The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die (30 page)

George felt the blood drain from her face with a prickle. Dizziness threatened to topple her.
Breathe
.
Remember to breathe.

Her gaze drifted along the wall to a series of news clippings – coverage of the bombings similar to the ones stuck onto the back of Klaus’ wardrobe. Next to those were pasted technical diagrams, giving step-by-step instructions on how to make a simple but high-powered suicide bomb, using a mobile phone as a remote detonator.

‘Where is young Karelse?’ van den Bergen asked, putting a supportive hand on her shoulder blade.

George shook her head in silence. Her eyes wandered to the window and the view of her bedroom.

‘Phone him,’ van den Bergen said.

She pulled out her phone and dialled his number. The phone was about to go to voicemail yet again when he picked up. George felt relief cut through the crisp, cold dread, flooding her with warmth.

‘You okay?’ she asked.

‘Of course I’m okay,’ he said. There was no trace of animosity or awkwardness in his voice. It was as though he had never stormed out of her room. As though he hadn’t been avoiding taking her calls.

‘Where are you?’

‘Look, I’m in Groningen. I got here just an hour ago. I’m at Mum and Dad’s. Hang on.’ There was a rustling sound and a pause. ‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘I had to get out of earshot of Mum. I’m going to break it off with Astrid later. I’m sorry about—’

Van den Bergen interrupted her deliberations and his apologies by grabbing the phone out of George’s hand.

‘Listen, Karelse. Stay in Groningen. Stay with your family and don’t go anywhere until the local police have put a patrol car outside your house. No heroics. They don’t bloody suit you anyway. Do I make myself clear?’

Van den Bergen cut Ad off and gave abrupt orders for the police protection to be arranged for his parents’ Groningen address immediately. George felt tears caused by a peculiar mixture of relief, panic and wistful emotion stab at the backs of her eyes. She had a sudden impulse to hug the inspector; to thank him for the practical help and protection he was offering to Ad, though it was concealed behind a veil of misanthropic bluster. She resisted.

Van den Bergen squatted to examine the bomb-making guidelines on the wall.

‘I wish you would switch that darned thing off when you’re at home,’ Ad’s mother said. She put down her fork, reached over her plate of apple tart and patted his hand. ‘Who was that? You look twitchy and pale.’

Ad was just about to answer her when she overruled her own question.

‘Now, go on, love. You were going to tell me something. Are you going to propose to Astrid? Is that it?’ She clasped her hands to her apron-clad chest. ‘That’s it, isn’t it? Oh, my boy. At last! My baby’s getting married.’

‘No. That’s not it at all.’ He had been about to tell her about how he had fallen in love with George. But that he was going to break it off with Astrid first. How he thought it was only fair after four years. Shit. He was such a wimp. Perhaps telling her about the police was preferable.

‘There’s going to be a squad car outside for a bit,’ he said. ‘Because of the murders in Amsterdam.’

His mother stopped chewing. She smoothed the edges of the oak kitchen table with fat-knuckled hands that showed the beginnings of arthritis.

‘You what? Have you been in trouble?’

‘No, Mum. The police are worried I might be a target.’

‘But the dead men were terrorists.’

‘No they weren’t, Mum. They were men on my course. Like me.’

‘One was a Negro, wasn’t he? And a Jew. You’re not a black or a Jew.’

The rosy, baking day nostalgia he had momentarily felt for his mother faded at once to cold, hard grey.

‘I don’t like it when you speak like that, Mum. It’s not nice. Really.’

His mother pointed her fork at him and paused. She narrowed her eyes. Brown like his but devoid of tenderness. Pursed her lips, which took on a thin, mean appearance. ‘Astrid’s told me you’ve been hanging around with foreigners. Think you’re clever, don’t you, son? Mr Arty Farty Gad About Town.’

‘Look, Mum. I’m an educated man and I don’t like—’

‘I don’t care what you like, Adrianus. You just leave your worldly, high-falutin’ rubbish at the door, young man, because this family has traditional Calvinist values and we’re not as impressed with your airs and graces as you think.’

‘Mum, this is about a killer. The police think I may be in danger!’

‘What do you make of this room?’ van den Bergen asked George.

George looked around at the old boxes, the naked bulb and the sinister collage.

‘There’s nothing else in here that says it’s his main workspace. He killed Klaus on the hoof but he has to have taken the others somewhere before dispatching them. He needs peace and space to strap explosives to somebody’s chest.’

She breathed in the essence of this predator. She shivered with distaste. ‘He needs equipment and somewhere easily accessible with parking. This place is too far from ground level.’

‘Good,’ van den Bergen said. He thumbed through one of the old leather-bound books and turned to the female detective. ‘Have we found a contact name in the university for the person renting this space?’

The female detective stood up, eyed George warily and checked her phone. ‘Email just in, boss. It’s registered to a Dr Vim Fennemans.’

He hummed ‘Crazy in Love’ by Beyoncé to himself as he drove the van up the motorway. The driving conditions were good. The asphalt sped smooth and flat beneath his tyres. He felt back on top of things. It was going to be a great day. Without swerving, he checked his crowbar was safely stowed under the passenger seat and that his gloves were in the glove box, where they belonged. Yes. All present and correct.

It was indeed going to be a great day.

‘I’m going out,’ Ad said, scraping his chair against the terracotta tiles of the floor.

He felt old resentments begin to resurface. Little Ad, living in Jolanda and Matthijs’ shadow. The apples of his parents’ eyes. Apples that didn’t fall far from the tree. He had always just felt like windfall rolling down a different path. Astrid had made him temporarily palatable to them, but it was clear that leaving her for George would drive a permanent wedge between him and his parents. He no longer cared, though. George had woken him from his slumberous half-life and he wasn’t ready to slip back into an emotional torpor.

His mother forked a large piece of apple tart into her mouth. ‘Where are you going?’

‘I’m going to meet Astrid.’

She breathed out hard through her nose. ‘Okay. Look, I’m sorry, dolly. I didn’t mean to … Just leave your dirty washing at the bottom of the stairs. I’ll do it while you’re out.’

Ad patted the phone in his pocket and nodded.

‘Don’t get killed,’ she shouted after him through her mouthful.

Ad walked through Villabuurt West towards the Quintuslaan bus stop, just missing the police patrol car that pulled up outside his parental home. The middle-class lanes were lined on both sides with almost identical sloping-roofed, chalet-style houses, brick built in the seventies in an exciting shade of drab brightened only by flashes of plain, white weatherboard cladding. Dull and characterless. Just like Mum and Dad. He cursed under his breath.

‘I hate this soulless shithole. I hate them. I’m never going back.’

Hands stuck resolutely in his reefer jacket pockets, he walked briskly past the Saabs, Audis and BMWs of the newcomers with money. Families with young children. Aspirational and professional. Not like Mum and Dad.

He planned what he would say to Astrid. He would take her into town. Find somewhere public, like a café that was open on a Sunday. Not for dinner. That would send the wrong message.

Should he make small talk first? Pretend like there was nothing wrong? But you couldn’t drop something like that gently into the conversation. ‘Oh, and by the way, I’m in love with another woman and we half had sex.’ No. That would not do. How about the old line, ‘It’s not you, it’s me’? Except it
was
her. Ad chewed the inside of his cheek. There was no easy way to dump a long-term girlfriend. He would just have to play it by ear.

When a white Renault Espace van slowly pulled onto Elsschotlaan, Ad was so engrossed in his plans that he was unaware of its presence. Its diesel engine went unheard. Its long wheel-based bulk went unseen.

The houses stood further apart here, near the cut-through to the bus stop. Even if it had not been almost deserted for a Sunday afternoon, evergreen trees grew dark and dense, meaning Ad’s progress towards the bus stop could not be seen by the occupants in the surrounding houses.

‘Oh, God,’ Ad said to the overcast sky. ‘Let me find the right words to say.’ He kicked a stone into the street. ‘I wish George was here.’

The van pulled alongside Ad and came to a standstill. He merely glanced at the driver, not really registering his appearance. Astrid and his mother had taken up residence in his mind’s eye and together they blocked out all other peripheral visual information or salient thought, including van den Bergen’s warning to stay put. Consequently, he was taken by surprise when heavy, lopsided footsteps quickened behind him. Ad just had time to look round before a man yanked his arms up behind him with one hand and silently placed a cloth over his nose and mouth. Two things dawned on him at that moment.

The first was that his assailant was the drug dealer from Heidelberg with the disfigured face and the limp. Up close, his dark eyes were too small. His nose was misshapen. His skin was shiny, lumpy in parts and too tight over the jaw. He wore what appeared to be a dark blond toupee. His grip was fiercely strong for a man of reasonably small stature.

The second thing that dawned on Ad was that the cloth that the man held over his face smelled strange. It had been soaked in something. Ad remembered the chemical smell from biology in school. Ether. But oddly, it wasn’t knocking him out. He just felt slightly woozy.

Ad was so taken aback by this attack that his survival instincts had taken over, banishing any fear completely. He swung around drunkenly and thumped his attacker squarely on the side of his jaw. Blood from his knuckles left a four-point imprint on the man’s face.

The man gasped, as though winded, but said nothing. In response, he merely reached inside his zip-up hoody and pulled a crowbar out from the waistband of his jeans. Before Ad could even shout for help, the man brought the crowbar down hard on his head. Broken glasses on the pavement and the ground rushing up at Ad were the last things he remembered about Elsschotlaan.

The black cab bounced into town. George sat bolt upright, watching as Parker’s Piece shot by on her right. Downing College waved hello on her left. Then, the warm stone of Emmanuel. She got out there and walked through the pedestrianised centre, down Sidney Street, past Sydney Sussex College, squatting like a grand old man behind its walls. Past Sainsbury’s. Down through the narrow Bridge Street to St John’s. And there it stood before her, like an old, beautiful creature lying on its back, stretching its glowing, pale stone legs into the blue sky. St John’s College Chapel. She didn’t bother going to the Porters’ Lodge. She slipped through the gate at the side and made her way straight to Sally’s room, via the 1930s quad at the back of the Chapel.

Dr Sally Wright’s room was on the first floor of the early seventeenth century Second Court. She looked out through large oriel windows over bright green, perfectly square lawns broken up by a grid of cobblestone pathways travelling at right angles to one another. From her room near the north-east corner was visible the famous Shrewsbury Tower with its brown Tudor brick turrets and sandstone edging. George’s senses were overwhelmed both by the feeling of being back in that place and also by its sheer beauty. It was a million miles away from the squalor she had always known on her South East London estate. She had never quite got over the fact that this visual, historical banquet was now her alma mater. She was a Johnian. She belonged here. Nothing short of amazing.

George tentatively knocked on the heavy wooden door.

‘Yes,’ came Sally’s throaty smoker’s voice from inside.

With some trepidation, George pushed open the door.

‘So, these are from the unsolved cases of the two dead prostitutes?’ van den Bergen asked.

Marianne de Koninck laid a series of photographs on the desk and spread them out so that they were facing van den Bergen.

Van den Bergen unfolded his reading glasses and put them on with all the flourish of a precise middle-aged man. He observed that her hands looked strong. You needed to have strong arms and hands to work with the dead. Realising he was becoming distracted, he looked down at the photographs and grimaced reflexively.

‘Two years old now,’ she said. ‘It’s funny you should have asked me to pull these records. Only the other night I was thinking that there’s almost certainly a link between these women and Remko Visser.’

In one photograph lay the corpse of a young woman of about seventeen. In the patches of skin where she was not badly burned, her dark olive colouring hinted at Middle Eastern or North African origins. The burns had left the upper layer of skin blistered, white and peeling, revealing livid flesh beneath.

‘This girl was a Jane Doe, wasn’t she?’ the pathologist asked.

Van den Bergen stared down at the photo, rifling through his memories.

‘A patrol car discovered her lying in a doorway in the red light district but I didn’t work on the case. I’d only just transferred back to homicide cases from a spell concentrating on narcotics. I seem to remember she died on the way to hospital.’

Two vertical frown lines between the pathologist’s eyes deepened. ‘Seventy percent burns. Poor girl. I performed the post mortem on her. The burns are the work of a blow torch. The skin around her genitals had not been torched though. She had been very sexually active about twelve hours prior to death. We swabbed her and found semen samples and pubic hair from several different men.’

‘Unusual for working girls from the red light district not to insist on condoms,’ van den Bergen said. ‘Very unusual.’