Marnie Riches - The Girl Who Broke the Rules

It began with auto-erotic scenes, where the woman played mischievously to the camera. Slowly peeling away the PVC. But with a series of obvious edits, the action degenerated quickly into something that was more akin to a horror film. The woman was on her back. Naked, spread-eagled and strung by her wrists and ankles between the posts of the iron bedstead. Subject to all manner of sadistic acts – all perpetrated by someone just off screen, using the sort of implements one would find in a builder’s toolbox – and culminating in dismemberment with a hedge trimmer, which, despite having seen the film four times already, still made Elvis squeak and squeeze his eyes shut.

Marie turned the camera off. Placed it on the dash. Exhaled heavily. Hooked her red hair behind her ear and started to finger a scab on her cheek.

‘What do you think, Marie?’ van den Bergen asked, turning to his almost perfectly composed passenger. ‘You’re my internet-nasty expert. Looks very much like a recording of a murder. Snuff porn, maybe? Could the mattress in the footage be the one upstairs in this house, minus the sheet?’

‘Whatever it is, it’s disgusting,’ Elvis said, pulling a box of cigarettes out of his breast pocket. ‘Just…just…horrible.’

‘Not in here!’ van den Bergen said, eyeing the cigarettes venomously. ‘Let Marie speak.’

Marie blushed. Tugged at the turtle neck of her green jumper. ‘Well, it’s certainly not a recording of either of the Jane Doe murders we’re looking at. Both of those women were at least left their limbs.’

Van den Bergen scrutinised Marie. How the hell did this girl even sleep at night? She had never once taken up the force’s offer of counselling, to help her do the job she did. He sighed. It was a damned crummy profession they were in. Briefly, he felt a pang of nostalgia for his time as a fine art student. Ancient history, now.

‘I need to see this on my big monitor, boss,’ Marie said. She bit her bottom lip; looked through the windscreen at the builders, who were now talking to Kees. ‘It’s certainly not continuous footage and if it is snuff…’ she inclined her head in the direction of the building site ‘…it definitely hasn’t been recorded in that attic with a camera just stuck on top of a tripod. There are close-ups, for a start. From different angles. Someone was walking around the room while they were filming. Maybe there was a second camera man.’

Elvis leaned forward again, blasting van den Bergen with a whiff of peppermint. He chewed gum noisily. Clack, clack, clack. ‘What’s the bet another body turns up in the next couple of days? I think Hasselblad’s right. We’ve got a serial killer on our hands.’

Van den Bergen grimaced. ‘You sound like a Friesian cow chewing hay, do you know that?’ But though Elvis irritated him, his focus did not waver from Iwan Buczkowski. Speaking on his phone. Leaning with one arm above his head against the van. ‘Somebody was behind the lens. Some depraved bastard wielded those tools and that hedge trimmer. The print Kees lifted belongs to someone.’

Just then, Kees walked around the bonnet of the car and rapped on the glass, driver’s side, with the edge of his notebook.

At the push of a button, the window slid down with a satisfying whir. ‘You knock on my car like that again, and I’ll knock you all the way down to traffic detail,’ van den Bergen said. ‘What do you want?’

Kees leaned in. His putty-pallor was gone now, and had been replaced by flame-cheeked enthusiasm – almost palpably buzzing. ‘Been quizzing those builders a bit more. Getting chatty, like.’

‘And?’

‘I’ve got a hunch, boss, and you’re gonna wanna hear it.’

‘Let me go,’ George pleaded, folding the wrapping paper from the jaunty poinsettia plant she had brought her supervisor into tight, ever-shrinking squares.

‘Absolutely not,’ Sally replied. She carried the gift gingerly, as though it were radioactive material, and plonked it into a ceramic plant pot holder at the side of her computer. Murmured something inaudible that had a sour tone to it. Turned to George, hooking her battleship-grey, bobbed hair behind her ear. ‘And don’t think you can bribe me so easily! I see through your pot-plant charms, young lady.’ Her pointing index finger was nicotine stained, but her fingernails were the same bright red as the plants’ leaves. She sat imperiously in her typing chair. Queen on her academic’s throne. The large, oak desk wedged a physical barrier between them, leaving George feeling like she had been abruptly banished from court.

George blushed. Bit back her irritation. Crossed and uncrossed her legs. ‘Come on, Sally! It’s a bona fide request. An Overseas Institutional Visit. You had no problems with me doing the internship in Westminster. You’ve never taken issue with me divvying my time between here and—’

‘That’s entirely different. It’s London. The two things are not comparable. Especially not in your bloody situation.’

George quietly mused that it was a good job Sally didn’t know about her gig as a cleaner in a Soho strip club. The shifty Italian chaperone for those young pole dancers whom Derek had been clucking around had only asked her for a double whisky and a private lap dance. But he had got pretty nasty when she had turned him down. No, her brush with a man who was clearly something far more sinister than just an ageing wide-boy was exactly the sort of thing Sally didn’t need to hear.

Sticking her finger defiantly through the rip in her jeans, George searched all the admissible arguments filed away in her brain as to why Sally should sanction overseas travel. She downloaded the sure-fire winners. ‘I study the effects of pornography on violent offenders, for Christ’s sake! I’d be a visiting scholar in a city that’s one of the biggest players in Europe’s porn industry. Amsterdam, man! My funding body would agree immediately.’

‘No, I said. And don’t “man” me!’

‘But think how cool it would be, if I could just hop on the overnighter to Prague to do some qualitative research there as well. Porn was totally banned in the Czech Republic under Soviet rule. Now they’re going mental with themselves. Imagine how revealing that would be about the effects of pornography on sex crimes. A breakthrough study with your department’s name on it!’ George was willing Sally to relent. For Ad’s sake. For van den Bergen’s sake.

‘Nice try, you persistent little bugger! The phenomenon has already been studied, as you well know. Diamond, Jozifkova and Weiss. I know you’ve done your homework, so don’t pretend to be a fool and don’t try to take me for one, either.’

George threw her hands up in the air. Stood and walked over to the mullioned window that looked onto the frosty courtyard below. Her breath steamed on the air. ‘Jeeesus! I’m a boring PhD student doing dry academic research. What the hell could happen to—’

Behind her, Dr Sally Wright slammed her hand down on the desk top. ‘I will not authorise it. Do you hear me? Because I cannot authorise it. You’ve been told to stay put. After last time. Your track record for staying out of trouble is not exactly unimpeachable, is it, Ms McKenzie?’ She looked over the top of her winged glasses, fixing George with a gaze so unyielding that she felt silenced like a rebuked child. ‘That is my final word on the matter.’

George folded her arms, flung herself back onto the chaise longue and dug her short nails deeply into the plush velvet covering. Stared into the glowing embers of the fire that heated only two feet directly in front of it, leaving the rest of that cavernous old room feeling like a morgue. ‘But if anyone can swing it, you can.’ She kept her voice small. Flattery was the only weapon left in her arsenal, though she knew it would not work.