The Girl Who Broke the Rules (21 page)

But The Duke had been seated and fully clothed. Wearing a sharp suit. Holding court on a fuchsia velvet sofa, that diamond in his tooth, glinting. Lines of coke on the table for him to ingest at regular intervals, he was unaware that his left nostril was caked in powder. Sniffing, glassy-eyed. His accent was the finest cut crystal. But his arrogance like overwhelming, cheap cologne. This was a man who had climbed to the top of a slag heap for kicks. Treading on the putrefying corpses of those he had vanquished. Almost certainly to defy family. Public school dropout, though there was a sharp entrepreneurial mind behind those coked-up eyes.

‘I’m pleased with the way you’ve been delivering,’ he’d said. Talking just that bit too fast.

‘I want more money.’

‘Isn’t it enough I ship you here on my private jet? Don’t I look after you? Show you a good time? Don’t you like my parties?’

‘I do.’

‘Is the coke not good enough?’

The coke had been good, actually. ‘It’s fine. But I still want more money. You think you can get cheaper elsewhere, we can go our separate ways, if you like. This is difficult and technically demanding work.’

Renegotiating and agreeing terms had been easier than expected. The Duke had handed over a list.

‘These are my needs and these are the timescales,’ he said, sniffing, sniffing and never managing to stop the dew drop of snot from dropping onto the crotch of his trousers. Wiping his nose. Shaking his head like a dog that shakes rain from its drenched coat. ‘There’s a freight liner due to dock in Dover about three am. Coming straight from the Congo. What you need’s on board that ship but you can pick it up from Ramsgate. Easier to transfer the cargo and have it dock in Ramsgate on a fishing trawler. You can do what you need to do nearby. I’ve made provision for your requirements, as agreed.’

The party had been less of a buzz than anticipated in the end, because of the need to keep a clear head and steady hand. The list was the list. Business was business. Seeing some loser in a custard-yellow shirt getting the living daylights beaten out of him on the driveway of that farmhouse served only as a reminder that, once an agreement had been entered into with The Duke, it had to be adhered to. He was not a man to be trifled with.

At least the Ramsgate mission had been easy enough. In fact, it was fair to say that the procedures had been refined even further. So, the drab medical convention had truly served its purpose.

Now, as the private aircraft wobbled down perilously on the insistent south-westerly wind towards Rotterdam The Hague airport, there was a certain comfort in knowing that another job had been satisfactorily completed, the money had been transferred successfully, a glorious professional reputation remained intact and a good night’s sleep with a clear conscience beckoned. Because of Ramsgate, some good would be done in a rotten, festering world. The victims racked up but the maths stacked up. And the police didn’t have the slightest inkling of what the hell was going on.

The air hostess was about to fasten her seatbelt in preparation for landing. She made eye contact.

‘Do you need help?’

‘Actually, if it’s not too late, I will have that glass of champagne.’

CHAPTER 42

Amsterdam, police headquarters, later

‘How has this happened?’ Hasselblad asked.

He was pacing, as usual, like a fat cockerel strutting in a farmyard. Hands behind his back. Eyes bulging, boggling, ogling George in the corner surreptitiously. Except it was not his space he was territorially marking out.

Van den Bergen sat behind his desk, feeling like a visitor in his own office. He put his hands behind his head and closed his eyes, blocking off the view of the framed photo of Tamara and the simple white potted orchid that sat by his computer. ‘What do you mean, “How has this happened?” Have I got personal jurisdiction over the entire country?’

Hasselblad stopped pacing. Leaned over the desk, so that his paunch rested on the table top. A tic flickering in his left lower eyelid. ‘You’ve got a known pervert and all-round scumbag under lock and key. You
solved
the murders of the year in record time! Those are headlines the chief of police would have been happy to read. But now?’ He stood, raising himself to his full height of five feet and eight inches. Pointed with a chubby finger at van den Bergen, as though he were aiming a gun at his head. ‘How am I supposed to enjoy my dinner, when there’s some hack on the phone from
de Telegraaf
, telling me they’ve just found another body? In Rotterdam!
Freshly
butchered, “like a side of beef”, he said. ‘In an opened cargo container.’

‘I know. I got the call last night.’ Van den Bergen pinched the bridge of his nose and remembered how the news had ruined his own potentially wonderful evening. A bottle of red, airing. A table for two, perfectly laid. A blueprint for romance laid out along with the Thai take-out menu.

But these were not Hasselblad’s concerns. ‘And is the victim a prostitute or a porno starlet?’ He thumped the desk. ‘I should be so fucking lucky! Because that would at least make us look like we knew one end of a motive from another.’

Van den Bergen felt like somebody had plugged his head with the soiled wadding from the Valeriusstraat mattress. Wished he was anywhere but in this office, being bawled out by his superior in front of George, of all people.

Only half-listening to Hasselblad, now, he took a blister pack of tablets out of his desk drawer and pushed a codeine capsule into the palm of his hand.

‘Are you even paying attention to me, van den Bergen?’ Hasselblad’s face was bright red, as though he had run a marathon.

Van den Bergen swallowed the codeine with a gulp of cold coffee. Anxiety abating a little. ‘You know, Jaap, I think you might suffer from high blood pressure? You want to get that checked out.’ Looked over at George. ‘The pathologist in Rotterdam puts money on it that the victim’s Filipino – the contents of his stomach were largely undigested ingredients specific to some Filipino dish or other. What do you make of that?’ he asked her.

Hasselblad jerked his thumb towards George. ‘Who’s
she
?’

‘This is Georgina McKenzie,’ van den Bergen said. ‘She’s my new administrative assistant but is also a very talented criminology student from Cambridge University. Studying for her doctorate.’

George did not rise to greet the commissioner. She merely stretched out in her chair and crossed her legs at the ankle. One raised eyebrow.

Hasselblad fingered the dimple in his chin. He looked somewhat nonplussed by her body language. Studied her face. ‘Aren’t you the girl who was caught up in the case of the Bushuis bomber? The Firestarter kid?’ He turned to van den Bergen. ‘Why the hell is
she
working in my headquarters?’

Finally, George spoke. ‘Are you not listening to what your own chief inspector is telling you? Like the man said, I am
very
talented.’ She spoke at volume and rather slowly, as if he were a simpleton.

Hasselblad blinked, one two three, like a chugging computer straining to understand the information that had just been input into it. ‘Make me a coffee,’ he said.

‘No. I make
his
coffee…’ she pointed to van den Bergen ‘…and
my
coffee. You want coffee, get your own assistant to make it.’

Van den Bergen felt a flicker of pride warm him from within. He stood, hip clicking, and approached George’s chair. Put his hand on her shoulder, claiming her as his charge. His responsibility, though he knew she might not appreciate what she sometimes dubbed his ‘alpha male bullshit’.

‘Tell the commissioner your theory, George,’ he said.

George leaned back in her chair. Chewed intermittently on the end of her dormant e-cigarette. ‘Well, I’ve seen the photos from the crime scene that were emailed over.’

‘Who are you speaking to there?’ Hasselblad asked van den Bergen.

‘Wouter Dreyer from the Rotterdam Port Authority police,’ van den Bergen said.

George continued. ‘You’ve got a body, split open. Organs removed. The modus operandi of the murderer is exactly the same. So, unless Ruud Ahlers did the Amsterdam women and this Rotterdam murder is the work of an accomplice with an identical surgical skillset, you’ve got the wrong man under lock and key.’

‘Is that all you’ve got, Miss Criminologist?’ Hasselblad asked.

George stared at the palms of her hands. Pink and criss-crossed with a network of fine brown lines. ‘All three are immigrants,’ she continued. ‘An illegal, underage Somali, a porn-star Latvian and a Filipino, though we don’t know anything much about him, yet. Could be a race hate crime or an extreme political statement by anti-trafficking activists.’

Shaking his head like a stubborn toddler who refuses to eat the meal he has been given, Hasselblad emitted a snort of derision. He poked himself defiantly in the chest. ‘I’m top brass here, little criminology student. I’m the one with decades of detective work under my belt. You mark my words, Ahlers is our Amsterdam man. We’ve got evidence says he is. And I think he has got an accomplice. They’re a serial killing team of lunatics, keeping those organs as trophies.’ He marched back over to van den Bergen’s desk and pulled a fat bud off the orchid. ‘Get every nut-job who has a criminal record in for questioning.’

‘Define nut-job.’

‘The mentally ill, of course. There must be a register of the freaks somewhere.’

‘Freaks?’ van den Bergen said, scowling. Thinking about the anti-depressants in his overstuffed medicine cabinet at home. Insensitive, ignorant bastard.

‘Find it!’ Hasselblad said, unaware of the animosity encroaching on him in that room. ‘Pull them in! And get over to Rotterdam and have a look round.’ He tapped the desk insistently, unaware that his chief inspector was wishing norovirus on him for having manhandled his precious orchid. ‘Bring me a psychopath, Paul. Bring me one and fast, or you’re out. For good.’

CHAPTER 43

Amsterdam, van den Bergen’s car, en route to Rotterdam, later

‘About last night,’ George ventured, as van den Bergen manoeuvred his car slickly out of the car park.

The tyres squeaked noisily as he pulled away. The force of acceleration pressed George back into the leather seat.

‘What about it?’ he asked.

He honked his horn angrily at a van driver who had carved him up. Jabbed at the car’s satnav buttons, which served only to cause a computerised voice to bark a string of disjointed instructions at him. ‘Piss off, satnav. Jesus! There’s bloody roadworks everywhere at the moment. Why is nothing ever straightforward? Pass me the thing.’ He clicked his fingers in the direction of his glovebox and George withdrew a well-thumbed, spiral-bound road map.

‘This thing?’

He growled. Snatched it from her. Balanced it on his steering wheel and started to turn the pages. One eye on the road. One eye on the map. ‘We need to get out to the E19.’

She covered her eyes. ‘Please don’t do that. You’ll crash the fucking car.’

‘I never crash the car.’

Exasperating. That’s what van den Bergen was, she reflected, spying his perfectly straight nose and prominent forehead. An angular-looking man with clean, sharp edges to his personality on the surface. Unyielding. Seemingly self-assured and completely lacking nuance. But she knew better.

‘You dodged a bullet last night,’ she said. ‘We were going to talk, but this Rotterdam thing happened. Then you drag me into work at the crack of dawn, and I know you’ve been up all night. It’s a strange bed. I woke up for a pee at three am and could see your light was on. You still haven’t told me what’s going on with you.’ Momentarily, she put her hand on his outstretched right arm that gripped the steering wheel. He looked down at it. ‘Paul, watch the road, for Christ’s sakes!’

His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down inside a sinewy neck. ‘It’s nothing,’ he said, staring through the windscreen as the historical centre gave way to ugly industrial outskirts. The canals got wider here. Grey buildings, grey, bare trees, grey skies reflected grey on the water.

He sighed deeply.

‘You’re lying,’ she said. ‘Don’t send me cryptic texts and then expect me not to ask when I get over here, you attention-seeking tosspot.’

A smile just about breached the severe expression that was gateway to all that lurked inside this complex man. It dissipated too quickly.

‘The anniversary of my dad’s death is coming up,’ he finally said, turning onto the motorway. The countryside rapidly flattened out to green polders, the canals looking like mercury crawling through the landscape in a grid-like formation. ‘I didn’t get on with him. He used to call me a pansy when I was at art school. When I knocked Andrea up, I was just a reckless failure. I could never win with the old man. But it still hurt like hell when he got sick.’

‘Cancer, right?’

He nodded. Puffed air out of his mouth noisily. ‘I’ve not been sleeping well.’

‘You’re depressed?’

Glanced at her. His normally steely eyes looked heavy and dull. His upper eyelids, lax and more low-hanging than usual. Medicated. Dolorous. ‘What do
you
think? And Tamara’s getting married to that utter loser, Numb-nuts.’ He shook his head. Exhaled too long and too hard.

But though George wanted to sympathise, a memory presented itself as an unbidden distraction. She held her hand over her mouth to obscure the giggle that was brewing. ‘Didn’t you tell me you planted a GPS tracker on him, when they first started living together? You were determined to prove he was up to no good, but then he found it in his guitar case or something, and she totally lost it with you.’

Van den Bergen pursed his lips. There was that suggestion of a smile again.

‘Oh, stop being so grim-faced, Paul!’

‘Are you going to tell me to cheer up?’ he said. Was that hurt strangling his voice; making his usual deep, rich rumble seem strained and thin? ‘You, of all people?’

‘No!’ This wasn’t going the way she had intended. She wanted to comfort, not castigate. ‘I just think…’ She sought the correct words from the green fields and the giant, slow-turning wind turbines that studded the view. ‘…Sometimes you won’t allow yourself even the slightest shred of happiness. You begrudge yourself a smile, for God’s sake. And who gives a shit if Tamara marries Numb-nuts, as long as she’s happy?’