The Girl Who Broke the Rules

by Marnie Riches

  George wriggled free. Searched for the words. Felt her cheeks warm up as if there were a heating element just beneath her skin which Katja had plugged in and switched on.

  A knock at her door salvaged her from ridicule and honesty. There was a portly strawberry-blond man standing in the doorway, combing his hair across his forehead with a meaty pink hand. His face was swollen on one side.

  ‘You coming then, Katja?’ he said.

  Katja sashayed towards him and slapped the unbecoming man on his behind. Planted a lipstick kiss on his cheek. ‘Ruud, honey. Didn’t I tell you to wait for me downstairs? You’re a bad, bad boy!’ She turned to George. ‘I’m standing you up, darling. I’ll make it up to you.’

  ‘No need to stand your friend up,’ the blond man said. ‘She can come with us.’ He looked at George and smiled. Made a grab for her hand and kissed the back of it. ‘Dr Ruud Ahlers. Pleasure to meet you. Come for lunch at mine. I’m quite the cook. And I’ve got a couple of bottles of champagne sitting in my fridge, unopened.’

  Frantically wiping her hand, but before she could respond to the offer, George’s phone started to ring. She glanced down at her display. It was van den Bergen.

  ‘Hadn’t you better answer that?’ Katja asked.

  Her thumb hovered over the button. She had wanted to surprise him by showing up later at the station, bearing a packet of convolvulus seeds and the new indestructible Thermos flask she had brought all the way from England for him. But she couldn’t resist.

  ‘Hello, Paul.’

  ‘Hey. I got a domestic ringtone,’ he said. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Closer than you think.’ She was unable to keep the smile out of her voice.

  ‘Really? You’re already on Dutch soil?’ There was a gruff confidence to his voice, as usual, though she knew different. ‘I’m on the road, but I can pick you up if you’re in town. Me and Marie are on our way to—’

  ‘I’ll come and find you this evening,’ she interjected. Though she was yearning to see the cantankerous old sod, it wouldn’t hurt to keep him on his toes. ‘I’m going for lunch with Katja and her doctor friend, Ruud.’ She hung up. Allowed herself a satisfied grin. She couldn’t wait for this evening.

  CHAPTER 29

  Amsterdam, van den Bergen’s car, later

  ‘Come on, then,’ van den Bergen said. He shot a glance towards Marie, who was sitting in his passenger seat. ‘Tell me about Linda Lepiks.’ Her normally florid complexion was peaky, bordering on green. ‘You OK?’

  Marie opened her window slightly, holding her hand over her mouth as van den Bergen’s Mercedes lurched out of the way of a tram and sped along Sarphatipark, only to come to an abrupt standstill ten metres further down.

  ‘Bloody roadworks,’ the chief inspector said, honking his horn at an old drunk who stumbled into his path. ‘They spring up overnight like magic mushrooms.’

  He had hoped to reach the porn actress’ canalside home on Jacob van Lennepkade inside fifteen minutes, but workmen were digging up asphalt with noisy pneumatic drills that seemed to be knocking on the door to hell itself. Cones studding the road, promising forward momentum, but delivering only irritating stasis and the resulting belch of diesel fumes from a steam roller and other vehicles.

  ‘Damn this traffic!’ he said, hitting the dash. ‘I’ve got a doctor’s appointment to make after this.’

  ‘Are you okay?’ Marie said, some of the colour returning to her face as the car’s engine cut out, motionless behind a Heineken truck.

  Van den Bergen looked at her appraisingly. Felt that it might be cathartic to unburden himself to her. Hers was a sympathetic face – soft-featured beneath the terrible complexion, hinting at a gentle soul. But he was Marie’s boss, and she was not George. ‘Lepiks. Details!’

  Marie hooked her greasy red hair behind her ear and read from her notes on a small tablet.

  ‘Twenty-four. Latvian. Came over here six years ago and has been in gainful employment from day one. Strictly legit, by all accounts.’

  ‘Her apartment. It’s not in the cheapest area,’ van den Bergen said, restarting his engine and edging forwards by a couple of metres towards some temporary traffic lights.

  ‘She’s always been registered self-employed,’ Marie said. ‘She paid her tax. Her main source of income seems to have come from a company called Scream Screen Productions.’

  ‘Earnings?’ Van den Bergen quietly belched stomach acid and made a mental note to tell the doctor that he was certain he had an ulcer.

  ‘She earned a lot,’ Marie whistled low. She tutted. ‘I’m in the wrong game, boss. Last year, Linda Lepiks took home just over a hundred and seventy-six thousand euros. My God!’

  Narrowing his eyes, van den Bergen processed the figures in his head. ‘Seriously? That much for pretending to lose her limbs?’

  Marie nodded. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Jesus. The English have got a saying, “I’d give my right arm…” As in, I’d give my right arm for that kind of money. Now I know why. They clearly watched Linda’s films.’

  ‘You’re funny,’ Marie said.

  Van den Bergen scowled. ‘I am not funny. Continue. Anything in her tax records about payment to a cosmetic surgeon?’ He visualised the scarring under her breasts.

  ‘Yes,’ Marie said, scrolling down. ‘There’s a clinic sounds like it could be what we’re looking for. “New You Medical Practice”. Fancy address near the Museum Quarter.’ She frowned. ‘Hey, I’ve heard some really famous celebrities go there. Doesn’t sound like the kind of place that would botch a boob job.’

  The traffic lights turned to green. Van den Bergen stepped on the gas. His heartbeat started to calm as the car roared away, leaving the congestion and the insistent hammering of the road drills behind.

  ‘No police record,’ Marie said. ‘Nothing in the gossip pages about Lepiks. She didn’t even have her own Wikipedia page. If you Google her, hardly anything comes up, except an official website that has just a front page with a photo of her in a leather basque. Contact details given are for a Viper Management.’

  ‘Any address? Phone number?’

  ‘A generic “info@” email address. All very anonymous.’

  ‘Considering how much money she was making,’ van den Bergen said, negotiating the bewildering urban tangle comprised of tramlines, overhead cables and zebra crossings that was the junction between Museumplein and de Lairessestraat, ‘I can’t believe she was so low profile.’ There was a word that George had used to describe the actress’ oeuvre. What was it? He wracked his brains, but the codeine blunted the possibility of sharp recall. He almost didn’t see the woman trying to cross the road, pushing a pram. Swerved just in time. Damn. He needed to drink more coffee to counter this terrible blurring around the edges.

  Slicing through the green of Vondelpark, he remembered. ‘Niche,’ he said aloud.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The porno she starred in. An area that appeals to few. Which hopefully means we’re fishing in a very small pool of really screwed-up perverts.’

  Finally, they turned into Jacob van Lennepkade. The sun was poking meekly out from behind oppressive dark grey rain clouds, transforming the canal that bisected the street full of attractive period conversions from an inky black slug into a glittering strip of blue. Home to boxy houseboats on both sides, the water was wide, here. Wide enough and deep enough to swallow a young porn actress’ innermost secrets and carry them to the North Sea. Did the water guard the identity of Linda Lepiks’ murderer? Had he been here, to her home? Had it reflected his face on its surface, perhaps in the moonlight of her last night on earth?

  Van den Bergen reversed into a parking space. Checked his own reflection in the rear view mirror with a degree of disappointment. Bared his teeth and was at least pleased to see there were no remnants of lunch in them.

  ‘What are Elvis and Kees doing again this afternoon?’ he asked.

  ‘Checking the records for surgeons who have been struck off for malpracti
ce,’ Marie said, gathering her handbag from the passenger-side foot well.

  ‘Good.’ He locked the car and climbed the stairs to Lepiks’ apartment. ‘That should keep them out of mischief.’

  CHAPTER 30

  Amsterdam, later

  Kees stepped out of the pub and belched loudly. He pulled his collar up against the bitter wind, eyeing the young tourists. Brash and moneyed Americans, by the sounds and looks. They loped in small backpacked, baseball-capped groups along the canals, seeking out the best-looking coffee shops where they might indulge cannabis-fuelled fantasies, enabling them to regale frat buddies back home with tales of their tour of decadent Europe; Amsterdam’s red light district and perhaps the seedier parts of Paris being top of the heap.

  ‘Peasants!’ Kees barked at a young man who could not have been much older than seventeen, judging by his spots and bum-fluff that heralded the beginnings of facial hair.

  Elvis followed behind him. ‘If van den Bergen finds out, he’ll cut our balls off with his trowel.’ He shivered visibly in his leather jacket. ‘You know, I’ve heard he calls that bloody thing “Excalibur”.’

  ‘What thing?’

  ‘The trowel! He sharpens it in his office with a gadget, like a bloody hunting knife.’

  ‘Stop being a pussy,’ Kees said, feeling buoyed by the alcohol and the promise of a little light subterfuge. ‘It was only a couple of beers. He buggers off to his allotment and gets away with it, doesn’t he?’

  ‘I didn’t mean that,’ Elvis said, lighting a cigarette. ‘I meant going to the builder’s without a warrant.’

  Kees checked his phone for messages, then switched it off. ‘We’re following up a line of enquiry. I’m not waiting for a warrant to come through and I’m sure as hell not spending hours trawling through the database, looking for some quack that can’t sew. Leave that to Marie. It’s women’s work.’

  The apartment block they sought loomed before them. Everything about it spelled depressing. Drab, dark brown brick. Here, the windows were unusually small, as though the construction company that had built them in the 1970s had had to pay a premium for letting daylight in. Kees thought it ironic that the predominantly Eastern European inhabitants who lived round here should have opted to begin their new lives squashed into soulless blocks that were not dissimilar to the spartan concrete shitholes that had constituted accommodation under Soviet rule.

  Several presses of the buzzer being met with zero response told Kees that nobody was home.

  ‘Leave it, man,’ Elvis said. ‘Let’s just go.’

  Kees looked blankly at his colleague and understood why Kamphuis was so disdainful of both van den Bergen and his lackey.

  ‘I thought you were a player,’ Kees said, pulling skeleton keys from his anorak pocket. ‘Like me. I’m disappointed in you, Dirk. Or is it Elvis? Which do you prefer? Your real name, or that disrespectful bullshit label van den Bergen slaps you with?’

  Elvis stroked his sideburns and looked down at his shoes. ‘Just get the door open and let’s get on with it.’

  Iwan Buczkowski’s apartment was on the second floor. It was tidy, clean and poorly furnished with battered old crap from Ikea that Kees had seen in other downmarket rentals. Same all over the city. Not dissimilar to his own pad. He made straight for the bedroom, where the bed had been made. Opened the drawers to the bedside cabinet. Took out a pair of handcuffs lined with pink feathers and a black rubber dildo. Threw them on the bed for Elvis to see.

  ‘Kinked. I told you,’ he said, grinning.

  ‘Put them back, man,’ Elvis said, staring at a framed photo on the cabinet. ‘That means nothing.’

  Kees picked up the photo. It showed an attractive young woman with her arms wrapped around Buczkowski. They were dressed in their best, standing outside a church. Smiling. Lucky Buczkowski. How did a bowling-ball headed, broken-nosed ugly son of a bitch like that get such a hot girl? Kees felt a pang of jealousy. He moved over to a scuffed, white chest of drawers and rifled through the girl’s underwear. Pulled out a pale blue bra and sniffed it. It smelled good, of washing powder, but the cups were small.

  ‘Get a load of this,’ he said, waving the bra at Elvis. ‘Tiny tits.’

  Elvis shook his head. ‘You’re out of line.’ He left the room.

  What was wrong with him? Kees wondered. He had thought he had an ally in Elvis. Two young bucks, making their way. Showing the old guard how it was done. But Elvis played by the rules. He was pigheaded and unadventurous; preferring to adhere to the chain of command and protocol, rather than to be his own man.

  Never mind. Screw him.

  If Kees Leeuwenhoek made a collar on the back of his investigation, he resolved not to share the kudos. He felt certain this intrusion would throw up something significant. Follow your gut instincts, boy. That is what his father had always told him. That there were cops who were so attuned to the world that they could solve a crime simply by following their hunches. And Kees’ hunch said Buczkowski had—

  ‘Jesus,’ Elvis said. ‘Get in here!’

  Kees tracked the sound of his voice to its source in the living room. Elvis stood, holding his leather jacket tightly shut. Open-mouthed at the discovery. He turned to Kees, red in the face.

  ‘Get a load of this!’

  CHAPTER 31

  Amsterdam, mortuary, later

  With Strietman gone for lunch, Marianne fetched herself a cup of coffee and sat in silence in her mortuary. Peered thoughtfully at the fat woman’s feet. The corns and hard skin said they had carried a heavy load for most of that woman’s life. And now Marianne carried her own. Suffocating beneath the weight of having been rejected by a man she had loved. A divorcée’s dream that had turned nightmarish. Shouldering the burden of responsibility to van den Bergen.

  ‘Feeling sorry for myself,’ she told the fat woman’s big toe. ‘He’s got a cheek!’

  But the chief inspector had been right. She was wallowing in self-pity. The place was a mess. Everything Strietman got out, every implement, every piece of equipment, he failed to put away. This was her domain and she needed to take it back. And Jasper wouldn’t break her reputation as well as her heart. She put the fat woman’s organs into a plastic bag and inserted the bag inside her ribcage. Sewed her up with large stitches and called for her cadaver to be taken back to the chiller.

  After she had tidied to her satisfaction, Marianne located the drawers inside the giant mortuary chiller that contained the remains of van den Bergen’s two female victims. Opened the steel doors and slid the bodies out for a preliminary inspection. The peculiar, lumpy scarring that was common to both women caught her eye and brought to the surface a memory long forgotten: a student at med school who had always been hopeless with a needle and thread. A shy, sort-of-blond boy in his first few years with an obsession for Greek mythology, but a real pest by the time he had graduated. Always following girls around, despite their studied disinterest in him.

  ‘What was his name?’ Marianne asked the dismantled girls. She slid the bodies back into their cold storage. This was definitely the anomaly van den Bergen needed for his investigation. You just didn’t see stitching like that often, unless an unlicensed, under-qualified backstreet butcher was involved.

  She padded back through to access the computerised records. Remembered having the body of a woman come in some years ago. She had undergone a hysterectomy that had turned septic. The internal stitching had borne similar evidence of sloppy suturing.

  ‘Where are you?’ Marianne said, scrolling impatiently through the records listed. But there were too many and perhaps the woman in question had died before everything had been computerised.

  She took a Tupperware container out of the mortuary fridge and withdrew from it a pitta filled with falafel and salad that had long gone stiff and dry. Ate it nevertheless, staring blankly at the stick-thin ankles of the old man on whom she had been working. She remembered the police had been unable to bring a case against the gynaecologist. Their evidence to de
monstrate medical negligence had only been circumstantial. But there had followed backlash in the medical community, and it transpired that not only had the gynaecologist probably killed his patient, but he had been accused of trying to sexually molest some of his younger and more vulnerable patients during examinations. It had been quite a scandal.

  ‘Hang on a bloody minute,’ Marianne said, spitting falafel inadvertently onto the floor. She sat back at the computer and Googled ‘Gynae-sex pest’, as she vaguely remembered reading the sensationalist headline of that ilk in the tabloids.

  And there was the story.

  Some eight years earlier. The disgraced gynaecologist peered out at her from a photo. Leaving a casino. Bleary-eyed and on the arm of a large-breasted woman wearing a micro-miniskirt and stiletto heels. Though the man’s face was now bloated and middle-aged, all at once the bell that his name rang chimed inside her head at deafening volume and with shuddering resonance. It was the boy from med school. The stalker-type who couldn’t sew to save his life and clearly couldn’t sew to save anybody else’s either. And yes, now she remembered that he had gone on to major in gynaecology and obstetrics.

  Barely able to dial his number for her shaking hands, Marianne called van den Bergen.

  ‘Marianne! How did you know I was going to call?’ he said. ‘I’m at Linda Lepiks’ apartment. I need you to get a team here to go over her place. The murderer’s been here. I’d put money on it.’

  ‘I know who it is,’ Marianne said. ‘His name’s Ruud Ahlers.’

  Van den Bergen went silent momentarily. ‘A doctor? Dr Ruud Ahlers?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Shit.’

  CHAPTER 32

  Amsterdam, Ruud Ahlers’ apartment, later