Could see his brothel-creeper shoes under the door.
Van den Bergen closed his eyes. Saw his father, sitting in the chemo chair, hooked up to the drip, reading a well-thumbed thriller. ‘Tell Hasselblad he can bloody well wait.’
‘No, boss. You’ve got to come down quickly. We’ve had a call. Some Polish builder working in the Museum Quarter reckons he’s found a murder scene.’
Amsterdam, Valeriusstraat building site, later
‘The blade of the scalpel is broken,’ van den Bergen told Elvis. ‘Make a note of it. Get a photo, Marie.’
As Elvis scribbled feverishly in his pad, Marie moved closer on van den Bergen’s right. Pointed the digital camera at the broken surgical instrument, lying on the floor. With a bleep and a flash of light, it was captured, along with the other oddments in this gruesome montage. A woman’s blood-stained thong. A butcher’s cleaver. A hammer. A chisel. A cat-o-nine tails.
Van den Bergen squatted, close to the ground. Eyeing the blood-soaked mattress. He touched it tentatively, feeling that the wadding that lay beneath the surface was still damp.
‘There must be litres of blood on here,’ he said. ‘Someone’s life’s blood.’
‘But no body,’ Elvis said. ‘Could this be where our second victim died?’
Van den Bergen continued studying the mattress in silence. It was one of those heavy, pocket-sprung jobs like his own. Good for a bad back like his. Weighed a tonne. ‘Who the hell would have the strength to get a double mattress to the top floor of one of these old houses on their own?’ he mused. Shook his head and pursed his lips. Slid a codeine from its blister pack in the inside pocket of his coat and deftly swallowed it using only the spittle in his mouth. It lodged in his throat. His heartbeat sped up. He felt his eyes bulge. Last thing he needed was to choke to death at a bloody crime scene. Heartbeat calming slowly, once he had painfully gulped it down. Sixth one this morning and the medication hadn’t even started to take the edge off. Although, he couldn’t remember what the doctor had said about codeine reacting badly with his anti-depressants. What had he said? Racked his brains. Nothing.
‘Maybe the mattress was here already,’ Elvis suggested.
Van den Bergen shook his head. ‘No way. Didn’t you notice imprints in the dust all the way up the stairs? More than just footprints from the builders. I put my money on drag marks. Dust from downstairs on the sides of the mattress. See?’ He used his pen to point out a film of white that had become ingrained in the jacquard fabric of an otherwise filthy, greying mattress. ‘This has been brought in from elsewhere, so maybe we’re looking for two men. A team.’ He turned to Kees. ‘Right. We need to dust for fingerprints. Get on it!’ He turned to Marie. ‘And get forensics to go through the whole place with a fine tooth comb. What’s the ETA on Strietman?’
‘Any minute now,’ Marie said.
‘Good.’ He gestured towards the video tripod standing tantalisingly at the foot of the mattress. The camera that sat atop it was pointed right where any action would have taken place. ‘Can we get the camera running? See what’s on it, if anything.’
‘It’s got to be a recording of the murder,’ Elvis said, excitement visible in the high colour that crawled up his neck and into his cheeks.
Van den Bergen stood, hip cracking. Thoughtful. ‘Hmn.’ He strode to the window and peered down at the builders, all leaning against the side of their transit van, smoking. Pale-faced. The guy who had made the discovery… ‘What’s the name of the builder who was first on the scene?’ he asked Marie.
‘Iwan Buczkowski, boss.’
‘That’s right.’ …Iwan Bucz-whateverhisbloodynamewas had thrown his breakfast up all over the floorboards, contaminating the room; not just with his own DNA, but also with the acrid stench of stale alcohol and rancid stomach acid. Van den Bergen hated a contaminated crime scene. He remembered cleaning his father’s bathroom, after the chemo had made the old man sick. He hated vomit.
‘You’re growling, boss,’ Elvis said. ‘You told me to tell you when you did that.’
Van den Bergen swung around to face the younger detective. ‘What do you see of this building from the street?’ he asked.
Elvis frowned. Fingered the dyed-black hair that he had artfully sculpted into a quiff, earning him his moniker, together with the oversized red-brown sideburns. ‘It’s a building site. Empty house, right? Exactly the sort of place you could commit a murder and be left undisturbed.’
‘Not really,’ Marie interjected. Examining the camera carefully with latex-gloved hands. Blushing. ‘Valeriusstraat is quite a busy road.’
‘Correct,’ van den Bergen said, narrowing his eyes as he peered into the attic room opposite. ‘Houses either side with multiple occupancy.’ He strode to the wall and knocked on the brick. ‘Party wall.’ Turned to Elvis. ‘Get statements from the neighbours. If someone heard screaming or shouting on the other side of this wall, I want to know about it. There must have been some commotion.’
‘Unless the victim was gagged,’ Kees said, dusting the chisel on the floor with grey powder, using a fine bristled brush.
Thinking about the two disembowelled women, van den Bergen reflected on the fact that Strietman had found hallucinogenics in their bloodstream. ‘Or drugged. Most importantly, though, there are signs on the safety fencing marking this place out as a building site. Men coming in here every day to work. These Polish guys are renowned for their work ethic. They start early. They leave late. Whoever left all this shit lying around was either stupid or had intended for it to be discovered.’
‘No body, though,’ Marie said. ‘Just a blood-soaked mattress and what appear to be murder weapons. How could you get a butchered corpse out without being seen?’
Van den Bergen shrugged. ‘If you can get a mattress into a building site unseen, you can get a body out, too. Our perp—’
‘Or perps, plural,’ Kees said.
‘Or perps, if there are two involved, are stealthy and strong. Let’s see if another body shows up in the next couple of days. Or maybe this mess will be linked to our second Jane Doe, as Elvis has so astutely suggested.’
Kees lifted a print off the chisel, using a strip of clear tape. Held it up to the light. Smiled triumphantly. ‘Got one! It’s a beauty, too. Clear as a bell.’
Below, the sharp honk of a horn alerted van den Bergen to the forensics van. It pulled in between the builders’ vehicle and his own Mercedes. More honking, warning the group of rubber-necking neighbours and passersby to move it.
The scientists started to clamber out. For a fleeting moment, van den Bergen was hopeful that Marianne de Koninck would be leading them. How long could norovirus last after all? Surely she was back on the job.
His hope soon dissipated when he spotted Strietman’s head from above. Noticed with some satisfaction that, despite his relative youth, the
