Marnie Riches - The Girl Who Walked in the Shadows

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 one of the cabins in search of shelter. A cough, as the intruder stood on the other side of the flimsy wooden door. Trying the handle. Up, down. Up, down. The door opened inwards.

Van den Bergen brought the Thermos down heavily on a man’s shoulder.

‘Ow!’ the unexpected visitor cried.

‘You!’

Elvis rubbed the sweet spot where the boss had caught him, wincing at the pain that shot down his right arm.

‘Jesus Christ! It’s only me.’ He eyed the giant flask, wondering fleetingly if there was anything hot left inside and whether Van den Bergen would offer him a drink in this biting cold.

‘What the hell are you doing here, Elvis?’ the boss asked. He looked pale, as though he had seen a ghost. Mind you, he looked like that most of the time these days. They were lucky if they could get him to leave the air-conditioned warmth and artificial light of his office.

‘Kamphuis made me come and get you,’ he said, pulling his woollen hat off, realising that it was sub-zero in the cabin too, and promptly pulling it back on again. ‘I’ve been calling you for the last hour. When you didn’t pick up and didn’t answer the landline at your apartment, I figured you were here.’ He gestured at the mildewed chair that sported a bag of compost on the opposite side of the beat-up table. ‘Can I sit?’

Eyes darting side to side, Van den Bergen towered above him, still holding the tartan-patterned flask, as though he might hit him again should he put a foot wrong.

‘No. What does the fat bastard want? Am I not entitled to some space? Am I some wet-behind-the-ears constable that I should be at his beck and call all the sodding time?’

‘He insists you come back with me to Bijlmer to do door-to-doors. Marie’s doing Internet research on that London Jack Frost case George emailed you the details of.’

‘Insists, does he?’

Van den Bergen was staring at a curling poster on the wall of Debbie Harry from the early 1980s. There was an embarrassing moment where he noticed Elvis watching him ogle the faded, semi-naked star.

Elvis blushed and cleared his throat. ‘Kamphuis said you need the fresh air, boss. And I need the backup.’

‘Get in your car and bugger off back to the station. I don’t need a babysitter and neither do you. We’re men, Elvis. Men!’

‘I can’t boss. Came in a taxi.’

Van den Bergen switched off the fan heater and made that telltale growling noise that always said he was utterly pissed off. It was going to be a long morning.

There was silence in the car as they skidding along the icy patches, going too fast at times.

Elvis wondered if the boss was going to kill him before he made his thirtieth birthday. Not long, now. Mum was going to go into the home for the weekend, so he could have respite and go out for a drink with the lads.

He stared at the side of Van den Bergen’s face. Saw the split veins that had appeared around his nose. The open pores. Dark circles underneath his eyes said he rarely slept. Funny, how he had to guess at what went on in the boss’s private life. Neither of them knew that much about each other after all these years. He knew the Chief Inspector had been having an affair with George McKenzie for quite some time. Knew he popped those painkillers like sweets and disappeared off to sulk or wank or both in his super-shed at Sloterdijkermeer. But that was all. And did the boss have an inkling that his mother was on her last legs with Parkinson’s? That he was the main carer? Probably not. Van den Bergen had never asked.

The flats in Bijlmer were soul-destroying. As Elvis and the boss moved their way through the block, proceeding along landing after landing, climbing from floor to floor, front doors were opened reluctantly by the residents. Hitting them time and again with a fug of exotic cooking smells, unsanitary living conditions, piss, pet-stink, unwashed bodies, carbolic soap. All of life was here. But Elvis had just long enough to glimpse the common denominator of poverty beyond the threshold, before those doors were slammed resolutely in their faces.