‘Yeah, go on, you piece of shit!’ Letitia screaming in her bare feet. The figure, rapidly diminishing as he made his getaway. ‘Come back, and I’ll fucking finish the job. I ain’t scared of you, motherfucking rapist cunt.’ A good fourteen stones of motherly rage, shaking a balled fist in the air. Hair extensions still hanging perfectly in place, though there would be no dawn chorus issuing forth from the cockerel hat now that it had lost its strut.
Lights on inside the house. Twitching curtains revealed an old black man in his pyjamas, looking out. Fearful of whatever oversized cats might be on the prowl, using his tiny garden as their litter tray. Surprised when he saw Letitia the Dragon dragging George up from the bed of crushed hyacinths by her underarms, as though she was an oversized baby. Breathing brandy, whisky, Tia Maria fumes all over her. Aunty Sharon, screaming Call the cops! Stumbling around, still pissed on rum n Ting. If someone had flicked a match into life, all three of them would have gone up like plum puddings.
Rescued from certain death by the one person she had never thought would come to her aid. Maybe blood was thicker than water, after all. ‘Family,’ she said once more, under her breath.
A tendon in Sally’s lean, smoker’s face was twitching. Stinging from the slight.
‘Van den Bergen cares about you, young lady,’ she said. Arms folded. Legs folded. Emotional origami, trapping the hurt inside. ‘I care about you. We may not be blood relatives, but it takes more to bind people together than the chance provision of DNA. And those bonds such as we share are not easily undone.’
George could feel an apology trying to force its way out. Swallowed it back – a concession she was not prepared to make. Stubborn. She got that from Letitia too. The bond of shared DNA was perhaps stronger than Sally or George had hitherto appreciated.
Change the subject.
‘Listen, I don’t want to get into all this blame-apportioning bullshit,’ George said. ‘I thought I had a right to get out of the country for a bit. You didn’t. I’m back now. So, let’s agree to differ and move on.’
‘Is that an apology?’
Damn it! The woman’s like a dog with a bone. This is power play for her. Don’t rise to it.
‘What’s the score with Silas Holm and that letter? You said he’d been visited by some doctor called…’ She frowned. Started to scroll back through old emails on her phone. ‘What was it?’
‘A South African woman called Roni de Zwarte.’ Sally looked down at the chipped red nail varnish on her nails. Matched her oversized plastic beads. ‘When I spoke to security at Broadmoor, she was the only unusual visitor he had received. There was no other way the letter could have got out.’
Roni de Zwarte. George held her breath. Pulse, pounding in her ears. Not only déjà vu, but also déjà entendu. A familiar name she could see written in the font of her texts in her mind’s eye. She surreptitiously brought to life the screen on her phone, careful not to let Sally see. Another leaked text Marie had sent her, keeping her posted on the case.
Ahlers gave name of woman who adopted Magool’s baby before he was killed. Doctor called Roni de Zwarte.
Though Marie’s words resounded in her head at a deafening volume, Sally was oblivious to the connection that George had just made. She continued to talk. Hands clasped behind her back. More relaxed, now. Gazing out of her window once again at the fast-moving clouds that streaked across a bleak, East Anglian sky. Winter still teasing the tips of those medieval spires with ice and a wind that bit.
‘Holm is allowed contact with several non-staff, including you. Although believe me, madam, now you’re back, I shall be calling to have your clearance revoked. I don’t deal in idle threats.’ She turned around. Almost pierced George with her pointed glare. Menace in those nicotine-stained jagged teeth, like a vengeful piranha. ‘You can find yourself another study subject and think about what you could have done differently.’
George stared at her in sullen silence, mentally tipping the hot toddy that had now gone stone cold all over her horrible severe hairdo. Fuck off, surrogate mummy, with your saggy, barren tits.
‘Anyhow, they allowed this Dr de Zwarte access,’ Sally continued, shaking her head. ‘All her credentials seemed intact. They even had clearance documents logged on their computer system, which flummoxed the head of security in retrospect. When I call, I’ll see if there’s any more news.’
So, Sally hadn’t yet made the call to Broadmoor. Which meant George still had clearance to visit Silas Holm. With so many questions that demanded answers, she knew exactly where she was headed next. She would worry about breaking all the rules another day.
CHAPTER 80
Laren, the Netherlands, 16 February
Inside the windowless place – a panic room of sorts, given the unyielding metal shutters, separating him from the rest of the house, and the CCTV monitoring equipment in there – van den Bergen had stopped struggling against his bonds. He had long since tipped over the chair that Sabine had strapped him into, bashing his head; maybe dislocating his shoulder as he had hit the deck. The pain was intense. Had thought it unbearable, though as time had crawled by he had had no choice but to bear it. Sleep would not take him. Fainting at will was not possible. By now, he was subdued. No more muffled screams, because no one was coming. No more attempts at escape, because she had known what she was doing when she had tied him up and strapped his mouth shut.
He was going to die. Might as well do it with some dignity.
Minutes or hours or days earlier – it was hard to tell in that windowless place – he had wept at the thought that he would end up like the thing in the kiln. An effigy of a man, split into pieces. Head. Torso. Limbs. Too realistic to be sculpture and yet, apparently, cast in clay.
‘What is it?’ he had asked Sabine. Already jumpy, given she had appeared with hardly any warning like some menacing apparition. ‘It’s my husband,’ she had said. A glint of something deadly in her eyes.
‘What do you mean?’ he had asked. Not registering the shining thing in her hand. Idiot. If only he had trusted his instincts – the sense of unease that had brought him downstairs in the first place.
She was fast. She was strong. She was tall enough to grab him from behind with ease, holding a scalpel to his throat. He could barely breathe. The blade dug in; stung as blood seeped forth, warm and wet on his fingers as he tried to loosen her grip.
She spoke, close to his ear with that murderous mouth he had kissed just over twenty-four hours earlier. Hot breath on his cold, goose-pimpled skin, making the hairs on the back of his neck stand involuntarily. ‘When I killed him, I made a cast of his body parts before I cooked them to ashes in my kiln. Then, I used the cast to immortalise him in terracotta. I think it has artistic merit, don’t you? Like a funerary mask.’
Van den Bergen had wept. Considered throwing her off. But he knew that her blade, already millimetres into his skin, would slice through sinew and muscle to cut his jugular and carotid artery, meeting no more resistance than a steak knife through stamppot. He had seen what she had done to the others.
‘Please, Sabine. Let me go.’
Hot tears rolling down to the cut on his neck. Stinging, where the salt met the blood. He thought of his father. Dead in the hospice. Mouth slightly open. At first, the nurses hadn’t come when he had pressed the alarm button. He had held a mirror to the old man’s mouth to see if his breath still left vapour on the glass. Felt suddenly so alone when the mirror had remained clear. Had wept like a little lost boy for all the harsh words said and the times when he had looked up to and loved that broken body, suffocated and raddled by the big C until the life of Matthijs van den Bergen was no more. So lonely, then, even though Tamara had been just outside the room. Tamara, whose wedding it was tomorrow.
‘My daughter’s getting married tomorrow afternoon! Please, Sabine. I beg of you. Don’t do this. There must be another way.’
‘Get in here!’ Sabine had started to drag him backwards towards a door he had not noticed before.
The grim sculpture of her dead husband taunting him in the corner of his eye, as he tried to catch a glimpse of where he was being taken. The windowless room. This panic room. How apt.
She had made him sit on the chair. He should have reacted. Should have resisted. But the ten codeine he had taken that day had rendered him weak, sluggish, slow. Strapping the tape around his body, pinning him to the chair. Was this how she had despatched her other victims? Had they started down the road to hell, duct taped to a chair in a glorified cupboard meant to preserve life, not aid and abet the snuffing out of it?
‘You sit still until I come for you. Right?’
Now he realised why the sex had felt like a mechanical enterprise instead of a passionate encounter. Looking properly into those eyes, he could see no soul in this woman. Whatever humanity she had once possessed had gone.
‘Don’t try anything stupid, Paul. I need you…unblemished.’ Long, cold fingers stroking the stubble on his chin, like a caress from the legs of a venomous spider. Blowing a kiss that may as well have been from a hissing cobra. A praying mantis ready to consume her mate.
She stood back, scrutinising his bonds. Considering him like she might appraise a life-sized sculpture in a gallery. Nodding at her handiwork.
‘You’re in good shape,’ she said. ‘A little thin, but otherwise fit. You’re going to save a lot of lives.’ Smiling. Clasping her hands together demurely, head cocked to the side. A homicidal Florence Nightingale.
How could it be? A woman who healed the sick; a woman who specialised in the medical care of children; a killer who cut the organs out of the vulnerable for resale, clearly enthusiastic about the prospect of destroying life. Even if he had been able to speak, van den Bergen had neither the vocabulary nor the understanding to articulate the bewilderment he felt.
Tamara would walk down the aisle tomorrow, believing that her selfish shit of a father had not cared enough even to show up to her wedding to Numb-nuts. Elvis and Marie, his ersatz children, would believe he had abandoned them to navigate the stormy high seas of the Netherlands police force without a captain at the helm of their sinking ship. George…he had pushed beautiful George away, though he loved her with such ferocity, thinking dating this upper-class ghoul was somehow a better choice for everyone concerned. Now he was going to die alone, no longer able to tell the people he loved that he loved them.
Like father, like son, like unholy spirit.
Our Father, whose head be severed,
Gallows be thy fate.
Though Armageddon come,
Thy will be undone
In hell, for there is no heaven.
Nobody to deliver him from evil.
Neither dozing nor fully awake, lying on the floor, now, focusing on the parallel lines of the shutter, his heart quailed when the metal leaves clanked into life and started to rise. The door on the other side opened. There were Sabine’s feet in the sort of surgeon’s rubber shoes Marianne de Koninck wore.
‘It’s time, Paul.’
CHAPTER 81
Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital, later
‘I wondered how long it would take you to come,’ Silas Holm said.
A smile playing on his chapped lips. Steadily gazing into George’s eyes until she felt like she was being undressed by him. Her instinct was to look away but she willed herself to hold that gaze defiantly.
‘Where did you get my address in Amsterdam from, Silas?’ she asked. Sitting back in her chair, now with legs astride. One hand on her hip. Showing this cheeky arsehole that he couldn’t spook her so easily.
Silas put those immaculately manicured hands behind his head and grinned. Yellowing teeth that made the hairs stand up on her arms. When he raised his head to contemplate the ceiling, she saw the length of his neck exposed. Pale skin with salt and pepper stubble coming through. His top had ridden up to reveal greying navel hair. Involuntarily, she thought of van den Bergen’s naked body, taut and muscled beneath her. Hip-bones jutting. A chevron of grey hair lighting the way down to his groin. Sudden, unwanted images in her head of her and Silas Holm. Those perfect hands of his, gripping her by the hair; holding her in place. Jesus! No!
The mind played some terrible tricks.
She felt a pulse of anger flicker through her. Lunged forwards and slammed her palms on the table, though she realised too late he would now probably get a glimpse of her collar bone and chest.
‘Who gave you that Amsterdam address?’
Silas’ voice was so quiet, she had to strain to hear him even in that otherwise silent room. ‘Did you read my letter, dear Georgina?’
Cat and mouse. Okay. If that’s the way he wanted to play it. ‘Maybe I did. Maybe I tore it up.’
‘Ah, that would be such a travesty if you had,’ he said. Turned to Graham, who sat at his side, giant arms folded. ‘I sent Georgina here a lovely letter all about my formative years.’ Turned back to George, locking onto her eyes once more. Mischief in his.
‘We are sorry, Ms McKenzie,’ Graham said. ‘You should never have got that letter. We have looked into it. It was a terrible breach of security and we are still not certain how it happened.’
‘Roni de Zwarte,’ George said, simply. She had expected to see a glimmer of apprehension in Silas’ eyes, but if anything the almost palpable mischief became more intense. What the hell was he up to?
‘Ah, Dr de Zwarte,’ he said, breathing in through his nose, as though he had detected an appetising smell on the air. Licked his lips. A wet, red tongue darting out. Revolting. Seductive.
‘I know she bought a baby on the black market from one of the victims. How come you know her, Silas? What is Roni de Zwarte to you? Why have you got her posting love letters to me?’
‘Oh, Georgina. So little self-esteem in some ways and such arrogance in others. It’s as if you’re two different people entirely.’ A big yellow-toothed grin.
George shuffled uncomfortably in her chair. Noticed a loose thread in the inside seam of her jeans. Felt moisture emerge abruptly from her palms and upper lip.
Silas could see it, she was sure. ‘That was not a love letter, my dear.’ He reached beneath the table. Scratching something. Hopefully his leg. ‘They were reminiscences I wanted to share with you. A pondering on the nature of why we become the people we become.’ He steepled those beautiful fingers together with precision and elegance. ‘You come here to study the nature of desire, do you not? You ask me questions about my taste in pornography. Tell me, Georgina, how do we come to fetishise certain things? Certain objects. Attributes in people. Hair, for example. Shoes. Or amputated limbs.’
The air particles between them were charged; negatively, positively, sexually. George opened and closed her mouth, wondering if his questions were meant as rhetorical. Wishing those unbidden images would dissipate. Silas sat perfectly still. Pursed his lips. Awaiting an answer, clearly. So, she wracked her brains for an answer.
‘We form libidinal attachments to people…sometimes objects too,’ she said. ‘In childhood. We bond. Stimulants we’re exposed to regularly…how something looks, how it smells. Touch and taste too. They become sexualised, maybe because they’re important. A significant occurrence makes them special, triggers arousal.’ She was busking.
Silas Holm nodded. ‘Yes. So, what did you deduce from my letter?’
George remembered the implausibly neat hand on the watermarked paper. Tales of abuse from a Nazi-war-hero-turned-POW. Silas, a child who was desperate to please his hostile, distant amputee father. ‘That your fetish is rooted in your relationship with your father. That your thirst for violence against women stems from a disruptive childhood, where your father beat up on your mother regularly and made her out to be a whore. You wanted his approval and eventually went to the extreme of having your leg chopped off to be just like Daddy.’
Clapping, now. ‘Yes!’ Silas beamed at her. Nodded at Graham, as if to pull him into this celebration of George’s insightful analysis. ‘She’s got it! Well done, Georgina. You really hav
e put your finger on it. Now, have you heard of the artist, Frida Kahlo?’
‘Yes. What’s she got to do with it?’
‘A turning point in Kahlo’s life was a terrible bus crash. Covered in strange gold dust another passenger had been carrying, she lay dying on that bus in immense pain. Scroll forward some years, and she paints herself with wounds to her neck, death hanging over her, gold often featuring in her painterly palette. She was profoundly affected by this tragedy. It made her the artist we all know. What was your Frida Kahlo moment, Georgina? I know mine. What is our murderer’s Frida Kahlo moment?’
George felt like she was being played. ‘Hang on a fucking minute, Professor Freud.’ Noticed a face at the door trying to catch Graham’s attention. Instincts screaming that Sally had sussed her. Phoned through to get her permissions revoked. Yes. The woman at the door was frowning at her. Opening the door.
‘Can I have a word, Graham?’ A thick-set female officer from security. Stony expression indicated she meant business. Keys swinging at her side. Handcuffs and a baton. The trappings of authority. Hands like a man.
Would Graham give George the few seconds she needed on her own with Silas? Could she risk even a fleeting moment, sitting within reaching distance of that serial murderer of women? A man who could choke the life out of her with those delicate-looking fingers. Hunger in Silas Holm’s ice-blue eyes. She could see that much. His chapped lips parted as his breath also became rapid in anticipation.
George held her breath. Her pulse thumping in her ears. Graham rose from the table. Backed up several feet, though he didn’t leave the room. The security guard, whispering in his ear, checking George through narrowed eyes. Flint-faced cow. Now or never.
She propelled herself across the table and grabbed Silas’ hands. He reached out for her, as though he’d been expecting the contact. Those murderer’s hands were warm and soft but not clammy. He stroked her knuckles. The image of dismembered women she had seen in case notes. Blood everywhere. Lifeless eyes. But George kept holding him.
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