The Girl Who Broke the Rules

‘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 phone, 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.

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 played 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—’