The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die (31 page)

‘My guess is she was struck on the head with a blunt instrument first. Then torched. Her index finger had been cut off.’ De Koninck tapped the photograph of the girl’s mutilated hand with a Biro.

‘Beaten first, like Remko Visser, who was also missing a finger and Joachim Guttentag,’ van den Bergen said. ‘I think I’ve found my missing link.’

‘Ah, good. There you are,’ Dr Sally Wright said, peering over red, 1950s-style winged glasses at George.

Sally was sitting with her thermal-sock-clad feet up on a chaise longue, red pen in hand, reading through what looked like an undergraduate essay. She was clad head to toe in an off-beat ochre ensemble, the kind only an academic would be seen dead in, George mused. Around her neck hung oversized chunky beads the same colour grey as her short, bobbed hair.

After they had air-kissed on both cheeks and shared the stiff half-embrace that middle-class people liked to do, Sally pushed up her paperwork and made George sit down.

‘Tea? I’ve got an urn. It’s so damned cold here. We had snow last week. Only a smattering but still …’ Sally pottered around with china cups on a large tea tray. She fought with a giant catering urn until the urn gave in and scalded her with boiled water. ‘Terrific bastard!’

George smirked. She loved the way it sounded when Sally swore.

‘Earl Grey do?’ Sally asked, fumbling with a box of tea bags.

‘Great. Dutch tea is shite. All you can get hold of is Lipton’s. Gnat’s piss.’

‘Poor poor girl.’ Sally shook her head and carried a rattling cup and saucer towards George. She held it out in front of her as though it contained plutonium. ‘Here. Thaw you out.’

They exchanged pleasantries and ate biscuits for thirty minutes. In the back of George’s mind, she was trying to assess when the hammer would fall. It fell at thirty-two minutes in.

‘Now, George. Your serial killer …’

George folded her arms. She had expected to be grilled first about Fennemans. This was a surprise. How much did Sally know?

‘I’ve been following the gruesome progress on the internet,’ she said. ‘This isn’t the work of a terrorist, you know. This is the work of somebody trying to look like a terrorist. Trying and failing.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ George said. ‘A fictitious cleric leading a fictitious Islamist terror cell.’

Sally pulled at her blunt fringe in thought. ‘So, you have two murders rigged to look like suicide bombings. By the time of the third murder, the real killer has lost interest in trying to make it all look like a grand act of terrorism. His third murder is a much sloppier, straightforward burning, you see. He left the body in a public place in a bin. The fourth murder is just an open air attack. The police have really been given the run-around trying to track this man down.’

‘Yes. They have. At least, I think so. From what I’ve heard on the grapevine. You know.’ George looked down at the rug beneath her feet, keen not to make eye contact with her insightful senior tutor.

Sally pulled her thermal socks up, taut over her knees. ‘Right, so the killer is targeting boys he sees every day. He’s obsessed by fire. You know, most arsonists don’t get caught because of the lack of evidence left behind and most set fire to buildings just to make fraudulent insurance claims. The ones who are straightforward pyromaniacs are usually mentally ill. This guy is without doubt a sadist and a sociopath; thinks he’s doing a public service, ridding the world of these students. He has a normal job on campus; in your faculty where nobody thinks twice about him. He’s familiar with everyone on your course; familiar enough with their movements to abduct the boys successfully before murdering them. But first, he loathes them from a distance. He watches.’

‘What about the other victim?’ van den Bergen asked.

‘Well, this is interesting,’ the pathologist said. ‘Similarly, a young girl. There were copious amounts of uncut heroin in her stomach, shreds of plastic and one small plastic bag, intact, containing the drug. She had been cut open with something like a meat cleaver, post mortem. My opinion is that somebody must have made her swallow bags of heroin ready to export, killed her and then cut her open to retrieve the drugs. They burst most of the bags with the blade they used. She too was missing an index finger. She had dirt trapped under her toenails that we traced to the Helmand region of Afghanistan.’

Van den Bergen gave a low whistle. ‘My informant, Georgina, told me there were girls coming into Amsterdam from Taliban-ruled territories. She was right. I read that Helmand is one of the most notorious culprits for opium growing. Nobody there gives a hoot. Not NATO, certainly not the US and they could do something about it. No, they’re too busy recruiting local warlords to help them collect anti-terrorist intelligence. The Russians want to spray the crops but nobody else is interested.’

‘You seem to know a lot about it,’ the pathologist said.

Van den Bergen gave a hollow laugh. ‘I’ve done most of my time working homicide but I spent five painful years chasing after the sons of bitches that bring hard drugs into the country. Plus, I’ve got a very good, young teacher in Georgina. She’s quite a girl. Gave me a reading list on the politics of it, would you believe it?’

The pathologist’s cheeks coloured. Van den Bergen wondered if the mention of little Detective Cagney had made her think about her own fresh-faced squeeze. Wasn’t he a flatmate of that boy, Karelse, with his delicate stomach and his long, useless fingers that had never seen a day’s work?

Van den Bergen was sure George could do far better than Karelse.

He observed the Dutchman as he lay beneath the strip light on the slab, out cold. The blow to his head had left a large cut which had bled heavily during the long journey south. It had forced him to put a compress on the lesion, tape it and then seal what he could with plastic wound spray. It would hold for now but he suspected he had fractured the Dutchman’s skull. There was a certain satisfaction in knowing he had smashed up his perfect, unblemished dome.

He had already given the Dutchman a shot, but his waking up at this stage would be an inconvenience. Now he wheeled the drip stand over and hung a bag of the liquid sedative onto the hook at the top. Then he connected up a bag of saline and a bag of universal type O blood to keep the Dutchman going until he had decided where he would dispatch him. He inserted a catheter into the Dutchman’s penis – amazing the things you could learn by sitting in on the odd medical lecture and by scouring the internet. It wouldn’t do to have piss all over the slab. Next, he inserted a cannula into the Dutchman’s arm with expertise, connected all the tubing and watched with fascination as the life-giving and consciousness-stealing liquids started to drip through slowly. That should keep the Dutchman out of mischief. He would give him just enough sedative and then stop, timing it perfectly so that he would start to come round just as the phone rang. Just before the explosion. Then he would know fear and his punishment would be perfect.

Fennemans sat stiffly against the cold radiator in his basement. He strained against the duct tape that had been plastered across his mouth and bound around his hands. But nobody would hear him and nobody would find him. Not in time. Of that, he was certain. After all, who would actively seek out Vim Fennemans, apart from Senior Inspector van den Bergen?

He watched the pigtailed young girl as she bled slowly to death beside him on his thin camp-bed mattress; the rank, dark smile cut into her neck sneering at him. With regret, he realised that this too would be his fate: to die slowly in a freezing, damp basement. He wasn’t even able to reach the fruit he had put out for his contraband houseguest.

Perhaps worst of all though, Fennemans mused wryly, was the fact that his own prints were now all over the knife that had cut the girl’s throat. He had clutched at it under extreme duress, but the police, if they eventually came, would never believe him. Whichever way he looked at it, he was, for once, the one that had been well and truly fucked.

‘Is the killer an academic?’ George asked, wondering if there could be any connection with Fennemans. In her heart of hearts, she hoped so. Fennemans’ name was on the store-room rental paperwork, after all. It was almost enjoyable to believe that her academic tormentor was capable of being even an accessory to murder.

Sally pushed her glasses up her nose and toyed with her beads. ‘No. These killings are too unsophisticated to be the work of an educated killer. Bombing. Burning. Blowing up with a Second World War grenade. That’s blunt-minded, straightforward aggression. It pretends finesse but ultimately lacks it. And you say that two victims were ethnic minority and two were right-wing Germans?’

‘Yes. Neo-Nazi sympathisers.’

‘Well, I think your killer has an identity crisis. Low self-esteem. Negative associations with minorities
and
fascism. An inherent dislike of any foreigners, maybe. Very strange, to tell the truth. But he works alone, I’m sure of it. The cardboard indicates that his victims are being transported in large boxes.’

‘I thought so,’ George said, feeling proud that she’d had that very same lightbulb moment so many weeks ago. ‘So, he must have transport and the sort of equipment that removal men have access to,’ she added.

George reached out to the small side table that held the plate full of biscuits. As she stuffed her fourth down, she chewed over whether to tell Sally the full story of her involvement and the latest developments.

‘Partial decomp?’ van den Bergen asked, forcing himself to look down at the photograph of the second girl.

The pathologist nodded. ‘Yes, this one’s death pre-dates the other girl by a month. We were lucky to find the dirt. She must have worn sandals, hence the particles under her toenails. Her entry to the country would have been very recent, I’m guessing, because if she’d settled somewhere and showered, the dirt would be gone. Illegal, obviously. No records for either of the girls, as I understand it.’

‘Drugs mules, buying their way West with a spot of sexual slavery.’

‘I’m certain this girl had the same bludgeon and blow torch treatment. There was no evidence of this one having participated in sexual intercourse but then the body had started to corrupt.’

‘How was she found?’

‘Shallow grave in Oosterpark. Wrapped in a tarpaulin. It was summer.’

‘But the other one was—’

‘Found alive in a doorway.’

Van den Bergen stretched his arms up in the air. His back cracked. It felt looser after that. ‘He got sloppy with the second.’

The pathologist sipped from a plastic cup of water and studied the photograph of Remko through narrowed, green eyes.

Van den Bergen leaned forward. ‘May I?’ he asked.

She held it out so that he too could examine it. Hardened though he was to scenes of violent death, van den Bergen felt pangs of anguish as he looked again at the carbonised, folded shape in the bin that was the final bleak representation of all that Remko had been.

‘He just knocked this one out and threw him away,’ van den Bergen said.

‘We found traces of sedative in Ratan Patil’s and Joachim Guttentag’s blood. Unfortunately, seeing as only one intact body part was retrieved for each man, we can’t read the entire story. There was no sedative in Remko Visser’s or Klaus Biedermeier’s blood.’

Van den Bergen crossed his long legs and banged his knee on the underside of the desk. It made a nasty cracking noise. He was sure he had a spot of water on the knee. Too much kneeling when he potted up his dahlias.

‘He kept the bodies of the bombers somewhere before he delivered them to the target of his choice,’ he thought aloud. ‘He wanted to keep them alive before the bombs were detonated. He stalked the other two successfully but tried different techniques on them. I’m no psychologist,’ van den Bergen said, running his hand through his stiff white hair, ‘but I’d say he’s experimenting. Maybe. Trying to find the most enjoyable way of dispatching these wretched souls. Different ways of playing God.’

When he returned to the station, Elvis swaggered towards him, grinning.

‘Why are you looking so pleased with yourself?’ van den Bergen said.

‘There are no ex-military men, discharged with burns, that measure up to the photo of our guy. Our photofit specialist compared all the facial proportions in the squaddies’ head-shots against our man,’ Elvis said.

‘Did you check Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium like I asked?’

‘Yep. Nothing.’

‘Oh? So? That’s not good news.’

Elvis brandished a copy of an email under van den Bergen’s nose. ‘But our guy
has
been to Marienhospital in Stuttgart for burns treatment. They’re trialling some new bandage technique there called Suprathel or some shit. Like artificial skin. So, our guy goes in with severe second-degree burns, some third-degree burns all on his face, neck, upper body. Won’t say how he got them. But they’re happy to treat him as part of the trial.’

Van den Bergen’s heartbeat broke into a canter like a spooked horse. The tic in his right eye started up. The telltale signs of being on a hot trail. A perk of the job.

‘Name?’

‘Second name is German. First name sounds American. Oh, shit. Hang on, boss. That was sent in a subsequent email. I didn’t print out the full exchange. I’ll just go and get it …’

Van den Bergen wondered if Elvis could feel his eyes burning into the back of his head as he shuffled off in the direction of his computer.

Elvis stared intently at his screen for a moment, clicked for an irritatingly long time with his mouse and then looked up.

‘Brandon Köhler. That’s it,’ Elvis shouted.

‘We got an address?’

‘Yes, boss. A Heidelberg address.’

‘Get Dieter Mann on the phone immediately. We need to move fast.’

‘Look. I’ve got something to tell you,’ George said, staring out of the window to the opposite side of the quad. She could trust Sally. She was sure of it.
To hell with it.
‘I’ve been helping with the investigation all along.’ There. She had said it.

Ten minutes later, she and Sally were sitting and studying the same grainy photograph, taken by Ad, that Saeng had peered at only the day before.