The Girl Who Got Revenge: The addictive new crime thriller of 2018
‘Are you eating right?’ Van den Bergen asked, scratching his nose with the edge of his notebook.
‘What? What’s that got to do with a truckload of trafficked Syrians?’
Van den Bergen coughed awkwardly, wondering how to dress his fatherly concern up as idle curiosity. It wouldn’t do to let Elvis know that he cared… Would it? ‘Nothing. You just look…’
‘I’ve been going to the gym.’ He patted his newly flat stomach.
‘Oh. It’s just…what with you being garrotted and left for dead and—’
‘Can we just not, boss?’ Elvis smiled weakly and pulled his jacket closed against the wind. ‘Anyway, the driver was trying to turn around, can you believe it? Who the hell tries to do a three-point turn with a heavy goods vehicle on a road like this?! When they pulled over to ask him what the hell he was doing, the guy freaked, jumped out of his cab and tried to run away. That’s when they opened up the back and found all these poor bastards inside.’
Van den Bergen belched stomach acid into his mouth and swallowed it back down with a grimace. Wondered how Elvis felt about the black body bag that lay on a gurney by the roadside, having been found inside one himself on the brink of death. He walked over to the gurney.
‘Give me some space,’ he told the uniform – a young lad who looked like he was barely out of cadet school. ‘Let me see her.’
Breathing in deeply, he slowly unzipped the bag to reveal the pale face of the girl inside. Were it not for the blue tinge to her lips and the general grey hue to skin that had certainly been olive in life, she could almost be sleeping. One of the sobbing women who sat on the pavement leaped up and made for him. Tears streamed down her red face. She shrieked something at Van den Bergen – words that he didn’t comprehend, though he understood her anguish perfectly. Bitter, biting grief needed no interpreter. One of the other women pulled the girl’s mother back before two uniformed officers could restrain her.
Thinking of his granddaughter, Van den Bergen’s viscera tightened. He ground his molars together. Turned to the uniform. ‘How many of the refugees are critical?’
The lad touched the brim of his hat respectfully. Visibly gulped. ‘Twenty have gone off with the first lot of ambulances,’ he said. ‘They were in the worst shape. The rest…’
He inclined his head to the remaining ragtag band of chancers sitting on the pavement: about two-dozen men in dusty, cheap suits or hoodies and jeans, yellowed at the knees. They looked like they had stepped straight from a war zone into the truck. The half dozen or so women wore jeans and tunics for the most part – full-length, loose-fitting dark dresses on the older ones. All had their heads covered, though they had oxygen masks fitted to their faces. The remainder were children, ranging from about five years old to young teens, dressed in bright colours. Van den Bergen was struck by how ordinary they all looked. He berated himself for having expected them all to appear like Middle Eastern stereotypes instead of electricians, nurses, teachers, lecturers: people who had simply had enough of certain death in their homeland and had decided to take their chances on possible death in the back of a heavy goods vehicle.
‘Make sure they get whatever they need while they’re waiting,’ Van den Bergen said, swallowing hard and clenching his fist around his pen. ‘If the paramedics say they can eat and drink, arrange it. Good policing is about more than just arresting bad guys. Speaking of which, where’s the driver?’
The uniform pointed to a squad car that had been parked at an unlikely angle across the street, forming part of the roadblock. ‘He refuses to speak. My sergeant’s about to take him in for questioning. You’ll want to sit in on the interview, right?’
The squad car’s engine started up. The reverse lights came on, and the vehicle started to roll back slowly. In Van den Bergen’s peripheral vision, he caught sight again of the body bag that contained the little girl. Her keening mother was now being tended to by a paramedic. A corrosive force stronger than stomach acid welled up inside him. Pushing the uniformed lad aside, Van den Bergen took long strides towards the brightly liveried politie squad car. He wrenched open the passenger door and held up his large hand. Flashed his ID. Fixed the female sergeant with a stern and unflinching gaze. ‘Stop the car,’ he said. Pushing the central locking button on the console, he unlocked the car’s doors. Then he leaped over the bonnet to the driver’s side and opened the rear door. Without pausing to take a look at the greasy-haired trucker, he grabbed the handcuffed man by the scruff of his neck and pulled him out of the car.
‘Who are you working for?’ he yelled at him.
The trucker was a middle-aged man with a bloated, red face and veined nose that spoke to high blood pressure and too much whisky. Puffy beneath the eyes. He stank of stale cigarettes and fried food. A dark band of grease described the collar of his blue sweatshirt, ending in a V above his sternum. This didn’t strike Van den Bergen as a scrupulous or discerning man who might be bothered where the money for his alcohol might come from.
‘No comment. I want a solicitor,’ the man said, holding Van den Bergen’s gaze. ‘You just manhandled me out of that car. That’s police brutality.’
‘You ran, didn’t you? When the port cops pulled you over, you ran, you piece of shit. A kid’s dead on the back of your actions.’ He pushed the trucker hard in the shoulder – a family man’s rage taking over his professional sensibilities.
By the time the trucker had stretched his cuffed hands down towards his baggy jeans, Van den Bergen was too late to realise he was aiming for his pocket. With determined fingers, the man pulled out a white object.
‘Boss! Watch out!’ Elvis yelled, sprinting towards them.
What was it? A note? An envelope? Van den Bergen didn’t have time to put on the glasses that hung on the end of a chain around his neck to work out what the trucker had armed himself with.
‘Stay back!’ the man shouted, wide-eyed. Spittle had gathered at the corners of his mouth, putting Van den Bergen in mind of a crazed bull. ‘I’ll open it. I will. And you’ll all be fucked.’
‘Take it easy!’ Elvis said, holding his hands high.
Trying to make sense of the situation, Van den Bergen’s fingers crept slowly towards the gun in its holster, strapped to his body. ‘Whoa!’ he said. ‘What have you got there?’
‘Let me go, or I’ll throw this shit everywhere!’
‘What shit?’
Van den Bergen took a step closer, poised to draw his service weapon.
‘Anthrax.’
CHAPTER 3
Van den Bergen’s apartment, a short while later
Peering dolefully at the side of Van den Bergen’s wardrobe that she commandeered whenever she stayed, George saw only a phalanx of drab: nothing but washed-out jeans, black long-sleeved tops and her old purple cardigan, which was still going, despite the holes in the elbows.
‘How you going to wear any of that shit to the pool?’ Letitia screeched through the laptop’s monitor.
George closed her eyes and bit her lip. The joys of Skype, bringing her over-opinionated mother, who was currently sprawled on Aunty Sharon’s sofa in South East London, straight into her lover’s bedroom in Amsterdam. There was Letitia’s round face – no make-up yet today, and the recently sewn-in ombré hair extensions made her look more like a spooked lion than Beyoncé – grimacing at the collection of casual wear.
‘I ain’t going to no fancy tapas bars with you dressed like a builder, lady.’ Pointing with her talons, which were green today. Head rolling indignantly from shoulder to shoulder. ‘Them tops is a fucking embarrassment. Sort it out! Get down the shops. Or don’t they have shops in Holland?’
‘I’m skint,’ George said, angling the laptop’s camera away from the contents of the wardrobe. ‘I’m saving for a deposit, remember?’
‘Skint, my arse. All that fancy shit you do for the university and that old lanky Dutch bastard you call a boyfriend has got you on the payroll over there?’ Her mother sucked her teeth, snatched up a packet of cigarettes from the coffee table and lit up with a dramatic flourish. She blew her first lungful of smoke towards her screen, clearly aiming for George’s image. ‘Your Aunty Shaz’s gaff not good enough for you?’
‘Maybe I want to get away from you.’
The words had burst their way out before George had had chance to filter them. Damn it! She’d made a pact with herself not to rub her ailing mother up the wrong way, especially as Letitia had nearly lost her life prematurely at the hands of the Rotterdam Silencer himself.
And there was her father, edging his way into the frame and waving timidly. The last thing she wanted was for him to think she was planning to get away from him when they had only just been reunited after decades apart.
‘Not you, Dad!’ she said – in Spanish, for his ears only. ‘When I get my own place, you’ll always be welcome. There will be a bed for you, anytime. I meant Madam Gobshite. I need to put some distance between me and her when I’m in the UK.’
Her father looked at the monitor with warm brown eyes. A wry smile softening a face that was still somewhat haggard after his ordeal, though his cheeks had begun to plump up, presumably thanks to Aunty Shaz’s incredible cooking. George’s stomach rumbled at the thought. Jerk chicken. Rice and peas. Goat curry. Bun. Jesus, I’ve got to learn to cook.
‘Don’t worry, my love. I’d worked that out,’ he said.
But suddenly, Letitia’s grimace blocked up the picture. ‘Hey! Don’t you be thinking I don’t know you’re having a pop at me, you cheeky lickle rarseclart.’
Her mother snapped her fingers at the camera, and even with the breadth of the North Sea between them, George winced inwardly at the castigatory gesture. She knew she was in the wrong for bitching so blatantly in front of her, and felt instantly guilty for it. Wouldn’t let on to that horrible old cow, though.
‘My internet’s down,’ she said, slamming the lid of her laptop shut. Ending a conversation that had quickly soured – though she had been trying her hardest to keep it sweet.
Glancing at the clock, she just registered the fact that it was gone 11 a.m. and she still hadn’t heard from Van den Bergen when her phone rang. It was Marie on the other end.
‘What’s up?’ she asked. ‘Has he forgotten his reading glasses again?’
But Marie’s voice was thin and stringy, stretched to its limit with angst. ‘The boss has been rushed to hospital. You’d better come quick.’
The taxi seemed to drive too slowly down the s100, though George could see from the driver’s speedometer that he was flooring it.
‘Please hurry!’ she said, reaching forward to grab the man’s shoulder. She withdrew her hand when she spied the navy jumper full of dandruff.
They took a sharp right off the motorway and left the canal, speeding down Rhijnspoorplein. The clusters of high-rise office blocks blurred into the less densely built-up dual carriageway of Wibautstraat. A tram approached from the left and the lights were changing.
‘Put your foot down!’ she shouted.
‘No way, missy. Sit tight. I’m not going to kill us both to save thirty seconds.’
The driver eyeballed her through the rear-view mirror. She could see from the stern promontory of his brow that he wasn’t going to yield. In sullen silence, she sat with folded arms, imagining Van den Bergen breathing his last in the high-dependency unit. Marie, being Marie, hadn’t gone into any great detail and had hung up all too quickly. George ruminated on what gut-wrenching drama might greet her when the taxi finally swung into Eerste Oosterparkstraat.
The brutalist mid-century-modern block of the hospital sprawled on their left.
‘Drop me here.’ George thrust money at the taxi driver and sprinted into the Onze Lieve Vrouw Gasthuis, arriving at the information desk with a tight chest. ‘I’m looking for Chief Inspector Paul van den Bergen,’ she wheezed, determining to quit the clandestine cigarettes she was still snatching when nobody was watching.
The receptionist looked her up and down. The smile didn’t quite reach her eyes as she gave George the ward location and reminded her that it wasn’t currently visiting time.
When George arrived on the specialist heart ward, she found Van den Bergen’s bed empty. Grabbing a passing male nurse by the arm, she was dimly aware of tears pricking the backs of her eyes. She shivered with icy dread. ‘Where’s the patient? Where’s Paul van den Bergen?’ she asked. ‘I’m his partner. Please tell me he hasn’t—’
The male nurse looked down at her hand with a disapproving expression. He gently withdrew his arm from her grip and patted her knuckles sympathetically.
‘Don’t worry,’ the nurse said. ‘He’s not dead. He’s too busy grumbling about the “service”, like we’re some kind of hotel and not a hospital. He wouldn’t believe the doctor when he was told he hadn’t had a heart attack.’
George shook her head. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘He’s on the guts ward. Stomach, bowels and liver.’
With a thundering heartbeat and unsure what to expect, George finally found her lover, looking pale and ruffled in a bed, surrounded by patients who looked far worse than he did, wired up to rather more than a simple blood-pressure cuff and oxygen monitor. She glimpsed the stickers from an earlier ECG on his chest.
‘Jesus, Paul! Marie called and told me you’d been rushed in here. She put the fear of God into me. What the hell’s going on? You look like shit.’
Van den Bergen sighed heavily and bypassed her lips to give her a cheek that was rough with iron-filings stubble.
‘Not on the lips. My tongue’s like a fur coat. You wouldn’t believe what they did to me, George. It was inhumane.’ He reached out to caress her face but pulled his finger free of the oxygen cuff, sending the machine’s alarm into overdrive. ‘I thought I’d had a heart attack.’
George pulled up a chair to his bedside. ‘Why are you on the guts ward if you’re not dying? Have you been poisoned?’
Van den Bergen’s sharp grey eyes seemed to focus on something far away that George couldn’t see. ‘There was this truck full of trafficked refugees. A little girl had died.’ His hooded lids closed, the lines around his eyes tightening. ‘One minute, I’m trying to get some information out of the bastard of a driver, next minute, he’s pulling an envelope out of his pocket. I don’t know how the hell he did it, the sneaky, agile bastard. He was cuffed!’
‘What was in the envelope?’ George took his hand and gently put the oxygen monitor back on the end of his finger.
‘It was full of powder.’ His eyes opened and locked with George’s, the ghost of fear still evident in pupils that had shrunk to pinpricks. ‘Anthrax, he said. He threw the stuff all over me.’ Van den Bergen swallowed hard. The digital beep of his pulse sped up. ‘I thought I was a goner, George.’
Backing away slightly at the thought of contamination, George inhaled sharply. ‘And was it? Anthrax, I mean?’
He shook his head. ‘Talcum powder, apparently. But I didn’t know that at the time. I felt this unbelievable griping pain in my chest and I just hit the deck. I have a vague memory of medics in biohazard suits and breathing apparatus crawling all over the place. Maybe they tested the powder on site. I have no idea.’ He exhaled heavily. ‘Obviously, it was a hoax.’ He ran a shaking shovel of a hand through the white thatch of his hair. ‘Maybe the arsehole had been using it to blackmail the refugees. How else, as a lone operator, could you get a large group of poorly treated people to be compliant on a long journey?’
‘Easier to conceal than a gun,’ George said, suddenly flushing hot as anger engulfed her on behalf of the dead little girl. She imagined the child, sick, terrified and whimpering for help as some moron of a driver threatened her with poison. She pushed the thought aside. For now. ‘But never mind all that. Why did you collapse?’ She stood and poured Van den Bergen a glass of water. Proffered it to him.
He sipped and winced. Belched audibly. ‘Panic. I thought I’d had a heart attack, but it wasn’t. It was bloody stomach acid, would you believe it? They gave me a gastroscopy.’
George threw her head back and laughed. ‘At last! About bloody time! And?’
Van den Bergen growled, pushed the glass back towards her and threw the flimsy hospital covers off the bed.
‘Where you going, old man?’ George asked in English, standing quickly so that the blood rushed to her head.
As he began to rummage in the cabinet beside his bed, George could see that the invalid had been replaced once again by a chief inspector. He pulled out the clothes he had been wearing that morning and plonked them onto the bed. Dark trousers and a plain blue shirt. He stripped off the ugly fawn-coloured support stockings that covered his long, long legs. ‘Gastroscopies are no laughing matter,’ he said, taking out his size thirteens – gleaming from George’s ministrations with shoe polish. He made a spitting noise like a cat with a fur ball stuck in its throat. ‘They shoved a hosepipe down me. A damned hosepipe! With a camera on the end. And I was awake.’
Taking his arm, George tried to usher him back into bed. ‘Look. Give it up, will you? They clearly think you need observation, so why the hell are you trying to escape?’
‘I want to question the owner of Groenten Den Bosch. That’s the livery on the side of the truck. There’s a girl dead and maybe more on their last legs because of some profiteering bastard who thinks human beings are interchangeable with exported goods. Maybe it’s this Den Bosch guy. Maybe he gets twelve-year-old girls mixed up with capsicums and courgettes.’
‘Paul!’
‘Well, I’m not going to find out why the Port of Amsterdam’s latest cargo is the dead and dying from the war-torn Middle East unless I get out of here.’
George snatched up his clothes and held them to her chest. ‘You’re my priority. You’re the one I love. The girl’s dead and we’ll catch whoever did this to her. But she can wait until tomorrow.’
Van den Bergen grabbed the garments back and hastily started to pull his trousers on. Yanked the ECG stickers off his chest, grimacing only slightly when they tugged at the scar tissue that ran from his sternum to his abdomen. ‘I’ve got a granddaughter, George. This can’t wait. And I’ve not had a heart attack.’ He dropped the hospital gown to the floor and pulled his shirt on over the wiry musculature of his torso. ‘I’ve got a hiatus hernia. A bad one. But—’
‘So you’re not about to die on me?’ George asked as she appraised him. He was still in decent shape for a man of fifty, thanks to all that gardening. She licked her lips and winked. ‘Good. The banks won’t turn you down for a mortgage then.’
Her pointed remark was met with a disdainful harrumph. Van den Bergen pulled a blister pack of painkillers from his jacket pocket and swallowed two with some water. ‘You can sit here feeling concerned for me, like a mother I don’t need, banging on about getting a place together yet again, or you can come and help me. I’m about to do what I always do, Georgina.’
‘Which is?’ George raised an eyebrow and folded her arms. Irritated by his inferring that she had morphed from red-hot lover into some suffocating, clucky guardian. That she was nagging him.
‘Fight for the wronged. Get justice for the innocent dead.’ He fastened the metal links of his chunky watch and hooked his reading glasses on their chain around his neck. ‘Well? Are you coming?’
CHAPTER 4
North Holland farmland near Nieuw-Vennep, Den Bosch farm, later still
‘It’s pretty deserted for a big enterprise,’ Van den Bergen said. ‘I don’t like it.’ His voice was even hoarser than usual, George noted. Though his right hand was hidden inside his coat, poised to draw his service weapon, he had wrapped his left hand around the base of his neck.
‘You look knackered, old man,’ George said, wishing the difficult sod had sent Elvis or Marie to check the provenance of the truck.
The slight stoop in Van den Bergen’s shoulders said everything, but he merely pursed his lips and stalked off towards the red steel door of the Den Bosch reception.
Casting an eye over the utilitarian grouping of brick buildings with their corrugated-iron roofs, George could see that there was not a single light at any of the windows. Nothing to see beyond them apart from acres and acres of the Dutch flatland. To the left, the polders had been neatly planted with crops or were festooned with row upon row of grey polytunnels that shone like fat silk worms in the dim sunlight. They snaked away into the distance, their uniformity punctuated only by the inky stripes of dykes. To the right, the horizon was broken by a veritable crystal palace of greenhouses. The place gave her the creeps.
‘Wait for me!’ Crunching the gravel of the courtyard beneath her new Doc Marten boots, she watched Van den Bergen try the handle.
‘It’s locked,’ he said, taking a few steps backwards. Still rubbing his neck. He approached one of the windows and peered inside. ‘Elvis said he couldn’t get the owner on the phone, either.’
‘Look, Paul. I think you should go home and leave this to the others. You’ve just been in hospital, for Christ’s sake! I’m worried about you.’
Waving her away, he took long strides around the side of the reception building. Jogging after him, George wanted to drag him by the sleeve of his raincoat back to his Mercedes. But this was Van den Bergen, and she knew he took stubborn to a whole new level.
‘There is someone here!’ he said, gesticulating at a pimped-up Jeep, an old Renault and two Luton vans bearing the company’s insignia, all parked up by the bins.
‘Maybe they’re in the fields,’ George said.
The wind had started to blow across the expanse of green, flattening the leaves that sprouted in neat rows. She clutched her duffel coat closed against the chill, wistfully thinking that a rum-fuelled family bust-up by the pool in Torremolinos would be infinitely preferable to a bleak afternoon in the agricultural dead centre of the Netherlands. She was just about to suggest they call for backup when a man exited one of the giant greenhouses, carrying a tray of seedlings. He caught sight of them and frowned. Started walking towards them. He moved at a brisk pace and wore jeans and a sweatshirt that were covered in mud at the knees and on the belly.
‘Can I help you?’ he asked. There was a bright glint when he spoke. Braces?
George couldn’t place the man’s accent. He wasn’t an Amsterdamer. But she could tell from his confident stance that he was at least the manager, if not the boss. There was something about the confrontational tone of his voice; this wasn’t someone who took orders. He was big, too. A wall of a man with a thick bush of greying hair that looked like an overgrown buzz cut.
‘I’m looking for Frederik den Bosch,’ Van den Bergen said, blocking the path.
‘Who wants him?’
‘I do.’ Van den Bergen withdrew a battered business card but was careful to give the sapling-carrying man-mountain a flash of his service weapon, strapped to the side of his body. He stuck the card between two swaying plants. ‘Chief Inspector Paul van den Bergen. Where might I find Den Bosch?’
‘You’re looking at him.’ He grinned widely, displaying a perfect set of gold teeth.
Following the proprietor into the main office building, George took in her surroundings, trying to get the measure of Den Bosch. The place was cold and dark, despite the whitewashed brick of the wall. It was cluttered with vintage furniture – more charity shop than antique-dealer cool. It felt damp and smelled of moss and mildew. An earthy, utilitarian place. Den Bosch set the tray of saplings down on the draining board of a sink in a kitchenette area at the far end.