The Last Temptation (36 page)

The job was done. And done better than ever before. He was the master now, no question of that.

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Case Notes

i: Marie-Therese Calvet Session Number: I

Comments: The patient presents with a lack of respect for other human beings. Her self-importance blinds her to the needs and rights of others. She sees herself as the centre of her own universe to whom everyone else should defer. Other people exist purely for the furtherance of her own desires.

That she has attained her position in her chosen field is a tribute to her ruthless pursuit of her own desires to the detriment of others. She attempts to negate her femininity with an approach to her work that is aggressively masculine. She is reluctant to concede the contribution of others to her work, invariably claiming credit for herself. She lacks affect or empathy.

Therapeutic Action: Altered state therapy initiated.

Darko Krasic supposed he had better things to do than sit outside an apartment block off the Ku’damm waiting for a woman. On the other hand, time spent preventing his boss from making a fucking fool of himself had to be time well spent. It had been bad enough when Tadzio had wanted to show his face on the front line. Look where that had got them. Krasic had to set up an assassination and childcare, and he knew which was harder of those two to manage.

While wanting to be involved at the sharp end of his own business was almost understandable, seeing mirages was the kind of thing that got a man a bad name, especially in their line of business. A little megalomania was fine, some degree of paranoia almost obligatory in the circles where Krasic and his boss made their money. But seeing the features of the dead on the face of a stranger definitely fell into the dangerously demented category. If Krasic didn’t nip this in the bud, before he knew it they’d be signing up for stances. They would become a laughing stock. Which he needed right now like he needed a hole in the head, what with those crazy Albanians wanting ground-to-air missiles and the Chinese Snakehead gangs agitating abouTshipments of illegal immigrants and heroin.

He shifted in the seat of the anonymous Opel he’d chosen for his surveillance. It wasn’t designed for anyone with shoulders, he thought. Fine for skinny intellectuals, but not for real

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men. Half past ten and no sign of anyone answering the description Tadzio had given him. He’d been there since half past seven, and nobody who looked remotely like Katerina had gone in or out.

Shame about Katerina, he thought. She’d been a bit special. Not a brainless bimbo by any means, but, equally, not one of those smart-mouthed tarts who thought it was clever to try to put a man like him in his place. Lovely looking girl, too. Best thing about her, though, was that she’d kept Tadzio happy. And Tadzio happy was Tadzio on the ball. But right now, the boss was very definitely neither happy nor on top of his game. Eventually, he’d have to accept that the accident had been nothing more than that. Until that happened, Krasic saw a lot more wasted time ahead of him.

On that thought, the door of the apartment block opened and Krasic’s jaw dropped. If he hadn’t seen Katerina’s dead body with his own eyes, he’d have sworn that was her emerging on to the street. OK, the hair was different and he thought this woman had a bit more muscle about her than Katerina had ever had, but from this distance, he couldn’t have told them apart. ‘Fuck,’ he said, outraged. That’d teach him to take Tadzio’s word for things.

He was so astounded by what he was seeing that he almost forgot what he was there for. She was already well past him before he gathered himself together and clambered out of the car. She was walking at a good clip, long legs in sensible flat pumps covering the ground confidently. Krasic had to shift to keep her in sight as she reached the corner of Olivaerplatz and turned right.

As he reached the corner, he realized she had stopped at a news kiosk. He mingled with the handful of people waiting for the lights to change while she bought an English newspaper. Then she carried on to the cafe” further along the street.

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Optimistically, the patron had put out a handful of tables on the pavement, but it was still too early in the spring for most Berliners to fancy their chances outside. Like them, Caroline Jackson went inside.

Krasic hesitated. She might be meeting someone, she might be making phone calls. He didn’t want to draw attention to himself this early in the game, but he couldn’t let it go. He walked briskly past the cafe”, registering that about half the tables were occupied. Enough of a crowd to hide in, probably. He stood moodily staring into a shop window for five minutes by his watch, then walked back to the cafe\ He took a seat at the counter, where he could see the back of her head. He quite liked the idea of not having to see her face. It was too fucking spooky by half to look at somebody who resembled so closely someone you knew to be dead.

She was doing nothing more sinister than reading her newspaper and drinking black coffee. He ordered an espresso and a Jack Daniels and made them last. Thirty-five minutes later, she folded her paper into her bag, paid her bill and walked out. Krasic, who had already settled his tab, was close enough behind her to see which way she went. Heading for the Kudamm, he thought miserably. Women and shops. What was it about them? —

Two hours later, he was still on her tail. She’d been in and out of half a dozen clothes shops, thumbing through the designer racks. She’d bought a couple of classical CDs in a record store and spoken to no one except shop assistants. It had done his head in comprehensively. Not to mention making him feel as out of place as a cherry on a dungheap. He was going to have to get somebody else to keep an eye on her, that much was clear. Ideally, a woman. But failing that, one of those lads who were more interested in Armani than Armalites. ^-^”

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He trailed behind her as she turned into the street where she was staying and watched as she went back into the apartment block. Well, that had been a proper waste of a morning. She was due to meet Tadzio in an hour, so he reckoned nothing much was going to happen between now and then. Time enough to get someone else on the case. Krasic got back into the Opel and took out his phone. If there was anything dodgy about Caroline Jackson, he’d find out. But someone else could do the legwork from now on.

Petra Becker was rising in Tony’s estimation all the time. She’d rung him at 9.17 to tell him that a car was on its way to take him to Tempelhof for the short flight to Bremen, where he would be met by one of the detectives on the Schilling inquiry. ‘How the hell did you swing that?’ he said, still groggy from lack of sleep.

‘I lied,’ she said calmly. ‘I said you were a leading British Home Office profiler who just happened to be doing some work with Europol and that we would be very much obliged if they would extend every courtesy to you.’

‘You’re an amazing woman, Petra,’ he said.

‘It’s been said before, but not usually by men,’ she’d responded dryly.

‘Am I right in thinking that nobody in Bremen has made the connection with the earlier murder in Heidelberg yet?’

‘The Heidelberg boys were so eager to hand off their unsolved murder to us, they sold it to the local press as a seedy drug-related murder rather than a ritual killing, so it didn\t make headlines outside the region. I’d be very surprised if^ anyone in Bremen had even read a news report about the case.’

‘Doesn’t it feel weird, being the only cop in the country who’s made the connection?’ He couldn’t resist the chance to probe. He’d never been able to.

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‘You want the honest truth?’

‘Of course.’

‘I get a buzz from it. Oh, I know I have to come back inside the rules with these cases, I can’t go on acting like somebody in a movie. For now, though, I’m enjoying it. But I don’t think we have time for this. You have a plane to catch.’

Tony smiled. It was an obvious evasion, but he didn’t mind. ‘Thanks for sorting it out.’

‘My pleasure. Have a good day. We’ll talk soon, yes?’

‘I should have something for you before too long, but don’t expect a miracle,’ he said, guarded.

She laughed. ‘I don’t believe in miracles.’

The detective who met him at Bremen was a stumpy blond in his early thirties with bad skin and excellent English who announced himself as, ‘Berndt Haefs, call me Berndt.’ He had the slightly blase” air of someone who is incapable of being shocked. Tony had seen it in cops before. What worried him was that it was generally neither a pose nor a defence mechanism, but rather indicative of a blunting of the sensibilities that destroyed any capacity for empathy.

Certainly Berndt showed no signs of caring much about the woman whose death he was supposed to be resolving, referring to her throughout their drive to Bremen as ‘Schilling’. Tony, perversely, made a point of always giving Margarethe her title of Doctor.

They approached the city via a wide bridge over the swollen Weser, which flowed past in a swift torrent the colour of beer slops. ‘The river’s very high,’ Tony said to fill the lull that had grown in the conversation once Berndt had run out of nuggets of largely irrelevant information about the murder.

‘It’s not as bad as the Rhine or the Oder,’ Berndt said. ‘I don’t think it’s going to flood.’

‘What about the barges? How do they cope?’

\ &

‘Well, they can’t cope, can they? Haven’t got the horsepower to deal with it when it’s flowing like that. If it gets any higher, the river will be closed till the water level subsides. That’s already happened on the Rhine. The boats are all tied up in basins and backwaters. The skippers will be tearing their hair out at the thought of the money they’re losing, and the crews are all getting drunk.’

‘Not much fun for the local cops, then.’ J

Berndt shrugged. ‘It keeps them off the street,’ he said with a high-pitched giggle at odds with his squat frame. ‘That’s the cathedral over there,’ he added with a degree of redundancy. It was impossible to miss the twin towers. ‘Schilling was in the city centre the afternoon of the day she died. She ate alone in a little bar off the main market square.’

‘Are we far from Dr Schilling’s house?’ Tony asked.

‘About ten minutes.’

‘Has her partner been able to remember anything about his attacker?’

‘The boyfriend? About as much use as a eunuch in a brothel. He didn’t see anything, didn’t hear anything. All he knows is that there was a strange car on the drive. A VW Golf, either black or dark blue. I mean, he didn’t even notice if it was a local registration. Have you any idea how many black or dark blue Golfs there are in Bremen alone?’

‘Quite a few, I should imagine.’

Berndt snorted. ‘So many we can’t even think about pursuing that line of inquiry.’ He turned off the main road into a quiet tree-lined street. ‘This is the start of the suburb where she lived. Our man would have had to drive in this way, it’s the only logical way in and out.’ \

Tony looked out of the window, imagining the streetVui darkness. Houses set back behind small, neat lawns. Privatex lives going on behind closed front doors. No reason why

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anyone should pay attention to the dark outline of a car making its way to a fateful destination. He wondered if the killer had scouted the area out ahead of his crime. Often they did, staking out their ground, stalking their victim, learning their lives, getting to know the gap that their deaths would leave. But he had a feeling that Geronimo wasn’t that kind of killer. His need was of a different order.

Tony pictured him nosing down the darkened streets, making sure he was taking the correct turns. It was a complicated route with lots of potential to end up at the blind end of a cul-de-sac. ‘I wonder if he lost his way? Annoyed somebody by turning round in their driveway?’

Bernd looked at him as if he was mad. ‘You think we should do a door-to-door to see if he pissed anybody off?’

‘Probably pointless,’ Tony agreed. ‘But you never know. People can be very possessive about their property, especially if strangers make a habit of using their drive as a turning circle.’

Berndt had the expression on his face that Tony had seen from cops before. It was the physical manifestation of the thought that went something like, Fucking shrinks, haven’t got a clue about police work. He resolved to keep his mouth shut and save his ideas for Petra and Carol.

The car turned into a small road of a dozen houses that dead-ended in a tarmac semi-circle. They pulled into the drive of a house identical to every other in the road, save for the police tapes across the front door. ‘This is it.’ Berndt got out of the car and headed for the house without waiting to see if Tony was behind him.

Tony stood by the car for a moment, looking at the other houses in the street. Anyone glancing out of any of a dozen windows could have seen him clearly. ‘You’re not afraid of being seen, are you, Geronimo? You don’t mind if somebody

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catches a glimpse of you. You think you’re so insignificant they won’t remember anything about you.’ Nodding in satisfaction, he followed Berndt, impatient in the doorway, foot tapping and arms folded.

They walked in, both automatically attempting to wipe their feet on a doormat that wasn’t there. ‘Forensic took it away. Like they’re going to find some rare mud that only exists in a particular quarry somewhere in the Ruhr,’ Berndt said sarcastically. ‘It happened through here.’ He led the way to the kitchen.

Under the film of fingerprint dust, it all looked surprisingly domesticated. Tony even remembered the table. They’d sat around it discussing the possibilities of writing a paper together, drinking endless cups of coffee and glasses of cheap red wine. The thought that it had become the stage for Margarethe’s death made him feel queasy. He prowled around the room, taking in its neat order. It didn’t look like the scene of a brutal murder. There was no visible sign of blood, nor were there any of the smells associated in his mind with violent death. It was impossible to imagine this mundane kitchen as the location for so deliberately violent an act.