‘You don’t need me to help you blow your fucking trumpet in public, Sally. You’ve got that one covered all on your own, I reckon.’ George didn’t like being indebted. And apologies were overrated. She jammed her fist onto her hip defiantly. ‘And Paul is hardly a flake, is he? He’s one of the best coppers in Europe, actually. And if you must know, I’m going to Amsterdam because there’s been a development regarding Letitia.’
‘What?!’ Aunty Sharon shouted from inside the Toyota.
‘What?!’ Sally Wright said, clutching George’s arm.
George pulled herself loose from the grip of the Senior Tutor. Immediately regretted saying anything, as her aunt unbuckled and started to heave herself out of the car.
‘Georgina, why on earth didn’t you say anything?’ Sally said, her brow furrowed, perhaps with genuine empathy.
Before George could retreat, Sharon had rounded on them both, booting Sally Wright aside unceremoniously with her ample bottom. She clasped George into a suffocating hug. The threat of tears audible in her voice.
‘Is she dead?’ Sharon asked. ‘Has that silly cow’s body been found in a wheelie bin?’ She sniffed hard. ‘It has, hasn’t it? Oh, sweet Jesus.’
‘I won’t know anything until I speak to Marie, one of Paul’s detectives,’ George said, disengaging herself from her aunt. ‘All I know is that there’s a man in Maastricht. A dead guy, who’s somehow connected to Letitia’s disappearance. That’s all she’s told me so far.’ She turned to the Senior Tutor, realising it would do her no favours to curry the displeasure of a woman who could have her funding rescinded at any time, leaving her broke and jobless. Sally had threatened it before, but George was older, wiser and several steps closer to having a deposit saved for her own place, now. Biting this particular gnarled proverbial hand that fed would be folly. ‘That’s why I can’t stay for the launch, Sal.’ She rearranged her features into what would pass as an apologetic smile. ‘You’ll be brilliant without me.’
Sally tugged at her blunt-cut fringe and scowled. Hooked her short bob behind her ear. ‘But all of Dobkin’s family are coming. It’s a big deal, dedicating the book to his memory.’
‘We robbed his research,’ George said. ‘I could have saved his life and I didn’t. I knew Danny was up to no good and all I could think of was protecting my own arse.’ George’s viscera tightened at the memory of her squatting behind a car, watching her academic rival, Professor Dickwad Dobkin, succumb to the brutal intentions of her backstreet drug-dealing ex-lover. UCL’s finest criminologist crumpling to the ground like a falling autumnal leaf in a quiet London WC1 square, all because he had got too close to revealing the true identities of the major players in the UK’s people-trafficking rings. A bullet, punching its way into his superlative brain, that could have been avoided, had George only been quicker to punch his number into her phone. ‘I don’t deserve to have my name on the front of that book.’
Sally’s mouth hardened to a thin line. ‘We did not steal his research, Georgina McKenzie. Dobkin’s trafficking database and the information we … you gathered from inmates in prison developed organically under completely separate—’
‘His research made it into our book,’ George said, feeling shame heat her wind-chilled cheeks from the inside. Nervously looking at Aunty Sharon, expecting a look of disapprobation but seeing only confusion in her face.
‘What’s some geez in Maastricht gotta do with my turd of a sister?’ Sharon asked.
‘It’s going to be a Sunday Times bestseller,’ Sally said, pulling a cigarette packet out of her coat pocket. She offered one to George. George shook her head but took one anyway.
Sharon, clearly unimpressed by the interloper snatching George’s attention in this time of family crisis, shouted at the Senior Tutor, ‘Mout a massy, yuh cyan shut yup?’ Jamaican patois, delivered with such venom and speed that George was convinced the paving slabs of that genteel Cambridge road might blister at any moment. Sharon snatched the cigarette off George and lit it herself. ‘Listen, Professor whatever-your name is,’ she said, exhaling a cloud of blue-grey smoke in Sally’s direction. ‘If my niece here stands a cat in hell’s chance of tracking my sister down – who’s been missing for a fucking year …’ Jabbing the cigarette towards the startled Fellow. ‘… she’s going to Amsterdam if I have to put on bloody water wings and swim her there, myself. Right? And if that means you can’t roll her out at your fucking boring book launch as some novelty ghetto-fabulous lackey what serves the cooking wine and flutters her eyelashes at the dirty old codgers who pay your wages, you’re just going have to suck it up, darling! Cos family comes first. Right?’ She turned to George, straightening her burgundy, glossy wig. Glowing with an almost religious zeal that only Bermondsey women could really pull off when vexed. ‘Get your shit together, love. We’re going to the airport.’ A click of the fingers meant the conversation was over.
Dropping Sally Wright off outside St John’s College, leaving her open-mouthed and speechless, for once, George realised she was trembling with anticipation. Would this trip yield an answer to her questions? She covered her juddering hands with her rucksack. Not quick enough for her aunt, though.
‘I see you shaking there, like you’ve got the DTs! It would help if you ate a proper breakfast,’ she said, indicating left. Pulling up at the drop-off point at Stansted Airport, forcing the dented silver car into a bottleneck of taxis and disoriented relatives who were also dropping baggage-laden holidaymakers at Departures. Sharon reached for a cool bag at George’s feet.
‘Shift your feet. I made you a packed lunch,’ she said. Plonked the bag onto George’s lap. Grabbing her face and planting a wet kiss on her cheek, which George hastily wiped away. ‘Couple of nice homemade patties and some jerk chicken. That’ll keep you going for a bit.’
‘Ta. I love you, Aunty Shaz.’ George drank in the detail of her aunt’s face, feeling suddenly melancholy. She pushed aside unexpectedly negative feelings that she couldn’t quite articulate. A sense of impending loss or perhaps just separation anxiety. ‘Give my love to Tin and Patrice. I’ll text you.’
Aunty Sharon nodded. Her face, scrubbed of the make-up she wore to the club in the evening, seemed closer to five than forty.
‘Find her, George. Find Letitia, dead or alive.’
‘Well, there’s water in his lungs,’ Marianne de Koninck said, carefully lifting the slippery-looking mass out of his chest cavity and onto the scales in the mortuary. ‘That much is obvious.’
At her side, Floris Engels’ milky eyes stared out from his bloated face. His scalp and legs, where Marianne’s pathologist’s blade had not yet got to work, were florid in places, yellowy-grey in others like bad tie-dye, the skin showing signs of wrinkling only at his extremities, as though it might shrug itself off his feet or hands. But the bloating made Van den Bergen twitch involuntarily. He hated floaters. They decomposed so bloody fast. He was glad of the clean, menthol smell of the VapoRub beneath his nostrils.
‘But I’ll need to test for the concentration of his serum electrolytes and examine his bones and viscera for diatoms,’ she said, observing the scales’ reading. ‘Our canal water is quite saline in certain parts of town because of the locks at Ijmuiden letting seawater in. So, there’ll be microscopic algae from the sea in his deep tissues if he’s just fallen in