The Girl Who Broke the Rules Read online

  Van den Bergen drank the freezing lager and was surprised and angered by the tears that seemed to leak from his eyes unbidden. For the second time that day, he thumbed out a text to George, telling her the other dreadful thing that had happened. But as he was about to press send, the phone rang.

  ‘Van den Bergen. Speak!’

  ‘It’s Daan Strietman,’ a man said.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Marianne’s colleague. Forensic Pathology. We met last May at her birthday party. Remember?’

  Van den Bergen cast his mind back to a balmy evening, standing on the balcony at Marianne’s apartment, wishing he didn’t have to make small talk with her inane boyfriend, Jasper, who had brought that sap, Ad Karelse, along because George had been in England and Karelse was ‘lonely’. Boo hoo. What a pity. He had no recollection of a Daan Strietman. ‘No. Where the hell is Marianne?’

  ‘Norovirus. Listen, come and see me. I’ve finished the autopsy on your Jane Doe.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘Oh, you’ll be interested in this! I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  CHAPTER 3

  Soho, London, later

  Are u coming back? the text demanded to know. I miss u. xxx

  Ad had only been holed up at Aunty Sharon’s for three days, this time, and already he was moaning he was bored. He had British television to watch, for God’s sake. In all its multi-channelled, digital and Sky Plus glory. In fact, Aunty Sharon had a dish on top of her garage that was so big and contravened local authority regulations by such an excessive margin, that he could probably pick up broadcasts from outer space, if he used his initiative. How could he possibly be bored? Or he could simply go for a walk. Okay, so maybe a white boy going for a walk down the high street of Aunty Sharon’s South East London neighbourhood at dusk was not such a bright idea. But still…

  ‘Stop nagging, man!’ she told the phone. Typed out her response:

  Missing u 2. Back by 9.x

  One kiss. One was enough. The three were getting on her nerves. Always three, sent and expected in return. He was being demanding.

  ‘I’ve come over here especially,’ he had said; hurt visible in those sensitive brown eyes. ‘I don’t understand why you can’t take time off.’

  What was there for him to understand? The bills didn’t pay themselves. After all, he had just turned up on her doorstep. A surprise wooing that she hadn’t solicited, using birthday money from his parents for the flight. Bet they didn’t know he was squandering it on his English girlfriend. That sour-faced cow, his mother, certainly wouldn’t have given the trip her blessing. Wonder what excuse he’d given them this time? Four years of excuses.

  Ad would just have to suck it up.

  In the confines of her store cupboard, George squatted on the floor and checked that the thick wad of notes she had taken from her morning meeting with Silas Holm was securely zipped away in the side pocket of her bag.

  ‘Holm’s such a perv,’ she told the mop.

  She donned her polyester overalls and changed into her beat-up old sneakers. Filled the bucket with hot, bleachy water at the crackle-glazed Victorian butler’s sink, shoved a range of cleaning products into her deep pockets and emerged into the dimly lit fug of the club. The air was rank with heady, synthetic air fresheners, barely masking the cheap, over-perfumed smell of the girls; the floor sticky with spilled alcohol from the night before.

  ‘Ciao, bella!’ the manager said, checking his watch. He leaned in for a kiss, which George dodged.

  She slammed the heavy bucket onto the floor and started to wring the mop out. Mop, mop, mop by his feet, almost soaking his hand-stitched loafers and brown Farah slacks. ‘Wotcha, Derek. Sorry I’m a bit late. I’ve been rushing around interviewing people. Part of my doctorate, you know?’

  Out of earshot of the girls, who were already limbering up on the poles or else in the back, exchanging squealed gossip about the previous night’s punters whilst they back-combed their hair, Derek rounded on her. Grabbed her by the arm. Whispering sharply so that nobody else could hear.

  ‘Not fucking Derek! Giuseppe. I told you.’ His grip was sharp – the kind of grip George might have expected from a ratty-looking man who ran a titty bar.

  Wanting to knock his ill-fitting toupee from his head but resisting, George pulled her arm free. ‘Get off! Just because you’re my boss and Aunty Sharon’s your barmaid doesn’t give you the right to manhandle me,’ she said. ‘Anyway, you were Derek when you were with Aunty Sharon. What changed?’

  He stood poker-straight momentarily and eyed George. A thin-lipped mouth and puffy eyes from too many late nights and vodkas. Aunty Sharon said he had been a royal pain in the arse, but generous with it. Here, beneath the half-light of dusty crystal chandeliers, however, with no other employees within earshot, George didn’t like his expression at all.

  ‘Sharon was a long time ago,’ he said. ‘But me and her are still good mates. Only ’cause of her working here and being something more than a colleague to me that you got this job, right? And I’m running in different circles, now. So, if I say I’m Giuseppe de Falco and not Derek, then it’s Uncle Giuseppe to you. Like the other girls. Uncle Fucking Giuseppe. Same as Daddy Fucking Warbucks, but more Italian.’

  ‘Suit yourself, Uncle G,’ George said, sucking her teeth and steeling herself to desist from drowning his loafers with mop water.

  When she sprayed the brass handrail of the staircase that led down into the club with anti-bacterial spray, she did so with venom. When she wiped the laminate fixtures and PVC upholstery, she applied the rough, hot cloth with something bordering on aggression. Polishing mirrors, dappled with greasy fingerprints and, in the VIP area, traces of coke. Wiping semen from the walls of the men’s toilet cubicles. Unblocking the women’s toilets that choked with stinking discarded tampons and paper towels. It was demeaning, backbreaking work. But the job earned her an honest crust, where her PhD funding wouldn’t quite stretch to trips to Amsterdam and the odd night of decadence inside London’s better clubs. At least the act of cleaning was therapeutic. Especially after spending a morning with Silas Holm. Especially for someone like George.

  As she polished the metal pole on the main stage, she paused to check her phone again. Peered in the gloom at the glowing screen which offered up van den Bergen’s alarming, unanswered words.

  CHAPTER 4

  Amsterdam, mortuary, later

  ‘Paul. Thanks for coming.’ The wholly unfamiliar man stood in the spot that Marianne usually graced, by the side of the steel mortuary slab.

  Van den Bergen refused to shake his latex-clad hand. ‘It’s Chief Inspector van den Bergen. And I prefer to deal with Marianne,’ he said.

  He looked this interloper up and down, though it was difficult to get the full measure of him in his scrubs. He looked young. Fresh face and shiny eyes. Certainly in his early thirties. And small. Though at six feet five, van den Bergen could see the top of pretty much everyone’s heads as they scrabbled about beneath him. Maybe the guy wasn’t small. But he definitely had the upright posture of a cocky little arsehole, van den Bergen decided, and he wasn’t the lovely Marianne de Koninck.

  Daan Strietman smiled at him. ‘I’m her number two. You knew that, right, Paul? She introduced us at the party. Ha! You’re such a funny guy. You’re pulling my leg, now, aren’t you?’

  ‘No.’ Van den Bergen scratched at his aching hip. Fingered his scabbed-up knuckles. Hadn’t he just told this idiot he was Chief Inspector van den Bergen? Was this guy deaf? And where did this notion of funny come from? ‘I want number one. If I want second best, I’ll—’

  Daan put his clipboard and pen down. Slapped van den Bergen across the back in a chummy style. ‘Look, your Jane Doe’s in good hands, big feller.’

  ‘But Marianne… She was at the scene this morning.’

  ‘I told you. She’s ill. Throwing her guts up. Forget Marianne. Okay?’

  Van den Bergen noticed a pause before the okay, which meant Daan Strietm
an had finally decided that being challenged by a policeman was not okay, even if it was by a senior one. He smiled again. What was with all the smiling? Was this guy simple? The smile disappeared once the idiot noticed his scabbed knuckles.

  ‘Just give me the lowdown on my victim, Strietman. Okay?’

  Now that she was on the slab, van den Bergen was hoping the girl would look like any other cadaver – a spoiled mannequin, devoid of any remaining trace of vitality; deserted by her humanity, so that only an abstract husk was left; dissected like an oversized scientific experiment. He would find it easy to give a corpse like that the once-over and then listen to the pathologist’s report. But she didn’t, this Jane Doe. Her elfin face, framed by the wisps of black curly hair that still remained – after her cranium had been removed to allow examination of her brain – was outlandishly at odds with those unseeing eye sockets, staring out at him. Ghoulish. Vulnerable. Her dark skin, which must have been a warm hue when she had breath in her body, was flat grey. But so slight was her build with those spindly little arms and legs, so lost did she look in the aseptic white glare of the mortuary’s overhead lights, that van den Bergen had to swallow an unexpected lump in his throat. He almost felt compelled to hug the girl, though she had been utterly disembowelled both by her murderer and by the process of the post mortem. George was slightly built like that. George’s skin was dark like that.

  Feeling momentarily dizzy, he steadied himself on the steel sink at the dead girl’s feet.

  Daan Strietman chuckled. ‘I wouldn’t have put an old hand like you down as squeamish! You want to sit?’

  Van den Bergen glared at him. ‘I’m not squeamish.’ He pointed to his ear. ‘I have this balance thing. Sometimes it… Anyway. What did you find?’

  ‘You’re not going to believe this.’

  CHAPTER 5

  Soho, London, later

  I did a really stupid thing & I can’t tell anyone else. I’m losing my grip. Call me. Paul.

  George read the words out loud, as though giving voice to them would reveal the truth behind the cryptic, partial revelation. Should she call? She had been sitting on his text all day. Staring at her phone, as the train had carried her back from Broadmoor. Her heart told her to respond to this wonderful, troubled man. Didn’t she spend at least as much time with him during her trips to Amsterdam as she did with her boyfriend? Pottering at the allotment. Talking about music. Life, the universe and everything. Hadn’t their bond become the elephant in the room, whenever Ad questioned why she had grown distant and disengaged?

  ‘All right, darling? What you looking so shifty for?’ Aunty Sharon asked, grabbing her in a bear hug and planting a lipsticky kiss on her cheek.

  ‘Just a text,’ George said.

  She made to turn the phone’s screen off and slip it into her back jeans pocket beneath her overalls. But surprisingly for a woman of small statue and large volume, Aunty Sharon was agile enough to reach around and snatch the phone right out of her George’s hand.

  She gazed down at the screen, grinning.

  ‘Aunty Sharon! Gimme the phone, man.’

  Her aunt brought the text back up and read the words. ‘Paul? Oh, yeah?’ Fixed her niece with a knowing look. Nudged her joyfully and a little too energetically, so that her flamboyant head attire wobbled – a sculpture fashioned from a scarf, the colours of the Rasta flag, intertwined with platinum blonde, curly hair extensions that looked incongruous next to her mahogany skin. ‘You two-timing that poor Ad with some geez named Paul? Girl, you’re harsh!’

  George snatched the phone back. Jammed it into her pocket. Relieved that in the dingy light, Aunty Sharon would never suss she was blushing. ‘I’m not two-timing anybody. I told you about Paul. It’s just van den Bergen.’

  ‘The Dutch cop?’

  George nodded. ‘He’s just a friend, yeah?’

  ‘Oh, really? That why you hiding your phone, then?’ For all George’s qualifications and finesse and Aunty Sharon’s lack of them, this one-time Jamaica Road rose in Betty Boop heels and laddered sparkly tights had the measure of her, all right.

  George was searching for a way to change the subject, when three men entered the club. Two of them were tall, burly, wearing outmoded single-breasted leather jackets and cheap shoes. Cropped hair, dark eyes, olive skin. The third was small in stature and somewhat older-looking than the man-mountains that flanked him. Had the beady-eyed look of a coke-head, George swiftly estimated.

  ‘Get out the way and keep your gob shut,’ Aunty Sharon said, grabbing the bucket. Thrusting the mop into George’s hand. ‘Don’t attract no attention to yourself. Thems is bad news.’

  As she ushered George behind the bar, the men escorted inside four bewildered-looking white girls, who were quickly divested of their fun-furs by a sycophantic, scuttling Derek. Beneath their coats, they wore either string bikinis or lacy lingerie, all covered only by sheer net babydolls, as if they had been provided with uniforms. Heavy makeup. Fluttering eyelashes and bouffant hair. Flawless, tight behinds, which only the really young could boast, George noted. On their feet they wore identical Perspex-soled platform shoes.

  ‘Jesus,’ George said, pretending to dust down the vodka and whisky optics that lined the walls when in fact, she was scrutinising the girls. ‘They don’t look much more than about fourteen.’

  Walking uneasily in the vertiginous footwear, they advanced towards the main stage and came to a halt, as if awaiting instruction.

  ‘They’re crippled in them bloody stripper shoes, that’s for sure!’ Aunty Sharon said, wiping a wine glass with a tea towel. ‘They’re gonna end up with fallen arches.’

  The sound system was not yet switched on. George could clearly hear the girls chattering nervously to one another in an Eastern European language. Could have been Russian. Could have been Polish. Who knew? Not George. They blinked fast. Flutter, flutter, butterfly lashes. Taking in their new surrounds, while their escorts spoke to Derek. Clapping him on the shoulder. Nodding. Smiling like old buddies at a reunion.

  ‘Listen that! See how they’re chatting in Italian?’ Aunty Sharon said, raising an eyebrow. She sucked her teeth long and hard.

  ‘That why he’s going round asking everyone to call him Giuseppe?’ George spritzed the till with anti-bacterial spray.

  Aunty Sharon shook her head. ‘He’s into something, that scrawny fucking idiot. Well out of his depth. Them geezers been round here three or four weeks running, now. New girls every time. Young foreign girls. They dance for a night or two. Rake it in. Then they’re gone. Sometimes it’s African girls. Sometimes from the Far East. They don’t talk no English. Derek thinks cos his grandfather came from some tin-pot shithole outside Rome that he’s fucking mafia or something.’

  ‘Porn king that owns this place know?’

  Aunty Sharon shook her head. ‘Nah. Don’t reckon so. These girls ain’t legal. He’d lose his bloody licence. Dermot Robinson ain’t that daft. But I’d put money on it that Derek’s on some kind of fiddle. Fucking Uncle Giuseppe. Rarseclart.’

  The tallest man locked eyes with George. Started to walk towards her.

  ‘You!’ he said. Clicked his fingers, as though she were a willing waitress. ‘Come here!’

  CHAPTER 6

  Amsterdam, mortuary, later

  ‘Her vital organs are all but gone. Can you believe it? Kidneys, bladder, pancreas, liver… you name it,’ Strietman said. ‘Everything except the two biggies – her brain and heart. Hard to tell with so much of her missing what the actual cause of death was. I’d put my money on cardiac arrest. I’ll need more time to examine her brain properly.’ He gestured towards the girl’s groin area with his pen. ‘She shows signs of having had rough sexual intercourse either just before death or shortly afterwards. Difficult to tell. No semen, but we lifted a couple of pubic hairs that didn’t belong to her. There are some signs of a struggle – thumb prints to her wrists. Bruising to the left side of her face, as though she’s been struck, but not trauma like you’d
expect from a blunt instrument. Maybe a fist. Beaten, then raped, I guess.’

  ‘Don’t guess,’ van den Bergen said. ‘The sex may have been consensual and the bruising part of rough play.’

  Daan Strietman shook his head. ‘She’s been murdered! It’s got to be rape, hasn’t it?’

  ‘Has it? That’s for me to discern. Continue.’

  ‘Well, I’ve really never seen anything like it.’ The pathologist was smiling again. Almost feverishly. ‘I think we’ve got some kind of ritual sex murder on our hands, here.’

  Van den Bergen peered inside the girl’s chest cavity where the ribs had been peeled back to reveal black, coagulated blood and a rag-tag confusion of muscle and sinew. ‘Have we, indeed? Ritual sex murder. Why do you say that?’

  ‘Well, her uterus is gone.’

  ‘Yes, along with pretty much everything else, you’re telling me. Any trauma to the genitals other than what you’d normally expect from intercourse?’

  The sombre proceedings were interrupted by a woman, knocking at the door.

  ‘Knock, knock! Can I come in?’ she asked. A cheerful voice. Searching eyes. Looked over at Strietman and smiled. ‘Hello, Daan. They said it would be okay for me to come straight down here.’

  ‘Sabine!’ Strietman beckoned the woman inside. ‘Perfect timing! Paul, this a good friend of Marianne’s – a very well-respected paediatrician.’

  Van den Bergen moved away from the slab and was leaned against a tall storage cabinet. Arms folded; long legs entwined around each other. Wasn’t sure about this interloper.

  Strietman offered the woman a typing chair to sit on. ‘I felt I needed a second opinion from someone who knows more about children’s physiology than me, since our Jane Doe shows signs of aggravated sexual assault and has given birth underage.’