Читать книгу The Girl Who Had No Fear - Marnie Riches, Marnie Riches - Страница 17

Sitting in a deck chair on the small decking area by his shed, Van den Bergen relished the warmth of the mid-morning sun on his face. It felt like somebody had inserted a key into the bullet hole in his hip and had tried to wind him up. But aside from the incessant, nagging ache that he had tried and failed to calm with strong ibuprofen gel, he reasoned that he was faring a damn sight better than young Greg Patterson.

Radiohead’s Thom Yorke emoted out of the battery-operated CD player that George had bought him for Christmas. Wailing that the witch should be burned. The melancholy in his voice seemed fitting.

‘How many’s that now?’ he muttered, opening a foil-wrapped pile of ham sandwiches and biting into the top one hungrily. Not bothering to sweep the crumbs off his gardening dungarees. It felt like an act of rebellion. If George saw he was eating without having washed his hands first, he would never hear the end of it. Compost beneath his fingernails from repotting his petunias into larger containers. But not all of his fingers smelled of compost and leafy growth. He sniffed his middle finger and remembered their reunion on the sofa the previous evening. Smiled. Frowned. Remembered he was supposed to be thinking about more serious matters.

‘Five,’ he said to the allium globemasters that had just blossomed into giant purple balls on the end on their thick, green stems. ‘Five damned floaters.’

He belched. Ham played havoc with his stomach acid. Why did he never learn? His throat had been sore of late. Maybe he had oesophageal cancer. Swallowing, he realised it was more uncomfortable than yesterday. Or perhaps he just needed a cup of coffee from his flask to wash down the sandwich.

Checking his phone for an email from Marianne de Koninck, he thought about Greg Patterson’s body on the canal side at 5 a.m. that morning. Leaving George, warm in his bed, to stand in the drizzle beneath the umbrella, yet again. Next to Elvis, who had refused to share the umbrella, yet again. Marianne’s number two, Daan Strietman, had found a lump of frothed mucus and vomit in the boy’s throat. Later, during the preliminary examination at the morgue, he had confirmed recent rough intercourse and blistering inside the boy’s rectum – apparently a common side effect of taking liquid crystal meth anally via a syringe.

Grimacing at the florid pink flesh that hung out of his sandwich, Van den Bergen folded his lunch back up, levered himself out of the chair with a grunt and flung the packet onto the deck chair.

His phone rang. Looking around the allotment, he couldn’t make out where the noise was coming from. Peering inside the shed, it wasn’t on the potting table. Debbie Harry hung limply on the wall, looking clueless. She was no bloody use. It wasn’t in the trug of compost, with his trowel. Ringing. Ringing.

Agitated, he finally realised the phone had fallen into his oversized wellington boot.

‘Yes,’ he barked down the phone, wondering if his blood pressure was dangerously high. Made a mental note to switch vibrate on.

‘It’s Marianne,’ the chief pathologist said. ‘I’ve got the toxicology report back from Floris Engels. He’d taken a cocktail of drugs prior to death.’

‘Oh.’ Van den Bergen sat back down heavily onto his deck chair, inadvertently flattening his ham sandwiches. ‘An OD?’

‘Well,’ she said. ‘He had a lot of the drug G in his system – Gamma Hydroxybutyrate. But that wasn’t what bothers me. He’s also been poisoned by bad methamphetamine, commonly known as crystal meth or Tina. Acute lead poisoning, to be precise, apparently common where lead acetate has been used as a substrate in production in a bad batch.’

Van den Bergen rubbed the lengthening stubble on his chin and gazed up at the treetops contemplatively. ‘What about the others? The kids?’

There was a shuffling of paper at the other end of the phone. ‘I dug out the original toxicology reports from our younger floaters. There was nothing had been flagged apart from drug misuse. But then, they’d been in the water so long and were so badly decomposed, I guess it was hardly surprising the results were inconclusive. Especially given the weight of evidence that it was death by drowning, hence the open verdict. But then, when Floris Engels showed signs of having taken contaminated meth, I had the toxicology on the kids redone. And this time round, we found that they had suffered the same fate. Renal damage was present, consistent with severe lead poisoning. I’m sorry. I don’t know how Strietman missed it. Sometimes, you just have to be looking in the right place.’

‘Any other similarities starting to emerge?’ he asked. Perching his glasses on the end of the nose. Unable to read the instructions on a packet of seeds, thanks to a muddy smudge on his left lens.

‘Floris Engels and Greg Patterson had both had rough anal intercourse prior to death, given the abrasion. But there’s nothing to say it was forced. If they’d been taking drugs …’

‘It’s likely they’d been partying. Right.’ Fleetingly, Van den Bergen tried to imagine what young gay guys might get up to in a liberal city that was full of possibilities. He grimaced as his haemorrhoids twitched involuntarily. Wondered if he was due a prostate check. ‘And Ed Bakker?’

‘I couldn’t tell you about Ed Bakker, because of the tissue damage from being in the water so long, but witnesses say he’d been to a gay club, hadn’t he?’ There was a pause on the line. She was chewing something over. Something unpalatable, clearly. ‘Maybe Maarten Minks is not a million miles away with his serial killer theory, Paul. What if someone is spiking gay men on purpose and then shoving them into the canals?’

‘Bullshit!’ Van den Bergen shouted, well aware that her theory was anything but bullshit.

‘Suit yourself.’ The ice in her tone of voice almost froze the line. ‘You’re the detective.’ She hung up.

Mind whirring at how best he could step up the investigation without sparking media hysteria, he dialled George’s number. She picked up on the fourth ring, sounding sleepy.

‘Morning, hot stuff. What’s wrong?’ she asked.

‘I need you to get a job.’

‘A job?! What do you mean, get a job? I’ve got a job. I’m a criminologist, remember?’ Agitation had supplanted the sleepy affection in her voice.

‘You need to get a job in a nightclub. A barmaid or something. I need to find out about meth supply in the city. Urgently.’ He pinched the piece of skin at the bridge of his nose, imagining her outraged expression.

‘I told you this was about drugs! Didn’t I say last night?’ She sounded momentarily triumphant. Good. ‘Hang on.’ The triumph was abruptly replaced by suspicion. ‘You want me to do what?! I don’t want to work as a fucking barmaid in a club.’ He could hear her sparking her e-cigarette into life.

‘Don’t smoke in the flat! George!’

‘Yeah. Whatever.’

He imagined the fumes from the e-cigarette, lingering in his curtains. Finding their way into his lungs, causing changes in his healthy cells. An image of his father, wired up to the chemo for long afternoon sessions, hope ebbing away with every drip of poison that entered his bloodstream. Struggling to gasp his last on oxygen at the end.

Van den Bergen’s own breathing quickened. ‘I thought you liked clubbing! It’s your chance to be like a young person.’

There was a disapproving sucking sound that almost deafened him. How could he talk her round? Marie would never be able to pull a surveillance gig like that off. ‘Look, if it’s any consolation, I’m going to make Elvis go undercover too.’

‘As what? A shit Elvis impersonator?’

‘A gay clubber.’

She started to laugh but it wasn’t the sound of amusement. It was sarcastic and loaded with disappointment. ‘Do you really think Elvis – the straightest man in the world – is going to abandon his terminally ill mother to twerk in chaps until some murderous homophobe tries to bump him off with an overdose and a watery end? You’ve lost the fucking plot, old man.’

For the second time that morning, a woman hung up on Van den Bergen, leaving him alone with a half-chewed ham sandwich and a sense that something was deeply amiss in his beloved city of Amsterdam.