The Girl Who Broke the Rules

Making sure he did not betray the satisfaction that lurked just beneath the surface of his empathic expression, he patted her hand. Moved around the island and enveloped her in a stiff hug, which he immediately regretted. All those years, he had wondered if their professional rapport would translate to a physical one. It didn’t. There was no chemistry between them, whatsoever. And it was clear from the backwards step that she took that she thought so too.

‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ he said, retreating to his bar stool. Baffled that disappointment did not stir within him.

Marianne looked up to the spotlit ceiling with sorrowful, watery eyes and sniffed. ‘Do yourself a favour, Paul. Never fall for a younger woman. You’ll spend your life wondering how the hell she could fancy you, with your deteriorating eyesight and decaying body. Then one day, she’ll just up and leave for someone firmer. Honestly, they just eat you up and spit you out.’ She started to cry. Angry sobs with tears soaking the collar of her dressing gown. ‘He took my bloody stereo!’ Her words started to break into hiccoughs of sound, as though she were speaking down a phone line with intermittently poor reception. ‘I wouldn’t…mind but…it was m—my…birthday…present…a—and I…gave him the god—goddamned…money to…pay for it.’

Van den Bergen’s coffee had long gone cold before he could turn the subject to the case. ‘Look, Marianne,’ he said, spreading his fingers wide. He related what he knew so far about the murders.

‘So, what has all this got to do with me?’ Marianne asked. Her tone was sour. ‘Aren’t I allowed to take some sick leave? I’ve got a perfectly capable—’

‘I don’t trust Strietman,’ van den Bergen said. ‘Sorry. The guy’s just not you. He comes over like a crap crime noir film, full of theories and gum-shoe fucking interpretations.’

Marianne rubbed her face and groaned. ‘Daan Strietman is highly qualified, Paul. Yes, he loves his job—’

‘I don’t need Dick bloody Tracy or…’ He struggled to think of an illustration that would suit his purposes, but in truth, he hadn’t seen more than a handful of films since Tamara was at that age where the cinema had seemed a suitable activity for a father who saw his daughter every second weekend. ‘…I don’t know. Just Dick bloody Tracy. I need a pathologist who gives me straight facts.’ He withdrew a sheaf of paper from the inside pocket of his raincoat. It made a hefty thwack as he slammed it down emphatically on the worktop. Pulled his reading glasses up from their resting place on his stomach, at the end of their chain, and pushed them up his nose. Started to read the reports from the autopsy, giving extra emphasis to the hyperbole and melodrama with which Strietman had studded his otherwise dry medical observations.

‘Give me those sodding print-outs, you annoying old bugger!’ Marianne leaned over the island and snatched the sheaf up. The suggestion of a half-smile playing on her lips. Eyes darting from side to side as she skimmed the pages.

‘Intrigued?’ van den Bergen asked, staring at her from over the top of his half-moon glasses. ‘We should get the forensics back from the building site any time now. I’d prefer it was you who delivered the results to me.’

‘Look, I’ll come in tomorrow. We’ll see what we see.’

CHAPTER 21 (#ulink_688488cc-035c-5bac-9bbc-fa3ceac004f2)

Cambridge, Mill Road, later (#ulink_688488cc-035c-5bac-9bbc-fa3ceac004f2)

George saw nothing but a green and grey blur as she rattled across Parker’s Piece. Teeth juddering. Eyes streaming. Cycling on her rusting sit-up-and-beg diagonally across, from the University Arms towards Mill Road with aching legs that were out of practice. Every time she hit a bump in the giant criss-cross of tarmac that cut through the huge green square, her Sainsbury’s bags, full of tins that she vowed she would cook with, as Ad had shown her, bashed painfully against her shins.

‘Fucking man!’ she complained aloud, garnering a bewildered look from the pimple-faced boy (a fresher, by the looks) who approached from the opposite direction, only feet away from her now. ‘Not you, tit!’

The boy continued on his way, leaving George to ruminate over what a liability van den Bergen was, and how Ad was not much better. She had been back in Cambridge less than twenty-four hours. It had been her intention to do a little quiet reading, although she had admittedly gone off piste by selecting a criminology book that dealt with trafficked women, working as slaves in Britain’s sex industry. But she did, at least, have noble intentions of typing up her notes from her interviews with Silas Holm and Dermot Robinson. Van den Bergen had ruined all that with the email.

From: Paul van den Bergen06.27

To: George_McKenzie@hotmail.com (mailto:George_McKenzie@hotmail.com)

Subject: Victim ID

I’m attaching a video we pulled from a camera found in a crime scene. Marie says it is horror porno, but nobody can ID the film or the actress. You might know. Let me know a.s.a.p. if you’ve got ideas.

Come back to Amsterdam. It’s almost time to pot up the dahlias.

Paul.

PS: There’s something else I need to tell you.

She had deliberately not switched on her phone until she was in the supermarket and it had gone nine. Ad-avoidance. Ad had already left four messages, sent six texts and attempted a further three calls – all missed. Wanting to discuss the trip and her behaviour. Insisting he had to tell her what was on his mind and how they could sort things out and how he really didn’t speak to Astrid any more, despite George’s misgivings, and how he could come to terms with her hygiene obsession and that van den Bergen was absolutely not the only one who understood psychological problems. Being assailed by a defensive Ad was bad enough. But here, van den Bergen had sent her a video she did not have the credit to download. Her phone’s monthly contract was almost at its limit. Plus, it had been accompanied by a message that was both tantalising and tugged at her already compromised heart. What did he need to tell her, exactly?

‘Incorrigible arsehole!’ she said, as she cycled the length of Mill Road.

It felt like a five-mile hike. She would have liked a cigarette at the end of it with the fresh, ground coffee she had just bought. But she had sworn to both Ad and van den Bergen that she would stick with the e-cigarettes. They weren’t the same.

She turned into Devonshire Road. Opened the door to the terraced house she shared with another PhD called Lucy. Lucy was a tall, long-limbed rich girl who spent most of the time at her undergrad boyfriend’s place, four or five miles away, up in Girton College. Given the frequency with which George shuttled back and forth from London and Amsterdam, she and Lucy had met only a handful of times in a term. Probably just as well, since Lucy was a slovenly little shit, who didn’t know one end of a toilet cleaner bottle from another. Lucy had left a scum ring around the bath on three occasions, early on in the tenancy, rendering George apoplectic with rage. But Lucy had left a mess in the toilet only once. George smiled at the memory of threatening leggy, entitled Lucy with a beating, using the toilet brush as a weapon. No. Lucy didn’t come home very often, now. Though a note on the kitchen table said she planned to return tomorrow evening, and could George please leave the heating and hot water on? No. Fuck her. George didn’t have the money to subsidise Lucy’s preferred twenty-six degrees of tropical in winter. It wasn’t the Costa del Salcombe. She could put another sodding ten-ply cashmere jumper on.

Coffee on, and George picked up van den Bergen’s email on her laptop. Watched the video nasty, whilst chugging on her e-cigarette. Peered through her fingers as she reached the climax.

‘Jesus, man. That’s some fucked-up shit, right there,’ she told the screen.

The film was high resolution. Perhaps owing to the fact that the close-ups were all of body parts and implements, rather than focussing on her face, and that the lighting was sharply directional, George found she was struggling to place the actress. Certainly, despite having notched up some serious hours watching hardcore violent pornography until revulsion and outrage had turned to numb indifference, she did not even recognise the tasteless niche genre.

She captured the woman in a freeze-frame. Leaned in close. There was something about the woman’s eyes that seemed startlingly familiar, though she could not articulate why.

‘She looks like Katja with a wig on,’ she said aloud, swigging coffee from her special Amsterdam mug. ‘Is it Katja?’ Scroll back. Freeze. Scroll forward. Freeze. The woman flickered in slo-mo through her erotic cabaret. ‘Fucking looks like her, as well.’

How long ago had her erstwhile neighbour, Katja, gone into porn flicks – boosted from prostitution, where she had rented a humble room above the Cracked Pot Coffee Shop, directly beneath George’s attic bedsit, to the small screen? A step up the erotic career ladder, because giving a blow job to that prick the Firestarter had catapulted her from being a fifty-euro-a-trick nobody to being a sex-industry celebrity.

Sweat beaded instantaneously on George’s forehead. She pulled out her phone and dialled Katja.

Ringing. Ringing. Ringing. No answer. Then…

‘George, darling!’ Her voice was sluggish, as though George had woken her.

‘You alive?’ George asked, breathing deeply to slow her heartbeat.

‘Yes. Last time I looked, honey.’