The Girl Who Broke the Rules (24 page)

Marianne stood and beckoned George to the slabs. ‘You haven’t seen the women, have you?’

George was reluctant. ‘I had a look while you were on the phone, thanks.’

But Marianne grabbed her arm and pulled her slab-side. ‘You make me face my uncomfortable truth. I’m making you face yours. They’re just people. Dead people. You’re going to be a doctor yourself, right?’

Nodding, George looked inside the ribcage and empty abdomen of Linda Lepiks. ‘Criminologist. It’s different.’ Felt grief enter her headspace as an unwelcome visitor, threatening to take her composure hostage. Was this actress so different to her friend, Katja? She stole a glance over at the petite Somali called Noor. Had that poor working girl differed from her in any significant way? There was a mother out there somewhere, wondering what fate might have befallen her daughter. And she, in turn, had been a mother to a baby. Where was that child now? So much loss. So much tragedy. And who was this painfully thin Filipino, covered in bruises, with cuts to his hands and filth beneath his fingernails? Did somebody on the other side of the world pine for him nightly?

She looked up to find the pathologist eyeing her critically. Hard blue eyes. ‘Criminology is still a science, Georgina,’ she said. ‘If you want to take yourself seriously in your line of work, you must learn even the most unpalatable facets of it thoroughly. Like Paul, here.’

George blinked back a tear before it could make a formal appearance. ‘You finished patronising me?’ she asked. Hand on hip. Tired, now, after an absurdly long day. But realising this was not a time for attitude and sparring with Jasper’s ex.
Focus, George.

De Koninck seemed unperturbed. She ran her Biro along the line of Lepiks’ torso, careful not to make contact with the blackened, coagulated blood or the white dashes of the severed ribs that ran along the edges like cats’ eyes on a motorway. ‘Only a surgeon would have opened the victims up in this way. It’s textbook stuff, and now that I see it for myself, nothing like that backstreet butcher Ahlers could have done.’ She pointed to the nostril on the Filipino man to her right. ‘They’ve all had intubation for ventilation and…’ moved her pen down to the mark on the crook of his arm ‘…cannulas inserted into their veins. There are signs of invasive arterial monitoring in the veins of Lepiks and our Filipino. But not in Noor. In other words, the murderer failed to harvest the heart at first but had refined his techniques in these subsequent victims. He knew to expect cardiovascular collapse and avoided it.’ She smiled, with something that looked like relief. ‘These are all the scars you would expect from a person who has been in intensive care, not bloody drugged for fun, like Strietman said!’

Van den Bergen cleared his throat at the back of them, though it sounded more of a growl. George turned to see a satisfied expression on his face that belied the disapproving noises.

‘Here it is!’ he said. A wry smile playing at the corners of his mouth. ‘
This
is the bit I’ve been waiting for. Ha! I’m not one for enjoying saying told you so, but that guy’s a prick, Marianne. A sensationalist idiot who’s watched too many two-bit crime dramas on TV.’ He bounced his left foot on his right knee triumphantly. Wiped his glasses on the tails of his shirt.

‘His conclusions were valid, based on the evidence he had,’ de Koninck said. ‘But he has ignored the obvious, maybe because it’s mundane and logical, not what you’d expect from a serial killer.’

‘So, what does this mean about our victims?’ George asked. ‘The women’s uteruses are missing, but you can’t transplant a uterus, can you?’

The pathologist stepped back from the slab and drained what was left of her cold coffee. ‘I think your killer has deliberately done that to make the first two murders look sexual in nature. Strietman fell into that trap.’

‘That makes sense if Valeriusstraat was rigged to look like a kinky crime scene,’ van den Bergen said, pinching his nose. Nodding.

George appraised the three victims beneath the white-out glare of the mortuary lights. The empty vessels of their corpses making the only noise; their voices stolen from them along with the breath in their bodies, leaving only van den Bergen, Marianne de Koninck and her to speak on their behalf. ‘So, the murderer is running a human organ factory,’ she said. ‘With vulnerable immigrants providing his raw materials. And there’s a black market out there says the sum of their parts is greater than the whole.’ She closed her eyes. ‘Oh, Jesus. This is beyond grim.’

CHAPTER 48

Amsterdam, van den Bergen’s apartment, 25 January

‘Why did I have to track you down like this to speak to you, George?’ Ad asked. Hurt in those sensitive brown eyes. Not nearly well disguised enough behind the petrol-coloured coating on his glasses. An all too familiar look, recently.

George opened and closed her mouth, hoping sensible, placatory words would come out. None did. On Ad’s left brow was suspended a lump of sleep from his eye. Eye-snot, they called it at Aunty Sharon’s. Great. Now, she couldn’t tear her gaze away from the eye-snot. She wanted to point, but couldn’t.

He had pinioned her hands together inside his, though it strained her arms to reach him on the other side of van den Bergen’s kitchen table. She wished he would let go. Tried to prise her fingers free.

‘Well?’ he asked. ‘Why are you staying here and not at mine? Are you not my girlfriend? Why have you been ignoring me, when all the time you were in town? Staying with another man!’

‘Let go, Ad! You’re hurting me!’ George shouted, wrenching her hands free. Finally standing with a teeth-jarring scrap of the chair on the tiled floor. ‘I’ve been staying with van den Bergen, for God’s sake! He’s not
another
man. Not in the bloody way you mean.’

‘But I live in Amsterdam, damn it! Why wouldn’t you tell me you were coming? If I hadn’t got this letter…’ He pulled the crumpled envelope out of his reefer jacket pocket. ‘…And if Sally Wright hadn’t had—’

George snatched it from him. Stared down at the meticulous handwriting, which she would recognise anywhere. ‘Silas Holm?’ Felt the blood drain from her face. Suddenly slightly nauseous. Had to sit back down quickly. ‘How did that monster get your home address?’ She scanned the text inside. It was a long letter. She did not have time to read it in its entirety with Ad sitting there, waiting to hear why she had snubbed him. Snippets of writing registered with her.

Of course, I was young at the time, but I still remember my father, sitting in our living room, playing cards. He and his friends would drink and drink until they swayed in their chairs, and I, only twelve at the time, would watch, thinking this was how men behaved, Georgina. A proper hero, he regaled them with tales of how he had lost his leg in the war, when his Messerschmitt crashed during a bombing raid over London. An air raid warden found him in the ruins of a street of terraced housing that had been lain to waste by his fellow airmen. His internment in the prisoner of war camp was…

…beat me senseless once they had retired with their winnings. He used to remove his prosthetic limb and…

…my mother, both an angel and a hurtful witch, depending on how the mood took her. Worse when she was drinking, naturally.

‘What the hell is this?’ George said, trying to fathom why Silas Holm, of all people, had chosen to track her down, with such urgency and against such tremendous odds, to her boyfriend’s flat in Amsterdam. He had known she was coming before Ad had. ‘I went to Broadmoor just before I left. I must have let something slip without realising. He’s a wily bastard, if ever there was one. He must have someone smuggling letters out for him.’

‘George!’ Ad said. ‘Why have you been avoiding me?’

She looked blankly at him, only vaguely aware that he had come to confront her; that van den Bergen had left her behind and gone into the station without her, with the express intention that she should remain behind and sort things out with Ad.

‘Why’s Holm giving me all this reminiscing shit? He’s trying to tell me something, maybe?’

Ad’s fist made contact with the kitchen table. ‘For God’s sake, George! Are you coming to my place or what? Are we going to talk about this? About us?’

All at once, George remembered that her boyfriend was standing in front of her, demanding to clear the air. But she had better things to do than kiss and make up or dredge through the prickly tangle of her feelings. She wanted to get to the police station to listen to the debriefing van den Bergen would be giving Elvis, Marie and Kees, based on everything the two of them had discussed – combing over and over the details of the three murders until the small hours of the morning. How long could they keep Ahlers, if he wasn’t their man? He would make a perfect research subject for her PhD and right now, he was sitting in a cell with nothing better to do than talk.

‘Yeah, yeah. Whatever. I’ll bring a bag round.’

She kissed Ad on the cheek absently. Mind abuzz – not with their relationship but with Silas Holm. Clearly, her dangerous study subject had researched not just her, but the people around her too. He had somebody on the outside, doing his bidding. A murderous psychopath with a willing disciple was never a good thing. How had the trail led to Ad? She knew Aunty Sharon was safe and well. Knew she would never blab about her niece’s whereabouts – not even to Ad. In which case, had Silas discovered her Cambridge address first? Spoken to someone who unwittingly passed on personal information?

She turned to Ad as something began to niggle at the back of her mind. ‘When you tried to get me on my landline at my Cambridge place, did you manage to speak to Lucy?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Nobody picked up.’

CHAPTER 49

Amsterdam, police headquarters, later

‘Our murderer is geographically transient,’ the criminal profiler said, pointing to the three murder sites on the map with an index finger that had a rich, brown patina of nicotine, as though it was a nub of French polished wood. ‘Two in Amsterdam. One in Rotterdam.’

What’s his name again?
van den Bergen wondered. In his notepad, he was sketching Tamara from memory, around the age when she had started to walk. It was a good sketch. He hadn’t really been listening. Glanced up at Hasselblad’s puppet in a pretence of engagement. An old guy in an Arran-knit jumper and navy cords, with a yellowing beard and shining bald pate. Spitting when he spoke. Standing so close to van den Bergen that he could see green algae growth on the nose-clips of the man’s old-fashioned steel spectacles. He smelled of cigars and mothballed furniture. Shipped in from the crappy psychology course the commissioner had been on before Christmas. Bert or Gert or fucking Bart. Yes. Bart. That was it. Van den Bergen slid his own glasses onto the end of his nose and looked at Bart’s business card. He had an impressive collection of letters at the end of his name. Bert. Not Bart. Professor of criminal psychology at an institute van den Bergen had never heard of. Still, he was revered in his field, according to Hasselblad. Old Bert, with a face like a shipwrecked mariner and the waterlogged aroma to match. George would need to sit at the back. Especially given the man’s propensity to shower everything in spittle.

‘What I ask myself, as a criminal psychologist,’ Professor Bert said to Elvis, ‘is why is our murderer harvesting organs?’

‘To sell on the black market,’ van den Bergen said, enhancing the toddler Tamara’s chubby legs with bold cross-hatching from his Biro.

Bert lurched forward and held his amber finger aloft. ‘No, sir! No! This is paraphilia for our murderer. Fetishism. Organs as sexualised objects of desire. Disorganised serial killers like this position the dead body in a certain way. They leave weapons at the scene. Depersonalise the bodies of their victims, as is demonstrated…here!’ He smacked the pinboard that held photos of the victims with force, causing a photograph of the interior of Linda Lepiks’ gaudy, expensive apartment to fall to the floor.

Marie tutted loudly. Retrieved the photo from the floor and pinned it back up. ‘Can you not hit my board, please?’ she said. ‘It took me ages to get everything up there so neatly.’

‘Your murderer preys on the vulnerable,’ Bert shouted at the side of Marie’s head.

Marie jumped. Blushed. Sat back down rapidly between Kees and Elvis.

Van den Bergen sighed. This guy was like an American evangelical preacher. Any minute now, he half expected him to tell them all to put their hands on the screen and ask for fifty dollars to be sent in to Jesus. ‘Can we dial down the drama, please, Professor?’ he asked, making eye contact with the man.

Bert looked apologetically at his belly. ‘Of course.’ Cleared his throat. Began again. ‘He’s sexually sadistic. Collects violent pornography, as demonstrated by the film of Linda Lepiks. You can bet he’s collecting news clippings about his crimes. People like this often have an interest in Nazism, torture, monsters.’ His eyes widened. He splayed the fingers on both hands, as though he had performed a magic trick. ‘The occult.’

‘I knew it!’ Kees shouted across the board table. ‘Like Buczkowski. He’s mad about all that. We finally got into his apartment last night and got hold of all these crazy books on child-eating Jews and devil worshipping. He’s an accessory. I’m telling you!’ He started to count Buczkowski’s personality deficits off on his fingers. ‘He’s violent. He’s got a record. He’s an ex-druggie. He’s a known head case. The lot.’

Kees looked to his colleagues for appreciation. Marie remained inscrutable, examining her dirty fingernails. Elvis treated his new compatriot to a nervous smile, checking, van den Bergen noted, with his chief inspector first.

‘I bet the Pole does all the heavy lifting,’ Kees continued, ‘and then he’s got a partner who does the surgical stuff. I’m looking into Buczkowski’s tax records.’

Slowly, deliberately, van den Bergen swivelled around in his chair so that his body was angled towards his borrowed detective. Studied the young man’s flushed face. His glistening brow – beads of sweat shining in his hairline. Clenched chubby fists and a buck-toothed grin. If what the criminal profiler was saying was true, could Kamphuis’ padawan be onto something? Was it possible that they were looking for a beauty and the beast duo? One, wielding brute force. One, brandishing the surgeon’s scalpel. Two sadistic murderers, satisfied by violence and paid well for their enterprise by traffickers?