The Girl Who Wouldn't Die Part 19

'We'll drink a toast to Joachim,' Klaus said solemnly, as he ladled the concoction into punch gla.s.ses.

Ad clasped the hot gla.s.s between his chilly fingertips. The lenses in his gla.s.ses steamed over, so he took them off and put them into the breast pocket of his shirt. The florid fraternity faces were suddenly a blur, but though he could see nothing in detail, he could sense sombre sobriety momentarily settling on the men's shoulders.

Klaus cleared his throat. 'To Joachim. A fine German man, whose only crime was being in the wrong place at the wrong time.'

Ad squinted in the firelight, trying to see Klaus' face. d.a.m.ned c.r.a.ppy eyesight. He pulled out his gla.s.ses and pushed them back up his nose. The steaminess had dissipated. Tears stood in Klaus' eyes. Crocodile tears just for show?

Klaus spoke in a wavering voice now, full of emotion. 'Our brother's honour is being called into question but we know what kind of a man he was. He will be avenged.'

'Prost!'

Vengeance? What kind of vengeance? Grievous bodily harm vengeance or common garden homicide?

Ad started to drink his punch. The strong alcohol stung his nostrils and burned the back of his throat. He felt his body start to thaw.

Gradually the mood lifted amongst the frat boys. After half an hour, Ad finally managed to pee. He locked himself into the toilet, urinated for almost a full minute and then texted George.

Got here OK. Missing u. Nothing 2 report. Klaus signs name with 47:33 at end. Weird. Are u safe?

There was no response. He a.s.sumed she had gone to bed.

After an hour and a half of drinking, Ad was completely blotto. He had lost his gla.s.ses. He sprawled across the sofa, watching the others' childish antics with blurred vision, and listening to typical bawdy lads' jokes through ears that no longer made sense of much. The ten percent still-sober part of his brain prayed silently that he would wake in the morning, still alive. He knew he was at the mercy of these alcoholic buffoons. But as the room spun around uncontrollably, the ninety percent inebriated part of Ad's brain pondered the recipe for Krambambuli. George would love it.

The very last thing Ad registered before losing consciousness was the blurred vision of Klaus lumbering towards him, carrying a hunting knife.

'b.i.t.c.h. Come on!' George yelled, fumbling with the phone. 'A text from Ad!'

She tried to open the text and brought up the internet instead. Useless fingers. Fat fingers in woollen gloves. c.r.a.p burglar. But still the alarm's countdown tinkled on. Inbox. Open. Ten seconds now. Nine. OCD brain had to know what it said.

Klaus signs name with 47:33 at end.

Six. Five. How about punching in 4733? She entered the numbers on the keypad. f.u.c.k. Still tinkling.

Tick.

Two beeps signified the end of the countdown. No alarms and no unwelcome surprises. George almost wept with relief. She shook from head to toe but galvanised herself to lock the front door. She kicked her shoes off.

'Breathe. Just breathe.'

Adrenalin pushed her from one room to another; first pulling the blinds, then daring to switch on lights to have a good look. It was a small but expensive apartment, furnished with modern Danish teak pieces. Fitted kitchen in black gloss. Looked like it had hardly been used. Small square living room with tall windows, mercifully overlooked by a hotel, so unlikely a nosey neighbour was watching. Leather sofa. Ultra-modern and uncomfortable-looking dining set with a round oak table and four chairs that were moulded to fit the curve. Abstract art on the wall.

'This guy has no personality,' George told herself. 'There's nothing about this place that says anything about its owner. Apart from money.'

She ran her gloved finger over the top of the large HDTV. No dust. He had to have a cleaner. Or maybe he shared the same hygiene obsession that she did. George snorted. She didn't want to have anything in common with Klaus.

'Let's see what your bedroom says about you.'

George switched on the light. The bedroom faced onto a small courtyard garden at the back. There was a double bed squeezed up against the window, a nightstand and one wardrobe, all in the same modern style as the living room. Over the bed was a giant framed poster of the metal band, Rammstein. George grimaced. On the opposite wall was a poster of what George a.s.sumed was another metal band called Stahlgewitter. It was a cla.s.sical painting of an angel carrying a sword with the name Auftrag Deutsches Reich emblazoned across the bottom. Stahlgewitter was written in gothic script. She wasn't sure what Auftrag meant but she decided that Deutsches Reich was probably some kind of neo-n.a.z.i reference to the Third Reich. She wrinkled her nose at the poster.

'There must be something else here.'

George looked around. She opened the drawer of the nightstand. One packet of condoms, unopened. A pair of nail scissors. A packet of Ritalin without a pharmacist's label.

'Privately prescribed and doled out for ADHD?' George wondered. 'Or c.o.ke replacement? Which is it, big boy?'

She spied a vanity mirror with traces of white powder under the rim.

'Ho ho ho. Still being naughty, are we?'

The shiny cover of a p.o.r.nographic magazine caught her eye.

'Big n Black,' George read aloud. 'Oh really, Klaus? Is this your guilty pleasure, Mr Deutsches Reich? Nice chunky-a.s.sed sisters with big hooters for a five-knuckle shuffle on your Aryan Bockwurst?'

She shuddered and put the magazine back in its drawer.

Next, the wardrobe. She flung the doors wide. Klaus liked his clothes. Expensive suits hung inside along with scores of polo shirts in different colours, five pairs of chinos and three pairs of jeans. It was all very Tommy Hilfiger or Ralph Lauren. Expensive pastels. Fresh smelling.

She was just about to close the doors when she spotted something. She parted the clothes. The back of the wardrobe was decorated with photographs of Ratan, Joachim, Remko ... in fact most people from the cla.s.s. Certainly, most people in her circle of friends, including Ad. And me. Where did he get that photo from? It was her matriculation photograph from her first term at St John's. Interspersed among the cla.s.s photos were clippings from the newspaper articles, covering the bombings and the investigation.

'Oh, come on! How can he not be involved?' George said. She took out her phone and photographed the collage. But then she realised that she couldn't possibly show it to anyone other than Ad, as she would be implicating herself in breaking and entering. 'How can I convince van den Bergen to get a warrant and search this place? b.o.l.l.o.c.ks.'

George put everything in the wardrobe back as she'd found it. She then went systematically back through the flat, opening every drawer she could find. She photographed the exact layout of the contents with her phone, rifled through what was there, looking for anything that might be incriminating and then put each item back in the exact position it had held in the photo she had taken. Finally, she went back into the bedroom and looked beneath the bed. There was a laptop on the carpet.

'Bingo.'

Ad tried to open his eyes. His left eye was gummed shut with something. There was a dull ache above it on his brow bone. His right eye spied a fuzzy living room, lit by a solitary standard lamp. It was still dark outside, but the timorous chirrup of the odd bird and the thrum of car engines on the main road told him dawn was probably close. He could smell stale cigarettes, alcohol and sweaty feet. Snoring rumbled close by and kitchen noises clanged further away.

Gingerly, he tapped his left eye. That felt fine. The eyelids just seemed to be stuck together. He prodded his eyebrow. Sharp pain lanced through a dull, throbbing hangover headache. He could feel crust, as though he had a wound that had started to scab up overnight. He looked at his fingertips. They were smudged with dark red.

'Blood?'

Then he remembered Klaus holding a hunting knife. Or had he imagined it?

'Where are my gla.s.ses?'

He rolled off the sofa and started to grope around the floor. All he could see was the blurred, busy pattern on a red Persian rug, lit by a still-flickering tea light in a gla.s.s jar. After some searching, he came across his gla.s.ses under a coffee table. Thank G.o.d they're not broken. He put them on and realised that Klaus had been sleeping next to him on the floor. He lay on his side with the hunting knife by his hand.

Ad grabbed Klaus by the shoulders and flipped him over onto his back. His bleary blue eyes shot open. He looked at Ad quizzically, breathing heavily through his mouth. Ad quickly straddled his chest, pinning him to the ground, s.n.a.t.c.hed up the knife and held the tip of it near his throat.

'What are you doing?' Klaus asked. 'You're hurting me.' His breath stank like a distillery.

'Why is my eye covered in blood? What did you do to me?' Ad's voice was hoa.r.s.e and cracked.

Klaus, seemingly unafraid of the knife at his throat, threw Ad off him with ease and sat up. He looked at Ad and started to laugh. Ad knelt beside him, still holding the knife like an idle threat.

'I'm sorry,' Klaus said, pointing at Ad's forehead.

Ad stood up, spied the mirror over the fireplace and walked over to it on shaky legs. He slammed the knife onto the mantelpiece, looked into the mirror and scowled.

'Jesus. What the h.e.l.l have you done, you idiot?' He touched the stinging skin above his eye carefully. He could see a superficial cut on the brow bone, which had bled heavily into his eye during the night. It looked like someone had tried to gouge his eye out. But the most obvious problem was that he was now missing an eyebrow. He spat onto the cuff of his shirt and wiped the dried blood away. The skin underneath was livid and shiny.

Klaus hovered behind Ad, grinning. 'Sorry, mate,' he said. 'It seemed very funny at the time. Think of it like a bit of an initiation ceremony into the circle.'

'You shaved my b.l.o.o.d.y eyebrow off with a hunting knife? You're completely mad.'

'We were all very drunk. Krambambuli.' Klaus seemed to think this was an adequate explanation for Ad's missing eyebrow.

Ad stared at the bulbous-headed German and felt anger expand within him like a black hole, threatening to consume everything in the room. I'm going to punch him. I can be an alpha male. This is it. But innate aggression was not Ad's strong suit. You naval-gazing, spineless p.r.i.c.k, Karelse. Just hit him. Take out his jaw with a well-placed right hook, for G.o.d's sake. He clenched his fist. Caught sight of himself in the mirror. I look like some knuckle-trailing cave man. His resolve wavered momentarily. That was enough to make the black hole collapse in on itself, taking the anger with it and leaving only a dim nebula of frustration and disappointment in its stead. He forced a smile.

'Very funny. You got me,' he said, punching Klaus gently on the arm, feeling his metaphorical b.a.l.l.s shrinking up inside his body and cursing himself for it.

Klaus clapped him on the back. Glanced at his watch. 'Come on. Might as well get showered. We've got a big day.'

Checking her watch, which now said 5am, George took out the laptop and booted it up. There was no login to speak of, so no pa.s.sword was necessary. First, she checked the internet browser's history. She brought up the National Democratic Party of Germany's website.

'Far-right rubbish.'

Other than that, Klaus seemed mainly to have been visiting p.o.r.n sites, heavy metal band websites and, interestingly, her article on The Moment's blog. She checked to see if Klaus had a Blogger or WordPress login name, wondering if he had acted as a spoof al Badaar or one of the trolls who had flamed her for her article. But Klaus' laptop had not remembered any login details, so she deduced that he probably wasn't registered. He had clearly only been a pa.s.sive spectator as the al Badaar fiasco had unfolded.

George knew Klaus' email address. He had been copied in on a round robin sent by Fennemans at the start of the term. Fennemans was too stupid to Bcc everyone and had listed everyone's email address in the Cc header instead. She was desperate to log into Facebook under his name but knew any of his insomniac friends would see instantly that he was online if she did so.

She did, however, open his Hotmail, which had the pa.s.sword saved. She glanced down the subject header but found nothing interesting. Then she searched for emails from Joachim. Most from the last week of Joachim's life were ba.n.a.l comments about lectures or their arrangements to visit family and friends from the fraternity in Heidelberg. But then, George came upon a thread that made her hold her breath long enough to feel dizzy.

The thread was dated three weeks before Joachim's death and two weeks before Ratan's.

From: [email protected] To: [email protected] Subject: You've gone too far this time. I'm ratting you out and you'd better get over it. You know you're in the wrong.

From: Klaus Biedermeier (mailto: [email protected])16.23 To: Joachim Guttentag Subject: Re: But you're jeopardising all my plans. Everything I've been working towards for months.

From: [email protected] To: [email protected] aSubject: Re: Re: I accept your apology but I'm still going to say something about your crazy, hare-brained scheme. You're going too far.

From: Klaus Biedermeier (mailto: )15.49 To: Joachim Guttentag Subject: Re: Re: Re: I'm sorry about before. I hope we can still be friends and that you understand what I'm trying to do. It's for the greater good.

Klaus 47:33 88 'Got you, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d!' George said.

Chapter 20.

Heidelberg, later

Had Ad not had a stinking hangover, he would have thought the red stone colonnades that stretched upwards to support the vast vaulted ceilings in the Church of the Holy Spirit were nothing short of stunning. He would have thought it was rather like being inside a dinosaur's ribcage. But as he sat on a hard wooden seat, breathing in the over-perfumed smell of strangers in their Sunday best, nausea threatened to make even more of an idiot out of him than his missing eyebrow. The stained gla.s.s windows were too colourful. The giant church organ that ground out hymn after hymn was deafening. He was bathed in cold sweat.

Several students read aloud depressing extracts from Schiller and other Sturm und Drang cla.s.sics. An overweight soprano sang Brnnhilde's solo from Act 3 of Wagner's Gtterdmmerung. Not a single mention was made of the fact that Joachim had actually been identified as the perpetrator behind the Utrecht synagogue bombing, whether that had been his intention or not. Ad thought the entire service was like some mawkish ode to erudite Joachim's German perfection. But he still felt sorry for the hapless young man who had died so violent a death.

Why had Klaus not taken the podium to eulogise about his dearly departed friend? Sitting to his left, Klaus looked stiff and formal in his fraternity uniform, holding his cap on his knee. Ad had expected him to be amongst the other frat boys who were all seated in the second and third rows behind Joachim's weeping family. But instead, Klaus had chosen to sit next to Ad as though he too were an outsider. He fidgeted with his sash, picking imaginary specks of fluff from his trousers. Ad was not so hungover that he didn't notice this behaviour and think it odd.

Outside, when the service was finished, Ad was swept away from Klaus on a tide of mourners into the middle of the congregation. He found himself making small talk with a mousy-looking girl from Klaus and Joachim's cla.s.s. At first, the girl batted her eyelashes at him and ran a hand coquettishly through her hair. She introduced herself as Moni, short for Monika. But when Ad said he had come with Klaus, her behaviour abruptly changed like cold draught suddenly whipping through a warm house.

'You're friends with him?' It was more of a sneer than a question.

'Not friends. I'm sort of representing my faculty.'

'Which is where again?'

'Amsterdam.'

Moni short for Monika snorted. 'Oh yeah. I remember now. You're Dutch, then,' she said.