‘Sorry?’ he said.
‘I said, it’s funny how real-life shootings never look half as dramatic as the ones we sell.’ He reached for the open bottle of red wine on his desk and poured two glasses.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a real-life shooting before,’ Tadeusz lied. ‘I’m quite shocked they’re showing it in all its glory on the early evening news.’
The manager laughed as he handed a glass to his boss. ‘I’m sure the moral guardians of the nation’s youth will be clogging the TV station switchboard with complaints as we speak. Cheers, Tadeusz. Good decision to choose those guys. They’ve made a great job of the shop floor.’
Tadeusz raised his glass mechanically, reaching for his mobile with his other hand. ‘Yes. Now I need to find a way to justify the expense of doing up the rest of the chain. Excuse me.’ He touched a couple of keys to speed-dial Krasic. ‘It’s me,’ he said. ‘We need a meeting. I’ll see you at my place in half an hour.’ He ended the call without waiting for Krasic’s response, then sipped his wine. ‘Lovely stuff, Jurgen, but I’m afraid I’ve got to run. Empires to build, new worlds to conquer – you know how it is.’
Twenty minutes later, he was pacing the floor in front of his TV screen, flipping channels to see if he could find a local news station that was running the footage of Kamal’s assassination. Finally, he caught the tail end of the video and immediately raised the volume. The studio anchorman took up the story. ‘The dead man, whose name has not yet been released, had been arrested in connection with the seven heroin deaths in the city in the past week. Sources close to the investigation say that the woman who fired the fatal shot was the girlfriend of one of the addicts who died after shooting up with contaminated drugs. Already, there are calls for an inquiry into how the woman found out about the arrest before the prisoner had even been taken into formal custody.’ He glanced down at his papers. ‘And now over to our correspondent at the Reichstag, where representatives have been debating new measures to combat the spread of BSE …’
Tadeusz hit the mute button. He’d heard all he needed to know. When Krasic finally arrived five minutes late, complaining about the traffic, he launched straight in. ‘What the hell are you playing at?’
‘What do you mean, Tadzio?’ Krasic stalled. It was clear from the troubled look in his eyes that he knew exactly what his boss meant.
‘Fuck it, Darko, don’t play stupid games with me. What possessed you? Having Kamal taken out on the steps of the fucking police station? I thought we were trying to take the limelight off this investigation, not turn it into the lead story across the country? Jesus, you couldn’t have gone for a more public display.’
‘What else 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.’
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
