Val McDermid - The Last Temptation

She hoped she hadn’t let the depth of her disappointment show as they’d left the pub, forcing her face to smile the congratulation of a friend. Then she’d turned away, letting the sharp north-easterly wind give her an excuse for smarting eyes. She’d followed his car up the hill away from the picture-postcard harbour to the small hotel where he’d arranged a room for her. She’d taken a defiant ten minutes to repair her make-up and arrange her hair to its best advantage. And to change out of her jeans into a tight skirt that revealed more than anyone in the Met had ever seen. She might have lost the battle, but that didn’t mean she had to beat a bedraggled retreat. Let him see what he’s missing , she thought, throwing down a gauntlet to herself as much as to him.

Driving back to his cottage, they’d said little of consequence, making small talk about life in a small town. The cottage itself was much as Carol had expected. Whatever this woman meant to Tony, she hadn’t stamped her identity over his space. She recognized most of the furniture, the pictures on the wall, the books lined up on shelves along the study wall. Even the answering machine, she thought with a faint shudder, ambushed by memory.

‘Looks like you’ve settled in,’ was all she said.

He shrugged. ‘I’m not much of a homemaker. I went through it with a bucket of white paint then moved all the old stuff in. Luckily most of it fitted.’

Once they were settled in the study with mugs of coffee, present constraints somehow slipped away and the old ease that had existed between them reasserted itself. So while Tony read the brief that Morgan had couriered to Carol that morning, she curled up in a battered armchair and browsed an eclectic pile of magazines ranging from New Scientist to Marie Claire. He’d always read a strange assortment of publications, she remembered fondly. She’d never been stuck for something to read in his house.

As he read, Tony made occasional notes on a pad propped on the arm of his chair. His eyebrows furrowed from time to time, and occasionally his mouth quirked in a question that he never enunciated. It wasn’t a long brief, but he read it slowly and meticulously, flipping back to the beginning and skimming it again after he’d first reached the end. Finally, he looked up. ‘I must admit, I’m puzzled,’ he said.

‘By what, in particular?’

‘By the fact that they’re asking you to do something like this. It’s so far outside your field of experience.’

‘That’s what I thought. I have to assume there’s some aspect of my experience or my skills that overrides my lack of direct undercover work.’

Tony pushed his hair back from his forehead in a familiar gesture. ‘That would be my guess. The brief itself is more or less straightforward. Pick up the drugs from your source, exchange the parcel of drugs for cash and return it to your first contact. Of course, I’m assuming they’ll throw spanners in the works along the way. There wouldn’t be any point in it otherwise.’

‘It’s supposed to be a test of my abilities, so I think it’s fair to expect the unexpected.’ Carol dropped the magazine she was reading and tucked her legs underneath her. ‘So how do I do it?’

Tony glanced at his notes. ‘There’s two aspects to this – the practical and the psychological. What are your thoughts?’

‘The practical side’s easy. I’ve got four days to go at this. I know the address for the cash pick-up and I know the general area where I’m going to be doing the handover. So I’m going to check out the house where I’ve got to go for the money. Then I’m going to get to know the various routes from A to B like the back of my hand. I need to be able to adjust to any contingencies that crop up, and that means knowing the terrain well enough to change my plans without having to think twice. I need to think about what I’m going to wear and how easily I can adapt my appearance to confuse anyone who’s watching me.’

He nodded, agreeing. ‘But of course, some of the practicalities are conditional on the psychological aspects.’

‘And that’s the bit I don’t have a handle on. Which is why I’m here. Consulting the oracle.’ Carol gave a mock salute.

His smile was self-mocking. ‘I wish my students had the same respect for my abilities.’

‘They’ve not seen you in action. They’d change their tune then.’

His mouth narrowed in a grim line and she saw a shadow in his eyes that had been missing before. ‘Yeah, right,’ he said after a short pause. ‘Sign up with me and see circles of hell that Dante could never have imagined.’

‘It goes with the territory,’ Carol said.

‘Which is why I don’t live there any more.’ He looked away, his eyes focused on the street beyond the window. He took a deep breath. ‘So. You need to know how to walk in someone else’s shoes, right?’ He turned back to face her, a forced expression of geniality on his face.

‘And under their skin.’

‘OK. Here’s where we start from. We measure people by how they look, what they do and what they say. All our assessments are based on those things. Body language, clothes, actions and reactions. Speech and silence. When we encounter someone, our brain enters into a negotiation between what it’s registering and what it has stored in its memory banks. Mostly, we only use what we’ve got locked up there as a control to judge new encounters. But we can also use it as a sampler on which to base new ways of acting.’

‘You’re saying I already know what I need to know?’ Carol looked dubious.

‘If you don’t, even someone as smart as you isn’t going to learn it between now and next week. The first thing I want you to do is to think about someone you’ve encountered who would be relatively comfortable in this scenario.’ He tapped the papers with his pen. ‘Not over-confident, just reasonably at home with it.’

Carol frowned as she flicked back through her memories of criminals she’d gone head to head with over the years. She’d never worked with the Drugs Squad, but she’d encountered both dealers and mules more often than she could count when she’d been running the CID in the North Sea port of Seaford. None of them seemed to fit. The dealers were too cocky or too fucked up by their own product, the mules too lacking in initiative. Then she remembered Janine. ‘I think I’ve got someone,’ she said. ‘Janine Jerrold.’

‘Tell me about her.’

‘She started out as one of the hookers down at the docks. She was unusual, because she never had a pimp. She worked for herself, out of an upstairs room in a pub run by her aunt. By the time I came across her, she’d moved on to something a bit more lucrative and less physically dangerous. She ran a team of organized shoplifters. Occasionally, we’d lift one of the girls, but we never got our hands on Janine. Everybody knew she was behind it. But none of her girls would grass her up, because she always looked after them. She’d turn up to court to pay their fines, cash on the nail. And if they got sent down, she made sure their kids were looked after. She was smart, and she had so much bottle.’

Tony smiled. ‘OK, now we’ve got Janine in our sights. That’s the easy bit. What you have to do now is construct Janine for yourself. You need to mull over everything you’ve seen her do and say, and work out what ingredients went into the mix to make her the woman she is now.’

‘In four days?’

‘Obviously, it’s going to be a rough draft, but you can work something up in that time. Then comes the really hard bit. You’ve got to shed Carol Jordan and assume Janine Jerrold.’

Carol looked worried. ‘You think I’m up to it?’

He cocked his head on one side, considering. ‘Oh, I think so, Carol. I think you’re up to just about anything you set your mind to.’