The air crackled with tension, but Sharon remembered this was George’s spotlight moment in the ongoing Williams-May family drama.
‘Go on, love. Tell us about the man. We’re listening, babe.’
George shook her head. ‘It wasn’t an ex-convict or anything.’ She wiped her eyes and blew her nose loudly on the tissues Sharon offered her. ‘It was this academic from UCL. Professor Screw Loose Dobkin. Guy’s a twat. He grabbed me from behind.’
Sharon sucked her teeth. ‘Cheeky fucking rarseclart. What about that, eh? What did he want?’
‘I hope you kicked him in the bollocks,’ Letitia said, then inhaled sharply so that the end of her cigarette glowed brightly in the murk of the room.
‘Yeah,’ George said. Tears stemmed, now. She sniffed and shook her hair out regally. ‘I bit his skanky hand too and threw him like a fucking ninja. Right on his arse in the snow. Then, I punched him in the ear with my phone. He had horrible ears, man. Hair coming out of them and everything.’ She started to chuckle.
Letitia nodded sagely, full of ‘that’s my girl’ platitudes.
But Sharon was at pains lay claim to some of that fighter’s instinct in her niece. Hadn’t she been the girl’s surrogate mother getting on for six years now? She made sure she laughed louder and harder than that presumptuous fatty boom, her big sis.
‘Sounds like you give as good as you got, darling,’ she said, plonking herself on the sofa between George and her mother. ‘What did he want then?’
‘We ended up going for a coffee, would you believe it? Me, half strangled and him all mashed up from my right hook.’
George took a cigarette out of her mother’s packet and lit up – rejecting the Swiss roll, Sharon noted. Her heart sunk like a bad sponge mix.
‘So, turns out, this Dobkin twat thinks I paid someone to steal his research, right?’ George exhaled. She looked pointedly at her aunt and mother. ‘Remember how I got my laptop and USB stick taken from my room in Cambridge?’
‘Yeah. I fucking remember,’ Letitia said. ‘You nicked my bingo winnings to pay that blackmailing homeless skank what keeps coming after you for money, like you’re some cash machine.’
‘I didn’t nick them. I borrowed them.’ George pursed her lips and glared at her mother, hand in the air in faux horror. ‘Cos God forbid you should help your daughter in a tight spot.’
With a degree of satisfaction, Sharon swiped the uneaten Swiss roll and listened to the story unfold. George’s voice was hoarse from crying.
‘So, turns out, this Dobkin has had his entire research nicked a month ago. He’s been working on a trafficking project that sounded almost identical to mine.’
‘Maybe he’s been pinching your ideas,’ Letitia suggested.
George shook her head. ‘Sometimes duplications like this can happen and it means whoever gets their paper published first renders the other academic’s work useless. It’s a bloody nightmare. You can lose years just by being pipped to the post.’ She sniffed and stubbed her cigarette out. She spotted the fast-disappearing cake and looked apologetically at her aunt. ‘I was going to eat that, you know.’ She squeezed Sharon’s hand. ‘You’re the best baker in the world.’
Sharon felt heat creep into her cheeks and grinned, just as her sister’s mouth curled downwards like a stale sandwich. ‘Go on, love. Was it the homeless bird what nicked his stuff, like what happened with you?’
Shaking her head, George chewed her lip. Sighed. ‘A bloke, apparently. Dobkin said there was a student eyewitness, clocked this guy running away from the office – one of those old houses around the little park by UCL. A lot of the academics have got rooms there. But get this!’ She leaned forwards, a gleam of intrigue in her eye. ‘The student described the thief to the police as looking like a roughsleeper.’
‘So, was this homeless guy just after money, like the bird?’ Sharon asked.
‘No. Apparently not. Nobody’s been back and tried to extort cash out of Dobkin.’ George smiled ruefully and touched her neck. ‘Dobkin’s got a grip on him, even though I put him down. Terrible breath too. He could have taken out a burglar with his breath alone!’
Letitia pulled an old blanket around her knees defensively. ‘What did Dobbins have that you didn’t, then? How comes just you got fleeced for money?’
George turned to her mother. That gleam of intrigue looked suddenly like a fire had started somewhere inside the girl. ‘Dobkin has been sleuthing on the side for years, acting as a decoy in online chatrooms where paedos hang out – international ones, as well as British – trying to lure them into revealing shit about the big players in these huge underground networks. Over the years, he’s built a database with the names of sex offenders, child pornographers and child traffickers that the police wouldn’t touch. Maybe because there were some pretty fucking big and powerful names on his list. He wasn’t just doing research …’
Sharon set the half-eaten Swiss roll down in silence, rapt with attention as her niece spoke.
‘… he was planning an exposé in The Times. Dobkin was going to blow the lid off the whole shitty shebang, just as his research was stolen.’
‘By a homeless man,’ Sharon said, her curiosity piqued. She fingered her locket. ‘And yours by a homeless woman, right? That’s gotta be more than just coincidence.’
CHAPTER 28
A village South of Amsterdam, 4 August, the previous year
‘Do you think you could get out of bed at some point this week and do some work?’ Gabi asked, teeth clenched, as she looked at the recumbent form of her husband beneath the duvet, sleeping like the dead, almost around the clock.
Piet groaned. He shifted slightly, farted, rolled over and looked at her with an alarming directness. The sight of his haggard, stubbled face, that dimpled chin and those weak lips, continually on the point of trembling. Puffy eyes, perpetually red from self-indulgent tears.
‘I can’t, Gabi,’ he said quietly. ‘I’m ill.’
‘You’re not ill, for God’s sake.’
‘My stomach’s still raw. I’m in agony.’
‘Self-inflicted! Nobody asked you to overdose, did they? What they did … what I did … was ask you to be strong. To hold it together. And did you? Or did you stuff tablets down your gullet as a cry for help?’ She approached the bed. She could smell his unwashed body, sickly breath, greasy hair, sweat. ‘Our children are missing, and all you can do is seek attention!’
He pulled the duvet tighter to his chin and closed his eyes in answer.
‘The bills need paying,’ she continued, dragging the duvet down, forcing him to acknowledge she was standing there, though it pained her to look into those bloodshot eyes. ‘I’ve got to go into the bank today and beg them not to foreclose on the car loan.’ She flung a pile of opened, white envelopes onto the bed. ‘Bills, Pieter. Utilities. All overdue. My shitty charity salary won’t pay for this all on its own.’
Piet threw the duvet off suddenly, as if in defiance, revealing his naked body. His face twisted with emotion; he festered with resentment or anger or whatever else he clearly thought he was entitled to feel.
‘I don’t give a shit about your car,’ he said. ‘It was your bright idea to set up the Josh and Lucy fund. There must be nearly €200,000 sitting in it by now. People are throwing money at us. Can’t you ask the trustees for a handout to keep us going? They’re all your bloody cronies anyway.’
He pushed past her, beat a path to the en suite and slammed the door.
‘It’s for them!’ she shouted. ‘Someone’s got to pay for the PR campaign. Marketing and advertising and all that stuff doesn’t come for free, you know.’
His bitter voice emanated from behind the closed door, possibly stripping the paint on the other side. ‘PR! PR, this. Advertising, that. You’ve turned our kids into a portfolio-building opportunity.’
Anger burned inside her with a scorching incandescence. She pushed the door open abruptly.
‘Everyone on the continent is looking for o
ur children, thanks to me.’ She poked herself hard in the chest. She marched over to the television, flicked through the stations until she found a news programme and forced a satisfied smile when photos of Josh and Lucy popped up onto the screen. She silently acknowledged the crippling ache in her heart at the sight of those children she had grown inside her body and nurtured into toddlerhood. The twin-centres of her world feeling like they were spinning satellites lost on the dark side of the universe; a lifetime away now. ‘See?’ she said. ‘International news. How else do you think we’re going to find them?’
Piet, enthroned on the toilet, looking fragile and crumpled, like a ruined king, picked up a toilet roll and flung it at Gabi’s head.
‘It’s been ten weeks!’ he yelled. ‘We’ve got nothing. Absolute zero, you self-serving, blinkered bitch.’
Cranking the volume all the way up, Gabi tried to drown out her husband’s defeatism. She sat down at the stool in front of her mirrored dressing table, switched on the elegant porcelain lamp and sprayed perfume on herself to dispel the funk of Piet’s spending day and night in denial that summer and fresh air ever existed.
‘I can’t hear you, and frankly, I’m not interested in anything you have to say, Piet Deenen.’ She had one ear on the television report, admiring and approving of the gravitas that the rich-voiced presenter added to the latest developments in the case:
‘Sightings of the Deenen children have consistently pointed the finger of suspicion at the Roma camps that litter Dutch suburbs, and even the countryside. The Chief of Police, Jaap Hasselblad, has remarked that the Albanian and Romanian Roma setting up camps around Amsterdam, where they beg and target tourists in particular as easy victims of pick-pocketing, are a scourge.’
‘You’re not even listening to me!’ Piet shouted, flushing the toilet. ‘I’m trying to talk to you about the disability allowance and …’
But no, Gabi wasn’t listening. She was focussed on the TV screen, feeling where she should slide the pins into the back of her blonde curls to tame them as befitted a trip to see the bank manager, proud of the national fervour she had inspired with her efforts. And there was the montage of photos of Josh and Lucy, together with snippets of happy holiday film that her colleagues in London had so professionally, so slickly, put together. A heart-rending appeal.
Whilst she listened to public opinion, she applied her moisturiser. A retired bus driver from Amstelveen spoke with passion.
‘Everyone knows the gypsies snatch our blond children. Didn’t they find that little girl in Greece a couple of years ago?’
A woman who worked in Duty Free at Schiphol Airport beamed down the lens of the camera, clearly delighted to give her opinion.
‘Kids don’t just disappear, though. Do they? I mean, I know where my kids are 24/7. Why didn’t that Gabi Deenen? What kind of sub-standard mother is she?’
Gabi felt the blood drain away from her lips. The room felt suddenly too small, the strong scent of her perfume cloying and suffocating. She could see the sneering disapproval in that overly made-up woman’s face. She had seen tight lips and accusatory eyes in the supermarket. She swallowed hard and switched the TV off.
Piet was cocooned in bed once more. ‘See? This is what more publicity gets you, Gabi. Heat. Hate. And a pile of propagandist bullshit about gypsies. But no kids!’
‘They’ll find my babies,’ she said almost inaudibly. Feeling tears track along the lower rims of her eyes, she hoped they wouldn’t fall and ruin her freshly applied mascara.
She stood slowly, her movements measured, seeing her Twitter feed scroll down in her mind’s eye: an outpouring of national grief; an unfurling of love and support like a blooming hothouse flower – artificially cultivated and nourished by the rich, frequent supply of heartbreak, hysteria and mawkish photographic evidence that two perfect, blond tots ever existed. But carried on this rising tide of love were poisonous spores of mistrust and harsh judgement. Feeding the trolls.
Gabi blinked those thoughts away.
‘I’m going to the bank. Then I’m going into the office.’
In town, she carried her sense of loss around like a hidden, malignant tumour. People were staring, but they didn’t see how grief ingested her. They kept their distance, though she could still hear the indistinctive chummer, chummer of small town rumour on the wind.
Ignore them, she told herself.
She approached the counter inside the bank with an optimistic smile and braced herself for the warmth and fiscal understanding that would undoubtedly envelop her.
‘Sadly, Mrs Deenen, your children have nothing to do with the bank’s policy on defaulting,’ the dispassionate, lard-faced manager said.
His name tag told her he was Dr Joost Bregman. Pockmarks in his cheeks – the scars of teenaged acne – put Gabi in mind of Leerdammer cheese. What sort of charmless underachiever studied for years and years at university to become the manager of a village high street branch of a poxy bank?
‘For Christ’s sake! Have you no heart?’ Under her breath, she said, ‘My husband’s having mental health issues. He’s self-employed. If he can’t work …’
‘Can you sell the car? Didn’t you secure the loan to pay for a—’ He looked down at a sheaf of notes, printed out from some database that probably told him which breakfast cereal she preferred. ‘Volkswagen Touareg. Nice car. Do you need such a nice car?’
At that point Gabi wished the malignancy inside her would stop her heart and end this pain and humiliation.
But wait. That was how Piet thought, too ready to throw in the towel. The kids needed her to be strong.
‘I’ll get your money,’ she said. Just say the words in a convincing way. Smile. Bat your eyelashes. You have friends who will help you. ‘Next week.’
‘Please see that you do, Mrs Deenen. My hands are tied, you see.’
As she emerged from the bank onto the pristine cobbles of the village high street, she caught sight of the electrical shop opposite. Huge flatscreen TVs sat in the window, next to vacuum cleaners and washing machines, cake mixers, irons and a cornucopia of appliances to help every Dutch housewife in this Amsterdam backwater lead a life not far removed from that enjoyed by women in the 1950s. Wholesome. Easy. Less labour-intensive. The sign in the window in gold lettering said this was a family-owned business since 1956. Everything with a plug under one roof.
But it was not the seasonal 30% reduction or 0% APR that drew her gaze to the flickering screen of the Panasonic HDTV. It was the sight of the detective heading-up the investigation. In impressively high definition, he was standing in a field in the middle of the good, green, flat land.
Two older women had also stopped in front of the window beside Gabi. Respectable parishioners, idling the morning away with coffee and cake from de Vries bakery and patrolling the high street on the lookout for gossip, as though it might be left unattended, like a suspicious package or abandoned bag. And here that gossip was, in the form of Gabi Deenen. The English woman – you know?! That one with the neglected kids.
They were pointing at the soundless footage and talking animatedly. Noticing Gabi drawing ever closer at their side they nudged each other.
‘What do you think? It’s her! She’s hanging around the village with her make-up on. Why isn’t she out looking for her children?’
Ignoring the judgemental subtext that hung heavy in the air, Gabi stood, almost with her nose pressed against the glass. Looking at the news footage of that Chief Inspector. Wearing overshoes and giving orders, it seemed, to officers in frog-suits and some who wore waders up to their waists. They were standing in the watery artery that bisected the too green field, like water boatmen, skimming the surface to see what lay beneath.
‘What’s going on?’ Gabi asked the women.
One looked at her askance. The other had something akin to bitterness etched into her hatchet-face.
‘Haven’t you heard?’ Hatchet-face asked, eyeing her up and down like a photocopier light, capturing every detail t
o reproduce faithfully for easy redistribution amongst other information seekers. ‘They’re dredging the canal that runs through the polder near that disgraceful gypo encampment.’
Gabi gasped. She scrutinised the TV screen to see if she recognised that field – that wide, grey stripe of water with the slowly turning wind turbine in the background.
‘You should know this, shouldn’t you?’ the woman said, reaching into her shopping bag. ‘They’re your bloody children the cops think are dead at the bottom of that canal.’ An unpleasant glint in her septuagenarian eye. ‘But then, why would you? You lost those babies in the first place, you evil English whore.’
The woman withdrew from her shopping bag a large brown egg. Gabi had no time even to fathom what she might be doing with the smooth egg in her wrinkled hand before it hit the side of her face, oozing down onto her work suit. A snotty, yellow mess covering her broken heart.
CHAPTER 29
Amsterdam, Oud West district, 12 August, the previous year
‘Is the dress for a special little girl?’ the shop assistant asked, beaming at him.
Clearly she hadn’t recognised his face. She wrapped the little pink party dress in pristine white tissue paper. The dress was so small, it folded over only once and would still fit inside the crisp card bag.
‘Yes. It’s for my daughter,’ Piet said, touching the tiny raspberry velvet bodice before it was hidden from view in the upmarket packaging. €60 but worth it for Lucy. Smart new summer sandals for Josh too, now that his feet were growing. Dinosaurs on the straps, no less. ‘And the sandals for my boy. He’ll love them. He outgrows his shoes every five minutes!’
The assistant rang the sale through using Piet’s credit card. Still full of smiles for this clearly doting dad, out on a shopping spree for his little darlings. Strange, only in that he seemed to be wearing pyjamas and slippers beneath his denim jacket. But otherwise he’d made it past the gatekeeper on the door in this exclusive boutique. Walk in like you belonged there. That was the key.
The Girl Who Walked in the Shadows Page 16
