The Last Temptation (38 page)

He pointed out various landmarks as they continued along the canal and into the River Spree again. As they turned into the Westhafenkanal, Tadeusz waved his arm towards the right bank. ‘This is Moabit. Not always the nicest part of Berlin, I’m afraid. There were some rough turf wars here between the Albanians and the Romanians, fighting over who got to run their prostitutes where. Low-life stuff, not the sort of thing that interests business people like us.’

‘What interests me is supply and demand,’ Carol said. ‘You can supply me with what I need, and I can supply the paperwork they’re paying for. For a price, of course.’

‘Everything has a price.’ Tadeusz stood up. ‘Time for more champagne,’ he said, disappearing below.

Damn, Carol thought. She was fed up with this. Not that he wasn’t a charming and entertaining companion, but if she’d wanted a guided tour of Berlin, she could have climbed aboard an open-topped bus. It wasn’t easy to sit back and appreciate the architecture when her survival required her never to let her guard drop. She wanted to cut to the chase, because the sooner they got down to business, the sooner this whole operation would be over and she could return to her own life.

Tadeusz returned with another half-bottle of champagne. ‘OK. We have a little way to go before the next really scenic bit. So maybe you can tell me what it is you think I can do for you.’

Carol sat up straight, assuming the body language of someone engaged in serious discourse. ‘It’s more what we can do for each other. Are you going to be straight with me this time, or are you still pretending you don’t know what I’m talking about?’

He smiled. Til be honest with you. I did make some preliminary inquiries to see if you were who you claimed to be.’

‘As I did with you,’ Carol interrupted. ‘I wouldn’t have made an approach to you if I hadn’t taken a long, hard look at your professional pedigree. So, am I the woman I say I am?’

‘So far, things have checked out. My associates are still asking around, but I’m someone who sets great store by gut reactions. And I have a good reaction to you, Caroline. You’re clearly smart, you’re cautious but you can be bold when that is what will get results.’

Carol made a mock salute with her glass. ‘Thank you, kind sir. I’m glad to see we operate in the same way. Because, in

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spite of all the good things I’d heard about you, if I hadn’t taken to you on that first meeting, I’d have disappeared into the night and you’d never have seen me again.’

He draped his arm along the stern rail, not quite touching her, but making a statement of physical closeness nevertheless. ‘That would have been a pity.’

‘It would have cost you a lot of hassle that I can save you,’ she said, firmly bringing the conversation back to the purely professional. It didn’t hurt her campaign if Radecki started to fall for her, but she had to play hard to get, to keep him at arm’s length. She couldn’t afford to let romance blossom to a point where it would start to seem odd that she wasn’t sleeping with him. Even if she wanted to, which she reminded herself forcibly she did not, it would destroy her mission, devaluing everything she had found out about him and his business. If Radecki could demonstrate that they’d been to bed together, it would be a gift to a defence lawyer, turning her testimony from the reliable evidence of a respected police officer into the bitter revenge of a woman scorned. Besides, it would be utterly unprofessional. And Carol didn’t do unprofessional.

‘You think so?’

‘I know so. You were delivering between twenty and thirty illegal immigrants a month to Colin Osborne. The only trouble was that Colin bullshitted you about what he could actually supply. He didn’t have access to the kind of paperwork your customers were paying for. That’s why he had to double-cross them before they realized he was bluffing.’

‘I didn’t know about this,’ Tadeusz said.

‘I don’t suppose you did. This isn’t a business where dissatisfied customers turn up at the Customer Services desk asking for their money back,’ Carol said acidly. ‘Once they were in the hands of the immigration people, they were either deported or stuck in detention centres. There was no way for

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them to contact whoever they’d paid their money to in the first place. And Colin was always clever enough to make sure the businesses they were working in couldn’t be tracked back to his door. He used fake names to rent the premises, he always made sure any stock was cleared out before the raids happened. He didn’t even lose the sewing machines. It was a shitty way of doing business.* \

Tadeusz shrugged. ‘I suppose he thought he was doing what he had to to survive.’ I

‘You think so? That’s not how I do business. If you’re going to work outside the law, you need to be more honest than the straight people.’

He frowned. ‘What do you mean?’

‘If you operate in the straight world and you don’t deliver what you promise, you maybe lose your job or your marriage, but mostly nothing truly terrible happens to you. But if you operate in our world and you let people down, sooner or later it costs you more than you’re willing to pay. You sell fake drugs on street corners and you’re going to take a beating, either from ripped-off customers or from other dealers. You double-cross your mates on a bank job and you’re looking over your shoulder for the rest of your life.

‘Take Colin. If he did the dirty on one deal, chances are he did it on others too. And look what happened to him. Head blown off on a dirt track in the middle of the Essex marshes. Now, I don’t want that to happen to me, so when I do business with people, I do it honestly. And I expect the same from them.’

Tadeusz had drawn his arm back halfway through her speech. He was looking at her with a strange intensity, as if she was giving voice to his most deeply held beliefs. ‘You’ve obviously thought a lot about this,’ he said.

‘I’m a survivor,’ she said simply.

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‘I can see that.’

‘Look, Tadzio, I’m a smart woman. I could have made a reasonable living in the straight world. But I didn’t want to make a reasonable living. I wanted to make a lot of money. Enough money to stop when I was young enough to enjoy it. So I found a way to work outside the system. And I’m bloody good at it. I try not to mix with other criminals unless I have to, I cover my tracks and I deliver on my promises. Now, are we going to do business?’

He shrugged. ‘That depends.’

‘On what?’

‘On who killed Colin Osborne.’ He raised his eyebrows.

She hadn’t expected that, and she was afraid her face showed how startled she was by the question. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Colin’s death was very opportune for you. And nobody seems to know what exactly happened to him. No one has claimed responsibility. Usually, when one villain takes out another, they’re eager to capitalize on it. Respect, fear. You know how it works. So, Caroline, did you kill Colin?’

She didn’t know what the right answer was. He could be bluffing. He could know more than he was letting on, and this was a test to see how far she’d go to earn his good opinion. He might want her to be the killer, as evidence that she was prepared to be ruthless. Or he might be put off dealing with her if she claimed the kill, uneasy that her way of dealing with the competition might rebound on him in the worst way. ‘Why would I do that?’ she stalled.

‘To muscle in on his trade.’ l

She shrugged. ‘Why would I need to take that route? All I’d have to do would be to come to you with a better deal. I suspect you could supply enough bodies to keep us both happy.’

‘You didn’t, though, did you? You didn’t come near me till

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Colin was well out of the way.’ There was a hard edge to his voice now, and his eyes had lost their warmth. ‘That makes me suspicious, Caroline. That, and the fact you look so like Katerina. OK, Colin never met Katerina. But if he was halfway good at what he did, he would have checked me out He would have seen photographs of Katerina at least. And then, when she died, maybe he thought this was the chance to set “up some kind of sting using you to get to me. Only, you decided to eliminate the middle man.’

Carol was unnerved. He was wrong in almost every detail, but he was wrong in the right sort of way. Suddenly, they’d shifted from easy companionship to the edgy realm of suspicion. She didn’t know what to do.

She set her glass down and stepped away from him, folding her arms across her chest. ‘Let me off this boat.’

He frowned. ‘What?’

‘I don’t have to listen to this shit. I came here in good faith to do business. I’m not going to stand here and take accusations of murder and conspiracy from you. Tell your man to let me off this boat, now. Unless you want me to start screaming?’

Tadeusz looked amused. ‘You’re overreacting.’

Carol let the flare of anger show in her face. ‘Don’t you dare patronize me. You’re just another gangster, Tadzio. You’ve got no right to come the moral high ground with me. I don’t have to account for anything to you. And I certainly don’t want to do business with somebody who thinks I do. This is a waste of my precious time. Now let me off the boat, please.’

He took a step back, clearly unsettled by the vehemence of her reaction. He said something to the helmsman, and the boat veered towards a narrow wharf where a couple of launches were moored. ‘Caroline, I didn’t mean to offend you,’ he said as she moved to the side of the boat nearest the wharf.

‘And that’s supposed to make me feel better?’ The boat

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pulled alongside and, without waiting for the helmsman to tie up, Carol jumped ashore. ‘Don’t call,’ she threw over her shoulder as she marched up the wharf towards a flight of stone steps. Her whole body was trembling as she reached street level. She checked that he wasn’t following her, then stepped to the kerb to hail a cab.

She hoped she hadn’t wrecked the operation. But she hadn’t been able to think of anything else to do. His suspicions had come out of a blue sky, and she’d allowed herself to sink into complacency, so she hadn’t been quick enough on her feet to talk him round. She sank back into the cab seat and prayed she’d got it right.

The small plane from Bremen to Berlin was configured with a single seat on one side of the aisle, which meant Tony could look with impunity at the crime scene pictures Berndt had handed him at police headquarters in Bremen. He took them
(Jut of the envelope with some trepidation. He wasn’t looking forward to seeing the mutilated corpse of a woman he had been acquainted with. There was always something bizarrely intimate about poring over photographs of the dead, and he didn’t want such familiarity with someone he had known in life.p>

In the event, it wasn’t as bad as he had anticipated. The harsh glare of the flash had made the images of Margarethe’s body impossible to connect with the lively woman he remembered. He studied the photos in detail, wishing he had brought a magnifying lens with him. To the naked eye, there seemed to be no significant differences between the body of Margarethe and Geronimo’s other victims. They were all laid out in similar fashion, their clothes cut away to form an improbable table cover beneath them, the incongruous wound left by the scalping almost identical.

He was about to give up his perusal of the photographs

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when something caught his eye. There was something odd about one of the ligatures that bound Margarethe’s limbs to the table legs. He peered harder, trying to make out the details. The knot looked different from the others.

Tony felt a faint surge of excitement. It might not seem much but, at this stage of an investigation, any deviation from the pattern carried potentially huge significance. And in this instance, it could be all the more important because this was the crime that had been interrupted. Under the stress provoked by that intrusion, Geronimo might have let his guard slip enough to provide a chink in his boilerplate security system.

He was in a fever of impatience to pick up his laptop and get back to Petra’s. Of course, the taxi from Tempelhof seemed to take forever, finding every traffic hold-up in central Berlin. He let himself into the empty flat and made straight for the study and Petra’s scanner. While he was waiting for his computer to ready itself, he took out the magnifying glass from his laptop case and studied the picture more closely. He went back through to the dining area and pulled out the other crime scene photographs. A few minutes with the magnifying glass and his heart rejoiced. He’d been right. All the knots on the ligatures appeared to be straightforward, common or garden reef knots, apart from the single exception in that one crucial Bremen photograph.

He returned to the study and plugged the scanner into his laptop’s USB port. Minutes later, he was looking at an enlarged and enhanced section of the key picture. Tony knew nothing about knots, only that this one was different from the others. He connected to the internet and linked to a search engine, typing in . Within seconds, he had a list of websites devoted to the craft of knot-tying. The first site he tried offered him a link to an on-line newsgroup of knot enthusiasts. Tony logged on to the newsgroup and posted a message:

I’m a knot ignoramus, and I need some help in identifying a knot from a photograph, also info on where it’s likely to be used and by whom. Is there anyone out there that I can send the pic to as a JPEG file?

It would take at least a few minutes to get a response, always supposing there was a knot anorak on-line at this precise moment. To calm his urgent excitement, Tony went through to the kitchen and made himself a pot of coffee. For the first time in hours, he wondered how Carol was getting on. He remembered their tentative arrangement to meet at some point, but he didn’t know when he would be able to get away now he had the bit between his teeth.

When he got back to the desk, he sent her an email, suggesting they meet later that evening. There was a message in his in-box from someone who signed himself Monkey’s Fist. Tony knew enough to recognize the name of a particular knot, and he opened the message with a glimmer of hope.