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.
Amsterdam, Reguliersdwarsstraat, 1 May
‘Come on, Dirk. You can totally do this,’ George told Elvis. She grabbed him by the arm and marched him towards the entrance to the Amsterdam Rainbow Cellars. Music thumped its way up and out onto the bustling Reguliersdwarsstraat, which thronged with clusters of men, making their way from bar to bar. A rainbow flag was suspended from the façade of the tall townhouse in which the cellars were situated, just in case the tourists hadn’t worked out what sort of place this was.
Elvis swallowed hard, tugging at the uncomfortably tight white T-shirt that George had persuaded him to wear. Contemplating his burgeoning paunch, he then cast a judgemental eye over the ripped gay guys who were sitting outside a café, draped nonchalantly over their chairs like men who knew they could carry off tight clothing.
‘This is ridiculous,’ he said. ‘This is the worst idea the boss has ever had.’
‘Tell me about it,’ George said. ‘I’ve got to go and do a shift as a barmaid, now. I’ve only ever