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Opening and closing her mouth, George foraged in her mental lie-box for a good, feasible excuse as to why she had kept her flying visit to Cambridge a secret. Tried to work out how the aerobically challenged Senior Tutor had hoofed it from her office in St John’s College up the road to the house inside ten minutes. Ten goddamned minutes since Aunty Shaz’ car had rolled into town.
‘How—?’
‘Sophie Bartek,’ Sally explained, marching to the taxi that George had only just clocked, parked all the while in front of Aunty Sharon. She explained to the driver that she had decided to hitch a ride back in Sharon’s Toyota, paid him and sent him on his way.
‘Fucking Sophie,’ George said under her breath. ‘Shit-stirrer owes me one.’
She forced a smile for the Professor of Criminology who ruled her academic life like a benevolent dictator; the woman she would always be indebted to for having allowed her to learn her way out of a future where petty crime or prison or stacking supermarket shelves would otherwise have beckoned.
‘Why haven’t you been taking my calls, young lady?’ Sally asked, glowering at George. Pointing with a gnarled, amber-coloured finger. ‘It’s our bloody book launch tomorrow evening, and Sophie tells me you’re buggering back off to Amsterdam.’ She folded her arms across her narrow chest, squeezing the leather of her eccentrically cut coat until she was akin to a municipal bin bag with the drawstrings pulled tight. The pruning around her mouth deepened. But that fierce gaze had lost none of its potency behind the red acetate cat’s-eye glasses. ‘I’ll never be able to show my face in Heffers again. And all because you can’t resist the pull of that old flake, Van den Bergen. The man’s like a disappointing Svengali with prostate trouble. Our big night will be ruined. Now, what do you have to say for yourself?’
‘You don’t need me to help you blow your fucking trumpet in public, Sally. You’ve got that one covered all on your own, I reckon.’ George didn’t like being indebted. And apologies were overrated. She jammed her fist onto her hip defiantly. ‘And Paul is hardly a flake, is he? He’s one of the best coppers in Europe, actually. And if you must know, I’m going to Amsterdam because there’s been a development regarding Letitia.’
‘What?!’ Aunty Sharon shouted from inside the Toyota.
‘What?!’ Sally Wright said, clutching George’s arm.
George pulled herself loose from the grip of the Senior Tutor. Immediately regretted saying anything, as her aunt unbuckled and started to heave herself out of the car.
‘Georgina, why on earth didn’t you say anything?’ Sally said, her brow furrowed, perhaps with genuine empathy.
Before George could retreat, Sharon had rounded on them both, booting Sally Wright aside unceremoniously with her ample bottom. She clasped George into a suffocating hug. The threat of tears audible in her voice.
‘Is she dead?’ Sharon asked. ‘Has that silly cow’s body been found in a wheelie bin?’ She sniffed hard. ‘It has, hasn’t it? Oh, sweet Jesus.’
‘I won’t know anything until I speak to Marie, one of Paul’s detectives,’ George said, disengaging herself from her aunt. ‘All I know is that there’s a man in Maastricht. A dead guy, who’s somehow connected to Letitia’s disappearance. That’s all she’s told me so far.’ She turned to the Senior Tutor, realising it would do her no favours to curry the displeasure of a woman who could have her funding rescinded at any time, leaving her broke and jobless. Sally had threatened it before, but George was older, wiser and several steps closer to having a deposit saved for her own place, now. Biting this particular gnarled proverbial hand that fed would be folly. ‘That’s why I can’t stay for the launch, Sal.’ She rearranged her features into what would pass as an apologetic smile. ‘You’ll be brilliant without me.’
Sally tugged at her blunt-cut fringe and scowled. Hooked her short bob behind her ear. ‘But all of Dobkin’s family are coming. It’s a big deal, dedicating the book to his memory.’
‘We robbed his research,’ George said. ‘I could have saved his life and I didn’t. I knew Danny was up to no good and all I could think of was protecting my own arse.’ George’s viscera tightened at the memory of her squatting behind a car, watching her academic rival, Professor Dickwad Dobkin, succumb to the brutal intentions of her backstreet drug-dealing ex-lover. UCL’s finest criminologist crumpling to the ground like a falling autumnal leaf in a quiet London WC1 square, all because he had got too close to revealing the true identities of the major players in the UK’s people-trafficking rings. A bullet, punching its way into his superlative brain, that could have been avoided, had George only been quicker to punch his number into her phone. ‘I don’t deserve to have my name on the front of that book.’
Sally’s mouth hardened to a thin line. ‘We did not steal his research, Georgina McKenzie. Dobkin’s trafficking database and the information we … you gathered from inmates in prison developed organically under completely separate—’
‘His research made it into our book,’ George said, feeling shame heat her wind-chilled cheeks from the inside. Nervously looking at Aunty Sharon, expecting a look of disapprobation but seeing only confusion in her face.
‘What’s some geez in Maastricht gotta do with my turd of a sister?’ Sharon asked.
‘It’s going to be a Sunday Times bestseller,’ Sally said, pulling a cigarette packet out of her coat pocket. She offered one to George. George shook her head but took one anyway.
Sharon, clearly unimpressed by the interloper snatching George’s attention in this time of family crisis, shouted at the Senior Tutor, ‘Mout a massy, yuh cyan shut yup?’ Jamaican patois, delivered with such venom and speed that George was convinced the paving slabs of that genteel Cambridge road might blister at any moment. Sharon snatched the cigarette off George and lit it herself. ‘Listen, Professor whatever-your name is,’ she said, exhaling a cloud of blue-grey smoke in Sally’s direction. ‘If my niece here stands a cat in hell’s chance of tracking my sister down – who’s been missing for a fucking year …’ Jabbing the cigarette towards the startled Fellow. ‘… she’s going to Amsterdam if I have to put on bloody water wings and swim her there, myself. Right? And if that means you can’t roll her out at your fucking boring book launch as some novelty ghetto-fabulous lackey what serves the cooking wine and flutters her eyelashes at the dirty old codgers who pay your wages, you’re just going have to suck it up, darling! Cos family comes first. Right?’ She turned to George, straightening her burgundy, glossy wig. Glowing with an almost religious zeal that only Bermondsey women could really pull off when vexed. ‘Get your shit together, love. We’re going to the airport.’ A click of the fingers meant the conversation was over.
Dropping Sally Wright off outside St John’s College, leaving her open-mouthed and speechless, for once, George realised she was trembling with anticipation. Would this trip yield an answer to her questions? She covered her juddering hands with her rucksack. Not quick enough for her aunt, though.
‘I see you shaking there, like you’ve got the DTs! It would help if you ate a proper breakfast,’ she said, indicating left. Pulling up at the drop-off point at Stansted Airport, forcing the dented silver car into a bottleneck of taxis and disoriented relatives who were also dropping baggage-laden holidaymakers at Departures. Sharon reached for a cool bag at George’s feet.
‘Shift your feet. I made you a packed lunch,’ she said. Plonked the bag onto George’s lap. Grabbing her face and planting a wet kiss on her cheek, which George hastily wiped away. ‘Couple of nice homemade patties and some jerk chicken. That’ll keep you going for a bit.’
‘Ta. I love you, Aunty Shaz.’ George drank in the detail of her aunt’s face, feeling suddenly melancholy. She pushed aside unexpectedly negative feelings that she couldn’t quite articulate. A sense of impending loss or perhaps just separation anxiety. ‘Give my love to Tin and Patrice. I’ll text you.’
Aunty Sharon nodded. Her face, scrubbed of the make-up she wore to the club in the evening, seemed closer to five than forty.
‘Find her, George. Find Letitia, dead or alive.’
CHAPTER 7
Amsterdam, mortuary, later
‘Well, there’s water in his lungs,’ Marianne de Koninck said, carefully lifting the slippery-looking mass out of his chest cavity and onto the scales in the mortuary. ‘That much is obvious.’
At her side, Floris Engels’ milky eyes stared out from his bloated face. His scalp and legs, where Marianne’s pathologist’s blade had not yet got to work, were florid in places, yellowy-grey in others like bad tie-dye, the skin showing signs of wrinkling only at his extremities, as though it might shrug itself off his feet or hands. But the bloating made Van den Bergen twitch involuntarily. He hated floaters. They decomposed so bloody fast. He was glad of the clean, menthol smell of the VapoRub beneath his nostrils.
‘But I’ll need to test for the concentration of his serum electrolytes and examine his bones and viscera for diatoms,’ she said, observing the scales’ reading. ‘Our canal water is quite saline in certain parts of town because of the locks at Ijmuiden letting seawater in. So, there’ll be microscopic algae from the sea in his deep tissues if he’s just fallen in and met a watery end in the canal. Bones are always a good indicator.’ She took her scalpel and cut a sample of bone from the nub that protruded from his partially severed upper arm. Scraped the marrow into a test tube and sealed it. ‘It will take a couple of days in the lab. I’m due to get his bloods back any day, though.’ Pointing to his arm, she clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. Used her elbow to scratch at her belly beneath her scrubs. ‘That has been cut cleanly with the propeller of the barge, I’d say. Definitely done postmortem. My hypothesis is that our Floris here fell or was pushed in – point of entry by the barge. He sank, got trapped under the keel of the barge until our bargeman decided he needed a change of scenery.’
Van den Bergen wondered if Marianne’s muscular athlete’s arms would look so alien and ugly if she too had been underwater for a period of time. ‘So, he drowned, right?’ he asked.
The pathologist shone a light up the dead man’s nostrils and took swabs. Ever the professional, Van den Bergen wondered how she slept at night or ate after spending the working week with the dead. The last thing he needed a reminder of was his own mortality. Postmortems always left him feeling low for days.
‘He’s got froth in his air passages,’ she said. ‘Looking at his heart, I’d say it’s been subject to hypoxia and pulmonary oedema, causing ventricular tachycardia and haemodilution. There’s marked hyponatraemia. Everything’s pointing to drowning at this stage.’ Standing tall, she stretched out her back and yawned.
‘Late night?’ Van den Bergen asked.
‘You’d only be jealous if I told you.’ She winked at him. Turned her attention back to the cadaver on her stainless-steel slab.
Van den Bergen swallowed hard. Thought about the strange sexual chemistry that had historically been between them, fizzling to nothing when they had once actually found themselves in a clinch. Decided to ignore her prompt. ‘Pointing to drowning. You’re not sure?’
‘Listen,’ she said. ‘Drowning in adults is rare. You guys pull a handful out of the canals in a normal year. Right? The odd drunken tourist or some idiot who thinks it’s a good idea to go swimming. It’s rare. So, whenever someone gets pulled out of the canal, I do two things. I test the bloods for alcohol levels and narcotics – not so easy when the body has been under water for a while, as decomp and the invasion of water in the cells makes everything so bloody difficult.’ She tugged at Engels’ fingernails. ‘Luckily, our guy hasn’t been in the water for too long. He’s lost his body heat but his nails and skin haven’t started to come away yet.’
‘So, he can’t have been in there for more than twenty-four hours,’ Van den Bergen said. ‘Isn’t that right?’
‘I’d say this guy’s been in a little while longer. Thirty-six hours, maybe. Just shy of forty-eight at a push. Any longer, his nails would have started coming away.’ The pathologist loped round to the far side of the body, her Crocs squeaking on the tiled floor. She pointed to his armpit. Livid purple bruises by the shoulder joint. More tricky to see on the side with the severed arm, but there, nevertheless. ‘And in cases like this, I also look for bruising. Trauma signs, where somebody’s hit their head on the way in or where somebody’s been attacked before being pushed in. A true drowning will show hardly any signs of trauma externally. If you’ve had too much to drink or are stoned, you slide or roll in; you’re dead inside five to ten minutes. You’ve inhaled a good couple of litres of water in three. But no bruising necessarily, unless you bash yourself on the way in. But here, look!’
Van den Bergen studied the small round purple bruises. Four by each armpit in total. ‘He’s been grabbed or lifted by someone.’ Removed some photos from an A4 manila envelope that had been taken at the canal side. Sifted through them, until he found photographs of Engels’ personal effects. A photograph of his shoes. ‘These were expensive shoes,’ he said. ‘Russell & Bromley from England. Nice moccasins, but look! They’re scuffed as hell at the heel and the heels themselves have been worn down.’
Marianne nodded. ‘He’s been dragged down to the canal by someone strong and flung in. Until I get all these results through, I’d put my money on that.’ She snapped off her latex gloves and started to wash her hands at the steel sink. ‘And given the other canal drownings were badly decomposed when they were discovered, who’s to say similar hadn’t happened to them? I didn’t perform their autopsies, but Strietman said they’d all been partying too hard – drugs in the system. Who’s to say they hadn’t been forced into the water? He recorded an open verdict.’
‘Oh shit,’ Van den Bergen said. ‘You really think we’ve got a canal killer on our hands?’
The pathologist shrugged. ‘You’re the Chief Inspector. You tell me.’
CHAPTER 8
Amsterdam, police headquarters, later
‘When is he due back?’ George asked Marie in Dutch, wrinkling her nose at the foetid smell of the IT suite. Stale sweat, with an after-kick of onions. But mainly overcooked cabbage. Even the smell of the new carpet that Van den Bergen had got funding for could not mask that distinctive bouquet.
Marie narrowed her watery blue eyes. Opened the collar of her ribbed sweater and sniffed. Shrugged absently. ‘He’s at the morgue.’ She glanced at the clock on her computer monitor. ‘He’s already been gone an hour. I reckon you’ve got twenty minutes, tops, before he shows.’
George considered the white shards that covered the floor by Marie’s feet. Eyed suspiciously the empty bag of crisps next to her keyboard. Set her bag down on the desk, rather than the floor. Yawned so that her blocked ears popped with a deafening squeak.
‘Ow.’ She rubbed her ears. Sniffed her fingers and was pleased to discover they smelled of the Moroccan oil she had used to tame her hair. Better than Marie’s stink.
‘How was your flight?’ Marie asked.
‘Yeah, OK. So come on, then. Tell me about this Maastricht man.’ George folded her arms and studied the IT expert’s face for signs of sympathy, excitement or fear that would give her an inkling as to what the new lead meant for her mother. All she could see was a rash of embarrassment curling its way up Marie’s neck with red tendrils.
Marie clicked her mouse several times. Brought up a photo of a corpse on screen.
George grimaced at the partially decomposed man. ‘Jesus. He’s no looker,’ she said in English. ‘What’s his story?’ Back to Dutch.
Marie pointed with her biro to the empty eye socket on the left-hand side of the man’s face. ‘They actually found him about nine months ago, buried in some heavy clay when they were doing landscaping for the new A2 Maastricht double-decker tunnel.’
‘The motorway bypass?’ George asked.
‘Yes. Exactly. The clay had preserved his soft tissues pretty well but we don’t share a database with Maastricht, so I didn’t come across this record until the other day. Completely by accident and only because I was digging in the right place.’ Marie blushed and hooked her lank red hair behind her ears. ‘Excuse the pun.’
‘And?’ Wearing a scowl, George scrutinised the photo of the corpse. ‘How does that relate to Letitia? I don’t get it.’
‘He’s a DNA match.’
‘Shit. Get out of town,’ George said in English, standing abruptly. ‘It was his eye? All those months ago?’
Marie nodded. She clicked up a photograph of a man who appeared altogether healthier. Alive, for a start. Dark-skinned with brown eyes and his black hair cropped brutishly. A tattoo of an indiscernible pattern on the side of his head, visible beneath the stubble on his scalp. Another tattoo of black roses scrolling around his neck.
‘He wasn’t bad looking,’ George said, raising an eyebrow. ‘What a waste.’
‘Well,’ Marie said, ‘The eye in the gift box in Vinkeles belonged to a man, not your mother. Forensics sussed that straight away. We’ve known it all along. Right? So, turns out, it belonged to this poor chump.’ Marie rubbed her nose, examined the inside of her empty crisp packet and tutted. ‘Nasser Malik. Only twenty. Low-level Maastricht dealer, who knocked about with some really nasty types. A recent addition to the M-Boyz gang, a few of whom got busted in 2009, after a couple of kids died from a bad batch of coke that they’d cut with too much levamisole and bloody scouring powder, would you believe it? Malik had previous for dealing, burglary, GBH and car theft but had always managed to avoid prison, getting off with fines and community service. He went missing about a year ago – reported by his mother, who’s a widowed dentist. Apparently, he’d had ADHD and never did particularly well at school because of it. His brother, Ahmed Malik, is a doctor in Breda but Nasser, the younger son, went off the rails after his dad died.’
George considered the handsome young fool that peered out at her from one photograph and the enucleated, ruined corpse that ogled her with one solitary half-rotted orb in the other. ‘For God’s sake. How tragic is that? What did the coroner say in the report? I presume you’ve pulled it?’
Clicking onto another tab, Marie scanned the text. ‘He’d been strangled. Garrotted with soldering wire, in fact, in exactly the same manner as a couple of gang members had been killed that year, suggesting this was an organised hit.’
Pointing at the screen, George rocked back and forth in her typing chair, mulling over the information. ‘A lot of planning went into that hoax lunch at Vinkeles. Somebody somewhere knew I really wanted to hear from my dad and wouldn’t turn down an invitation if it came from him. Then, the whole Letitia missing bullshit. Then, that gift box containing my worst nightmares, waiting for me at precisely the time and place I’m supposed to be meeting my long-lost Daddy Dearest … who has also either vanished off the face of the earth or is living off-grid, without so much as an electoral registry listing online.’ She inhaled deeply and rubbed her face with her hands, remembering the abject terror she had felt when she had caught sight of the brown eye, staring back at her dully from its box. She had been convinced it was Letitia’s. Only Marianne de Koninck had persuaded her that the DNA had been that of a man of Asian extraction. A mystery. Now solved. George could finally let go of any nagging doubt.
Silence permeated the IT suite, leaving only the buzz of the computer terminals and the bodily funk of Marie.
‘This Nasser guy was bumped to order,’ George said, knocking against her full lips with a balled fist. ‘Whoever is behind this wanted his eye to put the frighteners on me. A grand gesture to make me think they’d got to Letitia. Probably a shit metaphor to say I’m being watched at all times.’
‘Well, some sick bastard has definitely got a hard-on for you,’ Marie said, nodding. ‘And it’s not going to be your dad, is it? No parent would torture their child like that.’ She sighed, stroking a framed photo on her desk of a pink-cheeked baby boy.
George tried to visualise her mother. The memory of that sour, over-made-up face. False-lashed eyes that were always on the lookout for slights and perceived inequities; never seeing joy in the small things or kindnesses or good intentions of the people around her. Letitia in the fur coat that made her look like a mountain lion, throwing cheap Chardonnay down her fat neck in Wetherspoons. Running her talon-tipped fingers, painted the colours of the Jamaican flag, through those caramel blonde hair extensions that she’d bought with her bingo winnings. That memory was beginning to fade, now. Gloria Gaynor at Christmas TK Maxx. That was the Letitia George remembered. That was the Letitia she wanted to remember. Not the bewildered, punctured woman who had been given the diagnosis that she had only a few years left, thanks to her sickle cell anaemia and pulmonary hypertension.
‘She’s out there, somewhere,’ she told Marie, acknowledging a heaviness in her heart that wasn’t just indigestion from eating Aunty Sharon’s patties too quickly on the flight. ‘Either buried in a shallow grave or chained to a radiator in some basement, annoying the shit out of her kidnapper.’ She gave a chuckle, devoid of any real humour. For years, she had opted to eschew the company of Letitia the Dragon, but now, with the element of choice having been stolen from her, she felt short-changed by a family that only really consisted of her aunty and her beloved, cantankerous arsehole of a partner, Van den Bergen.
Turning her attention back to Nasser’s blackened, hollow eye socket on the screen, she nodded. ‘Some evil wanker has orchestrated all of this with great skill and forethought.’ Sucked her teeth. ‘It must have been The Duke. That Gordon Bloom bastard denies it every time I go to see him in Belmarsh, but, of all the people I’ve pissed off, who else would have had access to guys with previous, that could be just whacked to order for their eye colour?’ She groaned with frustration and shouted, ‘Christ on a bike!’ in her native tongue.
‘What about him?’ A man’s voice coming from the threshold to the IT suite heralded the arrival of an interloper. A familiar, deep rumble. ‘Last time I heard, he’d been arrested for cycling under the influence. Gave us some bullshit about turning water into wine.’
George turned around as Marie furtively, hastily clicked her tabs shut. Van den Bergen’s long frame filled the doorway, leaning against the architrave with those long legs crossed in the way that caused a knowing, wry smile to curl the edge of George’s mouth upwards. ‘Are you trying to make a terrible joke in my general direction, Paul van den Bergen? Because you should pack that in, right now!’ She drank in the sight of him, noting the changes from the past few weeks since he had visited her in Cambridge. Looking thinner, healthy, well. Better colour from being outdoors, now the gardening season had started.
Rising to embrace her lover, she could smell on him a whiff of formalin from the mortuary and the remnants of VapoRub beneath his nose as she kissed him fleetingly on his dry, neglected lips. The difficult old bastard turned his head briskly to offer her his sharp-sand hard stubbled cheek, but in his grey hooded eyes, she spied a glint of mischief. ‘What was so urgent that I had to abandon my book launch to come over?’ she asked.
‘This,’ he said, pulling a large envelope out of his bag. Glancing over to Marie’s monitor, he started to lay out photo after photo of a man who appeared to be in his early thirties. Blond, almost handsome, slender in build and very much alive in the first three. Posing on a tropical beach with another man, his arm draped casually around his shoulder and a closeness evident between them that marked them out as lovers, George was certain. In the fourth photo, he was very dead and utterly unrecognisable. A photo of some bruising around the man’s armpits. Followed by further photos of three bodies in varying states of decomposition. Ragged, overblown effigies of the humans they had once been.