Neva is in a dilemma. After investigating Kritta further, and with more feedback from Elbakitten, she’s now certain that Mia and Michael are in danger. She contacts a source that can provide her with a new identity, but before she can go and take the pictures for another passport, she learns on the dark web that the forger she usually uses has been raided. He’s now facing a long time in prison. There are others of course, but the delay will cost so much time that she decides to risk an alternative.
Neva spots a possible candidate laughing and drinking in a riverside bar. The girl is her height and build. She’s in her early 20s and appears to be travelling with a group of people. The main attraction is the heavy goth make-up that Neva can replicate and will help her disguise who she really is on airport cameras. She watches who the girl interacts with and there is no obvious sexual attachment to any of the other members of her party. Then she follows them back to the hostel where they are staying.
After some enquires, she learns they are a group of students travelling from London. It all seems to be falling right into place. The trick, of course, will be to separate her from the others without causing alarm. After that she watches their movements at a distance, looking for the right moment to take the girl away from her friends and get possession of her passport.
After a few days of tracking them, Neva follows the group, a mixture of young men and women, to a known gay bar not far from the red-light district.
Neva has been studying how the girl moves, how she walks. With the right wig, Neva knows she could use her identity. At the club she watches her knocking back shots.
Neva buys herself a drink at the bar and then wanders through the crowd of people. The disguise she’s wearing includes a fake septum ring and heavy sweeps of eyeliner along with black lipstick. Her fair hair is covered with a long black wig that’s crimped and backcombed. She fits in at this club, because anything goes here.
As the evening progresses, Neva avoids contact with anyone in the girl’s group as she observes them, keeping her distance. She plans to make a move on the girl when the moment is right and she’s tipsy enough to make a new friend. Then she notices the girl accepting a drink from a woman in her 40s. Neva watches as they start hanging out together, dancing and drinking – all of which the woman pays for. They end the night with a full-on snog on the dance floor.
Later, the girl departs the club with the woman she’s met. The group of students she’s with barely notice her absence and this tells Neva it’s not the first time she’s abandoned them for a casual liaison. It gives her confidence in the decision she’s made to choose her.
She follows the girl and the other woman back to a hotel. It’s a lot nicer than the hostel the girl is staying in and she seems wowed by it as they enter the reception.
Neva follows them inside and gets in the lift as well. The woman takes the girl up to the third floor of the hotel. Neva exits behind them, and watches to see what room they go to. She passes them and pretends to look for her key for another room down the corridor. When they’ve gone into the room, she heads back downstairs and goes to the bar. There she asks for a bottle of Champagne, two glasses and a bucket of ice. She pays cash and takes them with her.
Back in the lift, Neva returns to the third floor. She makes her way to the service closet, picks the lock and goes inside. As she hoped, she finds one of the maid-service uniforms on a coat hanger. From her purse she removes face wipes and takes all of the make-up off her face as well as the fake septum ring. She removes the black wig, brushes her hair, and ties it up into a messy bun. Then she changes into the uniform.
She pops the cork of the Champagne and pours some of it away. From her bag she removes a flask and she pours some of its contents into the Champagne bottle.
Carrying the Champagne in the ice bucket, and the two glasses, she goes to the door of the woman’s room and knocks. She’s banking on them being too drunk and stoned to question why the bottle is already open, or the fact that she’s in a cleaner’s uniform and not a waitress’s.
‘Compliments of the manager,’ Neva says holding out the bucket when the woman answers. She sways in the doorway; her pupils are dilated and Neva’s assumption of the partying that’s happening in the room is correct.
‘Wow! That’s kind of him,’ slurs the woman. She takes the bucket and glasses from Neva.
‘Look what I got us,’ the woman says. ‘Champagne!’
Neva smiles as the door closes.
The sedative will take a while to work but Neva is patient. She goes back to the service closet and changes back into her own clothing. Then she waits.
It’s two in the morning before she enters the bedroom. Although all is quiet, the lamps are still on in the room. It looks as though they collapsed unconscious after downing the Champagne. Good.
Neva picks up the girl’s discarded purse and rifles through it. As she knew would be the case, her passport is there. It’s not the sort of item you leave in a hostel while you go out drinking.
Neva opens the passport and learns the girl’s name for the first time. She’s Adrienne Margaret Renfall. A very sophisticated name for what appears to be a rebellious student. She checks on Adrienne and the woman; they are unconscious and probably will be for hours. But Neva needs them to be unaware of the passport theft until she has reached London. She ponders giving them another dose of the drug because it’s uncertain how long they will be under for.
In the bathroom she finds a line of cocaine on a small mirror. She brings it into the bedroom and places it on the woman’s side of the bed. Hopefully the party will continue when they both wake up.
She takes out the flask again from her purse, and puts a few drops of the sedative in two glasses of water, which she places at each side of the bed as a precaution. A known side effect of the drug is thirst. She hopes this will send the pair of them back off when they come round and drink the water. But it feels like she’s leaving everything to chance: something she doesn’t like to do.
She contemplates killing them. The old her wouldn’t have a problem with that, but the new her does: neither of these women deserve to die.
No. The best guarantee of her exit from Amsterdam and return to the United Kingdom is for her to get there as soon as possible.
She opens Adrienne’s handbag again and takes out her credit card. Then she goes online on her burner phone and books the earliest flight she can find to London. She finds one at 8am to Luton. She hopes that this will give her enough time before Adrienne raises any alarm that her passport has been stolen and her card has been used fraudulently.
Neva places the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the door. By then it is almost three in the morning.
She goes back to her apartment near the river. Changing her clothes, she then chops the long black wig down into the razor-cut style that the girl wears.
Once Neva’s done this, she takes her time applying the make-up, copying Adrienne’s look from some pictures she’d snapped of her on her phone.
When she’s ready she packs a small overnight case with her laptop and a few essentials, as well as some English cash. At 5:30am she makes her way to the airport.
When she arrives at Luton, Neva abandons Adrienne’s passport and her disguise in the airport toilet once she’s through customs. Then she starts using her Dutch identity and cards again.
With her natural, strawberry-blonde hair scraped back into a ponytail, she makes her way into Central London via train to St Pancras. While she’s travelling, she books herself a last-minute hotel in Soho because she needs a base to work from.
The journey from Luton only takes thirty-three minutes and so Neva is soon leaving the station, keeping her head down, and avoiding all of the cameras there that she knows about. Outside she joins the black-cab taxi-rank queue.
When she reaches the front of the line, she approaches the next black cab and tells the driver her destination. He gives her an odd look through his rear-view mirror as she climbs into the back. As they pull away the driver starts to ask her questions about her trip. Neva is deliberately vague in her answers.
‘Look… be careful who you talk to here,’ the taxi driver says. ‘There’s been a few murders.’
‘Really?’ Neva says, speaking with a Dutch accent.
‘Yeah. Girls who… look a bit like you, to be honest,’ he says. ‘It’s why I’m asking what you’re doing here. I saw on the news that an Irish girl might have been groomed by the killer first…’
As they stop at some traffic lights, he passes her a newspaper through the screen between them. ‘Front page,’ he says.
Neva finds herself looking at the pictures of four women. The Irish girl the driver had mentioned had been visiting London for the first time. There was an older woman – a divorcee, a business woman and a livery stable owner. All of whom have nothing in common except for their physical appearance.
Neva speed reads the article and when they reach her destination, she thanks the driver, giving him an American-style tip of 20 per cent.
She registers at her accommodation. Then, because the driver knows the address, she immediately checks out. She goes on her app and finds alternative accommodation elsewhere. When she’s finally settled, she changes into jeans, T-shirt and trainers. She places a woollen hat over her hair to disguise her appearance and then she heads off, looking for all intents and purposes like a tourist. By then it’s late afternoon.
She makes her way to London Bridge and to the building where Michael works. At this point she isn’t sure how she’s going to get inside, but she knows she has to see Michael and try and talk to him face to face. For this reason, she plans to be around when he leaves work that night.