Hakan shook his head. ‘Perhaps there is a link to the zoo murders, but I cannot see the value in us being here tonight. Not when the light is so poor.’
Van den Bergen came to a halt before an alcove. Shone his torch on some scribblings there. Perched his glasses on the end of his nose, though they steamed up momentarily with the drop in temperature. He beckoned George to join him.
‘Look at this!’ he said. There was excitement in his voice. ‘Graffiti. Kids’ graffiti.’
George approached and stared at the childish drawings. ‘Animals,’ she said. ‘Elephants. Giraffes. Lions.’ Though the doodles were out of proportion and unaccomplished, the representations were clear enough. ‘Zoo exhibits.’
Van den Bergen nodded. A wry smile, lighting the dark places.
Snapping the images with her phone, just as she was about to turn away, George noticed a cupboard set into the wall. Curiosity tugged at her, dragging her inexorably towards the battered louvre doors. She opened them to reveal a stinking, cobwebby nook, cleared of its contents, now. But there inside, almost every inch of plaster had been covered with one particular kind of cartoon.
‘A man crossed with a bird of prey?’ Van den Bergen asked, running his finger over the peculiar hybrid of a stick-man with a beak, enormous feathered wings and claws on the ends of his stick arms.
George nodded. Pulse racing. Suddenly no longer cold.
‘Shquipëtar,’ she said. ‘The Son of the Eagle.’
CHAPTER 20
Berlin, Neukölln district, 10 March
‘What’s this area called again?’ George asked Hakan, squinting up at the harsh winter sunlight that ricocheted from one pale rendered apartment block to another. Everything seemed amplified to blinding point with that snow, icicles hanging threateningly from eaves, window ledges, balconies. She instinctively took a step backwards towards the road.
‘Schillerkiez,’ the Berlin detective answered. ‘Although this is just a part of a bigger district called Neukölln.’
Hakan nodded at a woman emerging from a corner shop, bent double with age. A flicker of recognition on her craggy dark, olive-skinned face, headscarf tied beneath her chin. Her floor-length, embroidered skirt dragged in the snow as she tried to wheel her tartan shopping trolley along an almost-impassable pavement.
‘It is the biggest area in Berlin for Roma settlers,’ he said.
Van den Bergen strode over to the old woman. He picked up the trolley and asked in English where she wanted to go. He was met with a look of disdain and a hoarse mouthful of a language George didn’t recognise. Arms flailing dramatically, the elderly woman snatched her trolley away out of his hands, gesturing that he should leave her alone.
George laughed. ‘That’ll teach you to be so bloody gallant!’ she said, as he traversed the snowbound road, tutting.
With a breakfast of cured meats and too much bread weighing her down, causing her to sweat despite today’s temperatures of -21°C, George stood and belched quietly in this run-down locale. She looked up at the shabby apartment blocks, abandoned stiff washing covered in snow, strung across balconies, with graffiti on the walls at street level. ‘So, this looks okay,’ she said. ‘No different from any other poor neighbourhood in Europe.’ She surveyed the cars parked in orderly rows, covered like misshapen cupcakes by a thick icing. ‘I was expecting an encampment. Some mess. Isn’t that the stereotype?’
Toying with his thick blue scarf, Hakan nodded. ‘There are still some travellers parked near the autobahn. Caravans and RVs holding families of eleven … sometimes more. We cleared one encampment a couple of years ago that had started up in a park in Kreuzberg, where the house we visited last night was situated. But the families in caravans are all new arrivals from Romania and Balkan states.’
Van den Bergen was watching a man intently pushing a rattling supermarket trolley full of scrap metal down the street, the air ringing with the deafening clash of corrugated iron against an old radiator. He made sluggish progress in the deep, deep snow. Above them a baby started to squall in one of the apartments. Raised voices, spilling out onto a balcony. Further down, somebody flung steaming liquid onto the street from on high. In a snow-covered park at the end of the street, just within sight, they could hear the delighted screams of children. Their white snowballs pinged through the air, hitting the windows of parked cars, where the heavy, glittering topping had started to slide to the ground. ‘These don’t look like persecuted fugitives,’ he said. ‘Not what I imagined, anyway.’
Hakan beckoned them towards a run-down café called Sofia’s, which advertised curious delicacies in childish writing daubed on the window in white paint. Inside, it smelled of animal fat and strong coffee.
‘What language is that?’ George asked, pointing to the window.
‘No idea,’ he said. ‘Bulgarian, maybe? Bosnian, Albanian, something from South Eastern Europe. Many of the Roma here came from Balkan states that were ravaged by war. We are having twenty thousand or so living in Berlin now. And the city is trying to integrate these families with other Berliner citizens and migrant groups. They may be self-employed – cleaners and so forth. Learn language. I sometimes do outreach work with the Roma advocacy group, Amaro Drom. Crime prevention with teenagers and that kind of thing. These people face many challenges still.’
A surly-looking man behind the café counter poured them the strongest coffee George had ever drunk. She sipped gingerly from her tiny cup, reminded of the utter poison her old landlord Jan used to brew at the Cracked Pot Coffee shop in Amsterdam. Crude oil and burnt molasses. She eyed the owner’s dirty fingernails suspiciously. ‘Jesus. This is so sweet.’ She stuck out her tongue. Clocking the café owner’s look of disapproval, she smiled coyly. Feeling guilty she raised her cup, as if in toast.
‘Haben Sie etwas ungewöhnliches während die letzten zwei oder drei Wochen gesehen?’ Hakan asked the owner. He then explained to George and Van den Bergen that he was asking if the man had spotted anything untoward in the neighbourhood in the last fortnight or so.
‘Nein,’ the man responded in the negative.
Hakan approached the counter and proffered a twenty Euro note – far in excess of what three coffees might have costed. No reaction. The man thumbed the stubble on his double chin, wearing an expectant expression, staring at Hakan’s still-open wallet. Another twenty was laid on the counter. Hakan’s hands in the air said that was as good as it got.
For several minutes, the two men conversed together. The café owner’s eyes darted to the glazed door, as he apparently conveyed news of something that was, indeed, out of the ordinary.
Sitting back down triumphantly at the table, Hakan pursed his lips and drained his coffee. ‘There is talk around here of the missing children being returned,’ he said. ‘I am already knowing this from my contacts in the community. He has heard of the Son of the Eagle, but only that it is an Albanian legend. Maybe it is a drug-dealer, he has said.’ He frowned and cocked his head to one side, thoughtfully. ‘Not all the Roma are poor. Some have been very successful in business. Especially those using clubs and discotheques as legitimate fronts for criminal activity.’
George nodded, remembering the seedy-looking venues they had passed on Karl Marx Strasse on the way, advertising Bulgarian gypsy chalga singers in the window.
‘The only other thing that is unusual in this area,’ Hakan continued, ‘is the local locksmith has not been open for a while. The café owner has had his premises burgled and when he went to get new locks put on …’
‘The shutters were down,’ Van den Bergen finished.
‘Let me guess,’ George said. ‘This locksmith guy hasn’t opened up since the morning the murdered men were found in the zoo.’
Pulling his mobile phone from the pocket of his parka, Hakan started to dial a number. ‘It is easy for me to find this information. I will call you before you are checking out of your hotel.’
Freshly damp from a hot shower that had been intended to thaw her out, George twisted a clean towel aro
und herself. Flapping around in the flimsy complimentary slippers, she flung her empty suitcase onto the bed and sighed. With a heavy heart and a feeling that she should have remained behind in Cambridge to work on her prison project now that she had her laptop back, George started to pack. Her mind whirled with the dizzying detail and mystery of this hastily arranged Berlin trip. She was still reeling from the bedtime rejection she had received from Van den Bergen, once Marianne had finally sloped off to bed and all was quiet in the hotel bar.
‘Are you coming upstairs, then, old man?’ she had asked him, stroking his hand. ‘For a nightcap!’ she’d said pointedly, winking, treating him to that mischievous grin he always said got the butterflies in his stomach a-flutter. ‘I’ve missed you.’ She raised an eyebrow, holding her fingers aloft. ‘See these? I’ve nearly worn them to stumps, thinking of me and you. So, what do you say?’
But Van den Bergen had merely shaken his hand loose to drain his beer. He’d set the bottle back down on the bar carefully. ‘No,’ he’d said. No clarification. ‘Night.’
He had neither softened the blow by kissing her, qualifying this flat rejection of romance with some excuse that he was tired, nor had he trotted out his usual line of late: that he could offer her nothing; that he was broken and washed up; that it was unfair to snatch away her prospect of a family like a cheap magician whipping a tablecloth from under a place-setting.
‘Is that it?’ she had shouted after him. ‘You ask me to come all the way out here. You. Asked me! Not the other way round.’
‘I’ll see you at breakfast, George,’ he had called over his shoulder.
A strictly professional arrangement. After two years. The cheek of it!
Now, as she packed her case, angrily flinging her bra and used ski-socks on top of the fluffy hotel towel she had liberated from the maid-service trolley for Aunty Sharon, she chewed on the inside of her cheek. ‘Fucking liberty,’ she said. ‘Who the hell does he think he is? Blowing hot and cold. Pushing my frigging buttons, the stupid Dutch tosspot.’
Pre-packed biscuits from the tea and coffee making facilities went into the case. All the hotel toiletries from the bathroom were souvenirs for Tinesha. Patrice would have to make do with a hug. There was nothing worth stealing for him apart from a shoe-cleaning sponge and some shitty hotel stationery.
When there was a knock on the door, George jumped. She tightened the towel around her naked body, and looked through the spyhole.
‘Hakan,’ she said, opening the door.
The Berlin detective stood outside, looking away when he saw her state of undress.
‘Don’t mind me!’ she said. ‘Come in! I don’t bite, man. Promise.’
As George stood by the king-sized bed, with Hakan perched awkwardly on the end, she failed to suppress unbidden images popping into her head: femmes fatales in Hollywood movies dropping their towels to the hotel room floor to reveal their nakedness to a potential lover. What if my towel falls off? she thought. I can feel it’s loose. It’s going to fall. He’ll see my droopy big tits and my belly. I need to eat less crisps and take up exercise. Got to start cycling again.
‘I have good news,’ Hakan said, running his hand through his hair, smiling uncertainly. ‘I have the name of the locksmith.’
‘Oh, yeah. What is it?’
‘Hans Meyer. It turns out that the zoo had contracted him to fix new locks to the Lion Gate after a break-in some time ago. He was one of their regular suppliers.’
‘Okay,’ George said. ‘Well, that’s a start.’
‘This is not all,’ Hakan said. ‘The dental reconstruction is finished on both men. There is a match in the thin victim with this locksmith, Hans Meyer. And you were right. The larger man is called Gerhard. Gerhard Hauptmann. He was a slum landlord, running houses in the Kreuzberg and Neukölln districts. He was owning a property next door to the house where the Roma children were found. We are now starting to unravel the Krampus case, thanks to you.’
‘Brilliant!’ George said, flinging her arms around the detective, unaware that somebody had walked into her room through the self-closing fire-door she had presumed had clicked shut behind her guest.
Van den Bergen. Towering above them both. Hooded eyes appraising a situation where a semi-naked George had her arms around a younger, attractive man, who was sitting on the end of her bed.
‘Paul! It’s not what it looks like,’ George cried, as he turned to leave.
CHAPTER 21
Amsterdam, police headquarters, 11 March
‘Why haven’t you caught me a bloody murderer yet?’ Kamphuis asked, slamming a meaty fist onto Van den Bergen’s desk. Sweat glistened on his top lip, his shirt visibly stained beneath the arms in wet, discoloured rings, like chromatography gone mad. ‘I mean, what exactly are you trying to pull here?’ He looked to the side and squeezed his eyes shut, as though he were hoping for insight and strength from the universe or some other-wordly authority. ‘You go on an unsanctioned trip to Berlin with her and Marianne.’ He jerked his thumb in the direction of George, not even bothering to glance her way.
Van den Bergen could feel his stomach propel hot lava into the back of his mouth. He imagined himself a komodo dragon spitting venom on his prey.
‘Don’t speak to Dr McKenzie like that, Olaf,’ he said, pushing his typing chair backwards so that he could throw one long leg over the other. He took off his glasses in a bid to show Kamphuis that he wasn’t remotely intimidated by his bullshit.
His view of George was partially obscured by the Commissioner’s rotund belly. But he glimpsed enough to know that she was holding the middle finger of her right hand aloft. Van den Bergen widened his eyes, keen to communicate that matters would not be improved if Kamphuis realised the freelance criminologist was flipping him the bird.
‘Look,’ he said. ‘We helped my guy in Berlin to ID his two Krampus victims.’
‘ID’ing the murder victims of the German police is not within my remit, Paul!’ Kamphuis yelled. ‘And neither is paying for a dirty overnighter at a boutique hotel so my Chief Inspector can indulge himself in a threesome with the fucking head of pathology and his girlfriend!’ He finally turned to George, looking her up and down pointedly. ‘On my payroll for some spurious profiling nonsense that I’ve yet to see the benefit of.’
George was out of her seat, of course, pointing, clicking her fingers to emphasis her words, spoken just as rapidly in Dutch as they ever were in English. Her beautiful, easily outraged head moved from side to side as though it was a remote-controlled device on a track of sorts.
‘Are you behaving in an inappropriate and disrespectful manner towards me in the workplace, Commissioner? Because I don’t need to put up with this shit from you. I’m freelance, see? Paul pays me to do a bloody good job, which I do, because in the world of criminology I’m no basic bitch. Right? And until you got me on the scene, nobody really knew jack shit about Roma involvement or child trafficking in this poxy murder case. Right?’ Hand on hip now, she took two steps towards Kamphuis, who straightened up and almost backed into Van den Bergen’s typing chair. She pointed at him. ‘And while we’re at it, you can stop verbally abusing your Chief Inspector, because he’s doing a damned terrific job and I think they call what you’re doing bullying in the workplace. Are you a bully in the workplace, Commissioner Kamphuis?’
Kamphuis puffed his cheeks out, clearly gasping for a response that would match George’s in eloquence and fervour.
At that moment, Van den Bergen had never felt prouder of his little Detective Lacey. He maintained a dour expression, however; he didn’t want her to notice the ardour behind his eyes. It wouldn’t do to let her know that rejecting her at that hotel had been an extraordinary feat of masochistic self-discipline for him – that he had restrained himself royally in resisting the urge to punch Hakan when he had found them in an embrace. She had insisted it had been a chance encounter, rather than a planned tryst, but he barely knew up from down anymore.
‘Thank you for your
input, Georgina,’ Van den Bergen said, putting his hands behind his head, watching with wry amusement as Kamphuis’ complexion grew dangerously red. ‘And thank you for your derogatory remarks and your enquiry about my case, Commissioner. I’ll keep you posted.’ He inclined his head towards the door of his office, making it clear in which direction he wanted Kamphuis to walk. Thankfully he was saved from a bout of prolonged one-upmanship with his superior by Marie knocking and entering.
Kamphuis’ eye started to twitch. He rubbed the sweat from his top lip with a slightly trembling hand. Marie was standing too close to him, pinning him to the spot with accusatory, narrowed eyes and something bordering on a sneer: a mouse, challenging an elephant to a stand-off and winning hands down.
With the Commissioner gone and the door firmly closed behind him, George bellowed with laughter.
‘Man alive!’ she said in English, slapping her knee, before switching to Dutch. ‘He’s totally petrified of you. What have you got on him, Marie?’
Marie hooked her hair behind her ear and blushed, fidgeting with one of her pearl earrings. Her blue eyes showed a little sparkle, which Van den Bergen had not seen evidence of for a long, long time.
‘I threatened to whack him with sexual harassment. It’s a while ago, now.’ A sly smile and a wink in George’s direction.
Van den Bergen spied camaraderie between the two that had not been there at the start. But abruptly, Marie’s smile and the friendly rapport evaporated. All business, now.
‘While you were both in Berlin, I’ve been checking out the bank details of our Bijlmer man, Tomas Vlinders,’ she said, brandishing an A4 notepad.
‘Go on,’ Van den Bergen said, pulling a third chair up for her to sit on, making an effort not to wrinkle his nose when he caught a whiff of her body odour.
Marie stared down at the words she had written in a neat hand. Line after line after line. Figures and sub-totals and notes in the margin. ‘Okay, so there’s just welfare benefits going into his current account. He was claiming disability because of his addiction. Me and Elvis went to scope out Vlinders’ registered home address. Typical junkie’s dump.’ Rolled her eyes. ‘Works from using, everywhere. Dirty syringes. Burnt teaspoons. Tin foil. Loads of paraphernalia on his kitchen table from cutting and bagging coke. I’m surprised Amsterdam’s junkies having been dying in droves. He’s been watering down pure Colombian with scouring powder, from what I can see!’
The Girl Who Walked in the Shadows Page 12
