The Girl Who Broke the Rules (40 page)

‘Just clarify for the tape, Daan,’ he said, pointing to the microphone. ‘Did you kill Magool Noor, Linda Lepiks, an unidentified Filipino man, Ewa Silbert and three unidentified African men in Britain?’

‘No. I bloody well did not and neither did Iwan Buczkowski. We went out to dinner, went clubbing and spent the night together on all of those dates you’ve been haranguing me about. We’ve got witnesses. There. I’ve said it. Happy now?’

‘Very. Thank you.’ Banged his chest. ‘I think you’ve just cured my stomach acid.’

CHAPTER 75

South East London, 14 February

‘The car’s waiting for you, Ms Williams-May,’ the man from the funeral place said. All dressed in black, looking like an emissary of Death himself.

Aunty Sharon nodded. Lifting her sunglasses just enough to dab her eyes with a large man’s hanky. Poignantly embroidered with a blue D. Collecting her handbag from the worktop. Peering inside, though it wasn’t clear she was actually looking for anything. George felt sure she was just going through the motions. Keep busy. Keep it together. By her side, Tinesha and Patrice clung to one another. Weeping openly, the poor bastards. Fat tears rolling down Tinesha’s cheeks. Reluctant moisture brimming in Patrice’s eyes – still bereft, though Derek had not been his father.

Leaning against the fridge, Letitia stood with Leroy. Arm in arm, with her flashy ring glinting under the shitty hundred-watt light, as though this were the time and the place to flaunt her romantic success.

‘You looking well smart, love,’ she said, straightening Leroy’s tie, though it didn’t need to be straightened. Reaching up on tippy toes to kiss his chin, almost taking his eye out with her downmarket department store fascinator. All petrol-coloured feathers and something akin to close-weave chicken wire. Looked like she’d mugged a cockerel.

Leroy on the other hand looked uncomfortable in his suit. A plain, ageing man with cropped hair and a double chin. Dry skin around his mouth where he had shaven and acne on his neck.

‘You suit that hundred-percent silk tie and matching hanky I got you.’

‘Yes, love.’

‘Lilac’s your colour. Goes with your skin, innit?’ Letitia looked over at her sister, who was pulling a thin black veil over her face. ‘Shame you not got a fella to help you through this, Shaz. I’d lend you mine, but this fine brother’s taken, I’m afraid.’

George sucked her teeth dramatically. ‘You’re a fucking piece of work, do you know that? You really think this is the time or place to pull that sibling rivalry bullshit, when they’re all grieving? Why have you got to be such a bi—’

Aunty Sharon grabbed George’s arm. ‘Leave it, darling. Let’s go. Derek’s waiting.’

Uniformed police stood on the steps of the church. Legs akimbo. Kevlar vests bulking them up. Menacing. Two German shepherds obediently watching at their masters’ sides, smelling fear in the mourners. Reminding those who filed in wearing suits they might have purchased only for court appearances and funerals, that they had come to say goodbye to a murdered man. Little Derek de Falco, who had tried to run with the big boys and got left for dust to dust. Protecting their witness, Aunty Sharon, who might never have been more susceptible to Mr Gera’s unsubtle art of persuasion to shut her fucking fat black mouth, should he show up in person to pay his disrespect.

George had been careful to modify her appearance. It wouldn’t do to provoke déjà vu in the wrong people.

Inside the church, though her feet were warm in her incongruous winter boots, the rest of her shivered in her best dress, normally worn with heels to formal dinners at college, where she would sit making the sort of chit-chat only academics made, dining on salmon en croute, prepared en masse, rehydrated to eating-point thanks to sauvignon blanc in copious quantities. Those were happy occasions for George. Derek’s funeral was not.

Strippers in their daytime clothes lined the pews, there. Dermot Robinson, looking sombre near the front in a double-breasted black overcoat. Thin black tie. Row after row, filled with wailing women of Italian descent, dressed in black, all mourning the loss of their cousin/brother/uncle/great uncle/second cousin, twice removed/something or other by marriage. Elaborate floral displays packed into every nook. Blood red roses spelled ‘Derek’. Crysanths in white paid tribute to ‘DAD’. Lilies from the relatives who had made a bob in the restaurant trade. Got themselves a bit of class. Unlike the girls from Skin Licks, who had clubbed together to get their Uncle Giuseppe a teddy fashioned from carnations, wrapped in purple ribbon. There was barely room for the priest to stand in his pulpit. Late-comers, genuflecting before the crucifix that hung over the altar; a forlorn-looking Jesus, clearly unhappy with the thorns and the nails and the general ennui that came with simply hanging there, dying painfully to save a bunch of ingrates who wouldn’t know a moral existence if it came up and slapped them in the face with five thousand wet kippers.

Poor tragic Jesus, George thought, presiding over a travesty of biblical proportions. Looked down at the ornate silver coffin beneath his bleeding feet. Filled with Derek, whose body the police had finally agreed to release, now that the post mortem had been performed. Poor broken, dead Derek. Kept fresh for two weeks in an industrial fridge, so the police could make sense of his multiple injuries, concluding that he had been stabbed to death in a frenzied manner and strangled, before being hit by Eurostar, effectively affording Derek three modes of violent death in one – a hellish unholy trinity. Kept fresh, so that he could be interred in the good South East London soil inside his hideously expensive casket; bid
arrivederci
by his hundreds of friends and relatives to the off-key performance of ‘Ave Maria’ and ‘My Way’ by a semi-famous Bermondsey club singer, who was wearing an evening dress with the BHS label showing at the back. Kept fresh, while George returned from the other side of the North Sea, where she had left Ad sobbing beneath the departures board in Schiphol, promising her they could patch things up and that he would overlook her transgressions. Poor, forgiving Ad. How like Jesus he was. And how like Judas van den Bergen had turned out to be.

‘Dearly beloved, we are gathered here to mourn the passing of Paul van den Bergen from the life of Georgina McKenzie. Though they were soul mates for some four years, spending long hours together, engaging in the intimacies of portraiture, gardening, failure to cook anything edible and crime-solving, the illegitimate consummation of their relationship displeased the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. A fiery throng of vengeful angels did cast Georgina into purgatory, where she has been tormented by the sight of her one-time friend consorting and cavorting
in flagrante delicto
with a long-limbed succubus of patrician origin.’

‘I didn’t realise you even liked Derek,’ Letitia said, shoving several screwed-up pieces of toilet roll into George’s hand. ‘Why you so broken hearted for?’

‘Fuck off, Letitia,’ George whispered loudly, blowing the hair from the auburn wig she was wearing out of her stinging eyes. She stared in disgust at the toilet roll. Threw it back into her mother’s lap.

‘I didn’t blow my nose on it, you cheeky cow,’ Letitia said. ‘It’s clean.’

‘Nothing that comes from you is clean.’ She winced and rubbed her hands on the skirt of her dress. Wiped her tears on the back of her arm. ‘And I don’t expect you to understand empathy.’

George put her arm protectively around Tinesha, who flanked Aunty Sharon on one side. Patrice attempting badly the stiff upper lip of a solid young bruv on the other. Being a rock for his women folk, where Derek de Falco, his errant, weedy not-even-really-stepfather, had let them down.

‘Let it out, Tin,’ George told her cousin. ‘It’s okay.’

Bawling, bereft Tinesha was almost certainly, like George, weeping for the things she had thought she deserved but which had been cruelly snatched away from her, though they had only ever, at best, dangled tantalisingly, just out of reach.

‘Let us pray,’ the priest commanded his flock.

But the mournful Our Father murmurings of the lapsed-Catholics and non-believers in that congregation may never have reached God’s ears. Despite the police presence outside, there was a commotion at the back of the church. The creak and boom of the door. Slamming open and shut. Screaming. Turning around to see some black boy in a hoodie, running down the aisle. A gun in his hand. Scanning the congregation for someone. Police too slow to let the dogs off their leashes. Made it to the front row, where he stood, momentarily nonplussed. Wide-eyed and panting. Waving the gun to and fro between Sharon and Letitia.

Sharon screaming uncontrollably. Tinesha shrieking. Letitia open-mouthed.

‘Which one of yous is Sharon?’

‘I ain’t no fat-arsed fucking Sharon,’ Letitia said. ‘Little dickhead.’

‘Police! Drop the weapon.’ The men in black, advancing slowly.

In the sliver of a second before the boy pulled the trigger, George saw the muscles in his index finger tighten. Watched, as his nostrils flared. Biting his lip in concentration. Turning the gun to the side, like he was some badass, riding shotgun in an outlandish Compton drive-by, instead of being a kid who had been bunged a ton or maybe even a monkey by Luigi Gera to ice Derek’s loud-mouthed, sort-of widow.
Brap, brap. You is dead, yeah?

Without any of the consideration she might give the situation if she had more time, George grabbed the underside of the pew and high-kicked the boy’s hand. Caught him squarely with the steel toecap of her boot. But the gun went off.

CHAPTER 76

Amsterdam, hospital, later

Marie glanced into the side-room where Ahlers was recovering. Van den Bergen was seated on one side of the bed, finally taking Ahlers’ statement. Elvis, on the other with the recording equipment. She could hear the boss’ rich, deep voice even through the glass. She had been listening to the interview as it had unfolded.

‘So, you were approached by a consortium of traffickers, after your public fall from grace.’

‘Yes. That’s right. The go-between was an Italian man. But he wasn’t the big cheese. He made it clear from the outset that he worked for someone higher up the food chain.’

Ahlers’ croaky voice. Propped in bed, looking pale and as though he might have lost a good half stone over the last fortnight, thanks to his new diet of slops.

‘Can you give me the big cheese’s name?’

‘No way.’

‘Do you know it?’

‘Yes. But I’m not about to blab that.’

Then, Elvis’ voice. Thin and stringy. Irritated. ‘For Christ’s sake, Ahlers! You promised you would tell us everything in return for protection. And need I remind you we’re talking about a drastically reduced sentence in a
minimum
security facility? Stick to your side of the bargain, will you?’

But van den Bergen had continued undeterred. ‘Can you give me the name of the Italian, then?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’ Elvis asked.

‘Is it Luigi Gera?’ van den Bergen said.

Ahlers had been shaking his head a little too energetically for a man who was recovering from having had an oesophageal stent inserted into his throat. ‘How do you know Gera?’

Van den Bergen had crossed his long legs and treated Ahlers to one of his grim, downturned smiles. ‘Perhaps you’re not the only one who’s had enough of being the fall-guy for this network of scumbags.’

Marie had known, of course, that van den Bergen had been referring to McKenzie’s aunt, over in London – a barmaid in a strip club, no less – who had been sitting on information about people traffickers that, had she spoken up sooner, could have saved the life of her ex-lover – the manager of said titty bar. What a classy family that McKenzie was from. No wonder she was so uptight about cleanliness. It must have been difficult coming from the upper echelons of British society and having to mingle with the unwashed, clog-wearing Dutch proletariat.

Van den Bergen speaking again: ‘We believe Gera and his men are near the top of this trafficking ring and that the murderer – yes, we know it’s not you, so stop gargling spit and making like you’re going to asphyxiate – is another surgeon.’ He leaned forward, his triangular nose almost touching that of the Ahlers. ‘Do you know who the surgeon is?’

No answer. Rapid, noisy breathing and more gurgling. Marie thought Ahlers sounded like her mother’s blocked waste disposal unit. A frustrated sigh from Elvis.

‘Okay, who bought the baby from Magool? I want a name.’

Ahlers spoke. But Marie failed to hear the name. The biggest, baddest looking beast of a man she had ever seen loomed into view at the end of the corridor. Clutching a gun. A long, thin silencer on the end. Moving quickly towards her. Twenty paces. Ten. Five. She did not even have time to draw her own service weapon. A blow against her temple with the butt of the weapon sent her reeling to the ground. Instantly dizzy and vomiting over her hands as she tried to push herself back up.

Dimly, she saw the man enter Ahlers’ room. Point the gun, as van den Bergen fumbled to draw his Walther P5. Elvis frozen in shock. Blip, blip, blip. Three muffled shots fired. Men down?

‘Help!’ Marie shouted. ‘Help me! Kees!’

The man with the gun emerged from the room. Stopped by her head. Huge feet in smart leather shoes. She hadn’t the energy to look up at him.

‘Keep your mouth shut,
puttana
,’ he said, before he kicked her sharply in the face.

CHAPTER 77

Soho, London, later

‘What do you mean, you want to work?’ Dermot Robinson asked, sipping brandy at the bar of his club. Packed with de Falcos and the gritterati of Bermondsey, tonight, laughing and knocking back Jägerbombs behind a cordon for VIPs. A rare visit from the Porn King himself, but seeing as it was Derek’s wake…

‘Just give me the fucking mop and bucket, Mr Robinson,’ George said, pulling the irritating wig from her head. Unleashing her own hair beneath, which she had pinned into a tight bun. ‘Please.’