CHAPTER 8

       Amsterdam, police headquarters, 9 October

      ‘Where are you with the illegal immigrant situation?’ Maarten Minks asked, sitting bolt upright, as though the chief of police had personally rammed a pointy-ended paperweight up his young commissioner’s rectum. Minks was flushed. He was only ever red in the face when he was wetting his big boy pants with excitement over a development in a case or if he had been given a dressing-down.

      Suspecting the latter, Van den Bergen folded his arms over the maelstrom of griping wind and acid indigestion that raged in his beleaguered stomach. He sighed. ‘Frederik den Bosch is an unpleasant character with some really disgusting views, but you can’t arrest a man for that unless he acts on them. And his record is squeaky clean. His claim that the lorry containing the Syrians was stolen checks out. He called in a theft in a couple of days before the find. Uniforms went and took a statement from his office manager, and Den Bosch contacted his insurers soon afterwards.’

      ‘Was it stolen from the yard?’ Minks asked, smoothing the leather padded arms on his captain’s chair. ‘Surely an international exporter with acreage like that has got decent security. A guard? Dogs? Cameras?’

      Van den Bergen nodded, wondering if he should mention the two old men and their suspicious deaths. But with a little girl dead, the Syrian refugee case was a murder investigation that warranted his full attention. If Minks got wind of the two nonagenarians with their mysterious tattoos, the overzealous stickler for rules would cry conflict of interest and immediately pass the case on to one of the other senior detectives. No way was Van den Bergen willing to let that happen. Especially since Arnold van Blanken had breathed his last only a few feet from where he had been uselessly sitting in the doctor’s surgery.

      ‘Marie has the CCTV footage from Den Bosch’s premises and has yet to find anything.’ He rubbed his stomach and belched quietly, trying to picture the inside of his ulcerated gullet.

      ‘You seem distracted, Paul. Is there anything you’d like to share with me? Are you…’ He leaned forward. ‘Well?’ Minks cocked his head in the semi-concerned fashion of a careerist who often practised being human in front of a mirror.

      ‘What kind of a question is that?’ Van den Bergen asked, straightening in his seat until, thanks to his long torso, he could see the top of Minks’s head. Thinning hair, since he’d whipped Kamphuis’s old job from under Van den Bergen’s nose.

      ‘A suspected heart attack and collapse at the scene of an arrest?’ Minks examined his perfectly clean fingernails. Clearly, the man was not a gardener. He failed to make eye contact with Van den Bergen. ‘Seems your little adventure in Mexico has knocked the stuffing out of you.’

      ‘I brought down the Rotterdam Silencer, and not for the first time!’ Van den Bergen could feel irritation itching its way up his neck. He regarded his superior officer with some cynicism. The smug arsehole was showing signs of turning into his predecessor. ‘I think you might find it physically testing to have anthrax thrown in your face.’

      Minks’s eyes narrowed. He touched the stiff Eton collar on his shirt. ‘It wasn’t anthrax.’

      ‘I didn’t know that at the time, did I?’

      The silence between them made the air feel too thick to breathe. Finally, Van den Bergen relented and spoke.

      ‘I’ve put Dr McKenzie on the payroll. She’s an expert in trafficking of all sorts.’

      ‘For Christ’s sake, Paul! I’m trying to keep departmental costs down. Not let them spiral out of control, and all because you want to play the generous sugar daddy with your girlfriend. Why the hell can’t you co-opt some junior detective from another station? McKenzie’s expensive.’

      Van den Bergen closed his eyes momentarily and swallowed down the scorching poker of bile that lanced its way up his oesophagus. ‘Dr McKenzie is a specialist consultant. Even if I didn’t have a relationship with her outside of the workplace, I’d still hire her. Pay peanuts, get monkeys.’

      ‘I’ve studied your expenditure. It’s gone through the roof in the last few years.’ There it was. Spreadsheet King had been getting his rocks off after hours with a five-knuckle shuffle over some ancient Excel files.

      ‘The world’s a bad place, Maarten, and every year it gets worse. Ten years ago, we didn’t have half the violent trafficking-related crime that we have now in the city. Or at least we weren’t aware of it. You want me to keep solving cases? Then I need the right people. Georgina has come in on our most complex and dangerous cases – multiple murders and organised criminal networks that have had international reach. Can you think of a single one that my team didn’t solve?’ He folded his arms triumphantly. ‘She’s got a criminologist’s insight – something that we lack. Dirk and Marie are the best officers I’ve ever had working for me, but there’s a limit to what—’

      Minks balled his fist, clearly ready to thump the table. His wrinkle-free face seemed even tauter than usual. ‘My priority is to crack down on crime committed by immigrants, Paul. Many influential Amsterdamers are not happy with the city being over-run by ISIS bastards, masquerading as refugees from these far-flung, bombed-out shitholes. The great and the good of Amsterdam are taxpayers, Chief Inspector! They’re our bloody bosses!’

      Listening to the alt-right bilge that Minks was spouting from between those too-tight lips of his, Van den Bergen was suddenly tempted to take the bottle of Gaviscon from his raincoat pocket and neutralise the commissioner’s acidic mouth with it. But he knew this edict had come from on high. It was in the papers daily: panic, prejudice and paranoia.

      ‘I’m not getting into a political point-scoring contest, Maarten,’ he said, standing abruptly. ‘That’s why I’m not sitting on your side of the desk. I’m a policeman. I put the bad guys behind bars. Let me find the bastard who landed a bunch of vulnerable people in hospital and killed a twelve-year-old. If I say I need Dr McKenzie’s help, just pay the invoices, will you? There’s a good lad.’

      Minks scowled at him. Van den Bergen could practically hear the potential responses that were being tried for size in his mind. But he merely gripped the desk, his fingernails turning bright pink; white at the tips.

      ‘You got a mandate to keep illegal immigrants out of the city? Let me find the trafficker that’s bringing them here.’ And whoever’s bumping off those poor old sods with the tattooed necks, he thought, already walking through the door.

      Flinging himself into his desk chair, Van den Bergen growled when the lever mechanism that allowed him to adjust the height of the seat gave way, dropping him to only inches above the floor.

      ‘Damn thing!’

      On the other side of the cubicle, he could hear Elvis sniggering.

      ‘Have you been pissing about with my chair?’

      ‘No, boss. Do you want me to show you how you adjust it…again?’