As she traversed the slippery backstreets behind county hall, making her way down to York Road, she saw the homeless making their beds for the night in doorways. Begging for spare change. Selling the Big Issue. Many were drinking super-strong lager and cosying up to their dogs. The lucky ones had cocooned themseves inside cardboard boxes. Poor bastards.
The smell of urine was strong, even in this cold. She shied away from them. When one of the forlorn figures lurched at her from who the hell knew where, she balked.
‘I’m skint, mate!’ she cried, clutching her bag close.
But the face was familiar.
‘You!’ George said, scrutinising the woman’s pinched features, barely concealed by the hood of an old, soiled parka.
The woman’s blue eyes were sharp, focused on her goal. ‘If you want the laptop back, I need a thousand in cash.’
George grabbed her arm, pulling her close so that she could smell the woman’s stale breath. No alcohol on it. She smelled thirsty and of sore throat. ‘You been stalking me? Have you been to my fucking place in Cambridge. Was it you?’
‘No,’ the woman said. ‘But I know where your laptop is. You can have that and the stick back. Intact. For a thousand in cash. I’ll come to your aunts. Call the police, and I’ll make sure it’s destroyed.’
‘But … I haven’t got—’
The woman dug her fingernails into George’s hand, so that she was forced to let go of her. Nostrils flaring, she had the desperate, haunted look of someone who was standing right at the edge of life and sanity.
‘A thousand by the end of the week, or you can wave goodbye to your research.’
CHAPTER 15
Amsterdam, police headquarters, 5 March
‘What do you think?’ Van den Bergen asked the forensic pathologist. He gesticulated with his unshaven chin towards a pile of paper, the top sheet of which stated this was the property of the Landeskriminalamt Berlin – specifically, the Kriminaltechnisches Institut.
‘Berlin forensics reports on two men found dead a couple of weeks ago,’ he explained. ‘Marie came across the cases during an Internet trawl. From what my German colleague tells me, there are too many similarities for them not to be connected to our Bijlmer guy and this Jack Frost murder in London that George flagged up. The German press is calling the murderer ‘Krampus’ – a kind of Alpine folklore horned monster who punishes badly behaved children around Christmas time. What are the odds, eh?’
‘Let me see.’ Marianne de Koninck hooked her hair behind her ear. She slid a pair of frameless reading glasses on and started to examine the reports that had been sent over from Berlin. ‘You’ll have to bear with me. My German’s not all that.’
‘If you think there’s something in them, we’ll get them translated into Dutch,’ he said.
The chunkiness of her cable-knit black jumper made her hands look more delicate and feminine than usual: elegant fingers, removing the contents from an A4 manila envelope. Images of the dead men, laid on the table side by side, one by one, until there was a long row of photographic evidence that said someone had snuffed out these two lives with unfettered rage. One man fat. One man thin. A deathly balaclava of coagulated blood encased the ruined head of the larger of the two, a mess of spoiled flesh where his penis had been.
‘The thin man’s got the same puncture marks as our Bijlmer victim,’ Van den Bergen said, studying the pathologist’s face in profile. Pointed chin. Sharp nose. No-nonsense features on a no-nonsense woman. ‘And so does the murdered entrepreneur in London.’
‘Hm.’ Marianne steepled her fingers together and pursed her lips. Her gaze shifted back and forth in a contemplative relay race from the start of the row of photographs to the finish.
She was ageing well, Van den Bergen mused. Bright-eyed. Clear-skinned. Obviously slept at night. Clearly untroubled by the fact that she was responsible for introducing him to the Butcher, who had almost sliced and diced him into the next life.
‘You okay?’ she asked, peering over the top of her glasses. ‘You seem a little tense.’
‘Fine,’ he said, turning away from her. Fingering the ever-deepening grooves either side of his own mouth, which bore testament to the fact that he was now not ageing so well. He crossed his legs uncomfortably beneath the low desktop, the uncharacteristic beginnings of a paunch in the way; it has begun to appear when he had stopped gardening quite so regularly.
Presently, Marianne cleared her throat. She nodded slowly, as if processing the facts weighed heavily on her sinuous runner’s neck. ‘I see what you mean. The murders certainly share similarities. Same waterlogged conical wounds in the thin man. Presumably inflicted by an icicle used as a shiv. Snow in the air passages of both victims, though they differ in that the fat man has been bludgeoned to death and his penis has been severed … and not by a sharp blade, by all accounts.’
Van den Bergen breathed in sharply and grimaced. Felt a sympathetic twinge in his groin and thought briefly about getting his testicles looked over and his prostrate checked during his next check-up at the doctor’s.
‘Anyway.’ Marianne stacked the reports in a neat pile. ‘Let’s get a translation of these pronto, just to make sure I’ve got the right end of the stick. Maybe I need to see the bodies, if they haven’t been claimed.’
‘They haven’t,’ Van den Bergen said. ‘My guy in Berlin says neither the police nor their forensics service has had a breakthrough in ID’ing them yet.’
‘Well, I think a little jaunt to Berlin is on the cards for us,’ Marianne said, unexpectedly reaching forwards and rubbing Van den Bergen’s forearm. Smiling.
He snatched his arm away and touched the skin there, gingerly, as though he had been burned. Flustered. Felt unwanted heat creeping into his cheeks. Hadn’t he and Marianne been down this road two years before, when she had broken up with that dick, Jasper? Before George. Before the Butcher. Hadn’t they mutually decided there was no chemistry there, though neither had needed to say a single word? Sharing an embrace in her kitchen that had, on paper, supposed to be electrifying but which had been devoid of any spark whatsoever.
He pushed his glasses up his nose. ‘If we’re looking for a killer who’s operating in at least three countries and we’ve only got two of the victims ID’d, we’ll need to look at the modus operandi and try to come up with some kind of a profile. Could be a serial killer, though I think I’ve had enough of those to last me a lifetime.’ How desperately he wanted to fix her with an accusatory stare. The resentment effervesced inside him. But it wasn’t her fault. Stop being a bastard, Van den Bergen. She didn’t have a crystal ball, for god’s sake. She’s got past the whole unpleasant episode, and so should you. She’s grinning at you! ‘Could be a hit man, if there’s drugs involved. Christ only knows what we’re dealing with. I’m going to get George involved.’
He had hoped the mention of George’s name would dim Marianne’s hopeful smile. It hadn’t.
‘She’ll need to come to Berlin too, of course,’ he said.
Then, the smile faded from Marianne’s face.
‘What do you mean, how do I fancy a trip to Berlin?’ George shouted down the phone. Sitting on the toilet at Aunty Sharon’s, hoping to snatch five minutes of privacy in a packed house. Patrice and Tinesha were downstairs, fighting over the TV remote control whilst their respective girl- and boyfriends sat primly at the kitchen table, making conversation with Aunty Sharon as she prepared a chocolate-orange soufflé. The recently appeared and self-installed Letitia was lying on the couch, awaiting the working class woman’s last rights of barbecue Pringles, a double rum ’n’ Ting and Jeremy Kyle. ‘Fucking hell, Paul. Haven’t you worked it out yet? I’m ignoring you! You’re in the dog house, man!’
The line went silent. ‘Dog house?’
She tried to explain the turn of phrase that had been lost in translation. She spoke quickly in Dutch, laying it on the line that he couldn’t toy with her feelings like this, two years in.
‘You know it’s nothi
ng to do with how I feel about you,’ he said. ‘I just think you deserve better. I’m old, for god’s sake! I’m broken, George. I can’t offer you anything. Not on a personal level. It’s not fair on you if we …’ He sighed heavily, filling the phoneline with melancholy.
Scratching at a patch of mildewed grout that she had missed during her big clean with the end of Patrice’s blue toothbrush, she visualised Van den Bergen lying in the intensive care unit of the Amsterdam hospital. She saw herself weeping over what she had presumed was his dying body, machines no longer beeping. Disconnected. Then being told by the consultant who had eavesdropped on her mournful prayers to an indifferent god that his oxygen had been switched off because he had no longer needed it. He had finally come out of the coma that morning and was just sleeping. The peritonitis had been defeated. The Butcher’s best efforts at killing him had failed.
‘Listen, you miserable, self-indulgent man,’ she said, barely able to conceal the irritation in her voice, ‘I’m sick of this.’ She wiped her cousin’s toothbrush on her dressing gown, poised to return it to the beaker, then noticed the beaker had a layer of toothpaste spatter in the bottom and started to wash it out with one hand. She clutched the phone in the other hand as though it were her lover’s cheek. ‘I love you. You love me. We’re right for each other. We always have been. I nearly lost you once, and I’m not losing you again. So, stop dicking me around. You can’t switch me on and off like a tap. It’s not like I’m not asking you for marriage and babies.’
‘Good, because you’re not getting them.’
She wanted to flush her phone down the toilet with exasperation at that moment. ‘Fuck you, Paul! You know I’m not interested in all that!’
‘Maybe might not be right now, but once your clock starts ticking—’
‘Don’t you dare!’ She flung the beaker and five toothbrushes into the sink in anger. She noticed that the bristles of her own toothbrush had touched those of her mother’s and immediately washed it under scalding water from the hot tap. ‘Don’t you patronise me. Telling me what to do with my ovaries! And much as you’d like to be consigned to the trash heap, you bloody masochist, there’s nothing wrong with your spunk, old man. If I wanted a child – which I don’t – you’re perfectly capable of giving me one. All you need is a change of scenery, a more patient therapist and a hot fortnight between my thighs.’
On the other end of the line, she could hear her lover growling with dissatisfaction. Stubborn old bastard missed her, she was sure. She tried to keep the smile out of her voice. ‘Don’t play games with me. They’re a waste of my time. We’re on. Right? That’s it. George and Paul. I don’t own you. You don’t own me. But we fuck like Olympic champions and we fit. I can’t have you acting like we’re some failed formula you’d like to expunge from a bloody whiteboard. Now, what the hell do you want?’
He explained the probable link between the four murders in three countries. Her interest was piqued, but her mind was still on the missing research and her stalking rough-sleeper.
‘Look,’ she said, staring blankly at opaque glass in the bathroom window, a swirling pattern that didn’t quite disguise the falling snowflakes outside or the ten-inch icy stalactites that hung from the eaves of her aunt’s house. ‘I’ve got a heap of shit going on here.’ She considered telling him about the break-in and the blackmail, but thought better of it. And telling him about her new research partner’s advances would not serve any purpose either. ‘A looming deadline for my prison project, massive computer issues that need sorting urgently, and my idiot mother turning up here, insisting she’s dying.’
‘Don’t you want to see me?’ Van den Bergen sounded wounded. Hot and cold, like an unpredictable jet stream ushering in ice one minute, melt the next. ‘The department will pay. Obviously.’
‘You don’t have to pay for my time, Paul. I’m not a bloody prostitute.’ He’s offering you money, you daft bitch! What is the thing you’re desperately in need of? She thought about the burden of paying rent on her room in Cambridge and having to give Aunty Sharon money for her keep. Her stipend from the university was peanuts. Hell, the funding she received from the Peterhulme Trust for her prison research barely made a dent in her travel costs! And now, didn’t she need a cool thousand?
‘I know. I didn’t mean it like that,’ Van den Bergen said. Contrite on the other end.
Though she wanted desperately to see him – she imagined lying in a warm bed in his arms, listening to the rich rumble of his voice – he had been so intolerable of late that she was tempted to rebuff all of his recent conciliatory approaches. But she was pragmatic, if nothing else.
‘I need two grand. Upfront. Paid into my bank a.s.a.p. I’ve got commitments.’
‘I can’t authorise that. You’ll have to invoice accounts.’
The red mist descended then. ‘Find another fucking criminologist to torture. And get yourself a new lover, while you’re at it.’
CHAPTER 16
South East London and Amsterdam, 6 March
‘Hello, love. All right? Bet you’re knackered after all that travelling,’ Aunty Sharon said, as George hung her Puffa jacket up in the cramped hallway. The place smelled of something meaty. Stew, maybe. Her stomach growled. The only thing that had passed her lips since breakfast was a bag of Quavers.
‘Last interview with the ladies at Her Majesty’s leisure,’ George said. ‘Same tragic shit. Different day. I’ll be glad to sign off on this bit of work.’ She tugged her boots off. ‘Still, got to make my name somehow.’
‘Bring us a cuppa, will you?’ Letitia shouted from the living room. ‘I’m dying of thirst here.’
In the dim light of the hallway, Aunty Sharon rolled her eyes. ‘Coming!’
George sucked her teeth. ‘When are you going to tell her to clear off back to Ashford?’ she whispered. ‘Don’t be keeping her here on my account!’
‘I ain’t. She won’t fucking go.’ Aunty Sharon peered mournfully down at her broken nails, which were less than pristine, having to clear up after five people in a tiny house that was supposed to hold maybe three, at most. ‘What am I supposed to do? She might be the sort to put her own sister on the street in this shitty weather, but I’m a soft touch, innit? And she knows it. Always has.’
Looking worn down in old jeans that were going at the knees and a fluffy red jumper that made her look even heavier, Aunty Sharon made a move in the direction of the kitchen. George held her back.
‘There’s nothing wrong with her, you know. She doesn’t need to be here. This is just because of Leroy.’
‘It ain’t just Leroy dumping her, though, is it?’ Aunty Sharon bit her bottom lip. She fingered the locket that contained little Dwayne’s photo. She still hadn’t taken it off. ‘She knows you’ve been in touch with your dad on the email.’
Reaching forwards to pull the living room door shut, George plunged the two of them into near-darkness. ‘You what? How the hell did she find out about that?’
Even in the murk, she could see that her aunt’s eyes were fixed worryingly, steadfastly, revealingly on her fur-lined market slippers.
‘You told her!’ George gasped. ‘I said that to you in confidence, Aunty Shaz. Aw, man!’ A loud tut. A shake of the head. ‘All this pulmonary hypertension rubbish and, ‘I’m dying’ act. It’s attention-seeking! You played right into her hands.’
‘What could I do?’ Sharon asked, squeezing her niece’s hand. ‘I was so cut up about, you know … the anniversary of little D. Then, I’m watching telly with her.’ She gesticulated with her thumb towards the living room. ‘There’s something on Lorraine about people who lose kids to meningitis. Spotting the signs and that, before it’s too late. One of the mums had a lost a disabled kid.’ She clasped George’s hand. Sweaty fingers said she was reliving her grief anew. ‘It was like they’d done a programme about me. It broke my heart, George. Then we got talking about the bond between a parent and a child.’
‘Like she’d fucking know!’ George scoffed
.
‘How it never breaks, even when you ain’t seen them in years. It slipped out. About your dad. Sorry, love. I ain’t been myself lately.’
‘Forget it,’ George said, resentful that Letitia the Dragon was still encroaching on their limited space. ‘She’s a using cow. I’m gonna sort this. We’ll get her off our backs.’
Over a dinner of lamb stew, Letitia winced at every opportunity.
‘Get us a cushion, love,’ she told Tinesha. ‘I’m in agony here.’ She rubbed her heaving bosom with a perfectly manicured hand. Red talons today. Hot-pink satin pyjamas beneath her dressing gown said she, at least, wasn’t feeling the cold. ‘It’s my pulmonaries. When I married that fucking Leroy, I never thought it was possible to actually break a person’s heart. Do you know what I’m saying?’
She followed Tinesha with bloodhound eyes as she returned with the pillows from the sofa.
‘Don’t be running after her, Tin,’ George said, snatching the pillows from her cousin and ramming them behind her mother’s back. ‘Leroy didn’t break your fucking heart! He made a lucky escape and not a moment too soon.’
But Letitia wasn’t listening. She was shovelling stew into her mouth at almost breakneck velocity, pulling G’s, a fighter pilot with a fork, executing nifty potato-based manoeuvres. She stared at the portable TV that flickered in silence on the kitchen counter.
‘Leave it, George,’ Aunty Sharon said, standing by the sink, eating her own dinner from a bowl. Eyeing her son, her daughter, her niece, her sister, who had left no room for her at her own table, George realised.
‘Sit down, Aunty Shaz.’
Standing by the flickering television, George watched the seconds hand marking time on the kitchen clock. Tick, tock. Seven o’clock. End of the week, her homeless stalker had said. Their impending confrontation was drawing close. Tonight, by George’s reckoning. And she needed cash upfront. That sinking feeling that she would fail to get her laptop back dragged on her like heavy antimatter. Her felt her career disintegrating in a cloud of radioactive decay, over before it had even begun. And why had this raggedy bitch targeted her as a walking ATM, after all she had done for her? Breaking into her room in Cambridge to steal her livelihood, perhaps because she thought George was a soft touch? Were there not eight million people in London alone that she could have stolen from?
The Girl Who Walked in the Shadows Page 9