The Last Temptation
The Number One bestselling crime series featuring Dr Tony Hill, hero of TV’s Wire in the Blood, written by the award-winning Val McDermid. The hunt for a serial killer leads from Britain through Europe in this terrifying psychological thriller.A twisted killer targeting psychologists has left a grisly trail across Europe.Dr Tony Hill, expert at mapping the minds of murderers, is reluctant to get involved. But then the next victim is much closer to home…Meanwhile, his former partner DCI Carol Jordan is working undercover in Berlin, on a dangerous operation to trap a millionaire trafficker. When the game turns nasty, Tony is the only person she can call on for help.Confronting a cruelty that has its roots in Nazi atrocities, Tony and Carol are thrown together in a world of violence and corruption, where they have no one to trust but each other.
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VAL McDERMID
The Last Temptation
Harper
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
77â85 Fulham Palace Road,
Hammersmith, London W6 8JB
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers in 2002
Copyright © Val McDermid 2002
Val McDermid asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Extract from Murder in the Cathedral by T. S. Eliot (published by Faber and Faber Ltd) reproduced by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the authorâs imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Source ISBN: 9780007344710
Ebook Edition © SEPTEMBER 2014 ISBN: 9780007327621
Version: 2014-09-28
For Cameron Joseph McDermid Baillie:
not much of a gift by comparison,
but the best I can do.
The last temptation is the greatest treason:
To do the right deed for the wrong reason.
Murder in the Cathedral T. S. Eliot
Only when it is responsible for providing psychological diagnoses for state purposes does psychology really become important.
Max Simoneit, scientific director of
Wehrmacht Psychology, 1938
Contents
Case Notes
Name: Walter Neumann
Session Number: 1
Comments: The patient has clearly been troubled for some time with an overweening sense of his own infallibility. He presents with a disturbing level of overconfidence in his own abilities. He has a grandiose self-image and is reluctant to concede the possibility that he might be subject to valid criticism.
When challenged, he appears offended and clearly has difficulty masking his indignation. He sees no need to defend himself, regarding it as self-evident that he is right, in spite of all evidence to the contrary. His capacity for self-analysis is clearly limited. A typical response to a question is to deflect it with a question of his own. He shows a marked reluctance to examine his own behaviour or the consequences of his actions.
He lacks insight and the concept of a wider responsibility. He has mastered the appearance of affect, but it is unlikely that this is more than a convenient mask.
Therapeutic Action: Altered state therapy initiated.
Blue is one colour the Danube never manages. Slate grey, muddy brown, dirty rust, sweat-stained khaki; all of these and most of the intermediate shades sabotage the dreams of any romantic who stands on her banks. Occasionally, where boats gather, she achieves a kind of oily radiance as the sun shimmers on a skin of spilled fuel, turning the river the iridescent hues of a pigeonâs throat. On a dark night when clouds obscure the stars, sheâs as black as the Styx. But there, in central Europe at the turning of the new millennium, it cost rather more than a penny to pay the ferryman.
From both land and water, the place looked like a deserted, rundown boat repair yard. The rotting ribs of a couple of barges and corroded components from old machinery, their former functions a mystery, were all that could be glimpsed through the gaps in the planks of the tall gates. Anyone curious enough to have stopped their car on the quiet back road and peered into the yard would have been satisfied that they were looking at yet another graveyard for a dead communist enterprise.
But there was no apparent reason for anybody to harbour idle curiosity about this particular backwater. The only mystery was why, even in those illogical totalitarian days, it had ever been thought there was any point in opening a business there. There was no significant population centre for a dozen miles in any direction. The few farms that occupied the hinterland had always required more work to make them profitable than their occupants could provide; no spare hands there. When this boatyard was in operation, the workers had been bussed fifteen miles to get to work. Its only advantage was its position on the river, sheltered from the main flow by a long sandbar covered in scrubby bushes and a few straggling trees leaning in the direction of the prevailing wind.
