The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die (10 page)

‘Fennemans was acquitted,’ Kamphuis said through gritted teeth. ‘And I’ve got enough to worry about without having his heavyweight, fat-fee-charging legal representation, not to mention the public prosecutor coming down on my head all because Dr Vim spent an unnecessary ten weeks in pre-trial detention. And now,’ he was violently poking himself in the chest, ‘
my
senior inspector is persecuting him on the basis of circumstantial evidence. Nice, Paul. Really nice.’

‘He’s got to be a prime suspect in Polman’s murder.’

Kamphuis tapped his finger on the desktop. Rata tat tat. ‘Where’s the ringleader for my suicide bombings? Where’s al Badaar?’

Van den Bergen groaned softly. ‘I’m going to pick up a prescription in a minute. The pharmacist is a Muslim woman in a headscarf. Shall I bring her in? Will you be happy then?’

Kamphuis pulled a sandwich out of his desk drawer and started eating noisily. ‘Just get me a Muslim fundamentalist so I can kiss the minister’s arse without the shitty aftertaste.’

‘I’ve got to see him now!’ George shouted over the counter at the uniformed officer.

He looked at her with cool detachment. Remote and getting further away like an ice floe at low tide. George sat heavily on her mounting agitation. ‘I know he’s here,’ she said, injecting politesse into her stricken voice. ‘They said he was in a meeting. But please, I need to speak to him urgently.’

The policeman eyed George up and down like some security scanner at Schiphol airport: checking for anomalies, bullshit and bombs. She noted that he didn’t subject Ad to the same sharp-eyed scrutiny.

‘Tell me what it’s about,’ he finally said.

When van den Bergen appeared in the Prinsengracht foyer, he ushered George and Ad quickly to a private room. George had been storing up a verbal storm to unleash on him after he had put the phone down on her. But now, seeing him harried, worn down, haggard, with demons on his shoulders, the storm dissipated and left her with only dead calm.

She tossed the photograph of Ratan standing on the Thai beach onto the table. Van den Bergen picked it up. He put on reading glasses that hung around his neck on a cord and squinted down his nose at the photograph. His eyebrows bunched above questioning, bloodshot eyes.

‘What …?’ he asked

‘Your so-called bomber,’ George said. ‘Look at the tattoo on his ankle.’

Ad cleared his throat as if to remind van den Bergen that he was in the room too. ‘Ratan Patil. He’s my … our friend from uni. We were all at a party together the night before the bombing of Bushuis library. He’s been missing ever since.’

Van den Bergen rubbed the grey, early afternoon stubble on his chin. He frowned at George over the glasses.

‘How do you know about the tattoo?’ he asked her.

‘This guy—’ George began.

Ad put his arm in front of George. ‘There’s a forensics photo gone viral among the med students. A friend showed it to us the other day. By chance, we—’

‘We asked Ratan’s landlady if we could take a look in his room to check he hadn’t collapsed or anything,’ George interjected. ‘I spotted that photo on his pinboard.’

Van den Bergen breathed in deeply. He pursed his lips and looked again at the photograph of the smiling Ratan: knobbly knees, ears sticking out, clearly delighted by his Thai female companions.

‘Do you think he was radicalised at college?’ he asked.

George mentally tutted and rolled her eyes. ‘This guy’s a Hindu,’ she said. ‘Ratan
Patil
. Not Muslim.’ She could feel a scathing comment brewing. She tried to bite it back but it was too hard. ‘Is it just that they all look the same to you?’ she said.

Van den Bergen thumped the table so hard that George jumped. Ad cleared his throat.

‘She didn’t mean—’ Ad said.

‘Listen, you two …’ van den Bergen said.

He leaned in closely. George could see the open pores on his nose and smell oranges on his breath.

‘… I have something tantamount to a signed confession from the leader of a fundamentalist Islamic terror cell,’ he said. ‘My bosses want this case solved yesterday and—’

‘Ratan was not Muslim!’ George shouted. ‘Ratan was a beer-swilling Hindu from Mumbai. And we’ve heard your second victim in Utrecht—’

‘George, don’t!’ Ad said.

‘—was white!’

Van den Bergen straightened up abruptly and breathed in sharply. ‘How do you know about that? Where are you getting your information from?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ George said. ‘We’re getting it. Okay? And I can see from your reaction that it’s good. So unless your al Badaar is secretly radicalising infidels in their sleep, I’d say you’re hunting the wrong man.’

Van den Bergen sat in silence. He looked at George and then at Ad. He shook his head and ran his large hand through his thatch of platinum hair. He smiled.

‘Cagney and bloody Lacey. I’ve got Cagney and bloody Lacey on the case.’ He turned to Ad. ‘Which one are you? The blonde or the brunette?’

Ad opened and closed his mouth. He was almost grey. George could see that Ad wasn’t used to police attention. She wanted to take his hand and squeeze it but her thoughts were stalled by van den Bergen standing.

‘Come with me, you two. I need you to do something for me, and it’s not pleasant.’

It was cold in there, close to where they kept the bodies. The floors were tiled and the light was harsh. George’s breath came quick as she and Ad followed van den Bergen down the aseptic corridors of the Forensics Institute.

‘The national forensics centre is in The Hague,’ van den Bergen said, ‘but we wanted to get an analysis from the Utrecht site here in Amsterdam. In case there were commonalities between Utrecht and the first bombing.’ Then he stopped suddenly at a set of double doors and turned round. His expression was grim. ‘Wait here.’

George fiddled with the buttons on her flimsy jacket, wishing she had worn a jumper that morning. And yet, despite the cold which made her nose tingle at the tip, she knew her armpits would be ringed with sweat. She could feel the moisture running down past her bra onto the waistband of her jeans. Adrenalin.

She looked at Ad. His grey pallor betrayed fear, or was it that he was going to throw up?

‘Have you ever seen a dead body before?’ she asked, tugging his sleeve gently.

He pushed his steel-framed glasses up his nose and smiled weakly at her.

‘Not unless you count my dog, Bart,’ he said. ‘You?’

She shook her head. Suspected what van den Bergen was about to show them. She shivered at the thought.

The double doors flapped open. Van den Bergen emerged.

‘Follow me,’ he said. ‘We’re ready.’

George fell into step with Ad behind the inspector. Had she bitten off more than she could chew? Ad took her hand. It felt warm and comforting. She felt like they were children venturing together into a dark forest full of ill intent and misadventure.

They entered a cluttered lab, where serious-looking people busied themselves over tiny test-tubes, pipettes and microscopes. Their heads were covered by white mop caps, they wore surgical masks over their mouths, white coats over their clothes.

Van den Bergen led them to a windowless office where a woman was already seated. She was dressed in green scrubs. Her caramel-coloured hair was cut short into the nape of her long neck, which suited her sharp features. Though she was relatively youthful-looking, she exuded cold authority which betrayed her age. George calculated that she was probably about forty years old.

‘These are the kids for the ID,’ van den Bergen said simply.

The woman rose and held her hand out to greet George first and then Ad. George was sure she could see a flicker of recognition pass between Ad and the woman.

‘I’m Dr Marianne de Koninck,’ she said. ‘I’m the head of the forensic pathology team.’

Van den Bergen pulled two bent wood chairs out for George and Ad. He indicated that they should sit.

‘Dr de Koninck here has just come up from the autopsy on the only deceased victim from the Utrecht blast,’ he said. ‘We believe it’s the bomber.’

George sniffed and took a deep breath. The contents of the office were unremarkable: filing cabinets, a light box for viewing x-rays, desk, lamp, chairs. She realised that they weren’t going to be shown a cadaver after all. She exhaled heavily with relief.

‘Dr de Koninck. If you will,’ van den Bergen said.

The pathologist took some large photographs out of a brown envelope. She laid them on the table. George looked down at them and gasped. The photographs showed only a head, covered at the neck with green gauze. It was not apparent that the head had been decapitated but from what Jasper had said, she knew that only the head had been found severed and intact.

George gulped down bile and a late breakfast of stale pain au chocolat. She clutched her hand to her chest. ‘Joachim.’

Ad coughed.

‘Bin?’ was all he said.

Van den Bergen whipped a wastepaper basket out of nowhere just in time for Ad to vomit into it. George wrinkled her nose as the acidic smell stung in her nostrils. She rubbed Ad’s back, pulling some tissues out of her jeans pocket. The pathologist walked to the water cooler in the corner of the room and came back to the desk, proffering a plastic cup to Ad.

‘Okay?’ she asked. ‘Drink. And don’t worry. You’re not the first.’

Ad nodded, clinging to the bin with white knuckles.

George rubbed the knees of her jeans, counting: one, two, three on the left. One, two, three on the right.
Keep it together
, she told herself.
Oh, God. I hate the smell of sick.

The pathologist sat down, seemingly unmoved by Ad’s outburst. ‘The inspector tells me you two have just identified the first bomber as a student.’

George nodded.

‘So, you know this one too, then,’ the pathologist said, looking down at the nightmarish images.

George nodded. ‘You bet. We both do,’ she said, nodding towards Ad. ‘This is Joachim Guttentag. German exchange student. From Heidelberg. Total …’ George wanted to say what she really thought of the arrogant, racist jerk. But then she looked at the mournful photo of a lifeless boy. The derision died in her throat. ‘He’s, er, was, I mean, a bit of a … er, not wildly popular. Him and his pal, Klaus, are into ritualistic duelling and all that old fraternity, funny handshake crap.’

Ad breathed out deeply beside her. His voice sounded wobbly and unsure. ‘He’s on our politics course. Was. He was going home for Christmas.’ He blew his nose loudly. ‘He told me about his plans when I asked him to come for a coffee with the others at the end of term. Him and Klaus were getting the train down south. They were going to some meet with his frat buddies in Heidelberg before going home to their families.’

George sucked her teeth. ‘Poor Joachim. My God.’

She forced herself to look at the images. Joachim’s eyes were unfocussed, bloodshot and dull, his complexion too yellow to belong to the living. George could see a band of dark purple bruising just below the jawline, before the green gauze concealed what did or did not lie beneath. This was a photograph of a shell. Grief suddenly washed over her and threatened to overcome her.

‘What happened to him?’ she asked.

The pathologist spoke quickly, with an air of brisk efficiency and complete detachment.

‘It’s an interesting case. There’s evidence of subconjunctival haemorrhage, as you can see from the bloodshot eyes, and the indented fracture to the skull and extra-dural haemorrhage, which you can’t see in the photo, make it clear there was blunt trauma ante-mortem.’

‘What do you mean?’ George asked.

‘The deceased was hit with something like a hammer before death but not killed by the blow.’ She pointed out the bruising beneath the jaw with the tip of a Biro. ‘The contusions you see around the jawline indicate strangulation or hanging. There’s some peculiar scarring on the cheeks on both sides and then a large, deep scar down the left side of the face, here. But they’re old wounds. I was wondering if it could be self-harm, although subjects suffering from depression normally cut their arms. But now you’ve told me he’s a dueller, it makes sense that they’re the ritual scars from mensur fencing. We were going to check dental records but what the inspector needs is a quick ID and it looks like you’ve given it to him.’

George put one hand on Ad’s shaking arm and shuffled in her seat. ‘So he was beaten and tortured before he blew himself up. Is that what you’re saying?’

The pathologist nodded. ‘This doesn’t look like straightforward terrorism, if there is such a thing. Nobody has ever seen a suicide bomber look like this before, even where we’ve been able to retrieve large sections of the body that haven’t suffered blast injuries or flash burns.’

‘And this guy is white,’ George said.

The pathologist nodded. ‘Yes. Exactly.’

‘It’s possible he was a convert,’ van den Bergen said. He had perched on the edge of the pathologist’s desk and now shifted his position with a grunt. He took off his glasses and started to polish the lenses with the cuff of his shirt.

‘Jesus! He ain’t no Muslim convert,’ George said softly, reflectively. ‘This guy was right-wing. Fascist.’

‘Aha,’ van den Bergen said simply.

George wondered if there was sarcasm in his response.

Van den Bergen exchanged satisfied glances with the pathologist. He stood up, unfolding his tall frame until he towered over the room like a king. He smiled at George. His face suddenly looked softer, as though the force of gravity now bore down on him just a little less than it had before.

‘Thank you, Miss McKenzie. Mr Karelse,’ he said. ‘You’ve been a great help.’

The smell of Ad’s vomit and the photographs suddenly made George feel trapped in the room. She wanted to leave. But as she grabbed the handle to the door, the nagging feeling that van den Bergen hadn’t made the same intellectual leap that she had stayed her hand. She turned to the inspector.

‘You know what this means, don’t you?’ she said. ‘You’re not looking for a bunch of Mujahidin.’

‘What do you mean?’ van den Bergen asked.

‘An Indian Hindu and a right-wing white man? Probably Lutheran. Both exchange students. One clearly tortured or beaten before the explosion. Forced into whatever he did. Untraceable declarations that Maastricht Muslim fundamentalists did it? And one of the bombings was outside a synagogue.’