The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die (29 page)

‘You said there was no connection between the Thai prostitute, Saeng Pradchaphet, and these murders,’ George said.

‘Yes.’ He wondered why she, of all people, had to be so prickly when he’d had a morning from hell that had already made him feel like he was permanently sitting on a cactus chair.

‘You’re wrong,’ Irritation rippled through her voice. ‘I’ve just been to see Saeng.’

Van den Bergen stood abruptly. He scowled at George, briefly supplanting her beautiful face in his mind’s eye with that of Elvis. ‘What did I tell you about going home and locking your door?’ He wiped muddy hands on the bib of his dungarees. ‘You don’t listen, do you?’

‘No.’

She became George again. Not his subordinate. But still, a protégée of sorts.

‘It’s time you listened to me,’ she said, pointing at him with her glowing cigarette. ‘Now, Saeng recognised this man. Ad says he’s a dealer that all the neo-Nazi thugs in this Heidelberg bar seemed to know. So, he had a connection to Joachim and Klaus.’

Van den Bergen shuffled over to George in his giant wellington boots and grabbed the grainy photo of the scarred man from her. He buried deep his shame at having failed to pursue the line of enquiry himself.

‘How the hell could she tell from this?’ he scoffed.

‘I could see from her body language she recognised him straight away. And she was petrified. The guy threatened her and her family back home. Said he knew people in Thailand.’

Van den Bergen searched for the right words. How should he deal with this girl, showing him up for being all the things he detested – lacking in thoroughness, dismissive, stubborn?

‘Hmm. She wouldn’t tell the police anything.’

‘Suppose I’ve got the magic touch, then,’ George said, winking. ‘Have you got any of that coffee in your flask? I’m really thirsty.’

‘No.’ Van den Bergen scratched his thatch of white hair and grimaced as a burp of indigestion forced its way up and out. She was being gracious about the whole thing. He allowed his scowl to soften. ‘So, you think we’re looking for a German drug dealer?’

He caught George studying his face. He had got rid of the goatee but hadn’t shaved for a couple of days. He touched his jaw self-consciously, wondering what she thought about the stubble that popped out of his skin like steel and iron filings. Did she think it … attractive? Or did he repel her?

‘This guy flits between Amsterdam and Germany,’ she said. ‘He knows the students in my faculty enough to select victims from among us. Perhaps Klaus and Joachim led him to Amsterdam but later pissed him off. How long ago was Saeng attacked? It was November last year, wasn’t it?’

Van den Bergen nodded. ‘Klaus and Joachim had been in Amsterdam for a couple of months.’ He leaned on his spade, which he had thrust into the fertile earth. Then he strode over to his summerhouse, erected two fold-up chairs and took out his flask.

‘I thought you didn’t have any coffee,’ George said.

Van den Bergen seated himself gingerly on the flimsy chair and treated her to a wry grin. ‘I didn’t think you deserved to share it. You’re very disobedient.’ He knew he was flirting with her now. It seemed entirely the wrong thing to do under the circumstances and yet, here he was, babbling on like an idiot. And blushing! Perhaps the ibuprofen and small beer that he had found hidden behind his rose fertiliser were a poor lunchtime combination.

He handed her two cups and poured them out a drink each.

George took her cup and warmed her fingers around it. She downed the contents in three gulps.

‘Your coffee tastes like shit, Inspector.’

Van den Bergen shot her a sideways glance and smirked. ‘Has anybody ever told you, George, you’re a real charmer?’

George patted her hair, set her cup on the mosaic patio and stretched out her arms. ‘Listen! There’s something else. I’ve had a stalker these past few weeks.’

Van den Bergen’s flagrant, burning desire to flirt with a girl half his age was immediately snuffed out. He watched George’s expression change from mischievous to troubled, as though some shadow had passed across the sun. She looked suddenly vulnerable.

In an uncharacteristically shaky voice, she told him how she had found matches and a semen stain in her room. She relayed her sense of being followed and then explained how she had discovered Peeping Tom equipment on the other side of the canal, facing directly into her room.

‘It took speaking to Saeng for me to realise that I saw this disfigured guy limping into a sex show after I’d been to the flower market. Now I come to think of it, his face looks like he’s been burned or wounded beyond recognition in an explosion or something.’

‘Why the hell didn’t you report it?’ van den Bergen demanded.

George crossed her arms. ‘Like I said, I thought it was some one night stand gone wrong. I didn’t want to bother you. I didn’t think it was relevant until Klaus entered the picture, and by the time I was ready to say something, you call and tell me he’s dead.’

He tutted and shook his head. ‘Silly girl.’

Then, silence for a while, which George didn’t interrupt. He needed to think. What kind of a man had burns like that?

‘Maybe this guy’s ex-military,’ he said. ‘There are a lot of men coming back from active service in Afghanistan who have terrible bomb-blast and shrapnel injuries. I’ll get my people to look for German or Dutch soldiers with criminal records who have gone AWOL or been discharged.’

George then told him about a mystery foreign-sounding middle man who was shepherding the Middle Eastern girls through Amsterdam from a comfortable distance.

‘My housemates think the girls are muling drugs to the UK,’ she said. ‘Here we have a drug dealer. Now you’re saying maybe this guy might have been injured in Afghanistan. I have a theory …’

Van den Bergen wiped out his empty coffee cup with a tissue and screwed the lid back on the flask. His synapses were crackling and flashing with anticipation. ‘You think our murderer is possibly ex-military, involved in a big international vice ring? Well, that’s not unfeasible. And we break rings like that once every few years. Maybe once a decade, even. Career cases for the vice boys. And this guy has Afghan or even Taliban connections for drugs and girls? Okay. That’s where a lot of the heroin is coming from.’

‘Got any murdered prostitutes or young girls of Middle Eastern origins?’ George asked, sipping a second cup of coffee despite her protestations that it was shocking. ‘Any unsolved drug murders in Germany or the Netherlands as a whole? They could all be worth looking at. This guy struck before with Saeng.’

Van den Bergen unexpectedly found himself putting his hand on her forearm. It was time to say something. Drop the facade. ‘How does an academic goody-two-shoes know so much about international vice, Georgina McKenzie?’

George looked directly into his eyes. He could see, as her pupils dilated, that she had stumbled on the truth.

‘You know about me,’ she said.

Van den Bergen allowed the chuckle of the resigned and worldweary to stagger from his lips. ‘I was the junior inspector in charge of the Dutch end of your drugs bust, George,’ he said pointedly. ‘Or should I call you Ella? You didn’t suit the nun’s habit at all!’

George concealed a childish, embarrassed grin beneath a shaking hand. She lit a cigarette. Dragged hard on it.

Van den Bergen didn’t want to belittle her or make her feel uncomfortable. He resolved not to mention the Rotterdam Silencer and her accidental connection to him again. But he did feel a degree of satisfaction that now they had only truth between them.

He stood up. He removed his boots and beat the mud from the soles against the side of his summerhouse. ‘But I tell you what, before you fly off,’ he said, ‘let’s get our forensics team to take a look around your bedsit. See if they can lift any prints. And while we’re at it, I’ll get a warrant to look in the store room that faces into your place.’

‘Hey, Georgina, everything all right here?’ Jan asked, peering at her through smudged glasses.

George could see her landlord was nervous as he toyed with the buttons on his waistcoat.

‘I’m okay, Jan. I’ll fill you in later.’ The last thing George wanted was Jan clucking around her room, winding the police up, spouting half-baked hippy politics and pretending to be the laidback, cool uncle she neither had nor needed.

Jan cocked his head to the side and hooked a chunk of fuse-wire hair behind his ear. ‘You look like you’re going to be sick,’ he said. ‘You come down and get me if these guys are giving you hassle.’

George gave a half-hearted wave as a mountain of a forensics man made to shut the door in Jan’s perplexed face. But a question popped into her head like a giant cartoon question mark. She wedged her foot between the man and the door just before it closed.

‘Do us a favour, Jan,’ she said.

‘Anything.’

‘Ask Katja or Inneke if they know the names of the English guys who do fake ID for some of the girls. If I’m out, get them to text me.’

The forensics man mountain had his way. He slammed the door shut on grumbling Jan.

George found the intrusion of the three forensic crime scene investigators almost intolerable. Every surface was covered in grey dust, highlighting the plethora of fingerprints that George had hitherto not been aware of. She stood with arms folded, mouth curled downwards into a scowl, wishing she could take a hot, damp cloth and some cream cleanser to the mess they had created.

Using what looked like women’s blusher brushes, they were dusting every surface. At least the men wore plastic overshoes. It was a small consolation.

Van den Bergen emerged from her kitchenette, just as she was examining her phone display for the twelfth time to check in vain for a text or voicemail from Ad. The dungarees had given way to his usual dark trousers and a beige raincoat, worn over another ageing blue shirt. In his latex gloved hands, he carried out a clear plastic bag containing the cook’s matches. The only thing that hinted at him having been at his allotment not forty minutes earlier was the honest dirt beneath his fingernails.

‘Nothing so far?’ van den Bergen asked the fingerprinting team in a gruff voice.

One of the men, a barrel-chested, short man with a ruddy face, nodded. ‘Over here, boss,’ he said, pointing to a photograph in an Ikea pine frame.

The photo was of George and Ad outside the impressive arched portico of the Rijksmuseum. Ad’s arm around George’s shoulder. Both smiling. Before their first, abortive kiss.

‘See these prints?’ the barrel-chested man said.

George followed van den Bergen over to the photo. She peered at the grey dusty pattern of the fingerprint. Instead of it being the usual elliptical maze of tiny lines, the print was completely blank in the middle. Only around the outside were there traces of a pattern.

‘Our perpetrator has no prints left on the pads of his fingers,’ van den Bergen said.

‘Burned off,’ George suggested, looking at the barrel-chested detective for corroboration.

He nodded. ‘Looks that way.’

George looked at the photograph again. ‘Why is he so interested in me?’

She felt van den Bergen’s eyes boring into the side of her head. ‘He could have been watching every student on your course, George,’ he said. ‘We’re going to have to pay a visit to everybody’s accommodation.’

Van den Bergen’s phone rang out with a deafening blast of music from some ghastly grunge band that made George jump.

‘Yes,’ he barked into the receiver. ‘Oh.’ He turned to George. ‘You’d better come with me.’

His voice had a deadpan, cold tone to it that made the hairs on George’s arms stand on end.

Wordlessly, they marched over to the sex shop on the other side of the canal. She clambered up the tenants’ steep stairs behind van den Bergen, who took them two at a time. They passed the first floor, where, like Katja and Inneke, two prostitutes occupied rented rooms with red lights in the picture windows that faced on to the canal. The girls stood in see-through chiffon robes in their doorway, chatting amiably in heavy Eastern European accents with one of van den Bergen’s detectives.

She continued up to the top floor, where finally they reached the store room that contained the boxes stacked against the back wall. The door stood open. She followed van den Bergen inside, who ducked to avoid banging his head on the low threshold.

The floorboards were bare and dusty. A female detective not much older than George was leafing through the boxes’ contents, which appeared to be dog-eared leather-bound books. Perhaps antiquated library stock. George couldn’t see clearly enough to make out any titles on the spines.

‘Over here, boss,’ said a dark-haired detective whom George remembered was called Elvis. At least, that’s what van den Bergen called him. He was wearing a black leather biker’s jacket today. He still looked a prat.

George followed Elvis’ pointing finger to a patch of wall next to the window, out of the line of sight from her room. Then, her world abruptly came to a standstill. Blood froze in her veins. Breath seized up in her lungs. Even her heart forgot to beat.

Tacked to the wall were eight-by-ten-inch photographs of every man on her course, clearly taken from a distance on the university campus using a long-range lens. Ratan’s, Joachim’s, Remko’s and Klaus’ faces had been crossed out with thick black felt-tip pen. The photographs of six other course-mates, whose names she was not familiar with, were untouched.

There was a high-resolution photograph of Ad. In it, he was standing at her window with George’s ear and part of her hair visible on the edge of the frame. Judging by the angle and height, it had clearly been taken by the photographic equipment she had spotted in the window of the store room. Ad was smiling into the unseasonably warm mid-autumn morning sunshine, with his eyes shut. He had brought her fresh croissants for a late breakfast. She remembered they had been looking out over the rooftops together, talking about him coming to stay with her in Cambridge. At no point had she suspected that a serial killer had been capturing those tender moments; spying on their blossoming friendship from a vantage point just a few metres away. Now Ad’s sun-kissed face was ringed with bright red felt-tip pen. Perhaps what was equally disconcerting about this collage, though, was the fact that all of the photographs of the male course-mates were arranged in a ring around photos of one woman. Pulling on her underwear in the morning. Staring down onto the street in the afternoon sun. Dancing on her own at night, dragging on a cigarette. The only woman that featured on the wall. Her.