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