As if the boss sensed his reticence, Van den Bergen turned around and beckoned him forwards. He tutted like a castigatory Jedi, glaring down at Elvis, his disappointing Padawan. ‘Two children. Missing for months. He’s in the frame, somehow.’ He prodded himself in the stomach with those long fingers and winced. ‘I feel it, here. Am I ever wrong?’
‘No. Well…’ Elvis thought of how Van den Bergen had misjudged the Butcher, but decided not to say anything more about it. ‘No.’
‘Are you bothered about being spotted and sacked by that ass-kissing, two-faced, abusive donkey’s rectum?’
‘Nope.’ The boss was right. He was sick of playing the beta male. He was a grown man, for Christ’s sake. A catcher of criminals. A righter of wrongs. A possessor of bollocks. He forced himself to remember the time when he had been full of swagger, before his mother’s Parkinson’s. That Elvis was still there, wrapped inside an extra stone of fat and an ageing leather jacket.
They approached the windows of the motel and caught sight of Kamphuis, walking from the too-brightly-lit foyer into a dismal-looking bar area. A woman rose to greet him. Small, like a doll. Redhead. Kamphuis always went for redheads. Overly groomed with that big bouffant hair that middle-aged women had. A tanned complexion on a frosty winter night said spray tan, and the red was probably fake. Not like Kamphuis’ burly wife, who had attended a Christmas party looking like the changing cubicle in which she may or may not have tried her new dress on. Plenty to hug.
‘He’s got a bit on the side,’ Elvis said. ‘No surprises there. The guy shags anything that moves. He had a pop at Marie, for God’s sake!’ He turned to rummage in his jacket pocket for his cigarettes, desperate to have a smoke and get the hell out of there. ‘Maybe she’s a prostitute!’
But at his side Van den Bergen was silent, eyes narrowed, staring intently at the couple as they air-kissed with the promise of more. Kamphuis’ hand on the woman’s pert bottom, clad in a figure-hugging bandeau dress. She turned towards the window. Her blank expression said she was clearly unable to see her audience. Lights inside, brighter than outside.
‘Aha,’ Van den Bergen said.
‘What is it?’ Elvis asked, a thrill tapping along his spine.
Van den Bergen took out his mobile phone and deftly photographed Kamphuis with the woman.
‘You gonna blackmail him, boss?’
‘Don’t be fucking stupid, Elvis.’ He turned to his protégé, wearing a broad grin. Impossible in those light conditions to tell if it was jubilant or malevolent. ‘I know her. I know that woman!’
Elvis reappraised the Commissioner’s squeeze. No memories triggered. He shrugged.
‘This onion has many layers,’ Van den Bergen said, snapping again with his phone’s camera.
‘Who is she, then?’
‘Jaap Hasselblad’s ex-mistress.’
CHAPTER 53
Amsterdam, Van den Bergen’s apartment, 24 March
The bed was empty. The room was dark and silent. Where was he? George looked at the clock and saw it wasn’t yet 7 a.m. She wrapped the duvet tightly around her, extreme fatigue making her bones feel leaden and her brain feel like an overwrought computer processor. Sliding her head onto Van den Bergen’s pillow, she drank in the scent of his skin; a lingering whiff of sport deodorant, but the essence of him beneath it. Two short, white hairs on the aubergine pillowcase. She wished he was still there to kiss away the heavy feeling before breakfast. She placed one of his tiny hairs on her tongue and swallowed it deliberately, feeling instantly foolish for a romantic gesture that was almost certainly odd by most people’s standards. Fuck most people. She and Paul weren’t most people. She smiled and stretched out.
She remembered all at once that Letitia was in the living room on the sofa. Realised why she felt so dog-tired. There was nothing to smile about. She, her mother, her aunt and her two cousins had crowded into Van den Bergen’s apartment, taking advantage of its owner being out on surveillance. Until three in the morning, there had been high drama and hyperventilation surrounding Letitia’s health woes. Too many cups of coffee, followed by a bottle of rum, which Sharon had sent Tinesha to the local minimart to buy.
Tears had dripped steadily onto Letitia’s bosom, making her skin glisten. Puffy-eyed, she had held court on the sofa. Loving every minute of it. Talking about funeral arrangements, acceptable levels of bling when selecting a coffin and, once the tears had dried, how she was going to apply for disability benefits as soon as she got back to the UK. A broad smile then.
‘Can’t wait to get back to bingo,’ she had said. Turning to George, her smile had faded. The soft face of the emotionally exposed had hardened. ‘And you can give me back those fucking winnings what you nicked out of my handbag, you cheeky cow.’
George had been torn. Any kindness the woman had shown her in early childhood had been negated by more than a decade of neglect and toxicity. And yet, here Letitia was. Crying on the sofa. Contemplating the news that she had maybe five years to live.
You’re a heartless bastard, George. Hug her for Christ’s sake. She’s looking to you for solace. Why can’t you just grant her that? It’s so easy and costs so little. But even a stiff embrace would have felt like daylight robbery to a daughter who had been left to rot at Her Majesty’s leisure by Letitia the Dragon.
Pulling on her dressing gown, George padded into the living room. The sofa was now empty.
She spotted the guest duvet in disarray, an indent in the pillow, and reasoned her mother must have gone to the toilet.
In the kitchen, George flicked on the kettle. Cleared out the cafetiere. A hard crust of coffee grouts left by Paul, whom she imagined tiptoeing past his unwelcome, sleeping houseguest before heading out to work. As the coffee brewed, she turned on her laptop, still sitting on the kitchen table after the previous night’s family research session into all things sickle cell anaemia and pulmonary hypertension.
There in her inbox was another email from her father.
From: Michael Carlos Izquierdo Moreno ([email protected])
Sent: 23 March 23.58
To: [email protected]
Subject: Meeting up
Hi George,
Thanks for the photo of you with your family. Letitia hasn’t changed one bit. She still looks glamorous as ever. Your cousins have grown. They’ve all got a distinct Williams-May look about them, like your mum and Aunty Sharon. You could pick them out in a crowd any day of the week. Yours, of course, is the standout face. I’d recognize you anywhere. You’ve grown into such a beautiful woman.
I think it might be quite nice, after all this chat, to meet up. I don’t know your movements at the moment, but your web page tells me you move between London, Cambridge and Amsterdam. As it happens, I’m in Amsterdam on business next week. If you’re in town, meet me for lunch at Vinkeles, 1 p.m. on 4th April. My treat. Email me if you can’t make it. Otherwise, I’ll see you there!
Love Dad
George stared at the email. Blinking repeatedly at her father’s words. Meet me for lunch. The man she hadn’t seen since she was a small child wanted to take her to a fine restaurant, as if an afternoon of expensive food and drink could make up for two decades of absence, silence and, by implication, utter disinterest. It felt like a betrayal both to herself and to her memory of the caring Letitia from George’s childhood even to consider re-forging contact with this semi-stranger.
George closed her Hotmail tab. She was annoyed. She was excited. Her father could wait.
The kitchen yielded nothing for breakfast apart from a stale crust of bread and a packet of biscuits, which George duly opened. Van den Bergen was no better than her when it came to food provision. But Letitia would be moaning if she found out the cupboard was genuinely bare. ‘Where is the silly cow?’ The apartment was silent.
Pouring herself a black coffee and wedging a ginger biscuit into her mouth, she shuffled back into the living room. Checked the time. Twenty minutes since she had got u
p.
‘Maybe she’s gone out for bread,’ she told Paul’s portrait of Tamara, hanging above his stereo. She rummaged through his execrable CD and vinyl collection, finally finding an old Massive Attack 12”. Unfinished Sympathy. Unstarted sympathy where her mother was concerned. But where the fuck was she?
George stood in front of the sofa, pulling on one of her corkscrew curls until it was straight. Sucking on the tract of hair, deep in thought, she tried to spot what was wrong about this set-up. Duvet. Pillow. A plate half-pushed under the sofa containing half-eaten toast from 2 a.m. Phone gone. Handbag gone.
‘Letitia!’ George shouted.
She checked the toilet. Nada. She checked the spare bedroom in which she had refused to sleep. Empty. Her coat was still hanging on the peg by the front door. Not good, given it was snowing outside. Not the sort of fat flakes that settle, but the wet stuff that comes hard and fast. George rang her mother’s phone, chagrined to find it kicked straight into voicemail. Letitia trying to sound like a sassy DJ on some sweet soul South East London pirate radio station. Bullshit FM. Carleen Anderson, singing in the background that you better listen to your Mama. Leave a message, yeah? And you know I’ll hit you back later.
‘It’s me. Where the fuck are you?’ George hung up. Accelerated heartbeat signified her body speaking for her mind. She dialled again, just in case. A third time, because three was a proper number. Still going to voicemail. Shit.
Aunty Sharon might know. George pulled up the number of her aunt. Ringing. Ringing. Answer the bloody phone.
Finally, she was greeted by a slow, lazy voice that sounded thick with sleep and befuddlement: ‘Wotcha, darling. What time is it?’
In the background, the sound of snoring reverberated around her old Cracked Pot Coffee Shop room. Almost certainly Tinesha at her side, sharing the double bed. She sounded like a rumbling volcano at the best of times.
‘You seen Letitia, Aunty Shaz?’
The smacking of lips. Shifting of position in the squeaking old bed. ‘Nah. Why?’
George hung up. A waste of time. She silently prayed her mother would put the spare key in the lock and walk through the front door with a loaf under her arm. But George was still alone with her disquiet.
She called Van den Bergen, aware of a tense, dull ache that had her viscera in an iron grip.
‘Van den Bergen. Speak.’
‘It’s me.’
‘Oh, yes. Sorry. We’re just trying to get into the bank accounts of—’
‘We’ve got a problem. I think Letitia’s gone walk about.’
CHAPTER 54
Amsterdam, police headquarters, then, Carlien Dekker’s house, later still
There were two photos on his desk. One of him with George, standing outside the Houses of Parliament in London, taken by a tourist. A summer’s day, with azure blue skies above the gothic rooftops. She, a good foot shorter. He, actually smiling for once, though he could remember being in agony at the time – his vertical scar itching in the heat. But there was his arm, protectively draped around her, looking more like her father than her lover.
He grimaced at the thought, attention turning to the photo of Tamara, when she had been four. On a swing in the back garden of his and Andrea’s old family home. Kiddy-toothed smile and childish delight in her eyes. Chubby little hands gripping the ropes either side. First, he felt a pang of nostalgia and wistful hope that he could relive that time through his grandchild. Then, a ball of stomach acid propelled itself into Van den Bergen’s gullet, incinerating the rosy optimism to ashen grey realism. Tamara, playing in the garden, aged four – just like Josh Deenen. Tiny little blonde girl – just like Lucy Deenen.
He picked up the phone. Dialled Marie’s extension. ‘Any joy?’
‘Morning, boss. No. I’ve been wracking my brains overnight, trying to think of a way round it that won’t get us into a pile of steaming shit. I’m going to have to call in a favour from a … friend.’ She hesitated. Van den Bergen knew the silence was loaded. ‘We’re in seriously dodgy territory here.’
Swallowing hard, Van den Bergen considered ‘I know. I’m sorry. You don’t have to do it. Any of this. I know I’m putting you in an awkward—’
‘I want to,’ Marie said. Her voice sounded strangled. Fierce, even.
Tenderly, he ran his finger over the two dimensional souvenir of his daughter’s toddlerhood. He thought about the couple, locked in his cabin, subsisting on the sandwiches, soup and flasks of coffee that he brought them. Shitting in a bucket, while he tried to track down their children. An unsustainable situation. Time running out for everyone.
‘Me and Elvis are going to drive over to the Kennemer golf club in Zandvoort that Hasselblad and Bloom belong to,’ he said. ‘See if anything turns up. Somehow, Hasselblad and Kamphuis are both involved in this bullshit. But I’d like you to keep hammering away at the finances and do a bit of digging into Kamphuis’ mistress.’
‘Ooh. Mistress?’ A sharp intake of breath said Marie was not immune to the sensationalist appeal of office gossip. ‘You mean he’s stopped shagging trainees?’
‘If Kamphuis spends time with her, maybe she knows something. I can’t keep the Deenens tucked away indefinitely. It’s inhumane.’
‘Who is this woman, then?’
‘Carlien Dekker.’
‘Carlien. Rings a bell. Hang on. Wasn’t she the auditor who totally pissed accounts off a couple of years ago? She pissed me off too, actually. I’ve never had such earache over three-year-old expense receipts. Is it that cow? Perky tits and a crepey chest from too much sunbedding?’
‘Yep.’ Van den Bergen was struck by a memory of Dekker, perched coquettishly on the corner of Hasselblad’s desk. Foxy in stilettos. Always heavily made-up. Less interested in spreadsheets than silk sheets. She was the ultimate anti-accountant.
‘Leave it with me,’ Marie said, hanging up.
‘I shouldn’t even be here,’ George said, moving to fling her bag onto the floor of Marie’s office. She considered Marie’s habit of dropping shards of crisps all over the carpet and set the bag on her lap instead. ‘My bloody mother’s gone AWOL.’
‘What do you mean?’ Marie glanced towards her absently.
A Google search on Marie’s computer screen clearly dominated her attention. The image of a hatchet-faced red-headed woman in a corporate power suit – pneumatic tits and a tiny waist – told George this was the accountant Van den Bergen had been telling her about.
‘Letitia’s buggered off. No coat. No breakfast.’ George started to hook paperclips together in a long chain, making a perfect oval shape with them on the desk. ‘I spent over an hour in a blind panic. Then I eventually get a text from her just as I’m about to completely lose my shit. She said she had to get out the flat and spend some time on her own.’
‘So?’ Marie said, clicking on a search result that yielded Carlien Dekker’s address. ‘Mystery solved, right? I’ve got a car booked out. Let’s go.’
‘Go?’ George asked, thinking about the benders her mother had disappeared on for days at a time when she had been only twelve, maybe thirteen. Having to get the neighbour to open tins of beans for her because the shitty old tin opener had been too stiff for her small hands.
‘Surveillance. You can keep me company. As long as you don’t start moaning about standards of cleanliness and the smell of the upholstery.’
Driving down past the airport, hail started to rattle on the bonnet of the Ford Focus. Accompanied by the soporific swish and whine of the windscreen wipers, George found her eyelids becoming heavy, her heart heavier still. She absently – fruitlessly – checked her phone for news, either of her wayward mother or the missing toddlers.
‘Do you think we’ll ever find these poor bloody kids?’ George asked, peering out of the window as the car scudded down the E19. Flat fields quickly turned from grey-green to white, covered with the pea-sized balls of ice that fell from the sky like little pieces of Armageddon.
Marie stared solemnly a
t the whiteout ahead. ‘No.’
‘No? Seriously?’
The detective shook her head in silence. George sensed she was agitated. She remembered Marie had lost a baby and probably no longer believed in miracles. George wondered fleetingly how her life would be once she became a step-grandmother of sorts to the child of a woman who was roughly her own age.
The car ploughed on down the straight road, hail turning to sleet. In parts, where the canals had become inundated by meltwater, bursting their banks, the ghostly white of the big sky was reflected in the standing water.
‘Hang on a minute,’ George said, peering round at the smattering of Dutch barn-style houses. A petrol station, there. A wind turbine, here. A roadside hypermarket. ‘Isn’t this the way to—’
‘The Deenens?’ Marie said. A half-smile flirting with the corner of her mouth. ‘Yes. Do you believe in coincidences?’
The lights in the dashboard glowed, as the sleet abated. Indicator strobing said they were bearing left.
‘The same fucking street? Oh, you are kidding!’ Flashbacks in George’s mind’s eye to the last time she had been here.
The place had been crawling with Marianne de Koninck’s forensics team, uniforms, paparazzi, newspaper reporters and TV journalists camped out along the street. Even at night, when she had visited the place with Van den Bergen, red tail lights like demonic eyes had snaked their way to the Deenen’s front door. The world’s press, pointing their enormous vehicle-mounted satellite dishes at the heavens, beaming the couple’s misery to every bleeding heart on the planet, and perhaps even to the abductor himself.
Today, the place was deserted. A tragedy long forgotten.
‘No. I couldn’t believe it when I saw Carlien Dekker’s address,’ Marie said. A grin manifested itself fully on her face now, as if declaring its supremacy over whatever claim sorrow usually staked on her features.
The Girl Who Walked in the Shadows Page 31