The Girl Who Broke the Rules (41 page)

‘You’re shaking, love. Have a drink instead. Comfort your poor aunty.’ He snapped his fingers at the barman, brought in for the evening from one of the other clubs to give Sharon a night in which to drink to the memory of her ex. ‘Give her a sherry or something, Al.’

‘I don’t want a sherry,’ George said, dragging on her e-cigarette with trembling hands. ‘Thanks. But no thanks. I need to clean. You said you’d keep my job open for me.’

‘I lied. We got a replacement. You’ve been gone too long.’

‘Just for tonight. I need something to do with my hands. You know? It’s all got too much.’ Would a man like Dermot Robinson understand her need to wrestle order from chaos by means of limescale-removing bathroom cleaner and anti-bacterial surface spray?

‘What’s too much? Some black kid shooting the head off a giant flower teddy bear at a funeral? Or you been doing more of that porn studying over there?’

He laughed into his glass. Looked up at the dancers on the stage, naked but for the tiniest of thongs, winding their lithe bodies around the brass pole. His girls. His stage. His pole. Covered in weeks’ worth of neglected sticky finger marks, George could see.

‘You’re going to rot your brain, girl,’ he said. ‘Take it from one who knows.’

‘I’ve been working with the Dutch police on serial murders. Remember I called your PA, Marge, to see if she’d heard of Linda Lepiks?’

He nodded. His mood suddenly sombre. ‘One of my actresses has been missing for over a month. Then, Derek gets killed and I find out the scheming fuckwit has been letting some wops from Rome pimp out their underage whores in here.’ He poked the bar emphatically. ‘
My
fucking club, part of
my
empire that I built in
my
name with
my
sweat and tears. I wanna find my missing girl. If them wops took her, I want them dead. While that girl was working for me, she was my property. Know what I mean?’

And there it was. Ownership. Like her ex-teen-squeeze, Danny. Like his small-time-henchman-turned-big-time-psychopath, Jez. Like Ad. Like her old Dutch tutor, that manipulative sex-pest, Fennemans. Men, claiming ownership over women’s bodies. Nothing like the man she loved – van den Bergen – who steadfastly refused to accept even temporary tenure of hers.

‘You think your mates in the police can find my girl?’ he asked, eyeing George’s heavy boots.

‘Give me the mop and bucket and I’ll see what I can do,’ she said.

He nodded. ‘What exactly you got on your feet? Thought you girls all wore fuck-me shoes with a nice dress. What you call them, then?’

‘Don’t fuck me shoes.’

In the course of the evening, mopping around the feet of the mourners who now didn’t look too mournful at all with a few inside them, George found herself getting more and more irritated by her situation. She hated walking away from unfinished business and she knew that was exactly what she had done in coming home. Derek’s funeral had just been a cover for the deep, deep hurt of having that stupid, lanky old sod reject her, choosing Dr Lovely Legs, Friend to the Dying Children, instead. Hiding in her cupboard, surreptitiously smoking a real cigarette, blowing her exhaled smoke out through the old Vent-Axia fan that sucked the vapours of evil from the club and spat them into a back alley somewhere off Peter Street, she checked her phone. Her in-box was at capacity, piled high like an EU sugar mountain with sickly sweet texts from Ad. Swimming in acidic emails from Sally, like an
appellation d’origine
non
-contrôlée
wine-lake, demanding she make contact. Nothing from van den Bergen. Typical. But here was one from Marie.

Hit-man took out Ahlers this morning and wounded Kees. I got assaulted – fractured cheekbone. VdB told me to warn you to keep a look out for unfriendly Italian faces. Murderers are not Strietman & Buczkowski. Marie.

George emerged from the cupboard, still smoking. Scanned the room too quickly in panic. Scanned it again and again like an unreadable bar code. They were
all
unfriendly Italian faces. The extended de Falco clan had split to sit one side of the VIP area, whilst a gathering of two – Aunty Sharon and Letitia – sat the other. Was a murderer among them?

Cleaning would not expunge this fear so easily, now. Ahlers was dead. A man she had broken bread with was dead. A sleazy arsehole, an abuser of the vulnerable, but a friend of Katja nonetheless. He had welcomed her into his home, perhaps with the intention to fuck her but apparently not with the intention to murder her. And he had been whacked. Like a two-bit informant in a gangster film.

There was safety in numbers. She made a beeline for Letitia’s chicken hat.

‘Where’s your fiancé?’ George asked her mother, swigging from Sharon’s glass of rum. ‘He jilted you the minute he got a whiff of an altar?’

Letitia was all folded arms and heaving breasts. ‘Think you some fucking comedian? He took Tinesha and Patrice home,
actually
,’ she said. ‘Cos my Leroy is well caring.’

‘This ain’t no place for children,’ Aunty Sharon slurred. ‘Not my children, anyways.’ She hiccoughed and downed her drink. Foisted the glass into George’s bleach-dry hands. Gave her a twenty. ‘Get another round. One for yourself. Come and sit with your Aunty Shaz, love.’ Slapped the banquette affectionately. Knocked her hat to the floor but seemed not to notice.

George returned from the thronging bar, her small hands struggling to encase three potent drinks. Downed a large gin and tonic quickly, sucked up through a straw. Gasping as sharp bubbles pushed their way out of her nostrils. Alcohol on an empty stomach. Instant hit. At Aunty Sharon’s behest, chased it down with another. Then a glass of wine.

Letitia eyed George critically through false lashes. Sipping her Tia Maria and green BOLS. ‘Where you been the last couple of hours?’ Sniffed the air near her. With those incongruous caramel blonde tresses that hung like doggy ears either side of her head, she put George in mind of a beagle trying to pick up the scent of the fox’s lair. ‘You ain’t been fucking cleaning, have you? In a posh dress?’

‘What’s it to you?’ George stared absently at the dancers, wondering what it was about sex workers that had particularly appealed to the murderer. Perhaps he came into regular contact with working girls and porn stars. Used their services. Perhaps the killer was here right now. Had a Skin Flicks actress not gone missing? Scanned the drunken, leering faces in the packed club. Most of the women from the funeral had gone now. Mainly men; their tongues hanging out at flesh they hadn’t seen that firm and blemish-free for decades. Felt suddenly uncomfortable as though she were being watched. ‘I needed to do a shift, anyway. All this flying back and forth… Paying towards rooms in three different places. I’m potless.’

‘Better ways to earn money if you’re skint,’ Letitia said. ‘You, of all people, should know that. Or you grown a conscience nowadays?’

‘Stick it up your arse, Letitia.’

‘Bet you could earn ten times what you get, cleaning other people’s shit up, by dancing.’ Winking. Nodding towards a Chinese girl who had just enclosed her thighs around the top of a pole and was now corkscrewing slowly down to the ground. Straight, black hair sweeping the floor.

‘What the fuck would I want to take my clothes off for?’ George asked, palpably drunk. The room spinning. Her head pounding with the beat of the dance music.

‘You scared the punters wouldn’t pay to watch you dance?’ Gave her daughter the once-over. ‘Actually, I don’t think they would. You far too fucking frumpy. I seen them posh white women dressing like you in Waitrose one time. Bet they got some pig ugly, raggedy old undies on under them pensioner clothes. Bet you do too.’

Without fully understanding why she did it, but feeling that festering resentment and the compulsion to shock her mother might underpin her actions, George lifted her dress over her head and strutted unevenly in her underwear and boots to the stage.

‘Come back!’ her mother yelled. ‘I didn’t mean it. Get back here, girl! You making a fucking spectacle of yourself!’

George offered her the finger.

Jeering and applause from strangers.

Go on, you pissed-up cow. Show us your tits. Get them off.

As she spun herself drunkenly around the pole, gyrating in non-matching underwear – budget black pants from M&S paired with an expensive red Triumph Amourette bra – she caught sight of someone besides her mother, Aunty Sharon and Dermot Robinson, all staring at her with horrified expressions. A familiar face attached to an unfamiliar body. Blinked. Gone. She must have imagined it. Now, there were men trying to stuff ten-pound notes into her knickers and Letitia was trying to throw her coat around her. Shouting in patois that she should be ashamed of herself, and had she not been brought up to know better?

‘No. I dragged myself up, remember?’ she answered, barely registering the slap across her cheek.

She threw her dress back on. Marched up the stairs, too drunk to feel the bite of the chill night air as she fell through the door onto the street. Hugged her coat tightly around her, trying to make out the time on the face of her watch. Shouldn’t have had that extra glass of wine. Idiot. Tubes and trains still running, hopefully, though she couldn’t remember what day it was. Stumbling along.

On the train back to Catford, she felt eyes on her. Young lads staring at her wig, worn askew. When they got off, she still had that feeling of being the focus of someone’s attention. Too tired to scrutinise the other passengers thoroughly. She kept losing the thread of her thoughts, the posters on the train riding up the walls and down the walls.

Then, off at her stop. Doors bleeping as they started to close. Someone had got off behind her, jamming their body into the doors at the last minute; forcing them to open again. Bleeping. The train moved off, but she heard footsteps behind her. But nobody in her peripheral vision.

It must have been late, because the streets were graveyard-deserted. Not even a fox. Lights out in all the houses. Frost, settling in jagged patterns on car windscreens. Then, footsteps quickening behind her. A tall figure.

George spun around just in time to see the shining blade of the scalpel catch the light from the streetlamp. Blinding her momentarily. She only glimpsed her attacker – wearing a surgical cap and mask. A hand jabbing down towards her neck. She screamed.

CHAPTER 78

Laren, the Netherlands, 15 February

Lying in a strange bed, in a strange home, waiting for the return of a new lover whom he didn’t love. It was a peculiar experience, van den Bergen thought. The last time he had done something so decadent and foolish, he had been a young man, dating Andrea. Except he hadn’t been burdened by guilt back then. Now, old enough to know better, he was thinking of George whilst luxuriating in Sabine Schalks’ Egyptian cotton bedding. Trying to focus on the quiet, elegant ambience of her country house in Laren, which had been a relatively short drive southeast of Amsterdam.

As if her Koninginneweg house hadn’t been grand enough.

‘You’ve got to go
right
now?’ he had asked the previous afternoon, watching Sabine dress hastily, spraying perfume in the air above her. Masking the fact that she had not even taken the time to shower the scent of him off her body. ‘Seems a little sudden.’

‘Yes. Sorry. I must, must, must be in London by this evening. Business. But you can stay until you’re ready to go.’

‘Why did you invite me over if you knew you’ve got a flight to catch?’

‘Spontaneity,’ she had said. Throwing clothes into a case. ‘Aren’t you glad I did?’ Blew him a kiss.

He picked up his watch from her nightstand. Checked the time. Three o’clock. Hasselblad would haul him over the coals for going AWOL in a time of crisis. ‘Give me five minutes. I’ll be dressed and out of here.’ He had thrown the duvet aside to reveal his nakedness.

Shaking her head. Hastily putting in her earrings. ‘If I don’t go now, I’ll not get a flight. Some things won’t wait, I’m afraid.’ Zipping her small case closed. ‘Now, make sure you lock up this place properly when you go,’ Slipping on her high heels, though she hardly needed the extra height. It was the first time he had not needed to stoop to speak to a woman. ‘Especially after the shenanigans with the building site at the back, I’ve got to be really on the ball about security.’

Van den Bergen cast a glance at the window that faced onto the enclosed courtyard gardens below. Smiled.

‘What were the odds of Marianne’s expert paediatrician living in the very house that backs onto the Valeriusstraat building site?’ He laughed at the curious irony.

‘It was obviously fate,’ Sabine said, grabbing his hand, gathering up her leather skirt and thrusting his fingers into the warm wetness inside her knickers. ‘There. A little something to remember me by while I’m gone. Dior couldn’t bottle that.’

Van den Bergen withdrew his hand. Found himself blushing like a schoolboy.

‘Are you marking your territory?’ he asked. ‘I thought only men did that.’

She smirked and winked. ‘I call it Eau de Sabine. Anyway, listen! I’ll meet you at the Laren house. Three locks. Easy enough. Let yourself in. Get the open fire going. I’ll be back before you know it.’

She had leaned in for a kiss that promised more. Her hair fell onto his face. He drank in the smell of her expensive perfume. But her lips were harder than George’s; her tongue more probing and aggressive. She was a beautiful woman by any standards. And yet, he found her slightly intimidating, despite the fact that they had just made love. Well, less making love – something he had definitely done with George – more, had enjoyed surprisingly perfunctory but adequate afternoon-sex. Still, two different lovers in the same month after years of romantic drought was nothing short of a miracle. On paper, he was a stud. In reality, he was nothing but a love rat, betraying his own heart, as well as his friend. His head was in bits. George had not lied when she had mischievously promised she would ruin him.