said.
Magool clutched her shoulder bag across her chest defensively. ‘I said I never wanted to see you again.’
‘Look, it’s a storm out there. It’s warm in here. I’ll drive you home. You’re wringing wet.’
‘No thanks. I’ll walk it.’
‘Come on! Don’t be ridiculous. I’ve got heated seats.’ Placatory tone. Friendly eyes. The driver’s face and body language were benign. ‘Get in, for God’s sake!’
By now, she was quaking with the cold. Beyond uncomfortable. Despite sensing that the driver’s concerned gesture was off key, Magool walked round to the passenger side. Opened the car’s heavy door and registered the sting between her shoulder blades, as she sank back into the luxurious, leather heated seat…
The snow had stopped falling by the time Magool Osman returned to the red light district. Her makeshift bed was a bench beneath the windows of the Old Sailor Café Bar at the junction of Oudezijds Achterburgwal and the cobbled alley of Molensteen. Fittingly opposite the Erotic Museum, and ironically within spitting distance of her compatriots in their relatively safe, red-lit booths. But she had been dropped off after her final ordeal in the small hours, when only the water rats and the ghosts of Amsterdam’s Golden Age roamed those streets. The darkest hours before an unforgiving, wintry dawn.
Just after 6.30am, Magool’s empty eye sockets stared blankly up at Chief Inspector Paul van den Bergen. With a cracking hip, wishing he had had time for breakfast and a coffee before leaving home, he crouched to get a better look at this young woman:
Dark skin. Diminutive stature. Completely naked. Frozen solid, with a dusting of ice that still sparkled like fake diamond dust beneath the harsh light in the makeshift forensic tent.
He thumbed his white stubble in contemplation of her corpse; once a thing of beauty, now defiled and incomplete. It was as though the girl had been unzipped from her throat to her pubic area, revealing all the fragile matter that lay beneath. Chest framed by the white stripes of her ribs, which had been split down the sternum and levered apart. Where once her lungs must have breathed in this sharp, Amsterdam air; where once her stomach might have digested a moreish meal; where once her kidneys and liver might have filtered celebratory wine…now, there were but gaping holes, frozen blood and a mere suggestion of the life and hope that had once inhabited such a young body.
Elvis, one of van den Bergen’s two most loyal protégés, moved the flap of the tent aside. He entered the scene, wearing white plastic overshoes.
Van den Bergen rose to his full height. Noticed the alarmed grimace on his subordinate’s face.
‘Stop gawping, Elvis,’ he said. ‘Show some fucking respect for the dead.’
‘Sorry, boss.’ Elvis covered his nose, though the icy conditions meant there was nothing unpleasant to smell. ‘What do you want me to do?’
‘Is Marianne de Koninck and her team on their way?’
‘Yep. Due any minute now.’
Van den Bergen nodded. Sniffed. Acknowledged the black dog lurking inside the tent, outside the tent, in the warmth of his car. Bearing down on him. Casting a long shadow over everything. He swallowed painfully, prodding at the swollen glands beneath his ears. ‘My throat’s on fire. Think I’m coming down with something. Just my luck, it will be Ebola. Grab me a coffee, will you?’
Van den Bergen withdrew his phone from his coat pocket and brought up his contacts list. Scrolled down to G. There was the number. George McKenzie. He sighed deeply.
Broadmoor Psychiatric Hospital, UK, 17 January
The slight man who sat facing her examined the fingernails at the ends of his slender fingers with an expression of intense concentration. George noted that they were always very clean and manicured. His lank, thinning hair hung sullenly over the shoulders of a faded blue sweatshirt. Dirty dark grey. Starting to recede at the temples. Perhaps his haggard, small-featured face might once have been attractive, given its delicate, perfectly symmetrical bone structure. George shuddered at this thought that had popped, unbidden, into her mind. She averted her gaze from his hands and focussed instead on her pad.
‘Cold, Georgina?’ Silas Holm asked. A smile playing on his chapped lips, he leaned back in his chair and looked up at the tall, arched windows of the Victorian building. The perfectly white expanse of snow-heavy sky outside was carved up by peeling painted bars that stretched ceiling-wards. ‘It’s that period of architecture,’ he said. ‘Terribly draughty because of the lofty proportions, you see. Doesn’t matter how much they crank up the heating.’
His gaze found her face and focussed sharply on it, now. George McKenzie knew this much without looking up from her notes. The prison officers said his manner was always one of an attentive vicar, listening with dedicated enthusiasm to the concerns of his adoring flock. It was unclear, therefore, whether Silas Holm was staring at George because he was genuinely engaged by their conversation or whether he was simply fantasising about what he could do to the only woman he was allowed to see on a regular basis, if he still had his liberty. Either way, the fact that he had noticed her shiver – almost imperceptibly, she had thought – made George feel very itchy. She started to arrange her pens in perfectly parallel lines on the desk. Then stopped herself. Reveal nothing about you as a person or the details of your life, her Cambridge University supervisor, Dr Sally Wright had told her. Not only was Sally the senior tutor of St John’s College – the Big Boss-woman in what was otherwise still a man’s world – but she was also the country’s foremost criminologist. If she didn’t know what she was talking about where handling dangerous psychopaths was concerned, nobody did. Dress dowdily. Be on your guard. Don’t get involved.
‘What’s with the tracksuit?’ she asked, deliberately steering the focus back onto her study subject. ‘Where are your tweeds? What did you do?’
Silas Holm gave a small sigh and a resigned smile. Rapped on his leg with his knuckles. The sound was hollow. ‘What could a harmless amputee like me ever do to warrant such a petty punishment? I ask you!’
‘Well you must have done something pretty bad to have your normal clothes taken away,’ George said. ‘It’s not like you’re in prison.’ She shot a questioning sideways glance at Silas’ nurse, who was seated at the end of the desk, within reassuring reach of this small but deadly psychopath.
Graham’s muscle-bound bulk heaved up and down beneath his T-shirt. Laughing heartily. He smoothed a hand over his shaven head. ‘Dr Holm. You are funny,’ he said. His Nigerian accent was pronounced. ‘You are lucky you weren’t transferred back to high dependency. Poor Kenneth! Why don’t you tell Ms McKenzie straight about your little set-to with him?’
The small-featured face of Silas Holm appeared suddenly sharp, grey, remorseless. His voice was clipped. Words came fast. ‘No. I don’t think I will. And I don’t think it warranted being singled out this way.’ The sneer that turned his mouth into a thin, drooping line and the way that he tugged at the sweatshirt with his fingertips marked out his disdain for the garment and that place. ‘The other men look up to me.’ He shuffled in his seat, straightening his posture. But something within him clicked and the friendly smile reappeared. Locked onto George’s face with those ice-blue eyes. ‘They come to me for wisdom, the men in here,’ he told her.
‘What sort of wisdom?’ George uncapped her pen.
‘I know about the world, of course! These oiks know nothing. Most of them are semi-literate at best. I, however, am a man of learning as you know. Before I was subjected to the indignity of coming to this dump, I was celebrated in my field of expertise!’ He leaned forward and stretched his fingers out towards George’s side of the desk.
‘Back