The Girl Who Broke the Rules. Marnie Riches

had not been his intention to let that out, and especially not in that piqued tone. An indicator of how he felt about Karelse. Nearly four years on, and his resolve to keep his misgivings about George’s boyfriend to himself had morphed into regular, semi-naked scorn.

      ‘Stop! Before you start, just bloody stop!’ George had warned him.

      So, he had quickly changed the subject and told her about the first dead girl, then the gruesome discovery of the second earlier that evening. An equally troublesome scenario, where a woman’s mutilated body had been found naked, dumped in a public place. And yet, nobody had seen a thing. Not yet. She didn’t have enough face left to make an ID possible. Strietman had bleated on about ritual sex killings yet again. Worse still, Hasselblad agreed.

      ‘What are the similarities?’ George had asked.

      Van den Bergen picked at his toenail and recalled the second victim’s body on the slab. ‘Unzipped from neck to vagina. Disembowelled. Organs removed. Signs of rough sexual intercourse and lacerations on her back commensurate with a whipping. Similar scarring on her breasts that suggest maybe the same guy had given her a breast augmentation as performed the caesarean on the first girl.’

      At the other end of the phone, it was easy to detect George’s immediate interest. The silence and quickening of her breath said it all. Two unidentified women. Mutilation. Probable sexually motivated murders. After all these years, van den Bergen knew which buttons to push to get her intellectually fired up. He certainly knew better than that loser, Karelse, who wouldn’t know finesse if it was a silk-clad fist, punching him in the face. That mamma’s-boy had no mastery of the subtle art of manipulation. You needed years of wisdom to really get a feel for that. If he could only get George hooked on the case, perhaps she’d come over. Visit. Stay a while. But her silence continued for a couple of beats beyond what might pass for curiosity.

      ‘You think you can lure me over there with this?’ George asked.

      Not so subtle. How the hell did she know? Maybe he was losing his touch.

      ‘I’m not trying to lure—’

      ‘I’m hanging up, Paul. Go see your doctor.’

      ‘But George, you could work as a profiler. You always said you’d love to do that. We could be a team.’

      ‘You don’t need me to solve this case! You’re a pro.’

      ‘It’s the perfect opportunity for both of us. Think about it!’

      ‘Tell me you’re not going to try any more funky OD bullshit.’

      He gave her silence this time. Hated himself for not responding. As manipulation went, he knew this was low.

      ‘Hanging up. Night.’

      The line had gone dead and he was left in the oppressive loneliness of his bedroom, clutching the phone to his cheek, as though the smooth warmth of the casing were her face.

      Checking the phone’s display now, in the privacy of the disabled cubicle, he contemplated sending her an apologetic text. Started to type one out with his thumb. Was just about to send it when the door to the top-floor men’s toilet smashed against the wall.

      ‘Boss!’ It was Elvis. Could see his brothel-creeper shoes under the door.

      Van den Bergen closed his eyes. Saw his father, sitting in the chemo chair, hooked up to the drip, reading a well-thumbed thriller. ‘Tell Hasselblad he can bloody well wait.’

      ‘No, boss. You’ve got to come down quickly. We’ve had a call. Some Polish builder working in the Museum Quarter reckons he’s found a murder scene.’

       CHAPTER 15

       Amsterdam, Valeriusstraat building site, later

      ‘The blade of the scalpel is broken,’ van den Bergen told Elvis. ‘Make a note of it. Get a photo, Marie.’

      As Elvis scribbled feverishly in his pad, Marie moved closer on van den Bergen’s right. Pointed the digital camera at the broken surgical instrument, lying on the floor. With a bleep and a flash of light, it was captured, along with the other oddments in this gruesome montage. A woman’s blood-stained thong. A butcher’s cleaver. A hammer. A chisel. A cat-o-nine tails.

      Van den Bergen squatted, close to the ground. Eyeing the blood-soaked mattress. He touched it tentatively, feeling that the wadding that lay beneath the surface was still damp.

      ‘There must be litres of blood on here,’ he said. ‘Someone’s life’s blood.’

      ‘But no body,’ Elvis said. ‘Could this be where our second victim died?’

      Van den Bergen continued studying the mattress in silence. It was one of those heavy, pocket-sprung jobs like his own. Good for a bad back like his. Weighed a tonne. ‘Who the hell would have the strength to get a double mattress to the top floor of one of these old houses on their own?’ he mused. Shook his head and pursed his lips. Slid a codeine from its blister pack in the inside pocket of his coat and deftly swallowed it using only the spittle in his mouth. It lodged in his throat. His heartbeat sped up. He felt his eyes bulge. Last thing he needed was to choke to death at a bloody crime scene. Heartbeat calming slowly, once he had painfully gulped it down. Sixth one this morning and the medication hadn’t even started to take the edge off. Although, he couldn’t remember what the doctor had said about codeine reacting badly with his anti-depressants. What had he said? Racked his brains. Nothing.

      ‘Maybe the mattress was here already,’ Elvis suggested.

      Van den Bergen shook his head. ‘No way. Didn’t you notice imprints in the dust all the way up the stairs? More than just footprints from the builders. I put my money on drag marks. Dust from downstairs on the sides of the mattress. See?’ He used his pen to point out a film of white that had become ingrained in the jacquard fabric of an otherwise filthy, greying mattress. ‘This has been brought in from elsewhere, so maybe we’re looking for two men. A team.’ He turned to Kees. ‘Right. We need to dust for fingerprints. Get on it!’ He turned to Marie. ‘And get forensics to go through the whole place with a fine tooth comb. What’s the ETA on Strietman?’

      ‘Any minute now,’ Marie said.

      ‘Good.’ He gestured towards the video tripod standing tantalisingly at the foot of the mattress. The camera that sat atop it was pointed right where any action would have taken place. ‘Can we get the camera running? See what’s on it, if anything.’

      ‘It’s got to be a recording of the murder,’ Elvis said, excitement visible in the high colour that crawled up his neck and into his cheeks.

      Van den Bergen stood, hip cracking. Thoughtful. ‘Hmn.’ He strode to the window and peered down at the builders, all leaning against the side of their transit van, smoking. Pale-faced. The guy who had made the discovery… ‘What’s the name of the builder who was first on the scene?’ he asked Marie.

      ‘Iwan Buczkowski, boss.’

      ‘That’s right.’ …Iwan Bucz-whateverhi‌sbloodynamewas had thrown his breakfast up all over the floorboards, contaminating the room; not just with his own DNA, but also with the acrid stench of stale alcohol and rancid stomach acid. Van den Bergen hated a contaminated crime scene. He remembered cleaning his father’s bathroom, after the chemo had made the old man sick. He hated vomit.

      ‘You’re growling, boss,’ Elvis said. ‘You told me to tell you when you did that.’

      Van den Bergen swung around to face the younger detective. ‘What do you see of this building from the street?’ he asked.

      Elvis frowned. Fingered the dyed-black hair that he had artfully sculpted into a quiff, earning him his moniker,