‘Wotcha, darling,’ Aunty Sharon said, prizing snow-encrusted wellies from her swollen feet and putting them neatly on the shoe rack. Next to them, she placed the Betty-Boop heels that she took out of a Tesco bag. Yawning. Throwing her handbag onto the kitchen table. Snatching up the kettle.
‘Here, let me do that,’ George said, taking the kettle from her.
‘All quiet?’ Sharon asked. She started washing her hands with Fairy Liquid and scalding water. ‘Jesus! You turned the thermostat up again?’ She sucked on her fingers, eyeing George suspiciously.
Hand on hip, George rolled her eyes and jerked her thumb in the direction of the door. ‘Who do you think cranked the heating up?’
Snoring, coming from the adjacent living room. The thunderous, slumberous roar of a dragon, sleeping.
‘I gave the bathroom a good do,’ George said. ‘Got the nailbrush on the grouting. Looks a treat now.’
‘Stressed, by any chance?’ Aunty Sharon flung herself down onto the kitchen chair. It groaned beneath the weight of her heavy frame. Her taffeta skirt bunched up around her like an airbag triggered in a car crash. ‘Fucking thing is doing my head in.’ She stood again, unzipped the skirt and stepped out of the layers of electric blue fabric and netting. Flung it over the back of the adjacent chair. Sat back down, wearing only her generous knickers and a thick jumper. Dimpled thighs. Knees like dark chocolate blancmange. White ankle socks digging into her chubby legs. She rubbed her belly. Twanged the elastic in the waistband of her knickers. ‘That’s better. That new manager is some corny little rarseclart. He’s got me dressing up in 1950s shit and bobby socks, like I’ve escaped some pensioner’s mental home. I’m an experienced barmaid in a Soho titty bar. Not some kid serving chips in a themed bloody chicken shop. Cheeky bastard, he is. It’s -20 out there tonight. My toes are like frozen meatballs, man! If my fucking legs fall off with hypothermia, I’m going to sue his skinny white arse. At least Derek didn’t take the piss, trying to tell me what to wear. And he could have done! But even though he was my baby-father and long-time boss, he never pulled this kind of shit! Fucking novelty nights and all the girls in sodding bunny costumes like the twenty-first century ain’t even here!’ She sucked her teeth long and low. Paused for breath. Looked at her niece. ‘Well? What you been crying for, puffy eyes? Tell your Aunty Shaz.’ She reached out to her with a robust, welcoming arm.
George ignored the gesture. Stood steadfastly by the sink, wearing one of Patrice’s hoodies on top of her own. Arms folded tightly with sleeves down over her hands. Couldn’t get warm, even with the heating on 27 and the gas meter lifted onto a bucket so that the wheel had stopped turning. Fuse wire through the electricity meter too, so that they could put fan heaters throughout the house without worrying about bills. George had gored a hole through the casing with a hot bodkin herself. A trick Letitia had taught her as a child, passed on to a reluctant, law-abiding Aunty Sharon. Chalk and cheese, those two.
‘I haven’t been crying,’ George said.
‘Suit yourself.’ Aunty Sharon trotted over to the bread bin. Took out a fruit loaf. Cut herself an ample slice, slathered in butter. Made appreciative noises. ‘I make the best fruit loaf in the world,’ she said. ‘Derek used to love my fruit loaf.’ She started to cut herself a second piece and dropped the breadknife. Wracking sobs, suddenly.
‘Not you as well,’ George said, wrapping Sharon in a bear hug as she heaved with grief.
‘So, you w-was crying,’ Sharon stuttered.
‘No. Yes. Never mind me. You let it out, Aunty Shaz.’
Sorrow streamed forth from Sharon’s face; tears quickly dripping from her jowls. Speech coming in hiccoughs. ‘It’s still hard, love. Especially working at that place. Porn King and them girls what have been there a while are always banging on about Derek, like he was some fucking saint or something. Uncle Giuseppe, this. Uncle Giuseppe, that.’ She looked up at George with ghoulish mascara-besmirched eyes. ‘Derek de Falco managed a titty bar badly. Some claim to fame, right?! He fucked himself up. He fucked me and Tin’s life up too. Selfish dickhead.’
‘They’re all selfish dickheads,’ George said, wiping her aunt’s second-hand make-up off her jumper with a hot cloth. Knowing Aunty Sharon knew the score and wouldn’t take it personally.
‘Yeah. Stuff Derek, the stupid bastard!’ Sharon grabbed the kitchen roll off the worktop and blew her nose loudly into a clean sheet. Dabbed gingerly at her eyes. Tugged at her elaborate arrangement of platinum blonde extensions and brightly coloured headscarf until it all came away in one cumbersome piece. Short greying hair underneath. Receding hairline. A little too thin in parts from stress-alopecia, where cheap hair extensions over the years had taken their toll.
George touched her own head of thick dark curls reflexively. Curls which Van den Bergen liked to grip when he kissed her passionately.
‘Anyway. Uncle Giuseppe’s old news. Tell your Aunty Sharon what’s eating you,’ Sharon said, pulling her sizeable bra from beneath her jumper and hanging it over the taffeta skirt. ‘It is laughing gas, in there?’ She gestured towards the living room.
George shook her head. ‘No. She’s the least of it. I keep getting texts from Van den Bergen. We’re on. We’re off. He loves me. He never says it, the arsehole. Up one minute. Down the next.’
‘Thought he was always like that, anyway. Didn’t you say he was depressed?’
George nodded. ‘He’s not been the same since the Butcher. Physically, he’s healed. But mentally … They’ve had him chasing missing persons for two years. Sat on his arse in the office, checking online reports or sat drinking coffee in people’s houses while he does interviews. Insisting he’s not well enough to face active service. But they’ve got him working a new murder, Marie’s telling me. I haven’t spoken to the tosser for weeks because of what happened. Now he wants me over there under the pretence of it being in a professional capacity, I’ll bet. Wants me to hold his hand, more like. He’s full of shit.’
The beginnings of a smile played on Sharon’s chapped lips. ‘Your fellers always end up in bits, thanks to you, don’t they? You’re more high maintenance than that mother of yours.’
A heavy sigh. ‘Actually, I’d be lying if I said she wasn’t doing my head in, too,’ George said, breathing out heavily. Glaring at the door to the living room, behind which her mother slept. ‘She was such a pain in the arse while you were at work. I’m trying to write my research up, and she’s chatting in my ear, giving it, I’m dying. I’ve got pulmonary hypertension – she can barely bloody pronounce it. I’ve got sickle cell anaemia – she doesn’t even know what the fuck that is. You don’t give a monkey’s about me. I can’t deal with it.’
‘Take no notice of that attention-seeking bitch, love,’ Sharon said, frowning and shaking her head. ‘My sister will play every last dirty card in her hand to get what she wants. I’ll believe that “I’m dying shit” when I see it. She’s got some brass neck, threatening to die when she’s strong as a horse.’
‘She’s got some brass neck, kipping on your sofa!’
Sharon was unexpectedly silent. Tremors, rippling across her chin and cheeks, gave the impression that she was about to be sick. Her face crumpled rapidly, the silence giving way to wailing loud enough to wake her sister and her sleeping son. Fleshy hands balled into tight fists.
George was taken aback. Barely knew how to react to this secondary outburst. ‘Try to remember Derek the way he was,’ she said, turning to tend to the tea. Stirring the cup too briskly. Nice and strong. Three sugars and a healthy wallop of rum. That’s how Aunty Shaz liked it after work on a cold night. Set the cup down on a coaster with handle perfectly perpendicular to the edges.
With electric blue nail extensions to match her abandoned dress, Sharon wrapped her hands around the mug, spitting and sputtering her words one by one. ‘It ain’t Derek,’ Sharon said. ‘Not really. I’m crying cos of …’ She flapped her hand in front of her fact, as though she was wafting away unwanted emotion. ‘It’s just … it’
s little Dwayne.’ She stared off into the middle distance.
‘It’s not today, is it?’ George asked, glancing at the calendar.
Sharon nodded. Looked suddenly feeble and frail, clutching at the silver locket around her neck. Dimpled chin and downturned mouth. Streams of glistening, sorrowful tears and snot, lit up by the kitchen lightbulb, looked like strange tinsel, two months too late for Christmas.
‘Shit. I’m so sorry,’ George said, sitting by her side and hooking her arm around her aunt’s shoulders. Suddenly her own problems seemed paltry in comparison. Guilt jabbed at the soft spots that were already raw.
‘I told you, didn’t I?’ Sharon said, snapping the locket open, shut, open, shut, revealing the faded colour photo of a small, smiling boy inside. ‘No agony in this world like the pain of losing a child. Ten, twenty years later, them wounds never heal.’
The loud knock on the kitchen window made both of them jump. Nothing to see in the black of the small hours with the light on inside.
‘Who the fuck is that at this time of night?’ Aunty Sharon asked, lurching out of her seat. Grabbing the kettle, still half full of boiled water. ‘I got that back gate padlocked to keep those cheeky little dipshits from down the way out.’
George’s heart thudded beneath her layers. She snatched up a meat cleaver from the magnetized knife-holder on the wall. ‘Stay back, Aunty Shaz,’ she said, switching the light off. ‘I got this.’
Still nothing to see in the empty, snowy yard at the back, except for a washing line supporting six inches of snow on top, icicles, hanging beneath, like a neat row of teeth strung along a cannibal’s necklace. Against the fence were snow-buried wheelie bins, lit by the nearest streetlamp some twenty feet away.
Reaching for the key lodged in the security door, George turned until the lock clicked. Pushed the handle down gingerly, cleaver in her right hand. Pulled the door open suddenly. Blast of arctic wind sucking the air from her lungs. Arm held high ready to slice.
A hooded figure was standing on the back step.
George screamed.
CHAPTER 5
Amsterdam, mortuary, 28 February
‘Well, well, well, if it isn’t Amsterdam’s prodigal son. Long time, no see,’ Marianne de Koninck said, eyeing Van den Bergen with what was almost certainly a degree of suspicion. ‘Where the hell have you been for the last god knows how long?’
‘Welded to the frost-bitten bottom of my cold case,’ Van den Bergen said, eyes smiling with mirth.
Almost ten months had passed since he had last seen the head of forensic pathology. The case he had been working on simply hadn’t turned up anything requiring forensic examination beyond the initial couple of weeks.
Today, in her scrubs and rubber sandals, with her normally short hair grown into a sleek blonde bob, Marianne looked younger than her forty something years.
‘Have you got a new man in your life?’ he asked, finally daring to unbutton his anorak. The chilly mortuary seemed warm in comparison to the white world outside.
‘Only this poor chump,’ Marianne said. She stared down at the naked corpse of the man who had been found in the Bijlmer play-area. Lit by the harsh, overhead lights, his body was a grim palette of yellow, purple and grey. The red stippling of the sores around his mouth and nose like the brush strokes of an impressionist’s nightmare. Marianne snapped a fresh pair of latex gloves onto her sinewy hands. Straight to business as usual.
Van den Bergen had always liked that about her.
‘What about you?’ she said. ‘You still cradle-snatching? I’m surprised the young Dr McKenzie isn’t with you. I thought you two were joined at the hip since she saved your life.’
There was nothing Van den Bergen could do to stifle the low growl that escaped his lips. Marianne might as well have gouged at his tired heart with her scalpel.
‘Like that, is it?’
The pathologist walked around the dead man, recording her observations into a Dictaphone. She scrutinised the blemished skin of his face.
‘Aside from the sores around the deceased’s nose and mouth that would suggest drug misuse, I can see tiny lacerations on his face,’ she said. She prized open his mouth with her fingers to reveal blackened teeth. ‘Jesus. Our man was certainly not a regular at the dentist’s.’
‘Show me a junkie who is,’ Van den Bergen said.
‘His lips, gums and tongue show bruising,’ she continued. ‘I’ll check his nasal passages later by microscopy, but I’m guessing it’s the same there. I can see significant amounts of mucus and blood at the back of his gullet. Petechial haemorrhages in his skin. Oedema.’
‘In layman’s terms, please!’
‘All in good time, Chief Inspector. You just sit tight and let me do my job.’ She took samples from beneath the man’s fingernails. Bloods. Swabs. ‘Okay. Let’s see what’s inside,’ Marianne said.
Taking up her scalpel, she began to open up the cadaver, cutting from his chest, working her way down to his pubic area.
‘Oh, Jesus!’ Van den Bergen said. He steadied himself against the built in sink at the end of the stainless steel slab. Flashbacks to waking up on the floor of the Butcher’s panic room. Strapped to a chair. Awaiting his fate. Then, walking towards the light, thinking it was the end and that perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad, only to find the source of the brightness came from a doctor’s light pen, checking for the response of his pupils as he emerged finally from his coma in the Intensive Care Unit. Only later, when his wounds were redressed, realising that he had been zipped open from top to bottom.
Just like the body of the Bijlmer man, now.
Marianne set down her scalpel. Staring at him askance as though he was a lunatic. ‘Paul? Are you okay?’
Pull yourself together, you loser. ‘I’m fine. It’s my middle ear playing up.’ He pointed to his ear, as though that made his lie more convincing. She didn’t need to know he was so weak-minded. ‘Vertigo. You know. A lot of viruses going round in this infernal shitty weather.’
‘Have you and Georgina split up?’ She narrowed her sharp blue eyes at him.
He pulled up a typing chair close to the action. His height made it easy to observe as Marianne resumed her dissection. Pointedly said nothing in response.
‘Suit yourself, tight-lipped sod,’ she said.
After the bulk of the examination had been performed, internal organs weighed and measured and the dead man scrutinised for signs of foul play visible to the naked eye, the pathologist scowled.
‘Well?’ Van den Bergen asked, hoping she had not noticed he had been looking anywhere but at the body for most of the procedure. ‘We found a big bag of mephedrone on him. It was odd that his stash hadn’t been taken. Are we looking at a simple drug-related stabbing?’
Marianne tutted. Looked perplexed. ‘This is the weird thing,’ she said. Snapping off her gloves in silence. Scrubbing her arms to the elbows. Silent all the while. ‘He’s clearly lost a lot of blood because he was stabbed with something in the carotid artery. Whoever did it knew what they were doing. The wound is about two inches deep, as though it’s been done with those home-made weapons you get in prisons.’
‘A shiv.’
‘Exactly. The wound is conical, but there’s no evidence of a blade. At first I thought he’d been stabbed with a stake or maybe one of those conical stoppers you get for wine bottles.’
Van den Bergen crossed one long leg over the other, bouncing his fur-lined boot on his knee. Finally, he pulled his beanie hat off and ruffled his thick, prematurely white hair. ‘It’s possible. Don’t rule it out at this stage. We haven’t found a weapon anywhere near the crime scene.’
Marianne pulled up another chair and sat beside him. ‘No, but the thing is, there are traces of water in the wound. I don’t get it. And though he lost pints of blood, his actual cause of death was suffocation. That’s what I was alluding to when I said there were lacerations and bruising in and around his mouth and nose.’
‘What?’ Van den Bergen lea
ned closer to her. Scrutinising the fine lines around her eyes and the hollows beneath her cheekbones, where long-distance running had stripped the fat away.
‘Someone shoved snow up his nose and into his mouth. They stabbed him first and then made sure they finished the job by suffocation. When I examined him at the scene, I found slush in his nasal passages and mouth. Almost melted, but not quite.’ She touched the tip of her own nose thoughtfully. ‘Even with the victim’s body temperature being a steady 37 degrees, by the time he’d started to bleed out, and his temperature had begun to drop, with the stupid sub-zero conditions we’ve got at the moment, his extremities would have taken barely any time at all to cool to freezing point.’
‘Hence the slush.’
‘Yes. Stay outside for more than ten minutes in this weather in the wrong clothes … It’s not exactly taking a bath in liquid nitrogen, but not far off it!’
Van den Bergen chewed over the information. Rubbing his brow. He could feel the pinching pain of his scar tissue responding to the mortuary chill, now that his coat hung open. Taking a blister pack out of his anorak pocket, he slipped two ibuprofen onto his tongue. Swallowed with spit. ‘What do you think of opportunism? This John Doe had no wallet on him. Could he have been robbed because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time?’
The pathologist stood and stretched. Glanced over at the dead man, baring his innermost secrets beneath the mortuary lights. ‘Very public place, though. If I wanted to mug a man, I wouldn’t choose that spot. Would you? It’s overlooked by scores of apartments.’
Van den Bergen nodded. Wished he was sitting on his sofa at home, savouring a hot coffee, bouncing ideas back and forth with George instead. Watching the winter sunlight that streamed through the French windows of his apartment kiss the tips of her hair.
‘The bag of mephedrone on the dead man was worth a fair few Euros,’ he said. ‘Who the hell would kill a junkie, take his money, but leave the drugs?’
Marianne de Koninck started to print off labels for the samples she had taken, methodically categorising the bits of the dead man that would be sent to toxicology. ‘You’re the Chief Inspector, Paul. Not me. But I’d be asking what kind of psychopath would commit such a public, brutal but efficient murder if it was just about stealing a wallet?’
The Girl Who Walked in the Shadows Page 3
