The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die: The first book in an addictive crime series that will have you gripped. Marnie Riches
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‘But Polman was there,’ he said. ‘I remembered this purple bobble hat. It was so distinctive. And then her mother has the same one in her hands when I visited …’
Van den Bergen went quiet. He felt his eye begin to tic and hastily put his glasses on in a bid to conceal it.
‘You went to the girl’s house?’ Kamphuis shouted. ‘It’s Nieuwman’s case! You’re a senior inspector, you cretin. As such, you are tasked with responsibility for solving the biggest terrorism mystery Amsterdam has ever seen. And here you are, jerking around with a bog standard homicide of some dropout kid who was probably hocked up to a loan shark or dealer.’ Kamphuis rubbed his face. ‘Why? Why do you always get knee deep in everybody else’s shit, Paul?’
‘Rosa Bianco,’ he said simply.
Kamphuis threw his arms in the air, revealing sweat stains that had turned the fabric of his red shirt a dark ruby colour, seeping outwards in a ring like life’s blood from a mortal wound. Van den Bergen was reminded of the tragic dark stain on the floor in Janneke’s parental home.
‘Fennemans was acquitted,’ Kamphuis said through gritted teeth. ‘And I’ve got enough to worry about without having his heavyweight, fat-fee-charging legal representation, not to mention the public prosecutor coming down on my head all because Dr Vim spent an unnecessary ten weeks in pre-trial detention. And now,’ he was violently poking himself in the chest, ‘my senior inspector is persecuting him on the basis of circumstantial evidence. Nice, Paul. Really nice.’
‘He’s got to be a prime suspect in Polman’s murder.’
Kamphuis tapped his finger on the desktop. Rata tat tat. ‘Where’s the ringleader for my suicide bombings? Where’s al Badaar?’
Van den Bergen groaned softly. ‘I’m going to pick up a prescription in a minute. The pharmacist is a Muslim woman in a headscarf. Shall I bring her in? Will you be happy then?’
Kamphuis pulled a sandwich out of his desk drawer and started eating noisily. ‘Just get me a Muslim fundamentalist so I can kiss the minister’s arse without the shitty aftertaste.’
‘I’ve got to see him now!’ George shouted over the counter at the uniformed officer.
He looked at her with cool detachment. Remote and getting further away like an ice floe at low tide. George sat heavily on her mounting agitation. ‘I know he’s here,’ she said, injecting politesse into her stricken voice. ‘They said he was in a meeting. But please, I need to speak to him urgently.’
The policeman eyed George up and down like some security scanner at Schiphol airport: checking for anomalies, bullshit and bombs. She noted that he didn’t subject Ad to the same sharp-eyed scrutiny.
‘Tell me what it’s about,’ he finally said.
When van den Bergen appeared in the Prinsengracht foyer, he ushered George and Ad quickly to a private room. George had been storing up a verbal storm to unleash on him after he had put the phone down on her. But now, seeing him harried, worn down, haggard, with demons on his shoulders, the storm dissipated and left her with only dead calm.
She tossed the photograph of Ratan standing on the Thai beach onto the table. Van den Bergen picked it up. He put on reading glasses that hung around his neck on a cord and squinted down his nose at the photograph. His eyebrows bunched above questioning, bloodshot eyes.
‘What …?’ he asked
‘Your so-called bomber,’ George said. ‘Look at the tattoo on his ankle.’
Ad cleared his throat as if to remind van den Bergen that he was in the room too. ‘Ratan Patil. He’s my … our friend from uni. We were all at a party together the night before the bombing of Bushuis library. He’s been missing ever since.’
Van den Bergen rubbed the grey, early afternoon stubble on his chin. He frowned at George over the glasses.
‘How do you know about the tattoo?’ he asked her.
‘This guy—’ George began.
Ad put his arm in front of George. ‘There’s a forensics photo gone viral among the med students. A friend showed it to us the other day. By chance, we—’
‘We asked Ratan’s landlady if we could take a look in his room to check he hadn’t collapsed or anything,’ George interjected. ‘I spotted that photo on his pinboard.’
Van den Bergen breathed in deeply. He pursed his lips and looked again at the photograph of the smiling Ratan: knobbly knees, ears sticking out, clearly delighted by his Thai female companions.
‘Do you think he was radicalised at college?’ he asked.
George mentally tutted and rolled her eyes. ‘This guy’s a Hindu,’ she said. ‘Ratan Patil. Not Muslim.’ She could feel a scathing comment brewing. She tried to bite it back but it was too hard. ‘Is it just that they all look the same to you?’ she said.
Van den Bergen thumped the table so hard that George jumped. Ad cleared his throat.
‘She didn’t mean—’ Ad said.
‘Listen, you two …’ van den Bergen said.
He leaned in closely. George could see the open pores on his nose and smell oranges on his breath.
‘… I have something tantamount to a signed confession from the leader of a fundamentalist Islamic terror cell,’ he said. ‘My bosses want this case solved yesterday and—’
‘Ratan was not Muslim!’ George shouted. ‘Ratan was a beer-swilling Hindu from Mumbai. And we’ve heard your second victim in Utrecht—’
‘George, don’t!’ Ad said.
‘—was white!’
Van den Bergen straightened up abruptly and breathed in sharply. ‘How do you know about that? Where are you getting your information from?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ George said. ‘We’re getting it. Okay? And I can see from your reaction that it’s good. So unless your al Badaar is secretly radicalising infidels in their sleep, I’d say you’re hunting the wrong man.’
Van den Bergen sat in silence. He looked at George and then at Ad. He shook his head and ran his large hand through his thatch of platinum hair. He smiled.
‘Cagney and bloody Lacey. I’ve got Cagney and bloody Lacey on the case.’ He turned to Ad. ‘Which one are you? The blonde or the brunette?’
Ad opened and closed his mouth. He was almost grey. George could see that Ad wasn’t used to police attention. She wanted to take his hand and squeeze it but her thoughts were stalled by van den Bergen standing.
‘Come with me, you two. I need you to do something for me, and it’s not pleasant.’
It was cold in there, close to where they kept the bodies. The floors were tiled and the light was harsh. George’s breath came quick as she and Ad followed van den Bergen down the aseptic corridors of the Forensics Institute.
‘The national forensics centre is in The Hague,’ van den Bergen said, ‘but we wanted to get an analysis from the Utrecht site here in Amsterdam. In case there were commonalities between Utrecht and the first bombing.’ Then he stopped suddenly at a set of double doors and turned round. His expression was grim. ‘Wait here.’
George fiddled with the buttons on her flimsy jacket, wishing she had worn a jumper that morning. And yet, despite the cold which made her nose tingle at the tip, she knew her armpits would be ringed with sweat. She could feel the moisture running down past her bra onto the waistband of her jeans. Adrenalin.
She looked at Ad. His grey pallor betrayed fear, or was it that he was going to throw up?
‘Have you ever seen a dead body before?’ she asked, tugging his sleeve gently.
He pushed his steel-framed