The Girl Who Broke the Rules

by Marnie Riches

  It was inevitable. She didn’t like lying to Ad. Keeping quiet about the clandestine call would have been what Sally called ‘being economical with the truth’, but now he’d expressly asked… ‘Van den Bergen. He’s not well.’

  ‘I don’t like you putting so much energy into him,’ Ad said, thumping the table. The other passengers looked at the two of them, askance. ‘Sorry.’

  George sucked her teeth. Shook her head. ‘You should be, mate. You telling me you never catch up with the Milkmaid when you’re back home? Seriously!’

  Ad blushed. Opened his mouth once, twice. ‘Don’t start. That’s not what I meant.’

  ‘That’s exactly what you meant,’ she retorted. ‘You said the words now. Don’t act like you can just suck them up. Time travels forwards in the universe, Adrianus. Not back. Face it, you’re jealous. And what of? A forty-odd-year-old with a painkiller addiction? Van den Bergen’s my friend. I get him. He gets me. That’s all. A friend. My friend. How many times I have to tell you, for Christ’s sake?’

  George looked out of the window – anger simmering, but just keeping a lid on it. The train to Stansted airport rattled and swayed through East London. Not George’s familiar turf but not dissimilar. Same disappointing back gardens, full of broken plastic kids’ climbing frames and slides. Washing on the line that had been forgotten. Dog shit lurking in the long grass, no doubt. Bare bulbs glowering out of single-glazed windows. A glimpse of high streets as they chugged through the postcodes, stopping only in Tottenham Hale. Tags spray-painted on the walls by gang members long since grown up or inside; once colourful, now faded and flaking. Cash your gold. Send money worldwide. Southern Fried chicken. Legal services: We speak Urdu, Gujarati and Punjabi – living in grand Victorian buildings that might have once been pubs, by the looks. Women wearing full burka, carrying bulging plastic bags with coriander hanging out the top. Small kids running on ahead in their puffa coats. Chatting shit like they hadn’t a care in the world on this dismal, pissy weekday in January.

  George noticed it all in a bid to avoid looking at Ad. Every time he clasped her hand, she found a reason to let go. Scratching her nose. Fluffing up her curls. Pretending to wipe the window with her sleeve so she had a better view of the grey urban scene that was unfolding on either side of the train. But this really wasn’t the way she wanted his trip to end. In a bid to bridge the yawning chasm that was growing between them, she put her head on his shoulder for the rest of the journey.

  The airport, still the most glamorous thing in that drab eastern England locale, was bustling with grey-suited businessmen, wheeling small overnighter suitcases with purpose and very shiny shoes. Kids with backpacks gazed up in awe or perhaps just bewilderment at the branches of the steel structural trees that supported the airy roof canopy. It was an airport George liked and loathed in equal measure. Happy when she was setting off for Amsterdam. Bereft, as she returned, leaving love far behind on the other side of the North Sea.

  Beneath the ‘Departures’ sign that marked where the soulless lounge ended and where the inner sanctum of passport control began – with the promise of duty free Toblerone and a view of the planes beyond – Ad kissed George until his glasses steamed up. A passionate kiss that she couldn’t quite return with the same level of enthusiasm, though she tried.

  ‘I love you, you know that, don’t you?’ he said.

  She nodded. Felt like a shit of the highest order. ‘I love you too. I really do.’ She said the words. They sounded correct. Looked into those eyes that had once all but electrified her.

  ‘You have to come. Seeing you every now and then, like this…’ He clutched her hands and kissed her knuckles tenderly. She stroked the stump where his index finger had once been. ‘It’s not enough. It’s tearing us apart. You’re here. I’m there.’

  George blinked back a tear, though she wasn’t sure why it had appeared. Couldn’t articulate the grief she felt. ‘Ad, I’m in the middle of a bloody PhD. My research project… It’s groundbreaking. It’s going to make my name. I’ve got a job, however mundane. This is serious, man. This is my career. I can’t just drop it and come running.’

  She rubbed an imaginary speck of dirt on his cheek. That beautiful pale olive skin. She had been so hot for it once. Ran her hand gently over his soft, shorn dark hair. He looked deflated. Defeated. But then, suddenly brighter.

  ‘Ask for study leave. Go on. I bet you can do it.’

  ‘Think I haven’t already asked Sally a million times? Think I wouldn’t be in Amsterdam if I could swing it? Six months here. Six months there.’ She shook her head.

  Ad grabbed her chin. Lifted her face so that she had no option but to meet his gaze. ‘Ask again. For us.’

  She looked up at the departures board. ‘Your gate’s been up for ages. Go on! Else you’ll miss your flight. Aunty Sharon said you’re costing her a fortune in cake and Sky subscription as it is. Go!’ A smile was easy, now he was hoisting his rucksack on his shoulders. Guilt weighed heavily on hers.

  He walked towards security. Took one last look at her over his shoulder.

  ‘Ask. For us,’ he repeated.

  ‘I’ll ask for us,’ she said. And for van den Bergen, she thought.

  CHAPTER 17

  Amsterdam, Valeriusstraat building site, later

  ‘Run it again,’ van den Bergen said, as Marie clicked the stop button on the camera.

  ‘I don’t think I can bear to keep watching this,’ Elvis said, leaning forward between the driver’s and passenger seats.

  ‘Wimp,’ Marie said, digitally spooling back to the beginning, forcing the others to watch the brutal scenes backwards and at four times the speed of live action on the camera’s tiny preview screen.

  Van den Bergen peered over his shoulder at Kees. ‘Don’t you throw up in here. Do you hear me?’ The young detective’s face looked like putty. He had wedged himself right into the corner on the rear passenger side, as though the supportive structure of the vehicle would provide him with an emotional bolster. ‘You’re a policeman, for God’s sake. If you can’t control yourself, get out.’

  ‘Need…air. Sorry.’ Kees opened the door to the Mercedes and stepped onto the pavement. Icy air whipped into the cabin.

  ‘Close the bloody door!’ van den Bergen yelled. With a hefty thunk, just the three of them remained. ‘Useless turd.’

  He felt suddenly claustrophobic. Though the smell of the leather seats and the wool carpet of the slip-mats was still pleasantly strong – the E class, a perk of being a chief inspector with impractically long legs, was only two months old – it was not strong enough to mask Marie’s stale sweat and Elvis’ appalling cologne. He would have to valet the interior at the weekend or else go to the allotment and bring the honest scent of earth and pine back home with him. He remembered his father, sitting in a deck chair in the allotment, enjoying the morning glories and the summer sunshine. He had been near the end. The old man’s clothes swam around his skeletal frame. Not now! Not now!

  Marshalling his thoughts, van den Bergen turned to Marie. ‘Go on. Play it.’

  There was the blonde woman. She was dressed in a PVC catsuit, which clung to her body like a shining, black second skin. Slim and honed like a gymnast but for disproportionately large, orb-like breasts that sat high on her chest. Hair tied severely into a high ponytail. Smiling at the camera with lascivious, crimson-lipped promise. Smoky made-up eyes with black false lashes. She was probably a high-cheekboned natural beauty underneath all the paint. Clutching at a cat-o-nine tails. Swish, swish. Whipping it provocatively between her own legs. The picture was of a high quality, though there was no sound. The setting was a large bedroom that could have been anywhere, its focal point, a brass bedstead framing a mattress that had been wrapped in a red satin sheet. There were no windows to gauge the age of the building in which this took place. The bare walls were painted black. And there was no other star of this movie. Only the blonde woman.

  It began with auto-erotic scenes, where the woman pl
ayed mischievously to the camera. Slowly peeling away the PVC. But with a series of obvious edits, the action degenerated quickly into something that was more akin to a horror film. The woman was on her back. Naked, spread-eagled and strung by her wrists and ankles between the posts of the iron bedstead. Subject to all manner of sadistic acts – all perpetrated by someone just off screen, using the sort of implements one would find in a builder’s toolbox – and culminating in dismemberment with a hedge trimmer, which, despite having seen the film four times already, still made Elvis squeak and squeeze his eyes shut.

  Marie turned the camera off. Placed it on the dash. Exhaled heavily. Hooked her red hair behind her ear and started to finger a scab on her cheek.

  ‘What do you think, Marie?’ van den Bergen asked, turning to his almost perfectly composed passenger. ‘You’re my internet-nasty expert. Looks very much like a recording of a murder. Snuff porn, maybe? Could the mattress in the footage be the one upstairs in this house, minus the sheet?’

  ‘Whatever it is, it’s disgusting,’ Elvis said, pulling a box of cigarettes out of his breast pocket. ‘Just…just…horrible.’

  ‘Not in here!’ van den Bergen said, eyeing the cigarettes venomously. ‘Let Marie speak.’

  Marie blushed. Tugged at the turtle neck of her green jumper. ‘Well, it’s certainly not a recording of either of the Jane Doe murders we’re looking at. Both of those women were at least left their limbs.’

  Van den Bergen scrutinised Marie. How the hell did this girl even sleep at night? She had never once taken up the force’s offer of counselling, to help her do the job she did. He sighed. It was a damned crummy profession they were in. Briefly, he felt a pang of nostalgia for his time as a fine art student. Ancient history, now.

  ‘I need to see this on my big monitor, boss,’ Marie said. She bit her bottom lip; looked through the windscreen at the builders, who were now talking to Kees. ‘It’s certainly not continuous footage and if it is snuff…’ she inclined her head in the direction of the building site ‘…it definitely hasn’t been recorded in that attic with a camera just stuck on top of a tripod. There are close-ups, for a start. From different angles. Someone was walking around the room while they were filming. Maybe there was a second camera man.’

  Elvis leaned forward again, blasting van den Bergen with a whiff of peppermint. He chewed gum noisily. Clack, clack, clack. ‘What’s the bet another body turns up in the next couple of days? I think Hasselblad’s right. We’ve got a serial killer on our hands.’

  Van den Bergen grimaced. ‘You sound like a Friesian cow chewing hay, do you know that?’ But though Elvis irritated him, his focus did not waver from Iwan Buczkowski. Speaking on his phone. Leaning with one arm above his head against the van. ‘Somebody was behind the lens. Some depraved bastard wielded those tools and that hedge trimmer. The print Kees lifted belongs to someone.’

  Just then, Kees walked around the bonnet of the car and rapped on the glass, driver’s side, with the edge of his notebook.

  At the push of a button, the window slid down with a satisfying whir. ‘You knock on my car like that again, and I’ll knock you all the way down to traffic detail,’ van den Bergen said. ‘What do you want?’

  Kees leaned in. His putty-pallor was gone now, and had been replaced by flame-cheeked enthusiasm – almost palpably buzzing. ‘Been quizzing those builders a bit more. Getting chatty, like.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I’ve got a hunch, boss, and you’re gonna wanna hear it.’

  CHAPTER 18

  Cambridge, St John’s College, later

  ‘Let me go,’ George pleaded, folding the wrapping paper from the jaunty poinsettia plant she had brought her supervisor into tight, ever-shrinking squares.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ Sally replied. She carried the gift gingerly, as though it were radioactive material, and plonked it into a ceramic plant pot holder at the side of her computer. Murmured something inaudible that had a sour tone to it. Turned to George, hooking her battleship-grey, bobbed hair behind her ear. ‘And don’t think you can bribe me so easily! I see through your pot-plant charms, young lady.’ Her pointing index finger was nicotine stained, but her fingernails were the same bright red as the plants’ leaves. She sat imperiously in her typing chair. Queen on her academic’s throne. The large, oak desk wedged a physical barrier between them, leaving George feeling like she had been abruptly banished from court.

  George blushed. Bit back her irritation. Crossed and uncrossed her legs. ‘Come on, Sally! It’s a bona fide request. An Overseas Institutional Visit. You had no problems with me doing the internship in Westminster. You’ve never taken issue with me divvying my time between here and—’

  ‘That’s entirely different. It’s London. The two things are not comparable. Especially not in your bloody situation.’

  George quietly mused that it was a good job Sally didn’t know about her gig as a cleaner in a Soho strip club. The shifty Italian chaperone for those young pole dancers whom Derek had been clucking around had only asked her for a double whisky and a private lap dance. But he had got pretty nasty when she had turned him down. No, her brush with a man who was clearly something far more sinister than just an ageing wide-boy was exactly the sort of thing Sally didn’t need to hear.

  Sticking her finger defiantly through the rip in her jeans, George searched all the admissible arguments filed away in her brain as to why Sally should sanction overseas travel. She downloaded the sure-fire winners. ‘I study the effects of pornography on violent offenders, for Christ’s sake! I’d be a visiting scholar in a city that’s one of the biggest players in Europe’s porn industry. Amsterdam, man! My funding body would agree immediately.’

  ‘No, I said. And don’t “man” me!’

  ‘But think how cool it would be, if I could just hop on the overnighter to Prague to do some qualitative research there as well. Porn was totally banned in the Czech Republic under Soviet rule. Now they’re going mental with themselves. Imagine how revealing that would be about the effects of pornography on sex crimes. A breakthrough study with your department’s name on it!’ George was willing Sally to relent. For Ad’s sake. For van den Bergen’s sake.

  ‘Nice try, you persistent little bugger! The phenomenon has already been studied, as you well know. Diamond, Jozifkova and Weiss. I know you’ve done your homework, so don’t pretend to be a fool and don’t try to take me for one, either.’

  George threw her hands up in the air. Stood and walked over to the mullioned window that looked onto the frosty courtyard below. Her breath steamed on the air. ‘Jeeesus! I’m a boring PhD student doing dry academic research. What the hell could happen to—’

  Behind her, Dr Sally Wright slammed her hand down on the desk top. ‘I will not authorise it. Do you hear me? Because I cannot authorise it. You’ve been told to stay put. After last time. Your track record for staying out of trouble is not exactly unimpeachable, is it, Ms McKenzie?’ She looked over the top of her winged glasses, fixing George with a gaze so unyielding that she felt silenced like a rebuked child. ‘That is my final word on the matter.’

  George folded her arms, flung herself back onto the chaise longue and dug her short nails deeply into the plush velvet covering. Stared into the glowing embers of the fire that heated only two feet directly in front of it, leaving the rest of that cavernous old room feeling like a morgue. ‘But if anyone can swing it, you can.’ She kept her voice small. Flattery was the only weapon left in her arsenal, though she knew it would not work.

  Sally lit a cigarette and coughed wheezily. Her throaty, rasping voice was punctuated by bouts of choking. ‘I know I could swing it. Theoretically. Not for nothing am I the senior tutor of St John’s College, Cambridge. I got MI5 to agree to you visiting for weekends, didn’t I? Study leave for half a year is, however, an entirely different kettle of fish.’ She started to type on her keyboard, cigarette hanging out the corner of her pruned mouth as she spoke. Studied indifference, George knew. Then, pausing dramaticall
y, her eyes sought out her protégée once more. ‘But I do not wish to swing it. Capisce?’ Sally inhaled deeply. The hacking cough started up anew. She thumped herself in the chest. ‘Because the last time you went gallivanting off to Amsterdam for the year, you nearly wound up dead and could have taken half of Trinity Street with you. Stay put, young lady! My rules. Good reasons.’

  George took the sucker punch.

  Dragging herself over the hump of the narrow stone corridor that was the Bridge of Sighs, traversing the sluggish, inky, almost frozen River Cam and negotiating the frost-dusted backs, she acknowledged that she had lost this bout with Sally. Trudging up towards the monolithic brick phallus that was the University Library tower, George resolved that she would come back fighting in round two. I will not go down and stay down. Got to get the hell out of this beautiful prison. Got to help Paul.

  ‘Stop torturing yourself, you donkey,’ she said under her breath, as she cleared the library’s security and climbed the stairs to the silent, gloomy stacks, where under the timed lights, she would find what she was looking for.

  CHAPTER 19

  Amsterdam, police headquarters, later

  ‘No. Sorry. Didn’t see a thing.’

  One by one, the doors had all slammed in van den Bergen’s face. Same lines, almost verbatim, from neighbours who differed in age, gender and ethnicity but who all had that upper-middle-class Museum Quarter/Old South thing in common. Nobody seemed to be neighbourly. Everyone kept themselves to themselves. Unfortunately, the woman, whose Koninginneweg house faced onto the back of the building site, was away on business, according the cleaner.

  Van den Bergen slammed his pad onto the meeting room desk. ‘What have we got?’ he asked Elvis, Marie and Kees.