The Girl Who Walked in the Shadows: A gripping thriller that keeps you on the edge of your seat

George had to get out of there. She’d had enough for one day. Checked her watch. Brought the session to an end.

As she made her way through the facility to the entrance, where she would reclaim her phone and her composure, she noticed the latest issue of Do What? – the inmates’ magazine she had remembered reading when she had been on remand here. Scattered copies on the table needed organising.

The baffled prison officer paused, giving George a moment to tidy the magazines into a neat fan. Beneath the headline that spoke of Shep, the drugs-dog almost choking to death on a hibernating hedgehog, there was a piece that triggered recognition deep within George’s mind. A debate on whether an icicle could actually be used as a shiv and whether it was right that the prison staff should leave these freakish twelve-inchers hanging off the old prison eaves.

‘Okay, Dr McKenzie?’ The prison officer asked.

George nodded. Tucked her portfolio of notes under her arm and made her way back down to security. Scanned on the way in. Scanned on the way out.

Having failed to find a USB stick at Aunty Sharon’s, she had once tried to bring in a CD-ROM she had burned especially in order to show the inmates a simple guide to the study she was doing into women’s prisons for the government. Security had confiscated even that, saying a teenage inmate had broken up a CD brought in for her by her sister and committed suicide by swallowing the shards. Everything was a weapon in here. She now made damned sure she never ran out of USB sticks.

Got to get the hell out. This place is bringing me down and down.

Beyond the gates, breath steaming on the sub-zero air, she switched her phone on to check for messages. Hoping that cantankerous old fool, Van den Bergen had been in touch. It was weeks since their argument. Six weeks to be precise. Her refusal to speak to him had been deliberate. Even Aunty Sharon had said she’d done the right thing by dropping the shutters on him.

But the screen yielded nothing. Silence. No abrupt words, saying he was sorry and that she had been right. That he would make amends.

On the train she sat at a dirty, crumb-sullied table, clutching her anorak tightly around her. Broken heating meant the journey would be purgatorial. Shivering at the sight of the snow-covered fields and jagged, naked hedgerows that scudded by. A white world, empty of life except for disappointing humanity and the odd cannibalistic robin. Irritation mounting inside her. Oppressive, like the Siberian freeze that had an entire continent in its grip.

Twenty minutes felt like an hour. Her phone still yielded nothing of note. Only nagging emails from civil servants, asking if she would be handing her study in on time. Pointed correspondence from a fellow criminologist who had it in for her. Professor Dickwad Dobkin at UCL. Complaining that he knew about her additional research into trafficking. Saying that he had started something almost identical, eons ago. Long before her. Of course.

‘Get fucked, Dobkin,’ George said, as she searched for her train ticket.

‘Sorry?’ The ticket inspector asked, swaying side to side in the Pendolino carriage, as it pelted through the crystalline hills of Staffordshire.

‘Nothing,’ George said. ‘Talking to myself. Too much work. Not enough play.’

The ticket inspector, a sweaty-looking man, despite the unrelenting cold, gave her a disinterested half-smile.

It was true. Her deadline loomed large. Today’s encounter with Donna had been one of her final interviews. She would have to start typing it up tonight. Perhaps even do a little work on her laptop now, on the train back to London.

Discipline yourself, George.

Except her phone pinged. Probably Aunty Sharon.

Fuck discipline.

Peered down at the screen.

Ah, finally.

But it was not the sort of message she was hoping for.

Come to Amsterdam a.s.a.p. Paul.

CHAPTER 3

Amsterdam, Bijlmer district, later

‘What do you want me to do, boss?’ Elvis asked, pulling his woollen hat down low over his ears, so that bushy red-brown sideburns were only just visible. His breath steamed on the air. Red nose and streaming eyes made him look peaky. But then, these days, Elvis always looked like he never slept. Experience could do that to a detective, even one as dopey and idiotically optimistic as Elvis.

With his protégé seemingly transfixed by the sight of his mobile phone, Chief Inspector Paul van den Bergen hastily slipped the device back into his pocket. ‘Get photos of everything,’ he said. Felt like he had been caught doing something forbidden, though texting George in a work capacity was hardly a misdemeanour. Since she had qualified, she worked for the Dutch police on a freelance basis often enough.

He turned to Marie, who looked as though she was wearing every garment her wardrobe held. Some ugly hand-knitted cardigan on top of a coat. Purple clashed with the red colour of her hair poking out beneath two hats, by the looks. Bet she smelled worse than usual beneath all those layers. But today, Marie had abandoned the warmth of the office and her Internet research in favour of dusting for prints. After the best part of a year spent working on missing persons cases, she had been desperate to get out. They all had.

‘You called forensics?’ he asked her.

‘Yep. Marianne said she’ll be about half an hour.’ Marie blushed. Crouched near the dead man’s head. Scowled at his blood-spattered face. ‘He looks familiar.’

‘They always look familiar round here.’

Gazing down at the cochineal Rorschach pattern that surrounded the dead man, Van den Bergen put his hand on his stomach. Though he could not feel the lumpy scar tissue beneath the thick wadding of his anorak, he pressed his long fingers there, tracing the line of the scarring from sternum to his abdomen. Like this dead man at his feet, he had lost almost his entire life’s blood. A good two years ago now. Time heals all scars, right? Bullshit, it did.

Elvis clicked away on a digital camera. Blue plastic overshoes over his snowboots. Behind him, the remaining high-rises of Bijlmer loomed. Once Amsterdam’s arsehole, a few colourful panels on the front of the renovated blocks and winter wonderland conditions made it only marginally more enticing than it had been in the dark days. Better than Van den Bergen remembered the area when he was a young cop. But still an armpit of a locale, crushed under the weight of second-rate infrastructure and drug-pushers that came out at night like cockroaches.

His phone rang. He was praying it would be George.

‘Van den Bergen. Speak.’

It wasn’t her. Fat bastard Olaf Kamphuis was on the line, barking at him for information, though why he was getting his big pants in a twist over a run-of-the-mill Bijlmer stabbing was beyond him. Power had clearly gone to his bulbous head, now he was Commissioner. Hands-on micromanagement also had extended to grabbing Van den Bergen by his balls tightly and squeezing.

‘I want you off the missing persons bullshit,’ Kamphuis had said, sitting in his new desk chair, cranked even higher than the last one, in an office, even roomier than the one he had amply occupied before. Sweat had blossomed darkest blue around his armpits through the ceremonial glad rags. ‘You’ve had long enough to recover,’ he had insisted, huffing, puffing, trying to blow Van den Bergen’s house of cards down. ‘Get back on active service or it’s early retirement for you, you lanky streak of piss.’

How the hell had it happened? Pushing forty-seven now, though he felt nearer to sixty. Two of the biggest cases the Netherlands Police had ever solved, down to him and his team. But trumped yet again by a nemesis in a high-stakes game he thought he had cleaned up in long ago. Commissioner, for fuck’s sake. Olaf Kamphuis was his boss. Again! There was no God. And with his unimpeachable ally, Gus Kosselaar retired and replaced as Chief of Police by that other infernal arse-carbuncle, Jaap Hasselblad, Van den Bergen’s life had become even more of a misery.

As Van den Bergen leaned over to scrutinise the dead man’s face, stomach acid shot up into his gullet. The flames of digestive purgatory the only source of warmth in that unrelenting cold. He straightened up with a click from his hip. Six feet five of broken man. How he longed for the comfort of his office and those stone cold missing persons files now.

He grimaced. Pointed to the gun by the dead man’s hand. The scabs around his mouth and nose. Leather jacket, too flimsy for the cold. Covered in stains. Jeans, yellowing at the knees. Greasy blond hair, plastered to his scalp, now encrusted with blood as was his left hand, where perhaps he’d grabbed at his neck. Bleeding out in arterial spurts across the base of the children’s slide. Then, on the ground in a foetal position. Leaking his last into the pretty red Rorschach. Butterfly. Humming birds. Flower.

‘Crystal meth head. Or mephedrone, is my guess,’ he told Elvis. ‘This is just a drugs killing over some two-bit stash or a botched deal. Our guy pulls a gun on some other junkie arsehole. A bit of a fight breaks out. He gets stabbed in the neck, judging by the looks of the wound and the blood loss. Perp runs away.’

Elvis nodded. Continued to take photos, as Marie dusted for prints on the semi-automatic pistol that lay inches away from the dead man’s blue-grey right hand.

Van den Bergen looked around at the spectators who had started to gather. Rubber-necking, though the scene had been cordoned off with fluttering police tape. Those residents who didn’t stop to watch and pass comment on the body – opinions voiced loudly, scathingly in a variety of languages; dramatic hand gestures and beseeching invocations to Allah - shuffled by in the national dress of their country of origin. Women in full burka. Men in salwaar kameez, wearing overcoats over the top. Indonesian. Ghanaian. Somali. Surinamese. All bundled up in this freakishly bitter northern European climate.

‘Did anyone see anything?’ Van den Bergen asked the crowd. It was a public enough place, for Christ’s sake. Right by a brown monolithic block on Sean MacBridestraat. In the kiddy-park, at that! At the foot of the snow-bound slide. Overlooked by hundreds of people, potentially. ‘Anyone?’

Blank faces. Chatter ebbing away, now.

‘Please come to me with any information you have. Anonymously.’ He started to hand out cards, but not a single resident would take one.

Hands tucked abruptly beneath folds of fabric. Into pockets. No eye contact. The crowd started to disperse, fast.

‘Marie! Help me take statements,’ he called out to his detective.

By the time Marie had finished lifting the solitary print from the gun, the onlookers had all gone, save for a boy of about eight. Drowned in a shabby Puffa jacket that was clearly an adult’s given that his sleeves swept the snow. No hat. Inquisitive brown eyes staring at the dead man.

Van den Bergen and Marie approached the child together, though it was Marie who crouched on the opposite side to the police tape, so that her eyes were level with his.

‘Did you see anything?’ Marie asked.

The Chief Inspector pulled the chain that held his glasses from the inside of his anorak. Slid them onto his tingling nose to observe the child’s reaction. Knew better than to engage the kid in conversation. Only his own daughter understood that he was child-friendly and Tamara was the wrong side of twenty-five now. Marie had the right touch.

The boy was silent. Staring. Staring at the corpse, surrounded by so much red.

‘What’s your name?’ Marie asked, taking the boy by the outsized sleeve.

‘Imran.’

‘You know him, don’t you, Imran? The dead man.’

For five or six almost frozen heartbeats, Imran looked into Marie’s watery blue eyes. Opened and closed his mouth, as though he were about to speak. Van den Bergen stiffened, feeling truth and illumination trying to emerge from deep within the silent boy.

But then, Imran turned on his heel and sprinted into the anonymous vertical warren of the apartment block.

‘Shit!’ Van den Bergen said.

CHAPTER 4

South East London, 28 February

At 2am, the only sound in the small terraced council house was the clickety-click of George’s fingers as they tap-danced back and forth over her laptop’s keyboard. A consummate performance, outlining the suffering of women on the inside. Bedbugs. Beatings. Braless and behind bars. Family gone. Copy-sheet well and truly blotted for life. Hope in prescription capsules, containing chemical respite from anger and pain.

George paused typing to examine again her pay slip from the Peterhulme Trust. Sighed heavily at the disappointing sum on which tax would be due. Not enough, by far. Pocket change to fund a life split between London, Cambridge and Amsterdam. It was only the second full-length study she had completed for the civil servants of the Home Office in Westminster since becoming a professional criminologist. A career she had fought for. And yet, her working life was not panning out quite as well as she had hoped, even with the continuing support of the formidable Dr Sally Wright. None of it was panning out as George had hoped.

Reflected in the laptop’s shining screen, she observed with some distaste the tears rolling slowly down her cheeks. Wiped them away angrily. Pull yourself together, you wimp. Don’t let it all get to you. Don’t take shit personally. You mustn’t let Van den Bergen bring you down. Her hand shook with emotion. Perhaps she should allow herself a good cry. Just this once. Might be cathartic. If she smothered the nose with her sleeve, Patrice wouldn’t wake up.

Key in the lock. Front door opened. At this hour, it could only be one person. No time for tears.

‘Wotcha, darling,’ Aunty Sharon said, prizing snow-encrusted wellies from her swollen feet and putting them neatly on the shoe rack. Next to them, she placed the Betty-Boop heels that she took out of a Tesco bag. Yawning. Throwing her handbag onto the kitchen table. Snatching up the kettle.

‘Here, let me do that,’ George said, taking the kettle from her.

‘All quiet?’ Sharon asked. She started washing her hands with Fairy Liquid and scalding water. ‘Jesus! You turned the thermostat up again?’ She sucked on her fingers, eyeing George suspiciously.

Hand on hip, George rolled her eyes and jerked her thumb in the direction of the door. ‘Who do you think cranked the heating up?’

Snoring, coming from the adjacent living room. The thunderous, slumberous roar of a dragon, sleeping.

‘I gave the bathroom a good do,’ George said. ‘Got the nailbrush on the grouting. Looks a treat now.’

‘Stressed, by any chance?’ Aunty Sharon flung herself down onto the kitchen chair. It groaned beneath the weight of her heavy frame. Her taffeta skirt bunched up around her like an airbag triggered in a car crash. ‘Fucking thing is doing my head in.’ She stood again, unzipped the skirt and stepped out of the layers of electric blue fabric and netting. Flung it over the back of the adjacent chair. Sat back down, wearing only her generous knickers and a thick jumper. Dimpled thighs. Knees like dark chocolate blancmange. White ankle socks digging into her chubby legs. She rubbed her belly. Twanged the elastic in the waistband of her knickers. ‘That’s better. That new manager is some corny little rarseclart. He’s got me dressing up in 1950s shit and bobby socks, like I’ve escaped some pensioner’s mental home. I’m an experienced barmaid in a Soho titty bar. Not some kid serving chips in a themed bloody chicken shop. Cheeky bastard, he is. It’s -20 out there tonight. My toes are like frozen meatballs, man! If my fucking legs fall off with hypothermia, I’m going to sue his skinny white arse. At least Derek didn’t take the piss, trying to tell me what to wear. And he could have done! But even though he was my baby-father and long-time boss, he never pulled this kind of shit! Fucking novelty nights and all the girls in sodding bunny costumes like the twenty-first century ain’t even here!’ She sucked her teeth long and low. Paused for breath. Looked at her niece. ‘Well? What you been crying for, puffy eyes? Tell your Aunty Shaz.’ She reached out to her with a robust, welcoming arm.

George ignored the gesture. Stood steadfastly by the sink, wearing one of Patrice’s hoodies on top of her own. Arms folded tightly with sleeves down over her hands. Couldn’t get warm, even with the heating on 27 and the gas meter lifted onto a bucket so that the wheel had stopped turning. Fuse wire through the electricity meter too, so that they could put fan heaters throughout the house without worrying about bills. George had gored a hole through the casing with a hot bodkin herself. A trick Letitia had taught her as a child, passed on to a reluctant, law-abiding Aunty Sharon. Chalk and cheese, those two.

‘I haven’t been crying,’ George said.

‘Suit yourself.’ Aunty Sharon trotted over to the bread bin. Took out a fruit loaf. Cut herself an ample slice, slathered in butter. Made appreciative noises. ‘I make the best fruit loaf in the world,’ she said. ‘Derek used to love my fruit loaf.’ She started to cut herself a second piece and dropped the breadknife. Wracking sobs, suddenly.

‘Not you as well,’ George said, wrapping Sharon in a bear hug as she heaved with grief.

‘So, you w-was crying,’ Sharon stuttered.

‘No. Yes. Never mind me. You let it out, Aunty Shaz.’

Sorrow streamed forth from Sharon’s face; tears quickly dripping from her jowls. Speech coming in hiccoughs. ‘It’s still hard, love. Especially working at that place. Porn King and them girls what have been there a while are always banging on about Derek, like he was some fucking saint or something. Uncle Giuseppe, this. Uncle Giuseppe, that.’ She looked up at George with ghoulish mascara-besmirched eyes. ‘Derek de Falco managed a titty bar badly. Some claim to fame, right?! He fucked himself up. He fucked me and Tin’s life up too. Selfish dickhead.’

‘They’re all selfish dickheads,’ George said, wiping her aunt’s second-hand make-up off her jumper with a hot cloth. Knowing Aunty Sharon knew the score and wouldn’t take it personally.

‘Yeah. Stuff Derek, the stupid bastard!’ Sharon grabbed the kitchen roll off the worktop and blew her nose loudly into a clean sheet. Dabbed gingerly at her eyes. Tugged at her elaborate arrangement of platinum blonde extensions and brightly coloured headscarf until it all came away in one cumbersome piece. Short greying hair underneath. Receding hairline. A little too thin in parts from stress-alopecia, where cheap hair extensions over the years had taken their toll.

George touched her own head of thick dark curls reflexively. Curls which Van den Bergen liked to grip when he kissed her passionately.

‘Anyway. Uncle Giuseppe’s old news. Tell your Aunty Sharon what’s eating you,’ Sharon said, pulling her sizeable bra from beneath her jumper and hanging it over the taffeta skirt. ‘It is laughing gas, in there?’ She gestured towards the living room.

George shook her head. ‘No. She’s the least of it. I keep getting texts from Van den Bergen. We’re on. We’re off. He loves me. He never says it, the arsehole. Up one minute. Down the next.’

‘Thought he was always like that, anyway. Didn’t you say he was depressed?’

George nodded. ‘He’s not been the same since the Butcher. Physically, he’s healed. But mentally … They’ve had him chasing missing persons for two years. Sat on his arse in the office, checking online reports or sat drinking coffee in people’s houses while he does interviews. Insisting he’s not well enough to face active service. But they’ve got him working a new murder, Marie’s telling me. I haven’t spoken to the tosser for weeks because of what happened. Now he wants me over there under the pretence of it being in a professional capacity, I’ll bet. Wants me to hold his hand, more like. He’s full of shit.’

The beginnings of a smile played on Sharon’s chapped lips. ‘Your fellers always end up in bits, thanks to you, don’t they? You’re more high maintenance than that mother of yours.’

A heavy sigh. ‘Actually, I’d be lying if I said she wasn’t doing my head in, too,’ George said, breathing out heavily. Glaring at the door to the living room, behind which her mother slept. ‘She was such a pain in the arse while you were at work. I’m trying to write my research up, and she’s chatting in my ear, giving it, I’m dying. I’ve got pulmonary hypertension – she can barely bloody pronounce it. I’ve got sickle cell anaemia – she doesn’t even know what the fuck that is. You don’t give a monkey’s about me. I can’t deal with it.’

‘Take no notice of that attention-seeking bitch, love,’ Sharon said, frowning and shaking her head. ‘My sister will play every last dirty card in her hand to get what she wants. I’ll believe that “I’m dying shit” when I see it. She’s got some brass neck, threatening to die when she’s strong as a horse.’

‘She’s got some brass neck, kipping on your sofa!’

Sharon was unexpectedly silent. Tremors, rippling across her chin and cheeks, gave the impression that she was about to be sick. Her face crumpled rapidly, the silence giving way to wailing loud enough to wake her sister and her sleeping son. Fleshy hands balled into tight fists.

George was taken aback. Barely knew how to react to this secondary outburst. ‘Try to remember Derek the way he was,’ she said, turning to tend to the tea. Stirring the cup too briskly. Nice and strong. Three sugars and a healthy wallop of rum. That’s how Aunty Shaz liked it after work on a cold night. Set the cup down on a coaster with handle perfectly perpendicular to the edges.

With electric blue nail extensions to match her abandoned dress, Sharon wrapped her hands around the mug, spitting and sputtering her words one by one. ‘It ain’t Derek,’ Sharon said. ‘Not really. I’m crying cos of …’ She flapped her hand in front of her fact, as though she was wafting away unwanted emotion. ‘It’s just … it’s little Dwayne.’ She stared off into the middle distance.

‘It’s not today, is it?’ George asked, glancing at the calendar.

Sharon nodded. Looked suddenly feeble and frail, clutching at the silver locket around her neck. Dimpled chin and downturned mouth. Streams of glistening, sorrowful tears and snot, lit up by the kitchen lightbulb, looked like strange tinsel, two months too late for Christmas.

‘Shit. I’m so sorry,’ George said, sitting by her side and hooking her arm around her aunt’s shoulders. Suddenly her own problems seemed paltry in comparison. Guilt jabbed at the soft spots that were already raw.

‘I told you, didn’t I?’ Sharon said, snapping the locket open, shut, open, shut, revealing the faded colour photo of a small, smiling boy inside. ‘No agony in this world like the pain of losing a child. Ten, twenty years later, them wounds never heal.’

The loud knock on the kitchen window made both of them jump. Nothing to see in the black of the small hours with the light on inside.

‘Who the fuck is that at this time of night?’ Aunty Sharon asked, lurching out of her seat. Grabbing the kettle, still half full of boiled water. ‘I got that back gate padlocked to keep those cheeky little dipshits from down the way out.’

George’s heart thudded beneath her layers. She snatched up a meat cleaver from the magnetized knife-holder on the wall. ‘Stay back, Aunty Shaz,’ she said, switching the light off. ‘I got this.’

Still nothing to see in the empty, snowy yard at the back, except for a washing line supporting six inches of snow on top, icicles, hanging beneath, like a neat row of teeth strung along a cannibal’s necklace. Against the fence were snow-buried wheelie bins, lit by the nearest streetlamp some twenty feet away.

Reaching for the key lodged in the security door, George turned until the lock clicked. Pushed the handle down gingerly, cleaver in her right hand. Pulled the door open suddenly. Blast of arctic wind sucking the air from her lungs. Arm held high ready to slice.