The Orpheus Trail (18 page)

It was Friday and the space in front of the ticket barriers was already packed with young people, off on their weekend jaunt to hoped-for difference in erotic, exotic Paris while the young French were setting out from their end with the same motive, and there were long queues inside the ticket hall itself.

‘Here’s your boarding pass.’ Hildreth handed me the cardboard strip and I fed it meekly into the machine that spat it back at me as if it was alive, and swung open the metal gate. We flashed our passports at immigration and passed through to the security checks. The whole thing took only minutes. I should have felt some sense of excitement I suppose but I was still too hung over from last night.

‘I don’t think you’ll need much in the way of euros since you’re my accompanying expert but you might feel like buying me a drink some time.’

Obediently I went to the nearest bureau de change.

‘Do you want a drink now?’

‘Why not. What about you?’

I toyed with the idea of hair of the dog but settled for a double tomato juice with ice. As I carried the drinks over to the little round table Hildreth had chosen by a window, the absurdity of the situation, of the pair of us like two people off on a city break without a care in the world, relaxed, smiling even, raising our glasses – ‘Cheers’ – as if we weren’t looking for possible child molesters, murderers, struck me with all its surreal force, with the very banality of our everyday actions
in such a context. The tomato juice tasted salty as blood and I
regretted
my choice even as I downed it.

‘Are you feeling alright?’

‘I suddenly saw the irony of us sitting here calmly with a drink when we’re supposedly in pursuit of criminals.’

‘Ah, well, I’m afraid you wouldn’t make a policeman, Alex. We can’t afford such thoughts. If we’re the sort to have them when we join the force, the job itself sees them off. You’ve too much imagination. You should have had a proper drink to buck you up.’

I thought it best not to tell him my glass seemed full of blood. ‘I had too much last night, that’s my trouble,’ I said trying to put over a more macho image.

‘We’re business class,’ Hildreth said when the Brussels train was called.

‘They were the only seats left, I don’t usually travel in style. We’re booked into the Novotel in Amsterdam. I’m told it’s clean but not fancy.’

The rest of the journey passed quickly, through the flat fields of Flanders that blurred past the window, after the twenty minutes deep under the channel. The air seemed full of the cries of the wounded, and the thunder of Big Bertha being punctuated by the stutter of machine guns. And then we were bowling across the great
continental
plain that stretched from the Channel to the Carpathians, taking in the land of my father and the repro-Gothic of Budapest, the plain that had offered no resistance to the Panzers sweeping east and west. I glanced across at Hildreth. He had settled himself in a corner and was deep in the day’s Suduko grid. It seemed wiser not to intrude and foster my image as hopelessly imaginative and therefore impractical. I took a paperback out of my briefcase and tried to concentrate on the latest research info on the evolution of seaside structures: betting machines, beach huts, Canvey Island bungalows and caravans.

Soon it seemed we were inching through the suburbs of the Belgian capital, the train became a tram gliding between the usual city outskirts of industrial and old housing. At the station we ate a slice of pizza in the bar before boarding the Thalys express to Amsterdam, clean and bright as British transport, however new, never seems to achieve. As
we crossed the border immigration officials, I suppose some kind of police, moved through the carriage checking our passports. Handing back Hildreth’s the official tipped him a kind of half salute, as if
recognising
a European fraternity, that Hildreth acknowledged with the slight nod of a co-conspirator, a freemasonry of the just holding back the barbarians.

‘They’re expecting us at police headquarters,’ Hildreth said. ‘We’ll take a taxi. At least,’ he went on sinking back into the cushioned seat, ‘nobody here expects you to speak Dutch.’

‘Have you been here before?’

‘Oh yes. They’re some of our closest support. The Dutch decided years ago it was better to regulate the sex trade than try to suppress it. That way you know what’s going on so they have decades of valuable experience, especially useful to us, always working in the dark with our hands tied behind our backs. He’s a good bloke the man we’re going to see. Beemsterboer is his name. A bit of a mouthful but you get used to it.’

I stared out of the window at the crowds on the street. Some of them were tourists I thought. The natives themselves stood out taller and heavier. I’d read somewhere that they were now the tallest in the Western world and had outstripped even the Americans. They exuded confidence from their calm demeanour and handsome faces. I thought of an average British crowd with its centuries of industrial poverty and hard labour in mills, mines and warehouses that had left us pale and stunted by comparison, with frames that ran to fat rather than height and breadth like the Dutch men and women. Hildreth himself I judged was about five-foot-eleven and heavily set, a true Wexford.

The taxi wound its way over bridges, along the sides of gleaming straight-edged canals, lined by tall town houses in handsome brick with cut-out scrolled gables and pediments, dodging the ubiquitous cycles ridden by all ages with the aplomb of knowing yours is the right of way. Maybe all the cycling had contributed to the length of Dutch legs.

‘I don’t care for water much myself but I suppose if you lived here you’d get used to it. You’d have to,’ Hildreth said as we sailed over another stretch of canal.

The driver had been silent all this time. Now, he waved his hand
towards the right. ‘Anne Frankhuis,’ he said, before turning left and turning right again. I caught sight of the street name: Elandsgracht, but it carried no resonance except as the possible habitat of a species of African deer. ‘Hoofbureau van Politie, Police Headquarters,’ the driver said and drew up with a flourish.

‘Captain Pete,’ the big man behind the desk in shirtsleeves, stood up and put out his hand, dwarfing Hildreth by several centimetres.

‘This is Alex Kish, Harry. He’s helping me with the background for all this.’

My hand was gripped and wrung. ‘Pleased to meet you. Have a chair. I got your email, Pete. What can I tell you?’

‘We’ve had this series of bodies turning up, young boys, pre or early teens. Forensics say some of them died of suffocation but not in the usual way, manually if you get my meaning, strangulation or a pillow or plastic bag over the face. There are some signs of bruising to the ribs as if the chest was being constricted. And they’re all foreign. I got to thinking of all those dead migrants, illegals, under the base board in the back of a lorry. I remembered we’d once talked about that sort of thing and I wondered if you’d any more experience, any advice you could offer. It’s not something that’s come my way before.’

‘People-smuggling, of course. Amsterdam is a good
jumping-off
place for the US and the UK. We try to intercept them coming through but this is a port where trucks come from all over the world and there are so many ways to hide such illegal cargo. You sent me some pictures. I ran them against our missing young persons database. I think I have a match for one of them. Come. Look out here.’

We got up and went to stand on either side of him where we could see over his shoulders at his computer screen.’

‘This is the one. He was found by the docks wandering. He was probably trying to get on a ship. He spoke no Dutch of course but no English either. It was easy to see he was under the age so he was taken into care. He disappeared from the children’s hostel after two weeks. Either he ran away or he was, what do you say, kidnapped?’

I found myself staring at the boy whose slightly smiling face I had last seen looking down through the glass egg on the beach at Canvey. ‘Do you have a lot of cases like this?’ I felt it was time to justify my
presence, even with something that sounded like the detective
equivalent
of ‘Do you come here often?’

‘Mostly it is girl children from the sex trade. They are promised education or jobs as children’s nurses. What do you call them?’

‘Nannies,’ I said automatically.

‘And the boys? What happens to them?’

‘They pay to come here mostly or their parents pay for a new life. The boys work and save to pay the smugglers. When they get here they are put on the dump, on the streets alone. Sometimes a gay man will find them and taken them in, this is Amsterdam, the gay capital of the world. Or we find them. In Holland we have strict age restrictions. Under sixteen is a child still. We take them into care to deport, like the girl children, and like them they run away.’

‘The poor little sod didn’t get far.’ The anger and compassion in
Hildreth’s
voice surprised me.

‘You think perhaps he died en route to the UK?’

‘It’s a possibility.’

‘And then what happened? How did you find him?’

‘He, his body was made part of an artwork, an installation. It was enclosed in a glass egg.’ I answered for Hildreth.

‘An egg? Like the German artist who uses body parts, dried
foetuses
as earrings. I forget his name.’

‘The difference,’ Hildreth said, ‘is that pictures of those death scenes are finding their way onto the internet. A kind of S&M soft porn.’

‘This we have too but not with dead boys. We have the usual whips and chains. That is not illegal as long as the woman is the age. We also of course find the child pornography. It comes most from Russian or US sites.’

‘Yes, we know about that. This is something different. This mixes in religion and art. Death and decadence.’

‘But if the boys are already dead? Is it even a crime? How would we prosecute it? Might it not be seen as censorship? Here in the
Netherlands
it might not be possible.’

‘We should be able to get them on something.’

‘Even in England? Obscenity? Now if you could find the
peoples-
mugglers
and stop them. But it is very difficult. They have many other
outlets we believe like drugs, money laundering, as well as the
worldwide
sex trade both virtual and physical. I wish you luck. If we can help let me know. In any case keep in touch. We too would like to stop this traffic.’

‘You may have wondered why I got a bit worked up there,’ Hildreth said when we were outside on the pavement. ‘Let’s find a bar. I could do with a drink. There must be an O’Reilly’s Irish house somewhere.’

We wandered up the road the way the taxi had come.

‘What’s that? Is that a bar?’

‘I think it’s a boat museum,’ I said.

‘More water. I suppose we’ll have to cross that bridge.’

I got out the guidebook I had bought at Waterloo. ‘You’ll be pleased to hear we’re close to the Torture Museum.’

‘That’s all I need. What’s that over there? Surely that’s a bar.’

‘De Zothe,’ I read. ‘It seems to mean “the Sot” so it should be okay for a drink.’

‘Come on then.’

‘It’ll all be some sort of lager,’ Hildreth said when we had settled at a table. ‘Belgian’s better than German. I’m a bitter man myself though it’s hard to find now in London. I used to drink Newcastle brown but after a certain age it doesn’t taste the same.’

We ordered two large glasses of local brew that came with a deep head on it. ‘At one time we’d have sent that back saying it wasn’t a full glass,’ Hildreth said, wiping away a foam moustache with the back of his hand. ‘Still it’s better than nothing. I was going to tell you why this business upsets me. I grew up with it you see: religion, art of a sort and sex. You probably didn’t think it to look at me but I was once a pretty little altar boy, lighting the candles, swinging the censor and always overlooked by Jesus’s bleeding heart or Mary in the Lady Chapel, a pale girl in a blue dress with hands clasped waiting to be fucked by an angel. And after the service Father Brown, only that wasn’t his name, would take us back to the rectory, “the rectum” we called it among ourselves, for tea and cake and gropes. We were still in short
trousers
.’ He took a long pull at his beer. ‘We didn’t tell anyone: you didn’t in those days. We just joked about him among ourselves. I’d almost forgotten until all this stuff came up and I found I was getting angry.
It can be a distraction, that kind of personal involvement. In theory, coppers shouldn’t feel it but sometimes we have to admit we’re only human. Any skeletons in your cupboard, Alex?’

‘Only an absent father,’ I said without thinking. I wasn’t sure that I wanted this level of intimacy with Hildreth. And then I thought: he’ll think I’m a mummy’s boy and we know what that means, and added, too hastily and brutally, so that my own words shocked me, ‘And a dead wife.’

There was a silence. Then Hildreth went on, ‘These boys –
Beemsterboer
seems pretty certain they’re smuggled illegals, certainly one at least for sure. It has to be part of a chain that starts maybe thousands of miles away in some foreign country with a kid desperate to get out. Are the smugglers the same people who put up the pictures? Who set up Stalbridge? How do we break into the chain? We can check missing persons through Interpol but if the parents think they’ve gone to find a new life they won’t even have notified the boys as missing.’

‘They must be very desperate to start out on such a journey not knowing where they’d end up.’

‘We’re a nomadic species. That’s how we populated the world with just a small group coming out of Africa.’

‘You believe that? What I really meant was: how do you know that, an ordinary copper risen through the ranks?’ He saw through me at once and laughed.

‘I told you I was an armchair archaeologist. Besides I feel it myself. I came south looking for something. Me Dad was a redundant miner, embittered by the loss of his world. But I hadn’t wanted, dared, to step out of my class, think of college and all that. There were no jobs in Blyth. After bumming around London for a bit I joined the police. In those days it was a bit like the army – you didn’t need any
qualifications
. What about your missing father?’