‘Elvis has questioned the driver again, boss. He’s still refusing to talk. He won’t even give us his name. Won’t have legal representation. Nothing. It’s as though the guy doesn’t exist and nobody has come forward to his rescue. It’s a no-hoper of a case.’
‘With a dead twelve-year-old? There’s no way I’m letting this go. Not on my damned watch.’ Unlocking the car, he folded his long frame into the driver’s seat. ‘Where does Den Bosch live?’
‘In De Pijp. I’ll text over his address.’
‘A multimillionaire living in a shithole like that? I don’t buy it.’
‘It’s an up-and-coming area,’ Marie said.
‘Up and coming means ethnically mixed and full of lefty trendies,’ Van den Bergen said, gunning the car towards the nearest pharmacy. ‘Why the hell would someone like Frederik Den Bosch live in anything other than a white, conservative enclave?’
He rang off, sensing there was considerably more to the owner of Groenten Den Bosch than was immediately apparent. Calling George, he cut through her concerned chatter with a simple instruction: ‘Get ready. I’ll pick you up in an hour. We’re going to De Pijp.’
But first, he planned to take a little detour to the morgue.
Van den Bergen’s apartment, later
‘Fucking arseholes.’
George read the email yet again. The first time, she had digested its contents, open-mouthed and with a thudding heartbeat. She’d had that horrible feeling of dread she’d known on many an occasion, where all the blood drained from her skin, leaving her numb. The second time, she’d read it with a degree of disbelief, thinking there must have been a mistake. She had even called the entitled limp-dick who had signed off on the decision. Perhaps he’d accidentally emailed her instead of some other poor sod, who had put their heart and soul into a piece of work for an entire year or more and who had been looking forward to their travails coming to fruition in print. But no. There had been no error. Now, she reread the curt missive and felt only white-hot fury.
From: [email protected]
Subject: Forthcoming publication of ‘Heavy Traffick’
Dear Dr McKenzie,
I regret to inform you that, owing to a change in publishing priorities at Potestas Books, we have had to look again at our list for the forthcoming year and have come to the conclusion that your detailed study of ‘The traffick of women through Europe, and modern sexual slavery’ is no longer a good fit with our other titles. I am afraid your excellent criminological tome will have to find another home.
With all best wishes,
Timothy L Fitzmaurice MA Oxon
Grinding her molars together, George shook her head violently, tempted to pick up the laptop and hurl it through Van den Bergen’s French doors, onto the balcony. But what good would it do? This was the precarious life of a criminologist, she knew: reliant on her university teaching post to maintain her status and publication prospects as an academic; reliant on publication to secure funding; reliant on funding to continue her research work in prisons. She was just another arse-kissing PhD, trying to make a name for herself in a world where you had to stick your fingers in as many pies as possible to make ends meet, always preparing for them to get burned when you were inevitably kicked from grace into the fires of unemployable hell by some senior academic.
‘Bastards! I know exactly what’s going on here,’ she shouted at the glowing screen. ‘Same shit, different day. She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, twisting the knife.’
Making herself a foul-tasting coffee, using some granules from the bottom of a jar that had seen better days, she logged onto her UK online bank account. Checked the balance: £367.92. And no payday pending, thanks to her own personal academic puppet-master, Sally Wright, who had cut George’s strings after she’d flouted her demands once too often. Controlling bitch.
Feeling disgusted with herself, she logged out, imagining all the things she would say to that duplicitous cow when she next saw her. Do you get off on abusing your position of power, you hatchet-faced old bag? Is this what you had in mind when you signed up to being my mentor and protector? Fucking blackballing the black girl? Rescinding her tenure, leaving her potless, shamed and out in the cold?
In her mind’s eye, she was standing in Sally Wright’s office in St John’s College in Cambridge, shoving the cup of tea back onto her desk, leaving behind a spatter pattern that psychologists might interpret as pure disgust in liquid form. Except Professor Shitbag All-Wrong was now the vice chancellor of the university and was invincible before all but God and her close cousin, Satan.
She clicked the iPlayer link to the breakfast show on which her saviour-turned-nemesis had recently appeared. There she was, with her ridiculous blunt-cut fringe and short bob and those daft red cat’s-eye glasses that only someone thirty years younger with infinitely better bone structure could really carry off.
‘Of course, writing this Sunday Times bestseller about the legendary, enigmatic Duke was a dream piece of research. I’m so glad the layman has embraced the story of this seemingly respectable peer of the realm, who was in actual fact a people and drug trafficker at the head of an international web of deceit.’ Professor Plagiarism had toyed with her big red beads with those nicotine-stained fingers that looked like lumps of amber, grinning inanely with newly whitened teeth at the show’s blonde host, whom George knew Sally hated for nothing more than cultural snobbery reasons.
‘Bitch!’ George yelled at the buffering screen. ‘Ruinous, treacherous bag!’ Unwelcome tears started to well in the corners of her eyes. She definitely needed this holiday.
Just as George was contemplating a sneaky cigarette, remembering she had hidden an emergency pack of Silk Cut behind the cleaning products under Van den Bergen’s sink, a Skype alert popped up on her monitor, informing her that Letitia the Dragon demanded an audience.
‘What the bloody hell do you want?’ George asked, wiping the first rogue tear away hastily.
‘You crying? What you crying for?’ A lo-res Letitia the Dragon exhaled a plume of blue and yellow cigarette smoke towards the webcam on Aunty Sharon’s PC. ‘That miserable old bastard you call a boyfriend dumped you again so’s he can spend time with his precious “girls”?’ A raised eyebrow. Her head at a sassy angle that spelled cynicism.
Steeling herself to show no reaction, George stared down at the coasters on the battered coffee table, lining them up in a perfectly parallel row along the edge of the tabletop.
‘Or is it some case that’s got him all fired up and now he’s pissing in your chips? Or some ailment? Eh?’ Letitia stared into the webcam, making George feel as though her innermost thoughts were being excavated at the determined and brutal hand of a tomb raider. Letitia the Dragon was examining her talons, now painted with stars and stripes; studded with tiny diamanté.
‘It’s nothing to do with Paul. Paul and me are fine,’ George lied, conjuring the memory that played on repeat in her mind’s eye: Van den Bergen jettisoning their date night, only hours after her touchdown at Schiphol airport, in favour of driving down to Tamara’s because Numb-Nuts was playing a gig and Tamara fancied a little help with baby bath time from Opa. George swallowed hard. Distract the Dragon. Tell her about Sally Wright. But she was reluctant to betray the betrayer, since she knew Letitia would love nothing more than hearing George malign the very woman who had enabled