George nodded. Showed no emotion. Dr McKenzie was a criminologist. Professional detachment was the only way to endure these heart-breaking stories. But it was the same story over and over, told by different women. Abuse, leading to abuse. Young girls playing chicken through the fast lanes of traffick. They never made it to the other side intact.
‘So why the GBH?’
Donna snorted noisily. ‘Day our Thom was put in care. Went out, didn’t I? Got mashed up. Beat some slag to a pulp with a snooker cue. She’d been looking at my fella, so …’ She looked up at George. No longer morose but suddenly hopeful, as if a timid sun was trying to push its way through the storm clouds. ‘I’m going to get him back. Our Thomas. When I get out of here. He’s coming home to his mam.’ A gingivitis grin. Radiant with rotten teeth. Thin hair scraped too high on her head into a tight ponytail made her look like a ruined child.
George had to get out of there. She’d had enough for one day. Checked her watch. Brought the session to an end.
As she made her way through the facility to the entrance, where she would reclaim her phone and her composure, she noticed the latest issue of Do What? – the inmates’ magazine she had remembered reading when she had been on remand here. Scattered copies on the table needed organising.
The baffled prison officer paused, giving George a moment to tidy the magazines into a neat fan. Beneath the headline that spoke of Shep, the drugs-dog almost choking to death on a hibernating hedgehog, there was a piece that triggered recognition deep within George’s mind. A debate on whether an icicle could actually be used as a shiv and whether it was right that the prison staff should leave these freakish twelve-inchers hanging off the old prison eaves.
‘Okay, Dr McKenzie?’ The prison officer asked.
George nodded. Tucked her portfolio of notes under her arm and made her way back down to security. Scanned on the way in. Scanned on the way out.
Having failed to find a USB stick at Aunty Sharon’s, she had once tried to bring in a CD-ROM she had burned especially in order to show the inmates a simple guide to the study she was doing into women’s prisons for the government. Security had confiscated even that, saying a teenage inmate had broken up a CD brought in for her by her sister and committed suicide by swallowing the shards. Everything was a weapon in here. She now made damned sure she never ran out of USB sticks.
Got to get the hell out. This place is bringing me down and down.
Beyond the gates, breath steaming on the sub-zero air, she switched her phone on to check for messages. Hoping that cantankerous old fool, Van den Bergen had been in touch. It was weeks since their argument. Six weeks to be precise. Her refusal to speak to him had been deliberate. Even Aunty Sharon had said she’d done the right thing by dropping the shutters on him.
But the screen yielded nothing. Silence. No abrupt words, saying he was sorry and that she had been right. That he would make amends.
On the train she sat at a dirty, crumb-sullied table, clutching her anorak tightly around her. Broken heating meant the journey would be purgatorial. Shivering at the sight of the snow-covered fields and jagged, naked hedgerows that scudded by. A white world, empty of life except for disappointing humanity and the odd cannibalistic robin. Irritation mounting inside her. Oppressive, like the Siberian freeze that had an entire continent in its grip.
Twenty minutes felt like an hour. Her phone still yielded nothing of note. Only nagging emails from civil servants, asking if she would be handing her study in on time. Pointed correspondence from a fellow criminologist who had it in for her. Professor Dickwad Dobkin at UCL. Complaining that he knew about her additional research into trafficking. Saying that he had started something almost identical, eons ago. Long before her. Of course.
‘Get fucked, Dobkin,’ George said, as she searched for her train ticket.
‘Sorry?’ The ticket inspector asked, swaying side to side in the Pendolino carriage, as it pelted through the crystalline hills of Staffordshire.
‘Nothing,’ George said. ‘Talking to myself. Too much work. Not enough play.’
The ticket inspector, a sweaty-looking man, despite the unrelenting cold, gave her a disinterested half-smile.
It was true. Her deadline loomed large. Today’s encounter with Donna had been one of her final interviews. She would have to start typing it up tonight. Perhaps even do a little work on her laptop now, on the train back to London.
Discipline yourself, George.
Except her phone pinged. Probably Aunty Sharon.
Fuck discipline.
Peered down at the screen.
Ah, finally.
But it was not the sort of message she was hoping for.
Come to Amsterdam a.s.a.p. Paul.
Amsterdam, Bijlmer district, later
‘What do you want me to do, boss?’ Elvis asked, pulling his woollen hat down low over his ears, so that bushy red-brown sideburns were only just visible. His breath steamed on the air. Red nose and streaming eyes made him look peaky. But then, these days, Elvis always looked like he never slept. Experience could do that to a detective, even one as dopey and idiotically optimistic as Elvis.
With his protégé seemingly transfixed by the sight of his mobile phone, Chief Inspector Paul van den Bergen hastily slipped the device back into his pocket. ‘Get photos of everything,’ he said. Felt like he had been caught doing something forbidden, though texting George in a work capacity was hardly a misdemeanour. Since she had qualified, she worked for the Dutch police on a freelance basis often enough.
He turned to Marie, who looked as though she was wearing every garment her wardrobe held. Some ugly hand-knitted cardigan on top of a coat. Purple clashed with the red colour of her hair poking out beneath two hats, by the looks. Bet she smelled worse than usual beneath all those layers. But today, Marie had abandoned the warmth of the office and her Internet research in favour of dusting for prints. After the best part of a year spent working on missing persons cases, she had been desperate to get out. They all had.
‘You called forensics?’ he asked her.
‘Yep. Marianne said she’ll be about half an hour.’ Marie blushed. Crouched near the dead man’s head. Scowled at his blood-spattered face. ‘He looks familiar.’
‘They always look familiar round here.’
Gazing down at the cochineal Rorschach pattern that surrounded the dead man, Van den Bergen put his hand on his stomach. Though he could not feel the lumpy scar tissue beneath the thick wadding of his anorak, he pressed his long fingers there, tracing the line of the scarring from sternum to his abdomen. Like this dead man at his feet, he had lost almost his entire life’s blood. A good two years ago now. Time heals all scars, right? Bullshit, it did.
Elvis clicked away on a digital camera. Blue plastic overshoes over his snowboots. Behind him, the remaining high-rises of Bijlmer loomed. Once Amsterdam’s arsehole, a few colourful panels on the front of the renovated blocks and winter wonderland conditions made it only marginally more enticing than it had been in the dark days. Better than Van den Bergen remembered