The Girl Who Walked in the Shadows

by Riches, Marnie

  ‘What the hell are we doing here, Piet?’ she said, turning to him. Red-rimmed eyes said her resolve had all but left her. ‘If the police haven’t caught this bastard, what chance do we have? A million to one. London’s massive. There’s a school on every corner. He could be anywhere.’ She exhaled heavily. ‘Let’s go. Let’s get a hot drink and something to eat. I’ve fucked up.’

  Piet reached out to comfort his wife; he squeezed her shoulder, though she shrugged his comfort off. She started a brisk onwards march away from the school up towards New Cross, negotiating these back streets as though she knew precisely where she was going. A human tracking device, bound for some unspoken target.

  ‘Slow down, Gab!’ Piet said, panting. Having to use his inhaler, as Gabi started to take longer strides, impossible to keep up with her long distance runner’s idea of pace-setting.

  It was too much. He swept the snow off the low front garden wall of a house and sat down, forcing Gabi to retrace her steps. Yet another school looming behind high Victorian walls at the end of this street. Though Gabi was right. What use was it? The bell had rung now, in any case. All the children tucked safely inside while they still wandered aimlessly; parental diaspora in a not-quite-familiar land.

  She sat beside him in silence, breath steaming on the crisp air. The snow started to fall heavily. Settling on the two of them – a frozen representation of grief sculpted by a callous God.

  Sitting there, watching cars crawl along the slippery snow-bound asphalt, Piet noticed presently that one or two children were still skidding their way down the street towards that high wall. Slightly older children, wearing blazers and carrying fat book bags slung over their shoulders. And there was a chubby black girl – probably eleven or twelve, though she looked no older than nine – struggling with her bag. She fell over, landing on her side in the snow, looking like she was about to cry.

  Piet stood, preparing to cross the road and help her. But Gabi’s fingers, crab’s stubborn pincers digging into his arm, held him back.

  ‘Hang on,’ she said. ‘What’s this?’

  CHAPTER 39

  South East London, later

  A man advanced swiftly towards the girl from who knew where? Perhaps he had been waiting, just beyond their field of vision. Perhaps he had followed the girl. He was a non-descript character of medium height and medium build, dressed in unremarkable clothing. Jeans. Quilted navy jacket. Trainers. Wearing a beanie hat that was pulled low over his ears. But the collar of his jacket was open just enough to reveal distinctive ink, as though he had been barcoded to be scanned and identified at this very moment.

  ‘Fuck,’ Gabi said, pulling the car-thief’s slide hammer and screwdriver from her rucksack with shaking urgent hands. ‘Grab him!’

  Adrenalin powered Piet across the road, sent him bowling into their quarry just as he had grabbed the little girl, putting his gloved hand over her mouth. Gabi rounded on the predator, holding a screwdriver to his neck, the slide hammer to his stomach.

  ‘Bugger off!’ she said calmly to the little girl. ‘Go to school. You never saw us.’

  The weeping child scrambled to her feet, nodding wordlessly, and scurried away, leaving them with the Candy Man.

  Piet had no doubt they had the right man when he looked into those soulless eyes and then caught a proper glimpse of that tattoo.

  ‘The universe provides,’ Piet said in Dutch, feeling hate mushroom inside him as he imagined this man defiling Lucy and Josh.

  ‘Get your fucking hands off me,’ Trevor Underwood shouted. ‘I was just helping her, you crazy bastards.’

  When he started to struggle, Piet felt certain he would not be able to hold him for long. He felt his breath coming short as the adrenalin worked his lungs too hard in the cold. But he yanked the man’s arm up his back, gaining mastery over him.

  ‘You do as I say, or I’ll cut your throat.’ Gabi said, pressing the screwdriver into his neck so that she drew a bead of bad blood.

  Underwood nodded.

  ‘Start walking.’

  The awkward salsa in the snow, executed clumsily as a threesome, brought them several streets down, where they came upon a semi-derelict pub. A once-beautiful Victorian hostelry on the corner. It was surrounded by poorl erected metal fencing, warning kids to keep out. Telling them that this was a construction site and that hard hats must be worn at all times. A portaloo, standing like a bright-green frozen sentry alongside a giant, yellow skip in the road – its half-empty bulk delineated by flashing traffic cones. Scaffolding criss-crossed the facade, with a giant white tube that shot down from the topmost level into the low mound of snow-covered rubble.

  ‘Get in there,’ Gabi ordered Underwood. Gestured with her chin towards a gap in the fencing that was just about navigable.

  They trudged inside, crunching broken glass underfoot and stepping carefully over red steel beams, clearly destined for the roof. Piet looked up. A large expanse of white sky above them. Snowflakes drifting down past the naked spires of buddleia that grew like bristles of a witch’s broom through gaping apertures in the partially collapsed roof; down through the giant hole in the first floor, where damp had maybe caused the floorboards to rot and give way. Nature was taking the place back. To an architect’s trained eye, the building didn’t look structurally sound, but he had no time to ponder his safety.

  ‘Sit down. Try anything funny and I’ll kill you,’ Gabi said.

  Piet forced their captive onto a stack of timber. He climbed a ladder to the first floor, spying what he sought through that giant hole. A builder’s bucket with a length of sturdy rope tied to the handle. He untied the rope, shinned back down and bound Underwood’s hands behind his back.

  Still holding the screwdriver at his neck, Gabi was the first to begin the interrogation. ‘Where are my children?’ she asked.

  ‘How the fuck should I know?’ Underwood said, sneering at Piet, who stood before him, wondering if he looked threatening enough.

  ‘Lucy and Josh Deenen,’ Piet said. ‘What do you know about them?’

  ‘Never heard of them.’

  Unexpectedly, Gabi flipped the screwdriver and used the handle to treat Underwood to a sharp blow to the temple. ‘Lying bastard. Two blond children. A boy of four. A girl of two. Living south of Amsterdam. They were abducted from our back garden. You’ve been convicted for an almost-identical offence. Spill the beans or you’re dead meat.’

  Underwood tried to look round at her. He clutched his hand to his head, as blood tracked between his fingers to form bright red circles on the filthy ground. ‘You ain’t got it in you, you stupid tart.’

  He suddenly kicked out in front of him, catching Piet squarely in the kneecap. Piet’s vision clouded with pain. No time for salient thought. Within seconds Candy Man had somehow wriggled his hands free of the rope and grabbed a piece of four by two from the timber stack. He brought it crashing down on Gabi’s shoulder and hand, knocking the screwdriver from her determined grip. The wood whistled through the air again as Underwood hammered it home on the top of Piet’s head.

  ‘Gabi! Get help,’ he moaned, slumping to the floor, feeling nauseous and dizzy, struggling to say anything more.

  Lucidity coming and going, he watched his wife fighting valiantly for her life with a tattooed paedophile. Was he dreaming? Were they both back at home, the children tucked up in bed? Perhaps he had just fallen asleep on the sofa and slipped into a strange dream world.

  ‘Piet!’ Gabi’s shrill voice brought him to his senses.

  He crawled forwards through the rubble and detritus. Underwood had Gabi by the neck and was squeezing with his hands. Gabi’s face grew redder and redder, eyes bulbous, staring.

  Come on, Piet. You can do this. Step up. Grow a pair of balls.

  He rose to his feet, pain from his knees so acute that he almost vomited. He grabbed Underwood from behind and punched him repeatedly in the kidneys, wrestling with him for longer than he thought possible.

  Suddenly, there was the
sound of a bottle smashing. Gabi, brandishing the deadly shards of an old wine bottle, cuffed Underwood in the neck with it. Blood spurting onto the pile of virgin timber. Then, in one final gesture of defiance, she plunged the broken bottle deep into his chest.

  The fight went out of him immediately. He clutched uselessly at the neck of the bottle as Gabi backed away, wide-eyed at what she had done. But Underwood’s breath was already coming short. A gurgle in his throat. Blood bubbling up at the corners of his mouth. He sank against the timber, leaning back onto its bulk. Panting. Grimacing. His face turning purple-black with effort, as the air failed to reach his punctured lungs through the slashed windpipe.

  ‘Jesus. What have I done?’ Gabi asked.

  The noises emanating from this Candy Man were anything but a sweet offering. Gasping. Groaning. His skin fading to grey-blue, now. Deep red flowering around the wounds. All the colours of the rainbow; no treasure at the end. This defiler was not bound for paradise. But it was still a grim sight. Death looked like hard work.

  Piet put his arm around Gabi. Still dizzy. He tried to pull her head to his chest, at least to shield her eyes from the spectacle of a dying man. But she stood like a pillar of salt. Lot’s wife staring down at Sodom.

  ‘What do we do?’ she asked.

  Her voice was small. For the first time since they had met, she seemed utterly helpless. Some primal emotion swelled inside Piet’s chest, warming him, emboldening him. He covered her ears, trying to muffle the incessant noise coming from Underwood taking his last laboured breaths.

  ‘It’s alright, my love. It’s going to be alright. Keep breathing. We’ll find a way.’ Stroked her hair. ‘I’m here. I’m here.’

  The anguished look on Underwood’s face lessened. His breathing was shallow now. Only the prickling sound of blood bubbling inside him. Then, it stopped. He stopped. He was gone.

  Gabi howled. Head in hands, she flung herself onto a stack of roofing felt, wracking sobs shaking her body. She clutched at her heart as though she had been stabbed there, not Underwood. But Piet guessed she was crying for more than a dead child sex offender.

  ‘We’ve got nothing,’ she said, after her tears slowed.

  Tearing his gaze from the dead man, Piet braced himself to take the reins. He rummaged in Underwood’s jeans pocket and found a phone. He took the cash out of his wallet but left the rest. An old carpet lying in the adjacent lounge would do. He dragged it through to where Gabi sat.

  ‘Come on. Help me.’

  ‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘I just can’t.’

  ‘You can. You will.’ More than at any other time in his life, he needed to be strong and persuasive, bend his normally inflexible wife to his will. ‘We’ve got to hide the body and get out of here.’

  She nodded.

  Together they lifted the leaden weight of Underwood onto the filthy carpet and rolled his body up like an enchilada stuffed with their murderers’ guilt, his evil and the undiluted tragedy of the young lives he had ruined. They checked first that the street was deserted – nobody peeking through their windows – then carried the carpet to the skip and slid it onto the mound of old bar fittings, broken roofing and discarded bricks.

  Piet looked up into the snow-heavy sky, descending flakes seeming grey against the white of the heavens.

  ‘They’ll find him,’ Gabi whispered. ‘They’ll find him and trace him to us.’

  Taking her by the hand, he led her away from that street at a brisk pace. ‘In this weather, they won’t find him for weeks, if at all. With a bit of luck, he’ll end up in landfill, with nobody any the wiser.’

  ‘He’ll start to stink.’ Her eyes darted this way and that, seeking witnesses from behind their net curtains.

  Piet kept his voice calm. ‘He won’t even stink if it stays cold like they say it will.’

  Later, sitting in a café on the A2 in New Cross, warming his hands on a mug of hot chocolate, Piet looked down at the phone. ‘Now all we need to do is hack into this. How the hell are we going to do that?’

  Gabi looked at him through watery, bloodshot eyes. ‘I know who might help us.’

  CHAPTER 40

  South East London, Aunty Sharon’s house, 22 January

  The crack of stone against glass. Several heartbeats passed, but there it was again. George opened her eyes, clutching her duvet to her neck. Praying the knack-knack insistence would stop. The clock on her bedside table said 4 a.m. Still dark outside, but the dark before dawn. Not a time for vandalism. Those little arseholes were in their beds now.

  Maybe she had been dreaming.

  Knack. Stone bouncing from the window onto the path below. Knack.

  ‘What the fuck?’

  George sprang out of her camp bed, gathering her duvet to her in the icy chill of Tinesha’s bedroom. She pushed the curtain aside and rubbed the condensation from the window. It was freezing to the touch. She peered below, dumbfounded as to who she could see looking up at her.

  ‘What the hell are you two doing here?’ she asked, a few minutes later, stirring her instant coffee, twice clockwise and once anti-clockwise. ‘Van den Bergen emailed me to say you’d committed suicide.’

  Gabi and Piet Deenen were seated at Aunty Sharon’s kitchen table. They gripped the cups of tea she had made them with grubby hands, and ate toast savagely, as though it were their last meal. Blackened fingernails made her cringe. It was the first time she had seen Gabi looking anything but immaculately presented.

  ‘As you can see,’ Gabi said, wiping crumbs from her wind-burned cheeks, ‘we’re not dead. We’re looking for Lucy and Josh.’

  She began to cry. Shaking hands relinquished the mug as though it were radioactive. Trainee tears gave way to fully qualified wracking sobs within seconds. She clutched at her chest, showing signs of emotional frailty George had not thought Gabi capable of.

  ‘Did we have an option?’ Piet asked.

  He put his arm tenderly around his wife. No tears in his eyes, which were clearer than the last time George had seen him. His voice was strong. His posture said confident. A sudden role reversal, she observed, where the meek had inherited the Earth and the strong had been brought to their knees.

  Gabi put her head on her husband’s shoulder. She wiped her tears on his coat, then turned to George. ‘You’re the only person we could come to.’ There was a pleading look in her bloodshot eyes. ‘You won’t turn us in, will you?’

  ‘Won’t turn you in for what?’ Aunty Sharon asked, padding into the kitchen while tying her pink fluffy dressing gown tight around her middle, clippety-clop in the fur-trimmed mules she wore on her small feet. She picked up the kettle and took the lid off pointedly, as though it were a metaphor for her discovery of this clandestine dawn summit. ‘Who the fuck are these white people sitting in my kitchen, Georgina?’

  As George related the tale of the past eight months, her aunt’s sceptical expression softened, giving way to sympathetic tears. Half an hour in, Sharon clasped Gabi’s hands, stumbling through heartfelt words.

  ‘I know what it is to lose a child,’ Sharon said. She released herself from Gabi’s grip, moving to a heavy old sideboard and opening a slim drawer, secreted inside the centre cupboard. She pulled out a shining silver locket and showed the visitors the photo inside. ‘See him? That’s my Dwayne. He was only seven when he died. I fell pregnant with him when I was still a girl myself, really. Stupid cow, I was. Still. The Lord giveth, right? Ended up my own Mum raised him as much as I did. I tried to do right by little Dwayne, though. It weren’t easy, I can tell you.’ Her brow furrowed deeply. She fell silent, gazing at the photo. She took a ragged breath and continued, placing a hand on top of the locket on her large bosom. ‘He had Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy – not the sort of thing your boy had. But I feel for you, cos I know what it’s like, trying to bring up a kid what’s different. Then he got meningitis. There weren’t nothing they could do. Just one of them things. The Lord taketh away, innit?’

  George put her arm around Aunty Shar
on, and felt a pang of loss for a cousin she only vaguely remembered. A smiling boy who had been slow to walk and who, at times, resorted to a wheelchair. Born around the same time as she had been. She wondered what kind of man he would have turned into, had he lived.

  ‘How do you cope with the grief?’ Piet asked. ‘Does it ever get any easier?’

  Sharon shrugged. ‘I only bring the subject of him up once a year on the anniversary of his death. I made a vow that I’d keep my sorrow to myself, especially since I got Tinesha and Patrice. I fell pregnant with our Tin a year after little Dwayne passed. I couldn’t let Tin and her babyfather see how I was hurting. It wouldn’t have been right. So, I decided I’d put a brave face on.’ She looked down at her work-worn hands as though some wisdom were inscribed in the brown lines etched into her pink palms. ‘But there ain’t a day I don’t think about him and what might have been.’ She dabbed at her eyes with a piece of kitchen roll.

  Pushing more toast into the toaster, George turned to face the Deenens. ‘I just don’t know about this.’ She sighed, wrapping her old mohair cardigan tight around her and wriggling her freezing toes in her bedsocks. ‘By rights, I should turn you in,’ she said.

  ‘Turn us in for what?’ Piet said.

  He had a point. ‘You’ve still defrauded a nation by pretending you’re dead,’ she said, feeling like the right thing to do was lurking at the edge of her conscience, like a reluctant wallflower at a school dance. ‘And if Hasselblad was about to order your arrest …’

  ‘The Commissioner is a dick,’ Gabi said, squeezing the bridge of her nose. ‘The Chief of Police is a clown. You and Van den Bergen were the only hope we had. I know your hands were tied, though. Look …’ she reached out to George, but George remained by the toaster. Didn’t want to make contact with those unscrubbed digits ‘… we’re here to find our children, not commit a crime.’