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