Black Widow (14 page)

‘Oh, fine,’ Ursula answered.

‘Still at UvA?’

‘Yes,’ Ursula replied. ‘Just started my final year. And you? I take it you graduated with full honours?’

‘Yes. I’ve got my own studio, now.’

‘Wow,’ said Ursula. ‘Really? Of course, I could always see you were going places. Remember how we used to talk about it? We decided that you would only photograph women, and dead men –’

Emmeline pulled a face. ‘Well, that was more your idea, as I recall. And there are commercial realities to contend with.’ She puffed out her chest. ‘I’ve just bought a studio!’

‘Sounds great. So I’d imagine you have, um, all sorts of
equipment
there.’

‘Yes,’ Emmeline confirmed. ‘It’s cost a fortune to kit out. But it should pay for itself in time. It had better – I’ve borrowed a fortune from my parents to pay for it.’

‘They’ve forgiven you, then?’

‘For being a lesbian? More or less.’ Emmeline wound a finger into a tendril of long hair. ‘Ursula? What are you doing here?’

‘Why, looking for you, of course. But anyway, your photographic equipment. What can you do with it, exactly?’

‘I’m not sure I follow.’

Ursula blew air through her cheeks. ‘Well, let’s suppose someone had a photograph. And then let’s say that the photo had a streak through it, which sort of hid the subject’s face – is there anything you might do, you know, some sort of filter –’

Emmeline frowned. ‘Well, possibly. It would probably be more of a software-based process than a physical act, though. There are things that can be done, with the right algorithms.’

‘Really? Well, that’s very interesting.’

Emmy seemed surprised. ‘Oh? You always used to say it was dull, before.’

‘Are you sure? I don’t remember saying that.’

Ursula took a sip of Emmeline’s vodka. When she looked up, she saw that Emmy was looking at her with a mixture of longing, and sadness.

‘And there I was hoping that it was me you wanted,’ Emmy said softly.

Ursula made a grab for Emmy’s hands. ‘It is you,’ she said. ‘But I wasn’t brave enough to say it directly. There
is
a photograph I’d like you to look at, as it happens – it’s part of my coursework; I won’t bore you with the details – but it’s you I’ve come to see. I’ve been thinking about it for months, but it’s taken me this long to pluck up the courage.’

There was a definite hint of moisture in Emmeline’s eye. ‘You mean you’d like to get back together?’

‘Well, I’d like to give it a try!’

Ursula felt bad for misleading a sister. But at the same time she was desperate to find out the mystery woman’s identity. Emmy was nice enough, but to the best of Ursula’s knowledge she had yet to kill a man; she was no heroine. Her feelings would have to be sacrificed, to the greater good.

*

Tanja had no recollection of the journey back to Alex’s flat.

It had started out slowly, tenderly (or hesitantly, Tanja’s more persistent demons reckoned); but it had quickly become something else. Not violent; Alex would never hurt her, not physically – yet it was still subtly different to what she remembered. More draining. More –? She couldn’t quite think of the word.

She’d fallen asleep against Alex’s chest but, for all her tiredness, her rest had been fitful. And now she was awake in the darkness, looking at him as he slept. His body, turned pale and ghostly in a stray shaft of moonlight, was as finely proportioned as she remembered. Just like Anton had been. At twenty-seven, he was absolutely in his prime, his body so far removed from hers in terms of strength and fitness of purpose that he might as well have belonged to a different species.

‘Bestial,’ she whispered. That’s the word she was looking for.

She needed the toilet. She eased herself away from the bed, her footsteps following a familiar path, around familiar obstacles. Alex’s place was cluttered: here was a football; here a freestanding rack of CDs. Here was a punch-bag, fashioned to resemble Rocky’s arch-nemesis, Clubber Lang. Tanja had bought him that. Alex was a fan of those movies. For ironic reasons, he claimed, but Tanja wasn’t taken in.

When she was done, she poured herself a glass of water, studying her reflection in the bathroom mirror as she did so. Nose aside – it looked a little more crooked, in this light – she wasn’t in bad shape. The lines around her eyes were quite delicate, while her breasts were full enough, and yet to head south across her personal equator. Her legs seemed longer than her modest height might have dictated. It could have been a lot worse.

But the one thing she couldn’t afford was complacency.

She was over-tired, and still drunk, and under those conditions her imagination tended to run away with itself. She gripped onto the sink, seeing her reflection change, growing younger all the while, her hips narrowing, her breasts disappearing, until she was just a little girl; and the sadness, the guilt, were as strong as ever.

Imagination gave way to memory. She closed her eyes, and suddenly she was at her desk, looking at a report from the criminal profiler, Professor Antje Scholten. Looking at it, but not
seeing
it. She’d known, at the time, that Alex was going to break up with her; it had driven her mad. And for that week, and weeks afterwards, she’d thought of nothing else. The evidence gathered around her, without ever merging into a uniform whole. There was the photofit, derived from the only surviving victim’s admittedly shaky testimony; and also a clear DNA sample, taken from the semen that had been spilled during the preliminary acts of torture. A map, pinned at what appeared to be a random set of locations, linked only by their remoteness.

It wasn’t much, Wever had argued, and continued to argue, given that the DNA sample didn’t match any records on the database, and that the killer was otherwise so careful to mask his movements. Yet still Tanja blamed herself for not pulling it all together; she would always blame herself.

A copy of Scholten’s report still sat in her desk. From time to time she would leaf through it, but the words still seemed to blur.

But for now she had another case to worry about. And this time she was determined that she wouldn’t fuck up; that she would give Mikael Ruben the attention he deserved. She pushed herself away from the sink, stabbing at the light switch.

She returned to the bedroom. The light was on. Alex was sitting up.

‘We need to talk,’ he said. ‘Properly, this time.’

*

The fury couldn’t be denied; once awoken, only one thing would send it back to sleep. The woman who called herself Hester saw that clearly now.

Jasper Endqvist had escaped her, damn his eyes, saved by a chance phone call from his boss. All those months of meticulous planning, gone to waste! She’d wandered the streets for hours afterwards, the rage building within her all the while, until there came a point where she’d had no choice but to find someone else.

She really had no idea how she came across to others, whether she seemed frivolous, or serious; cold, or warm; extroverted, or introverted – she felt so far removed from her public persona that she, and it, might as well have been different people. But inside, in that blue-lit, almost-void, where flashes of vengeance coalesced, she was deeply, mechanically methodical. Selecting another victim,
almost
at random, went against every instinct.

He’d thought she was a prostitute. She, whose motives were so pure! And he, stinking of booze, and dosed up on pot.

Well. Never again. Not with a man like that.

She looked down at his still face, at the brown, staring eyes.

They weren’t much, as eyes went; they conveyed no particular power. But still she had jars to fill. And she’d given him his gift; it was only fair that she should claim her own. She took out a tent peg from her handbag, and proceeded to lever out a keepsake. She pressed the other eye back into its socket, the squelching sound filling her with a savage joy.

An involuntary spasm shook the man’s body. The killer gasped, more fascinated than alarmed. Perhaps he hadn’t been quite dead, before.

It gave her an intriguing idea: what if, she wondered, she were to keep the next one alive whilst treating him? Conscious, even? Communicative. Could there been anything more gratifying? She might twist the eye around, the nerve still attached, so that he could look on his own fear.

She shook at that, and James Anderson shook beneath her. It was a beautiful thing.

Some minutes later, she pulled herself off him, then padded into the bathroom. It wasn’t much of a hotel – just one of the many grubby places that were to be found within walking distance of the docks – but that was how she liked it. The beauty, the purity of what she did – it shone out more clearly when set against a grubby backdrop. She spent a few luxurious minutes in the shower, then made her way outside, down the fire escape.

She blended rather easily into the dark vista of burnt brick and twisted iron. Now that the fury was abed, she felt blissfully inanimate, as peaceful as an unlit forge.

Chapter 10

Sunday

Tanja had been up for the rest of the night with Alex, talking about their relationship. It had been a civil conversation for the most part, but that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. A screaming row might have cleared the air; as it was, the
air
remained as thick and impenetrable as the blanket heat which continued to smother the city. She wasn’t sure they had reached any resolution as to where they were heading. And now, as she drove into work, tired and frustrated, she really had no idea where they
were
.

She wished that Alex could simply have left things alone. It was supposed to be the woman who demanded such analysis, not the man.

Thank God for work. She strode across the office floor, determined that this day would be more productive than those which had preceded it.

Pieter Kissin was already at his desk, reading
De Telegraaf
. He handed it to her, pointing out an article on the inside cover. Tanja read the passage, which provided a more detailed summation of Wednesday night’s murder than any she’d read previously – including the matter of the eyes.

‘Word spreads,’ Tanja observed sourly. ‘We’ll probably have the TV crews at the door soon.’

Pieter nodded ‘Worse than that, I’ve just had our friend Gus de Groot on the phone. He was looking for more information.’

‘Did you tell him anything?’

‘Of course not. But get this – he’s come up with a name for the murderer. He’s calling her the “Cougar Killer”. Coming to a gutter newspaper near you soon!’

‘It was de Groot who came up with “The Butcher of the Bos”,’ Tanja mused. ‘He seems to have influence in that regard.’

‘I’ve been wondering about that,’ Pieter said. ‘Is “Butcher” an appropriate name, given his MO? Wouldn’t “Strangler” be better?’

He looked at Tanja quizzically, but only for an instant. Maybe it was something in her expression, or maybe it was just that he was starting to appreciate that not
every
mystery needed solving – but either way his open curiosity quickly resolved to something else. He looked away, at the floor, at his desk, at anyone or anything that wasn’t Tanja.

‘De Groot loves his alliteration,’ Tanja said lightly, but she couldn’t help the slow clenching of her fists. ‘And besides, there
was
blood. The Butcher liked to cut.’

Pieter nodded, and quickly changed the subject. ‘Oh! Karl Visser dropped something in your in-tray.’

‘Have you read it?’ Tanja asked.

‘No. It’s in your in-tray Detective Inspector, not mine.’

‘What a charming display of manners,’ Tanja observed as she set to studying the report. ‘Ah, it’s from the Fingerprint Lab. Finally! So, what have we got? Blah-blah… Ah, here we are. They’ve identified forty distinct sets of prints so far. Terrific. What are the maids in that place doing with their time, for fuck’s sake?’

‘Can’t be any fun, doing what they do, though.’

‘I don’t give a shit,’ Tanja said, as she headed off towards the coffee machine. She took a sip of the flavourless stuff, wishing that she’d had the time to prepare a thermos before leaving Alex’s place. She liked –
needed
– her coffee strong. This might as well have been decaf.

Back at her desk, she picked up her phone. ‘Karl?’

‘Detective Inspector Pino,’ Visser responded. ‘How pleasant to hear from you.’

‘Cut the crap. I’ve just seen the fingerprint report. It’s shit.’

‘Hardly my fault.’

‘No,’ Tanja acknowledged. ‘But I was wondering – do you have anything else for us yet?’

‘Maybe,’ Visser replied. ‘I was just going to ring you, actually. Do you want to come down?’

‘Is your coffee percolator on the go?’

‘Always.’

‘Be there in two minutes then,’ Tanja grunted.

‘We’re off to see Visser?’ Pieter queried as Tanja hung up.

‘Excellent deduction, Detective Kissin. You father would be proud.’

Pieter fidgeted. ‘Look, I thought we were going to keep my dad out of this?’

‘I never said that,’ Tanja countered as she moved towards the stairs. ‘In fact, I plan to bring him up every time you do something stupid.’

Pieter followed her. ‘So how was your date?’ he asked.

‘Great.’ She came to a sudden halt, aware of his sneakiness, and almost approving of it. ‘I tell you what – I won’t mention your dad, if you will promise to shut up about Alex.’

‘Deal.’

‘And don’t grin like that, Kissin! Makes you look like you’ve had a stroke.’

‘Does it? No wonder I’m finding it so hard to find a girlfriend.’

‘Are you looking for a girlfriend, then?’

‘Well, sort of,’ he admitted. ‘But Amsterdam girls are quite scary, compared with what I’m used to.’

‘Milkmaids?’

‘Nothing wrong with a nice milkmaid, boss. I hear they make excellent wives. And mothers.’

Visser’s department was on the next floor down. Karl already had a mug of thick black coffee waiting for Tanja. She took it from him gratefully, and ignored Pieter’s plaintive look completely.

She did keep an eye on him though, as he set off on a tour of the lab, his fingers brushing the modest arrangement of microscopes and centrifuges. The complicated stuff – the DNA sequencing, for instance – was carried out off-site, and the overall impression was more like a school science lab than the hi-tech hub of a forensic dynasty. Yet still he seemed fascinated.