The Girl Who Wouldn't Die Part 26

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, Adria.n.u.s. 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 works.p.a.ce. He killed Klaus on the hoof but he has to have taken the others somewhere before dispatching them. He needs peace and s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce?'

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 Beyonce 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 pa.s.senger 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, sc.r.a.ping 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-cla.s.s 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 s.h.i.thole. 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 cafe 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 s.e.x.' 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 Es.p.a.ce 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, G.o.d,' 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 a.s.sailant 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 gla.s.ses on the pavement and the ground rushing up at Ad were the last things he remembered about Elsschotlaan.

Chapter 26.

Cambridge, 26 January

The black cab bounced into town. George sat bolt upright, watching as Parker's Piece shot by on her right. Downing College waved h.e.l.lo on her left. Then, the warm stone of Emmanuel. She got out there and walked through the pedestrianised centre, down Sidney Street, past Sydney Suss.e.x 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 prost.i.tutes?' 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 gla.s.ses 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 s.e.xually active about twelve hours prior to death. We swabbed her and found s.e.m.e.n 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.'

'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 gla.s.ses 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-cla.s.s people liked to do, Sally pushed up her paperwork and made George sit down.

'Tea? I've got an urn. It's so d.a.m.ned 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d!'

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 s.h.i.te. All you can get hold of is Lipton's. Gnat's p.i.s.s.'

'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 a.s.sess 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 fict.i.tious cleric leading a fict.i.tious 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 s.a.d.i.s.t 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 n.o.body 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. n.o.body 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 n.o.body 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 b.i.t.c.hes 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 p.e.n.i.s 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 p.i.s.s 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 bas.e.m.e.nt. He strained against the duct tape that had been plastered across his mouth and bound around his hands. But n.o.body would hear him and n.o.body 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 bas.e.m.e.nt. 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 f.u.c.ked.

'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 gla.s.ses 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-n.a.z.i sympathisers.'

'Well, I think your killer has an ident.i.ty crisis. Low self-esteem. Negative a.s.sociations 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 s.e.xual slavery.'

'I'm certain this girl had the same bludgeon and blow torch treatment. There was no evidence of this one having partic.i.p.ated in s.e.xual 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.'