The Last Temptation. Val McDermid

was I supposed to do? There wasn’t enough time to stage a convenient road accident …’ His voice tailed off as he realized what he’d said.

      The colour drained from Tadeusz’s face. He looked terrifying in the shadows cast by the subtle lighting of the room. ‘You insensitive bastard,’ he snarled. ‘Don’t think you can divert me away from this fiasco by reminding me of Katerina.’

      Krasic turned away and scowled. ‘That’s not what I meant. I just meant that I didn’t have enough time to set something up that would look accidental. So I reckoned if it was going to end up looking like murder, it needed to look like a domestic, not something to do with the business. So I got Marlene to do the dirty. She’s been working for us, shifting product in Mitte for the past couple of years. She’s not a user herself. And she’s smart enough to play the distraught girlfriend, deranged with grief. She’ll get away with next to nothing when it comes to court. And she won’t grass us up. She’s got a six-year-old girl I’ve promised we’ll take care of. She knows me well enough to understand what that means. One word out of place and the kid gets taken care of, though not in the way she wants. Boss, it was the only way. It had to be done, and it had to be done like this.’ There was no plea in Krasic’s voice, just a convinced finality.

      Tadeusz glared at him. ‘It’s all going to shit,’ he complained. ‘This was supposed to go away. Instead, Kamal’s whole life is going to come under the microscope.’

      ‘No, boss, you’re wrong. It’s Marlene they’re going to be looking at. Before we’re done, we’ll have turned her into the heroine who rid the city of some vile drug-dealing scum. Like I told you, she’s not a user. Her life looks clean. And we can put up plenty of people who’ll make her sound like Mother fucking Teresa. Photographs of the six-year-old looking lost. Stuff about how she was trying to get her boyfriend off the junk. Besides, now they’ve seen how we dealt with Kamal, nobody else is going to say a thing to the cops. Trust me, Tadzio, it’s for the best.’

      ‘It had better be, Darko. Because if it all goes to shit, I know exactly who to blame.’

11

      Tony glanced at the clock as he left the seminar room. Five past eleven. Carol would almost certainly have embarked on her quest by now. He wondered where she was, how she was doing, what she was feeling. Her visit had unsettled him more than he cared to admit. It wasn’t just that she had disturbed him on a personal level; he’d been expecting that and had done what he could to armour himself against the turbulent currents he knew would be swirling beneath the surface of any encounter between the pair of them.

      What he hadn’t anticipated was how she would stir him up on a professional level. The pleasure he’d taken in the preparation they’d done had been the mental equivalent of a cold shower. It had snapped his synapses to attention in a way that no interaction with undergraduates had ever done. It had reminded him that he was operating at about half his capacity here at the university, and while that might have been sensible as a kind of convalescence from the harrowing he’d undergone at the hands of Jacko Vance, it was no way to spend the rest of his life. If he’d needed further reinforcement, it had just fallen into his lap.

      He’d always feared this moment. Deep down, he’d known the siren call of what he did best might rise again to waken him from the slumberous existence he’d chosen. And he’d done everything in his power to guard against that moment. But the combination of the news of Jacko Vance’s appeal and the return of Carol Jordan had been too strong for his fortifications.

      Things had changed since he’d last been in the front line, he knew that. Quietly, privately, the Home Office had taken a sideways step from using professional psychologists as consultants on complex serial murder investigations. The publicity that had been generated by their earlier policy had given them too many sweaty-palmed moments for them to be willing to continue it indefinitely. Not everyone was as talented as Tony; and few were as close-mouthed. Although there were still a handful of experts who were called in on an ad hoc basis, the police had been busy behind the scenes building their own skills base at the National Crime Faculty at Bramshill. Now there was a new breed of criminal analyst, officers trained in an impressive mixture of psychological skills and computer navigation. Like the FBI and the Canadian RCMP, the Home Office had decided that it was better to rely on police officers trained in specialist areas than to call on the sometimes questionable skills of clinicians and academics who, after all, had no direct experience of what it took to catch a criminal. So, in one sense, there was no longer a place for Tony doing what he believed he had a unique talent for. And after the last debacle there was no way any politician would agree to give him any training or developmental role.

      But perhaps there was something else he could offer. Perhaps he could find a niche that would allow him occasionally to flex his analytical muscles in pursuit of the profoundly disturbed minds who committed the most unreadable of crimes.

      And perhaps this time, with Carol almost certainly moving to some new role in Europol, he could escape the turmoil that had accompanied his last two excursions into the minds of serial killers. It was certainly worth thinking about.

      The only question now was who he could reach out to in a tentative approach. The Vance appeal would have reminded people of his existence. Maybe this was the perfect time to jog their memories a little more, to persuade them that he alone had something to throw into the ring that nobody else had. Not only did he understand how the mind of the serial offender worked; he was one of the few people on the planet who had actually been responsible for putting some of them where they could do no more harm.

      It wouldn’t hurt to try.

      That Monday morning in Berlin, Petra Becker was also thinking about serial offenders. It would be a terrific boost to her career if she managed to be the person who made the links that demonstrated there was a serial killer working across European borders.

      But first she had to find the case she’d been reminded of. Petra sat and frowned at her computer, the severity of her expression a sharp contrast to the spiky exuberance of her short dark hair. Parallel lines furrowed her broad forehead and her eyebrows shadowed her blue eyes, turning them navy. She knew she’d read about it relatively recently, but she’d dismissed it as being of no interest. Petra worked in intelligence. Her team were responsible for gathering information on organized crime, building a basic case, then passing it on to the appropriate law enforcement bodies. With European borders allowing free passage to the criminal as well as the law-abiding following the Schengen Agreement, that frequently meant colleagues in other countries, often using Europol as a conduit. In the past three years, Petra had investigated areas as diverse as product tampering, drug running, credit-card fraud and human trafficking. Murder wasn’t normally on her beat, except when the investigating officers thought there might be a connection to organized crime. It was, she thought cynically, a way of handing off any difficult case that looked remotely like a scum-on-scum killing, the sort of scuzzy case that most police forces didn’t lose any sleep over if they couldn’t nail a culprit.

      So the case she was looking for would have come in as a possible gangland killing. But if it had been tossed aside because it didn’t fit any of their parameters, it wouldn’t be in any of the holding files on the computer. It might even have been deleted from the main system, on the basis that it was just clutter.

      Petra, however, was too anally retentive to dump case information without a trace. You never knew when something written off by everyone else might just feed into a subsequent investigation. So she’d developed the habit of taking brief notes even on the apparently irrelevant. That way, she could always go back to the original investigating officers and pull the details again.

      She called up the folder that contained her notes and checked the recent files. There were four murder cases from the past seven weeks. She dismissed a drive-by shooting in a small town between Dresden and the Polish border and the murder of a Turk in Stuttgart. He’d bled to death following the amputation by machete of both hands. Petra had thought it was probably more to do with some domestic settling of scores than any