Marnie Riches - The Girl Who Broke the Rules

‘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, together with the oversized red-brown sideburns. ‘It’s a building site. Empty house, right? Exactly the sort of place you could commit a murder and be left undisturbed.’

‘Not really,’ Marie interjected. Examining the camera carefully with latex-gloved hands. Blushing. ‘Valeriusstraat is quite a busy road.’

‘Correct,’ van den Bergen said, narrowing his eyes as he peered into the attic room opposite. ‘Houses either side with multiple occupancy.’ He strode to the wall and knocked on the brick. ‘Party wall.’ Turned to Elvis. ‘Get statements from the neighbours. If someone heard screaming or shouting on the other side of this wall, I want to know about it. There must have been some commotion.’

‘Unless the victim was gagged,’ Kees said, dusting the chisel on the floor with grey powder, using a fine bristled brush.

Thinking about the two disembowelled women, van den Bergen reflected on the fact that Strietman had found hallucinogenics in their bloodstream. ‘Or drugged. Most importantly, though, there are signs on the safety fencing marking this place out as a building site. Men coming in here every day to work. These Polish guys are renowned for their work ethic. They start early. They leave late. Whoever left all this shit lying around was either stupid or had intended for it to be discovered.’

‘No body, though,’ Marie said. ‘Just a blood-soaked mattress and what appear to be murder weapons. How could you get a butchered corpse out without being seen?’

Van den Bergen shrugged. ‘If you can get a mattress into a building site unseen, you can get a body out, too. Our perp—’

‘Or perps, plural,’ Kees said.

‘Or perps, if there are two involved, are stealthy and strong. Let’s see if another body shows up in the next couple of days. Or maybe this mess will be linked to our second Jane Doe, as Elvis has so astutely suggested.’

Kees lifted a print off the chisel, using a strip of clear tape. Held it up to the light. Smiled triumphantly. ‘Got one! It’s a beauty, too. Clear as a bell.’

Below, the sharp honk of a horn alerted van den Bergen to the forensics van. It pulled in between the builders’ vehicle and his own Mercedes. More honking, warning the group of rubber-necking neighbours and passersby to move it.

The scientists started to clamber out. For a fleeting moment, van den Bergen was hopeful that Marianne de Koninck would be leading them. How long could norovirus last after all? Surely she was back on the job.

His hope soon dissipated when he spotted Strietman’s head from above. Noticed with some satisfaction that, despite his relative youth, the pathologist’s hair was starting to thin. A circle of pink scalp, the size of a one cent coin, had already punctured the thicket of blond, short curls. Van den Bergen ran his hand through his own hair and grunted with approval. One thing he had inherited off the old man that he could be thankful for, at least. Even if his hair had turned snow white by his late thirties, he had plenty of it.

As the forensics team donned their protective jumpsuits over their own clothes on the pavement below, van den Bergen walked away from the window in disgust. Sighed heavily.

‘Bloody Strietman. Again,’ he said.

But before van den Bergen could go into disgruntled overdrive, Marie looked up. Her eyes seemed to glitter. Her florid face was even more flushed than usual.

‘You’re not going to believe what’s been caught on this camera, boss,’ she said, breathless, wearing a crooked smile that was somewhere half way between bemusement and horror.

George gave a half-hearted smile for the camera. One of Ad’s arms territorially around her shoulder, one extended. His face pressed up against hers. She could feel his stubble burn against her cheek. He smelled of Aunty Sharon’s soap. Ad clicked the button on his phone, capturing the two of them in a selfie on the Stansted Express. Made to kiss her but she had already shuffled squarely into her seat, leaving more space between them than was strictly acceptable for lovers.

‘What do you think?’ he said, showing her his photographic efforts.

It was a photo that showed only hangdog disappointment in his brown eyes. Boredom in hers. ‘Yeah. Nice.’

‘Something to remember this trip by.’

In her head were layers of competing voices. Good George apologised profusely for what she knew must have been an utterly soul-destroying trip for her boyfriend, the highlight of which had been Aunty Sharon’s rum-laced fruitcake. Bad George just wanted to tell him to sod off. Sod off for turning up unannounced. Get lost for thinking she’d drop everything to play happy housewife. Shove it up his arse, if he thought he could demand sex at a time when she was utterly overworked, overwrought and so overexposed to the sex industry that all she had the inclination to do was masturbate furiously while thinking of someone she definitely shouldn’t have been thinking about.

‘You going to come over to see me soon?’ Ad asked, studying his ticket, as though her answer was written there.

‘When I get some money together. Yeah. Course.’ Van den Bergen’s name was on the tip of her tongue, as usual, but she was careful not to mention him. She eyed the table. It was covered in somebody else’s crumbs. Held her breath and counted to ten. There was nothing with which she could wipe the surface. ‘Let’s move to a clean table,’ she said.