The Girl Who Broke the Rules

by Marnie Riches

  She turned to the D. Hiccoughing through her words. ‘You need to line me up with an interview with your boss, right? My Derek – he was in some deep shit, man. And it’s got him killed. I ain’t scared of grassing no more. Not if you can guarantee me protection like yous did with my niece.’

  ‘What do you mean, Sharon?’ the detective said, taking out his notepad and pen.

  ‘I know some stuff you’re gonna want to hear.’

  CHAPTER 69

  Amsterdam, later

  ‘Do you think we’ll track her down?’ George asked Marie, peering up at the faceless office block on Weerdestein, uncomfortably eating messy falafel in the pool car.

  ‘Maybe,’ Marie said. ‘It’s nice to get out, though.’ She spoke whilst crunching crisps, spraying the dash with globs of white pulp. Oblivious to George wincing beside her. ‘After a morning of trawling through the crap on Strietman’s laptop, I was glad of a change of scenery.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ George marvelled at how Marie was utterly oblivious to her own spit-mess.

  ‘Kinky photos of men in body bags. Like, necrophilia porn.’ Marie laughed and blushed through to the roots of her red hair. ‘I mean, it makes sense, when you consider the job he does, but I’ve known Daan Strietman for years.’ She looked directly at George. A shard of crisp clinging to the down above her top lip. ‘I’d never have had him down as a pervert. Never. He’s a total dick, but not perv material.’

  ‘Shows how much you can ever know about a colleague,’ George said, thinking about van den Bergen’s unexpected sense of adventure and athleticism in the bedroom. Not here. Not now, George. Put that shit out of your mind. She peered up at the office block. ‘I’m a bit disappointed. I thought they’d know Magool personally.’

  ‘The Emancipation Servicepoint just deal with offering financial guidance to women,’ Marie said, rustling the crisp packet. ‘Older women, at that.’ Trying to get the dregs out. Pouring them in her mouth directly from the bag, so that crumbs fell onto her top, which she brushed all over her knees, the car and George.

  George dumped her half-eaten falafel dramatically onto the dashboard. ‘Can you watch what you’re doing, for Christ’s sake? I didn’t come out to get a shower in your chewed-up lunch.’

  Marie screwed up her crisp packet and threw it in the back of the car. Defiant. Unapologetic. ‘Oh, and you’re not stinking out the car with the smell of bloody garlic and onions?’

  Stalemate. George could see arguing was pointless.

  ‘Forget it,’ she said. ‘So, what have we pieced together? Magool went to the Emancipation Servicepoint place, asking for advice on how to make money and how to set up a bank account. Right? But you’ve got to be twenty-five at least to qualify for the organisation’s services, so they put her in touch with IFTIN.’

  ‘Yes. The Somali women’s thing on Mercatorplein,’ Marie said, reading her notes. ‘And all they could give us was an address of another asylum seeker who went looking for support around the same time as Magool. We’re going round in circles a bit. Could be a dead end.’

  ‘We won’t know until we try,’ George said, wiping her fingers with an anti-bacterial wipe and buckling up.

  ‘So, I come back to find Ahlers in hospital, Strietman and Buczkowski are both in the cells and the forensics from Linda Lepiks’ flat missing?’ van den Bergen shouted, his irritation fighting its way up and out through the numbing fuzz of codeine. ‘I go away for two days – not twenty-two, but two days, for God’s sake – with my phone switched on.’

  Elvis cleared his throat. ‘Actually, boss. I tried to get hold of you sooner, but your phone kept going to voicemail for most of the time you were there. I wondered if something bad had gone down. You know…? On a personal level.’

  Van den Bergen tried to disguise being wrong-footed by Elvis’ perspicacity by thumping his chest, as he did when he had crippling stomach acid. ‘Bloody English food. Plays havoc with—’

  ‘Strietman’s guilty as hell,’ Kees said. ‘Has Marie told you about the gay snuff on his hard drive?’

  ‘No, actually, Detective Leeuwenhoek. I’ve been too busy attending the post mortem of a child and meeting a paediatrician who is coming in to advise you all on paedophile rings, so I suggest you cultivate a little tact and good manners. And she comes from a world where they dress like real professionals. So, it might help if you actually took off that grubby old anorak.’

  Kees was sitting astride his chair. Cocky. Van den Bergen felt instinctively that in his absence, this borrowed detective had been engaging in some very successful arse-kissing with Hasselblad. Time to let a little air out of the puffed-up idiot.

  ‘Marianne de Koninck personally wants your head on a platter if it turns out you’re wrong,’ he told the gap-toothed, irritating shit. ‘Did you even check first to see if he has an alibi? Or have you lot just conspired behind my back to ridicule this department and my good name as rapidly and thoroughly as possible?’

  The reddening in Kees’ face was revealing. ‘Strietman says he has a cast iron alibi but won’t tell me what it is. I like to think I inherited my dad’s legendary Leeuwenhoek bullshit-detector, and I’d say he’s like a dirty stall in a dairy farm.’

  Elvis turned to Kees. ‘Kees, mate. They don’t have bulls on dairy farms,’ he said. ‘Cows are female. You know that, right?’

  ‘Stud farm, you remedial idiot,’ van den Bergen said. ‘Strietman won’t give his alibi up, eh?’

  An image of George, naked, luxuriating post-coitally in their hotel bed, popped unbidden into his mind. He batted it away. There were some alibis a man simply couldn’t confess to. He turned to Elvis.

  ‘What did you find at his apartment?’

  ‘Ah, well,’ Elvis said, tugging at a stray hair in his otherwise perfectly sculpted quiff. ‘That’s the most interesting part…’

  CHAPTER 70

  Amsterdam, Nieuw West area, then, police headquarters, later

  ‘What do you want?’ the girl asked, speaking through the letterbox.

  ‘We’re police. Come on! Open up,’ Marie said, flashing her ID through the gap.

  ‘No,’ said the girl. ‘I am alone. That is maybe counterfeit.’

  ‘It’s not fake.’

  George crouched so that she was level with the letterbox. Got a clear view of the girl. She was about seventeen, dark-skinned like Magool, wearing a yellow hijab trimmed with a floral pattern. Trepidation in her eyes. Though her Dutch was good, even if the woman at IFTIN had not already told George this girl was a Somali, her accent would have betrayed her as a recent immigrant. Plus, the Slotervaart Overtoomse Veld block of flats that the apartment was in, and the Nieuw West area in general, were the sort of grim places only recent arrivals in the country and the very poor would want to live in. 1960s concrete, medium to high rises. Grey, brightened here and there with almost arbitrary splashes of green that the council had seen fit to provide, when the area had been planned as overspill from the city. Panels of colour, where blocks had been given a facelift by some hip and trendy architect or other who didn’t have to live there. Hardly any different from the sort of area George had grown up in on the other side of the North Sea. Except this place was actually clean.

  ‘Please. We want to talk to you about Magool Osman,’ George said. Looking directly into the girl’s eyes. Trying to convey her sincerity.

  The flap to the letterbox clattered shut. Clicking, clacking as locks were undone. The door opened abruptly. ‘Magool?’ the girl asked. Alarm clearly visible in the way her hand and lips trembled. The girl looked furtively onto the landing. Beckoned them in.

  The interior of the apartment was sparsely furnished. A couple of threadbare Tree of Life rugs. A smoked glass coffee table and battered tan leatherette sofa that looked as though it might convert into some kind of double bed arrangement. Smears on the windows said they hadn’t been cleaned in years. Mattresses stacked against the living room wall – one, two, three, four…seven, George counted. Smelled of a strang
e mixture of cooking, sweat and fresh washing.

  ‘Please, sit down!’ the girl offered them a seat on basic, collapsible wooden chairs that had been hanging on nails on the wall.

  ‘How many people live here?’ Marie asked, pen at the ready.

  ‘There are ten of us. But please, to keep your voice down. A couple of the women are sleeping. They are working nights.’

  The girl explained that her name was Amaal Samatar, also from Mogadishu, and that she had been sent to the Kakuma refugee camp in northwestern Kenya, whereupon a trip to Nairobi to visit relatives had seen her threatened with deportation to Mogadishu. Though her aunt had been herded onto a plane and shipped back to Somalia under spurious grounds that her refugee-status document was not in order, Amaal had managed to gain the support of the United Nations Refugee Agency and had boarded a flight to the Netherlands.

  ‘So, you’ve been here how long?’ Marie asked.

  Amaal shrugged. ‘Nearly two years. Something like that.’

  ‘And how did you meet Magool?’

  Amaal scratched beneath her headscarf and clutched her cardigan shut over her floor-length dress. ‘What has happened to her? Is she okay?’

  ‘How did you meet Magool?’ Marie asked again.

  George nodded at the girl. Encouraging her to speak.

  ‘We were both at Katwijk together,’ she said. ‘Both young and without parents or chaperones. I am remembering her when she arrived. They are putting her in the room next to mine. She was in a mess.’

  ‘What happened then?’ George asked. ‘How did you come to be here?’

  ‘I am wanting to learn while my asylum application goes through,’ Amaal said. ‘I study science and Dutch at college.’ She smiled only very slightly, as if she daren’t allow herself more than a glimmer of relief, George thought. ‘They are letting me rent this place with some of the other women under the self-care agreement.’

  ‘Some!’ Marie scoffed, eyeing the mattresses.

  ‘We cannot afford bigger apartment.’

  ‘And when was the last time you saw Magool?’ George asked.

  Frowning momentarily, Amaal said, ‘Two weeks ago or more. She went out to work and is not coming back. I am wondering if I will get the police showing up at the door.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ Marie said, tugging at the pearl in her ear. Starting to grin like a suspicious hyena, sensing a kill was nearby. ‘Are you telling me Magool lived here?’

  Amaal stared blankly at the detective. ‘Lived? So, something is wrong with her!’

  George reached out and grabbed Amaal’s hand. ‘Look. She’s dead. I’m so sorry.’

  As Marie turned to George, her shoulders seemed to stiffen. ‘That’s not how we break that kind of news. You’re not following protocol.’

  ‘Fuck protocol,’ George said. ‘You’re stringing her along. It’s not right.’ She turned back to Amaal. ‘Magool was murdered. Brutally. We need to know everything you can tell us about her life. Where she worked. Who she hung out with. What happened to her baby. If you help us, we might be able to find her killer.’

  Crumpled up on the makeshift chair, suddenly looking like a lost child swathed in too much fabric, Amaal started to weep. Wiping her face on her pretty headscarf, the pink floral border turning a deeper hue with hot tears, until George produced a clean tissue from her coat pocket.

  ‘She is always going out at night,’ Amaal began, haltingly. ‘She says she works as a cleaner in offices. One job as a waitress. She is sending money home to her relatives, she told me one time. But she does not ever speak of her family. Except her brother. She says her little brother was adopted by a rich white family and is living in Italy. To be honest, I do not know any of her friends. She has very western tastes. Not an observant Muslim like me and some of the other women here. She goes to nightclubs. Drinks alcohol. Mixes with men.’

  ‘What men?’ Marie asked.

  ‘I do not know.’ Amaal shrugged. ‘I am never meeting any of them, but people in the Somali community gossip about her a bit. They say she is loose-moraled. Haram.’

  ‘Did she say if she had a boyfriend?’ George asked.

  A shake of the head. More tears.

  ‘And the baby?’

  ‘She is going out one morning, when she was heavily pregnant and was coming back in a taxi. No baby.’ Amaal blew her nose and sat up straighter. Wiped her eyes. Looked resolutely at George. ‘She has said she had the baby adopted because she needs the money and cannot offer the baby a respectable Halal life. But she says one day, when she is older and has her own place and a good job, she is hoping, Insha’Allah, to use some of the money she is earning to buy the baby back.’

  Her breathing was uneven. Her expression utterly sorrowful and bewildered. She rose from her chair, disappeared into the kitchen and returned with a grey, lockable cash tin.

  ‘Magool asks me to look after this when she is out. I hide it from the other women because three of them are thieves from Tanzania.’ She unlocked the tin and revealed roll after roll of money inside, all high euro denominations. ‘This is her money for her family and the baby.’

  ‘Jesus!’ Marie said, unfolding one of the rolls and flicking through the notes. ‘There must be twenty thousand or more in there. Maybe thirty.’

  George whistled low. Turned to Amaal. ‘You’re a good, honest friend, Amaal, to hide this cash for her. And you’re doing really well,’ George said. ‘I hope one day, we can give this money to Magool’s son or daughter. Now, we know the doctor who delivered the baby, but do you know who bought it? Did Magool ever tell you that?’

  Amaal looked suddenly uncertain. Narrowed her eyes. Clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. Then, finally, nodded.

  ‘Who the hell is Daan Strietman?’ van den Bergen asked. Swaying slightly now the codeine had taken hold. Staring down at the folder full of provocative and highly sexualised images of children.

  ‘Who knows, boss?’ Elvis said, taking photos of the books on the bookshelf in Strietman’s little office.

  Van den Bergen sat heavily in Strietman’s desk chair. A leather affair that was a damn sight better than his at the office. He adjusted the height so that his legs were no longer bunched up near his ears. Banged his knees on the too-low desk. Caught his large foot in the tangle of cables that were left behind now Marie had taken the pathologist’s laptop.

  ‘Fucking dwarves!’

  ‘Boss?’

  ‘Nothing.’ He placed the folder back onto the desk, feeling slightly nauseous. Hoping those photos had been photoshopped in some way to look like children performing lewd acts. ‘I don’t know how Marie ploughs through this kind of crap all day.’ Took his glasses off, letting them hang on their chain. Steepled his fingers in contemplation. Staring out at the attractive Old South apartments opposite. ‘Tell me what you think, Elvis,’ he said. ‘Regardless of what Kamphuis’ lackey keeps dripping into your ear.’

  Elvis perched on the edge of the desk and glanced up at the proliferation of Scandi-noir whodunits, real-life-crime tomes, written by jazzy-sounding American criminologists, and non-fiction books about cultures that practised voodoo. These constituted about seventy percent of the literature on Strietman’s bookshelves. The other thirty percent seemed to be medical textbooks and the occasional fantasy or sci-fi box set. Tolkien. George R. R. Martin. Frank Herbert. He sighed.

  ‘I don’t know, boss.’ He counted his observations on his fingers. ‘There’s a connection to Buczkowski, who’s got mental health problems and a shady past. This place is only three streets away from Valeriusstraat. How the hell does he afford a pad like this, unless he’s on the take from a job he does on the side? Forensics pays okay, but not that well for someone in his thirties! And Strietman can’t give us – or won’t give us – alibis for the nights that any of those murders took place. He’s got the surgical skills. He’s into dead men and kids, sexually. And he seems to have vanished some of the Lepiks forensics info.’ He turned to van den Bergen and sniffed. ‘B
uczkowski’s DNA is all over the Valeriusstraat hoax scene. How can they not be our prime suspects?’

  ‘But has he been to England?’

  Elvis scratched at his sideburns and smiled wryly. ‘Would you believe it? Yes! He went to some medical conference recently. The timing fits with your Ramsgate man.’

  Nodding thoughtfully, van den Bergen slid his glasses back on and looked at the photograph of a naked little girl. ‘Jesus. This is a potential PR disaster for the Dutch authorities.’ He rubbed his face with his broad palms. ‘Let’s get that paediatrician in tomorrow for her thoughts. I don’t care what she’s doing. I want her input first thing. It looks like Leeuwenhoek Junior has found us our murderers. Shit.’

  CHAPTER 71

  Amsterdam, Ad’s apartment, then NOS TV studios, then police headquarters, 30 January

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Ad asked, biting into his toast. Chewing noisily.

  George had only recently noticed that he chewed like the goats at the urban farm Letitia used to take her to. Grinding his food methodically between those big white molars of his. He had good teeth. Good skin. Lovely soft dark hair. A decent brain. A well-meaning soul. Why the hell wasn’t he enough? Why was she such a philandering shitbag?

  ‘Wrong? What do you mean?’ she asked, spooning the bran flakes carefully into her mouth.

  Ad reached out and put his hand on top of hers. ‘You seemed down before, but you’re a million miles away since you got back from England. Did everything go okay? Did something happen between you and that grumpy old fart?’

  Could he hear that her heart was banging against the inside of her chest? Could he see the sweat beading on her top lip? Feel it emerge hot, wet and shameful from her palms?