was a dishonest reason for snatching this opportunity. If he went to Berlin for Carol's sake, his mind wouldn't be focused on the job he was supposedly there to do. Worse yet, his presence might prove to be the opposite of helpful for Carol. She needed to stay in role as much as possible, and if he kept popping up like a jack-in-the-box, it could damage her ability to maintain Caroline Jackson. Providing insights and reinforcement from a distance was one thing; to be there in person could tempt her to lean too heavily on him. Then if it came to the crunch and she was thrown entirely on her own resources, she might lack the necessary confidence to carry it through.
Still, he thought, it wouldn't hurt to check it out on the web. He loaded his search engine and typed in, 'Bremen + murder + psychology + lecturer', going for the most recent one first. Seconds later, he was looking at a German newspaper report. Luckily, he'd learned German at school and had kept it up so he could read scientific papers. But even if he hadn't been able to understand it, one thing would have leapt out like a firework in the night sky.
Tony stared at the screen, scarcely able to believe his eyes. There had to be a mistake. His hands clenched into fists and his face closed in a frown. He rubbed his temples with his knuckles, trying to make sense of what he was reading.
There was, however, no room for doubt. There couldn't be two Margarethe Schillings who were psychologists attached to Bremen University. That was beyond the bounds of credibility. But equally impossible was the idea that Margarethe Schilling was dead at the hands of a serial killer.
He could see her face now. Wide mouth grinning at something someone had said, laughter lines scored in the corners of her eyes. Hard to believe any psychologist could have found enough in the world to laugh at to etch them so deep. Blonde hair loose, impatiently pushed back behind her ears when she was making a point in debate. Lively, intelligent, argumentative to the point of being infuriating.
They had met at a symposium in Hamburg three years before. Tony had been interested in the relationship between religious belief and certain types of serial offender, and Margarethe's experimental work had intrigued him. He'd listened to her paper and found several points he wanted to discuss with her. So they'd gone off to a bar with a few others and missed the official banquet, so wrapped up had they been in their discussion.
They'd found a lot of common ground, him and Margarethe. So much so that she'd persuaded him to change his flight and come back to Bremen with her for a couple of days so he could see her research results at first hand. It had been a fascinating experience, and the vigorous exchange of information and ideas had exhilarated him. She'd even put him up in the spare room of the charming nineteenth-century barn conversion she shared with her husband Kurt and their son Hartmut in a small village near an artists' colony a dozen miles from the city.
He hadn't taken to Kurt, he recalled. He'd made not a virtue but a martyrdom of necessity, complaining about his boring life of childcare following his redundancy from a research post with a pharmaceutical company. 'Of course, having to look after a child all day means it's impossible for me to keep my knowledge current,' he'd moaned over dinner. 'It's all right for Margarethe, she can scale the heights of the academic world, but I'm stuck out here in the backwoods with my brain rotting.'
It had become clear to Tony that Kurt was parenting not out of necessity but out of idleness. According to Margarethe, his parents had left them enough money to buy the house with a little left over. Kurt had seized the chance to take redundancy with the intention of assuming the life of a dilettante. As she told the tale, Margarethe had smiled wickedly. 'The first thing I did when he told me what he'd done was to sack the nanny. He couldn't argue with me, because it would be like saying he didn't want to spend time with his son. But he's never forgiven me for it.'
At the time, Tony had thought it was remarkably bad psychology for someone who made her living out of the labyrinth of the human mind. Unless, of