Marnie Riches - The Girl Who Walked in the Shadows - A gripping thriller that keeps you on the edge of your seat

Twenty minutes felt like an hour. Her phone still yielded nothing of note. Only nagging emails from civil servants, asking if she would be handing her study in on time. Pointed correspondence from a fellow criminologist who had it in for her. Professor Dickwad Dobkin at UCL. Complaining that he knew about her additional research into trafficking. Saying that he had started something almost identical, eons ago. Long before her. Of course.

‘Get fucked, Dobkin,’ George said, as she searched for her train ticket.

‘Sorry?’ The ticket inspector asked, swaying side to side in the Pendolino carriage, as it pelted through the crystalline hills of Staffordshire.

‘Nothing,’ George said. ‘Talking to myself. Too much work. Not enough play.’

The ticket inspector, a sweaty-looking man, despite the unrelenting cold, gave her a disinterested half-smile.

It was true. Her deadline loomed large. Today’s encounter with Donna had been one of her final interviews. She would have to start typing it up tonight. Perhaps even do a little work on her laptop now, on the train back to London.

Discipline yourself, George.

Except her phone pinged. Probably Aunty Sharon.

Fuck discipline.

Peered down at the screen.

Ah, finally.

But it was not the sort of message she was hoping for.

Come to Amsterdam a.s.a.p. Paul.

‘What do you want me to do, boss?’ Elvis asked, pulling his woollen hat down low over his ears, so that bushy red-brown sideburns were only just visible. His breath steamed on the air. Red nose and streaming eyes made him look peaky. But then, these days, Elvis always looked like he never slept. Experience could do that to a detective, even one as dopey and idiotically optimistic as Elvis.

With his protégé seemingly transfixed by the sight of his mobile phone, Chief Inspector Paul van den Bergen hastily slipped the device back into his pocket. ‘Get photos of everything,’ he said. Felt like he had been caught doing something forbidden, though texting George in a work capacity was hardly a misdemeanour. Since she had qualified, she worked for the Dutch police on a freelance basis often enough.

He turned to Marie, who looked as though she was wearing every garment her wardrobe held. Some ugly hand-knitted cardigan on top of a coat. Purple clashed with the red colour of her hair poking out beneath two hats, by the looks. Bet she smelled worse than usual beneath all those layers. But today, Marie had abandoned the warmth of the office and her Internet research in favour of dusting for prints. After the best part of a year spent working on missing persons cases, she had been desperate to get out. They all had.

‘You called forensics?’ he asked her.

‘Yep. Marianne said she’ll be about half an hour.’ Marie blushed. Crouched near the dead man’s head. Scowled at his blood-spattered face. ‘He looks familiar.’

‘They always look familiar round here.’

Gazing down at the cochineal Rorschach pattern that surrounded the dead man, Van den Bergen put his hand on his stomach. Though he could not feel the lumpy scar tissue beneath the thick wadding of his anorak, he pressed his long fingers there, tracing the line of the scarring from sternum to his abdomen. Like this dead man at his feet, he had lost almost his entire life’s blood. A good two years ago now. Time heals all scars, right? Bullshit, it did.

Elvis clicked away on a digital camera. Blue plastic overshoes over his snowboots. Behind him, the remaining high-rises of Bijlmer loomed. Once Amsterdam’s arsehole, a few colourful panels on the front of the renovated blocks and winter wonderland conditions made it only marginally more enticing than it had been in the dark days. Better than Van den Bergen remembered the area when he was a young cop. But still an armpit of a locale, crushed under the weight of second-rate infrastructure and drug-pushers that came out at night like cockroaches.

His phone rang. He was praying it would be George.

‘Van den Bergen. Speak.’

It wasn’t her. Fat bastard Olaf Kamphuis was on the line, barking at him for information, though why he was getting his big pants in a twist over a run-of-the-mill Bijlmer stabbing was beyond him. Power had clearly gone to his bulbous head, now he was Commissioner. Hands-on micromanagement also had extended to grabbing Van den Bergen by his balls tightly and squeezing.

‘I want you off the missing persons bullshit,’ Kamphuis had said, sitting in his new desk chair, cranked even higher than the last one, in an office, even roomier than the one he had amply occupied before. Sweat had blossomed darkest blue around his armpits through the ceremonial glad rags. ‘You’ve had long enough to recover,’ he had insisted, huffing, puffing, trying to blow Van den Bergen’s house of cards down. ‘Get back on active service or it’s early retirement for you, you lanky streak of piss.’

How the hell had it happened? Pushing forty-seven now, though he felt nearer to sixty. Two of the biggest cases the Netherlands Police had ever solved, down to him and his team. But trumped yet again by a nemesis in a high-stakes game he thought he had cleaned up in long ago. Commissioner, for fuck’s sake. Olaf Kamphuis was his boss. Again! There was no God. And with his unimpeachable ally, Gus Kosselaar retired and replaced as Chief of Police by that other infernal arse-carbuncle, Jaap Hasselblad, Van den Bergen’s life had become even more of a misery.

As Van den Bergen leaned over to scrutinise the dead man’s face, stomach acid shot up into his gullet. The flames of digestive purgatory the only source of warmth in that unrelenting cold. He straightened up with a click from his hip. Six feet five of broken man. How he longed for the comfort of his office and those stone cold missing persons files now.

He grimaced. Pointed to the gun by the dead man’s hand. The scabs around his mouth and nose. Leather jacket, too flimsy for the cold. Covered in stains. Jeans, yellowing at the knees. Greasy blond hair, plastered to his scalp, now encrusted with blood as was his left hand, where perhaps he’d grabbed at his neck. Bleeding out in arterial spurts across the base of the children’s slide. Then, on the ground in a foetal position. Leaking his last into the pretty red Rorschach. Butterfly. Humming birds. Flower.

‘Crystal meth head. Or mephedrone, is my guess,’ he told Elvis. ‘This is just a drugs killing over some two-bit stash or a botched deal. Our guy pulls a gun on some other junkie arsehole. A bit of a fight breaks out. He gets stabbed in the neck, judging by the looks of the wound and the blood loss. Perp runs away.’

Elvis nodded. Continued to take photos, as Marie dusted for prints on the semi-automatic pistol that lay inches away from the dead man’s blue-grey right hand.

Van den Bergen looked around at the spectators who had started to gather. Rubber-necking, though the scene had been cordoned off with fluttering police tape. Those residents who didn’t stop to watch and pass comment on the body – opinions voiced loudly, scathingly in a variety of languages; dramatic hand gestures and beseeching invocations to Allah - shuffled by in the national dress of their country of origin. Women in full burka. Men in salwaar kameez, wearing overcoats over the top. Indonesian. Ghanaian. Somali. Surinamese. All bundled up in this freakishly bitter northern European climate.

‘Did anyone see anything?’ Van den Bergen asked the crowd. It was a public enough place, for Christ’s sake. Right by a brown monolithic block on Sean MacBridestraat. In the kiddy-park, at that! At the foot of the snow-bound slide. Overlooked by hundreds of people, potentially. ‘Anyone?’