The Girl Who Broke the Rules

by Marnie Riches

  ‘You’re such a superstitious old woman!’ Stefan said, punching his shoulder.

  ‘This place is haunted,’ Iwan said. ‘I’m telling you.’

  The gable window was dark, but his fevered imagination conjured up a ghost from the past eyeing him from above. Perhaps a Jew, sheltering from the Nazis. Maybe a sick or deformed child from Amsterdam’s glory days gazed down at him. Some merchant’s dirty secret, locked in the attic. Protruding from the gable was a beam with the hook on the end – so useful for hoisting materials up to the top floor. But Iwan imagined it was a witch’s finger, beckoning him up to the top, so he might plunge to his death.

  He crossed himself and followed his workmates inside.

  ‘We’re going to get you plastering out the top floor today,’ Stefan said. Laughing raucously.

  The others joined in. Iwan might have retorted with something witty, had he not felt like he was dying. All he could manage was a ‘Ha ha. Very funny.’

  ‘You think I’m joking?’

  ‘Stefan! Come on, man. No!’

  Stefan pointed to the giant sheaf of plasterboards that were stacked in the hallway. ‘Top floor. Board and skim by the end of the day. Take Pawel up there with you. He’ll fight the ghosts off.’

  Iwan groaned. Picked up his drill case from the cupboard under the stairs. Collected the bucket containing his trowel and saw.

  ‘You seen the rest of my tools?’ he asked the others.

  They replied that they hadn’t. He shrugged. They’d be around. Trudged to the top. There was a strange smell on the air. Something more than just dust, damp and rotten wood. The precise nature of the scent eluded him. Never mind. He’d have a cigarette and a coffee from the flask Krystyna had made him, first. Fuck Stefan!

  As he passed beneath the threshold that marked the smaller of the attic rooms, he heard Michal shout downstairs.

  ‘Someone’s been in! Back door’s been jemmied, by the looks.’

  ‘Anything taken?’ Stefan shouted between floors.

  Iwan backed onto the landing and bellowed down the stairwell, ‘My drill is still here. They’d have taken that. You sure you’re not still pissed, Michal?’

  ‘Nothing missing here,’ Stefan shouted. ‘Have a good look round, lads. Then, screw the door shut for now. Can’t have cats or squatters getting in.’

  Iwan nodded. Sighed. Progressed beyond the threshold, traversing the smaller ante-room that would be divided into a hallway and en suite to a master. Entered the main room. The one with the window. The one he had been dreading entering. He dropped his drill case and bucket. Screamed. Then, he vomited over the steel toecaps of his boots.

  CHAPTER 14

  Amsterdam, police headquarters, later

  Van den Bergen was sitting in the disabled cubicle on the top floor. Clutching at his spasming stomach. Contemplating the frenzy of excitement that had been almost palpable during the press conference. Imagining the dressing-down he was going to get from Hasselblad when he eventually emerged from his hideaway. His throat burned as though he had swallowed razor blades. Maybe he wasn’t coming down with a throat infection. Perhaps he was just hoarse from talking to George for ninety minutes or more, in the freezing cold of the small hours. Last night. Seemed a lifetime ago now.

  ‘Paul, you’re driving me mad,’ she had said. Whispering at almost normal pitch above the noise of what could have been an extractor fan. Her voice sounding tinny, as though she were in a tiled space like the bathroom. ‘Just spit it out. What the hell have you done?’

  He had sighed. ‘I’m struggling. I’ve been…you know? And I took these…’

  ‘What? What did you take, you silly bastard?’

  ‘Too many codeine.’

  There had been a silence that he wasn’t entirely sure he’d be able to breach.

  ‘You telling me you OD’d?’

  He had nodded, though she couldn’t see him, sitting as he was on the end of his bed in his pants and his frayed work shirt. Head in his left hand, staring dolefully at his bare feet.

  ‘You okay? Paul? Speak to me!’

  ‘They pumped my stomach. I’m fine, now,’ he had lied.

  In the ensuing silence, he had held the phone close against his heart and let out a silent sob. Glad that nobody was watching. Took a deep breath and returned the phone to his ear. ‘It’s all getting on top of me. I—’

  ‘For God’s sake, Paul, get some help. Go to Narcotics Anonymous or something. See a doctor. Anything. But acknowledge you’ve got a problem.’

  ‘Come over.’

  ‘How can I just drop everything and come running? To Amsterdam! It’s not round the corner. And you’re not the only one with commitments. I’m in the middle of a PhD. I’ve got Ad here, for Christ’s sakes!’

  ‘Oh?’

  It had not been his intention to let that out, and especially not in that piqued tone. An indicator of how he felt about Karelse. Nearly four years on, and his resolve to keep his misgivings about George’s boyfriend to himself had morphed into regular, semi-naked scorn.

  ‘Stop! Before you start, just bloody stop!’ George had warned him.

  So, he had quickly changed the subject and told her about the first dead girl, then the gruesome discovery of the second earlier that evening. An equally troublesome scenario, where a woman’s mutilated body had been found naked, dumped in a public place. And yet, nobody had seen a thing. Not yet. She didn’t have enough face left to make an ID possible. Strietman had bleated on about ritual sex killings yet again. Worse still, Hasselblad agreed.

  ‘What are the similarities?’ George had asked.

  Van den Bergen picked at his toenail and recalled the second victim’s body on the slab. ‘Unzipped from neck to vagina. Disembowelled. Organs removed. Signs of rough sexual intercourse and lacerations on her back commensurate with a whipping. Similar scarring on her breasts that suggest maybe the same guy had given her a breast augmentation as performed the caesarean on the first girl.’

  At the other end of the phone, it was easy to detect George’s immediate interest. The silence and quickening of her breath said it all. Two unidentified women. Mutilation. Probable sexually motivated murders. After all these years, van den Bergen knew which buttons to push to get her intellectually fired up. He certainly knew better than that loser, Karelse, who wouldn’t know finesse if it was a silk-clad fist, punching him in the face. That mamma’s-boy had no mastery of the subtle art of manipulation. You needed years of wisdom to really get a feel for that. If he could only get George hooked on the case, perhaps she’d come over. Visit. Stay a while. But her silence continued for a couple of beats beyond what might pass for curiosity.

  ‘You think you can lure me over there with this?’ George asked.

  Not so subtle. How the hell did she know? Maybe he was losing his touch.

  ‘I’m not trying to lure—’

  ‘I’m hanging up, Paul. Go see your doctor.’

  ‘But George, you could work as a profiler. You always said you’d love to do that. We could be a team.’

  ‘You don’t need me to solve this case! You’re a pro.’

  ‘It’s the perfect opportunity for both of us. Think about it!’

  ‘Tell me you’re not going to try any more funky OD bullshit.’

  He gave her silence this time. Hated himself for not responding. As manipulation went, he knew this was low.

  ‘Hanging up. Night.’

  The line had gone dead and he was left in the oppressive loneliness of his bedroom, clutching the phone to his cheek, as though the smooth warmth of the casing were her face.

  Checking the phone’s display now, in the privacy of the disabled cubicle, he contemplated sending her an apologetic text. Started to type one out with his thumb. Was just about to send it when the door to the top-floor men’s toilet smashed against the wall.

  ‘Boss!’ It was Elvis. Could see his brothel-creeper shoes under the door.

  Van den Bergen closed his eyes. Saw his father, sittin
g in the chemo chair, hooked up to the drip, reading a well-thumbed thriller. ‘Tell Hasselblad he can bloody well wait.’

  ‘No, boss. You’ve got to come down quickly. We’ve had a call. Some Polish builder working in the Museum Quarter reckons he’s found a murder scene.’

  CHAPTER 15

  Amsterdam, Valeriusstraat building site, later

  ‘The blade of the scalpel is broken,’ van den Bergen told Elvis. ‘Make a note of it. Get a photo, Marie.’

  As Elvis scribbled feverishly in his pad, Marie moved closer on van den Bergen’s right. Pointed the digital camera at the broken surgical instrument, lying on the floor. With a bleep and a flash of light, it was captured, along with the other oddments in this gruesome montage. A woman’s blood-stained thong. A butcher’s cleaver. A hammer. A chisel. A cat-o-nine tails.

  Van den Bergen squatted, close to the ground. Eyeing the blood-soaked mattress. He touched it tentatively, feeling that the wadding that lay beneath the surface was still damp.

  ‘There must be litres of blood on here,’ he said. ‘Someone’s life’s blood.’

  ‘But no body,’ Elvis said. ‘Could this be where our second victim died?’

  Van den Bergen continued studying the mattress in silence. It was one of those heavy, pocket-sprung jobs like his own. Good for a bad back like his. Weighed a tonne. ‘Who the hell would have the strength to get a double mattress to the top floor of one of these old houses on their own?’ he mused. Shook his head and pursed his lips. Slid a codeine from its blister pack in the inside pocket of his coat and deftly swallowed it using only the spittle in his mouth. It lodged in his throat. His heartbeat sped up. He felt his eyes bulge. Last thing he needed was to choke to death at a bloody crime scene. Heartbeat calming slowly, once he had painfully gulped it down. Sixth one this morning and the medication hadn’t even started to take the edge off. Although, he couldn’t remember what the doctor had said about codeine reacting badly with his anti-depressants. What had he said? Racked his brains. Nothing.

  ‘Maybe the mattress was here already,’ Elvis suggested.

  Van den Bergen shook his head. ‘No way. Didn’t you notice imprints in the dust all the way up the stairs? More than just footprints from the builders. I put my money on drag marks. Dust from downstairs on the sides of the mattress. See?’ He used his pen to point out a film of white that had become ingrained in the jacquard fabric of an otherwise filthy, greying mattress. ‘This has been brought in from elsewhere, so maybe we’re looking for two men. A team.’ He turned to Kees. ‘Right. We need to dust for fingerprints. Get on it!’ He turned to Marie. ‘And get forensics to go through the whole place with a fine tooth comb. What’s the ETA on Strietman?’

  ‘Any minute now,’ Marie said.

  ‘Good.’ He gestured towards the video tripod standing tantalisingly at the foot of the mattress. The camera that sat atop it was pointed right where any action would have taken place. ‘Can we get the camera running? See what’s on it, if anything.’

  ‘It’s got to be a recording of the murder,’ Elvis said, excitement visible in the high colour that crawled up his neck and into his cheeks.

  Van den Bergen stood, hip cracking. Thoughtful. ‘Hmn.’ He strode to the window and peered down at the builders, all leaning against the side of their transit van, smoking. Pale-faced. The guy who had made the discovery… ‘What’s the name of the builder who was first on the scene?’ he asked Marie.

  ‘Iwan Buczkowski, boss.’

  ‘That’s right.’ …Iwan Bucz-whateverhi‌sbloodynamewas had thrown his breakfast up all over the floorboards, contaminating the room; not just with his own DNA, but also with the acrid stench of stale alcohol and rancid stomach acid. Van den Bergen hated a contaminated crime scene. He remembered cleaning his father’s bathroom, after the chemo had made the old man sick. He hated vomit.

  ‘You’re growling, boss,’ Elvis said. ‘You told me to tell you when you did that.’

  Van den Bergen swung around to face the younger detective. ‘What do you see of this building from the street?’ he asked.

  Elvis frowned. Fingered the dyed-black hair that he had artfully sculpted into a quiff, earning him his moniker, together with the oversized red-brown sideburns. ‘It’s a building site. Empty house, right? Exactly the sort of place you could commit a murder and be left undisturbed.’

  ‘Not really,’ Marie interjected. Examining the camera carefully with latex-gloved hands. Blushing. ‘Valeriusstraat is quite a busy road.’

  ‘Correct,’ van den Bergen said, narrowing his eyes as he peered into the attic room opposite. ‘Houses either side with multiple occupancy.’ He strode to the wall and knocked on the brick. ‘Party wall.’ Turned to Elvis. ‘Get statements from the neighbours. If someone heard screaming or shouting on the other side of this wall, I want to know about it. There must have been some commotion.’

  ‘Unless the victim was gagged,’ Kees said, dusting the chisel on the floor with grey powder, using a fine bristled brush.

  Thinking about the two disembowelled women, van den Bergen reflected on the fact that Strietman had found hallucinogenics in their bloodstream. ‘Or drugged. Most importantly, though, there are signs on the safety fencing marking this place out as a building site. Men coming in here every day to work. These Polish guys are renowned for their work ethic. They start early. They leave late. Whoever left all this shit lying around was either stupid or had intended for it to be discovered.’

  ‘No body, though,’ Marie said. ‘Just a blood-soaked mattress and what appear to be murder weapons. How could you get a butchered corpse out without being seen?’

  Van den Bergen shrugged. ‘If you can get a mattress into a building site unseen, you can get a body out, too. Our perp—’

  ‘Or perps, plural,’ Kees said.

  ‘Or perps, if there are two involved, are stealthy and strong. Let’s see if another body shows up in the next couple of days. Or maybe this mess will be linked to our second Jane Doe, as Elvis has so astutely suggested.’

  Kees lifted a print off the chisel, using a strip of clear tape. Held it up to the light. Smiled triumphantly. ‘Got one! It’s a beauty, too. Clear as a bell.’

  Below, the sharp honk of a horn alerted van den Bergen to the forensics van. It pulled in between the builders’ vehicle and his own Mercedes. More honking, warning the group of rubber-necking neighbours and passersby to move it.

  The scientists started to clamber out. For a fleeting moment, van den Bergen was hopeful that Marianne de Koninck would be leading them. How long could norovirus last after all? Surely she was back on the job.

  His hope soon dissipated when he spotted Strietman’s head from above. Noticed with some satisfaction that, despite his relative youth, the pathologist’s hair was starting to thin. A circle of pink scalp, the size of a one cent coin, had already punctured the thicket of blond, short curls. Van den Bergen ran his hand through his own hair and grunted with approval. One thing he had inherited off the old man that he could be thankful for, at least. Even if his hair had turned snow white by his late thirties, he had plenty of it.

  As the forensics team donned their protective jumpsuits over their own clothes on the pavement below, van den Bergen walked away from the window in disgust. Sighed heavily.

  ‘Bloody Strietman. Again,’ he said.

  But before van den Bergen could go into disgruntled overdrive, Marie looked up. Her eyes seemed to glitter. Her florid face was even more flushed than usual.

  ‘You’re not going to believe what’s been caught on this camera, boss,’ she said, breathless, wearing a crooked smile that was somewhere half way between bemusement and horror.

  CHAPTER 16

  Stansted Express, East London, later

  George gave a half-hearted smile for the camera. One of Ad’s arms territorially around her shoulder, one extended. His face pressed up against hers. She could feel his stubble burn against her cheek. He smelled of Aunty Sharon’s soap. Ad clicked the button on his ph
one, capturing the two of them in a selfie on the Stansted Express. Made to kiss her but she had already shuffled squarely into her seat, leaving more space between them than was strictly acceptable for lovers.

  ‘What do you think?’ he said, showing her his photographic efforts.

  It was a photo that showed only hangdog disappointment in his brown eyes. Boredom in hers. ‘Yeah. Nice.’

  ‘Something to remember this trip by.’

  In her head were layers of competing voices. Good George apologised profusely for what she knew must have been an utterly soul-destroying trip for her boyfriend, the highlight of which had been Aunty Sharon’s rum-laced fruitcake. Bad George just wanted to tell him to sod off. Sod off for turning up unannounced. Get lost for thinking she’d drop everything to play happy housewife. Shove it up his arse, if he thought he could demand sex at a time when she was utterly overworked, overwrought and so overexposed to the sex industry that all she had the inclination to do was masturbate furiously while thinking of someone she definitely shouldn’t have been thinking about.

  ‘You going to come over to see me soon?’ Ad asked, studying his ticket, as though her answer was written there.

  ‘When I get some money together. Yeah. Course.’ Van den Bergen’s name was on the tip of her tongue, as usual, but she was careful not to mention him. She eyed the table. It was covered in somebody else’s crumbs. Held her breath and counted to ten. There was nothing with which she could wipe the surface. ‘Let’s move to a clean table,’ she said.

  ‘No need,’ Ad said, taking a tissue out of his pocket and wiping the crumbs into the aisle. He remained silent for several uncomfortable beats, then asked, ‘Who were you speaking to in the middle of the night?’ Pushed his glasses up his nose.