The Girl Who Walked in the Shadows: A gripping thriller that keeps you on the edge of your seat
‘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.’