Читать книгу The Girl Who Walked in the Shadows - Marnie Riches - Страница 17

‘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?’