Marnie Riches - The Girl Who Had No Fear

George grimaced at the partially decomposed man. ‘Jesus. He’s no looker,’ she said in English. ‘What’s his story?’ Back to Dutch.

Marie pointed with her biro to the empty eye socket on the left-hand side of the man’s face. ‘They actually found him about nine months ago, buried in some heavy clay when they were doing landscaping for the new A2 Maastricht double-decker tunnel.’

‘The motorway bypass?’ George asked.

‘Yes. Exactly. The clay had preserved his soft tissues pretty well but we don’t share a database with Maastricht, so I didn’t come across this record until the other day. Completely by accident and only because I was digging in the right place.’ Marie blushed and hooked her lank red hair behind her ears. ‘Excuse the pun.’

‘And?’ Wearing a scowl, George scrutinised the photo of the corpse. ‘How does that relate to Letitia? I don’t get it.’

‘He’s a DNA match.’

‘Shit. Get out of town,’ George said in English, standing abruptly. ‘It was his eye? All those months ago?’

Marie nodded. She clicked up a photograph of a man who appeared altogether healthier. Alive, for a start. Dark-skinned with brown eyes and his black hair cropped brutishly. A tattoo of an indiscernible pattern on the side of his head, visible beneath the stubble on his scalp. Another tattoo of black roses scrolling around his neck.

‘He wasn’t bad looking,’ George said, raising an eyebrow. ‘What a waste.’

‘Well,’ Marie said, ‘The eye in the gift box in Vinkeles belonged to a man, not your mother. Forensics sussed that straight away. We’ve known it all along. Right? So, turns out, it belonged to this poor chump.’ Marie rubbed her nose, examined the inside of her empty crisp packet and tutted. ‘Nasser Malik. Only twenty. Low-level Maastricht dealer, who knocked about with some really nasty types. A recent addition to the M-Boyz gang, a few of whom got busted in 2009, after a couple of kids died from a bad batch of coke that they’d cut with too much levamisole and bloody scouring powder, would you believe it? Malik had previous for dealing, burglary, GBH and car theft but had always managed to avoid prison, getting off with fines and community service. He went missing about a year ago – reported by his mother, who’s a widowed dentist. Apparently, he’d had ADHD and never did particularly well at school because of it. His brother, Ahmed Malik, is a doctor in Breda but Nasser, the younger son, went off the rails after his dad died.’

George considered the handsome young fool that peered out at her from one photograph and the enucleated, ruined corpse that ogled her with one solitary half-rotted orb in the other. ‘For God’s sake. How tragic is that? What did the coroner say in the report? I presume you’ve pulled it?’

Clicking onto another tab, Marie scanned the text. ‘He’d been strangled. Garrotted with soldering wire, in fact, in exactly the same manner as a couple of gang members had been killed that year, suggesting this was an organised hit.’

Pointing at the screen, George rocked back and forth in her typing chair, mulling over the information. ‘A lot of planning went into that hoax lunch at Vinkeles. Somebody somewhere knew I really wanted to hear from my dad and wouldn’t turn down an invitation if it came from him. Then, the whole Letitia missing bullshit. Then , that gift box containing my worst nightmares, waiting for me at precisely the time and place I’m supposed to be meeting my long-lost Daddy Dearest … who has also either vanished off the face of the earth or is living off-grid, without so much as an electoral registry listing online.’ She inhaled deeply and rubbed her face with her hands, remembering the abject terror she had felt when she had caught sight of the brown eye, staring back at her dully from its box. She had been convinced it was Letitia’s. Only Marianne de Koninck had persuaded her that the DNA had been that of a man of Asian extraction. A mystery. Now solved. George could finally let go of any nagging doubt.

Silence permeated the IT suite, leaving only the buzz of the computer terminals and the bodily funk of Marie.

‘This Nasser guy was bumped to order,’ George said, knocking against her full lips with a balled fist. ‘Whoever is behind this wanted his eye to put the frighteners on me. A grand gesture to make me think they’d got to Letitia. Probably a shit metaphor to say I’m being watched at all times.’

‘Well, some sick bastard has definitely got a hard-on for you,’ Marie said, nodding. ‘And it’s not going to be your dad, is it? No parent would torture their child like that.’ She sighed, stroking a framed photo on her desk of a pink-cheeked baby boy.

George tried to visualise her mother. The memory of that sour, over-made-up face. False-lashed eyes that were always on the lookout for slights and perceived inequities; never seeing joy in the small things or kindnesses or good intentions of the people around her. Letitia in the fur coat that made her look like a mountain lion, throwing cheap Chardonnay down her fat neck in Wetherspoons. Running her talon-tipped fingers, painted the colours of the Jamaican flag, through those caramel blonde hair extensions that she’d bought with her bingo winnings. That memory was beginning to fade, now. Gloria Gaynor at Christmas TK Maxx. That was the Letitia George remembered. That was the Letitia she wanted to remember. Not the bewildered, punctured woman who had been given the diagnosis that she had only a few years left, thanks to her sickle cell anaemia and pulmonary hypertension.

‘She’s out there, somewhere,’ she told Marie, acknowledging a heaviness in her heart that wasn’t just indigestion from eating Aunty Sharon’s patties too quickly on the flight. ‘Either buried in a shallow grave or chained to a radiator in some basement, annoying the shit out of her kidnapper.’ She gave a chuckle, devoid of any real humour. For years, she had opted to eschew the company of Letitia the Dragon, but now, with the element of choice having been stolen from her, she felt short-changed by a family that only really consisted of her aunty and her beloved, cantankerous arsehole of a partner, Van den Bergen.

Turning her attention back to Nasser’s blackened, hollow eye socket on the screen, she nodded. ‘Some evil wanker has orchestrated all of this with great skill and forethought.’ Sucked her teeth. ‘It must have been The Duke. That Gordon Bloom bastard denies it every time I go to see him in Belmarsh, but, of all the people I’ve pissed off, who else would have had access to guys with previous, that could be just whacked to order for their eye colour?’ She groaned with frustration and shouted, ‘Christ on a bike!’ in her native tongue.

‘What about him?’ A man’s voice coming from the threshold to the IT suite heralded the arrival of an interloper. A familiar, deep rumble. ‘Last time I heard, he’d been arrested for cycling under the influence. Gave us some bullshit about turning water into wine.’

George turned around as Marie furtively, hastily clicked her tabs shut. Van den Bergen’s long frame filled the doorway, leaning against the architrave with those long legs crossed in the way that caused a knowing, wry smile to curl the edge of George’s mouth upwards. ‘Are you trying to make a terrible joke in my general direction, Paul van den Bergen? Because you should pack that in, right now!’ She drank in the sight of him, noting the changes from the past few weeks since he had visited her in Cambridge. Looking thinner, healthy, well. Better colour from being outdoors, now the gardening season had started.

Rising to embrace her lover, she could smell on him a whiff of formalin from the mortuary and the remnants of VapoRub beneath his nose as she kissed him fleetingly on his dry, neglected lips. The difficult old bastard turned his head briskly to offer her his sharp-sand hard stubbled cheek, but in his grey hooded eyes, she spied a glint of mischief. ‘What was so urgent that I had to abandon my book launch to come over?’ she asked.