The Girl Who Walked in the Shadows

by Riches, Marnie

‘Shit!’ He thumped the phone receiver against the wall, hammering an even deeper hole into the plaster, pounding the earpiece in the same spot where many men before him had also taken out their frustration. His lip curled at the thought that he had anything in common with the bottom-feeders standing behind him.

  ‘What about Hasselblad? He’s standing up for me, right?’

  ‘I’m afraid Jaap won’t vouch—’

  The phone cut out. Time’s up. Kamphuis withdrew his phone card and stared at it in disbelief. Inserted it back into the slot. Took it out. Inserted it. Nothing. His balance registered as zero. Hasselblad wouldn’t vouch for him. Jesus Christ! Had that fiend Van den Bergen told the Chief of Police that his very own deputy had been plotting a betrayal of biblical proportions all this while? That he had stolen the Deenen children ultimately to bring Hasselblad down? No, no, no!

  He stared down at the phone card again, barely able to process the feelings of failure and rejection.

  ‘Fuck off back to your cell, you fat bastard!’ one of the brutes behind him shouted.

  ‘That’s enough, lads!’ one of the prison officers said.

  Kamphuis turned around, wrenching his thoughts away from the phonecard, Hasselblad, his solicitor and the Holy Grail of bail, and snapped back to focus on this grim place with its emulsioned walls and its harsh lighting and the smell of sweat and tobacco. These hostile, violent men, gathered before him. No longer any distinction between the Commissioner of the Dutch Police and these cockroaches. And yet …

  ‘Pig!’ one of the prisoners shouted. A man with a shaved head, a face entirely covered by tattoos with a broken nose as its centrepiece. Towering above the others in this queue for contact with the sane world outside. Staring straight at Kamphuis with manic eyes that said he’d smuggled amphetamines or coke in somehow. ‘Fucking looks one. Smells like one. Nonce!’

  Grunting and squealing from the others. Pack-mentality at its worst.

  ‘I’m not a nonce!’ Kamphuis shouted. ‘I’m the opposite of a nonce. I’m … I’m—’

  ‘That’s enough, lads,’ the prison officer said, taking Kamphuis by the elbow.

  He could feel his knees giving way, sweat rolling down over his belly into his waistband. But he didn’t want to show these animals that his world was caving in.

  I’m the Commissioner. I’m Olaf Kamphuis. I’m going to beat this charge. That lanky prick Van den Bergen will get the evidence he needs against Hasselblad and Bloom. The judge will cut me a deal for bringing down an international trafficking ring. I can do this. I’ve always done this. Somehow, I’ll make a silver lining out of this dark cloud.

  The prison officer marched him past the derisory mob and he felt his legs almost buckle. Testosterone and hate thick on the air made it difficult to breathe in this den of iniquity. Back to his cell, where he would at least be left alone to savour thoughts of his elegant home, his magnificent car, his wife … comforting himself, as he pondered how he would feel when he eventually sold the rights to his true life story for a sum of money that would make a Chief of Police’s salary seem like pocket change.

  Eyes boring into him as he walked through the recreation area, though. Men playing cards, the tension between them palpable. Porcine grunting noises again, emitted in his direction.

  Ignore them. Think of the future.

  He may have scuppered his chances of taking Hasselblad’s job, but he wouldn’t be the first jailbird to sell a story about his rise and fall to Hollywood. All he needed was his solicitor to pull it out of the bag in court and a good agent to come knocking. It’s going to be fine.

  ‘You bearing up?’ the prison officer asked as they neared his cell. A short man with the strength of an ox. No nonsense. Pincer-like grip on his upper arm.

  Fleetingly, Kamphuis wondered what the prison officers thought of the Deenen case. Did they too hate him?

  ‘Yes. Of course I’m bearing up,’ he said. ‘I’m the Commissioner, aren’t I?’ Pulling his arm free with a disdainful jerk. Best to show these uniforms who was really boss around here. Act like a policing legend and you’ll be treated like one.

  Cell door, open. Newspapers waiting for him on the bed. Every single front cover – broadsheets, red tops and magazines – plastered with the Deenens’ faces.

  COUPLE ADMITS TO FAKING DEATH.

  DEENENS: BACK FROM THE DEAD.

  FRAUD OR DEVOTED FATHER? WHO IS PIET DEENEN?

  ROBO-MUM RETURNS – SHOULD GABI GET HER KIDS BACK?

  ‘Did you put those there on purpose?’ he asked the officer, grinding his teeth, eye ticking.

  But the fire alarm was ringing suddenly. Resounding throughout the prison with lights flashing near the ceiling, as if to corroborate that this was, indeed, a red alert. Almost immediate mayhem, as the prisoners’ cell doors were all unlocked. Men jeering. The pelting of feet on lino as inmates ran hither and thither towards muster points.

  Bewildered, without his prison officer escort, Kamphuis found himself alone. He looked inside his cell. Without a lock it offered no sanctuary. But the alarm was ringing insistently, protesting, ‘Fire! Fire!’

  ‘Hello, darling. Fancy that. Me and you. Alone at last.’

  It took Kamphuis a moment to register to whom the voice belonged. The giant of a man from the phone queue who had called him a pig. Those eyes … manic, staring, inside a head the size of an extra large bowling ball. The Dutch flag tattooed in amateurish fashion in red, white and blue on the man’s right cheek. The Nazi iron cross in faded blue on his miserly forehead. A winged SS insignia on his neck. Now that he was only three feet away, Kamphuis could behold him in all his terrifying splendour. Skulls, adorning his skull. Sleeves of ink all the way to his wrist depicting hellish scenes of torture and pain. Bulbous arms that had been pumped up with steroids and a membership for life of the prison’s gym. Yellowed, twisted teeth with the front incisor missing from the top that put him in mind of a nineteenth-century bare knuckle fighter.

  ‘Oh. There’s a fire,’ Kamphuis said, smiling weakly. ‘We need to, er …’ It was as though his voice had given up on him. Like it knew something he was refusing to believe.

  In a feeble attempt to square up to the advancing tattooed man, Kamphuis stuck out his paunch and stood on his tiptoes, still optimistic that he could somehow turn this confrontation around to suit him.

  ‘I knew when I first saw you,’ Kamphuis said, winking. Chummy. ‘I thought to myself …’

  But even if his voice hadn’t faltered once more, bonding to the accompanying sound of the fire alarm was clearly not on the agenda for this painted beast.

  The prisoner took out a length of what appeared to be thin gauge electrical wire.

  ‘Oh,’ Kamphuis said, pointing uselessly at the ligature, every sense on overdrive, fear so acute that it had paralysed his fight or flight impulses.

  His attacker’s movements were swift and practised. He moved in quickly for this last deadly tango, where he led and Kamphuis could only follow. Wire wrapped around his neck. Spinning him around somehow, so that the portly police Commissioner had his back to the tattooed man’s chest. Fingers inside the workshop-garrotte. Desperately trying to fight the pressure, as his assailant squeezed tighter and tighter.

  He tried to buck the man and kick out behind. Suddenly Kamphuis’ bleeding fingers were free. He was gasping, gasping. Dizzy and disoriented. But the man had a fresh grip on him again. No fingers in the way this time. The pain was intense. Wire cutting into his neck. No better than a piece of Gouda on a cheese board. Desperately trying to kick his way free. Lights popping behind his eyes, as his vision blurred. Still, part of him was surprised that this was ending so badly. A fleeting moment, where he felt abject self-pity, already lamenting the passing of Olaf Kamphuis. Fading fast.

  Why?

  Perhaps a taker of life can hear the thoughts of the dying.

  ‘The Duke says, “Hello,” Commissioner. Says you should have kept your nose out of his fucking business.’

  Kamphui
s’ last thought was one of regret that Van den Bergen would probably get his job now.

  CHAPTER 62

  Amsterdam, mortuary, 31 March

  Standing beneath the harsh overhead lights in her scrubs, staring down at the saddening bulk of the grey corpse, Marianne de Koninck sighed heavily.

  In Van den Bergen’s peripheral vision, he realized she had turned towards him for a reaction, but he was unable to tear his own gaze away from the sight of his nemesis on the slab. Naked. Lifeless. A footnote in policing history.

  ‘Who would ever have thought, eh?’ she said. ‘Olaf bloody Kamphuis. Dead.’

  Van den Bergen closed his eyes and tried to identify how he felt. Bereft? Not really. Relieved? No. Triumphant? He wasn’t the kind of man to gloat on the misfortune of even his enemies. He realised he felt nothing. Numb. The sight of a dead fat man with livid strangulation marks around his neck did not even inspire his old friend, health anxiety, in him. Glum resignation. Almost pH neutral, but not quite. A sense that the world was a shitty place and that he, like Olaf Kamphuis, was a fallible man.

  ‘What have you got, Marianne?’ he asked, turning away, focussing on the hollows in her cheeks that marked her out as a long-distance runner. So alive. So healthy. So unlike Kamphuis.

  ‘I’ve made a preliminary examination and it’s obvious he was garrotted with something thin and strong, like wire,’ she said, leading the Chief Inspector into her office, where she had notes spread out on her desk and records up on her computer screen. ‘Inmates can be violent bastards, I’m sure, but this was clean. Looks like the work of a professional.’

  ‘Maybe someone he’d put away,’ Van den Bergen said, contemplating how many convicted criminals inside that prison might have wanted a police commissioner dead. Especially one who had orchestrated the kidnapping of two toddlers. He tried to picture Kamphuis on the inside. So reviled, he had had to be escorted everywhere by his own dedicated prison officer – strangely absent during a fire drill. An alarm going off just as Kamphuis was neither in his cell nor in a public area.

  How fortuitous it must have been for a man who had intended to strangle the life out of a heavily guarded inmate to have freedom of movement inside the prison. No guard. No witnesses.

  Van den Bergen’s numbness suddenly gave way to a delicious thrill of realisation. ‘It was a hit. Somebody put out a hit on Kamphuis.’

  An eyebrow shooting northwards said Marianne was surprised. ‘You think? Why?’

  ‘There was a motive behind Kamphuis abducting those Deenen kids, but I can’t share the details. Not yet.’

  ‘Oh?’ She narrowed her eyes at him, clearly rattling through the possibilities in her head.

  ‘It’s sensitive.’ He folded his arms high across his chest, and blinked hard at her, willing himself not to blurt Hasselblad’s name. He felt it in every inch of scar tissue and his probably rheumatic bones that Bloom was behind Kamphuis’ death.

  Change the subject.

  ‘So, I was bloody relieved when Elvis finally impounded Kamphuis’ Audi last night,’ he said. ‘Parked on the wrong side of town, would you believe it? God knows what he’d been up to in that. Are you going to be able to take a look at some point today?’ Talking fast. A friendly tone. Hoping to distract this most intelligent and intuitive of forensic pathologists.

  She was still frowning. Dissecting his expression, as she would soon be dissecting his opposite number’s corpulent body. ‘Strietman’s already on it,’ she said. ‘Said they’d found a couple of mobile phones in the glove box, hidden beneath the casing.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. Did Elvis not tell you?’

  ‘Little bastard.’ Van den Bergen watched Marianne move the mouse over the mouse pad, clicking. He wondered if Kamphuis had kept a phone for every woman he’d been screwing behind his wife’s back.

  ‘Talk of the devil. I’ve just had an email from Strietman,’ she said, frowning, a look of alarm contorting her handsome features. There was a change in the timbre of her voice from idle interest to deep suspicion. ‘Look at this.’

  Leaning over her desk, Van den Bergen slid his glasses from their chain onto the end of his nose. She turned the screen around to meet him.

  Marianne,

  Just switched on those mobile phones. No pin or password protection on them. The name Hauptmann rings a bell but not sure about Underwood. Any thoughts?

  Strietman.

  Staring at the black words on the white screen, Van den Bergen’s thought processes came to an abrupt halt. Scrambled neurons. Overcooked synapse spaghetti where separate strands glued themselves together. It made no sense.

  ‘Hauptmann was one of Jack Frost’s Berlin victims,’ Marianne said. ‘Well, Jack Frost or Krampus, or whatever the hell you want to call him. How on earth did Kamphuis come to have his phone? And who’s Underwood?’ She was glaring, now. Inching her face closer to his, as though she could intimidate a response from him with an accusatory glance alone. ‘Paul?’

  ‘Trevor Underwood,’ Van den Bergen said simply, remembering Gabi’s confession that she had killed the escaped convict, leaving his body to freeze, wrapped in a rug, dumped in a builder’s skip in London. ‘A paedo.’

  Spaghetti sticking together. A mess without substance or meaning.

  Piet Deenen had admitted to killing Rufus Lazami, Tomas Vlinders… Gabi had admitted to killing Underwood in self-defence. He was certain that one or both of them had killed Hauptmann and Meyer in the zoo. All tied up. Wasn’t it?

  ‘We didn’t have a shred of useful forensic evidence from those Jack Frost murders,’ Marianne said. ‘And now we’ve got two mobile phones in the Commissioner’s car. What exactly have your investigations been throwing up, Paul? What’s so sensitive you’re not prepared to talk about? Was Olaf Jack Frost?’ Incredulous voice and a wry, half-smile on her face.

  ‘No. He wasn’t. I’m absolutely certain of it. I know who Jack Frost is. I’m preparing the case.’

  Marianne scratched her scalp beneath her cap and shrugged. ‘Well, if you think—’

  ‘Go through your evidence again, Marianne. Please. Every last sample. Something here’s not right.’

  CHAPTER 63

  Amsterdam, The Cracked Pot Coffee Shop, at the same time, then, police headquarters, later

  ‘What do you mean, why we packing up?’ Aunty Sharon said, neatly folding Tinesha’s clothes and stacking them inside the old suitcase. She turned to George, bags beneath her eyes said she hadn’t been sleeping so well, sharing that lumpy old bed with her daughter; kept awake by the sound of Inneke downstairs, screwing her way to a paid utilities bill. ‘I wanna go home. We all do.’

  Frustrated, noticing that the heavy old curtains hadn’t been pulled back sufficiently on the left hand side, George pressed her palms to her temples.

  ‘This isn’t over, Aunty Shaz. You’re still in danger,’ she said, eyes roving over the place, noticing the orange roses in a vase on the side. Photographs from Aunty Sharon’s place. A plant. The place smelled clean, as it had done when George had lived there.

  ‘If that cow, my sister can up sticks and leave, then so can we,’ she said, wafting into the kitchenette to retrieve a cardigan, hung on one of the battered cabinet handles. ‘My Patrice is missing school. Tin is down on her wages. They won’t pay her for this little holiday.’

  George sighed and sat down on the edge of the chaise longue. She could smell Patrice’s feet. She stood abruptly and dizziness from days of worrying about her mother’s whereabouts and nights of sleeplessness battered her until she felt like a woozy bare-knuckle fighter, taking too many punches.

  ‘Van den Bergen will sort it.’

  ‘What? Like he said he’d sort us a nice hotel?’ Her Aunty closed the lid on Tinesha’s case. Zipped up. Snapped the tiny padlock shut.

  ‘He did!’

  ‘Yeah.’ Hand on hip. Raised eyebrows. The standard Williams-May response to an outlandish suggestion. Face arranged into an expression that said she was a
bout to disparage the shit out of George’s notion. ‘Some shithole in the middle of nowhere? A train ride into town.’ She sucked her teeth, long and low. ‘If I’m going to have an enforced holiday in Holland, I’m going to make damn sure I’m where the action’s at, if I can. We ain’t no suburbian types. But enough’s enough now. I’m homesick for London and my house with my things. There’s shit I can’t get at the supermarkets, here. I can’t do no baking in that crappy little oven, neither.’ She pointed to her ‘holiday wig’ and then pulled it up to reveal her hairline beneath, even more dog-eared than usual. ‘See that? I tried to put the oven on gas mark six the other day and singed my poor fucking barnet. It ain’t dignified, George.’

  But George had no space in her thoughts for idle chit-chat about the non-safety of Jan’s cooker. Remembering the man that had broken into Aunty Sharon’s house, just as the cussing band of refugees had exited through the back gate, George swallowed hard. Fear infecting her bones like the sickly ache of a virus. As though it had happened only yesterday.

  Sharon grabbed her arm and pulled her into a bear hug, unexpectedly. ‘You worrying about her? Don’t worry about her. It ain’t the first time she’s gone missing, is it, darling? What was it she texted you? She wanted time to herself. Time to think?’

  But her aunt’s embrace did nothing to stem the advance of George’s fear. ‘It’s not Letitia I’m bloody worried about! It’s you! People are getting bumped off left right and centre. This place …’ she looked up at the cracks and cobwebs that marked the high, gabled ceiling out as old ‘… this seedy, crappy room seems to be a safe haven, whenever I need it. And we need it now! Danny is dead. Right? The Commissioner of the police force is dead! You need to stay here until me and Paul—’

  ‘Sod Paul!’ her Aunt said. ‘He ain’t gonna get me my job back from Dermot Robinson, is he? He ain’t gonna pay for all that heating you mother’s been using. My windows need cleaning, George! You know how it is. I don’t want that bitch across the way pointing the finger.’