The Girl Who Broke the Rules (32 page)

Laughing loud enough to make the other diners look over to see what the commotion was about, she was giddy like a young schoolgirl.

Van den Bergen looked at her quizzically. ‘If you’re going to be with me?’ he asked. ‘What do you mean?’

Her incandescent expression of enthusiasm dimmed somewhat. ‘Our affair. We’re lovers now, right? This wasn’t just a booty call for me, Paul.’ She drained her coffee cup. Clasped his hand again. Her skin was warm and soft. Beyond the smell of frying that permeated the hotel dining room, he could detect the residue of coconut shower gel coming from her arms. ‘You know how I feel about you, don’t you?’

‘Yes.’

He nodded and made an effort to smile. Staring out the window, the squall of the grey-brown North Sea echoed the turmoil of conflicting emotions within him. His heart felt like it might quake and collapse under the strain. Did he love George? She was looking at him for a response. Though she had not said the words outright – I love you – he knew she meant them and now she wanted him to reciprocate, he could see. Soulful brown eyes seeking the truth that lay behind the rationed, careful words of her older, clandestine paramour. Of course he loved her. He had fallen head over heels for this captivating, brilliant young woman pretty much as soon as they had met. She was his dahlia in full bloom. Perfect. Multi-faceted. Vibrant. But to harbour such desires for a girl who was old enough to be his daughter had felt wrong then, as it felt wrong now, even after their heady night of passion. Perhaps she had ruined him, after all.

‘I’m not good enough for you,’ he said, sipping hot coffee, watching a ferry chug slowly towards the horizon, growing smaller with every blink.

‘Bullshit.’ She slammed her coffee cup onto the saucer and wiped her mouth with the napkin. ‘God, I’ve eaten too much now.’ Unbuttoned her jeans. Puffed out her cheeks. Looked around the dated Victoriana dining room. ‘This flowery wallpaper is hideous. Reminds me of my grandma’s from when I was a kid. We’ve got to get out of here.’ Checked her phone. Read a message, scrolling down on her screen with delicate fingers that had conquered every inch of van den Bergen within the last twelve hours, inside and out. ‘London-bound, right? That Rob said the dead men may have been refugees that got into trouble with gangs. My Aunty Sharon is taking us to meet a woman who knows everything about everyone worth knowing anything about. She’s an elder at one of the big gospel churches and works in an outreach centre for refugees.’

‘There are eight or nine million people living in London,’ van den Bergen said. ‘What makes you think we can find out anything useful about three illegal immigrants?’

George winked. Stood up. Came round to his side of the table and kissed the top of his head. ‘Wheels within wheels. Some things the police can’t find out. But I can.’

Despite his best intentions, he found himself encircling her waist with his arms, pulling her to him. Stroking the contours of her womanly shape. She felt warm and reassuring, standing there. He knew the elderly diners were watching them; passing judgement on the nature of the relationship between this middle-aged white man and this young mixed race woman. But he didn’t care.
You’ve cuckolded Karelse
,
his conscience berated him.
Stop touching her. You must not kiss her. Do the honourable thing, for Christ’s sake. Let her go.
But he found there in that dining room, drinking in the scent of her clean clothes and toiletries and her skin beneath them, he couldn’t.

‘What time’s check-out?’ he asked.

‘Eleven,’ she said.

‘Then we’ve got forty minutes.’

CHAPTER 61

Somewhere in Kent, a field, later

Overhead the silver sky was punctuated by swathes of rain clouds, scudding by like hulking grey battleships on a drab sea. In his peripheral vision, Derek saw naked poplar trees bending in the wind, as though they were upturned brooms sweeping the heavens. He had never had such profound thoughts before. Maybe this was what actually happened before you died, rather than a mere replay of your life in your mind’s eye.

What had his life even amounted to?

Sweet FA: a disastrous romance with Sharon Williams-May – the only woman he had ever really loved. A beautiful daughter. Yes, Tinesha was the sole good thing in his life and yet, even now, he had put her safety in jeopardy because of his greed.

How the hell had it come to this?

His parents had wanted him to join the Royal Air Force as a cadet. Instead, he had worked as a roadie for a soul band in the eighties, ending up working in shitty Soho bars and pubs once his back had gone, eventually landing a ‘career’ as the low-life manager of a titty bar. Now, he was lying with the sharp woody stalks of last year’s wheat crop sticking into his back. In a field. In an area of outstanding natural beauty. In the middle of Kent. And the stalks weren’t even the worst of it, because he couldn’t feel them. He couldn’t feel anything.

He was going to die.

Derek waited. Still watching the clouds. He hoped it wouldn’t hurt more than the actual act of getting stabbed repeatedly and strangled.

He was definitely going to die, now.

It started to spit with rain; the kind that was so cold, it felt like needles puncturing your skin. Derek opened his mouth to let the moisture in, though just parting his lips drained him of all the energy he could muster. For another eon or possibly only a minute (for time runs differently in the shadow of death) he lay, motionless. Then, it occurred to him that could actually feel the rain. After a long while, or it could have been but moments, he realised that he was hurting all over. In fact, he was in agony.

‘H.’ He tried to make a sound but could only manage a shallow exhalation. The beginnings of a word. Did he imagine that he could open and close his right hand?

His throat was too dry. The sound would not come. Flickering movement in his fingers was not an indication that he was any less of a dead man than before the rain started to fall. But somehow, from a place within him that Derek de Falco had not hitherto been aware was there, he found a certain resolve. Courage, even. And he started to roll himself over.

This barren, frost-hard field in the rolling, bucolic Garden of England seemed to him a dream. A bad dream, with the whine of a high speed train a tantalisingly, potentially navigable distance away, carried to him on the wind. Eurostar, plummeting through the British countryside, carrying mainly business travellers and ordinary people celebrating big birthdays and milestone anniversaries from the cat-shit exoticism of Paris into the grubby bustle of London, with its Maccy D wrappers and ubiquitous Starbucks. Too skint to do the Orient Express, but a two-star mini-break, staying in the crappiest of the arrondissements, had done nicely. Every single one of those bastards was unaware that a middle-aged man in ripped, brown Farah slacks with one missing loafer and a blood-stained shirt lay dying some two hundred feet away.

The outlook was bleak to say the least. But somehow, Derek dragged his anaemic, plundered body a few metres. He had to get to a phone. Somehow attract attention to his plight and speak to Sharon. Tell the police everything he knew and all that had befallen him.

Dr Doolittle had turned out not to be a doctor at all. He was just some murderous little turd; a lowly pawn, mopping up blood and shit for an altogether more important piece on the chess board. Derek had asked too many questions and found himself checkmated, by means of what looked like a boning knife in the belly. And the shoulder. And the leg. And the chest. If his death – for he was certain he would die of exposure now, if nothing else – was written up in one of the red-top newspapers, they would definitely use the words, ‘frenzied attack’.

Those hands that Tony the driver possessed, hidden inside the ridiculous leather gloves that had never in a month of Sundays come from a normal shop… Those hands had, indeed, turned out to be killer’s hands, which had closed around his throat like unforgiving vices. Stabbed and strangled in a derelict industrial estate in the middle of nowhere. Nice move, Uncle Giuseppe. The girl on the gurney should count herself lucky. At least she was unconscious.

In the end, the only act of self-preservation available to Derek de Falco had been to play dead, which he had managed with sufficient aplomb as to have been driven out to this field and dumped.

In the sputtering imagination of a dying man, he saw his beautiful girl, Tinesha. Surely, if he did nothing else in this wasted life, he had to get to her. Had to warn her that she might be in danger because of her old dad’s stupid, flapping mouth. Gleaned some strength from this need.

‘Help!’ he cried. Weak voice. Bruised, constricted throat. Vomited with the effort. Had he been hit over the head as well? He hadn’t the energy to lift his hand to check for blood on his scalp.

Just crawl, Derek
, Sharon said.
You ain’t nothing but a fucking cockroach anyways. So, do what you do best and crawl.
A hallucinatory hologram of Sharon, standing in that field of dead wheat stalks. Admonishing him, arms folded, though she was tucked up and hopefully safe in the club, grappling with empty barrels of bitter and disrespectful punters.

Perhaps he had advanced fifty feet. Perhaps five. It was hard to tell with the jaws of pain closing around him. Then, a dog barked in the distance and scampered closer, closer until it was sniffing this unexpected lump of meat in the field. Barking like a nutter. Deafening noise. It licked his wounds with a warm, wet tongue. Snuffling around his crotch. Cocking its leg and peeing on the gaping slash that formed a grim smile in his abdomen. Where was its owner?

A whistle some way off. The dog bounded away. Derek remained undiscovered.

In time, as the storm clouds rolled in, and the light began to fail in earnest, he made it, against every odd, to the train track. Now, somebody would definitely find him. People walked their dogs along train tracks, didn’t they? And perhaps the Eurostar driver would see him in those powerful headlights. It was still light enough.

Telling Sharon would be the last thing he did. God was keeping him alive for this purpose and this purpose only, he realised. A sort of redemption.

Overhearing the conversation between Tony and Dr Doolittle, as they had driven him to the field, he now knew everything. The police in Britain were trying to solve the serial murder of illegal immigrants. The police in Holland were on the hunt for a surgeon with an interest in satanic ritual killing. Now he, Derek de Falco, knew the name of that perpetrator. His attackers had said it in the car. He would remember it as long as there was breath in his body, so that he could tell it to Sharon. Then, he could die with a clear conscience.

But no ambling dog-walkers came. A magpie alighted on him and pecked at his leg, then flew off. Presently, the rumble in the earth beneath him said the train was coming, causing rabbits to scatter from their burrows beneath the tracks. Sound followed the reverberations, and finally the two pinpoints of strong light heralded the train’s approach proper.

Stand up, Derek. Let the driver see you.

With the last of his breath, a blood-soaked Derek scrambled to his feet and waved his arms to and fro.

Please see me. Please stop.

The driver of the Eurostar, bound for St Pancras, did see what looked like a zombie, covered in blood, standing on the tracks, waving its arms. He balked. Sounded the horn. Slammed on the brakes. And came to a stop almost a quarter of a mile beyond the place where Derek had stood. Derek’s body travelled on the front of the train, glued to it by forward momentum alone, for almost half of that distance before being flung like a savaged rabbit into the sidings. By the time the driver found him in the driving rain, he was conclusively, finally, very dead.

CHAPTER 62

Kent, on a train, then Amsterdam, mortuary, later

‘This is the 11.05 Southeastern high-speed rail service from Ramsgate to St Pancras…’ came the man’s voice over the Tannoy. He spoke with an estuary twang that reminded George she was still far from the comfortable home turf of South East London, though they were, at least, on their way.

She stretched out and yawned. Scratched her crotch surreptitiously and readjusted the seam of her jeans. Sipped from the still-hot latte she had bought at the station. So far, so good.

Except the train slowed to a halt and it transpired that the man had not finished his announcement.

‘Hello ladies and gentlemen. I’m sorry to announce that due to an earlier…er…fatality on the line involving the Eurostar, there will be a delay to this service. On behalf of Southeastern Rail, I’d like to—’

‘Shit! Typical! The one time when we’re over here together and we’re on a bloody time limit!’ George said, talking over the bad news. She turned to van den Bergen. Studied his face. ‘You’re quiet.’

His smile gave nothing away. ‘Just tired.’

She could almost see turmoil like latent heat coming off his skin. Perhaps now was not the time to probe. He had seemed happy enough only half an hour ago when he had been inside her. George had her own demons to wrestle with – the most pressing of which was the spectre of a meet with Letitia the Dragon later that evening.

Letitia. With her fat neck and her ‘Leroy this and Leroy that’ and how it was all George’s fault that Letitia had had to move to that shithole, three-bed box in Ashford, losing her family and her nice little fiddle at work. Letitia had a selective memory. She chose only to remember George as that grassing little cow who sold her mum up the fucking swanny. Convenient that Letitia forgot her own divisive role in all that had come to pass.

The train shunted forwards and began to pick up speed. On George’s phone were three missed calls from Ad and a text, saying he would do anything to make her happy. This was the really onerous demon with which she must inevitably grapple, but he would keep for now.

She was just about to Google the woman Sharon was planning on introducing them to, when van den Bergen’s phone rang.