The Girl Who Broke the Rules (12 page)

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

From: Paul van den Bergen06.27

To:
[email protected]

Subject: Victim ID

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

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

Paul.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ringing. Ringing. Ringing. No answer. Then…

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

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

‘Yes. Last time I looked, honey.’

‘Good. Listen, I’m going to send you a still of a porn actress. Do you think you could tell me who she is? It’s pretty important.’ Van den Bergen had told George that he had released limited information about the murders to the media. Should she tell Katja that there was a possible serial killer of women on the loose in Amsterdam? Did Katja already know? But George did not have time to get sucked into the melodramatic upwards-spiral of panic that would surely ensue if she levelled with her friend. ‘It’s for my course. I need to know straight away.’

Silence crackled along the line. ‘I’m very tired, darling. I only went to bed two hours ago.’

‘Sorry. Look, text me yes or no when you get the picture. And stay safe, you big tart. I’ll see you soon.’

George hung up. She saved a screen grab from early on in the film and texted it as a JPEG. Within five minutes, Katja’s answer came back as:

No idea.xxx

Feeling hopeful, she then emailed the picture to Dermot Robinson’s PA, Marge. She might know. Surely she would help. An hour passed. The response came back as negative.

Then, it occurred to her. The eyes. The niche interest. There was one person who would definitely be able to identify both actress and film.

CHAPTER 22

Amsterdam, police headquarters, later

‘Where were you on the night of the eighteenth, Iwan?’ Kees asked in English.

As they faced one another across the table in the interview room back at the station, Kees tried to get the measure of this Polish builder who spoke such bloody good English. There was something about the man that he instinctively did not trust. Not in the slightest. For a start, Iwan Buczkowski was pig ugly. His unshaven face was swollen; his complexion grey. Blue eyes were red-rimmed; the blond lashes crusty, giving him a demonic appearance. Baggy lower lids bore a purple tinge in the corners, as though he were recovering from black eyes. Had he been fighting? Kees’ scrutiny turned to Iwan’s knuckles. No cuts. No scabs. Perhaps he’d
been
punched. With a broken nose like that and the black remnants of a laceration visible beneath his fair buzz-cut, Kees felt certain he was on the money. This guy was a brute. A fighter. Bad news. And he, Kees Leeuwenhoek, had undoubtedly inherited his father’s sleuthing instincts – a man who had received so many commendations for bravery and excellence, that his reputation throughout Limburg was the stuff of legend. Kees Leeuwenhoek senior: lion by name. Lion by nature.

‘Can I smoke?’ Iwan asked, pulling a pack of Marlboro from the breast pocket of his red and black lumberjack shirt.

‘No. Tell me where you were two nights ago. I want your movements from the time you left the building site to the time you returned, the following morning. I want you to give me names of the people you were with.’

Though the man was a good three or four inches taller than he was, Kees had been careful to seat him on a lower chair – a trick Kamphuis had taught him – so that they were now equal in height. He deliberately sat bolt upright, where the builder slouched. Even better. Kees was careful to speak in a commanding voice, projecting from the bottom of his diaphragm – a trick the speech therapist had taught him as a child, to counteract his naturally soft voice; something his father agreed to only after he had received four beatings from the other boys at school. Perhaps, in a moment, he would stand up and lean over the table, arms spread wide, like he had seen US detectives do in thrillers on TV. Bear down on this thug a bit. Then, his having the upper hand would be unquestionable.

‘I already told you,’ the builder said. ‘I went straight home for my dinner. My girl, Krystyna, will confirm what I say. I left for Stefan’s after I’d had a shower.’ He rolled the unlit cigarette between his fingers. Failed to make eye contact with Kees. ‘Drove over to his place in my van. We all played cards and drank beer. Me, Stefan, Pawel and Michal. I got very drunk. Pawel wasn’t drinking, so he dropped me back at my place about three am. Then I crashed out and got picked up for work just before seven am.’ Raising his head slowly, he locked eyes with Kees. ‘When can I have my drill and my toolbox back? I need them for work.’

Despite his best intentions, Kees found himself wriggling free of the clutches of this Pole’s malevolent stare. Unable to settle on anything and feeling downright uncomfortable, his gaze eventually rested on the man’s tattoo, which was just peeping beneath the cuff of the lumberjack shirt.

‘What are you hiding under that shirt sleeve?’ he asked.

‘Hiding?’

‘The tattoo. Show it me.’

Iwan Buczkowski shrugged and rolled his sleeve up to reveal a beefy, muscled arm, tattooed with an elaborate black design from shoulder to wrist. The peripheral markings were detailed and delicate representations of tree branches in full leaf. But the focal points – a naked woman nailed to an inverted cross, a skull and several pentagrams – were nothing short of ghoulish. The design made Kees shudder. His father had always abhorred tattoos, and they had been outlawed in his house as something only the dregs of the barrel subjected themselves to.

‘Explain the design to me!’ Kees could feel adrenalin starting to course through his tired, disappointingly average body. It was a wonderful feeling. One of the things he loved about being a detective.

‘This?’ Iwan said, rolling his sleeve back down. ‘A friend did it for me back in Poland. I just let him do what he wanted. He’s one of the best tattoo artists around.’

Kees snorted with derision. ‘You don’t just let a friend tattoo you with upside-down crosses and all that devil-worshipping shit.’

Iwan frowned. He stood abruptly, towering above Kees. The scraping noise of the chair on linoleum felt like violence. ‘What the fuck do you know?’ He was shouting. His previously impassive expression had given way to open hostility, scowling as he was. ‘And what’s it to you, anyway? I gave you the information you needed. So, unless you’re planning on arresting me for throwing up on a building site, I suggest you open that door, give me back my bloody tools and leave me the fuck alone.’ He stuck the unlit cigarette in his mouth.

At this stage, there was nothing to be gained by Kees standing as well. He had ceded any physical advantage that his higher chair had briefly given him. But his father said a good detective never gives up, and he was not ready to let this belligerent Pole go.
Remember, you are a detective on your home turf
,
he counselled himself
. Iwan Buczkowski is a lowly Eastern European manual worker inside a Dutch police station. Your police station. Strietman said ritual murders. Follow your nose. Van den Bergen has given you a green light to follow the line of inquiry. Kamphuis personally promised you promotion if you can crack this case. Fuck that ponce, Elvis. Fuck Marie. Fuck van den Bergen. Fuck teamwork. Kamphuis is your sensei. Show this Pole no mercy.

Kees allowed himself an inward smile, reasoning that he definitely had the upper hand, psychologically. This man would surely submit to his authority.

He steeled himself to push one more time. ‘Are you a Satanist, Iwan?’

‘Fuck you!’

CHAPTER 23

Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital, later

The sight of the Victorian sprawl that was Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital made George’s heart sink. The gateway to hell. Twice now, inside a week. A large, black, arched entrance, presided over by orange-brick Italianate towers that stood like stout sentinels either side of an ornate clock face. Guarding time itself – entire lifetimes for some of the men who dwelled behind those thick walls, including the Firestarter, twisted Firestarter. If it weren’t for the bars at the windows and the high fencing, if she screwed her eyes up very tightly until everything became blurred around the edges, a stranger might mistake the place for a grand spa hotel. George sighed. It was not a grand spa hotel. And even if visitors could bring fluffy towelling robes in with them, they would almost certainly not be allowed to keep the belts, so easily used as ligatures with which a patient might hang himself or one of his fellow residents. In fact, with more than six sheets of paper on her person, George knew she might get into trouble just for that.

Now, she produced her documentation yet again for security to see. Walked through the metal detectors. Checked in her phone, which she could retrieve only on exit.

‘Back so soon, love?’ the security officer said. She arranged her face into something resembling a warm smile. Started to frisk George. Her smile faltered.