MARNIE RICHES
The Girl Who Walked in the Shadows

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Copyright

Published by Avon

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www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2016

Copyright © Marnie Riches 2016

Marnie Riches asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Ebook Edition © March 2016 ISBN: 9780008138356

Version 2019-03-01

Dedication

For Weez Maria Owenen, who has grown up to be one of the kickest-assest women I know.

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Part 1

Chapter 1: London, Belgravia, 16 February

Chapter 2: North West England, Women’s Prison, 27 February

Chapter 3: Amsterdam, Bijlmer District, Later

Chapter 4: South East London, 28 February

Chapter 5: Amsterdam, Mortuary, 28 February

Chapter 6: St. John’s College, Cambridge, Later

Chapter 7: Amsterdam, Vinkeles Restaurant, 2 March

Chapter 8: A Village South of Amsterdam, 25 May, the Previous Year

Chapter 9: St. John’s College, Then, The Bun Shop Pub, Cambridge, 3 March, Present

Chapter 10: Amsterdam, Sloterdijkermeer Allotments, Then, an Apartment Block in Bijlmer, 4 March

Chapter 11: Amsterdam, Apartment in Bijlmer, Then, Police Headquarters, Later

Chapter 12: A Village South of Amsterdam, 25 May, the Previous Year

Chapter 13: The City of London, 5 March, Present, Mid-Morning

Chapter 14: London, Westminster, Later

Chapter 15: Amsterdam, Police Headquarters, 5 March

Chapter 16: South East London and Amsterdam, 6 March

Chapter 17: Amsterdam, Police Headquarters, 30 May, the Previous Year

Chapter 18: Berlin, Zoological Gardens, 9 March, Present

Chapter 19: Berlin, a Hotel in Potsdamer Platz, Later

Chapter 20: Berlin, Neukölln District, 10 March

Chapter 21: Amsterdam, Police Headquarters, 11 March

Chapter 22: Amsterdam, Marie’s Apartment, Later

Chapter 23: A Village South of Amsterdam, 8 June, the Previous Year

Chapter 24: South East London, 15 March

Chapter 25: Amsterdam, Police Headquarters, 16 March

Chapter 26: The City of London, 16 March

Chapter 27: City of London, Then, Aunty Sharon’s House, South East London, Later

Chapter 28: A Village South of Amsterdam, 4 August, the Previous Year

Chapter 29: Amsterdam, Oud West District, 12 August, the Previous Year

Chapter 30: Amsterdam, Police Headquarters, Later

Chapter 31: London, Westminster, 17 March, Present

Chapter 32: St. John’s College, Cambridge, Then, Cambridge Train Station, 18 March

Chapter 33: Doubletree Hilton Hotel in Cambridge, Later

Chapter 34: South East London, Later

Chapter 35: London, the West End, Later

Part 2

Chapter 36: A Village South of Amsterdam, 16 January, Earlier That Year

Chapter 37: London, South Docklands, 17 January

Chapter 38: South East London, Later, Then 21 January

Chapter 39: South East London, Later

Chapter 40: South East London, Aunty Sharon’s House, 22 January

Part 3

Chapter 41: London, Liverpool Street Station, 19 March

Chapter 42: London, South Bank, at the Same Time

Chapter 43: London, Later

Chapter 44: A Railway Arch in South East London, at the Same Time, and Flashbacks to Early February

Chapter 45: South East London, at the Same Time

Chapter 46: South East London, Aunty Sharon’s House, Later

Chapter 47: Amsterdam, Above The Cracked Pot Coffee Shop, Much Later, Then Sloterdijkermeer Allotments, Then, Even Later, Van Den Bergen’s Apartment

Chapter 48: Amsterdam, Van Den Bergen’s Apartment, Later Still

Chapter 49: Amsterdam, Bijlmerbajes Prison Complex, Then, Marie’s Apartment, Then, Sloterdijkermeer Allotments, 20 March

Chapter 50: Amsterdam, Police Headquarters, Then the Deenen’s House in a Village South of Amsterdam, 23 March

Chapter 51: Amsterdam, The Cracked Pot Coffee Shop, Then, Consulting Rooms, Then, Kamphuis’ Home Near Vondelpark, Later

Chapter 52: Amsterdam, Outside Kamphuis’ Home, Much Later

Chapter 53: Amsterdam, Van Den Bergen’s Apartment, 24 March

Chapter 54: Amsterdam, Police Headquarters, Then, Carlien Dekker’s House, Later Still

Chapter 55: A Village South of Amsterdam, Carlien Dekker’s House

Chapter 56: Zandvoort, Kennemer Golf & Country Club, Later

Chapter 57: Maldives, North Male Atol, Four Hours Ahead

Chapter 58: Amsterdam, Police Headquarters, Later

Chapter 59: A Village South of Amsterdam, Carlien Dekker’s House, Then, Marie’s Office, Police Headquarters, Later

Chapter 60: Amsterdam, Sloterdijkermeer Allotments, Later

Chapter 61: Amsterdam, Bijlmerbajes Prison Complex, 30 March

Chapter 62: Amsterdam, Mortuary, 31 March

Chapter 63: Amsterdam, The Cracked Pot Coffee Shop, at the Same Time, Then, Police Headquarters, Later

Chapter 64: Amsterdam, Prison Services’ Family Centre, 1 April

Chapter 65: Amsterdam, Hasselblad’s House, 2 April

Chapter 66: Amsterdam, Van Den Bergen’s Apartment, Then, Vinkeles Restaurant, Later, 4 April

Acknowledgements

Keep Reading …

About the Author

By the Same Author

About the Publisher

PART 1

CHAPTER 1
London, Belgravia, 16 February

Cold jabbed his raw skin where it was exposed. Hands, wrapped in torn, woollen gloves; the filthy threads had come loose, long ago. Blackened nails, blue fingers, toes on the cusp of being devoured by greedy frostbite. Vulnerable. But his discomfort mattered no longer. Only watching these two men, as he crouched behind a Range Rover, out of view. On this grand Belgravia street in London, double yellow lines – hidden beneath thick, shovelled banks of snow, but there nonetheless – ensured a clear line of sight.

Problem was, a man like him stood out, here. An imperfect grey figure, juxtaposed against flawless white stone; perfectly white snow, too deep to clear with grit, even in the city; icicles hanging from every portico and window frame – deadly diamond daggers.

Move along, sir. Sorry, no spare change. Shift, or I’ll call the police.

Always looks of utter disdain, as these wealthy denizens of SW1X picked up the scent of urine and stale alcohol. Especially the women. Clad in real fur, now. Since the Siberian winter of discontent …

Fuck them.

He had eyes only for these two men, standing outside Mosimann’s private restaurant. A picture of establishment respectability, posed in their cashmere outer layers before ecclesiastical built-beauty, where now only millionaires could afford to dine. Worshipping at the altar of fine food and business transactions, sealed over bottles of wine that cost thousands. Scum of the earth, these two. Black hearts so easily hidden beneath bespoke Jermyn Street clothing. Lies. Corruption. Evil.

His heart was pounding, as he rehearsed in his mind what he intended to do. Steeling himself, though a man could have no better motivation. Would he miss his chance?

Across the road, the men laughed. Easy in each other’s company. Moving aside, to let a blonde beauty pass. Some Russian oligarch’s squeeze, walking her lapdog. Trot, trot, trot. Firm buttocks clad in baby-pink Lycra. A show-pony, even in harsh conditions, drawing the men’s gaze. Now, he had a good look at them, as they turned to follow the blonde’s progress.

His quarry was neither tall nor fat. An average man in physical respects. Forty something. Dark-haired. Ordinary looks compensated for with immaculate grooming and a physique that had been created in an expensive gym. He knew this much. He also knew that this man lived in a mansion block with Chelsea views of the river. Too much security round there. So, the backstreets of Knightsbridge would suffice, providing things went according to plan.

The other – Mephistopheles with a paunch – would wait. Somewhat older. Fifty-two, in fact. That his chicanery had gone undiscovered for decades was barely credible. But different rules applied to the super-rich. Not today, though. Not today. A day of reckoning was nigh.

Pushing thoughts of the pain in his joints out of his mind, he crossed the road in haste. Dodged a black cab, skidding along on the ineffectually gritted asphalt. Slush, seeping through the holes in boots lined with newspaper.

The men were on the move. Ambling along. The older man even made a snowball and hurled it against the wall, just beyond the frontage of Waitrose supermarket. Ha ha. Playful and lighthearted. Apologising, like some charming billionaire bastard who fits right in, here, to the elderly woman it had almost taken out, before it had plopped harmlessly onto the brickwork. Chatting amiably, unhurried, like men who had the entire week diarised satisfactorily by their P.A.s. No unwelcome surprises for these masters of the universe.

Well, that was about to change, just as he had changed.

Crippling fear had turned to adrenalin. A rush. A hunger. His bloodlust was rising, fending off the chill of a Wednesday afternoon. -17°C and falling. Light already failing. He had to act fast.

At the head of the junction with the neighbouring Lowndes Street, the considerable bulk of a brown and cream Rolls Royce Phantom was waiting as close to the snow-bound kerb as was possible. A billionaire’s car, heated to perfection, its door held open by a liveried chauffeur for the older of the two men. Designed to ferry him to the next Big Meeting. Mephisto with the paunch bade his companion farewell.

Now, it was time.

His quarry started to walk briskly up through Knightsbridge, towards Harrods. Coat hem spattered with icy mess. Head bent forwards, advancing into the jaws of the Arctic wind.

Take a turn into one of the backstreets, goddamn it!

He had anticipated where this man was going. Had studied his movements well enough. But the idiot was staying on the main drag. Too many people, here. Police, cruising by slowly in a patrol car.

Shit. Turn down an alley! Turn!

Except there were no alleys. The man progressed through Lowdnes Square. A green strip in the middle, covered in thick snow; a picture postcard straight from Narnia. Fringed by cars, covered in forgetful white blankets. Here. Maybe he could do it here. The snow sucked the sound out of everything. Except, this spot was completely overlooked by townhouses and mansion blocks. Every window, a potential set of prying eyes.

Not here.

The man hastened along the pavement at a brisk pace, given conditions underfoot. Already some way ahead. The distance between them widening fast. But then, his belly was full. His body had been warmed by fine wine and brandy. His energy hadn’t been sapped by biting hunger, sucked dry by spending the harshest winter since records began on the streets. Robbed for breakfast. Moved along at lunch. Beaten up for dinner. Pissed on by other homeless, too drunk to realise what they were doing - the only midnight snack on offer.

Stop feeling sorry for yourself, you piece of shit. Remember why you are here.

He kept going. The moment would present itself. He had faith.

Two women, moving towards him now. Bulked up with Puffa jackets and ridiculous furry hats. Blocking his view. Talking, talking. Espanol. Muy pericoloso. Muy dramatico. Hands beating the freezing air in telenovela-exaggerated movements, breath steaming like two pressure cookers on the boil. Tourists, no doubt.

Get out of the way, you fat Spanish cows.

Heart thudding, as they crowded his vision, snuffing out the sight of his target entirely.

They passed him by. Grimacing at the sight and smell of a vagrant.

The target was out of sight. Gone.

Shit.

His face prickled with anxiety. Panic rendered him almost breathless. Peering ahead. No sign of the rich, gutless fucker. Glancing in the doorways of the surrounding buildings. Not there. Glancing in the park. Not there either. Was this all in vain? He should have planned better. Had a plan B. All was lost. But then …

Harriet Street. A sharp left, leading to Sloane Street. There he was. Pausing beneath the Victorian lamppost by the cast iron railings that fringed a 1930s block. An unwitting child, stumbled through the wardrobe wearing seasonal finery into a hard, white world. Waiting to be lured into the shadows by a ragged, destitute Tumnus.

The man struggled to light a cigarette in the wind. Sputter, sputter, the flame died. He advanced to the doorway of this white stone and brick mansion block. Unobservant, as he finally lit his smoke. Opposite, every window had been obscured behind some kind of green builder’s gauze, stretched tight over scaffolding. Hiding the view below entirely. It was a gift from an otherwise vengeful and unforgiving god.

Heart fluttering. Determination stiffening his aching spine. From the railing, he snapped one of those giant icicles that hung everywhere since the freak cold spell had descended on Europe. Ten inches. Sharpened by nature to a point. Galvanised by weeks of sub-zero temperatures.

Five paces. Four. Three. Clutching the icy shiv in his frostbitten hand.

The man was facing the other way.

Jab, jab, jab in the sweet spot in his neck before the weapon could melt or weaken. The man’s blood gushed, hissing hot on the frozen ground, spattering against the wall. Screams coming out as gurgling. But he was the only human being within earshot.

‘That’s for Amsterdam, you piece of shit,’ he said, as the man bled out, staring glassy-eyed and disbelieving into the abyss.

Running away, now, he tossed the icicle down a storm drain that had been cleared of snow. By the time the police found the body, all traces of the weapon would have been washed away in the dirt-splattered slush of the road. Melted by grit-residue. The only clue left at the scene would be the watery holes in the dead man’s neck: the calling card of Jack Frost.

CHAPTER 2
North West England, women’s prison, 27 February

‘Put a bag over my head, didn’t I?’ the woman said, biting nails that were already at the quick.

Couldn’t have been more than twenty, this one. Looked nearer to forty with a complexion the colour of porridge. Overweight and swollen-faced, George guessed anti-depressants were at work. Dull blue eyes, as though the medication had caused a film to form over her sclera, preventing her from seeing the world in its grim true colours. Another poor cow in a pen full of poor cows.

‘What do you mean, you put a bag over your head?’ she asked the woman. She was poised to write. Steeling her hand to stop shaking. Unnerving to be back inside the very same prison she had spent three unforgettable months in – now a long time ago. A one-star vacation at Her Majesty’s leisure. All meals provided. The beatings had come for free. She had not known then that she would swap these Victorian red-brick walls of a one-time Barnardo’s home for the ivory tower of St. John’s College, Cambridge. No, she had been a poor cow in a stall full of crap, same as the others.

Her interviewee leaned forward. Cocked her head to one side. Grimaced.

‘Are you fucking thick or what?’ A spray of spittle accompanied ‘thick’.

Issued forth with venom, George knew. Tap, tap on her temple with her chewed index finger.

‘Donna.’ The prison officer’s tone issued warning enough for Donna to back up.

‘I said, I put the bag on my head. They didn’t know I had it. Tied it tight.’ Donna folded her arms. Smiling now. Satisfied. ‘It was Sainsbury’s. It had fucking holes in the bottom, didn’t it?’

‘Did you intend to kill yourself?’ George asked, a rash unexpectedly starting to itch its way up her neck. She knew Donna wouldn’t catch sight of it so easily because darker skin hid a multitude. She disciplined herself not to scratch.

‘Yeah. Course I bleedin’ did.’

The prison officer, a heavy-set woman in her thirties, by the looks, laughed. ‘Come on, Donna. We all know you were doing a Michael Hutchence, weren’t you?’

‘What?’

Donna was almost certainly too young to have heard of him, George thought.

‘Feller from INXS. Offed himself by accident, doing an asphyxi-wank or something.’

Donna tugged at the collar of her standard-issue tracksuit – too tight over her low-hanging, braless breasts. ‘You taking the piss?’

‘Yes.’

Insane laughter from both of them then. A camaraderie that George was used to seeing, along with the gallows humour. When the mirth subsided, Donna confessed the real reason for her grand polyethylene gesture.

‘I had bedbugs, didn’t I? They were biting like bastards.’ She started to rub her forearms through the jersey material. ‘I asked for a new mattress but they wouldn’t bloody listen. So, I puts the bag on my head, cos if they think you’re going to top yourself in here, you stand a better chance of them actually listening to what you’re on about.’ She glowered at the prison officer, seated beside her. Switched the glare for a grin like a deft pickpocket. ‘I been in here two years, right? Got another six to go.’

George scratched at her scalp with the end of her pen. Got the cap entangled in one of her corkscrew curls. Unrelentingly itchy. Was it the nervous rash? Was this her body telling her brain that she was losing her shit? She couldn’t possibly be freaked out, though. Definitely not. Not after all this time. Not a pro, like her.

She shuffled her sheaf of paper straight, as if to demonstrate to herself that she had mastery over everything. In control of herself and her environment at all times. Now that she was qualified, she spent more time inside prisons than out. Except when she was in Amsterdam with Paul. Bastard. Oh, well. Not everything was within her control.

‘What did you do, Donna?’

‘I didn’t do it.’

‘No? Okay. But what were you convicted for?’

‘GBH. I got my son taken off me, didn’t I?’ Tears welled in Donna’s eyes, replacing the Valium film with something more organic. Sleeve pulled down over her fist, she wiped the burgeoning tears away. ‘They said, social services said, that I’d battered him. And I hadn’t. They said I was unfit, the fucking lying do-gooding bastards. Just because that old bitch next door grassed me for smoking weed and that. And the dead rabbits in the yard. Wasn’t my frigging fault. They shat everywhere. Then, I gets social services and the environmental health come knocking. And school gets involved, saying my Thom was truanting and had bruises and that.’

She pursed her lips. Hers was suddenly a mean face that looked as though its owner could inflict pain happily. George had grown up with the likes of Donna. Not so different from Tonya. A hard-faced calamity queen.

‘My Thomas was not fucking abused.’ Poked herself in the chest, hard, so that George could hear the drumming on her sternum. ‘I was fucking abused. I could tell them how I was bounced round Rochdale. Me an’ about ten other girls off the estate in the back of a van. Thirteen-year-old rent-a-slags for all the dirty bastards in the area. Two pimping wankers raking in it like we was stock in a cash and carry. Working for some warped bastard called the Hawk or some shit like that. Our mams didn’t give a fuck. They was too busy getting pissed down the pub.’

George nodded. Showed no emotion. Dr McKenzie was a criminologist. Professional detachment was the only way to endure these heart-breaking stories. But it was the same story over and over, told by different women. Abuse, leading to abuse. Young girls playing chicken through the fast lanes of traffick. They never made it to the other side intact.

‘So why the GBH?’

Donna snorted noisily. ‘Day our Thom was put in care. Went out, didn’t I? Got mashed up. Beat some slag to a pulp with a snooker cue. She’d been looking at my fella, so …’ She looked up at George. No longer morose but suddenly hopeful, as if a timid sun was trying to push its way through the storm clouds. ‘I’m going to get him back. Our Thomas. When I get out of here. He’s coming home to his mam.’ A gingivitis grin. Radiant with rotten teeth. Thin hair scraped too high on her head into a tight ponytail made her look like a ruined child.

George had to get out of there. She’d had enough for one day. Checked her watch. Brought the session to an end.

As she made her way through the facility to the entrance, where she would reclaim her phone and her composure, she noticed the latest issue of Do What? – the inmates’ magazine she had remembered reading when she had been on remand here. Scattered copies on the table needed organising.

The baffled prison officer paused, giving George a moment to tidy the magazines into a neat fan. Beneath the headline that spoke of Shep, the drugs-dog almost choking to death on a hibernating hedgehog, there was a piece that triggered recognition deep within George’s mind. A debate on whether an icicle could actually be used as a shiv and whether it was right that the prison staff should leave these freakish twelve-inchers hanging off the old prison eaves.

‘Okay, Dr McKenzie?’ The prison officer asked.

George nodded. Tucked her portfolio of notes under her arm and made her way back down to security. Scanned on the way in. Scanned on the way out.

Having failed to find a USB stick at Aunty Sharon’s, she had once tried to bring in a CD-ROM she had burned especially in order to show the inmates a simple guide to the study she was doing into women’s prisons for the government. Security had confiscated even that, saying a teenage inmate had broken up a CD brought in for her by her sister and committed suicide by swallowing the shards. Everything was a weapon in here. She now made damned sure she never ran out of USB sticks.

Got to get the hell out. This place is bringing me down and down.

Beyond the gates, breath steaming on the sub-zero air, she switched her phone on to check for messages. Hoping that cantankerous old fool, Van den Bergen had been in touch. It was weeks since their argument. Six weeks to be precise. Her refusal to speak to him had been deliberate. Even Aunty Sharon had said she’d done the right thing by dropping the shutters on him.

But the screen yielded nothing. Silence. No abrupt words, saying he was sorry and that she had been right. That he would make amends.

On the train she sat at a dirty, crumb-sullied table, clutching her anorak tightly around her. Broken heating meant the journey would be purgatorial. Shivering at the sight of the snow-covered fields and jagged, naked hedgerows that scudded by. A white world, empty of life except for disappointing humanity and the odd cannibalistic robin. Irritation mounting inside her. Oppressive, like the Siberian freeze that had an entire continent in its grip.

Twenty minutes felt like an hour. Her phone still yielded nothing of note. Only nagging emails from civil servants, asking if she would be handing her study in on time. Pointed correspondence from a fellow criminologist who had it in for her. Professor Dickwad Dobkin at UCL. Complaining that he knew about her additional research into trafficking. Saying that he had started something almost identical, eons ago. Long before her. Of course.

‘Get fucked, Dobkin,’ George said, as she searched for her train ticket.

‘Sorry?’ The ticket inspector asked, swaying side to side in the Pendolino carriage, as it pelted through the crystalline hills of Staffordshire.

‘Nothing,’ George said. ‘Talking to myself. Too much work. Not enough play.’

The ticket inspector, a sweaty-looking man, despite the unrelenting cold, gave her a disinterested half-smile.

It was true. Her deadline loomed large. Today’s encounter with Donna had been one of her final interviews. She would have to start typing it up tonight. Perhaps even do a little work on her laptop now, on the train back to London.

Discipline yourself, George.

Except her phone pinged. Probably Aunty Sharon.

Fuck discipline.

Peered down at the screen.

Ah, finally.

But it was not the sort of message she was hoping for.

Come to Amsterdam a.s.a.p. Paul.

CHAPTER 3
Amsterdam, Bijlmer district, later

‘What do you want me to do, boss?’ Elvis asked, pulling his woollen hat down low over his ears, so that bushy red-brown sideburns were only just visible. His breath steamed on the air. Red nose and streaming eyes made him look peaky. But then, these days, Elvis always looked like he never slept. Experience could do that to a detective, even one as dopey and idiotically optimistic as Elvis.

With his protégé seemingly transfixed by the sight of his mobile phone, Chief Inspector Paul van den Bergen hastily slipped the device back into his pocket. ‘Get photos of everything,’ he said. Felt like he had been caught doing something forbidden, though texting George in a work capacity was hardly a misdemeanour. Since she had qualified, she worked for the Dutch police on a freelance basis often enough.

He turned to Marie, who looked as though she was wearing every garment her wardrobe held. Some ugly hand-knitted cardigan on top of a coat. Purple clashed with the red colour of her hair poking out beneath two hats, by the looks. Bet she smelled worse than usual beneath all those layers. But today, Marie had abandoned the warmth of the office and her Internet research in favour of dusting for prints. After the best part of a year spent working on missing persons cases, she had been desperate to get out. They all had.

‘You called forensics?’ he asked her.

‘Yep. Marianne said she’ll be about half an hour.’ Marie blushed. Crouched near the dead man’s head. Scowled at his blood-spattered face. ‘He looks familiar.’

‘They always look familiar round here.’

Gazing down at the cochineal Rorschach pattern that surrounded the dead man, Van den Bergen put his hand on his stomach. Though he could not feel the lumpy scar tissue beneath the thick wadding of his anorak, he pressed his long fingers there, tracing the line of the scarring from sternum to his abdomen. Like this dead man at his feet, he had lost almost his entire life’s blood. A good two years ago now. Time heals all scars, right? Bullshit, it did.

Elvis clicked away on a digital camera. Blue plastic overshoes over his snowboots. Behind him, the remaining high-rises of Bijlmer loomed. Once Amsterdam’s arsehole, a few colourful panels on the front of the renovated blocks and winter wonderland conditions made it only marginally more enticing than it had been in the dark days. Better than Van den Bergen remembered the area when he was a young cop. But still an armpit of a locale, crushed under the weight of second-rate infrastructure and 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.

CHAPTER 4
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 George suspiciously.

Hand on hip, George rolled her eyes and jerked her thumb in the direction of the door. ‘Who do you think cranked the heating up?’

Snoring, coming from the adjacent living room. The thunderous, slumberous roar of a dragon, sleeping.

‘I gave the bathroom a good do,’ George said. ‘Got the nailbrush on the grouting. Looks a treat now.’

‘Stressed, by any chance?’ Aunty Sharon flung herself down onto the kitchen chair. It groaned beneath the weight of her heavy frame. Her taffeta skirt bunched up around her like an airbag triggered in a car crash. ‘Fucking thing is doing my head in.’ She stood again, unzipped the skirt and stepped out of the layers of electric blue fabric and netting. Flung it over the back of the adjacent chair. Sat back down, wearing only her generous knickers and a thick jumper. Dimpled thighs. Knees like dark chocolate blancmange. White ankle socks digging into her chubby legs. She rubbed her belly. Twanged the elastic in the waistband of her knickers. ‘That’s better. That new manager is some corny little rarseclart. He’s got me dressing up in 1950s shit and bobby socks, like I’ve escaped some pensioner’s mental home. I’m an experienced barmaid in a Soho titty bar. Not some kid serving chips in a themed bloody chicken shop. Cheeky bastard, he is. It’s -20 out there tonight. My toes are like frozen meatballs, man! If my fucking legs fall off with hypothermia, I’m going to sue his skinny white arse. At least Derek didn’t take the piss, trying to tell me what to wear. And he could have done! But even though he was my baby-father and long-time boss, he never pulled this kind of shit! Fucking novelty nights and all the girls in sodding bunny costumes like the twenty-first century ain’t even here!’ She sucked her teeth long and low. Paused for breath. Looked at her niece. ‘Well? What you been crying for, puffy eyes? Tell your Aunty Shaz.’ She reached out to her with a robust, welcoming arm.

George ignored the gesture. Stood steadfastly by the sink, wearing one of Patrice’s hoodies on top of her own. Arms folded tightly with sleeves down over her hands. Couldn’t get warm, even with the heating on 27 and the gas meter lifted onto a bucket so that the wheel had stopped turning. Fuse wire through the electricity meter too, so that they could put fan heaters throughout the house without worrying about bills. George had gored a hole through the casing with a hot bodkin herself. A trick Letitia had taught her as a child, passed on to a reluctant, law-abiding Aunty Sharon. Chalk and cheese, those two.

‘I haven’t been crying,’ George said.

‘Suit yourself.’ Aunty Sharon trotted over to the bread bin. Took out a fruit loaf. Cut herself an ample slice, slathered in butter. Made appreciative noises. ‘I make the best fruit loaf in the world,’ she said. ‘Derek used to love my fruit loaf.’ She started to cut herself a second piece and dropped the breadknife. Wracking sobs, suddenly.

‘Not you as well,’ George said, wrapping Sharon in a bear hug as she heaved with grief.

‘So, you w-was crying,’ Sharon stuttered.

‘No. Yes. Never mind me. You let it out, Aunty Shaz.’

Sorrow streamed forth from Sharon’s face; tears quickly dripping from her jowls. Speech coming in hiccoughs. ‘It’s still hard, love. Especially working at that place. Porn King and them girls what have been there a while are always banging on about Derek, like he was some fucking saint or something. Uncle Giuseppe, this. Uncle Giuseppe, that.’ She looked up at George with ghoulish mascara-besmirched eyes. ‘Derek de Falco managed a titty bar badly. Some claim to fame, right?! He fucked himself up. He fucked me and Tin’s life up too. Selfish dickhead.’

‘They’re all selfish dickheads,’ George said, wiping her aunt’s second-hand make-up off her jumper with a hot cloth. Knowing Aunty Sharon knew the score and wouldn’t take it personally.

‘Yeah. Stuff Derek, the stupid bastard!’ Sharon grabbed the kitchen roll off the worktop and blew her nose loudly into a clean sheet. Dabbed gingerly at her eyes. Tugged at her elaborate arrangement of platinum blonde extensions and brightly coloured headscarf until it all came away in one cumbersome piece. Short greying hair underneath. Receding hairline. A little too thin in parts from stress-alopecia, where cheap hair extensions over the years had taken their toll.

George touched her own head of thick dark curls reflexively. Curls which Van den Bergen liked to grip when he kissed her passionately.

‘Anyway. Uncle Giuseppe’s old news. Tell your Aunty Sharon what’s eating you,’ Sharon said, pulling her sizeable bra from beneath her jumper and hanging it over the taffeta skirt. ‘It is laughing gas, in there?’ She gestured towards the living room.

George shook her head. ‘No. She’s the least of it. I keep getting texts from Van den Bergen. We’re on. We’re off. He loves me. He never says it, the arsehole. Up one minute. Down the next.’

‘Thought he was always like that, anyway. Didn’t you say he was depressed?’

George nodded. ‘He’s not been the same since the Butcher. Physically, he’s healed. But mentally … They’ve had him chasing missing persons for two years. Sat on his arse in the office, checking online reports or sat drinking coffee in people’s houses while he does interviews. Insisting he’s not well enough to face active service. But they’ve got him working a new murder, Marie’s telling me. I haven’t spoken to the tosser for weeks because of what happened. Now he wants me over there under the pretence of it being in a professional capacity, I’ll bet. Wants me to hold his hand, more like. He’s full of shit.’

The beginnings of a smile played on Sharon’s chapped lips. ‘Your fellers always end up in bits, thanks to you, don’t they? You’re more high maintenance than that mother of yours.’

A heavy sigh. ‘Actually, I’d be lying if I said she wasn’t doing my head in, too,’ George said, breathing out heavily. Glaring at the door to the living room, behind which her mother slept. ‘She was such a pain in the arse while you were at work. I’m trying to write my research up, and she’s chatting in my ear, giving it, I’m dying. I’ve got pulmonary hypertension – she can barely bloody pronounce it. I’ve got sickle cell anaemia – she doesn’t even know what the fuck that is. You don’t give a monkey’s about me. I can’t deal with it.’

‘Take no notice of that attention-seeking bitch, love,’ Sharon said, frowning and shaking her head. ‘My sister will play every last dirty card in her hand to get what she wants. I’ll believe that “I’m dying shit” when I see it. She’s got some brass neck, threatening to die when she’s strong as a horse.’

‘She’s got some brass neck, kipping on your sofa!’

Sharon was unexpectedly silent. Tremors, rippling across her chin and cheeks, gave the impression that she was about to be sick. Her face crumpled rapidly, the silence giving way to wailing loud enough to wake her sister and her sleeping son. Fleshy hands balled into tight fists.

George was taken aback. Barely knew how to react to this secondary outburst. ‘Try to remember Derek the way he was,’ she said, turning to tend to the tea. Stirring the cup too briskly. Nice and strong. Three sugars and a healthy wallop of rum. That’s how Aunty Shaz liked it after work on a cold night. Set the cup down on a coaster with handle perfectly perpendicular to the edges.

With electric blue nail extensions to match her abandoned dress, Sharon wrapped her hands around the mug, spitting and sputtering her words one by one. ‘It ain’t Derek,’ Sharon said. ‘Not really. I’m crying cos of …’ She flapped her hand in front of her fact, as though she was wafting away unwanted emotion. ‘It’s just … it’s little Dwayne.’ She stared off into the middle distance.

‘It’s not today, is it?’ George asked, glancing at the calendar.

Sharon nodded. Looked suddenly feeble and frail, clutching at the silver locket around her neck. Dimpled chin and downturned mouth. Streams of glistening, sorrowful tears and snot, lit up by the kitchen lightbulb, looked like strange tinsel, two months too late for Christmas.

‘Shit. I’m so sorry,’ George said, sitting by her side and hooking her arm around her aunt’s shoulders. Suddenly her own problems seemed paltry in comparison. Guilt jabbed at the soft spots that were already raw.

‘I told you, didn’t I?’ Sharon said, snapping the locket open, shut, open, shut, revealing the faded colour photo of a small, smiling boy inside. ‘No agony in this world like the pain of losing a child. Ten, twenty years later, them wounds never heal.’

The loud knock on the kitchen window made both of them jump. Nothing to see in the black of the small hours with the light on inside.

‘Who the fuck is that at this time of night?’ Aunty Sharon asked, lurching out of her seat. Grabbing the kettle, still half full of boiled water. ‘I got that back gate padlocked to keep those cheeky little dipshits from down the way out.’

George’s heart thudded beneath her layers. She snatched up a meat cleaver from the magnetized knife-holder on the wall. ‘Stay back, Aunty Shaz,’ she said, switching the light off. ‘I got this.’

Still nothing to see in the empty, snowy yard at the back, except for a washing line supporting six inches of snow on top, icicles, hanging beneath, like a neat row of teeth strung along a cannibal’s necklace. Against the fence were snow-buried wheelie bins, lit by the nearest streetlamp some twenty feet away.

Reaching for the key lodged in the security door, George turned until the lock clicked. Pushed the handle down gingerly, cleaver in her right hand. Pulled the door open suddenly. Blast of arctic wind sucking the air from her lungs. Arm held high ready to slice.

A hooded figure was standing on the back step.

George screamed.

CHAPTER 5
Amsterdam, mortuary, 28 February

‘Well, well, well, if it isn’t Amsterdam’s prodigal son. Long time, no see,’ Marianne de Koninck said, eyeing Van den Bergen with what was almost certainly a degree of suspicion. ‘Where the hell have you been for the last god knows how long?’

‘Welded to the frost-bitten bottom of my cold case,’ Van den Bergen said, eyes smiling with mirth.

Almost ten months had passed since he had last seen the head of forensic pathology. The case he had been working on simply hadn’t turned up anything requiring forensic examination beyond the initial couple of weeks.

Today, in her scrubs and rubber sandals, with her normally short hair grown into a sleek blonde bob, Marianne looked younger than her forty something years.

‘Have you got a new man in your life?’ he asked, finally daring to unbutton his anorak. The chilly mortuary seemed warm in comparison to the white world outside.

‘Only this poor chump,’ Marianne said. She stared down at the naked corpse of the man who had been found in the Bijlmer play-area. Lit by the harsh, overhead lights, his body was a grim palette of yellow, purple and grey. The red stippling of the sores around his mouth and nose like the brush strokes of an impressionist’s nightmare. Marianne snapped a fresh pair of latex gloves onto her sinewy hands. Straight to business as usual.

Van den Bergen had always liked that about her.

‘What about you?’ she said. ‘You still cradle-snatching? I’m surprised the young Dr McKenzie isn’t with you. I thought you two were joined at the hip since she saved your life.’

There was nothing Van den Bergen could do to stifle the low growl that escaped his lips. Marianne might as well have gouged at his tired heart with her scalpel.

‘Like that, is it?’

The pathologist walked around the dead man, recording her observations into a Dictaphone. She scrutinised the blemished skin of his face.

‘Aside from the sores around the deceased’s nose and mouth that would suggest drug misuse, I can see tiny lacerations on his face,’ she said. She prized open his mouth with her fingers to reveal blackened teeth. ‘Jesus. Our man was certainly not a regular at the dentist’s.’

‘Show me a junkie who is,’ Van den Bergen said.

‘His lips, gums and tongue show bruising,’ she continued. ‘I’ll check his nasal passages later by microscopy, but I’m guessing it’s the same there. I can see significant amounts of mucus and blood at the back of his gullet. Petechial haemorrhages in his skin. Oedema.’

‘In layman’s terms, please!’

‘All in good time, Chief Inspector. You just sit tight and let me do my job.’ She took samples from beneath the man’s fingernails. Bloods. Swabs. ‘Okay. Let’s see what’s inside,’ Marianne said.

Taking up her scalpel, she began to open up the cadaver, cutting from his chest, working her way down to his pubic area.

‘Oh, Jesus!’ Van den Bergen said. He steadied himself against the built in sink at the end of the stainless steel slab. Flashbacks to waking up on the floor of the Butcher’s panic room. Strapped to a chair. Awaiting his fate. Then, walking towards the light, thinking it was the end and that perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad, only to find the source of the brightness came from a doctor’s light pen, checking for the response of his pupils as he emerged finally from his coma in the Intensive Care Unit. Only later, when his wounds were redressed, realising that he had been zipped open from top to bottom.

Just like the body of the Bijlmer man, now.

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
St. John’s College, Cambridge, later

‘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.’

George allowed herself a tired smile. ‘Please god, yes! I’m so skint.’

‘Not for you, smart arse. We need money for the library and to fund your little field trips to interview survivors. Where are you with our research?’

‘I’ve got qualitative stuff from at least twenty people – about twelve are women who were trafficked domestically as young girls in the 1970s and 1980s. Some are participating witnesses in the Operation Oak Tree case. Paedophiles in the media, obviously. The rest were boys in the 1960s and 1970s who were pimped out to some very prominent men in society. Runaways from children’s homes. Abductees. There was a boarding house in Sussex where the boys were taken to be abused. If I could only get that fucking idiot at UCL off my back, once I’ve finished the Home Office shit we’ll have a ground-breaking study on our hands in about a year’s time.’

‘Bugger a ground-breaking study,’ Sally said. ‘We’ll have a non-fiction hardback that tops the Sunday Times bestseller list. Mine and your name on the front.’ She grinned a piranha grin, which George did not entirely like, especially since she was doing all the actual work. Sally just opened the doors.

‘How are you coping?’ Sally asked, breaking into a coughing fit that made her sound as though she was a consumptive war-veteran from the trenches of the First World War. ‘Emotionally, I mean.’

Focusing on the Persian rug in the room, George shrugged. ‘It’s horrific, but then, I’m used to distancing myself from pain. I’m fine.’ Lies. She wasn’t fine. But George knew she had chosen to pursue criminology as a career so that she could give the silenced a voice, as she had been given a voice.

She was just becoming irritated by the fact that the rug was not in perfect alignment with the skirting boards, when a woman – roughly the same age as George – entered the room, wearing a gown that was still deepest black, denoting her newness, though the gown was stained with what appeared to be gravy. She flicked long, unkempt brown hair out of her well-scrubbed face. Dangling earrings with feathers attached told George much of what she needed to know.

‘Can I join you for a smoke, guys?’ she said. A heavy West Country accent. She pulled out a tightly rolled joint.

Sally winked at the woman. ‘Of course, dear.’ Turned to George. ‘This is your new partner in trafficking crime, Georgina. I wanted you to get here on time so I could make the introduction. Meet the new Fellow in Social Anthropology and expert in all matters regarding Roma child abduction.’

The newcomer stuck out her hand; her fingernails painted gaily in rainbow-coloured nail varnish belied a grip like an arm-wrestler who hustled and won. ‘Wotcha, George. I’m Sophie Bartek.’

CHAPTER 7
Amsterdam, Vinkeles restaurant, 2 March

‘What have you got for me?’ Kamphuis asked, shovelling a piece of steak into his mouth that was far too large, even for him.

The exclusive eatery, Vinkeles was rammed with the great, the good and the possibly criminal underbelly of Amsterdam’s high society. Dressed to kill, as though they were impervious to the weather. Understated ritzy decor. Wide armchairs, serving to accommodate even Kamphuis’ fat arse, as he enjoyed his Michelin starred lunch. Chewing with his mouth open, like the moron he was, Van den Bergen mused. Staring out at the Keizersgracht, as though the Chief Inspector sitting to his right was not even worth a cursory glance.

‘You summoned me here, Olaf,’ Van den Bergen said, stomach growling at the sight of the beautifully arranged food. Snatching a bun from a passing waiter bearing a bowl heaped with golden brown orbs – doling them out with metal tongues to those who were still doing carbs. Half the bun gone, in one bite. The morgue always made him hungry. It was something to do with the formalin, Marianne reckoned.

Finally the Commissioner deigned to turn to him. A half-sneer on his face. Sauce hanging in a blob on the side of his mouth. Threatening to besmirch the pristine white tablecloth, or else the jacket he insisted wearing, even in the overheated salon, because brass buttons on top screamed to the other diners that he was top brass. Fucking idiot.

‘It’s Commissioner Kamphuis to you,’ Kamphuis said.

Van den Bergen defiantly chewed his bun in silence for long enough to be irritating. Kamphuis’ trigger-points were big-chested new admin girls, Van den Bergen’s silent treatment and inappropriately stylish shoes on older men – all elicited responses of extreme ardour or intense dislike.

‘Been stood up on a date?’ Van den Bergen asked, bouncing his size thirteen boot on top of his bony knee. Ugg Adirondacks. A birthday present from George before they had had The Argument. Far cooler than anything he ever would have bought for himself. Certainly enough to drive Kamphuis wild with annoyance.

Slamming his cutlery down noisily, Kamphuis’ eye started to twitch. Sure enough, he grimaced at Van den Bergen’s bouncing foot. Took a swig of his sparkling mineral water. ‘I’m a busy man. And a regular here. I don’t need an excuse to have a quick bite in an establishment where I don’t have to look at ugly bastards like you all day. Now, I asked you here to debrief me on the autopsy of that John Doe.’ Shovelled in another oversized medallion of rare flesh. Spoke with his mouth full, of course. ‘Well?’

Van den Bergen helped himself to a glass of water. Swallowed down an extra strong iron tablet. ‘Don’t know why you’ve got your elasticated pants in a twist over some dead junkie.’

‘My city. My reputation. Murder rate’s right down, thanks to my vigilance.’

‘Except it’s not your city, is it? It’s Hasselblad’s. He’s the Chief of Police, not you.’ Van den Bergen could see the colour rising in Kamphuis’ face. Quickly turning florid. Telltale sweat breaking out.

‘We’re a team, me and Jaap. And I don’t need lessons on leadership from you. Facts, please!’

‘Suffocated by snow. Stabbed in the neck. Wallet gone. Looks like a mugging by a mugger who missed the drugs on him. Maybe our killer panicked and ran off. It’s a very public spot.’

‘ID?’

‘Nothing yet. Nothing’s come in from missing persons.’ Van den Bergen peered over the table and through the multi-paned, tall window to the snowy scene beyond. The canals were all completely frozen solid – now thronging with residents who had bunked the day off to ice-skate along the city’s waterways. Wrapped up against the blistering cold, he could even see three women skating along, pushing pushchairs that contained grinning toddlers. A modern day Breughel painting, where wool and fur had been replaced by Goretex.

He imagined for the briefest of moments, skating along the Keizersgracht with George, hand in hand. Losing himself in her soft brown eyes. Skating away from his cares and responsibilities. Just for an hour or so. Remembered doing that with Tamara, when she had been a little girl. One, two, three, wee, suspended between him and Andrea, his ex. Swinging the little four-year-old into the air. Tiny gloved hands. Knitted animals on the end of each finger. Fine times long gone, until George had come into his life and set his heart to thaw.

‘Are you smirking at me?’ Kamphuis asked, snapping Van den Bergen out of his reverie.

‘No.’ A silent beat. ‘It’s a waste of my team’s time. They’re too experienced. We do the serial killers and criminal networks and high-profile cases. You’ve got plenty of junior detectives who could be looking into the dead junkie. I want to keep working on the missing persons’ operation. We’ve spent so long looking for—’

‘Forget it,’ Kamphuis said, belching. ‘I’m the boss now. My priority is the murder rate. You tow my line, you streak of piss, or I’ll put you out to pasture quicker than you can say, “pensioner discount”. Right?’

Early retirement. Arrogant turd. Kamphuis’ words resounded like a bad bout of tinnitus, as Van den Bergen stood on the steps of the restaurant, watching the skaters. Retirement. Consigned to the scrap heap. Nice. And Kamphuis had grounds. Everyone knew Van den Bergen had been struggling since the Butcher. He touched his scar tissue beneath his coat, poking where it ached in the cold.

The windows of the beautiful, four-storey townhouses that leaned in on him felt suddenly oppressive. Spying on him. Marking him out as a failure. A man who should have died. A Chief Inspector who had not succeeded in solving his most recent case. An ageing idiot who had pushed his young lover away. He felt utterly alone.

Opting to walk through the streets back to the police HQ, instead of driving in the shitty, slippery conditions, he hammered out a text to George. Intended it to be conciliatory. Wanted to tell her that he loved her and was sorry. That he could commit, after all. That he would go for more therapy.

Despite his best intentions, he found he had sent:

Assigned to murder case. Suffocation with snow. Strange neck wounds. What do you think, Detective Lacey? P.

Shit. Why was he such an emotional cripple?

Feeling the lead-weight of disappointment snuff out any lightness of step, he trudged back towards police headquarters. Passed some makeshift stalls that had sprung up on the icy Prinsengracht, selling mulled wine, stroopwafels and greasy doughnut-like ollieballen to tourists and ice-skaters who had overestimated the length of time they could bear in the cold without libation. The sweet cinnamon smell was intoxicating, but he had no appetite. This lingering smell of Christmas was a false God. It was early March now, and only the remaining dead weeks of winter stretched and stretched ahead of him.

He stood in the glazed portico of the police headquarters when a text pinged back. It was from George.

Is that an attempt at romance, arsehole?

She had attached to the text a jpeg of an article from The Times newspaper. The headline made Van den Bergen draw a sharp breath: An icy end for entrepreneur. Who is Jack Frost?

CHAPTER 8
A village South of Amsterdam, 25 May, the previous year

A glance into the garden confirmed that the children were both playing happily. Clambering onto the small plastic climbing frame. Josh was even helping Lucy to get up the three steps. There they both were, squealing as they slid down the Day-Glo pink slide, then crawled into the space beneath the platform, poking their little heads out of the ‘window’. Good. And the play area was still in shadow, as the morning sun had not yet moved round from the front. No need to apply sunscreen just yet. They were safe. Perfectly safe. He could concentrate. Even if it was only for twenty minutes or so, that would be enough.

Peering down at the architectural drawing of the Wagenaar family’s poky three-bedroomed house, Piet Deenen could see how he could utilise the dead space to the side. Where a washing line currently hung forlornly, he could create an open plan living area. Bring more light into that horrible galley kitchen. Theirs was another poorly designed boxy house on the outermost fringes of Amsterdam. A garden suburb. A post-war poor-man’s utopia, thrown together by shortsighted town-planners in response to a burgeoning population and the need for slum clearance. The Netherlands was now crying out for men like Piet: architects with modest ambitions, an easy-going nature and an affordable rate. Gabi had been so wrong about his earning potential. Fuck London with its cut-throat property- and job-market.

A few clicks on the mouse, and he manipulated his design software to create an extra five feet of usable floor space for Mr and Mrs Wagenaar and their three children. Better.

He drank from his coffee. Scattered crumbs onto his jeans from the appeltaart he had knocked up for him and the kids. Gabi wouldn’t touch anything containing carbs, of course. She was still on the corporate treadmill in her head. Sharp-dressing. 8 a.m. starts, though she no longer needed to keep those ridiculous hours. An hour of exercise every day: disciplined body, disciplined mind. Old habits weren’t dying hard.

Leaning forward, knocking his coffee all over the plans of the existing front elevation, he opened the window.

‘Kids!’ he shouted in his native Dutch. ‘Ten minutes and I’ll bring you out some cake and milk. Okay?’

Delighted squeals from outside. Josh jumping up and down, Lucy not really understanding much beyond cake and milk, no doubt. They waved up at him. All, ‘love you, Paps!’ Sticky juice hands. Dirty knees. Both with flaxen hair just like he had had as a child. But their curls had come from Gabi’s side of the family.

Piet surveyed this perfect domestic scene. Perched atop the Day-Glo pink climbing frame were his very own small people. His family. Here – the middle of nowhere – had to be the safest place in the world to raise children, hadn’t it? Here, they had green space. Privacy. You wouldn’t even know there was a train line running behind the garden. It was a glorious sight. The relocation had been worthwhile. Gabi would come round without water eventually.

Except Josh ruined the perfect snapshot in time, as usual. He started to dangle Lucy by her ankles over the ladder of the climbing frame. Shrieks of excitement from his tiny sibling, quickly turned to anguished screaming.

‘Stop that, Josh! Leave your sister alone. Don’t make me come down there!’

Shit. Bloody kids. Coffee spillage or Lucy: which was the more urgent? Suddenly, he found himself flapping, and ran to the bathroom to get toilet roll. At least he could blot the worst of it.

‘I’m coming down!’ he shouted through the open window.

‘Pappie!’ Cries from Lucy.

Mischievous laughter trilling on the air from Josh.

But then the phone started ring.

Shit. Shit. Shit. Gabi on the other end.

‘Did you put the wash on?’ she asked. Sounded harried.

‘What? Yes. No. Hang on, darling. The kids are going mad in the garden. There’s coffee— I’ve got to …’ Looking out at the precarious scene below, he could see that Josh had released his sister from his tyrannical grip but was now holding the sides of the climbing frame, rocking the plastic tower back and forth. Trying to topple that which was not designed to be toppled.

Gabi’s voice, tinny but insistent down the phone-line. ‘Piet! I told you to put the bloody washing in. The one time your mother actually comes to babysit overnight and there’s no clean bedding.’ Her tone had quickly turned from undisguised mistrust to naked fury.

‘I’ll do it! Darling, I can’t—’

‘Can’t? Can’t? Then how come I manage? I’m sick of it, Piet. You promised me we’d have some time for ourselves. That was the whole damned point, wasn’t it? Better quality of life, you said!’

‘Gab, the kids are—’

‘Did you put Josh’s assessment on the calendar like I told you?’

Piet tore himself away from the window. He turned to the calendar, pinned to a corkboard in his little office, one ear still on the mayhem in the garden. Feeling torn between answering his wife’s demands and monitoring his ebullient charges, he was relieved when it became relatively quiet outside. Little children’s voices chatting nicely, not bellowing. Laughter. This meant the kids were finally behaving, leaving him to focus on dealing with Gabi. ‘Yes. It’s down for 10 a.m. on the 18th.’

‘Of June? You got the right month?’

He felt the prickle of irritation on the back of his neck that he always got that when Gabi started to undermine him. He imagined her, snip, snip, snip at his testicles with the big garden shears. ‘Yes, I got the right fucking month. It says in capital letters, ‘Josh – psychiatric evaluation. 18th of June’. It was all he could do not to shout June down the phone.

‘Did you pay the credit card bill?’

‘No.’

‘What do you mean, no?’

‘Not enough money in the account. Not after the deposit on the car and the first repayment coming out.’

The argument quickly escalated into a slanging match over whether they were going to be cut off by the utilities company or not. As usual. By the time he slammed the phone down on his wife, Piet was exhausted.

He finished mopping the coffee spillage. The drawing was brown and rippled now, like the waves of the North Sea in winter. Damn.

Throwing the soggy tissue into his wastepaper basket, he peered out of the window. Sod Gabi. He would sit outside for a bit with the kids. If he invoiced a few more customers early, chances are, one would pay up before the thirty-day notice and he could settle the overdue gas bill.

Padding down in bare feet to the kitchen – a sleek luxury he had insisted upon if she was to have that ridiculous car they didn’t even need – he sliced up the cake. Piet poured milk into two plastic beakers. One green for Lucy. One yellow for Josh. An orange one for him, so he could join in. Took a tray outside.

The rustle of a late spring breeze in the trees was nothing short of idyllic. A train approached in the distance, although he hardly noticed the sound now, as the Rotterdam to Schiphol service trundled past some several metres below the line of houses – out of view, deep in its purpose-built cutting.

‘Come on, babies. Let’s take some time out.’

Silence.

Had they answered and he hadn’t heard them over the train’s rumble? Setting the tray down, he looked at the climbing frame, expecting to see his children. They weren’t there. Hide and seek, no doubt. Always a favourite. His heart had started to pound. He could feel the blood draining from his face. But that was fine, because they were hiding.

‘Josh! Lucy! Come on out now. Time for a snack.’

No sign of them in the void of the climbing frame. Neither could he see small figures skulking behind the wooden sun-loungers.

‘Not funny, kids! Come out!’

Peering at the bases of the holly bushes, he could see no telltale feet. Crap. The gate! He ran to check the side gate. Had they walked onto the street? No! The side gate was bolted and padlocked.

‘I know where you are, you little rascals!’

It was a simple but mature garden, mainly full of evergreen shrubbery and trees. Holly, laurel, a eucalyptus, cotoneaster, the heavy canopy of three Japanese maples, specimen pine, other stuff he didn’t know the names of. All surrounded by a solid, six-foot-tall wooden fence. They were hiding. He had to calm down. It simply wasn’t possible for them to have disappeared. Only one place could successfully conceal them.

At the far end of the garden was a small weeping birch that cascaded right to the ground, providing the kids with a curtain of green, behind which they could safely hide from view.

Smiling tentatively, Piet crept forward. Preparing to sweep the whippy branches aside to reveal his collaborating toddlers. Grabbed the branches. Hope fading as he realised he could not hear any delighted, anticipatory giggling. Looked for the sandaled feet, mucky knees and brightly coloured shorts in vain. Lifted the canopy suddenly.

‘Gotcha!’

The void by the tree trunk was empty.

In a dizzying vortex of panic, Piet stepped backwards. Tripped on Lucy’s Sesamstraat tricycle, Big Bird staring goggle-eyed into the abyss as he was now.

‘Josh! Lucy!’ he shouted at the top of his voice.

Hands shaking. His breath started to come short. Where was his inhaler? Inside. Maybe they had gone inside.

‘Lucy! Josh! Where are you?’

Found his Ventolin on the worktop. Inhaled sharply. Eyes scanning the kitchen. Back into the garden now. Screaming at the top of his lungs. Frightened tears starting to leak from his eyes.

‘Joshua! Lucy! Where are you?’

He fell to his knees as the bottom dropped out of his world. The garden was empty. His children were gone.

CHAPTER 9
St. John’s College, then, The Bun Shop pub, Cambridge, 3 March, present

‘Fucking idiots,’ George muttered under her breath. She was eyeing the beefy rugger-buggers in the crowded college bar who had hoisted two blow-up sex dolls aloft and were bashing them together, ‘like lesboes’. Then, pretending to hump them, doggy style. Pints all round, boys, to celebrate Rupes’ birthday. Empty glasses bearing testament to two hours’ solid drinking.

Looking at Charlotte, the mousy third-year student she was supervising on the side, George felt suddenly protective. ‘Let’s call it a night, shall we?’

Charlotte fingered a twee enamel flower brooch on her jumper nervously. Nodded. She hooked her dark blonde hair behind her ears. Left her diet coke half drunk. ‘I always find it too rowdy in here,’ she said, barely audible above the raucous laughter and bawdy jokes. ‘But thanks for the drink anyway. I’m glad you thought the essay was okay.’

‘The essay was great, but this was a bad idea. I’m sorry. Next time, we’ll have the supervision at my house, right?’

As she pulled on her coat, one of the boys locked eyes with George. Clearly failed to recognize her as a Fellow. He humped the blow-up sex doll towards her, shouting, ‘Fancy a ride, darling? I’ve got plenty of love to give when I’ve finished with this bitch.’

Deftly, George detached the enamel brooch from Charlotte’s jumper. Nice long, sharp pin, she noticed with satisfaction. Took long strides to meet the leering idiot. Popped the first sex doll. Swung to her left and popped the second.

‘Oh, you total cow!’ one of the boys shouted.

‘See, boys?’ George said. All eyes on her. Stunned silence meant she had their attention. ‘An unwanted prick’s not much fun, is it?’

Before the pack could round on her, she ushered Charlotte to the door. She only barely registered the fact that a man, too old to be a student, was sitting in an alcove. A man who didn’t fit with these surrounds. The wafting stench of more than stale alcohol. Watching her. Someone she didn’t recognise. Or did she? It was a shadow of a thought and George didn’t have time to form it fully before she was through the door; warm air supplanted by cold, a testosterone-fuelled demi-riot supplanted by silence.

Outside in that frozen cloudless night, the drop in temperature punched the air from her lungs. She struggled to catch her breath as she watched Charlotte scurry off towards Cripps block in safety.

George was preoccupied and unprepared, when a figure wearing too many clothes bundled into her.

‘Watch where you’re going!’ she said, wondering if one of the boys from the bar had come to start something with her. But the figure was too small, she realised.

‘George!’ A woman’s voice. Rich rolling R. She pulled back her hood enough to show her face clearly in the moonlight. Dark hair gathered in a low widow’s peak above her brow. Feather earrings just peeping out, though the colours were not visible in this half-light. ‘I was looking for you.’

‘Sophie!’ George said. Chuckling with relief at the sight of the Social Anthropology Fellow.

‘Fancy coming for a pint and we can chew over our collaboration some more? The Bun Shop does a good burger if you’ve not already eaten. My treat.’

George assessed her options. Back to her college house full of untidy idiot undergraduates, where she could never find peace enough to work? Beggars, it turned out, really couldn’t be choosers. Or off to the pub for a second stab at sociability with women roughly her own age? Her empty stomach growled long and low. It had already decided on her brain’s behalf.

‘Perfect!’

As the two women trudged arm-in-arm towards the Porter’s Lodge, George was unaware of the man following some twenty paces behind.

That he had got past the Porters and into the college was a miracle. No. Not a miracle. Merely a feat of bluff and self-confidence. Walk like you belong there. Head held high. His time on the streets had taught him this was the best way to move around unnoticed. The moment you started acting like you didn’t belong was the moment people took you for an interloper.

Still, his heart was thudding as he followed McKenzie and her friend through the labyrinthine medieval sprawl towards the lodge. Seeing the towers loom large, covered in the claustrophobic white blanket that swallowed sound like the walls of a confessional box, he felt sick. But in the middle of the snow-bound courtyard, where the gritted paths intersected, the women suddenly took a sharp left. They entered a different courtyard on the other side of the chapel. Wider spaces here. The snow glittered like homeless man’s diamonds in the moonlight. It looked like they were going through some more discreet exit. Except, downside was, he was exposed here. If they turned around, they would realise, perhaps, that they were being followed.

Get to McKenzie, the email had said. Get her laptop and the USB stick that has her database on it – by any means necessary. The names are all on there.

Any means necessary. Yes. He was a committed soldier and this was war. It was his job to obey orders. He removed his glove for thirty seconds – just long enough to reach down through the tear in his pocket into the space between the lining and outer of his coat. Touched the tools hidden along the inner seam. Screwdriver. Hammer. Chisel. Tonight he would not use ice and snow. Tonight, he needed something a little more robust.

George looked into Sophie’s startling green eyes. Looked away after a couple of uncomfortable beats. Felt instinctively like there was more than just friendly curiosity at play in her new colleague’s exacting gaze. Some kind of chemistry shit going on. She hadn’t experienced that with a woman since Tonya …

‘I’m going to be honest with you,’ George said. ‘I don’t see how your study into the Roma has any bearing on my trafficking research. I’m all about qualitative and quantitative. Interview transcriptions from victims and perps. Stats. You’re presumably coming at it from a cultural heritage angle.’ She took a large bite out of her burger. Eyes on the clientele in the pub, feeling like she was being observed. Back to Sophie. Perhaps observed only by her.

All hands flapping and smiles, Sophie’s intense expression was suddenly transformed. ‘You couldn’t be wronger there, my love,’ she said in that rolling West Country accent. George wasn’t sure about the ‘my love’. ‘The reason Sally wanted us to work together was that the Roma – my speciality – are at the centre of many a child abduction scandal.’

Drinking deeply from her pint of beer, George started to arrange the condiments in a perfectly straight line along the middle of the table. Separating her and Sophie with a barrier of salt, pepper, vinegar and ketchup. ‘There’s often stories in the media about blond children allegedly being abducted by the Roma. Usually when northern Europeans are on holiday in countries like Turkey and Greece.’

Chewing slowly, thoroughly, perhaps thoughtfully, on her veggie-burger, Sophie nodded and flicked her long hair over her shoulder. ‘Stories like that always engender mass hysteria in the press – especially in the tabloids. White Europeans are up in arms whenever they get wind of some kind of abuse of a blond child by an underclass of minority ethnic people like ‘gypsies’. And the Roma have always been vilified as child-abductors. It goes back donkey’s years, like the myth of Jews baking their Passover bread with Christian children’s blood.’

‘Racist propaganda, then?’ George asked, pulling her e-cigarette out of her rucksack.

‘But the point is, the Roma informally adopt children from families that can’t bring their own kids up. Happens a lot. I think in the case of the ‘Blonde Angel’ back in 2013, for example, the mother was Bulgarian and just couldn’t look after her daughter. Lack of paperwork implicates the adoptive parents though, and the media jumps onto a witch hunt.’

George thought about how the case Van den Bergen had been working on had been given the moniker of Operation Roma by Kamphuis or Hasselblad or one of those odious bastards above him, and wondered about the prejudices behind the name in light of what Sophie was saying. Missing person equals gypsies, if the bigots were to be believed. Hadn’t Hasselblad pointed the finger at Romani travellers, amongst other easily maligned groups? She had thought the Roma referred to the Italian capital of Rome – a suspected destination of the missing, at one point, and the frequently used European hub of trans-national trafficking networks. Only now did she make the link. How the hell did I miss that?

‘You’ve got a point.’ She rubbed her finger along her full bottom lip. Chapped and rough from the cold. ‘Roma kids from South Eastern Europe are by far the largest ethnic group preyed on by traffickers,’ George said, thinking about what she had read about beggars and child prostitutes in Italy, the Russian Federation and Turkey. ‘So, the truth is actually a world away from media representation.’

Sophie seemed momentarily to be assessing George. Peering at her intently over her beer glass. She looked suddenly thoughtful again. ‘Yep. Of the kids trafficked out of Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia, Roma kids constitute about seventy per cent. They’re disproportionately poor. Maybe someone trusted in the family or village offers to get a child work elsewhere. What the fuck have they got in their little villages at home? Domestic abuse, maybe. Poverty, certainly. Sod all in the way of education or prospects. So they often go willingly. Unwittingly. Factor in corrupt border patrol and police, and you’ve got movement of children over borders into brothels, sweatshops, begging on the streets.’

George drained her beer glass, feeling suddenly lightheaded in the over-heated warmth of the pub, with a full stomach. Sophie was twirling some of that long, unkempt hair coquettishly around her finger. Her chipped nail varnish made George feel itchy. Inadvertently, she found herself checking her phone for texts from Van den Bergen, as though those would save her from the keen-eyed appraisal of the inexpertly groomed Dr Bartek. Nothing. She found herself looking up at the décolletage of her colleague.

‘So, studying human trafficking in Europe…’ Sophie said, licking her fingers now that her plate was clean ‘… is not all stats. There’s a social anthropology aspect to it to. Poverty, ethnicity … Do you fancy a fuck?’

George burst out laughing, and felt the heat suffuse her cheeks with embarrassment though she had not been easily embarrassed in years. ‘I only came out to supervise my Sociology finalist!’

‘So?!’ Sophie reached out, stroked her hand, and started to play footsie with her under the table, which, in snow boots, felt more like a football tackle than flirtation.

The sight of ketchup under Sophie’s fingernails made George pull her hand away. She pressed her lips together and smiled awkwardly, looking everywhere but at this five-foot tall propositioner with mesmerising eyes. ‘I’m in a relationship. Sort of.’

‘Sort of?’

‘On and off.’

‘Well, then?’

George had agreed to coffee. That was all.

The walk back to her place, up the steep incline of Castle Hill and along the Huntingdon Road, took place in anticipatory silence. But the noise in her head was unbearable. She’s going to expect more from me. I haven’t slept with a woman in years. I wasn’t looking for this. I don’t even fancy her. I love Van den Bergen. But he’s an arsehole and treats me like an afterthought.

‘You okay?’ Sophie asked, as they stood on the front doorstep to George’s shared house.

‘It’s a bit messy,’ George said. ‘The communal area, I mean. But my room’s a clean space, so you’ll have to take your shoes off before you go in. I’m a bit funny about …’

Key in the lock. The flickering light on the wall of the living room said the other housemates were watching TV. George bypassed them and led Sophie up the narrow Victorian stairs to her room.

The door was open. The lock bust. Splintered wood on the architrave.

‘Shitting Nora!’

Key still uselessly in hand, George walked in and surveyed the mayhem. The room had been ransacked, top to bottom. Bedclothes on the floor. Contents of drawers strewn all over. Pot plant spattered mess across the carpet. Typing chair upended. Desk drawers flung hither and thither. She ran over to her desk. A space where the laptop had been.

‘Fuck!’ she shouted, staring at Sophie with desperate eyes. ‘My research is gone!’

CHAPTER 10
Amsterdam, Sloterdijkermeer allotments, then, an apartment block in Bijlmer, 4 March

‘For Christ’s sake! When will it bloody rain and wash this crap away?’ Van den Bergen shouted, trying to manoeuvre his car into one of the only spaces at the allotment complex that had been shovelled clear of snow over the past few weeks. Not shovelled well enough though. There had been another downfall overnight, covering the icy rectangle with virgin snow that creaked in complaint when compressed. Now, compacted beneath the tyres of his rear wheel drive E-Class Mercedes, the snow caused him to skid back and forth, back and forth, as if in some kind of retribution for being sullied.

‘Fuck this!’ he growled, slapping the steering wheel in frustration. He realised the car was at an awkward angle but had had enough and clicked the brake button on. He turned the engine off and stepped outside into -22°C. Perhaps it was lunacy coming here in this weather. But he needed to get away from the station. Here, at the otherwise empty Sloterdijkermeer allotment complex, he could sit in his wooden cabin in a state of suspended animation. Pretend just for an hour – or, as long as he could bear in these ridiculous Arctic temperatures before hypothermia set in – that everything was alright. That life was normal. That he still had a measure of control over his own destiny.

Carrying the portable heater in one gloved hand, his Thermos flask and an Albert Heijn supermarket bag containing a fat file in the other, he trudged through the malign winter wonderland. More than two feet deep. It was heavy work. He eyed with suspicion the icicles that hung everywhere from sheds and cabins; he noted the sheer volume of snow that now sat on top of every roof, threatening to slide off at any moment and engulf a hapless victim below.

Snowmen leered at him from other people’s patches. Jolly characters, easily identifiable as figures of fun on the day they were created by gardeners’ children and grandchildren. Now, covered with yet more snow, they had become ghostly amorphous blobs, with drooping carrots for noses. Their sinister pebble smiles with those crow-like raisin eyes made Van den Bergen feel like he was being watched.

‘Stop being a prick,’ he told himself.

He kicked aside the snow on the step. Grey-white sky threatened another blizzard of bloated flakes. Better not get stranded here. Better keep an eye on the time.

He unlocked the cabin. Got the heater going. Sat uncomfortably in the padded salopettes that were relics of the time he had taken Tamara and Andrea skiing in Chamonix, just before the divorce. A last ditch attempt at happy families. He cracked open the flask, steam rising in whorls on the freezing air. Sipping at the oily coffee, laced with a little medicinal brandy, he pulled his phone out of his pocket, and re-read those poisonous emails. There were so many of them.

Jesus can see your soul, Paul van den Bergen. You are a weak man. You are the scum of the earth. There’s a special space reserved in purgatory for you because you failed.

This was just the latest missive from what appeared to be his bank. When the emails had first started to arrive, he hadn’t been sure they weren’t part of some phishing scam, encouraging him to phone a bogus hotline and give all his financial details away. Then, as the contents of the emails became increasingly unpleasant, wishing him dead, saying the Devil was coming to claim him, he realised someone had created a false email address in order to spam him with pseudo-religious loathing. But the bogus Verenigde Spaarbank was not the only source of electronic woe.

I know where you live, you fucking paedo-loving pervert. I hope you get raped up the arse and beaten to death by those other useless pigs you work with.

This had allegedly been sent by a government official in the Hague, whom a little digging revealed to be an entirely fictitious person. Email account-holder unknown.

After a month or two of filing the hate mail into a folder, he had shown the first few to Tamara, not daring to let George see them for fear of her protective outrage and apocalyptic desire for revenge.

‘You’re being trolled, Dad,’ Tamara had declared. ‘I’d say go to the police, but you are the police! Get Marie to track down the sender and get whoever it is arrested. Or ignore it. Don’t feed the trolls, right? It’s your call.’

Sipping from the plastic cup, scrolling through this virtual bilge, he realised he had made a conscious decision to do nothing, hoped it would all go away over time … assumed he wasn’t actually under any kind of real threat. And today, he had come to his allotment to do a little thinking. Perhaps there was something in this hate mail. Perhaps the senders were tied to the case that Kamphuis had ordered him to archive under S for stone-cold dead. Or maybe he was just weak and a failure. Either way, the words gnawed continually at his conscience so that he had endured yet another lonely, sleepless night, resolving to come to the cabin at first light and go through the missing persons’ case notes yet again.

Repositioning his slightly foggy glasses on the end of his nose, he took out the hefty A4 lever arch file he had taken from the archives. Started to leaf through the list of suspects he had interviewed in the beginning. Were there any fervently religious types among them?

Outside, he heard creak, creak, creak, growing closer. Louder. Someone else was mad enough to come to the allotments in this infernal cold. Van den Bergen realised he was all alone out there. He hadn’t spoken to a soul yet that morning; had deliberately turned the ring off his phone to avoid Kamphuis’ nagging.

Footsteps trudging up his little path. Creak. Creak.

Raising the bulk of the Thermos over his head, he stood behind the door. Wondering if some bum was trying to break into one of the cabins in search of shelter. A cough, as the intruder stood on the other side of the flimsy wooden door. Trying the handle. Up, down. Up, down. The door opened inwards.

Van den Bergen brought the Thermos down heavily on a man’s shoulder.

‘Ow!’ the unexpected visitor cried.

‘You!’

Elvis rubbed the sweet spot where the boss had caught him, wincing at the pain that shot down his right arm.

‘Jesus Christ! It’s only me.’ He eyed the giant flask, wondering fleetingly if there was anything hot left inside and whether Van den Bergen would offer him a drink in this biting cold.

‘What the hell are you doing here, Elvis?’ the boss asked. He looked pale, as though he had seen a ghost. Mind you, he looked like that most of the time these days. They were lucky if they could get him to leave the air-conditioned warmth and artificial light of his office.

‘Kamphuis made me come and get you,’ he said, pulling his woollen hat off, realising that it was sub-zero in the cabin too, and promptly pulling it back on again. ‘I’ve been calling you for the last hour. When you didn’t pick up and didn’t answer the landline at your apartment, I figured you were here.’ He gestured at the mildewed chair that sported a bag of compost on the opposite side of the beat-up table. ‘Can I sit?’

Eyes darting side to side, Van den Bergen towered above him, still holding the tartan-patterned flask, as though he might hit him again should he put a foot wrong.

‘No. What does the fat bastard want? Am I not entitled to some space? Am I some wet-behind-the-ears constable that I should be at his beck and call all the sodding time?’

‘He insists you come back with me to Bijlmer to do door-to-doors. Marie’s doing Internet research on that London Jack Frost case George emailed you the details of.’

‘Insists, does he?’

Van den Bergen was staring at a curling poster on the wall of Debbie Harry from the early 1980s. There was an embarrassing moment where he noticed Elvis watching him ogle the faded, semi-naked star.

Elvis blushed and cleared his throat. ‘Kamphuis said you need the fresh air, boss. And I need the backup.’

‘Get in your car and bugger off back to the station. I don’t need a babysitter and neither do you. We’re men, Elvis. Men!’

‘I can’t boss. Came in a taxi.’

Van den Bergen switched off the fan heater and made that telltale growling noise that always said he was utterly pissed off. It was going to be a long morning.

There was silence in the car as they skidding along the icy patches, going too fast at times.

Elvis wondered if the boss was going to kill him before he made his thirtieth birthday. Not long, now. Mum was going to go into the home for the weekend, so he could have respite and go out for a drink with the lads.

He stared at the side of Van den Bergen’s face. Saw the split veins that had appeared around his nose. The open pores. Dark circles underneath his eyes said he rarely slept. Funny, how he had to guess at what went on in the boss’s private life. Neither of them knew that much about each other after all these years. He knew the Chief Inspector had been having an affair with George McKenzie for quite some time. Knew he popped those painkillers like sweets and disappeared off to sulk or wank or both in his super-shed at Sloterdijkermeer. But that was all. And did the boss have an inkling that his mother was on her last legs with Parkinson’s? That he was the main carer? Probably not. Van den Bergen had never asked.

The flats in Bijlmer were soul-destroying. As Elvis and the boss moved their way through the block, proceeding along landing after landing, climbing from floor to floor, front doors were opened reluctantly by the residents. Hitting them time and again with a fug of exotic cooking smells, unsanitary living conditions, piss, pet-stink, unwashed bodies, carbolic soap. All of life was here. But Elvis had just long enough to glimpse the common denominator of poverty beyond the threshold, before those doors were slammed resolutely in their faces.

‘No. I didn’t see a thing. Nope. I was at work/my parents’/the mosque/in town.’

Ghanaians. Somalis. Moroccans. Sometimes pretending not to speak Dutch. Hell, maybe they couldn’t. Every ethnicity Amsterdam sheltered lived here fearfully, silently, treading lightly. You could see the fear in their eyes and smell the desperation coming off their bodies. Please don’t ask to see my paperwork, their pleading glances said. When the El-Al jumbo had crashed in one of the old multi-storey blocks in 1991, the death toll had been officially set at forty, but had been estimated to be over two hundred in reality, since most of the dead had been illegal immigrants.

‘Are you sure you don’t recognise the photo of this man?’ Van den Bergen said, stooping to speak to an old Asian guy who couldn’t have been taller than five foot five. A shake of the head said no.

After an hour with no joy, and the boss getting more and more surly, they followed a woman dressed head to toe in black Arabic robes, wearing an oversized anorak over the top. She kept looking back at them furtively.

‘Look at this! Someone knows how to spot a cop when she sees one,’ Elvis said.

The boss nodded. ‘My instincts say, stay on her.’

The woman picked up her pace. Shuffling along the communal landing at speed, she looked over her shoulder. Wide-eyed. Shoved her key in the lock of a door some twenty metres away. Ten. Five. Desperately trying to wriggle her key free. Still clocking their approach with a nervous expression that screamed guilty conscience. Key free, she disappeared into the apartment’s hallway. Tried to close the door. Except the door wouldn’t shut.

The woman glanced down and frowned at Van den Bergen’s enormous foot in the way.

‘Police, madam,’ the Chief Inspector said, showing his ID.

Tears in her eyes. Screaming in Arabic maybe, to people beyond the hallway out of sight. Hands flailing, she ran inside. Van den Bergen took out his service weapon and pushed his way in.

Ten or more men scattered at the sight of them – some white, some black – into the bedrooms and kitchen. The air rang with the sounds of panic in several different languages. In the middle of the living room were two kids on mattresses, playing some board game or other. They looked up at the policemen. One had a familiar face.

‘It’s the boy from the playground,’ Elvis said. ‘Imran.’

CHAPTER 11
Amsterdam, apartment in Bijlmer, then, police headquarters, later

‘We’re not interested in whether you’re legal or not,’ Van den Bergen said. Shouting at volume as though his audience were communally deaf. Might as well be, judging by the silence. Holding his hands up in the hope of demonstrating to the cowering gaggle of eight men, one woman and two children that he meant them no harm. It was hard enough to inspire any kind of trust in the residents of Bijlmer. Now that the two uniforms had shown up as backup for what was potentially a combustible situation, he could see the naked scepticism on their faces.

He turned to Elvis. ‘Tell them, for God’s sake! Tell them we don’t give a shit about their status.’

Elvis shrugged. ‘I don’t know Arabic, boss!’ He sighed heavily. ‘Does anybody here speak Dutch? English? French? Come on! Vous … Oh, fuck it. I can’t speak French either. Nobody?’ He pointed at the two white men. ‘What nationality are you?’

Kneeling with their hands in the air, as though they were about to pray to the Netherlands Police for absolution, or, at least, asylum, the two men spoke in what sounded like Russian. Polish, maybe.

Feeling the agitated lava of his stomach acid spurt into his gullet, Van den Bergen stalked towards the boy from the playground. ‘You!’ he said. ‘You understand what I’m saying, don’t you? Imran, right?’ The boy peered sullenly down at the board game. English Monopoly. Pieces strewn over the dirty mattress. Metal car, iron, top hat. Half-eaten remnants of lunch on a plastic plate. A piece of pitta bread on Trafalgar Square. He remained silent, looking intently at the younger boy who was building a house out of Community Chest cards.

Van den Bergen knelt and tried to gain the boy’s attention. ‘It’s okay, Imran. I just want to ask you some questions about the man that died. The man in playground.’

The woman lurched forwards. Prodded Imran in the back. Said something in her native tongue, though the tone was castigatory, Van den Bergen could tell.

‘Is this your mother?’ Van den Bergen asked.

Imran shook his head at the same time that the woman nodded.

‘Mother. Yes. Yes,’ she said, breaking into an unfamiliar and excitable string of consonants and vowels. Clasping the boy to her chest. Kissing the top of his head.

‘Chief Inspector!’ one of the uniforms shouted from another room. ‘You’d better come and see this!’

Backing towards the bedroom, quickly assessing whether Elvis was at risk or not from the jittery, diasporic occupants of the apartment, he poked his head in on the scene in one of the bedrooms. A dark-skinned man lay on a squalid, single camp bed, clutching at his stomach. His nether regions were wrapped in soiled bandages, a foetid stink on the air of infection. Beside his cot, balanced on top of a stool, was a cardboard vegetable tray from a supermarket. Filled with blood-caked plastic bags containing white powder.

‘Call for an ambulance,’ Van den Bergen told the uniform. Eyeing the bloody ooze that had contaminated the sheet beneath the man’s body. Sweat rolling from his brow, the whites of his eyes on show as he trembled and winced. ‘I think we’ve got ourselves a flat full of drug mules. Looks like some cargo has burst inside this poor bastard’s stomach.’

Back in the living room, Van den Bergen glanced at the soiled mattresses that the boys sat on. He cast an appraising eye over the visibly jumpy men in the room, shared a knowing glance with Elvis, then turned to the second uniform.

‘Contact social services, as well. Tell them I’ve got two at-risk kids. And get the van. This lot are coming down the station for questioning.’

‘Death by snow,’ Marie said to her flickering screen, momentarily catching sight of her face, reflected on its shining surface. Despair etched in parallel lines onto her forehead, their depth and permanence accelerated by the world of Internet filth that Marie inhabited, as her police specialism dictated. Blot it out. She refocussed on the Google list.

‘Snow-related deaths. Ice as a weapon. Right. Come on, Google. Come on, Europol database. You’re my best girls. Don’t disappoint me.’

Marie was happy to be alone. The silence was comforting. There was no expectation for her to make polite conversation with Elvis and the boss, although she rarely did these days, in any case. She could just concentrate on the information that came whizzing down the fibre-optic cables to her machine. A world of pain. A world of hate. But, a firewall of gigabytes and machinery that put a couple degrees of separation between her and the places where the world was truly broken.

As the results appeared on the various search engines, she slurped from her lukewarm coffee. Pulled the collar of her top wide, sniffing and wondering if it had another day in it. Probably not. She knew what the other detectives said about her, although she had never heard Van den Bergen or Elvis complain about the smell. That George could be cutting, though. But then, she had a problem with OCD and was okay otherwise. It was the admin-bitches Marie couldn’t stand. Other women were always the worst.

‘Harpies,’ she said, staring at the wall whilst visualising the cows upstairs. Kamphuis’ harem. She looked fleetingly at the photo of the six-month-old boy on her desk. Swallowed hard. The world at this end of those fibre optic cables was broken too.

Her focus returned to the Google list that went on for page after page after page. Jack Frost was not the only damaged soul using snow and ice to kill. Mother Nature had previous. She was the Queen of the psychopaths. Avalanches. Ice falling from a great height that could take out an entire car. Frozen corpses scattered along the base of K2’s North Face; marble-white near-perfection in perpetuity, only broken in the parts that had trifled with the mountain on the way to the bottom.

Marie skimmed over Marianne de Koninck’s forensic report again. Conical wound. Water permeating the surrounding cells. No trace of a blade.

‘Got to be an icicle. What else could it be?’ she muttered.

Her practised, analytical gaze scanned the contents of story after story. Page after page. Deftly click-clicking her mouse, until she happened upon what she had half hoped the search would throw up. She allowed herself a broad grin.

‘Ha! Hello, Jack Frost. Looks like you have very itchy feet.’

Her private celebration was interrupted by Van den Bergen bursting in. Grim-faced.

‘I need you to be my wingman. I’ve got to question a minor. Now, please!’

In the quiet of the meeting room – the only relatively relaxed space they could source at short notice where a child might be questioned – Marie sat next to Van den Bergen. She studied the little boys, who, in return, seemed to be getting the measure of her. Two sets of clear brown eyes fixed on her red hair. Two furrowed brows. Cynical expressions that, by rights, belonged to far older children. The smaller boy couldn’t have been more than six.

‘Imran,’ Marie began, turning to the older boy. A flicker of a smile playing on her lips. She scratched an angry patch of dry skin on her chin. ‘You told the Chief Inspector, here, that the woman in the apartment isn’t your mummy.’

The boy shook his head. ‘No. She’s not my mother.’

‘Where is your mother, then?’

No answer. She turned to the younger boy, who started to suck his thumb, stroking his nose with his index finger.

‘What does she do, that woman? What do those men in the apartment do? Do you know them?’

Imran shrugged. ‘She looks after us. The man says she’s our aunt, but she’s not our aunt. She’s mean.’

Van den Bergen leaned forwards. Kept his voice deliberately quiet. ‘Mean in what way?’

‘She beats us, sometimes.’

‘Why?’

‘When we don’t do our job. I hate her. She stinks.’

Running her fingers along the edge of the table, Marie breathed in sharply, as though she had considered something and then decided against saying it. ‘What’s your job, Imran? I bet a clever boy like you can do lots of things?’

‘If I tell you, she’ll beat me.’

‘The woman?’

Nodding. The smaller of the two boys said something in his native tongue to Imran. Startled eyes. A look of fear. Wiped his thumb on his trousers and started to hug himself. Imran spat harsh, unfamiliar words at the side of his head in response.

‘What about the dead man?’ Van den Bergen asked. ‘What’s his name?’

The boy’s reluctance to respond made the air in the meeting room feel heavy, loaded with stifled possibility. In a sudden eruption of emotion, the smaller child started to sob. Van den Bergen’s fatherly instincts screamed at him to hug the little boy. His professionalism held him in his seat. Rigid. Unflinching on the outside. Anguish manifesting itself as chest pain on the inside.

‘Let’s turn them over to social services, boss,’ Marie said. ‘Get them a safe bed for the night and hot meal. We’ll try again tomorrow.’

Angered by the haunting phenomenon of the crying boy, Van den Bergen marched into the interview room that held the woman, her interpreter and Elvis. At his behest, Elvis switched on the recording equipment.

Carefully, deliberately, Van den Bergen shoved a photo of the dead Bijlmer man under the woman’s nose. Tapping on the table next to the photo, he said, ‘You know who he is, don’t you?’ He scowled at her impassive face. ‘I’ve got a man in A&E, found in that apartment … looks like he’s going to die from septicaemia. A drug mule. I’ve worked enough drugs cases in my time to know that much. Carrying bags in his stomach and shitting them out once he’s been safely trafficked from some far-flung shithole to Amsterdam. Bringing poison and death into my town. Are you a drug mule, too? Are you a dealer? Did the dead man use those boys as dealers? Scouts? What? Tell me!’

‘No comment,’ the interpreter told him. ‘She has no comment. She wants to speak to someone at her embassy.’

He turned to the diminutive woman who was acting as linguistic go-between and steeled himself to remember she was just the messenger, that he should not shoot her. ‘There are two little boys who are going to spend the night in an emergency foster placement. Frightened out of their wits, saying she’ll beat them if they speak. Tell the hatchet-faced cow that if she doesn’t give me the info I require now I’ll have her on the next flight to whatever warzone she’s crawled out of.’ He was shouting. He knew he was shouting. He didn’t care. Let this bitch come at him with whatever she could muster. Let her try to level an accusation of intimidation or sexism or racism at him.

‘Syria.’

‘Right. Well, Syria can fucking have her back before the weekend, unless she talks.’

‘She wants a Dutch passport.’

‘Talk!’

There was a heated exchange in the woman’s native tongue. She treated Van den Bergen and Elvis to looks of utter disdain, as though she were a Red Cross nurse, rather than a woman somehow embroiled in drug-dealing and human trafficking.

Finally, the interpreter turned to Van den Bergen, alarmed and disconcerted, judging by her look of disgust. ‘The dead man is called Tomas Vlinders. He paid her to take the boys to rich men’s houses. They were delivering drugs for parties. Parties held by powerful men.’

Van den Bergen sat back down. Pushed his knees beneath the low table. Leaned forward in a measured manner. ‘What powerful men?’

CHAPTER 12
A village south of Amsterdam, 25 May, the previous year

‘Phone, door keys, bag,’ Gabriella Deenen said, staring blankly at her possessions on the passenger seat. ‘Car keys. Where’s the—?’

The police officer leaned in through the driver’s open window. His hat and the bulk of his navy and yellow Politie jacket filling the space. ‘Are you sure you want to drive yourself?’ He sounded incredulous. His furrowed brow said he didn’t believe her. ‘You can come in the squad car and get someone to pick your vehicle up later.’

Gabi started the engine. The key had been in the ignition all the time! Which made sense, since she was sitting in the damned car and had to have had the key to unlock it in the first place. Pay attention, for god’s sake. Breathe in. Breathe out.

‘I’m fine. I’ll meet you at the house.’

She was surprised by how strong her voice sounded. She didn’t feel fine. She felt like she was going to be sick. Pull yourself together, you weak woman, she counselled herself. You’ll get home. This will all be a big mistake. With a click of a switch, the window closed, shutting the irritating, well-meaning and concern of the policeman outside.

Pulling out of the parking space, she almost crashed into the police car. Almost. Not quite. She was fine. This was okay. It was going to be a mistake. Except she had that horrible feeling in the pit of her stomach. Not butterflies. More like flapping, desperate moths, blind to the direction in which the light lay.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

When they had turned up, in the middle of her fundraising presentation, at first she had been annoyed. Knock, knock on the door of the meeting room, right as she was delivering a heart-rending speech about the hope that the charity’s medical research brought to families affected by traumatic brain injury. The donor – a director in a multi-national mining company with a shocking health and safety record – had been rapt with attention; chequebook open, hoping to buy the company a better public image. But just as things were going well and she had enjoyed that rush she used to get back in London, when she had pulled off a particularly good PR campaign, propelling Schoen Engineering Systems to the top of the aerospace heap, they had barged their way in. Flashing ID.

Yes. She had had a bad feeling. The moment she had seen them in the doorway. Eyes only for her.

‘Can you come with us, please, Mrs Deenen?’

The policewoman’s face had been arranged into an expression of kindliness and sympathy. She wondered if the Dutch Police HR department had arranged training for that kind of thing. Body language was so important.

Now, her hands shook, though she was gripping the steering wheel as tightly as possible. Skin stretched tight over white bony knuckles.. As she waited at the traffic lights, fragmented thoughts punctured her apparent composure. Josh and Lucy missing. A slight chip on her bronze nail varnish. Trip to the nail bar was in order. But Josh and Lucy were missing. Missing.

The traffic lights turned to red. Slamming hard on the brakes, the police car almost ran into the back of her. Suddenly, her foot was disobeying her brain. Trembling. Jerking. Kangaroo petrol, she lurched away on green.

‘What do they mean, missing?’ she asked the road sign as she pulled into their street.

There were two police cars outside their hydrangea-fronted house. The lawn needed a trim, she noted. Her Dutch home in this Amsterdam satellite town – quiet but for the Schiphol to Rotterdam line that ran at the back of the long garden – was hardly in the same league as the Victorian house they had had in London. But at least it was detached. She didn’t feel ashamed to have the police officers in and offer them a cold drink. Perhaps Piet would already have made them one. The kids were almost certainly playing in the back garden in this weather.

The kids.

The kids weren’t playing in the garden. The police were here. Josh and Lucy were missing.

Almost ploughing into the back of a small white van that overhung the paved driveway by a small margin, Gabi parked up abruptly, only an inch or so between the bumper and the brick wall. Light-headed, she patted her hair. Phone. Bag. Keys. Going through the routine. Imposing some normality on the abnormal. Staring at everything but seeing nothing. Fingers fumbling with the fob. Locking the car. Turning her ankle as she walked in through the open front door. Unaware of the pain. Past the constable on the step, talking into his hissing walkie-talkie. He reached out to try to stop her but she strutted on into the kitchen.

Look for Lucy and Josh. They’ll be there. Sitting at the table, drawing. Bet Piet hasn’t washed their hands all morning. If they’re not there, they’re in the garden. Yes, they’ll be outside.

At her back, the police officers who had come to the office were saying something to her, though she wasn’t listening. She heard her name. ‘Mrs Deenen.’ But the rest was rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb.

‘Rhubarb,’ she said under her breath, remembering stage instructions for extras in the school play when she had been a child, though she had always taken the leading role. ‘Rhubarb.’ Josh’s favourite kind of crumble pudding, though Lucy often gagged on the stringy consistency.

Steeling herself to connect with here and now, Gabi took in her surroundings. So many police officers were encroaching on her space. There was a man in plain clothes, talking to Piet, taking notes at the island in the middle of the kitchen. He had a glass of water by his right hand. Good. Piet had offered them all refreshments.

Beyond, she saw the empty lawn. The enormity of the situation started to dawn on her.

Piet was crying, staring at her, with tears coursing down his cheeks. Red-eyed. Red-nosed. Snot on his upper lip and the white fluffy remnants of kitchen roll stuck in his stubble.

He held his arms out as he stood and stumbled towards her. ‘I’m so sorry, darling.’

Gabi put her bag carefully on the work surface. Pushed Piet back towards his stool, walked to the sink and washed her hands carefully, running the water until it was boiling hot. Rubbing and rubbing the astringent lemony hand-wash between her fingers. She dried her hands methodically on a clean towel. The garden appeared empty of children. Nobody on the slide. No Josh, jumping up and down on the sun-lounger, trying to launch himself onto his sister or clutching his ears as the train roared past.

The policeman who wore his own clothes was speaking to her – a detective. Yes. He must be a detective. She stared at him blankly. Little Gabi, blinded by the glare. Silenced by the attention. All eyes on her. Struggling to remember her opening lines. Rhubarb. Rhubarb. ‘You’re in shock, Mrs Deenen. Shall I make you a cup of coffee?’ a policewoman said. Who was she? Oh, that’s right. One of the constables who had shown up at the office.

‘Where are Lucy and Josh, Pieter?’ Gabi asked her husband. No longer was she a child. Big Gabi needed to take control of this shambles. Big Gabi would sort it. ‘What have you done with our children, you fucking useless bastard?’

She marched up to Piet and thumped him squarely on the side of the head, with such force, that he fell off his stool onto the kitchen floor. ‘All you had to do was babysit them for half a day, while I went in to give that presentation.’ Big Gabi was screaming. ‘And you couldn’t even do that. You miserable, useless fucking wimp.’

‘Mrs Deenen! Please to try stay calm.’ The detective grabbed her by the forearms. He was tall. Authoritative.

This badge-toting turd wasn’t the boss of her. She shook him off.

She ran into the garden, screaming at the top of her lungs. ‘Josh! Lucy! Mummy’s here. You can come out now!’

‘Can you think of anyone who might have taken them, Mrs Deenen? A relative? A friend? Neighbour?’ the detective asked. He had followed her outside. Now, he was standing between her and the climbing frame.

Interfering pain in the arse, she thought. She could find her own children. They were obviously just playing hide and seek.

‘Move! I want to check under there,’ she said, pointing to the void beneath the platform.

‘We’ve had a team combing the garden and all along the train track at the back for the last hour. There’s no way in. There’s no way out. The train track is clear for a mile in each direction, though they’ve stopped the Schiphol to Rotterdam service until we’ve searched the entire line. No trace of them.’

When she tried to push him aside, he stood his ground.

‘Mrs Deenen. Your children aren’t hiding, I’m afraid. They’re gone. They can’t have wandered off. They’re not in the house or the garden. They’ve been taken. Abducted.’

Gabi looked at the Sesamstraat tricycle and an abandoned Iggle Piggle doll Lucy had brought from the UK. She sank to her knees, arms crossed tightly over her bosom. Big Gabi, wrapping Little Gabi in a protective embrace. Keening. Cursing god that her babies were gone. That her life had been thrown into chaos.

‘This can’t be happening. This can’t.’

The detective put a large hand on her shoulder. ‘I’m so sorry.’

CHAPTER 13
The City of London, 5 March, present, mid-morning

‘My Lord,’ the chauffer said, holding the door of the Rolls Royce wide. He touched the brim of his cap.

Gordon Bloom shook his head. He looked longingly at the plush cream and truffle interior of his car; he knew that the heated leather seats would offer some measure of comfort in these infernal sub-zero temperatures. Last night on the TV, the weatherman had been bleating on about Arctic Sea ice melts causing high-pressure weather systems over the Barents Sea and northern Russia, icy wind blasting mainland Europe and the UK as a result. Nobody had seen off-the-charts temperatures like this in England since the big freeze of 2012. Global warming or some bullshit. Whatever the cause was, he was sick of it. Sick of having to wear uncomfortable thermal underwear. Tired of having to be driven everywhere. Bored with being under constant scrutiny since Rufus’ death.

‘Thanks, Kenny, but I’ll walk,’ he said, stamping his feet. The snow at least a foot deep, even in EC1 where his meeting had taken place. Strange, to sit at the head of a boardroom table, discussing a major acquisition and then having to change back into skiwear in the men’s. A man like him shouldn’t be inconvenienced by this nonsense. Though he may not quite have all the money in China, his assets bettered many a country’s GDP. He was an übermensch, after all. A Titan from a long line of Titans. Shame then, that those like him blessed with demigod status couldn’t control that insane bitch, mother nature. ‘It’s not far. You can pick me up afterwards. Go and treat yourself to a hot coffee and a cake or something.’ He unfurled a twenty from his wallet. ‘You need a break. I need some air. This weather is making fools of us all.’

Kenny touched the brim of his cap again, and pocketed the twenty. ‘Mental, isn’t it, my Lord?’ he said, his breath steaming on the air as he blew uselessly into gloved hands. The broad, older man wore a smart coat in thin fabric – far too flimsy for this weather. His wind-burned face and bulky build gave him the appearance of a builder nearing retirement, at odds with the dapper uniform of someone who drove a Rolls Royce for a billionaire.

Bloom remembered his father’s driver. Jenkins, wasn’t it? He had been cut from similar cloth. Poor old bastard. He made a mental note to furnish Kenny with a better coat. And a gun. Definitely time he had a gun.

‘It never snows in central London,’ Bloom said, pulling the fox fur flaps of his Russian hat down over his ears, obscuring his peripheral view of this blinding winter wonderland. The chrome pipes and corkscrews of the Lloyds building towered above him like a bartender’s tool kit, thrown into an ice bucket. ‘People skating on the Thames! How is that even bloody possible?’ The icy air made his filled tooth sensitive. He winced.

‘It’s a long way to Southwark Cathedral, sir,’ Kenny said, closing the car door with a thunk. ‘You sure? Police said you shouldn’t go anywhere unescorted.’

Bloom nodded. Squeezed his eyes shut. Showed he appreciated Kenny’s concern for his employer. But inside his gloves, he balled his fists at the thought that the police should dictate to a man like him what to do and where to go in his city. ‘I need a bit of space. Especially today. You know?’

Kenny cocked his head to one side. Narrowed his eyes. A gap-toothed half smile whispered uncertainty.

‘Don’t worry. I’m a big boy.’ He patted the driver’s arm.

‘Of course, sir. As you wish.’ His formal, stilted turns of phrase always sounded stiff and superficial, with that horrible east end accent. Bloody performing monkey.

Sighing deeply, Bloom turned towards Leadenhall Market. Trudging through the snow, he headed through the brief, dry respite that the gaudy red and gold Victorian arcade offered. Glum in the post-Christmas slump, where all the Yuletide tat was now 75% off, hanging unwanted on rack after rack.

He looked up through the vaulted glass ceiling, blurred around the edges by his halo of grey fur, and saw that the sky was perfectly white. Then, peering through the opening at the far end which led in the direction of Bishopsgate, he could see fat flakes start to come down again. Unrelenting. Forcing the grey-faced denizens of the City of London to hasten home early before public transport ground to a halt. Ice on the roads. Wrong kind of snow on the train lines. Broken-down, blizzard-blinded this and that.

He would definitely be better off crossing London on foot. Catching sight of himself, reflected in a men’s suiting shop window, he decided that he looked like an Inuit. Unrecognisable with the hat on and the glasses. On the periphery of the reflection, he barely registered a shuffling figure several paces behind him.

But never mind that. He was thinking about Rufus.

The memorial service was a nice idea, in light of the fact that the police were still refusing to release the body. Everyone would be there, of course. Rufus’ widow, sobbing, no doubt. He had always wanted to fuck her. Maybe now, he would have his chance. Hadn’t Harpers named him as Europe’s most eligible bachelor? Yes, he would enjoy sliding his hand between her gym-honed thighs. Riding her throughout the night, innocently comforting her throughout the mourning.

Rufus’ beleaguered children would be there too, wondering what the hell they had done to have their father taken away from them. Squalling, snot-nosed pug-faced little fuckers of ten, six and three. Jesus. The fallout the murder had caused was unimaginable, the most unfathomable injustice being his own loss of a trusted super-lackey and friend of old.

The press would be gathered outside, no doubt, snapping the staff of Bloom Group plc, as they entered the hallowed cathedral to bid farewell to their Chief Executive, dabbing at their eyes to show their commitment to the company, whether they had ever met Rufus or not. Nobody had liked him, that’s for sure.

Gordon Bloom allowed himself a wry chuckle as he neared London Bridge. He looked into a café window at all the city office workers, trying to thaw themselves out by wrapping their gloved hands around cups of steaming coffee. He caught sight again of the shuffling figure, some way behind, entering the reflected scene as he exited, huddled up in clothes that seemed too big for him. Perhaps a homeless man, making his way towards a shelter. Nothing to worry about, though Bloom did pick up his pace. Tripped on a kerbstone as he crossed the slush-logged street onto the Bridge itself. He had difficulty with his depth perception these days. The surgeon had said the ocular nerves were too badly damaged. At least the glass eye was the finest money could buy. Couldn’t be helped. If the worst thing that ever befell him was visual impairment, he was doing reasonably well. Better than Rufus, at any rate.

As he crossed London Bridge with snow whirling around him, settling on his hat, drip-dripping freezing water onto his tingling nose where it melted, he imagined himself trapped inside a snowglobe. No escape from this claustrophobic scene. Just falling snow and the same chain of events replaying in his mind.

He and Rufus had had lunch. They had parted company. Now, Rufus was dead. Drowning by snow. Holes in his neck like the Devil’s stigmata.

Who was this Jack Frost that the press referred to? Why had he wanted Rufus Lazami dead? Was he, Gordon Bloom next on the hit list?

Glancing behind, he was pleased to see the homeless man was no longer on his tail.

‘Stop being so easily spooked, you bloody idiot,’ he counselled himself, clutching the handrail as he made his way down the gritted stone stairs to Southwark Cathedral, where he would say goodbye in public.

Cameras flashing, as anticipated. Paparazzi pests, swarming like unseasonal flies on a frozen carcass.

‘Lord Bloom! Aren’t you worried that Jack Frost will come after you?’

He was careful to maintain an air of sobriety. ‘I am here to bid adieu to a dear friend and longstanding business partner. Thank you. Good day.’

Their voices rang in his ears, as he stood in the threshold of Southwark Cathedral’s great stone hall.

‘Are you taking measures to protect yourself, Lord Bloom?’ they shouted.

Inside, an organ ground away at a hymn he didn’t recognize. The place was packed with mourners wearing snowboots and colourful ski-jackets that were at odds with the sombre occasion. All eyes were on him. He nodded to the young man with the plucked eyebrows who stood in the aisle, ushering family to the left and business colleagues to the right. Recognised him as one of his rising stars.

At his back, the journalistic hordes continued to bay for a response.

‘Is it true that the killing was ordered by someone in the criminal underworld? Did Rufus Lazami have many enemies?’

Their questions bounced off him thick and fast; those cadaverous flies throwing themselves against a sealed window. He would not answer. He would not give them the satisfaction. Let the press and Scotland Yard keep digging. They wouldn’t find a fucking thing.

CHAPTER 14
London, Westminster, later

‘What are you going to do?’ Sophie asked, her Doc Martens scuffing up snow onto the hem of her floor-length batik-print skirt. She grabbed George’s hand, as they walked along Millbank.

The Thames was on their left, a white ribbon twisting through a cityscape that looked like it had been dipped in liquid nitrogen. On their right, Millbank Tower loomed: a 1960s brutalist monolith with windows. Somewhere, on one of those dizzying levels that stood sentinel over Albert Embankment, the Open Society Foundation was situated.

George shook Sophie’s hand loose, swiftly switching her rucksack to her right shoulder to prevent her from trying to hold her hand again. She sighed heavily. Wondered whether to say anything about this unlooked-for physical contact. Perhaps some things were better left unsaid. ‘I don’t know. Sally’s on my case. The Home Office is burning my ear about deadlines. If I don’t find that fucking laptop and my USB stick, I might as well apply for a job stacking shelves at Tesco. Maybe my Aunty Shaz can get me back my old cleaning job at the titty bar. It’s at least a years’ worth of work. Gone. Just like that.’

‘What did the pigs say?’ Sophie asked. Her earrings, necklaces and the buckles on her flowery satchel jangled as she walked.

‘Don’t call them the pigs,’ George said. ‘My partner’s a Chief Inspector in the Dutch police.’

‘Your partner? You were slagging him off the other night. Blows hot and cold, you said.’

‘That was then. A lot’s happened since.’ George noticed the expectant expression on her newfound friend’s face. She remembered the awkward moment when Sophie had propositioned her in the pub, and regretted even having asked her back for a coffee with no strings. Today, every gesture of camaraderie seemed like a cloying advance. Every knowing glance on the tube had felt overly suggestive. ‘Right now, I wish I had six foot five of policeman to stand guard over my place. It’s freaky having someone go through your stuff. It happened to me when I was living in Amsterdam.’ She shuddered, thankful for the long johns she wore beneath her jeans, though it was the memory of the Firestarter, touching her things in the little bedsit above the Cracked Pot Coffee Shop that caused the hairs on her skin to stand on end.

The brightness of Sophie’s green eyes seemed suddenly dimmed, or was it just the shadows cast by the covered approach to Millbank Tower’s lobby? George quietly chastised herself for being arrogant.

‘You’re welcome to stay on my sofa again tonight, if you want,’ Sophie said, holding the door open for George. ‘I might not be able to offer you pig protection, but at least I’m on your doorstep if you need me.’

Sophie’s sofa had been less than comfortable. A battered old thing, covered in cigarette burns and cat hair. Next to it, a large coffee table, festooned with carelessly abandoned coffee cups, wine glasses, ashtrays, Rizla packets, a hairbrush, several hefty academic books and the latest by Donna Tartt. But the anticipation that George would join Sophie in bed in the middle of the night had occasioned something far worse than simple discomfort. It had brought on an unwelcome bout of insomnia.

‘Darkest hour is just before dawn,’ George muttered beneath her breath, remembering how the night had felt like it would never end.

‘What?’ Sophie asked.

‘Nothing.’

Together in the cavernous reception area, they signed in. All brown, white and black marble harked back to a time when London was swinging and fabulous. Now, rendered fashionable again by a passion for all things mid-century, George reflected. If she could only afford her own place, she might go for that retro-look too. In fact, she’d settle for bloody Ikea if it came to it. As long as it was hers.

High above the city, George and Sophie sat in comfortable armchairs. Biscuits artfully arranged on a plate. Herbal tea in hand-painted mugs. They were facing a dumpy middle-aged project worker called Graham Tokár. He oozed well-meaning and an energy that almost audibly crackled, directed, quite plainly, towards Sophie. Had Sophie at some juncture also offered him a fuck in a pub over a burger, George wondered?

‘So, I’ve told George, here, about the charity funding initiatives that lessen the poverty and social exclusion of the Roma,’ Sophie said.

‘That’s right,’ Graham said, angling his body towards George but not tearing his gaze from Sophie’s eyes. ‘Musical institutes. Education grants. Lobbying European parliament for change. We work with the poorest people in some of the most financially stagnant and racist environments in Europe.’ He finally looked at George. The spark had vanished. ‘And many of the staff, Europe-wide, are Roma too. Like me. I’ve got a Scottish mother, but a Hungarian Roma dad.’

George looked down at her notes. She followed the line of her pad to Graham Tokár’s shoes. He had a piece of chewing gum stuck to the heel of his left foot. This much, she could see, as he crossed his legs. In his right ear, he wore a small, silver sleeper. He was clearly an articulate and interesting man, but she hated his earring. His ears were wrong.

‘You know you’ve got an infection in your piercing,’ she said, pointing to the inflamed flesh of his earlobe.

He touched his ear self-consciously. George made a mental note not to shake his hand when they left.

‘Have I?’ he asked, face flushing red right up to his hairline where his greying hair had started to thin. ‘Oh, well, did Sophie tell you about—?’

‘Look,’ said George, blinking hard. Checking her phone. No messages from the police about her stolen laptop. Shit. ‘I’m a criminologist. I’m doing research into trafficking. Not the Roma. Sophie asked me to come here today, and it’s nice of you.’ She rammed a biscuit hastily into her mouth. ‘And these biscuits are great.’ Speaking with her mouth full. ‘But to be honest, I can’t see the point—’

George could feel her colleague’s eyes boring into the side of her head. She felt instinctively that both Sophie and this charity project worker thought her an outrageous arsehole. Was she being rude? Probably.

‘I spend a lot of time in prison,’ she said by way of an apology. ‘I’m specifically interested in hearing how the Roma are embroiled in human trafficking. As victims. As perpetrators. Anecdotes. Groups you can put me in touch with. Stats. That sort of thing.’

Graham Tokár was looking at her with his mouth hanging slightly open. He glanced at Sophie, a look loaded with judgemental import.

‘What about criminal empires in countries where the Roma live?’ George asked.

‘Shqipëtar,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘It’s an Albanian legend.’

At her side, Sophie started to nod. She closed her eyes, as though Graham was about to give a virtuoso performance. ‘It refers to the Son of the Eagle,’ she said.

Graham rubbed his earlobe. ‘Albanian legend has it that there was an eagle soaring in the sky with a fat, venomous snake in its mouth, right?’ He sniffed his fingers. ‘Below it, the eagle’s defenceless eaglet lay in the nest, watched by a young man.’

‘What young man?’ George asked.

‘It’s not important. Just this young man. Anyway, when the eagle dropped the snake, presuming it to be dead, the snake fell into the nest, right? Apparently it was still alive. So, it was about to attack the eaglet, but the youth shot it with an arrow. Then, the youth takes the eaglet but is confronted by its parent …’

‘The eagle,’ Sophie said. Grinning.

‘Right. The eagle who thought the youth was deliberately kidnapping its offspring. So anyway, the eagle realises the boy had saved the eaglet and …’

George checked her phone again. ‘I’m listening. Go on.’

Bunched eyebrows said Graham Tokár was getting annoyed with her. ‘So, the eaglet flies over the boy for the rest of his life, acting as his guardian, and he becomes the best hunter. A real hero. The son of the eagle.’

‘What’s that got to do with—?’

‘Rumour has it that the big-wig who runs trafficking out of Albania – and lots of Roma kids get sucked into that – goes by the nickname Shqipëtar.’

‘I’ve read about him,’ Sophie said. ‘Apparently only people high up in the trafficking network know who he is, but his tentacles stretch into Western Europe.’

George frowned. She wrote three lines of notes, then ate another biscuit in silence. ‘Eagle,’ she said. It rang a bell, but she wasn’t sure why. She rifled through her memory of all the names on her homespun trafficking database but nothing resonated with her. Thought about the pile of handwritten notes from her women’s prison sessions. They, at least, were still at Aunty Sharon’s. There was something in among those notes. Something that almost clicked but didn’t quite. Eagle. She needed to get out of this air-conditioned box and get her hands on that paperwork while her hunch was still fresh.

She stood abruptly. Stuck out her hand. ‘Bye, then. Thanks for the biccies.’

Outside, Sophie ran after her. ‘You are such a dick!’ she said. ‘I thought you were cool, but you’re really not. You’re a fucking … a fucking …’ Her attractive face screwed up in undisguised irritation.

‘Psychopath?’ George offered, walking as briskly as the poorly gritted pavement would allow. She headed towards the Palace of Westminster, the pale stone towers of which seemed to reach up into the white sky; trying to poke a hole in snow-heavy clouds so that they might pull more clement weather forth.

Sophie grabbed her arm.

George shook her loose. ‘Please don’t touch me. I don’t like being touched unless I invite it.’

Halting by Victoria Tower Gardens, which was playing host to a pack of American school kids engaged in a snowball fight, Sophie swung her satchel across her body. ‘I don’t think I want to work with you. Sally seemed to be describing another bloody person. You’re strange!’ Sophie looked her up and down. Those green eyes were now judgemental and hard.

By the time George had thought of the right thing to say to her, Sophie had crossed the road and was already some two hundred yards away, making for St. James’s Park tube, in all likelihood. ‘Fucking hippies!’ George said, thinking wistfully of her former landlord, Jan. He had been one for grabbing her in suffocating hugs. But he had never condemned her. She was torn. She wanted to like Sophie. Found her charismatic. But … perhaps she was becoming strange.

Bound for Waterloo Station, she crossed Westminster Bridge, barely glancing up at Big Ben as it chimed 4 p.m.

Darkness had already fallen. Her breath steamed on the air, catching the light cast from the street lamps. Workers, heading home early in the bitter chill, passed her by. Her heart was heavy. Her feet were leaden. County Hall seemed a long way away, on the other side of the river. The train station, even further.

‘Eagle,’ she said, dodging a red Routemaster that spattered grey slush over the pavement. Aunty Sharon said the new buses weren’t a patch on the old. ‘Son of the Eagle.’

As she traversed the slippery backstreets behind county hall, making her way down to York Road, she saw the homeless making their beds for the night in doorways. Begging for spare change. Selling the Big Issue. Many were drinking super-strong lager and cosying up to their dogs. The lucky ones had cocooned themselves inside cardboard boxes. Poor bastards.

The smell of urine was strong, even in this cold. She shied away from them. When one of the forlorn figures lurched at her from who the hell knew where, she balked.

‘I’m skint, mate!’ she cried, clutching her bag close.

But the face was familiar.

‘You!’ George said, scrutinising the woman’s pinched features, barely concealed by the hood of an old, soiled parka.

The woman’s blue eyes were sharp, focused on her goal. ‘If you want the laptop back, I need a thousand in cash.’

George grabbed her arm, pulling her close so that she could smell the woman’s stale breath. No alcohol on it. She smelled thirsty and of sore throat. ‘You been stalking me? Have you been to my fucking place in Cambridge. Was it you?’

‘No,’ the woman said. ‘But I know where your laptop is. You can have that and the stick back. Intact. For a thousand in cash. I’ll come to your aunts. Call the police, and I’ll make sure it’s destroyed.’

‘But … I haven’t got—’

The woman dug her fingernails into George’s hand, so that she was forced to let go of her. Nostrils flaring, she had the desperate, haunted look of someone who was standing right at the edge of life and sanity.

‘A thousand by the end of the week, or you can wave goodbye to your research.’

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