Marnie Riches - The Girl Who Walked in the Shadows

‘They’re all selfish dickheads,’ George said, wiping her aunt’s second-hand make-up off her jumper with a hot cloth. Knowing Aunty Sharon knew the score and wouldn’t take it personally.

‘Yeah. Stuff Derek, the stupid bastard!’ Sharon grabbed the kitchen roll off the worktop and blew her nose loudly into a clean sheet. Dabbed gingerly at her eyes. Tugged at her elaborate arrangement of platinum blonde extensions and brightly coloured headscarf until it all came away in one cumbersome piece. Short greying hair underneath. Receding hairline. A little too thin in parts from stress-alopecia, where cheap hair extensions over the years had taken their toll.

George touched her own head of thick dark curls reflexively. Curls which Van den Bergen liked to grip when he kissed her passionately.

‘Anyway. Uncle Giuseppe’s old news. Tell your Aunty Sharon what’s eating you,’ Sharon said, pulling her sizeable bra from beneath her jumper and hanging it over the taffeta skirt. ‘It is laughing gas, in there?’ She gestured towards the living room.

George shook her head. ‘No. She’s the least of it. I keep getting texts from Van den Bergen. We’re on. We’re off. He loves me. He never says it, the arsehole. Up one minute. Down the next.’

‘Thought he was always like that, anyway. Didn’t you say he was depressed?’

George nodded. ‘He’s not been the same since the Butcher. Physically, he’s healed. But mentally … They’ve had him chasing missing persons for two years. Sat on his arse in the office, checking online reports or sat drinking coffee in people’s houses while he does interviews. Insisting he’s not well enough to face active service. But they’ve got him working a new murder, Marie’s telling me. I haven’t spoken to the tosser for weeks because of what happened. Now he wants me over there under the pretence of it being in a professional capacity, I’ll bet. Wants me to hold his hand, more like. He’s full of shit.’

The beginnings of a smile played on Sharon’s chapped lips. ‘Your fellers always end up in bits, thanks to you, don’t they? You’re more high maintenance than that mother of yours.’

A heavy sigh. ‘Actually, I’d be lying if I said she wasn’t doing my head in, too,’ George said, breathing out heavily. Glaring at the door to the living room, behind which her mother slept. ‘She was such a pain in the arse while you were at work. I’m trying to write my research up, and she’s chatting in my ear, giving it, I’m dying. I’ve got pulmonary hypertension – she can barely bloody pronounce it. I’ve got sickle cell anaemia – she doesn’t even know what the fuck that is. You don’t give a monkey’s about me. I can’t deal with it.’

‘Take no notice of that attention-seeking bitch, love,’ Sharon said, frowning and shaking her head. ‘My sister will play every last dirty card in her hand to get what she wants. I’ll believe that “I’m dying shit” when I see it. She’s got some brass neck, threatening to die when she’s strong as a horse.’

‘She’s got some brass neck, kipping on your sofa!’

Sharon was unexpectedly silent. Tremors, rippling across her chin and cheeks, gave the impression that she was about to be sick. Her face crumpled rapidly, the silence giving way to wailing loud enough to wake her sister and her sleeping son. Fleshy hands balled into tight fists.

George was taken aback. Barely knew how to react to this secondary outburst. ‘Try to remember Derek the way he was,’ she said, turning to tend to the tea. Stirring the cup too briskly. Nice and strong. Three sugars and a healthy wallop of rum. That’s how Aunty Shaz liked it after work on a cold night. Set the cup down on a coaster with handle perfectly perpendicular to the edges.

With electric blue nail extensions to match her abandoned dress, Sharon wrapped her hands around the mug, spitting and sputtering her words one by one. ‘It ain’t Derek,’ Sharon said. ‘Not really. I’m crying cos of …’ She flapped her hand in front of her fact, as though she was wafting away unwanted emotion. ‘It’s just … it’s little Dwayne.’ She stared off into the middle distance.

‘It’s not today, is it?’ George asked, glancing at the calendar.

Sharon nodded. Looked suddenly feeble and frail, clutching at the silver locket around her neck. Dimpled chin and downturned mouth. Streams of glistening, sorrowful tears and snot, lit up by the kitchen lightbulb, looked like strange tinsel, two months too late for Christmas.

‘Shit. I’m so sorry,’ George said, sitting by her side and hooking her arm around her aunt’s shoulders. Suddenly her own problems seemed paltry in comparison. Guilt jabbed at the soft spots that were already raw.

‘I told you, didn’t I?’ Sharon said, snapping the locket open, shut, open, shut, revealing the faded colour photo of a small, smiling boy inside. ‘No agony in this world like the pain of losing a child. Ten, twenty years later, them wounds never heal.’

The loud knock on the kitchen window made both of them jump. Nothing to see in the black of the small hours with the light on inside.

‘Who the fuck is that at this time of night?’ Aunty Sharon asked, lurching out of her seat. Grabbing the kettle, still half full of boiled water. ‘I got that back gate padlocked to keep those cheeky little dipshits from down the way out.’

George’s heart thudded beneath her layers. She snatched up a meat cleaver from the magnetized knife-holder on the wall. ‘Stay back, Aunty Shaz,’ she said, switching the light off. ‘I got this.’

Still nothing to see in the empty, snowy yard at the back, except for a washing line supporting six inches of snow on top, icicles, hanging beneath, like a neat row of teeth strung along a cannibal’s necklace. Against the fence were snow-buried wheelie bins, lit by the nearest streetlamp some twenty feet away.

Reaching for the key lodged in the security door, George turned until the lock clicked. Pushed the handle down gingerly, cleaver in her right hand. Pulled the door open suddenly. Blast of arctic wind sucking the air from her lungs. Arm held high ready to slice.

A hooded figure was standing on the back step.

George screamed.

‘Well, well, well, if it isn’t Amsterdam’s prodigal son. Long time, no see,’ Marianne de Koninck said, eyeing Van den Bergen with what was almost certainly a degree of suspicion. ‘Where the hell have you been for the last god knows how long?’

‘Welded to the frost-bitten bottom of my cold case,’ Van den Bergen said, eyes smiling with mirth.

Almost ten months had passed since he had last seen the head of forensic pathology. The case he had been working on simply hadn’t turned up anything requiring forensic examination beyond the initial couple of weeks.

Today, in her scrubs and rubber sandals, with her normally short hair grown into a sleek blonde bob, Marianne looked younger than her forty something years.

‘Have you got a new man in your life?’ he asked, finally daring to unbutton his anorak. The chilly mortuary seemed warm in comparison to the white world outside.

‘Only this poor chump,’ Marianne said. She stared down at the naked corpse of the man who had been found in the Bijlmer play-area. Lit by the harsh, overhead lights, his body was a grim palette of yellow, purple and grey. The red stippling of the sores around his mouth and nose like the brush strokes of an impressionist’s nightmare. Marianne snapped a fresh pair of latex gloves onto her sinewy hands. Straight to business as usual.

Van den Bergen had always liked that about her.

‘What about you?’ she said. ‘You still cradle-snatching? I’m surprised the young Dr McKenzie isn’t with you. I thought you two were joined at the hip since she saved your life.’