The Girl Who Walked in the Shadows

by Riches, Marnie

  ‘Just keep walking, bruv,’ an unfamiliar voice said. Cornrows. An indelicate Peckham patois, not unlike Danny’s. Sounded older. ‘Which way you wanna go back?’

  ‘Cops are coming.’ Danny’s voice. Two metres away and gaining ground. Sounded breathless. ‘Backstreets are quiet.’

  ‘Nah, man. Got to get into the crowds. Hiding in plain sight.’

  ‘Whatevs. You wiped your prints of the gun? Ditch it, yeah?’

  A thunk, as something heavy hit the frosty ground at the base of the trees in the park.

  An amused chuckle. ‘You telling me how to do my job, man?’ Cornrows sucked his teeth. Moving further away now. ‘You the one paying me for my expertise, innit?’

  ‘Respect. Listen. I got to be someplace else, bruv. Laters.’

  George took the arrival of several police cars as her cue to move. Last thing she needed was to get roped in as a witness.

  With a thunderous, disbelieving heart, she emerged from her hiding place. She spotted Danny on the other side of the street, on his own once again. No sign of Cornrows.

  Go home or keep on his tail?

  A snap decision, fuelled by anger at the theft of an innocent criminologist’s life. George determined that she would follow her ex-lover, as he made his way briskly to some other terrible rendezvous, wondering how long it would be before she joined Dobkin in his one-way journey to the other side …

  CHAPTER 44

  A railway arch in South East London, at the same time, and flashbacks to early February

  ‘Tell me about your sordid little enterprise,’ Gabi said, pushing the razor blades further into the flesh between Bloom’s fingertips and his nails.

  A muffled cry was the closest she got to eliciting a scream.

  ‘Made of stern stuff, are you?’ She moved back round to the front to examine his face. He was biting his lip so hard that the skin was turning purple. Eyes screwed up tight – the prosthetic orb not quite concealed by the lid – a solitary tear trickled its way along his jawline. But the sweat beaded freely on his brow and his nostrils flared as he breathed in, out, in, out heavily. Good. He was in agony. Blood had started to flow in earnest from the wounds, pooling on the floor behind him, beneath where Piet had tied his hands together.

  ‘Come on, you entitled piece of shit,’ she said, savouring this switch in the balance of power. No longer a sycophant, servicing the ego of her fee-paying client.

  She took a stiletto flick knife out of her jeans pocket. A handy weapon for a woman living on the streets. The thin blade sprang to attention in her slender hand. She stuck it deftly up Bloom’s right nostril. ‘Tell me, or you’ll never snort a line of coke again, the Duke.’ Her clipped annunciation of his underworld moniker was laced with mocking cynicism.

  Bloom’s eyes shot open, his good eye, staring at her, as though she were deranged. He shifted his focus to Piet, standing behind her. Grey-faced and waxy-looking, holding the gun, which looked too heavy for him.

  ‘You two are fucked up,’ he said.

  But Gabi inserted the knife several millimetres more into his nasal passage, knowing she was about to draw blood. ‘Spill the beans, old bean.’

  ‘Okay, crazy tits! Take the knife and the razors out before I bleed to death.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then you might as well kill me.’

  ‘That can be arranged,’ Piet said, clicking off the safety on the gun. He gesticulated at the recumbent shape of Sophie in the corner. ‘You can join her in hell, if you want.’

  ‘Alright! I’ll talk. But only if you take those goddamned razors out of my nails.’

  Gabi withdrew the various blades. She bound his hands with a filthy rag, then returned the stiletto to his jaw, pressing into pink fleshy jowl.

  ‘Speak!’ she said.

  ‘I run a trafficking ring,’ he said. ‘But you already know that, because …’ he grimaced at Piet ‘… you killed my fucking business partner.’

  ‘Did I? Did I really?’ Piet’s voice, behind Gabi, so unlike the downtrodden ghost of a man who had departed those lowland shores in the belly of an old lifeboat. Even though he shook with illness, his was a confident voice now.

  But Bloom was not displaying the requisite amount of fear and respect owed to Jack Frost.

  ‘Yes,’ he said to Piet. ‘You murdered Rufus Lazami. Three children, now without their father. I hope you’re proud of yourself. I’ve had one of my people watching you. Did you really think you were off the radar?’ He started to laugh. Menacing and derisory. ‘Amateur! You can run, but you can’t hide, Mr Deenen. I know it was you who took out one of my players in Amsterdam. And two associates in Berlin.’

  ‘You know less than you think,’ Gabi said, scrutinising Bloom’s pudgy, cosmetically altered face, biting back the urge to tell him exactly how the drama had unfolded in the Zoological Gardens on that snowy night.

  *

  In addition to discovering on Trevor Underwood’s phone a text exchange with Gerhard Hauptmann and photos of children they had been certain were Lucy and Josh, she and Piet had found the details of a man called Tomas Vlinders. It had taken days of painstaking and logistically difficult Internet research in libraries and Internet cafés to track Vlinders down to a run-down block in the Bijlmer district of Amsterdam, and Hauptmann, the owner of several tenanted houses in Kreuzberg and Neukölln, to a smart, second-floor abode in a historic block near the Zoological Gardens in Berlin.

  The decision to travel back to mainland Europe had caused a great deal of consternation between them.

  ‘We’ve only just got to London, for God’s sake!’ Piet had said, warming his hands by an open fire that the other rough sleepers had set beneath a Camden railway arch. ‘We haven’t got passports!’

  ‘Piet, we’ve got to follow every available lead,’ she had said, feeling the ever-deepening snow that had gathered in drifts – even here – creeping through the soles of her inadequate boots. ‘Because one of them might lead us straight to the kids.’ She had lowered her voice, looking over her shoulder at the drunks knocking back stinking bottles of cooking brandy and tins of strong lager. ‘Underwood was worth going after, wasn’t he? Haven’t we got a new trail to follow?’

  Nodding, Piet had said, ‘Yes. But I thought you couldn’t face it. I thought you were in bits. Having second thoughts about it all.’

  His words had stung. Gabi had always been one to thrive under pressure; the orphan who coped with adversity. The little hard-nut daughter of a South East London builder, making her way in the middle-class world of marketing and PR. Holding her own with the likes of Gordon Bloom. In her marriage to Piet, she was undoubtedly the stronger of the two. Or had been. Until killing Underwood.

  ‘I’m fine,’ she had said, batting away the memory of the paedophile as he had drowned in his own blood. ‘I’m over it. Now, are we going to track down these animals and get our son and daughter back?’

  ‘How the hell can we travel without passports?’

  ‘This is London. You can find anything here.’

  The recommendation to make contact with a man called Danny had come from a homeless man called Irish Tony. Living in a Kilburn squat, Tony had offered them shelter for several nights in exchange for a bottle of single malt and a hand job from Gabi. They had negotiated amicably, settling on two bottles of whisky, no hand job. Danny was your man, apparently. Purveyor of fine counterfeit identification and other contraband articles of great practical value – for a fee. She had left Piet to seek this man out, while she had made another fundraising approach to George and her endlessly empathetic aunt.

  Travelling to Zeebrugge in the cab of a Polish truck driver had been painless enough. Nobody had been looking for dearly departed Gabi and Piet Deenen, let alone interested in questioning the well-faked identities of a rather dishevelled René Vandewinkel and his wife, Bouvien. Even the authorities were too preoccupied with the freakish weather. Stories of the Deenen children had been replaced by rolling news shows depicting gridlock,
whiteout and record-breaking icicles hanging from every rooftop.

  But once on Belgian soil, rather than go immediately in search of Vlinders in Amsterdam and risk discovery by the Dutch authorities, they had opted to continue with the Pole through to Berlin.

  Sleeping in a strange land, with three feet of snow for a bed and unforgiving Arctic temperatures as their blanket, had become the toughest of survival challenges. Days had passed, as Gabi pieced together information about Hauptmann, sneaking in and out of hotel computer rooms, where lazy residents had failed to log out of their guest accounts, consuming what was left of their daily Internet allocation.

  Huddled together, trying and failing to sleep in an old Volvo estate car they had broken into, they contemplated what she had discovered: the porn sites, registered in Hauptmann’s name, that had given way, several pages in, to a new log-in; a firewall she simply didn’t know how to bypass, though she could guess the content on the other side. ‘If only I could have cracked the password,’ she had said, pausing to cough violently in the car’s freezing interior. The smell of plastic and diesel had caught at the back of her throat, making it harder to suppress the tickle. ‘Maybe I’d have seen Josh and Lucy.’

  ‘Is that what you’d want?’ Piet had asked, holding her close. ‘To see our babies in stomach churning photos?’

  She had bitten her lip, shaking her head fervently. ‘I’d rather. I’d—’ The unpalatable words had stuck. ‘I’d rather they were dead.’

  It was a thought she had entertained a hundred times or more in the privacy of her own mind. It had been the first time she had ever said it aloud, and had felt immediately guilty, as though she had, indeed committed the infanticide that the Twitter trolls had accused her of.

  Piet had merely squeezed her hand. ‘We’ll get them back,’ he’d said. ‘They’re young. Maybe they won’t even remember. Maybe some rich lunatic who desperately wants a family has bought them off these traffickers. Maybe they’re …’

  At 4 a.m., the air was too cold and thin to sustain anything akin to promise or hope. Piet had fallen silent. Gabi had slept fitfully for only an hour.

  Sustained only by partially eaten falafel that they had salvaged from a bin outside a kebab shop, they had used the cover of darkness the following evening to advance on Hauptmann’s apartment. Second floor up, the light had been shining in his living room. Slipping into the communal entrance hall, as a neighbour had left the building. Whispering in the shadows; hatching a plan.

  ‘Is that you, Hans?’ The response to Piet’s authoritative knock. A muffled voice had come from somewhere inside the apartment.

  Unhurried footsteps had gotten closer on the other side of the heavy, ornate door. The light that had been visible through the spy-hole had suddenly snuffed out. Hauptmann had looked out onto the landing. ‘Hans? Hans! Are you there?’

  Would he open up? Gabi had held her breath, praying he wouldn’t slide some large bolt home, pad back to his living room, rendering their visit useless. But curiosity had clearly got the better of him. When the lock clicked and the door had opened a fraction, Piet had thrown all of his weight against it, pushing the rotund Hauptmann onto his back in the hallway. Scrambling to his feet with astonishing speed for a fat man.

  They had chased him down along the slippery polished floor of the hall into a bedroom to the left. An acrid stench had hit Gabi on entering the room – unmistakeably tomcat urine. An overfed Persian cat had sat on almost every available surface. Newspaper had covered the floor, dotted with cat turds and pools of thick yellow pee. Dust had hung heavy in the air, along with the foetid tang of old, soiled bedding. But the most distasteful sight of all had been three lots of computer equipment, each hooked up to wide-screen monitors: a pornographic image of a pre-teen girl up on one of the screens, opened in Microsoft Paint; two more suggestive images of naked boys on the remaining equipment, clearly in the midst of being photoshopped.

  ‘What do you want?’ Hauptmann had shouted. A thin, reedy voice for such a large man. ‘I’ve got money.’ He’d backed towards his wardrobe, though there was nowhere to go.

  ‘Money won’t be necessary,’ Piet had said. ‘It’s you we’ve come for.’

  The crotch of Hauptmann’s trousers had stained dark as he’d urinated. ‘Please don’t hurt me.’

  Together they had wrestled him onto the bed, tying him up with electrical cable from his own computer equipment, kneeing him in the small of his back, straddling him so that he was face down, gasping for breath.

  ‘Where are these children?!’ Gabi had shouted, twisting Hauptmann’s head with a nauseating crack so that he was forced to look at the monitors. She’d wanted to snap his fat neck, but the hunger for answers had been gnawing. ‘Where are our children? Two Dutch toddlers.’

  ‘Lucy and Joshua,’ Piet had said, emerging from Hauptmann’s kitchen, carrying a meat cleaver with purpose. His dead eyes had given him an utterly sinister aura.

  After twenty minutes of quietly terrorising Hauptmann to no avail, but then finally persuading him to give them access to his computer suite by threatening to dismember his cats, Gabi had uncovered his website and database. It contained thousands of images of children. Feeling a mother’s anguish, manifesting itself as almost crippling dyspepsia, she had looked to Piet for guidance.

  ‘What the fuck shall we do with him?’ she had asked.

  Piet had raised the machete. ‘I’ll kill him. It’ll be messy, but it’s something to do on a cold snowy night, I guess.’

  ‘Kill me?’ Hauptmann had squealed. ‘No! I’m innocent. These are just photographs, nothing more. I’m a photographer, specialising in children’s portraits.’

  Gabi had brought a computer keyboard smashing down on his head. ‘No photographer I know photographs the abuse of abducted children and calls it portraiture, you fucking moron.’

  ‘I don’t know where your children are!’

  But they had rifled through the drawers of his desk. That had been the point at which Piet had found the keys, labelled up with the address of the house in Kreuzberg.

  ‘Keep an eye on him,’ Piet had said, handing the machete to Gabi. ‘I’ll be back.’

  *

  ‘Are our children living with the Roma?’ Piet asked, moving closer.

  Bloom looked askance. ‘Roma? Gypsies, you mean? How the hell should I know?’

  ‘You took them!’ Gabi screamed.

  Shaking his head vociferously, Bloom scowled. ‘No, I fucking did not!’ A flash of anger unexpectedly blurred the lines as to who was really in charge here. ‘And what have gypsies got to do with your missing brats?’

  ‘Your trafficking ring preys on kids from Roma camps,’ Piet said. ‘You use corrupt Roma men to provide you with a steady stream of children as young as four or five. And the Roma are mobile as well as desperately poor. Why the fuck wouldn’t you move our children around with them, so they can be abused all over Europe, you scum bag?’

  He lunged forwards and pistol-whipped Bloom on the temple.

  *

  Finding the house in Kreuzberg had been the toughest challenge Piet had yet faced during this mission: the basement of a semi-derelict Berlin townhouse where the stuff of nightmarish news reports was reality. Ten children had been locked in together in the dark, sleeping on filthy mattresses spread across the floor. No Joseph Fritzl or Fred West had stood guard, yet this situation had seemed so far worse to Piet: missing children, at the mercy of not one psychopath but an entire network of traffickers and abusers that saw young lives only as commodities to be exploited and monetised. To Piet, that basement had represented the ghoulish reality of a ruined world.

  ‘Have you seen this little girl and little boy?’ he had asked, showing a photograph of Lucy and Josh taken at nursery.

  Shaking heads had told him that none of them had.

  Setting the captives free to wander in the snow in the hope that they might somehow be reunited with their parents had felt like an empty triumph. He had wanted to wait with the
m until the police arrived – to know that they would be safe – but Piet had had no option but to slink away into the shadows, to return to Gabi and Hauptmann.

  Climbing the stairs of the paedophile’s apartment block, he had felt a mixture of relief and dread: relief that his babies had not been in that house of heartbreak; dread that they might be prisoners inside another. He had determined to make Hauptmann suffer. Where justice had failed, he would avenge those Roma children.

  But his rising bloodlust had been quelled at the sight of the door to Hauptmann’s apartment standing ajar.

  ‘Gabi?’ He had pushed it open, following a smudged trail of blood that had led to the chintzy living room. His pulse had pounded in his neck. ‘Gabi?’

  The apartment had been devoid of any signs that his wife and Hauptmann had ever been there, but for the giant message on the wall, daubed in blood. One word.

  ZOO.

  *

  ‘I’ve already told you, you piece of shit,’ Bloom said, spitting as he spoke in a voice thick with venomous intent. ‘I don’t know where your kids are. And why the hell would I? I don’t keep tabs on every product that’s bought and sold under my name.’

  Yet again Piet brought the weight of the gun down on his temple, drawing blood this time.

  ‘Product? You see children as fucking products? To be peddled around celebrities and politicians in some Margate hotel, as though they were drinks in a minibar or a room service special.’

  Bloom’s raised eyebrow showed his surprise.

  Piet nodded. ‘Oh, yes, I know all about that hotel. And I’ve got the list of so-called pillars of society that are regular paying guests, Lord Bloom.’

  For the first time since their interrogation had begun, Piet watched with satisfaction as Bloom swallowed hard, the pupil dilating in his functioning eye betraying fear. ‘You’re bluffing,’ he said.