The Orpheus Trail

by Maureen Duffy

  The dig finished and I applied for the job at St Julian’s where my published reports, as well as my experience in the field, gave me a headstart. I should have settled down, put it all behind me but I couldn’t. It was a terrible itch I had to scratch. It wasn’t just sites for artefacts that I knew must be stolen or looted, that I accessed.

  So when they contacted me they knew and I knew, that I was guilty and therefore vulnerable on two counts. Of course I suspected what they wanted my experience for. It’s a very specialist but lucrative market, the luxury end of the trade you might say.

  The pier fire wasn’t one of mine. Too crude and not very well researched. I had seen about the glass egg on your doorstep, though of course I didn’t know that, or you then and, I saw its possibilities. It was also a test of how well organised they were, how capable of carrying out a complicated project requiring the kind of skills and co-ordination you have to have to set up a dig.

  The order was for something bizarre, beautiful and deathly. I even made maquettes of how each scene should look. I destroyed the last one tonight. They were a kind of Fabergé in their field, a development of the Victorian tableaux if you like. But I truly had no idea that they would use real boys until it was too late. When I protested once, they told me that the boys were already dead when they got them, that they were merely latter-day body snatchers, plundering the dead but no more guilty than the old anatomists.

  As for who ‘they’ are, I don’t know. We dealt only over the internet on websites that were constantly changing and anyway I was too afraid of exposure to the college authorities to risk trying to track them down. That was the real hold they had over me: the loss of my job, the public disgrace, my name on a register that would bar me from ever working in academia again or anywhere near children. I’m too old for fieldwork, and anyway a lot of countries prefer to employ their own rather than be patronised by us.

  Now what I feared and tried to avoid by digging myself in deeper will inevitably happen. The police will go on until they’ve hunted down everyone involved. I can’t face that. I haven’t even the physical stamina let alone the mental resources.

  I’m merely anticipating a little and it frees you and everyone else to go on.

  I believe they were responsible for Linden’s death and would certainly have been for mine, one way or the other.

  By the way the pieces from the Prittlewell Prince’s grave were my undoing. I saw them advertised on one of the specialist websites and when I tried to buy them they pounced. Then under pressure, blackmail I suppose you call it, I told them how to use them, almost superstitiously to give the boys some kind of rite of passage like the obols placed in the mouths of the dead. They gave me the coin that I gave you as a kind of devilish contract. If I believed in such things, in anything, I’d probably say it was cursed. Lock it away from you, just to be sure.

  Then came his signature. JS Stalbridge

  When I’d finished reading I looked up. Hildreth waited silently. Now he held out his hand and I passed him the letter. He studied it minutely while I stood in an agony of anticipation and shame.

  Finally he spoke. ‘Well we see some bizarre things and weird people in this job but this is up there with the best of them. This is only his version of events, as you might say the Stalbridge edition, and now he’s put himself beyond questioning. So Alex, when and where did you meet him and what did he tell you?’

  ‘Yesterday, at the London Library.’

  ‘Why there?’

  ‘It’s a members-only library, by subscription, just off Piccadilly. You can find somewhere private to talk and we couldn’t be followed in except by another member of course.’

  ‘And were you followed?’

  ‘It seems not, at least he doesn’t suggest it in the letter.’

  ‘And what did he tell you?’

  I did my best to remember and repeated our conversation as accurately as I could. At the end Hildreth nodded.

  ‘And who set up this meeting? Did he ask to see you?’

  ‘I’m afraid it was my suggestion.’

  ‘Why Alex, after I’d warned you about going off on your own?’

  ‘I thought I might find out something, that because I was in the same sort of business and had known Jack that he might confide in me. Then of course I would inform you.’

  ‘But you didn’t.’

  ‘He asked me to give him a day before going to the police. He was ill. I thought he needed time to recover.’

  ‘Time to destroy or bury any evidence he might have given us.’

  ‘I didn’t think for a minute that he would kill himself.’

  ‘No, you didn’t think. Well that’s all water under the bridge now. I intend to keep you in my sights in future. That means you’ll have to take some time off. I’m going to Amsterdam and you’re coming with me. Unless I charge you with impeding a police enquiry and lock you up. Which is it to be, Alex?’

  His gentle half-mocking tone didn’t deceive me.

  ‘I’ll tell them at work I’m taking some of my leave now.’

  ‘Right. Meet me at my office at ten o’clock tomorrow. Don’t forget to turn up, with your passport. I don’t want to send someone in uniform knocking on your door.’ Hildreth heaved himself away from the buff tiled mantelpiece he had been leaning against.

  ‘I’ll be there.’

  ‘Yes, you will. Reckon to be away at least one night.’

  ‘There’s just one thing.’ Desperately I tried to assert a more favourable image of myself, in my own eyes as well as Hildreth’s.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Stalbridge thought at first his blackmailers would use dummies, replicas, something like that. Then he seems to have believed the boys were already dead when they were used in the tableaux. Were they, and was that the point of it all?’

  ‘Forensics support that view. As to why, the answer has to be porno pics for internet circulation, either for love or money. But you must have sussed that.’

  ‘And have they been circulated?’ Again I felt a fool with my naive questions.

  ‘Oh, yes. They’ve been turning up all over the web. Now we have to find out who’s doing it and, most of all of course, where the boys’ bodies are coming from.’

  I didn’t remember the drive home or how I managed to get there without accident in my agony of humiliation. It would have been hypocritical to feel grief for Stalbridge but I should have felt renewed pain for the unknown, lost boys. I had slipped back into my old cocoon of numbness and alienation from ordinary human emotion that Hilary had briefly dispelled, so much so that I couldn’t bring myself to ring her but sat emptying the whisky bottle until I fell asleep in my chair, and woke chilled to stumble to bed.

  When I reached Hildreth’s office the next morning he was already waiting with his overcoat on. ‘Have you remembered your passport, in case we get separated?’

  For answer I held up the plum-coloured pasteboard.

  ‘Right. A car will take us to Waterloo. We’re going on Eurostar. I don’t like flying. I’m relieved they’ve decided it’s bad for the environment.’

  It was Friday and the space in front of the ticket barriers was already packed with young people, off on their weekend jaunt to hoped-for difference in erotic, exotic Paris while the young French were setting out from their end with the same motive, and there were long queues inside the ticket hall itself.

  ‘Here’s your boarding pass.’ Hildreth handed me the cardboard strip and I fed it meekly into the machine that spat it back at me as if it was alive, and swung open the metal gate. We flashed our passports at immigration and passed through to the security checks. The whole thing took only minutes. I should have felt some sense of excitement I suppose but I was still too hung over from last night.

  ‘I don’t think you’ll need much in the way of euros since you’re my accompanying expert but you might feel like buying me a drink some time.’

  Obediently I went to the nearest bureau de change.

&nb
sp; ‘Do you want a drink now?’

  ‘Why not. What about you?’

  I toyed with the idea of hair of the dog but settled for a double tomato juice with ice. As I carried the drinks over to the little round table Hildreth had chosen by a window, the absurdity of the situation, of the pair of us like two people off on a city break without a care in the world, relaxed, smiling even, raising our glasses – ‘Cheers’ – as if we weren’t looking for possible child molesters, murderers, struck me with all its surreal force, with the very banality of our everyday actions in such a context. The tomato juice tasted salty as blood and I regretted my choice even as I downed it.

  ‘Are you feeling alright?’

  ‘I suddenly saw the irony of us sitting here calmly with a drink when we’re supposedly in pursuit of criminals.’

  ‘Ah, well, I’m afraid you wouldn’t make a policeman, Alex. We can’t afford such thoughts. If we’re the sort to have them when we join the force, the job itself sees them off. You’ve too much imagination. You should have had a proper drink to buck you up.’

  I thought it best not to tell him my glass seemed full of blood. ‘I had too much last night, that’s my trouble,’ I said trying to put over a more macho image.

  ‘We’re business class,’ Hildreth said when the Brussels train was called.

  ‘They were the only seats left, I don’t usually travel in style. We’re booked into the Novotel in Amsterdam. I’m told it’s clean but not fancy.’

  The rest of the journey passed quickly, through the flat fields of Flanders that blurred past the window, after the twenty minutes deep under the channel. The air seemed full of the cries of the wounded, and the thunder of Big Bertha being punctuated by the stutter of machine guns. And then we were bowling across the great continental plain that stretched from the Channel to the Carpathians, taking in the land of my father and the repro-Gothic of Budapest, the plain that had offered no resistance to the Panzers sweeping east and west. I glanced across at Hildreth. He had settled himself in a corner and was deep in the day’s Suduko grid. It seemed wiser not to intrude and foster my image as hopelessly imaginative and therefore impractical. I took a paperback out of my briefcase and tried to concentrate on the latest research info on the evolution of seaside structures: betting machines, beach huts, Canvey Island bungalows and caravans.

  Soon it seemed we were inching through the suburbs of the Belgian capital, the train became a tram gliding between the usual city outskirts of industrial and old housing. At the station we ate a slice of pizza in the bar before boarding the Thalys express to Amsterdam, clean and bright as British transport, however new, never seems to achieve. As we crossed the border immigration officials, I suppose some kind of police, moved through the carriage checking our passports. Handing back Hildreth’s the official tipped him a kind of half salute, as if recognising a European fraternity, that Hildreth acknowledged with the slight nod of a co-conspirator, a freemasonry of the just holding back the barbarians.

  ‘They’re expecting us at police headquarters,’ Hildreth said. ‘We’ll take a taxi. At least,’ he went on sinking back into the cushioned seat, ‘nobody here expects you to speak Dutch.’

  ‘Have you been here before?’

  ‘Oh yes. They’re some of our closest support. The Dutch decided years ago it was better to regulate the sex trade than try to suppress it. That way you know what’s going on so they have decades of valuable experience, especially useful to us, always working in the dark with our hands tied behind our backs. He’s a good bloke the man we’re going to see. Beemsterboer is his name. A bit of a mouthful but you get used to it.’

  I stared out of the window at the crowds on the street. Some of them were tourists I thought. The natives themselves stood out taller and heavier. I’d read somewhere that they were now the tallest in the Western world and had outstripped even the Americans. They exuded confidence from their calm demeanour and handsome faces. I thought of an average British crowd with its centuries of industrial poverty and hard labour in mills, mines and warehouses that had left us pale and stunted by comparison, with frames that ran to fat rather than height and breadth like the Dutch men and women. Hildreth himself I judged was about five-foot-eleven and heavily set, a true Wexford.

  The taxi wound its way over bridges, along the sides of gleaming straight-edged canals, lined by tall town houses in handsome brick with cut-out scrolled gables and pediments, dodging the ubiquitous cycles ridden by all ages with the aplomb of knowing yours is the right of way. Maybe all the cycling had contributed to the length of Dutch legs.

  ‘I don’t care for water much myself but I suppose if you lived here you’d get used to it. You’d have to,’ Hildreth said as we sailed over another stretch of canal.

  The driver had been silent all this time. Now, he waved his hand towards the right. ‘Anne Frankhuis,’ he said, before turning left and turning right again. I caught sight of the street name: Elandsgracht, but it carried no resonance except as the possible habitat of a species of African deer. ‘Hoofbureau van Politie, Police Headquarters,’ the driver said and drew up with a flourish.

  ‘Captain Pete,’ the big man behind the desk in shirtsleeves, stood up and put out his hand, dwarfing Hildreth by several centimetres.

  ‘This is Alex Kish, Harry. He’s helping me with the background for all this.’

  My hand was gripped and wrung. ‘Pleased to meet you. Have a chair. I got your email, Pete. What can I tell you?’

  ‘We’ve had this series of bodies turning up, young boys, pre or early teens. Forensics say some of them died of suffocation but not in the usual way, manually if you get my meaning, strangulation or a pillow or plastic bag over the face. There are some signs of bruising to the ribs as if the chest was being constricted. And they’re all foreign. I got to thinking of all those dead migrants, illegals, under the base board in the back of a lorry. I remembered we’d once talked about that sort of thing and I wondered if you’d any more experience, any advice you could offer. It’s not something that’s come my way before.’

  ‘People-smuggling, of course. Amsterdam is a good jumping-off place for the US and the UK. We try to intercept them coming through but this is a port where trucks come from all over the world and there are so many ways to hide such illegal cargo. You sent me some pictures. I ran them against our missing young persons database. I think I have a match for one of them. Come. Look out here.’

  We got up and went to stand on either side of him where we could see over his shoulders at his computer screen.’

  ‘This is the one. He was found by the docks wandering. He was probably trying to get on a ship. He spoke no Dutch of course but no English either. It was easy to see he was under the age so he was taken into care. He disappeared from the children’s hostel after two weeks. Either he ran away or he was, what do you say, kidnapped?’

  I found myself staring at the boy whose slightly smiling face I had last seen looking down through the glass egg on the beach at Canvey. ‘Do you have a lot of cases like this?’ I felt it was time to justify my presence, even with something that sounded like the detective equivalent of ‘Do you come here often?’

  ‘Mostly it is girl children from the sex trade. They are promised education or jobs as children’s nurses. What do you call them?’

  ‘Nannies,’ I said automatically.

  ‘And the boys? What happens to them?’

  ‘They pay to come here mostly or their parents pay for a new life. The boys work and save to pay the smugglers. When they get here they are put on the dump, on the streets alone. Sometimes a gay man will find them and taken them in, this is Amsterdam, the gay capital of the world. Or we find them. In Holland we have strict age restrictions. Under sixteen is a child still. We take them into care to deport, like the girl children, and like them they run away.’

  ‘The poor little sod didn’t get far.’ The anger and compassion in Hildreth’s voice surprised me.

  ‘You think perhaps he died en route to the UK?�
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  ‘It’s a possibility.’

  ‘And then what happened? How did you find him?’

  ‘He, his body was made part of an artwork, an installation. It was enclosed in a glass egg.’ I answered for Hildreth.

  ‘An egg? Like the German artist who uses body parts, dried foetuses as earrings. I forget his name.’

  ‘The difference,’ Hildreth said, ‘is that pictures of those death scenes are finding their way onto the internet. A kind of S&M soft porn.’

  ‘This we have too but not with dead boys. We have the usual whips and chains. That is not illegal as long as the woman is the age. We also of course find the child pornography. It comes most from Russian or US sites.’

  ‘Yes, we know about that. This is something different. This mixes in religion and art. Death and decadence.’

  ‘But if the boys are already dead? Is it even a crime? How would we prosecute it? Might it not be seen as censorship? Here in the Netherlands it might not be possible.’

  ‘We should be able to get them on something.’

  ‘Even in England? Obscenity? Now if you could find the peoples-mugglers and stop them. But it is very difficult. They have many other outlets we believe like drugs, money laundering, as well as the worldwide sex trade both virtual and physical. I wish you luck. If we can help let me know. In any case keep in touch. We too would like to stop this traffic.’

  ‘You may have wondered why I got a bit worked up there,’ Hildreth said when we were outside on the pavement. ‘Let’s find a bar. I could do with a drink. There must be an O’Reilly’s Irish house somewhere.’

  We wandered up the road the way the taxi had come.