Marnie Riches - The Girl Who Had No Fear

‘Are you okay?’ Sophie bellowed, putting her arm around him.

He shrank from her touch. Didn’t want to be that close. Nodded. His mouth prickled. Was he about to faint?

‘I’m going outside,’ he said.

No idea whether she had heard him or not, Greg felt panic draw him towards the exit, as though, like a bad marionette, some puppet-master controlled his movements and impulses with a yank of a string. Too many people. All watching him. Had to get away. Go where it was quiet.

Greg Patterson resolved to walk slowly down towards Club Church, hoping by the time he had got some fresh air, he would be good to go again. Six minutes, Google had told him. At this time of night, the towpath by the Leidsegracht had been clear of other pedestrians. Only the silent hulking shapes of parked cars stood between him and the gently lapping canal.

‘I’m going to be sick,’ he said to the streetlight, leaning against it for support. Wishing, now, that he had asked Sophie to come outside with him. Dry-heaving, he said a silent prayer that this gruesome feeling would pass; that he’d return home to see Mum and Dad and his room in halls and his gaming console and his books and Nana and the dog. Shit. What have I done? Memories of the sauna inserted themselves into his view of the cobbles and the notion that he might vomit on his new shoes. The laughter among strangers. The booty bump. The absurdly hot sex. So much fun that he now regretted having. Idiot.

There was a sound of footsteps. Good. Thank God for that. Greg was hopeful that the night-time stroller might come to his aid, should he need it.

When the still, black water rushed up to meet him, Greg was taken by surprise, not just by the freezing chill but that he had fallen in at all. Flailing his arms, trying to kick his way back up to the surface, he cried out. A muffled plea that only he heard, as the bubbles containing the last of his breath rose uselessly to the surface. His foot was snagged. His lungs were full. And then all was dark.

Sitting in a deck chair on the small decking area by his shed, Van den Bergen relished the warmth of the mid-morning sun on his face. It felt like somebody had inserted a key into the bullet hole in his hip and had tried to wind him up. But aside from the incessant, nagging ache that he had tried and failed to calm with strong ibuprofen gel, he reasoned that he was faring a damn sight better than young Greg Patterson.

Radiohead’s Thom Yorke emoted out of the battery-operated CD player that George had bought him for Christmas. Wailing that the witch should be burned. The melancholy in his voice seemed fitting.

‘How many’s that now?’ he muttered, opening a foil-wrapped pile of ham sandwiches and biting into the top one hungrily. Not bothering to sweep the crumbs off his gardening dungarees. It felt like an act of rebellion. If George saw he was eating without having washed his hands first, he would never hear the end of it. Compost beneath his fingernails from repotting his petunias into larger containers. But not all of his fingers smelled of compost and leafy growth. He sniffed his middle finger and remembered their reunion on the sofa the previous evening. Smiled. Frowned. Remembered he was supposed to be thinking about more serious matters.

‘Five,’ he said to the allium globemasters that had just blossomed into giant purple balls on the end on their thick, green stems. ‘Five damned floaters.’

He belched. Ham played havoc with his stomach acid. Why did he never learn? His throat had been sore of late. Maybe he had oesophageal cancer. Swallowing, he realised it was more uncomfortable than yesterday. Or perhaps he just needed a cup of coffee from his flask to wash down the sandwich.

Checking his phone for an email from Marianne de Koninck, he thought about Greg Patterson’s body on the canal side at 5 a.m. that morning. Leaving George, warm in his bed, to stand in the drizzle beneath the umbrella, yet again. Next to Elvis, who had refused to share the umbrella, yet again. Marianne’s number two, Daan Strietman, had found a lump of frothed mucus and vomit in the boy’s throat. Later, during the preliminary examination at the morgue, he had confirmed recent rough intercourse and blistering inside the boy’s rectum – apparently a common side effect of taking liquid crystal meth anally via a syringe.

Grimacing at the florid pink flesh that hung out of his sandwich, Van den Bergen folded his lunch back up, levered himself out of the chair with a grunt and flung the packet onto the deck chair.

His phone rang. Looking around the allotment, he couldn’t make out where the noise was coming from. Peering inside the shed, it wasn’t on the potting table. Debbie Harry hung limply on the wall, looking clueless. She was no bloody use. It wasn’t in the trug of compost, with his trowel. Ringing. Ringing.

Agitated, he finally realised the phone had fallen into his oversized wellington boot.

‘Yes,’ he barked down the phone, wondering if his blood pressure was dangerously high. Made a mental note to switch vibrate on.

‘It’s Marianne,’ the chief pathologist said. ‘I’ve got the toxicology report back from Floris Engels. He’d taken a cocktail of drugs prior to death.’

‘Oh.’ Van den Bergen sat back down heavily onto his deck chair, inadvertently flattening his ham sandwiches. ‘An OD?’

‘Well,’ she said. ‘He had a lot of the drug G in his system – Gamma Hydroxybutyrate. But that wasn’t what bothers me. He’s also been poisoned by bad methamphetamine, commonly known as crystal meth or Tina. Acute lead poisoning, to be precise, apparently common where lead acetate has been used as a substrate in production in a bad batch.’

Van den Bergen rubbed the lengthening stubble on his chin and gazed up at the treetops contemplatively. ‘What about the others? The kids?’

There was a shuffling of paper at the other end of the phone. ‘I dug out the original toxicology reports from our younger floaters. There was nothing had been flagged apart from drug misuse. But then, they’d been in the water so long and were so badly decomposed, I guess it was hardly surprising the results were inconclusive. Especially given the weight of evidence that it was death by drowning, hence the open verdict. But then, when Floris Engels showed signs of having taken contaminated meth, I had the toxicology on the kids redone. And this time round, we found that they had suffered the same fate. Renal damage was present, consistent with severe lead poisoning. I’m sorry. I don’t know how Strietman missed it. Sometimes, you just have to be looking in the right place.’

‘Any other similarities starting to emerge?’ he asked. Perching his glasses on the end of the nose. Unable to read the instructions on a packet of seeds, thanks to a muddy smudge on his left lens.

‘Floris Engels and Greg Patterson had both had rough anal intercourse prior to death, given the abrasion. But there’s nothing to say it was forced. If they’d been taking drugs …’

‘It’s likely they’d been partying. Right.’ Fleetingly, Van den Bergen tried to imagine what young gay guys might get up to in a liberal city that was full of possibilities. He grimaced as his haemorrhoids twitched involuntarily. Wondered if he was due a prostate check. ‘And Ed Bakker?’

‘I couldn’t tell you about Ed Bakker, because of the tissue damage from being in the water so long, but witnesses say he’d been to a gay club, hadn’t he?’ There was a pause on the line. She was chewing something over. Something unpalatable, clearly. ‘Maybe Maarten Minks is not a million miles away with his serial killer theory, Paul. What if someone is spiking gay men on purpose and then shoving them into the canals?’