The Girl Who Got Revenge: The addictive new crime thriller of 2018
‘Or is it some case that’s got him all fired up and now he’s pissing in your chips? Or some ailment? Eh?’ Letitia stared into the webcam, making George feel as though her innermost thoughts were being excavated at the determined and brutal hand of a tomb raider. Letitia the Dragon was examining her talons, now painted with stars and stripes; studded with tiny diamanté.
‘It’s nothing to do with Paul. Paul and me are fine,’ George lied, conjuring the memory that played on repeat in her mind’s eye: Van den Bergen jettisoning their date night, only hours after her touchdown at Schiphol airport, in favour of driving down to Tamara’s because Numb-Nuts was playing a gig and Tamara fancied a little help with baby bath time from Opa. George swallowed hard. Distract the Dragon. Tell her about Sally Wright. But she was reluctant to betray the betrayer, since she knew Letitia would love nothing more than hearing George malign the very woman who had enabled her to escape the clutches of a toxic narcissist of a mother and her dead-end life on the dead-end streets of a South East London shithole. ‘I’ve got PMT. That’s it. And I’m skint.’
Letitia threw her fat head back and started to laugh. All heaving bosom in some gruesome draped polyester number – from Primark, by the looks. Fashion that loved the thin, young and long-limbed, but was rather less forgiving of the chubby possessor of a G cup. ‘Do us a favour, girl. The rum and Coke’s all on you once we hit Torremolinos.’ She cast a glance to someone just out of the frame. ‘Ain’t that right, Shaz? Drinks on her, innit? With her fancy book ting and that.’
There was giggling in the background as Aunty Sharon appeared in front of the camera, the flesh of her sturdy arm wobbling as she stirred something in a mixing bowl. ‘Take no notice of her, darling. What’s the matter? Tell your Aunty Shaz.’
George tutted dolefully. Wondering if her family knowing the truth – at least in part – would be quite that bad. ‘Things have gone a bit tits up on the work front, if I’m honest.’
‘You paying your fair share of the holidays, though!’ her mother said, pointing at her with one of those Uncle Sam talons.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ George said, contemplating the modest balance in her account and the £500 she owed Aunty Sharon. Van den Bergen would surely lend her the rest. Wouldn’t he? ‘But my publisher has pulled out of the next book. And if I don’t publish every year, my funders won’t look kindly on me…’ She chewed her bottom lip, knowing she’d already said too much, but feeling the words pushing for release. ‘And if I can’t get funding, I won’t get my tenure renewed at St John’s.’
‘What the fuck does that mean? What hoity-toity bullshit you coming out with now?’ Letitia asked, flicking her ash into the palm of her left hand.
Aunty Sharon approached the camera and budged her sister out of the way on the well-worn old sofa. A look of alarm on her kind, unadorned face. She clutched at her mixing bowl as though it were a baby. ‘You gonna get the push, love?’
Though she tried desperately to hold them back, the rogue tears burst forth, and George could only submit to a bout of racking sobs. ‘I’ve already been given the push, Aunty Shaz. The Peterhulme Trust rejected my proposal for a new study.’
As Aunty Sharon reached out to stroke George’s image on her screen, Letitia elbowed her sister out of the way. ‘You need to come home is what you need to do, girl. Get your shit together. Get a proper bloody job. Not this arty-farty bollocks that white witch got you doing. Sally fucking Wright. Where’s Professor Fucking Do-Gooder when your shit’s hitting the fan, eh?’ She narrowed those eyes, the curling holiday false eyelashes obscuring the true intent behind them. ‘Or maybe she’s stirring the shit because you wouldn’t toe the line. Is that it? Am I right?’ She sucked her teeth loud and long, having nailed the truth of the situation. ‘Oh yeah. I see this now. And there’s you, flying across the North Sea every five minutes to service the Jolly Green Giant’s needs so you’ve not got a nicker to your name.’ She snapped her fingers and folded her arms triumphantly. ‘Bending over for Sally Wright. Blowing off Van der Twat and still no sign of commitment.’ She broke into patois. ‘Yu caan tun duck off a nest. Know what I mean? You ain’t going nowhere. You need to change your shit up, Ella.’
‘Don’t call me Ella. You know I hate it.’
‘She’s right, George,’ Aunty Sharon said, muscling her way back into the frame. ‘You letting people walk all over you, darling. But never mind.’ She started to beat her cake mixture anew, a look of grim determination on her face. Her towering confection of silk scarf and hair extensions shook with the effort. ‘This break will do you good. Tinesha’s coming home this afternoon. Patrice has even put his Nikes through the wash, can you believe it? And your dad…’ She glanced at Letitia. Her concerned frown was almost imperceptible. ‘Well, let’s just say some of that paella and sangria will fatten him up. You’ll be with your own, love. Give you time to mull things over, like. I can always get you a job with me behind the bar at Skin Licks, if you like.’
George swallowed hard at the thought of doling out vodka tonics to dirty old men at the Soho titty bar where she had once cleaned. Sticky glasses, stale booze and sodden beermats. Sod that. ‘Nah. You’re all right, Aunty Shaz. I’ll work it out.’
‘You need to be with your family for a bit,’ Letitia said. ‘Blood’s thicker than water, innit?’
Nodding, George glanced down at her phone. Noticed a text from Van den Bergen and absently started to read it. Felt the tears evaporate away as the fire lit within her again.
‘Home late. Nipping to Tamara’s first, then got a few people to interview. Don’t wait up.’
Was this it? Life with a policeman? A life sentence, trapped in a situation where Van den Bergen’s ‘girls’ always came first. And plans for their future together always came last. Perhaps Letitia, Queen of Shit-Stirrers, was right. Maybe it was time to change her shit up.
‘Listen,’ she said, studying the unlikely twosome of her homely, long-suffering aunt and her slowly dying glamour puss of a mother, with her sickle-cell anaemia and pulmonary hypertension and her Lambert & Butlers. ‘I’m gonna finish packing. I’ll see you tomorrow morning at Gatwick.’
Faking a smile, she severed the connection to her family and flopped back into the sagging second-hand sofa, like a deflating blow-up doll who serviced everybody’s needs but her own. With work-worn hands, she fingered the cashmere throw that she’d bought for Van den Bergen to cover the well-worn chintzy upholstery. Swallowing a sob, she savoured the memories of both her mother and her father having slept there, eschewing the uncomfortable guest bed. Her mother had been lured away and abducted by a psychopath. Her father, recovering after years of slave labour, had been unwittingly working for the same psychopath in the Coba Cartel. Happy families happened to other people, she mused, picking off the bobbles where the cashmere had started to pill.
And then there was the spectre of her own recent memory, having spent the night on the sofa only the previous Saturday after an argument with her ill-tempered lover. She allowed the loneliness to engulf her. Wept. Imagined the warmth of the Spanish sun on her skin and the barbed tongue of her mother as she sipped rum and passed harsh judgement on the pasty Thomson travellers that weren’t part of their noisy extended clan.
But then, her phone rang. Van den Bergen was on the other end, sounding flustered.
‘You won’t believe what happened to me today,’ he said. ‘And I’ve just come from the mortuary. Honestly, George. I’ve stumbled across something crazy.’
‘Yeah?’ she said, chewing the inside of her cheek. ‘Well you can tell it to Tamara, can’t you? I’m going on holiday.’
‘No! You can’t. That’s why I’m calling. I need your help. I’m not going to Tamara’s now. I’ll tell you when I get back. I’m on my way—’
‘Paul! No!’ she said. But it was too late. He’d hung up, pronouncing the death of her holiday plans whether she liked it or not.
CHAPTER 7
Amsterdam, mortuary, later still
White walls. Stainless steel slab. Greying corpse. George hated the mortuary. And yet, here she was, with Marianne de Koninck staring at the side of her head, waiting for signs of weakness, no doubt.
‘I wanted you to see this,’ Van den Bergen said, beckoning her close.
‘Not the sort of date night I had in mind.’ George clutched her inadequate cardigan closed against the cold. It was always chilly down there.
He turned to the head of forensic pathology and nodded. ‘Tell her, Marianne!’
The tall pathologist took her place at the side of the old man’s body, spreading ribs that had already been sawn down the middle. George grimaced at the sight of the dark cavity where his heart had been, feeling deep-seated sadness that all the old man had done, thought and felt during his lifetime, had been reduced to composite body parts, like a puzzle made from spoiling flesh. There was his heart on the scales. There was his brain on a dissecting table. Here was his stomach, being carefully lifted out of the abdominal cavity like a bad caesarean birth. De Koninck reopened the foul-smelling stomach and pointed with a latex-gloved finger to the clearly visible remnants of a small white tablet.
‘Arnold van Blanken. Ninety-five,’ she began. ‘Amsterdamer, born and bred, who was apparently visiting a friend in a different neighbourhood when he felt ill. I understand he registered at the surgery as a temporary emergency patient. When he came in here, as I told Paul last night, I took one look at him and presumed it was natural causes. A worn-out heart giving up.’
‘He just died in front of me,’ Van den Bergen said to nobody in particular, staring at the florid post-mortem colours in the old man’s face. ‘I had to get closure, I suppose. My doc wouldn’t tell me anything. That’s why I came. And I’m glad I did.’
‘Well, he looks ancient,’ George said. ‘Is that medication inside his stomach?’ She shrugged. ‘Surely there’s nothing weird about old guys taking tablets for this, that and the other.’
De Koninck stood straight, towering above George, looking austere and unforgiving in her white coat beneath the bright mortuary lights. The prominent veins in her masculine hands gave her away as the athletic type. Her punishing regime of tennis or hockey or whatever the fuck she did outside work had stripped away any softness to the woman’s face. She was all long Patrician limbs and skinny, shapely legs beneath those scrubs and the lab coat, unlike George’s bone-crushing tree-trunks. The pathologist had no arse to her name, though. Those blonde, northern European types never had any booty to speak of.
‘It’s cisapride,’ De Koninck said, ‘twenty-milligram tablets, which is normally prescribed four times per day for those with gastro-oesophageal reflux disease. I sent it off to the toxicologist overnight to get it analysed. There were four tablets, half-digested just like this one. Too high a dose in one go.’ She rummaged inside the upper end of the stomach and showed George a scene of coagulated gore, muscle and connective tissue that made little visual sense. ‘Van Blanken had a hiatus hernia. See where the stomach is protruding into the gullet?’
‘Like me, George!’ Van den Bergen said, his voice a shade higher than his usual low rumble. ‘Listen to this!’
Barely able to believe she was passing up a trip to Torremolinos to look at the dead body of a man who’d had more than his fair share of life, George folded her arms and put her weight on one foot. Tapping the tiled morgue floor with her steel-toe-capped Doc Martens. She rolled her eyes. ‘You’ve got staff for this, Paul. Put me on the payroll, or I’m off to catch a late flight to Malaga.’ She checked her watch. ‘My family needs me.’
‘Listen!’ Van den Bergen placed a hand on her shoulder.
Marianne de Koninck raised an eyebrow and snapped off her gloves, throwing them into a biohazard bin. She sat down in front of her computer. ‘When I found the hiatus hernia, I wasn’t surprised that Mr Van Blanken should be taking cisapride, which is an antacid medication. But four twenty-milligram tablets at once? That’s dangerously high.’
‘Senility?’ George asked. ‘If you’re meant to take one four times per day, is it not feasible he got mixed up and took four instead? It’s easy to be forgetful, even at my age.’
‘No.’ De Koninck scrolled through a report. ‘I’ve had his medical records sent over, and it seems his GP, a Dr Saif Abadi, had prescribed abnormally high doses of the medication, which is weird. You could say it’s professionally negligent at the very least. The Americans have taken their version of cisapride – Propulsid – off the market entirely. One of the dodgy side effects is that it’s widely known to put patients at risk of something called Long QT Syndrome.’
‘What?’
‘It’s a rare condition where a delayed repolarisation of the heart, following a heartbeat, increases the risk of something called Torsades des Pointes.’ She shook her head disapprovingly at George’s blank expression.
‘Do you want to tell me all about the foibles of drug mules or poor mental health among the female prison population?’ Now it was George’s turn to shake her head. ‘No? So, why the hell should I understand about bloody Marquis de Sade or whatever it is you just mentioned?’
‘Georgina!’ Van den Bergen said.
But George had had enough. ‘Look. Why am I here? What’s so fascinating about poor Arnold damned van Blanken and his dicky ticker?’
De Koninck pursed her lips, the nostrils of her narrow Dutch nose flaring. ‘Torsades des Pointes is an irregular heartbeat originating from the ventricles. It can lead to fainting and sudden death due to ventricular fibrillation. It basically brings on heart failure.’
‘And his GP intentionally put him on an unnecessarily high dose,’ Van den Bergen said, reaching into his pocket and withdrawing a pack of tablets that said ‘Omeprazole’ on the side. ‘I was worried that my own doc had prescribed the same killer meds.’
Well, thought George, that explains the previous night’s tossing and turning in bed.
‘Potentially killer,’ De Koninck said, smoothing her expensively streaked urchin cut behind her ears. ‘Normally, it’s a very safe drug.’
‘So, the old man was wantonly poisoned,’ George said.
‘And that’s the least of it,’ Van den Bergen said, approaching the corpse and pointing to his neck. He beckoned her over with a nod of his head. ‘See this tattoo?’
Not wishing to get too close, George craned her neck to see a tiny inking of a lion that had faded presumably from black to navy blue over time. The lion wore a crown and carried a sword. ‘I wonder what the S and the 5 stand for?’ She sniffed and took a step back. ‘Looks like a prison tattoo. Ink and a needle. Something really old school.’
Van den Bergen raised an eyebrow and treated her to a wry smile. Was he being patronising about her turn of phrase? Or was she overreacting because she was already so mad at him?
‘Well,’ he said, grabbing surreptitiously at his throat, ‘Marianne has had more than one old guy in here lately who’s died of a meds-induced heart attack and sported one of these tattoos.’
Breathing in sharply, all the cynicism and defensive, studied boredom fell away from George like a layer of dead skin, revealing the questioning machine of her intellect and curiosity beneath. ‘Really?’ She unfolded her arms and looked again at the tattoo. ‘You got photos?’
‘What do you think?’ De Koninck said, taking a file from her desk and opening it to reveal post-mortem shots of another old man. ‘Brechtus Bruin. Another ninety-five-year-old. I did his autopsy a couple of weeks ago. He’d been taking Demerol and OxyContin as prescription painkillers. And guess what he died from?’
‘Heart attack,’ George said.
De Koninck nodded, raising both finely plucked eyebrows with a wry smile. ‘You guessed it.’
George studied the shots of Brechtus Bruin’s neck, feeling the hairs rise on the back of her own. ‘The same tattoo! Marie’s going to have a field day searching for the background to this on the internet.’ She was undeterred by the sight of the lifeless nonagenarian in the pictures. It was far easier than cosying up to the discoloured, slowly decomposing neck of the actual corpse before her.
‘Both Bruin and Van Blanken had the same superficial cause of death and the same tattoo,’ Van den Bergen said, peering over her shoulder at the regal lion. ‘There’s a definite link.’
The pathologist switched tabs on her computer screen to another report. She scanned the notes, tapping the screen. ‘Though Brechtus Bruin took ill at home, so there were no witnesses. As I understand it from the ambulance team who brought him in to me, he’d been lying dead in his house, undiscovered, for several days before his neighbour realised he wasn’t picking up his grocery deliveries. But the painkillers he was taking are also notorious for causing heart attacks in the frail in high doses.’
George ran through the implications in silence. ‘Are you sure it’s not all just conjecture and coincidence? The tattoos and heart attacks, I mean. Or do you think you’ve got a Harold Shipman-style serial killer of oldies running riot in the city?’ She bit her lip in horrified anticipation.
Van den Bergen turned to her with a grim smile. ‘Worse than that. I think we’ve got someone who’s clearly targeting just one specific group of old men. We need to find out why and we need to find out who else is on the hit list. And you’re closer than you know with that Shipman analogy, Georgina. Both of these men were prescribed these meds by the same GP, and I don’t like it one bit.’
George let out a long, low whistle. Suddenly, she didn’t give a hoot about abandoning a bickering Letitia, her father and Aunty Sharon and her brood to a three-star poolside with only a partial view of the freezing cold Med. She thought about her ailing bank balance, and grinned. ‘Think you can use a freelance criminologist on the usual day rate?’
CHAPTER 8
Amsterdam, police headquarters, 9 October
‘Where are you with the illegal immigrant situation?’ Maarten Minks asked, sitting bolt upright, as though the chief of police had personally rammed a pointy-ended paperweight up his young commissioner’s rectum. Minks was flushed. He was only ever red in the face when he was wetting his big boy pants with excitement over a development in a case or if he had been given a dressing-down.
Suspecting the latter, Van den Bergen folded his arms over the maelstrom of griping wind and acid indigestion that raged in his beleaguered stomach. He sighed. ‘Frederik den Bosch is an unpleasant character with some really disgusting views, but you can’t arrest a man for that unless he acts on them. And his record is squeaky clean. His claim that the lorry containing the Syrians was stolen checks out. He called in a theft in a couple of days before the find. Uniforms went and took a statement from his office manager, and Den Bosch contacted his insurers soon afterwards.’
‘Was it stolen from the yard?’ Minks asked, smoothing the leather padded arms on his captain’s chair. ‘Surely an international exporter with acreage like that has got decent security. A guard? Dogs? Cameras?’
Van den Bergen nodded, wondering if he should mention the two old men and their suspicious deaths. But with a little girl dead, the Syrian refugee case was a murder investigation that warranted his full attention. If Minks got wind of the two nonagenarians with their mysterious tattoos, the overzealous stickler for rules would cry conflict of interest and immediately pass the case on to one of the other senior detectives. No way was Van den Bergen willing to let that happen. Especially since Arnold van Blanken had breathed his last only a few feet from where he had been uselessly sitting in the doctor’s surgery.
‘Marie has the CCTV footage from Den Bosch’s premises and has yet to find anything.’ He rubbed his stomach and belched quietly, trying to picture the inside of his ulcerated gullet.
‘You seem distracted, Paul. Is there anything you’d like to share with me? Are you…’ He leaned forward. ‘Well?’ Minks cocked his head in the semi-concerned fashion of a careerist who often practised being human in front of a mirror.
‘What kind of a question is that?’ Van den Bergen asked, straightening in his seat until, thanks to his long torso, he could see the top of Minks’s head. Thinning hair, since he’d whipped Kamphuis’s old job from under Van den Bergen’s nose.
‘A suspected heart attack and collapse at the scene of an arrest?’ Minks examined his perfectly clean fingernails. Clearly, the man was not a gardener. He failed to make eye contact with Van den Bergen. ‘Seems your little adventure in Mexico has knocked the stuffing out of you.’
‘I brought down the Rotterdam Silencer, and not for the first time!’ Van den Bergen could feel irritation itching its way up his neck. He regarded his superior officer with some cynicism. The smug arsehole was showing signs of turning into his predecessor. ‘I think you might find it physically testing to have anthrax thrown in your face.’
Minks’s eyes narrowed. He touched the stiff Eton collar on his shirt. ‘It wasn’t anthrax.’
‘I didn’t know that at the time, did I?’
The silence between them made the air feel too thick to breathe. Finally, Van den Bergen relented and spoke.
‘I’ve put Dr McKenzie on the payroll. She’s an expert in trafficking of all sorts.’
‘For Christ’s sake, Paul! I’m trying to keep departmental costs down. Not let them spiral out of control, and all because you want to play the generous sugar daddy with your girlfriend. Why the hell can’t you co-opt some junior detective from another station? McKenzie’s expensive.’
Van den Bergen closed his eyes momentarily and swallowed down the scorching poker of bile that lanced its way up his oesophagus. ‘Dr McKenzie is a specialist consultant. Even if I didn’t have a relationship with her outside of the workplace, I’d still hire her. Pay peanuts, get monkeys.’
‘I’ve studied your expenditure. It’s gone through the roof in the last few years.’ There it was. Spreadsheet King had been getting his rocks off after hours with a five-knuckle shuffle over some ancient Excel files.
‘The world’s a bad place, Maarten, and every year it gets worse. Ten years ago, we didn’t have half the violent trafficking-related crime that we have now in the city. Or at least we weren’t aware of it. You want me to keep solving cases? Then I need the right people. Georgina has come in on our most complex and dangerous cases – multiple murders and organised criminal networks that have had international reach. Can you think of a single one that my team didn’t solve?’ He folded his arms triumphantly. ‘She’s got a criminologist’s insight – something that we lack. Dirk and Marie are the best officers I’ve ever had working for me, but there’s a limit to what—’
Minks balled his fist, clearly ready to thump the table. His wrinkle-free face seemed even tauter than usual. ‘My priority is to crack down on crime committed by immigrants, Paul. Many influential Amsterdamers are not happy with the city being over-run by ISIS bastards, masquerading as refugees from these far-flung, bombed-out shitholes. The great and the good of Amsterdam are taxpayers, Chief Inspector! They’re our bloody bosses!’
Listening to the alt-right bilge that Minks was spouting from between those too-tight lips of his, Van den Bergen was suddenly tempted to take the bottle of Gaviscon from his raincoat pocket and neutralise the commissioner’s acidic mouth with it. But he knew this edict had come from on high. It was in the papers daily: panic, prejudice and paranoia.
‘I’m not getting into a political point-scoring contest, Maarten,’ he said, standing abruptly. ‘That’s why I’m not sitting on your side of the desk. I’m a policeman. I put the bad guys behind bars. Let me find the bastard who landed a bunch of vulnerable people in hospital and killed a twelve-year-old. If I say I need Dr McKenzie’s help, just pay the invoices, will you? There’s a good lad.’