The Girl Who Wouldn't Die Part 32

Pacing down the street with bare feet, she looked into every shop window. The place was deserted; an elegant Marie Celeste now that the early morning crowds had been evacuated right down to Caius College. She scanned the expectant faces behind the blue and white police cordon. Animated chatter ricocheted off the stone buildings on either side as they spotted her.

'Oi! Come back here!' a young policeman bellowed at her. He shouted into his radio that a barefoot woman was padding along the empty street. He started to give chase but fell back as advice crackled back to him.

She retreated towards Trinity Street, careful to cling to doorways and avoid the sharp-eyed scrutiny of the police gathered by the main gate. Where was Jez? Not in the empty shops. Not in the deserted cafes.

Rounding the corner, she looked up. And there she saw him, perched behind the parapet of Trinity College's Great Gate. He had eyes for everything. Clearly on the lookout for her. He momentarily stared down at van den Bergen, who stood with his hands in the air, surrounded by five armed British police, while the rest of the boys in blue scurried like startled rats, trying to work out what to do with the abandoned box and dismantled bomb.

Jez had not noticed her yet.

George skulked along the college's outer wall. Darted into the Porters' Lodge. Unseen. Everybody seemed to have been evacuated. Where were they? She entered the Great Court expecting to see a muster point for the students and staff but saw not a soul there. She had no idea how to get up to the roof of the great gate but she knew there must be a staircase. There was a flagpole behind the castellated facade after all. Porters somehow got up there to raise a flag when necessary.

Instinct told her where to go. She climbed a steep, winding staircase. At the breathless summit, she found a door she felt certain would lead outside. I've got you now, you son of a b.i.t.c.h.

She tried the handle. It opened. There he was, crouched low. Watching. Not antic.i.p.ating that the hunted had become the huntress.

'b.a.s.t.a.r.d!' she shouted as she lunged at him.

She knocked him to the ground, punching him repeatedly on the side of the head until her own knuckles felt like they had shattered. His toupee flew off to reveal a hairless scalp, scarred and wrinkled like skin that had been in water too long. When her blows seemed not to hurt him, she realised that he must have no feeling in his face at all. Was he medicated?

She kneed him in the groin. Then, at least, he had the decency to buckle up, groaning.

'Why? Why did you do this?' she cried.

But Jez glared at her through those deadly black eyes. She could see bloodl.u.s.t rising within him. Wished to G.o.d van den Bergen and the police below knew they were up there.

He overpowered her easily for the second time that morning. George was forced up against the low stone barrier that stood between a blistering view of Trinity College's courtyards and rooftops and her own certain death by broken back on the cobbles below. But she was on the wrong side of the parapet for the police in Trinity Street to see.

She screamed as Jez tipped her further and further backwards over the periphery of the abandoned Great Court. Fighting back, now, scratching and kicking whatever she could.

Unexpectedly, he pulled her close to him. Away from the edge.

'I took everything I wanted,' he hissed in her ear. 'The fire gave me the power. I took everything Danny had. I earned it. I'm the better man. But there was one thing I still wanted and that was you.'

She spat in his ruined face, plastering him in ill-intentioned mucus. She wished it had been acid but he probably wouldn't even have felt its sting. 'Why did you kill all those students? All my cla.s.smates. What had they ever done to you?'

He slapped her hard. 'Spitting's not very ladylike, is it? But then, you've never been a lady. Just a lovely dirty wh.o.r.e.' He wiped the spit away and stood back for a moment, as if in contemplation. 'Your cla.s.smates were just college-boy w.a.n.kers, buzzing round you like bees round a b.l.o.o.d.y honey pot. An Indian. A Jew. Two over-privileged a.r.s.eholes. No loss there.'

'You're evil!' George said. 'Demented! Have you been stalking me all year? Did you follow-'

'I was already there. Working at the faculty for Fennemans. A nice little cover for my European business enterprises. There was me and Danny, thinking you was doing time for us. Then you showed up. What were the chances of that? Little Miss Erasmus, walking straight back into my arms. That's fate, that is.'

George rubbed at her stinging cheek. She righted herself and started to edge away from him. Adrenalin pulsed through her body, but she had no plan.

'Those boys didn't deserve to die,' she said.

He seemed not to hear her. Looked wistfully beyond her to the rooftops. 'You rejected me all those years ago. You were the only woman I really wanted. I needed you to see the power I can wield. The power of life and death. I'm a craftsman, Ella. A king. I knew you'd eventually beg me to make you mine.'

His arrogance and utter absence of remorse dumbfounded George momentarily.

'Beg?' she said, blinking hard. 'You think I'd beg to be with you?'

Jez grinned. He sidled up to her and stroked her breast. She pushed him away, sneering into his mouldering face.

'Get your filthy hands off me. You make me sick.'

'I've got your loverboy in my workshop,' he said.

George felt the blood drain out of her legs. Felt her knees give way.

'What do you mean?'

'I told you I sent you a text from his phone, didn't I?'

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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d,' 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.

Chapter 32.

30,000ft above the North Sea, 29 January

'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 G.o.dforsaken 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 b.l.o.o.d.y fractured cheekbone. b.a.s.t.a.r.d packs one h.e.l.l 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 cla.s.smates, 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 gla.s.ses 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 pa.s.sed 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 a.s.sociate'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 a.s.sociate had left, the b.a.s.t.a.r.d'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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce?'

'Of course!'

'Is there a party wall with the neighbours going straight up to the roof, or is the loft s.p.a.ce 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 sc.r.a.ping on a d.a.m.ned 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 b.a.s.t.a.r.d 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.