The Girl Who Walked in the Shadows. Marnie Riches

came out to supervise my Sociology finalist!’

      ‘So?!’ Sophie reached out, stroked her hand, and started to play footsie with her under the table, which, in snow boots, felt more like a football tackle than flirtation.

      The sight of ketchup under Sophie’s fingernails made George pull her hand away. She pressed her lips together and smiled awkwardly, looking everywhere but at this five-foot tall propositioner with mesmerising eyes. ‘I’m in a relationship. Sort of.’

      ‘Sort of?’

      ‘On and off.’

      ‘Well, then?’

      George had agreed to coffee. That was all.

      The walk back to her place, up the steep incline of Castle Hill and along the Huntingdon Road, took place in anticipatory silence. But the noise in her head was unbearable. She’s going to expect more from me. I haven’t slept with a woman in years. I wasn’t looking for this. I don’t even fancy her. I love Van den Bergen. But he’s an arsehole and treats me like an afterthought.

      ‘You okay?’ Sophie asked, as they stood on the front doorstep to George’s shared house.

      ‘It’s a bit messy,’ George said. ‘The communal area, I mean. But my room’s a clean space, so you’ll have to take your shoes off before you go in. I’m a bit funny about …’

      Key in the lock. The flickering light on the wall of the living room said the other housemates were watching TV. George bypassed them and led Sophie up the narrow Victorian stairs to her room.

      The door was open. The lock bust. Splintered wood on the architrave.

      ‘Shitting Nora!’

      Key still uselessly in hand, George walked in and surveyed the mayhem. The room had been ransacked, top to bottom. Bedclothes on the floor. Contents of drawers strewn all over. Pot plant spattered mess across the carpet. Typing chair upended. Desk drawers flung hither and thither. She ran over to her desk. A space where the laptop had been.

      ‘Fuck!’ she shouted, staring at Sophie with desperate eyes. ‘My research is gone!’

       CHAPTER 10

       Amsterdam, Sloterdijkermeer allotments, then, an apartment block in Bijlmer, 4 March

      ‘For Christ’s sake! When will it bloody rain and wash this crap away?’ Van den Bergen shouted, trying to manoeuvre his car into one of the only spaces at the allotment complex that had been shovelled clear of snow over the past few weeks. Not shovelled well enough though. There had been another downfall overnight, covering the icy rectangle with virgin snow that creaked in complaint when compressed. Now, compacted beneath the tyres of his rear wheel drive E-Class Mercedes, the snow caused him to skid back and forth, back and forth, as if in some kind of retribution for being sullied.

      ‘Fuck this!’ he growled, slapping the steering wheel in frustration. He realised the car was at an awkward angle but had had enough and clicked the brake button on. He turned the engine off and stepped outside into -22°C. Perhaps it was lunacy coming here in this weather. But he needed to get away from the station. Here, at the otherwise empty Sloterdijkermeer allotment complex, he could sit in his wooden cabin in a state of suspended animation. Pretend just for an hour – or, as long as he could bear in these ridiculous Arctic temperatures before hypothermia set in – that everything was alright. That life was normal. That he still had a measure of control over his own destiny.

      Carrying the portable heater in one gloved hand, his Thermos flask and an Albert Heijn supermarket bag containing a fat file in the other, he trudged through the malign winter wonderland. More than two feet deep. It was heavy work. He eyed with suspicion the icicles that hung everywhere from sheds and cabins; he noted the sheer volume of snow that now sat on top of every roof, threatening to slide off at any moment and engulf a hapless victim below.

      Snowmen leered at him from other people’s patches. Jolly characters, easily identifiable as figures of fun on the day they were created by gardeners’ children and grandchildren. Now, covered with yet more snow, they had become ghostly amorphous blobs, with drooping carrots for noses. Their sinister pebble smiles with those crow-like raisin eyes made Van den Bergen feel like he was being watched.

      ‘Stop being a prick,’ he told himself.

      He kicked aside the snow on the step. Grey-white sky threatened another blizzard of bloated flakes. Better not get stranded here. Better keep an eye on the time.

      He unlocked the cabin. Got the heater going. Sat uncomfortably in the padded salopettes that were relics of the time he had taken Tamara and Andrea skiing in Chamonix, just before the divorce. A last ditch attempt at happy families. He cracked open the flask, steam rising in whorls on the freezing air. Sipping at the oily coffee, laced with a little medicinal brandy, he pulled his phone out of his pocket, and re-read those poisonous emails. There were so many of them.

       Jesus can see your soul, Paul van den Bergen. You are a weak man. You are the scum of the earth. There’s a special space reserved in purgatory for you because you failed.

      This was just the latest missive from what appeared to be his bank. When the emails had first started to arrive, he hadn’t been sure they weren’t part of some phishing scam, encouraging him to phone a bogus hotline and give all his financial details away. Then, as the contents of the emails became increasingly unpleasant, wishing him dead, saying the Devil was coming to claim him, he realised someone had created a false email address in order to spam him with pseudo-religious loathing. But the bogus Verenigde Spaarbank was not the only source of electronic woe.

       I know where you live, you fucking paedo-loving pervert. I hope you get raped up the arse and beaten to death by those other useless pigs you work with.

      This had allegedly been sent by a government official in the Hague, whom a little digging revealed to be an entirely fictitious person. Email account-holder unknown.

      After a month or two of filing the hate mail into a folder, he had shown the first few to Tamara, not daring to let George see them for fear of her protective outrage and apocalyptic desire for revenge.

      ‘You’re being trolled, Dad,’ Tamara had declared. ‘I’d say go to the police, but you are the police! Get Marie to track down the sender and get whoever it is arrested. Or ignore it. Don’t feed the trolls, right? It’s your call.’

      Sipping from the plastic cup, scrolling through this virtual bilge, he realised he had made a conscious decision to do nothing, hoped it would all go away over time … assumed he wasn’t actually under any kind of real threat. And today, he had come to his allotment to do a little thinking. Perhaps there was something in this hate mail. Perhaps the senders were tied to the case that Kamphuis had ordered him to archive under S for stone-cold dead. Or maybe he was just weak and a failure. Either way, the words gnawed continually at his conscience so that he had endured yet another lonely, sleepless night, resolving to come to the cabin at first light and go through the missing persons’ case notes yet again.

      Repositioning his slightly foggy glasses on the end of his nose, he took out the hefty A4 lever arch file he had taken from the archives. Started to leaf through the list of suspects he had interviewed in the beginning. Were there any fervently religious types among them?

      Outside, he heard creak, creak, creak, growing closer. Louder. Someone else was mad enough to come to the allotments in this infernal cold. Van den Bergen realised he was all alone out there. He hadn’t spoken to a soul yet that morning; had deliberately turned the ring off his phone to avoid Kamphuis’ nagging.

      Footsteps trudging up his little path. Creak. Creak.

      Raising the bulk of the Thermos over his head, he stood behind the door. Wondering if some bum was trying to break into