‘Did you intend to kill yourself?’ George asked, a rash unexpectedly starting to itch its way up her neck. She knew Donna wouldn’t catch sight of it so easily because darker skin hid a multitude. She disciplined herself not to scratch.
‘Yeah. Course I bleedin’ did.’
The prison officer, a heavy-set woman in her thirties, by the looks, laughed. ‘Come on, Donna. We all know you were doing a Michael Hutchence, weren’t you?’
‘What?’
Donna was almost certainly too young to have heard of him, George thought.
‘Feller from INXS. Offed himself by accident, doing an asphyxi-wank or something.’
Donna tugged at the collar of her standard-issue tracksuit – too tight over her low-hanging, braless breasts. ‘You taking the piss?’
‘Yes.’
Insane laughter from both of them then. A camaraderie that George was used to seeing, along with the gallows humour. When the mirth subsided, Donna confessed the real reason for her grand polyethylene gesture.
‘I had bedbugs, didn’t I? They were biting like bastards.’ She started to rub her forearms through the jersey material. ‘I asked for a new mattress but they wouldn’t bloody listen. So, I puts the bag on my head, cos if they think you’re going to top yourself in here, you stand a better chance of them actually listening to what you’re on about.’ She glowered at the prison officer, seated beside her. Switched the glare for a grin like a deft pickpocket. ‘I been in here two years, right? Got another six to go.’
George scratched at her scalp with the end of her pen. Got the cap entangled in one of her corkscrew curls. Unrelentingly itchy. Was it the nervous rash? Was this her body telling her brain that she was losing her shit? She couldn’t possibly be freaked out, though. Definitely not. Not after all this time. Not a pro, like her.
She shuffled her sheaf of paper straight, as if to demonstrate to herself that she had mastery over everything. In control of herself and her environment at all times. Now that she was qualified, she spent more time inside prisons than out. Except when she was in Amsterdam with Paul. Bastard. Oh, well. Not everything was within her control.
‘What did you do, Donna?’
‘I didn’t do it.’
‘No? Okay. But what were you convicted for?’
‘GBH. I got my son taken off me, didn’t I?’ Tears welled in Donna’s eyes, replacing the Valium film with something more organic. Sleeve pulled down over her fist, she wiped the burgeoning tears away. ‘They said, social services said, that I’d battered him. And I hadn’t. They said I was unfit, the fucking lying do-gooding bastards. Just because that old bitch next door grassed me for smoking weed and that. And the dead rabbits in the yard. Wasn’t my frigging fault. They shat everywhere. Then, I gets social services and the environmental health come knocking. And school gets involved, saying my Thom was truanting and had bruises and that.’
She pursed her lips. Hers was suddenly a mean face that looked as though its owner could inflict pain happily. George had grown up with the likes of Donna. Not so different from Tonya. A hard-faced calamity queen.
‘My Thomas was not fucking abused.’ Poked herself in the chest, hard, so that George could hear the drumming on her sternum. ‘I was fucking abused. I could tell them how I was bounced round Rochdale. Me an’ about ten other girls off the estate in the back of a van. Thirteen-year-old rent-a-slags for all the dirty bastards in the area. Two pimping wankers raking in it like we was stock in a cash and carry. Working for some warped bastard called the Hawk or some shit like that. Our mams didn’t give a fuck. They was too busy getting pissed down the pub.’
George nodded. Showed no emotion. Dr McKenzie was a criminologist. Professional detachment was the only way to endure these heart-breaking stories. But it was the same story over and over, told by different women. Abuse, leading to abuse. Young girls playing chicken through the fast lanes of traffick. They never made it to the other side intact.
‘So why the GBH?’
Donna snorted noisily. ‘Day our Thom was put in care. Went out, didn’t I? Got mashed up. Beat some slag to a pulp with a snooker cue. She’d been looking at my fella, so …’ She looked up at George. No longer morose but suddenly hopeful, as if a timid sun was trying to push its way through the storm clouds. ‘I’m going to get him back. Our Thomas. When I get out of here. He’s coming home to his mam.’ A gingivitis grin. Radiant with rotten teeth. Thin hair scraped too high on her head into a tight ponytail made her look like a ruined child.
George had to get out of there. She’d had enough for one day. Checked her watch. Brought the session to an end.
As she made her way through the facility to the entrance, where she would reclaim her phone and her composure, she noticed the latest issue of Do What? – the inmates’ magazine she had remembered reading when she had been on remand here. Scattered copies on the table needed organising.
The baffled prison officer paused, giving George a moment to tidy the magazines into a neat fan. Beneath the headline that spoke of Shep, the drugs-dog almost choking to death on a hibernating hedgehog, there was a piece that triggered recognition deep within George’s mind. A debate on whether an icicle could actually be used as a shiv and whether it was right that the prison staff should leave these freakish twelve-inchers hanging off the old prison eaves.
‘Okay, Dr McKenzie?’ The prison officer asked.
George nodded. Tucked her portfolio of notes under her arm and made her way back down to security. Scanned on the way in. Scanned on the way out.
Having failed to find a USB stick at Aunty Sharon’s, she had once tried to bring in a CD-ROM she had burned especially in order to show the inmates a simple guide to the study she was doing into women’s prisons for the government. Security had confiscated even that, saying a teenage inmate had broken up a CD brought in for her by her sister and committed suicide by swallowing the shards. Everything was a weapon in here. She now made damned sure she never ran out of USB sticks.
Got to get the hell out. This place is bringing me down and down.
Beyond the gates, breath steaming on the sub-zero air, she switched her phone on to check for messages. Hoping that cantankerous old fool, Van den Bergen had been in touch. It was weeks since their argument. Six weeks to be precise. Her refusal to speak to him had been deliberate. Even Aunty Sharon had said she’d done the right thing by dropping the shutters on him.
But the screen yielded nothing. Silence. No abrupt words, saying he was sorry and that she had been right. That he would make amends.
On the train she sat at a dirty, crumb-sullied table, clutching her anorak tightly around her. Broken heating meant the journey would be purgatorial. Shivering at the sight of the snow-covered fields and jagged, naked hedgerows that scudded by. A white world, empty of life except for disappointing humanity and the odd cannibalistic robin. Irritation mounting inside her. Oppressive, like the Siberian freeze that had an entire continent in its grip.
Twenty minutes felt like an hour. Her phone still yielded nothing of note. Only nagging emails from civil servants, asking if she would be handing her study in on time. Pointed correspondence from a fellow criminologist who had it in for her. Professor Dickwad Dobkin at UCL. Complaining that he knew about her additional research into trafficking. Saying that he had started something almost identical, eons ago. Long before her. Of course.
‘Get fucked, Dobkin,’ George said, as she searched for her train ticket.
‘Sorry?’ The ticket inspector asked, swaying side to side in the Pendolino carriage, as it pelted through the crystalline hills of Staffordshire.
‘Nothing,’ George said. ‘Talking to myself. Too much work. Not enough play.’
The ticket inspector, a sweaty-looking man, despite the unrelenting cold, gave her a disinterested half-smile.
It was true. Her deadline loomed large. Today’s encounter with Donna had been one of her final interviews. She would have to start typing it up tonight. Perhaps even do a little work on her
laptop now, on the train back to London.
Discipline yourself, George.
Except her phone pinged. Probably Aunty Sharon.
Fuck discipline.
Peered down at the screen.
Ah, finally.
But it was not the sort of message she was hoping for.
Come to Amsterdam a.s.a.p. Paul.
CHAPTER 3
Amsterdam, Bijlmer district, later
‘What do you want me to do, boss?’ Elvis asked, pulling his woollen hat down low over his ears, so that bushy red-brown sideburns were only just visible. His breath steamed on the air. Red nose and streaming eyes made him look peaky. But then, these days, Elvis always looked like he never slept. Experience could do that to a detective, even one as dopey and idiotically optimistic as Elvis.
With his protégé seemingly transfixed by the sight of his mobile phone, Chief Inspector Paul van den Bergen hastily slipped the device back into his pocket. ‘Get photos of everything,’ he said. Felt like he had been caught doing something forbidden, though texting George in a work capacity was hardly a misdemeanour. Since she had qualified, she worked for the Dutch police on a freelance basis often enough.
He turned to Marie, who looked as though she was wearing every garment her wardrobe held. Some ugly hand-knitted cardigan on top of a coat. Purple clashed with the red colour of her hair poking out beneath two hats, by the looks. Bet she smelled worse than usual beneath all those layers. But today, Marie had abandoned the warmth of the office and her Internet research in favour of dusting for prints. After the best part of a year spent working on missing persons cases, she had been desperate to get out. They all had.
‘You called forensics?’ he asked her.
‘Yep. Marianne said she’ll be about half an hour.’ Marie blushed. Crouched near the dead man’s head. Scowled at his blood-spattered face. ‘He looks familiar.’
‘They always look familiar round here.’
Gazing down at the cochineal Rorschach pattern that surrounded the dead man, Van den Bergen put his hand on his stomach. Though he could not feel the lumpy scar tissue beneath the thick wadding of his anorak, he pressed his long fingers there, tracing the line of the scarring from sternum to his abdomen. Like this dead man at his feet, he had lost almost his entire life’s blood. A good two years ago now. Time heals all scars, right? Bullshit, it did.
Elvis clicked away on a digital camera. Blue plastic overshoes over his snowboots. Behind him, the remaining high-rises of Bijlmer loomed. Once Amsterdam’s arsehole, a few colourful panels on the front of the renovated blocks and winter wonderland conditions made it only marginally more enticing than it had been in the dark days. Better than Van den Bergen remembered the area when he was a young cop. But still an armpit of a locale, crushed under the weight of second-rate infrastructure and drug-pushers that came out at night like cockroaches.
His phone rang. He was praying it would be George.
‘Van den Bergen. Speak.’
It wasn’t her. Fat bastard Olaf Kamphuis was on the line, barking at him for information, though why he was getting his big pants in a twist over a run-of-the-mill Bijlmer stabbing was beyond him. Power had clearly gone to his bulbous head, now he was Commissioner. Hands-on micromanagement also had extended to grabbing Van den Bergen by his balls tightly and squeezing.
‘I want you off the missing persons bullshit,’ Kamphuis had said, sitting in his new desk chair, cranked even higher than the last one, in an office, even roomier than the one he had amply occupied before. Sweat had blossomed darkest blue around his armpits through the ceremonial glad rags. ‘You’ve had long enough to recover,’ he had insisted, huffing, puffing, trying to blow Van den Bergen’s house of cards down. ‘Get back on active service or it’s early retirement for you, you lanky streak of piss.’
How the hell had it happened? Pushing forty-seven now, though he felt nearer to sixty. Two of the biggest cases the Netherlands Police had ever solved, down to him and his team. But trumped yet again by a nemesis in a high-stakes game he thought he had cleaned up in long ago. Commissioner, for fuck’s sake. Olaf Kamphuis was his boss. Again! There was no God. And with his unimpeachable ally, Gus Kosselaar retired and replaced as Chief of Police by that other infernal arse-carbuncle, Jaap Hasselblad, Van den Bergen’s life had become even more of a misery.
As Van den Bergen leaned over to scrutinise the dead man’s face, stomach acid shot up into his gullet. The flames of digestive purgatory the only source of warmth in that unrelenting cold. He straightened up with a click from his hip. Six feet five of broken man. How he longed for the comfort of his office and those stone cold missing persons files now.
He grimaced. Pointed to the gun by the dead man’s hand. The scabs around his mouth and nose. Leather jacket, too flimsy for the cold. Covered in stains. Jeans, yellowing at the knees. Greasy blond hair, plastered to his scalp, now encrusted with blood as was his left hand, where perhaps he’d grabbed at his neck. Bleeding out in arterial spurts across the base of the children’s slide. Then, on the ground in a foetal position. Leaking his last into the pretty red Rorschach. Butterfly. Humming birds. Flower.
‘Crystal meth head. Or mephedrone, is my guess,’ he told Elvis. ‘This is just a drugs killing over some two-bit stash or a botched deal. Our guy pulls a gun on some other junkie arsehole. A bit of a fight breaks out. He gets stabbed in the neck, judging by the looks of the wound and the blood loss. Perp runs away.’
Elvis nodded. Continued to take photos, as Marie dusted for prints on the semi-automatic pistol that lay inches away from the dead man’s blue-grey right hand.
Van den Bergen looked around at the spectators who had started to gather. Rubber-necking, though the scene had been cordoned off with fluttering police tape. Those residents who didn’t stop to watch and pass comment on the body – opinions voiced loudly, scathingly in a variety of languages; dramatic hand gestures and beseeching invocations to Allah - shuffled by in the national dress of their country of origin. Women in full burka. Men in salwaar kameez, wearing overcoats over the top. Indonesian. Ghanaian. Somali. Surinamese. All bundled up in this freakishly bitter northern European climate.
‘Did anyone see anything?’ Van den Bergen asked the crowd. It was a public enough place, for Christ’s sake. Right by a brown monolithic block on Sean MacBridestraat. In the kiddy-park, at that! At the foot of the snow-bound slide. Overlooked by hundreds of people, potentially. ‘Anyone?’
Blank faces. Chatter ebbing away, now.
‘Please come to me with any information you have. Anonymously.’ He started to hand out cards, but not a single resident would take one.
Hands tucked abruptly beneath folds of fabric. Into pockets. No eye contact. The crowd started to disperse, fast.
‘Marie! Help me take statements,’ he called out to his detective.
By the time Marie had finished lifting the solitary print from the gun, the onlookers had all gone, save for a boy of about eight. Drowned in a shabby Puffa jacket that was clearly an adult’s given that his sleeves swept the snow. No hat. Inquisitive brown eyes staring at the dead man.
Van den Bergen and Marie approached the child together, though it was Marie who crouched on the opposite side to the police tape, so that her eyes were level with his.
‘Did you see anything?’ Marie asked.
The Chief Inspector pulled the chain that held his glasses from the inside of his anorak. Slid them onto his tingling nose to observe the child’s reaction. Knew better than to engage the kid in conversation. Only his own daughter understood that he was child-friendly and Tamara was the wrong side of twenty-five now. Marie had the right touch.
The boy was silent. Staring. Staring at the corpse, surrounded by so much red.
‘What’s your name?’ Marie asked, taking the boy by the outsized sleeve.
‘Imran.’
‘You know him, don’t you, Imran? The dead man.’
For five or six almost frozen heartbeats, Imran looked into Marie’s wat
ery blue eyes. Opened and closed his mouth, as though he were about to speak. Van den Bergen stiffened, feeling truth and illumination trying to emerge from deep within the silent boy.
But then, Imran turned on his heel and sprinted into the anonymous vertical warren of the apartment block.
‘Shit!’ Van den Bergen said.
CHAPTER 4
South East London, 28 February
At 2am, the only sound in the small terraced council house was the clickety-click of George’s fingers as they tap-danced back and forth over her laptop’s keyboard. A consummate performance, outlining the suffering of women on the inside. Bedbugs. Beatings. Braless and behind bars. Family gone. Copy-sheet well and truly blotted for life. Hope in prescription capsules, containing chemical respite from anger and pain.
George paused typing to examine again her pay slip from the Peterhulme Trust. Sighed heavily at the disappointing sum on which tax would be due. Not enough, by far. Pocket change to fund a life split between London, Cambridge and Amsterdam. It was only the second full-length study she had completed for the civil servants of the Home Office in Westminster since becoming a professional criminologist. A career she had fought for. And yet, her working life was not panning out quite as well as she had hoped, even with the continuing support of the formidable Dr Sally Wright. None of it was panning out as George had hoped.
Reflected in the laptop’s shining screen, she observed with some distaste the tears rolling slowly down her cheeks. Wiped them away angrily. Pull yourself together, you wimp. Don’t let it all get to you. Don’t take shit personally. You mustn’t let Van den Bergen bring you down. Her hand shook with emotion. Perhaps she should allow herself a good cry. Just this once. Might be cathartic. If she smothered the nose with her sleeve, Patrice wouldn’t wake up.
Key in the lock. Front door opened. At this hour, it could only be one person. No time for tears.
The Girl Who Walked in the Shadows Page 2