The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die (41 page)

He eased himself into the rattan armchair on the balcony, stretched out his tattooed, tanned legs, put his feet up on the glass-topped table and lit a cigarette. This paradise was a long way from the grey concrete of South London. His mum, the drunken old slag, was proud. And he was pleased with himself that he’d managed to put her and his gran in a well smart bungalow with electric gates in Surrey’s most expensive village, even though they moaned that they couldn’t get to the shops no more.

But he had paid a high price to get this far.

Danny was not one for deep thoughts or reflection of any kind. He was a doer. A man with a plan. But today, he caught himself thinking stuff. Watching the pelicans diving for fish in the sea, he mulled over how he had lost all of those who had started out with him. Jez, Tonya, Big Michelle.

Her. Ella. Bitch. She was to blame.

He flicked his ash angrily onto the terracotta tiles. Tonya and Big Michelle were out now but they were too hot to have anything to do with, business-wise. Tonya looked like shit since she’d been inside anyway, so he didn’t even fancy fucking her on the odd occasion that he went back to the estate. She was rough, poor cow.

And Ella was to blame. So much to love. So much to hate.

What were the odds of her being on that Dutch loser’s phone? He’d told Jez to put feelers out to find the bitch. He hadn’t realised Jez was stalking her; popping off all the guys around her like some fucked-up Jeffrey Dahmer bullshit.

‘Jez, Jez, Jez, you twisted, stupid dickhead. You screwed up the whole game with your perverted Firestarter crap. All them books you read to be like her didn’t do you no good, did they?’

When he’d seen that squinting, poor fucking Dutch boy stumbling through the house and he’d got mad and shot the bastard, he felt bad. So, he slipped her that note and at the time, he really did feel all wrong and dirty that he had got wrapped up in Jez’s psycho mess. Part of him didn’t want to hurt her. But now he realised his business empire was vulnerable because of what
she
knew and some pain in the arse, dog-with-a-bone old detective she’d got pally with. She’d nearly taken everything from him once. Now he couldn’t afford to let her do that again.

Inhaling deeply from the hot end of his cigarette, he contemplated his next move. Those two would have to go.
Her
and the cop. But he’d have to find the right man for the job first. Someone skilled and discreet. It wouldn’t be that hard. Danny was a patient man.

‘Does it hurt, darling?’ Astrid asked Ad, as he pulled one of the socks she had brought him over the cast on his foot. She flapped around him, trying to pull the woollen toes straight.

The pain shot up his calf to his groin. Ad winced. ‘Jesus, Astrid. Leave it!’ He wanted to swipe her away like an irritating bluebottle; be left alone to watch MTV in peace. She just wouldn’t leave, no matter how heavy a hint he dropped. But swiping women wasn’t something he would ever do. So, he sat and took it. Constant fussing. Poking the healed stitches in his scalp. Remarking how the hair had grown back almost perfectly. He looked like his old self again.

He didn’t
feel
like his old self.

He’d left his old self in George’s bedsit weeks and weeks ago. The day he had come back from Heidelberg. A lifetime away, now.

‘But your tootsies. They’ll get cold,’ she said, smiling with pearly white teeth, a flush of exasperation in her perfect peach cheeks.

‘They’re fine. Just let it heal. Let me heal. Okay?’ He couldn’t abide that faux-crestfallen look on her face. A rebuked child in a woman’s body. Subtly controlling him through acts of acceptance-seeking kindness.

And here came Mommie Dearest. Gliding out of the kitchen with another hot casserole dish full of some tasteless baked crud which she would waft in front of him. Mum knows best. Wink wink. Mum’s taking good care of her boy now. Her little boy who can’t be left on his own for five minutes. Passed from the maternal tit to Astrid to suckle for life on watery, fat-free milk.

‘Hungry, son?’

‘Oh, that looks lovely, Mum. But only a bit for me.’
Christ, I’ve got to get into town and go for an Indonesian on my own. Even a kebab would do. Oh, no. It’s
witlof.
Endive, choking, gagging snot.

‘Nonsense. Astrid, you’re staying for lunch, aren’t you?’

Astrid nodded. Bright shining blue eyes like aquamarines. Always the poor man’s sapphires or diamonds.

‘Oh, you bet, Griet.’ Perky voice. Bouncing ponytail.

That 1950s, sanitised American sitcom persona had been endearing when she was sweet sixteen and Ad was a horny virgin but at twenty, every time she spoke, it was like biting into too much sickly white chocolate. Overfacingly sweet for a palate that had matured.

‘My boss has given me another week’s compassionate leave. I only nipped in to get these socks for Ad with my staff discount.’

Ad’s mother, half way to the kitchen to serve up the endives, leaned backwards and beamed at Astrid. ‘So thoughtful.’ She looked pointedly at Ad. ‘What a catch you have there, dolly. Just think how much better off you are here, at home with us. Not in grotty old Amsterdam with all those hoity toity so and sos and foreigners.’

‘Oh, what a waste of time that was,’ Astrid said. She turned to Ad. ‘Honestly, darling, you’ve got everything you could possibly want for right here in Groningen.’

His mother beamed. ‘Yes! Daddy’s going to see if he can get Ad a job in admin in Energy Valley.’

Staring blankly at the television that had been turned low, Ad wondered how George was doing; what George was doing. Was she plagued by the same nightmares as him? Did she see that monster’s face? She couldn’t have known about the fingers in the freezer or that he had worn dead Remko’s boots, but he was sure she had her own nightmares to wrestle with.

How could he have been so stupid? He had turned away from her. He only had an inkling of what had happened to her in Cambridge. Scant details, barked at him by that sour, surly, well-meaning old bastard, van den Bergen, who was now putting her up in his spare room.

George had brought him pink flowers.

How could she have kept her past so well hidden from him?

‘My parents died in a car crash.’

It seemed like a cliché now but why hadn’t he seen through it then? He tried to imagine her, a common criminal, the drug-pushing child of a single mother who didn’t care a damn. Locked up in some ghastly women’s prison. Peering up at the sky through bars. That was not the George he had fallen for. His vision of her as an intellectual goddess of ivory tower refinement and slick, capital city culture was now sullied and poisoned by cheap back-street sex with a man called Danny, who sold coke and trafficked underage whores.

The lies were huge.

Ad’s head was a mess. His heart was in ruins.

And now all he had left was Astrid and his mother’s cold comfort, a plate full of endives and sausage and the gut-rotting feeling that leaving Amsterdam and George were the two biggest mistakes he would ever make in his life.

Had he left it too late? Could he do the right thing?

‘Astrid,’ he called. ‘Have you got a minute? There’s something I need to tell you.’

What a shame he was not allowed to set fire to his cell. It would have been such an entertaining distraction in an otherwise dull day. But Jez wasn’t really complaining. He was due a visitor.

As he was pushed by the screw in his wheelchair through the heavy barred security gates, under the vaulted Victorian ceilings of his new home, he thought about how brilliant it was that now he too got to live in a place of great beauty. Just like that fancy, historical Cambridge College that Ella belonged to. They were so alike. But then, he had always known that.

As he entered the room where the hospital psychologist normally conducted the group therapy sessions, he saw a middle-aged woman with an ugly haircut and bad jewellery. She wore red winged glasses, like some old bird from the 1950s.

‘Who are you?’ he asked.

The woman sat in silence and seemed to be consigning the contours of his face to memory.

‘I’m Dr Sally Wright. I’m a criminologist. Tell me, how are you enjoying Broadmoor, Jeremy?’ she asked. Her voice was throaty and rasping like a man’s.

He threw himself forward, out of his chair and across the table that separated them, so that he was closer to her. He didn’t like her cocksure confidence. She should be quaking with fear in his presence.

The screw pounced and pinned him back in his seat. ‘Behave, Jez. You promised you’d be good for me.’

Jez nodded.

Dr Shit Haircut and Shit Glasses pursed her wrinkly old hag lips and asked again, ‘Tell me how you’re enjoying Broadmoor.’ He could see her teeth were stained brown with nicotine.

He sniffed. ‘My neighbours are the Yorkshire Ripper and the Stockwell Strangler. Man! Even Ronnie Kray lived here. These are hallowed fucking halls. How do you think I’m enjoying it? I’m an A-list celebrity. I’m with my own kind. What? You going to write a fucking book about me?’

‘Yes, Jeremy. As long as we’ve got you on English soil, I think I probably will.’

His scarred mouth stretched into a wide grin. It felt like the perfect ending to a long, long chapter.

Fennemans had spent several days wondering how to fashion a noose for himself out of the bedsheet he had been given. It was good to have something to preoccupy his mind; a little project that would distract him from the pain and humiliation of having his reputation systematically decimated by the legal system and the tabloids. Dr Vim Fennemans: a lynchpin within a vice ring that peddled barely pubescent prostitutes and hard drugs to Amsterdam’s students, amongst others. Verified as a user and abuser himself. Held responsible for a murder he hadn’t committed.

What a pity that even Saskia had not come to his rescue this time.

Now, he stared down at the makeshift shiv that he had fashioned from a razor blade, embedded into the head of a toothbrush. Considered the jade-green veins running beneath his translucent, pale skin. Surely its sting would be preferable to the living hell of being an inmate with a doctorate, branded as a paedophile.

George had no idea from which carriage Ad would emerge. The train spewed its late-night passengers forth – mainly drunken Ajax Amsterdam football fans coming home from a match against Groningen, singing at the tops of their voices; still clinging to long-empty beer cans. She searched beyond the sea of unfamiliar faces, willing the violent butterflies in her stomach to calm. Where was he?

Van den Bergen had passed Ad’s message on but had given no indication as to what this unexpected rendezvous was … after all this time.

As the crowds dispersed, she still couldn’t see him. Her heart started to sink slowly.

Then, she spotted him. Sitting on a bench; two crutches propped against his knee with his phone in his good hand. Forlorn.

Their eyes met. His smile was uncertain, hopeful. He struggled to his feet.

She started to run towards him. She ran through the wall of mistrust she had built back up. She ran through her fear of rejection. She pushed her past and her nightmares onto the tracks.

‘I wasn’t sure you’d come,’ he said.

‘I would always come,’ she said, allowing her final defences crumple and give way to tears.

‘I’m so sorry it took me so long.’

‘It doesn’t mat—’

‘I love you, George.’

Those words were the feast she had spent her life praying for at the starving man’s table. ‘I have always loved you.’

And in the middle of an empty platform in Amsterdam Central Station, George kissed Ad, hungrily, finally aware that the empty longing inside her had finally gone.

Outside in the wooded area below Ad and George’s new studio flat, cherry blossom trees of the same variety as the one in Letitia’s old back garden bloomed. Prunus kanzan. Ablaze with candyfloss pink flowers only. Now these were hers to look at and enjoy.

Ad propped himself on his elbow. Pushed her hair carefully off her forehead. He leaned in towards her and kissed her with passion and conviction.

She looked up at the ceiling. Rainbows of colour played on the plaster, as the sun shone through the large window and bounced off a bevelled cheval mirror in the far corner. Everything that had at first seemed so wrong, so broken, had turned out just right.

Rolling onto her side, hooking her right leg over his naked frame, she put her ear to his sternum. There she lay, listening to his heart beating strong and steady.

‘You know, just before I moved out of the Cracked Pot, I sat in the coffee shop with Jan,’ she said. ‘He was so cut up that I was leaving. Probably because he’d be down on the rent, knowing him. But we sat and shared a smoke and he did me a tarot reading.’

‘Go on,’ Ad said.

‘I pulled out death. Can you believe it? And I realised it wasn’t about murder or loss. It meant sometimes you have to let go of something if you’re going to start over.’

‘It’s okay to let the past die,’ Ad said, holding her close.

They finally managed a breakfast of burnt toast just after midday. George drank her now cold coffee and cocked her head sideways, studying her soul mate as he lounged on the second-hand Ikea sofa that van den Bergen had given them as a moving-in gift.

On Ad’s stereo one of her soul CDs played. Curtis Mayfield sang that she wouldn’t slip, despite the wet road that may lie ahead; encouraging her to just move on up and she would find peace.

George looked wistfully out at the cherry blossom trees as their petals were blown away on a sudden gust of wind. And she smiled.

MARNIE RICHES

Two prostitutes are discovered on the streets of Amsterdam, split open, their organs missing. Can Paul van den Bergen survive another serial killer case?