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

Marianne set down her scalpel. Staring at him askance as though he was a lunatic. ‘Paul? Are you okay?’

Pull yourself together, you loser. ‘I’m fine. It’s my middle ear playing up.’ He pointed to his ear, as though that made his lie more convincing. She didn’t need to know he was so weak-minded. ‘Vertigo. You know. A lot of viruses going round in this infernal shitty weather.’

‘Have you and Georgina split up?’ She narrowed her sharp blue eyes at him.

He pulled up a typing chair close to the action. His height made it easy to observe as Marianne resumed her dissection. Pointedly said nothing in response.

‘Suit yourself, tight-lipped sod,’ she said.

After the bulk of the examination had been performed, internal organs weighed and measured and the dead man scrutinised for signs of foul play visible to the naked eye, the pathologist scowled.

‘Well?’ Van den Bergen asked, hoping she had not noticed he had been looking anywhere but at the body for most of the procedure. ‘We found a big bag of mephedrone on him. It was odd that his stash hadn’t been taken. Are we looking at a simple drug-related stabbing?’

Marianne tutted. Looked perplexed. ‘This is the weird thing,’ she said. Snapping off her gloves in silence. Scrubbing her arms to the elbows. Silent all the while. ‘He’s clearly lost a lot of blood because he was stabbed with something in the carotid artery. Whoever did it knew what they were doing. The wound is about two inches deep, as though it’s been done with those home-made weapons you get in prisons.’

‘A shiv.’

‘Exactly. The wound is conical, but there’s no evidence of a blade. At first I thought he’d been stabbed with a stake or maybe one of those conical stoppers you get for wine bottles.’

Van den Bergen crossed one long leg over the other, bouncing his fur-lined boot on his knee. Finally, he pulled his beanie hat off and ruffled his thick, prematurely white hair. ‘It’s possible. Don’t rule it out at this stage. We haven’t found a weapon anywhere near the crime scene.’

Marianne pulled up another chair and sat beside him. ‘No, but the thing is, there are traces of water in the wound. I don’t get it. And though he lost pints of blood, his actual cause of death was suffocation. That’s what I was alluding to when I said there were lacerations and bruising in and around his mouth and nose.’

‘What?’ Van den Bergen leaned closer to her. Scrutinising the fine lines around her eyes and the hollows beneath her cheekbones, where long-distance running had stripped the fat away.

‘Someone shoved snow up his nose and into his mouth. They stabbed him first and then made sure they finished the job by suffocation. When I examined him at the scene, I found slush in his nasal passages and mouth. Almost melted, but not quite.’ She touched the tip of her own nose thoughtfully. ‘Even with the victim’s body temperature being a steady 37 degrees, by the time he’d started to bleed out, and his temperature had begun to drop, with the stupid sub-zero conditions we’ve got at the moment, his extremities would have taken barely any time at all to cool to freezing point.’

‘Hence the slush.’

‘Yes. Stay outside for more than ten minutes in this weather in the wrong clothes … It’s not exactly taking a bath in liquid nitrogen, but not far off it!’

Van den Bergen chewed over the information. Rubbing his brow. He could feel the pinching pain of his scar tissue responding to the mortuary chill, now that his coat hung open. Taking a blister pack out of his anorak pocket, he slipped two ibuprofen onto his tongue. Swallowed with spit. ‘What do you think of opportunism? This John Doe had no wallet on him. Could he have been robbed because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time?’

The pathologist stood and stretched. Glanced over at the dead man, baring his innermost secrets beneath the mortuary lights. ‘Very public place, though. If I wanted to mug a man, I wouldn’t choose that spot. Would you? It’s overlooked by scores of apartments.’

Van den Bergen nodded. Wished he was sitting on his sofa at home, savouring a hot coffee, bouncing ideas back and forth with George instead. Watching the winter sunlight that streamed through the French windows of his apartment kiss the tips of her hair.

‘The bag of mephedrone on the dead man was worth a fair few Euros,’ he said. ‘Who the hell would kill a junkie, take his money, but leave the drugs?’

Marianne de Koninck started to print off labels for the samples she had taken, methodically categorising the bits of the dead man that would be sent to toxicology. ‘You’re the Chief Inspector, Paul. Not me. But I’d be asking what kind of psychopath would commit such a public, brutal but efficient murder if it was just about stealing a wallet?’

CHAPTER 6 (#ulink_c7d70deb-b571-5269-8309-855caa9f3b8f)

St. John’s College, Cambridge, later (#ulink_c7d70deb-b571-5269-8309-855caa9f3b8f)

‘You’re late,’ Sally said, smiling, though her tone was acidic enough to strip the wax from the grand wooden mantel of the fireplace. She clutched what appeared to be a whisky, or brandy maybe, in a cut-crystal tumbler in her right hand.

George could smell the fumes from the strong alcohol. At 2pm, it felt like too early in the day for a drink. But then it was beyond freezing outside. ‘Can I have one of those?’ she asked.

‘No. I’m cross with you.’ Sally clacked on the side of her tumbler with the two chunky Perspex rings she wore on her gnarled fingers. Marking time. ‘I told you to make sure you got here in a punctual fashion.’

George pulled off her Puffa jacket and released herself from the strangling grip of her scarf. ‘Overslept,’ she said. ‘You wouldn’t believe—’

‘No, I wouldn’t,’ the Senior Tutor said. Nicotine-stained gritted teeth. Total sense of humour failure. ‘You were notable by your absence, young lady. The Master asked where you were and I had to string him a line about emergency dental surgery. So no fucking drinky for you. If he asks, the anaesthetic still hasn’t worn off.’

‘Oh, you’re harsh!’ George took a coffee, poured for her by one of the formal hall waiting staff into a cup embellished with the St. John’s College logo. Looked grand. Tasted like crap. She grimaced at the bitter, burnt flavour. ‘Better than nothing, I suppose,’ she muttered under her breath.

The other fellows were scattered around the drawing room in clusters: black crows in their floor-length gowns. All pleasantly pissed after a formal lunch that had been put on for some major benefactor or other. Accompanied by a minor HRH, whom George clocked on the other side of the room. Red ears and a flushed face, chatting to the Director of Studies for Modern and Medieval Languages.

‘I should be over there, rubbing shoulders with the Royal,’ Sally said. ‘Not chastising you like you’re an errant child.’

‘Well, don’t then, because I’m not one.’ George set the poisonous coffee down.

‘Get your bloody gown on, for god’s sake!’ Sally said. Fidgeting with her big chunky beads. Tugging at the blunt fringe of her short bobbed hair. ‘Christ, I could murder a cigarette.’

George took her neatly folded gown out of an Asda bag. Pulled it on over her idiotic smart black dress, which she wore only at the grand dinners that constituted the College’s formal hall. Not warm enough by a long stretch in this weather, she had concealed her thermal long johns as best she could beneath the skirt by wearing Aunty Sharon’s knee-length boots – designed for big women, they swam around her calves.

‘I’m in a spot of bother,’ George blurted, feeling overwhelmed in the fire-lit fug of the Master’s drawing room, her thoughts still on the events at 2am, when the hooded figure had appeared at Aunty Sharon’s back door.

Sally fixed her with laser-sharp hooded eyes – no less probing for being behind cat’s-eyes glasses. ‘Whatever it is, I don’t want to hear it.’ The lines etched into her pruned mouth grew deeper. ‘You’re a grown woman, now. You can stand on your own two feet. My time playing nanny for MI6 is over.’

‘It’s nothing like that,’ George said. ‘I don’t think, anyway. But I’ve got this homeless woman who keeps tapping me up for cash.’

Sally stealthily swiped the decanter containing amber alcohol, topped up her glass and sniffed at the contents. Swirled them around the crystal so that jambs dripped in perpendicular lines around the sides. ‘A homeless woman?’

‘It’s a long story,’ George said, sighing. ‘Second time she’s shown up at my Aunty’s, asking for a handout. It was gone two in the morning. I nearly stuck a meat cleaver in her head.’ She exhaled sharply, remembering how the dishevelled woman had screamed for mercy, then shoved her way inside, once she realised George was not about to attack her.

‘What you doing at my house?’ Aunty Sharon had said, kettle in hand. ‘I told you, I don’t want you coming here, pestering my niece.’

The diminutive figure had slid the hood from her head, shedding harsh light on cheeks that were raw from being too long in the cold. She looked far older than her years. Thin, with scabs on her knuckles and stinking like those wheelie bins you get outside restaurants of rotten vegetables and stale cigarettes.

‘Please. Just a twenty would do. It’s so cold out there. I’ve got nothing to eat. No money. I’m sleeping in a freezing van. I can’t even afford to put the engine on to get the heater going.’ Imploring eyes, begging George to help.

Seeing her again in the warmth and light of Aunty Sharon’s kitchen, George had wanted to give the poor woman a bed for the night. ‘Look, I told you not to bother me again,’ she had said, pressing fifty into the woman’s hand. ‘You can’t come round here. It’s not my house. There’s a kid here.’

‘The teenager?’ the woman had asked.

Aunty Sharon had got aggressive then. ‘You been fucking spying on my boy? You fruitloops or something?’ She had waved the kettle at the unwelcome visitor. ‘Cos I got boiled water in here and I ain’t afraid to cob it on your skanky homeless head. We don’t want no trouble here, do you get me? I don’t want no raggedy white arse in my house. So, take your cash and put one foot in front of the other, darling. And stop preying on my niece’s good nature.’

In the end, the woman had stayed until nearly four in the morning. Talking with George and Sharon over a convivial half bottle of rum. Had a shower, using up some of the excessively hot water. Turns out, Aunty Sharon had been just as prone to being a soft touch as George. No surprises there.

Back in the Master’s lodge, Sally dragged George into an adjacent room. Empty in there. Together, they forced the heavy window up and lit their cigarettes. Blowing the smoke into the deep-freeze of the snow-blanketed garden.

‘Who’s the woman?’ Sally asked.

George blew a dragon’s plume of smoke out of her nostrils onto the sub-zero air. ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s nothing to do with our work here. Just some other bullshit I’ve got going on. Nothing to do with skeletons in the closet or anything. Don’t worry. I’m cool on that front. I’m not stupid.’

‘Far from it, Dr McKenzie,’ Sally said, flicking her ash onto the sill. ‘Now, I clobbered that benefactor during lunch. Flashed him my wrinkly, ageing senior tutor knees and offered him an honorary doctorate in Criminology in return for some funding to keep us afloat.’