himself a mental shake and set about reading the trail that Geronimo had left behind him. He began to plough through the contents of the crime files, taking notes as he went. The material from Heidelberg and Leiden was comprehensive, the boxes containing everything from witness statements to crime scene photographs and background reports on the victims. Luckily, the Dutch files had been translated into English for Petra’s

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benefit, so he had no trouble reading them, apart from the odd awkward rendering. There was almost nothing from Bremen, simply because the investigation was still in the early stages and Petra’s request hadn’t yet borne much fruit.

Petra had made no attempt to engage him in conversation once he began, simply placing a fresh pot of coffee on the dining table where he was working. She poured herself a cup and said, Tm going out soon. I have to keep watch over Carol.’

He’d nodded absently, not really taking it in. He was too wrapped up in his study of the victims. It was after midnight when he finished his preliminary read through. He had a stack of paper with scribbled notes at his elbow. He would have to draw up a formal table relating all three cases to each other, but first he needed to know more about the academic specialities of the targets. He stood up and stretched, the muscles in his neck and back protesting at the sudden movement. Time for a change of scene.

He packed up his notes and let himself out of the flat. A short taxi ride brought him back to his apartment block. In the street, he glanced up at the third-floor windows. All was shrouded in darkness. If Carol was home, she was probably in bed. Their meeting could wait.

Upstairs, Tony ignored his still-packed bags and set up his laptop on the small writing table. He connected to the internet and navigated to the metasearch engine that he found most useful for tracking academic references. Within an hour, he had a reasonable overview of the research interests of Walter Neumann, Pieter de Groot and Margarethe Schilling. He scrolled back and forth through the material he’d downloaded, puzzled. He’d expected to find some glaring connection that would link the three dead psychologists. But their areas of specialism ranged from Margarethe’s interest in religious belief systems, de Groot’s studies of emotional

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abuse to Neumann’s work on the psychological dynamics of sadomasochism.

He went through to the kitchen and brewed himself a fresh pot of coffee while he ran through what he’d learned and compared it against what experience had taught him. Every serial offender had a mental profile of his victims. Usually, the common factors that linked them were purely physical. Whether the victims were all males, all females or a mix of the two, it was almost always possible to draw conclusions about the type he would go for. The elderly female victims of a certain kind of rapist; the vulnerable waifs who appealed to the sort of killer who had been abused himself as a child; the beautiful blondes who had to be wiped out because they would never look twice at the woeful inadequate who preyed on them. Even though the details of the offences could vary widely, the victims were usually as much a physical signature as the actions the offender took to make the crime uniquely his.

With this case, it had been clear from his first glance at the police reports that this wasn’t true of Geronimo. Unusually, what remained absolutely constant and inviolable was the ritual. There seemed no sign of escalation or variation caused by a lack of satisfaction with previous efforts. The victims themselves varied widely, from de Groot’s trimly muscled frame to Margarethe’s neat slenderness to Neumann’s comfortable bulk. That meant there had to be another element at play in the selection process, and Tony had been utterly convinced it must lie in a shared professional interest, since this was the one thing that connected the dead. Which only went to show how foolish it was to theorize ahead of the data, he reminded himself as he carried his cup back through to the living room.

‘What is it about psychologists that winds you up,

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Geronimo?’ he asked out loud. ‘Do you hate them? Did a psychologist make decisions that adversely affected the way your life has turned out? Or do you think they need to be put out of their misery? Is this personal, or do you see yourself as an altruist? Are you doing them a favour or are you doing the world a favour?’

He flicked back through the information he’d garnered from the web. ‘If this is about something somebody did to you, why are you going for academics? If you were fucked up by some educational psychologist or some presentence report in the courts, why aren’t you going for practitioners? What do academics do that clinicians don’t?’

If anyone could answer that question, it should be him. He’d walked on both sides of the wire, after all. He’d started out as a clinician and turned to academe only relatively recently. What was different about his own working life these days, apart from the obvious one - that he didn’t see patients? Was that it? ‘Are you taking it out on academics because they’re not putting their training to proper use, Geronimo?’ he asked of the hazy shade who was refusing to take shape in his mind.

‘No, I don’t think so,’ he continued. ‘That’s too ridiculous. Nobody kills people because they’re not fucking with people’s heads.’ He rubbed his tired eyes with his knuckles and leaned back in the chair. What did university staff do? They lectured. They supervised graduate students. They did research.

‘Research,’ he said softly, jerking upright. Hastily, he looked back through the articles and papers written by the three victims. This time, he saw it. ‘Experiments,’ Tony exclaimed with satisfaction. The one thing that academics did, that all three of these victims had done, that could remotely be defined as messing with people’s heads was to carry out experiments with live human subjects.

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‘You believe you’ve suffered as a result of psychological experiments,’ he said, confident now. ‘Something happened to make your life different from other people’s lives, and you blame the psychologists. You see them as vivisectionists of the mind. That’s it, Geronimo, isn’t it?’ He knew at some instinctive level that he’d conjured up the visceral motivation behind this series of killings.

Now he was ready to begin thinking about drafting his profile. But the hour was late, and he knew it would be better left for morning. Reluctantly, he turned off his machine and unzipped his travel bag. He doubted he’d get much sleep, but at least he could go through the motions. And tomorrow not only would he have the chance to do what he did best, he’d see Carol again. The thought made him smile. For once, he was convinced the positive elements of their relationship were starting to outweigh the bitter memories of the past. He might be kidding himself about that, but at least he was willing to put the theory to the test.

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The second act seemed to last forever. Carol couldn’t concentrate on the music; all her mind was capable of was rerunning their conversation and finding fault with what she’d said and how she’d said it. She wished she’d had the chance to role-play the scenario with Tony in advance. At least then she’d have felt more confident that she was pushing the right buttons. It wasn’t that she’d expected instant capitulation from Radecki. But she had hoped for something more than his obstinate refusal to acknowledge that he had any idea what she was talking about.