The Crime Tsar (29 page)

Then there was the knock at the door. It made her jump. She opened it and was handed a package by a dumpy maid in an ill-fitting uniform. Or perhaps not, thought Jenni. Maybe it's the body that doesn't fit. She shoved a piece of paper at Jenni and a cheap blue biro. She signed without thinking. The maid said, ‘
Danke
,' and waddled away down the corridor.

Jenni closed the door and opened the brown-wrapped box. Inside was a charming marcasite brooch. Perfect for Lucy, she thought. ‘From Dieter with thanks for an enjoyable interview.' And beneath the unwearable brooch? A neat packet of cocaine.

Jenni smiled. It had been worth it. She could tell the world that Jenni was herself again. Oh, the glorious power of beauty. There was not a man born she couldn't seduce or manipulate. How did plain women manage with just intelligence to carry them through? She laughed. That was not a question to which she'd ever have to discover the answer. She took a little powder, just a tiny buzz, finished her make-up and made her way to the nearest metro. At the deepest level modified but unchanged by experience.

When she was in Vienna before she had been shocked at the literature displayed openly at the news-stands at the mouths of the metro stations. On the ground were laid out pornographic magazines, and it had been a Sunday. A church-going day. Jenni smiled at how much she'd altered.

It was a glorious sunny morning and the walk past the old buildings made her feel clean and new. She recognised the feeling as happiness. She was getting what she wanted. Passing a fine old baker's she decided to take back a Sachertorte for Lucy and Gary. After all, Lucy had long since given up watching her figure and the thought would count. Poor Lucy. She had neglected her since coming out of the clinic. Concentrating too hard on the two-faced Mrs Carter. She'd always disliked the Welsh. Her mother said they were like fog: they were dense and you couldn't touch or trust them. And Eleri Carter had proved the rule. But she'd make it up to dear old loyal Lucy. Maybe she'd take her shopping when she got back, buy her some new clothes. That thing she'd worn to dinner must have looked nice on the hanger, she supposed. Ten years ago.

At the metro she found a spectacularly well-stocked pavement and searched the covers for one particular perversion, but what there was was too tame. She picked up a couple anyway and went to the shaggy individual in the booth. He took the note she offered without looking at her. His grimy mittened hand passed back her change.

‘Excuse me … do you speak English?'

There was no one else at the stall, just a few people scurrying down the escalator into the metro.

‘A little.
Ja
. I speak a little.'

Jenni didn't waste any charm on him.

‘These magazines, do you have more? Different? More … serious?'

He looked at her for the first time.

‘You want young? More young?'

‘Yes,' said Jenni.

‘More young. Girls? With adults, grown-ups. Anything.' He looked at her again.

She applied a dimpled smile.

‘Yes. But boys, not girls. For my husband. You understand. It is not possible to get in England.'

He nodded, sucking the nicotined ends of his moustache.

‘English men like little boys.'

‘And girls sometimes,' added Jenni, as if they were talking about a choice between pork and lamb.

‘
Ja
. Girls too. But not so much.'

He reached under the counter and produced a magazine.

It was hard-core homosexual paedophilia and sickeningly graphic. She looked at it briefly.

‘Only in German?'

He pulled at his nose.

‘
Nein … Ich habe
Dutch and … Wait …'

He rummaged under the counter.

‘American. But with American a little of dogs too.'

‘Oh good,' said Jenni sweetly. ‘My husband loves animals.'

She took the two well-fingered magazines. They were horrifyingly explicit.

‘How much?'

The figure he named was ridiculous and she knew he was ripping her off but was in no position to haggle. They looked as if they'd been used as part of a lending library they were so soiled. But she gave the money for them and for three other equally disgusting publications then put them quickly in her bag.

‘Wait,' the man in the booth said.

She stopped.

‘You like video? Not gay stuff. Men, women with little boys. One only three years.'

‘How much?'

He held his fingers up.

She did a quick calculation. Almost £80. He must have seen her coming. But she handed over the money and put the video in the carrier bag without looking at it.

As she turned to go she didn't notice the leather-jacketed young man with the camera.

The confidence that had surged through her an hour before was gone as she packed to leave. She had never been stopped at customs but now snakes of fear made her shake. She wished she had some of that magical white powder to give her that glorious feeling of untouchability again. She decided to go back to the hotel for just a tiny bit more of the magic powder. Dieter had sent a bottle of vintage Krug up to her room, and a note: ‘One more night…' Well,
she could do with a little more time, a little more cocaine, and if that meant having to sleep with one of Europe's most enigmatic sex symbols again, well, she'd manage.

There were two more jobs to do before she could relax. Jenni, for all the adrenalin and risk, regarded the destruction of Geoffrey Carter as something that had to be done, like removing the giblets from a chicken. It was a job. She didn't dislike him – he caused her no more emotion than a car parked across her gates. It was the driver for whom she nursed her hatred. And that was Robert MacIntyre.

She was sure, beyond sure, that he had known Carter was to be Crime Tsar when she rolled over for the Met. She was not stupid, as she never tired of telling Tom. She knew, if challenged, MacIntyre would say she'd never mentioned the other job, that she had wanted London for her puppet of a husband, and he'd got it for her. She had made a payment. He wasn't telepathic, after all. It was business, wasn't it? A messy business and unfinished …

Jenni fingered her crystal amulet as she left the hotel room, placing the ‘Do not disturb' sign on the door.

She was pretty sure where she was going; she'd seen it when visiting Vienna with Tom. He'd brought her for her birthday last year. But only because he was attending a symposium in the city. Another spoiled gesture of empty generosity, another shared bed undisturbed by their frigid bodies. People looked at them and saw enduring romance. But Tom and Jenni never looked at themselves, only at each other, and always with suspicion. Barcelona, where Tom was about to take her for another birthday, would be another such exercise, but this time she would shop. Her husband, she thought, was always the master of the inappropriate gesture.

As always, Jenni had seen everything and stored the images away like picture postcards. The one she pulled up now read Friedrich-strasse. The taxi dropped her at the end of the road and she walked up it, not quite sure what she was looking for.

There it was, exactly as she'd remembered it, a small dingy café, very old and very picturesque. She went down the steps holding on to the iron railing, her slim coltish legs and soft leather shoes, toned perfectly to the shade of her subtly gleaming legs, appearing first in the view of the men in the café. The door was heavy wood with small
leaded glass panels. She pushed. A bell tinkled and the door opened into a splendid pre-war expanse of polished wood. Music played loudly from a system behind the bar. For a moment she thought she'd made a mistake, then she saw them. The computers, as grey as wood lice against the dark sheen of the panelling.

The three men who had watched her come down the steps made no sign they'd noticed her come in, beyond a brief friendly nod from the barman. In the corner sat a dreadlocked Viennese whose blond braids were matted together at the roots and whose red neckerchief matched that of his dog. On the end of a piece of string it slumped in dejected neutral, staring at the wall. The second man was reading
El Pais
at the bar and was obviously a student of Spanish as he was discussing an item in the paper with the barman and doing grievous harm to that language with his Germanic accent. The three men, carefully indifferent, each glanced at her.

She liked the way their looks became appreciative as the full subtlety of her loveliness revealed itself to them. There was nothing obvious about her and men always had a feeling of private pride that they had spotted her. She somehow made men feel they had discovered her, like a rare flower. It was a skill she'd developed after marrying Tom.

Tom's view of Jenni hadn't changed since the night he'd seen her come home with – Jenni shook her head to dislodge the picture of Tom's hurt eyes in those early days. The awkward virgin Tom thrusting at her like a rabbit. Unable to arouse her and embarrassed by her practised fingers.

Their marriage had been a glorious Gothic arch of disaster followed by years of mutual ambition punctuated by public triumph and private grief. One pregnancy had ended as it had begun, quickly and without joy. Tom had bought her a card. It was inappropriate: ‘In Sympathy', the sort of card you'd send for someone's granny's funeral.

The death of her first child was her grief, her tragedy, and she always loved that barely formed unborn baby above all others. Jenni could only give love to something that didn't exist.

If she had allowed herself to love Tom, not deliberately wreck her nascent feelings on the rocks of promiscuity, she would have laid herself open to fear. The fear of losing him, the fear of illusions shattered. Sometimes the thought of what might have been, if she'd
been kinder, curled up like white smoke. But she always pulled away, blaming him for her anger. The anger that came out of a hurt he'd never inflicted.

Tom. Jenni had given up wishing for him to take charge in the house, in the bedroom, but couldn't, even after decades of marriage, see that she was responsible for his impotence. He seemed to cease to exist as he walked through the front door. Like that dog down there, staring at the wall, no more than the table leg, a part of the floor.

Jenni went to one of the computers, ordering a cream-laden Viennese coffee as she passed the bar. A young man came in and sat at the other computer. She didn't give him a glance.

She sat down and opened her bag; in a box she had two floppy discs of different specifications. She smiled, the more widely used of the two was compatible. She slid it in. She smiled. This was the maraschino cherry on the outrageous cocktail of her plan. And its consequences had no more reality for her than a video game.

She began surfing the net. An obliging young sub on one of her newspapers had spent a besotted afternoon close to her, guiding her mouse through webs and sites. She had rewarded him with a probing kiss and the pressing of her unfettered breasts against his polycotton shirt. Jenni always liked to express her gratitude where it would be appreciated.

She worked quickly, dipping in and out of various sites promising photographs, names and contact addresses for children, then found what she was looking for, an American paedophile site of such depravity Jenni had to sit stunned for a moment staring at the words and pictures. It would not make sense to her brain that this was real. For the first time she paused. The weapon she was about to use against Geoffrey Carter would split him apart as surely as the man would the boy on the screen in front of her.

If Jenni was ever to stand outside herself this was the moment to do it. And she did, she looked down on herself and prayed for cruelty, prayed to have Tom's ability to see people without compassion. The world related to Tom, he did not reciprocate, and that, watching this parade of filth, was the dislocation she wanted. Please God, let me not care. For a moment the mother in her hesitated. What if they were her children …

She pressed the keys and without drama or a finger of forked lightning from the sky the degrading and defiling of children was
downloaded on to her innocent disc. It was done. She moved on to another five sites and made a note of them. They were all more disgusting than anything she'd ever seen before but now she was in control. She cut herself off from the reality of the images moving jerkily on the screen in front of her.

She paid for her undrunk coffee, smiled at the three men and the indifferent dog and left. She needed to get back to her room, get her bag and go to the airport gently infused with one of her little pills. The man at the other computer pulled his jacket across his camera and drank her coffee.

Just one more thing to do.

The taxi stopped outside a disappointingly ordinary building situated in an area of Vienna that looked like an opera set. Jenni was speaking into her mobile as she struggled to find the money to pay the driver. He gave her her change and offered her back the scrap of paper she'd given him with the address. She waved it away. The page of the Vienna phone book that began with Speer and ended in SpyMeister. Subtle. No doubt during the cold war they'd been run off their feet.