The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die (38 page)

I love you. I’m finally coming to get you.

George knew now why the words had not rung true. She felt faint at the realisation. Jez wasn’t bluffing.

‘How do you think I did that, Ella? If you play nice, I might let him go when I get back. If you don’t, and this ends badly, I’ll get the chainsaw and blow torch on him.’

She felt bile rising in her throat. There was no time to ponder whether she could buy Ad his freedom. She needed to gain the upper hand physically.

‘You sick, lying bastard,’ she said.

Running at Jez hard, George barrelled into him with such force, he crashed into the low wall. But the momentum was too great. He rolled over the parapet, his body dangling Trinity Street side, against the edge of the Great Gate. He clung on with his shiny, burned hands.

George reached out to him, baffled that she had done what she had done. Unsure what to do. If he died, Ad would die.

‘Give me your hand,’ she said. ‘If you tell me where Ad is, I’ll pull you up. I’ll go with you. I promise.’

Below, she spied at least six armed police training their weapons on him with deadly focus. Van den Bergen looked at her, open-mouthed. Imploring eyes.

‘Come on, Jez. It doesn’t have to be like this. I know you’ve had it tough. I can help. Just give me an address.’

‘Tell me you love me.’ He looked at her, his black irises intense but still lacking warmth.

She evaded his gaze. Looked blankly at some flaked skin on his shoulder. ‘Give me your hand.’

‘You want to find lover boy? Try Vim Fennemans.’

‘Give me your hand, Jez!’

‘No.’

Her eyes met his. He let go. Fell too many metres to the ground. He landed awkwardly, leg bent at the wrong angle to his body. Eerily silent but not dead. George would never forget how he stared up at her, smiling like a hyena that had simply missed out on one easy meal.

Tears came again then, as George thought of Ad.

‘What if we’re too late?’ George asked van den Bergen.

‘Cross that bridge if we come to it.’ He patted her hand. His smile was uncertain. She was sure it belied real concern. ‘I’ve got my best disciple heading up the hunt. He’s an irritating sod but a brilliant detective.’

George nodded. She stared out of the small oval window of the plane, tracing her finger along the beautiful web of frost that had woven itself on the outside. The sky was a perfect delft blue where it met the upper atmosphere. Up there in the aircraft, with the hum of the engines and the occasional whine of adjusting wing flaps as they descended, she could almost detach herself mentally from what had happened. Forget Jez had ever existed. Banish from her memory his menacing, silent grin as the paramedics had put him into a neck brace. Leave behind the indignity of having to be examined in Addenbrooke’s Hospital where doctors took swabs from her body for his fluids. Shelve the notion that every minute she had spent protesting her innocence to the British police was a minute closer to Ad’s death.

‘I can’t stop thinking about him,’ she said. ‘Tied up in some godforsaken place. He’s going to die, isn’t he?’

‘For Christ’s sake, George,’ van den Bergen said, encasing her wrist in his long fingers. ‘Drink a gin and tonic and calm down. Leave it to the police. We’ll find him.’

‘I can’t drink. I’m on painkillers for this bloody fractured cheekbone. Bastard packs one hell of a punch.’ She touched her cheek tentatively and winced as pain pierced through the prescription-strength codeine.

‘You were lucky he peaked too early to rape you,’ van den Bergen said.

George squeezed her eyes shut, trying desperately to dispel the memory of an aroused Jez; full of savage hatred. Then she thought of Ratan, Joachim, Remko, Klaus … Ad. Enduring a far worse fate. ‘This is all my fault. I inflicted the Firestarter on my friends.’

‘You mean, you caught the Firestarter! Look, kiddo, none of this is your fault. If that psychopath hadn’t targeted you and your classmates, he would have found others. He’s killed before. Many times. When we find his place, and we will,’ he inclined his body towards her, peered at her over his reading glasses as if to persuade her that he knew best, ‘I’m hoping we’ll find evidence that will link him beyond doubt to some missing persons cases and homicides that have been unsolved for the last four years. If he’s torturing people in a house or lock-up somewhere, there must be victims’ DNA everywhere.’

The sign to fasten seatbelts illuminated. The captain announced that they would land at Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport shortly. The North Sea rushed up at them, seemingly never ending. Suddenly, mercifully, dry land appeared. The aeroplane screamed its way overhead towards the welcoming lights of the runway.

She was back.

She watched van den Bergen switch his phone on as they unclicked their seatbelts. Hope surged inside her. He had an abrupt exchange with Elvis. His mouth was a grim line.

‘Anything on Ad?’ she asked.

Van den Bergen shook his head. ‘Not yet. They’ve searched Fennemans’ place and found nothing.’

Fennemans felt the energy slowly drain from him, like the battery of an old car that had been parked overnight with its lights still on. He had already unavoidably urinated in his trousers three times and soiled himself once. Even though he had passed into the realm of not fighting death but just waiting for it, he still considered it denigrating in the extreme that an academic, epicurean man of his standing should have been left to rot like some overdosed junkie in a back alley.

There was no point in trying to free himself from the radiator pipe. Even for those few hours where he had had stamina enough to struggle, his business associate’s bondage was accomplished and unyielding. All he had succeeded in doing was saturating his feet in the pool of his little pigtailed houseguest’s life-blood. Within twenty minutes, a vengeful Jack Frost had started to bite relentlessly through his wet socks.

Everything below the waist was numb now. His mouth was painfully dry. His thoughts were sluggish. But even in this transitional state, hovering between a fast life and slow death, he could smell the girl. Had it really been three days since it happened? Her body was corrupting. Despite the winter chill, flies seemed to come from nowhere, buzzing around the thickening blood.

Before his business associate had left, the bastard’s final quip had been, ‘Play with fire, Vim. What happens when you play with fire?’

Trapped in his duct-tape prison, enveloped by the freezing damp and the desperation, Fennemans conceded that he had been badly burned.

‘I’m telling you, boss,’ Elvis shouted above the growl of the Mercedes’ engine and the ironic guttural buzz of ‘Love’ by the Smashing Pumpkins on the stereo, ‘there’s nothing there. We turned the place over. No sign of Fennemans. He never showed up at lectures on the twenty-sixth and he hasn’t been seen since. Not a trace of Karelse. And we’ve checked everywhere Karelse might hang out. All his university friends. The lot.’

Van den Bergen felt a twinge in his armpit and half registered a thought about lymphoma. He would have to get that checked out. ‘Got plans for the house?’ he asked.

‘Yes, boss.’

Elvis started to unfold a large sheet of paper containing the blueprints for Fennemans’ 1980s-built townhouse. Van den Bergen snatched them off him and started to open them fully on top of his steering wheel.

‘Boss! Let me do it. You’re going to crash the car,’ Elvis said, covering his eyes.

Van den Bergen was coasting on autopilot, strong caffeine drinks and multi-vitamins. He resented Elvis’ vote of no confidence in his driving ability.

‘I’ve never crashed a car in my life. Shut up and give me plenty of warning if you spot a red light.’

Keeping less of an eye on the road than he knew he should, van den Bergen quickly absorbed the layout of Fennemans’ house. Three bedrooms and a bathroom on the third floor. Small loft space above. Living room and dining area on the middle floor. Large open-plan kitchen, utility room, WC and a small garage at ground level.

A truck’s horn honked aggressively as van den Bergen swerved out of his lane. He flung the plans back at Elvis, wracking his brains for where a Pandora’s box might be concealed in such a house.

‘Have you checked the loft space?’

‘Of course!’

‘Is there a party wall with the neighbours going straight up to the roof, or is the loft space open?’

‘Closed. Party walls on both sides.’

He gnawed at the inside of his cheek with powerful molars. His eye twitched furiously. He would have to wait until they got inside the property and do what he always did: follow his gut instincts.

Pulling up opposite the house, van den Bergen eyed the neat, grey-brick exterior. The windows were clean. Fussy Austrian blinds hinted at a man who had let his mother furnish the place for him – or else he had the ghastly, froufrou taste of a menopausal woman trapped in the ’80s.

Inside, it was dated but orderly.

‘Where do you want to—’

Van den Bergen held his hand up. ‘Be quiet, Elvis. Your voice sounds like nails scraping on a damned blackboard.’

In silence, van den Bergen clambered into the dusty box-filled loft. Nothing. He worked his way down through the chintzy house, through the country-style kitchen and right back to the front door.

‘That English serial-killing bastard has played us like a fiddle. There’s nothing here,’ van den Bergen said, squeezing the bridge of his nose. He thumped the wall.

‘I did tell you,’ Elvis said.

Van den Bergen stared at the staircase that led back up to the living room. He was strangely reminded of the first
Harry Potter
film, which Tamara had dragged him to see at the cinema on one of ‘his’ weekends. Harry Potter had lived in the cupboard under the stairs.

‘Did the dogs check that?’ van den Bergen said, pointing to the small triangular hidey hole.

Elvis nodded. But van den Bergen was still drawn to the cupboard. He yanked open the door. It was carpeted inside. It contained a solitary overcoat on a hanger, hooked onto a peg, and a shoe rack containing two pairs of men’s size 42 shoes. The shoes were designer, fashionable and completely at odds with the decor in the house. There was an ironing board stacked against the tallest wall.

‘See, I told you, boss,’ Elvis said, toying with the lapel of his leather jacket. ‘It’s just a little cloakroom.’

Van den Bergen tried to block out the sound of Elvis’ voice; the way he was snorting heavily down his nose. Was he doing that just to irritate him?

‘Blow your fucking nose, Elvis.’

‘I’ve got hayfever.’

‘It’s too early for hayfever.’

‘You’d be surprised. The blossom’s starting to come out.’

Carpet.
Who the hell puts carpet in a tiny cloakroom?
And if Fennemans already had a utility room, why was the ironing board in there? It seemed to van den Bergen almost as if the space had been staged to look like a cloakroom.

‘Are you coming?’ Elvis asked, hovering by the front door with his hand on the lock.

Van den Bergen looked at the carpet. He sniffed hard, trying to work out what the funky smell was in there. Was it the shoes? He picked up the shoes.

‘Jesus! Fennemans’ feet are rotting away. Smells of old Gouda.’

He tossed the shoes into the hallway.

‘Come here, Elvis! What can you smell?’ His instincts were on overdrive. ‘I mean, apart from Fennemans’ shoes.’

‘My nose is blocked,’ Elvis said. ‘But it certainly didn’t smell the other day. The dogs would have picked it up.’

Van den Bergen systematically removed everything from the cupboard. Even at a glance, he could see that the carpet had neither been shoved under the skirting board with the blade of a carpet fitter’s tool nor fastened to the floor with carpet gripper rods.

‘I think this has been glued down onto something,’ van den Bergen said.

With cracking knees, he knelt down, committing himself to this thorough examination. He groped along the carpet’s edge, just beneath where the ironing board had stood. He felt unsanded wood. Then, he felt the thing he had been looking for. It was cold and hard and round. Unmistakeably a handle.

‘My God, what happened to your face?’ Jan asked, as George trudged up the stairs to her room. He stood at the bottom of the stairs with an open mouth and wide eyes behind glasses. ‘Did you fall off the side of a mountain?’

She felt his concern radiate towards her, but could only manage to look at him blankly through eyes she knew were bloodshot and puffy from crying.

‘There aren’t any mountains in Cambridge. I don’t want to talk about it right now,’ she said. ‘Maybe later.’ She gave him a weak smile. If his hair hadn’t been quite so greasy, she would probably have given him a wordless hug.

Her room was neat but for a fine layer of dust that had settled over everything during the last three days. This time, the dust could wait. There were no signs of intrusion that she could see. In any case, Jez was in Addenbrooke’s Hospital under heavy police guard. No chair under the doorknob, now. No checking behind furniture. George did not have the energy. All the self-absorbed anxiety from before had gone. It had given way to something far nastier – a black hole of worry for somebody else.

She threw her bag onto the floor, switched on her television and sat heavily on the chaise longue where she and Ad initiated their failed attempt at making love.

Flicking through the channels impatiently, she looked for a news programme. The dinner-time news would not be on NPO 1 for another twenty minutes. She pulled her laptop out of her bag and booted up. Checked the Dutch news sites and the BBC. There was nothing about Ad’s disappearance on there. Nothing new about the serial killer or the terror alert in Cambridge. Her heart sank further than she had thought possible.

She fixed herself a cup of tea without milk, wondering if the gut-wrenching feeling of grief would ever leave her. Her body told her that it wanted to sleep but her brain shouted that Ad had perhaps an hour or two to live and nobody had found him yet. The worst thing about falling asleep, she knew from experience, was that she would forget about how disastrous and heartbreaking her life was. When she woke up, the whole damn mess would bludgeon her over the head again and again, as if she were realising the enormity of what had come to pass for the first time.