The Girl Who Got Revenge: The addictive new crime thriller of 2018. Marnie Riches
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you’re exaggerating. This is the first time in ages that I’ve woken you up.’ He ran his long fingers gently along the sides of her unfettered breasts. ‘And there was once a time when you were happy to be disturbed in the middle of the night.’
He was smiling now, though the mirth didn’t quite reach his eyes. George could see that he was suffering. Nevertheless, Van den Bergen lifted her off the ground as though she were a doll, amidst her shrieked protests, and carried her into the bedroom. They had just begun to enjoy a passionate kiss, only slightly marred by the aniseed taste of his antacid medicine and the knowledge that Van den Bergen’s heart wasn’t entirely in it, when the mobile phone on his nightstand started to buzz.
‘Oh, you’re joking,’ George said, rolling his long frame off her. ‘See?’
‘Who the hell is it at this time in the morning?’ Van den Bergen asked, rummaging for his glasses among the pile of pill packets and gardening manuals. He held the folded spectacles up to his eyes and scowled at the phone’s screen. ‘Bloody Maarten Minks.’ He pressed the answer button and lifted the phone to his ear. ‘Morning, Maarten. Isn’t it a little early—?’
Gathering the duvet around her like a cocoon, George could hear Van den Bergen’s boss, the commissioner, on the other end. His voice sounded squeaky and overexcited. Demanding dickhead. She guessed he liked nothing more than to lord it over his ageing subordinate at an unsociable hour.
‘Yes. Okay. Straightaway. I’ll call you with an update.’ Van den Bergen nodded and hung up, exhaling heavily.
‘What is it?’ George asked, stifling a yawn.
‘Port of Amsterdam,’ he said. ‘Customs have found a truck full of suffocating Syrians, and guess who’s been tasked with investigating!’
‘Trafficked?’
‘What do you think?’
‘How many?’ George wiped the sleep from her eyes.
Van den Bergen was already on his feet, pulling on the weekend’s jeans, which were only slightly muddy from a trip to his Sloterdijkermeer allotment. ‘Fifty-odd. Minks has got his knickers in a twist. He’s under pressure to stem the tide of refugees coming into the city. The burghers of Amsterdam are happy to throw money at Syrian charities but they’re not overly pleased at the thought of hundreds of them arriving in cargo trucks to shit on their highly polished Oud Zuid doorsteps.’
‘Hypocrites,’ George said. ‘It’s the same in the UK. Most of the people you speak to are sympathetic about what’s being done to those poor bastards. Bombed by the Russians. Bent over by Daesh. Shat on by Assad. But nearly half the nation voted for Brexit, mainly to keep immigrants out, so somebody’s telling fibs.’ She padded back to the kitchen and switched on the kettle. As she prepared a flask of coffee for Van den Bergen, she thought about her own father, currently holed up in South East London with her mother, from whom he was estranged, and her long-suffering Aunty Sharon. With his Spanish passport, would he be sent packing back to his country of origin, unable to rebuild the relationship with his long-lost daughter properly?
Screwing the lid closed on the flask, she eyed the printout of the ticket to Torremolinos that she’d propped behind Van den Bergen’s peppermint teabags. Ten days, descending en masse on the three-star Sol hotel of Letitia’s choice, at Letitia’s insistence, with the sea-facing rooms that Letitia had stipulated. George in with her cousin, Tinesha. Her Dad in with cousin Patrice. Mommie Dearest, bunking up with poor old Aunty Sharon, where she’d undoubtedly hog all the wardrobe space – ‘’Cos I gotta look my best if I’m not well with my pulmonaries. I gotta make that rarseclart know what he’s been missing all these years, innit?’ Not long now. George could almost smell the rum and Coke by the pool and the melange of coconut sun cream scents from Thomson’s least intrepid travellers.
When Van den Bergen took his flask and kissed her goodbye, his phone was welded to his ear yet again. A grim expression on his handsome face and his thick shock of prematurely white hair seeming cold blue in the dawn light.
‘And one of them’s died?’ he asked. Presumably it was Minks on the other end. ‘Oxygen deprivation?’ A pause. He snatched a bag of crisps and the key to his Mercedes from the console table in the hall. ‘Dysentery?! Ugh. What a way to go in a confined space. How old?’
His brow furrowed. He pulled the door closed.
George could still hear him speaking in low, rumbling tones on the landing. ‘Twelve? Jesus. Poor little sod. Okay. I’m on it.’
‘How come the truck was intercepted here?’ Van den Bergen asked Elvis, his voice almost whipped away entirely by the stiff dockside wind and swallowed by the sobs of those Syrian refugees who were yet to be assessed by paramedics and ferried to hospital. He blinked hard at the sight of this desperate diaspora, sitting on the pavement, wrapped in tinfoil blankets, with blood-pressure cuffs strapped to their arms and oxygen monitors clamped on their fingers. ‘Seems a weird place for the driver to have come. It’s all logistics and exporter headquarters in this bit of the port.’
He studied the heavy goods vehicle, which had been cordoned off with police tape by the uniforms. On the side of the truck’s battered burgundy container, the livery of a produce company, Groenten Den Bosch B.V., had been emblazoned in yellow. It looked no different from any other cargo vehicle carrying greenhouse-grown unseasonable fruit and vegetables to the UK and beyond.
‘Apparently the port authority cops were heading this way after they’d been to investigate a break-in over there…’ Elvis gesticulated towards some grey industrial sheds in the distance that bruised the watery landscape with their utilitarian bulk. It looked exactly like the place the junior detective had almost met an untimely end at the hands of the Rotterdam Silencer’s men. Small wonder that he was shivering, his shoulders hunched inside his leather jacket, a pinched look to his face. ‘It was a chance discovery,’ he said, his eyes darting furtively over to the wharf-side warehouse behind them. The scar around his neck was still livid, though he’d covered it up today with a scarf. The quiff and mutton-chop sideburns that had earned him his nickname may have been replaced by a stylish cut and better clothes, but Van den Bergen’s protégé looked positively vulnerable these days.
‘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