The Girl Who Had No Fear Read online

  ‘She’s out there, somewhere,’ she told Marie, acknowledging a heaviness in her heart that wasn’t just indigestion from eating Aunty Sharon’s patties too quickly on the flight. ‘Either buried in a shallow grave or chained to a radiator in some basement, annoying the shit out of her kidnapper.’ She gave a chuckle, devoid of any real humour. For years, she had opted to eschew the company of Letitia the Dragon, but now, with the element of choice having been stolen from her, she felt short-changed by a family that only really consisted of her aunty and her beloved, cantankerous arsehole of a partner, Van den Bergen.

  Turning her attention back to Nasser’s blackened, hollow eye socket on the screen, she nodded. ‘Some evil wanker has orchestrated all of this with great skill and forethought.’ Sucked her teeth. ‘It must have been The Duke. That Gordon Bloom bastard denies it every time I go to see him in Belmarsh, but, of all the people I’ve pissed off, who else would have had access to guys with previous, that could be just whacked to order for their eye colour?’ She groaned with frustration and shouted, ‘Christ on a bike!’ in her native tongue.

  ‘What about him?’ A man’s voice coming from the threshold to the IT suite heralded the arrival of an interloper. A familiar, deep rumble. ‘Last time I heard, he’d been arrested for cycling under the influence. Gave us some bullshit about turning water into wine.’

  George turned around as Marie furtively, hastily clicked her tabs shut. Van den Bergen’s long frame filled the doorway, leaning against the architrave with those long legs crossed in the way that caused a knowing, wry smile to curl the edge of George’s mouth upwards. ‘Are you trying to make a terrible joke in my general direction, Paul van den Bergen? Because you should pack that in, right now!’ She drank in the sight of him, noting the changes from the past few weeks since he had visited her in Cambridge. Looking thinner, healthy, well. Better colour from being outdoors, now the gardening season had started.

  Rising to embrace her lover, she could smell on him a whiff of formalin from the mortuary and the remnants of VapoRub beneath his nose as she kissed him fleetingly on his dry, neglected lips. The difficult old bastard turned his head briskly to offer her his sharp-sand hard stubbled cheek, but in his grey hooded eyes, she spied a glint of mischief. ‘What was so urgent that I had to abandon my book launch to come over?’ she asked.

  ‘This,’ he said, pulling a large envelope out of his bag. Glancing over to Marie’s monitor, he started to lay out photo after photo of a man who appeared to be in his early thirties. Blond, almost handsome, slender in build and very much alive in the first three. Posing on a tropical beach with another man, his arm draped casually around his shoulder and a closeness evident between them that marked them out as lovers, George was certain. In the fourth photo, he was very dead and utterly unrecognisable. A photo of some bruising around the man’s armpits. Followed by further photos of three bodies in varying states of decomposition. Ragged, overblown effigies of the humans they had once been.

  ‘Floaters?’ George asked, fingering the prints and scowling at the grim portrait of a cadaver with opaque eyes and lips that had been nibbled away to reveal a deadly grin.

  ‘Precisely,’ Van den Bergen said, hanging his raincoat over the back of a chair and folding his long frame into another. ‘I thought there was a link between them, but I can’t work out what. We’ve got a twenty-year-old male – Alex Jansen.’ He took out his notebook. Wedged his glasses on the end of his triangle of a nose and peered through the lenses like an overtaxed teacher. ‘I’ve written something here and I can’t bloody read it.’

  He passed the book to George, who stifled a grin.

  ‘A student vet on holiday from Utrecht University,’ she read. ‘Found in the Keizersgracht near Vijzelstraat. Seems to have fallen in after a party at his friend’s house nearby, where he was last seen alive.’

  Van den Bergen’s grey eyes met hers for an instant and George felt warmed by the connection; the erotic promise that the evening might hold if he didn’t get called away on police business or they didn’t start arguing over something inane.

  ‘Then, there’s André van der Pol,’ he continued, taking the book from her. ‘Seventeen. Went to a nightclub – Church.’

  ‘A gay club,’ Marie offered, blushing. ‘Pretty full on, from what I’ve heard.’ She scratched at the angry threat of a spot on her chin. Eyes darting from her desk to the empty crisp packet. ‘My neighbour goes.’

  ‘Right,’ Van den Bergen said, sighing. ‘He wound up in the Singel. And finally Ed Bakker. Nineteen, from a wealthy family who were from Utrecht but who now live in Willemspark. He was out drinking with friends and seems to have gone into the Leidsegracht without leaving so much as a ripple. No witnesses for any of them. None that would come forward, anyway.’

  Gazing at the photograph of what was left of the unrecognisable nineteen-year-old boy, George imagined Danny Spencer – bones she had once jumped, by now in a cemetery in Southeast London, thanks to the ruthless change in fortunes the dealer had been dealt. Letitia, possibly floating somewhere in some tributary of the North Sea, becoming food for aquatic life and passing seagulls. This was a depressing, shitty line of work to be in.

  ‘They were all very young, apart from Floris Engels,’ Van den Bergen said. ‘But the three kids all had drugs and alcohol in their systems. Beer. Hash. Meth. MDMA.’

  ‘Partying hard,’ George said, closing her eyes. Remembering what it felt like to roll out of a nightclub in the small hours, full of intoxicating substances and drunk on expectation of what might yet come to pass before sun-up.

  ‘Other than that,’ Van den Bergen said, ‘I can’t find a connection between them. The parents all claim their dead children are angels. Their friends have got nothing but good things to say about them. No obvious commonalities, though, apart from them dying in the canals, stoned off their tits. In fact …’ He stretched in his chair until his hip clicked. Grimacing, he pressed two ibuprofen out of a blister pack and swallowed them down dry. ‘Maybe there isn’t a bloody connection and it is just coincidence, after all. But I inherited this case off Louis Beekmans, after Minks did a reshuffle.’ He rubbed at his prematurely white sideburns with a long finger.

  ‘Who the fuck is Beekmans?’ George asked.

  ‘Sudden heart attack. He’s just had a triple bypass,’ Van den Bergen offered by way of explanation. Put a hand over his sternum and belched noiselessly. Clearly feeling for ventricular abnormalities. His fingers wandered southwards along his torso to his scar tissue. His hooded eyes seemed to darken. ‘Anyway, his record-keeping wasn’t up to much and I have a hunch there’s some chicanery going on – especially now I’ve seen the bruises on our mysterious teacher, Mr Engels. When I get toxicology and bloods back, I’ll know more. My young and shiny-faced new boss, Minks, is pushing for a serial killer, because that’s what makes him feel tingly in his big-boy pants.’

  ‘And what do you think?’ George asked, surreptitiously grabbing his large hand and kissing it, as Marie reached into her desk drawer and withdrew another packet of crisps.

  ‘I think I want a fresh pair of eyes on it,’ he said, winking. ‘Me, Marie, here and Elvis have run out of steam for now. Feeling up to applying your criminologist’s mind to this mess, Detective Cagney?’

  George thought about the tantalising opportunity to do a bit of digging on the side around the circumstances surrounding Nasser Malik’s death. Spending time with her argumentative ageing lover, instead of being wheeled out on the book-signing and lecture trail by Sally Wright and marking sub-standard essays written by lazy first-year undergraduates. Then, she thought about the pot she was saving for a deposit on a flat. ‘Will I get paid?’ she asked.

  ‘Maarten Minks has a fancy post-grad qualification from the London School of Economics,’ he said. ‘He’s the polar opposite of Kamphuis. Nothing he likes more than forking out for an expert opinion to check his expert’s opinion was expert enough. He can’t wait to receive your invoice, Georgina.’

  C
HAPTER 9

  Amsterdam, Van den Bergen’s apartment, then, Melkweg nightclub, later

  ‘Oh, you’re not going to start going on about your bloody mother again, are you?’ Van den Bergen asked over dinner. ‘I thought we’d decided she’d done her usual disappearing act because the prospect of playing the second-fiddle mother figure in the drama of someone else’s life didn’t appeal. Isn’t that Letitia all over?’

  George eyed her burnt mushroom risotto. It put her in mind of cerebral matter served up in a vintage dish. She put her spoon and fork together and pushed the plate aside. ‘Nice,’ she said. ‘I don’t see you for weeks and you’re on my case the minute I set foot through the door. You asked me over, remember?’ Scraping her chair aggressively along the wooden floor, she walked into his kitchen and flung the dish on the side. ‘Not the other way round. And don’t give me that bullshit about you, Marie and Elvis running out of steam, because you’d only just inherited this bloody case. Face it. You’ve just been looking for an excuse to get me over here!’

  She was aware of him moving from the dining area towards her. Kept staring at the splashback tiles, waiting to see if he was coming in to offer some placatory gesture or merely gunning for an argument at closer range. When his arms slid around her waist, she smiled. Turned around and craned her neck to look up into that familiar, handsome face. Appraising his large, hooded grey eyes, topped with those dark eyebrows. The sunken furrows either side of his mouth were back now that he had started to return to fitness. His skin, so sallow over the winter months, was now lightly tanned and reflected time spent outdoors.

  ‘You look well. Being a grandfather agrees with you. Give us a snog, old man,’ she said, smiling as she ran a finger over his stubble. ‘And you’d better grow a goatee or something while I’m here, because I can’t do with scouring my lips off on your five o’clock shadow.’

  ‘Don’t you like my risotto?’ he asked, kissing her neck gently.

  ‘You’re a shit cook.’ Stroking the soft navel hair beneath his top, she ran her fingers delicately over the long lump of his scar. ‘But I missed your hot stodge so badly.’ Giggling, George unzipped the fly to Van den Bergen’s work trousers and dropped to her knees. Yanked down his disappointing grey jersey underpants to deal with the contents, which were wholly non-disappointing. Van den Bergen groaned as she took him into her mouth. Brought him almost to the point of no return with a tongue normally sharpened on the egos of Wormwood Scrubs wide boys, overinflated Cambridge Fellows or Peckham’s finest players in their low-rise G Star Raw.

  Van den Bergen buried his hands in her mass of curls, encouraging her steady rhythm. But George broke off, as he began to thrust too lustily, kissing her way up his abdomen. Teasing him with her abstemiousness so that he might afford her the same pleasure with that wry, acerbic mouth of his.

  They never made it to the bedroom but they did engage in a clumsy, desire-driven tango to the sofa, where George flung her clothes on the floor, climbed astride his long, lean frame and hungrily lowered herself onto him. First, she relished his tongue on her. Then, she slid her body sinuously down towards his groin, manoeuvring him inside her. With his hands caressing her breasts, the lovers locked onto a familiar fast track that shunted and rocked them all the way to the end of their urgent thrill ride.

  ‘Jesus. I needed that,’ George said, pulling her pants and jeans back on. She clambered back onto the prone Van den Bergen and kissed him passionately.

  ‘You’re balm for the soul,’ he said, wrapping his arms around her and cradling her head on his chest.

  His heartbeat loped steadily along. A comforting sound. She drank in his scent of warm skin, testosterone and sport deodorant. Committed it to memory.

  ‘I need a smoke and your hip bones are digging in me,’ she said, rising. ‘You’re a shit mattress.’

  Taking the box of tissues from the sideboard and throwing them into his lap, she stumbled to the balcony to spark her e-cigarette into life. Exhaled her smoke and what was left of her tension onto the Amsterdam night air. Listening to the animated chatter of the neighbours in adjacent apartments to the side and below. A slice of Dutch life. Those clean-living citizens knew nothing of the depravity and violence that George and Van den Bergen saw week in, week out. Good. There needed to be some innocence in the world still. And there had to be more to life than death.

  ‘Do you know what? I fancy going dancing,’ George told the full moon.

  When she returned to the living room, the steady buzz of snoring coming from the sofa told her she was either going to bed or going clubbing alone.

  Melkweg draped itself along the edge of the Lijnbaansgracht, like an elegant old burgher with bragging rights to its slumberous, low-rise canal-side position. Dwarfed by the outsized glazed boxes of the modern theatre that it sat next to, the five-storey townhouses behind it and the ugly apartment block in front. In the daytime, George had walked past this place and barely glanced up at it. At night, with the neon lights that shouted this was where the hip-hop, R&B and deep house happened reflected in the almost still canal water, the whole scene was transformed into something Van Gogh might have painted on acid, had he lived in modern times.

  Needing to feel the bass throbbing through the soles of her feet and reminding herself that there was no shame in going clubbing alone, George pushed to the front of the queue and marched up to the door.

  ‘Not so fast, girly!’ a bouncer said, putting his beefy arm out in front of her as a barrier to entry.

  George was aware of the complaints of the scantily clad teens standing behind her that she had jumped the queue. Speaking English and clearly on some sort of parent-funded mini-break, judging by the cut-crystal public school accents. Ridiculing her attire of ripped jeans, studded high-tops and the size and shape of her arse.

  Turning around, George quipped, ‘Have you fucking finished, children?’ She sucked her teeth at them, taking in every detail of the taut white skin on their waxy faces and the glazed look in their stoned eyes. ‘Or do you want me to tip off the bouncer here that yous are all underage and off your tits already?’

  The group of dissenters fell silent, glancing nervously at one another. George flashed her membership card at the bouncer. Perhaps he saw some of the thunder in her expression.

  ‘Sorry, miss. Go ahead.’ Respectfully ushering her inside.

  ‘That’s more fucking like it,’ George said under her breath. ‘Dick.’

  Inside the giant laser-lit space, the crowd heaved as one writhing organism. The smell of dry ice and alcohol was thick on the stifling, sweaty air. Music throbbing rhythmically like a beating heart. George imagined she could see sound travelling in waves from one side of the venue to the other. Losing herself in the middle of the dancefloor, she closed her eyes. Started to dance. Tried desperately to shake the feeling that she was being watched. In here, of all places, she could hide in plain sight. Wearing an invisibility cloak of young clubbers, she could free herself from surveillance. Because surely, whoever had sent that email from her father and stolen her mother had set out with the nefarious intention of getting to her. Whether her parents were lying dead somewhere or not, she was the target. She had received the eye. The metaphor that said her every move was being scrutinised. And what she hadn’t told Van den Bergen, for fear of pissing in his new-grandfather’s chips, was that she had had another email, purporting to be from Michael Carlos Izquierdo Moreno. Daddy Dearest. The image of the email started to take shape in her mind’s eye. Along with it, a memory of her stalker. She’d omitted to tell Van den Bergen about him, too.

  Stop fucking obsessing, George told herself. You came here to drown all that shit out and hide from the eye for a couple of hours. Listen to the music. Let the bass heal you. Nobody’s watching in here.

  Trying to dispel the mounting tension, she forced herself to dance to the compulsive, lazy beat of a hip-hop track. Shaking her thang. Arms in the air. Except she couldn’t relax. Her movements were out of sync with the rhythm, em
barrassing the ghosts of her ancestry who almost certainly, as stereotype demanded, had had all the moves. Adrift in a sea of gyrating kids, all at least seven years younger than she was, she realised she had become stiff-arsed, like some middle-aged housewife from Staines. The music started to irritate her. Then, she got annoyed at the misogynistic lyrics.

  And skanky Nasser Malik is in a fridge in a Maastricht morgue. Am I going to end up in a fridge in a morgue, with Van den Bergen grimacing at my cadaver?

  Forcing her way to the bar, she decided she would get a cheap beer and just people-watch for a while. Wait for her mojo to return. But the queue for drinks was five deep and George lacked the height of the Dutch. Perching at the end of the bar, she realised a peacock of a boy in a tight T-shirt, who clearly had cash to splash, had ordered a large round of bottled Belgian beer. Waving his €50 note, he was too preoccupied with barking orders at the harried barman to notice George swipe a single bottle of Hoegaarden.

  ‘Thanks, arsehole,’ she said under her breath, grinning.

  Perching upstairs on the balcony, George watched the revellers below, debating whether she should just go back to Van den Bergen’s flat and admit that she was getting too old for this. Maybe Van den Bergen was making her feel prematurely too old. Fifty wasn’t far away for him, after all, and then there was his granddaughter, little Eva, on the scene now.

  Eyeing the younger men that buzzed nearby, all sweaty from the dancefloor with their going-out-best clobber clinging to their firm bodies, George’s attention was pulled in the direction of a dealer, stealthily palming a baggie of white powder onto a boy of about eighteen. The dealer could have been a clubber. Nothing out of the ordinary, apart from the tattoo just visible in the stubble of his hair. Like Nasser Malik’s tattoo. Suddenly George had become distanced enough from her own woes to really notice what was going down.

  ‘It’s snowing in Amsterdam,’ she muttered.