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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wanted Ad to go away. She wanted her guest to get the hell out as well.
‘Gone nine,’ Ad said. ‘Come on. You’ve got to see this. Let’s go.’
Ad pushed the door open, taking George by surprise. He peered into her room and she knew then he had seen everything.
‘Filip?’ he said.
She could hear the ridicule in his voice. She flushed hot with embarrassment.
‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Meet me downstairs in two.’
As she closed the door on Ad, she was sure she could see hurt in the intelligent brown eyes that hid behind his steel-framed glasses. She drew back the brocade curtains in sharp, angry movements, annoyed with herself for letting Ad see what she had done. Whom she had done. Why did he care so much anyway? He already had his blonde, Milkmaid childhood sweetheart back home. What was she called? Astrid or Margo or something like that. Screw him.
Feeling like her brain was packed with cotton wool, George peered out over the steep rooftops of Amsterdam’s red light district. It had rained in the night, and now the roof tiles glittered in the morning sun.
She had the best view in the world; an exclusive view, hidden from those below. The judgemental. The respectable. The petty-minded. The paying punters who had eyes only for red-lit booths and the bongs in coffee shop windows.
Yes, it was a lovely morning. But then, on the horizon to her far right, George spotted a plume of black smoke. Thick and acrid, it curled up into the delicate blue of the morning sky like an angry fist. The explosion.
‘My God!’ she said. ‘He’s right. That’s some fire.’
Wishing she had the time to scrub away the blunted memory of her conquest in a hot shower, she hastily sprayed deodorant over her body. She threw on freshly ironed jeans and a T-shirt, quietly chiding herself for putting clean clothes on a dirty body. She dragged her fingers roughly through her curly black hair.
‘Lock up on the way out,’ she said to a stirring Filip. ‘Drop the keys in the coffee shop downstairs. Ask for Jan. Only give them to Jan, okay?’
‘Are you leaving?’ Filip asked, shielding his eyes from the glare of the day.
George answered him by closing the door behind her, relieved that she did not have to have the stilted ‘let’s just be friends’ conversation over coffee made with almost sour milk.
Perhaps her imagination had been over-stimulated by the violent events that were unfolding just down the road. Or possibly it was just a paranoia hangover from the previous night’s revelry. George was not entirely sure why, but as she undid the clanking, rusted U-lock that fastened her bike to the bike-rack, she felt inclined to look up.
She saw nothing but the unremarkable scene of dark, still water, the gnarled limbs of winter-bare trees, pointing to tempting shop windows that would later be crammed with sickly eye candy, dressed only in thongs and bras to satisfy the sweet, rotten tooth of the common, kerb-crawling Homo sapiens.
Flanked by Ad, George rattled on her old Dutch bike along the canals and through the slowly waking streets. Suddenly the awkward silence between them was punctured by the wail of sirens; the sound of screaming. Her heartbeat quickened. She felt the heat; smelled diesel.
‘We’ve got to stay together, okay?’ Ad said, looking back at her with watery eyes and a red, pinched nose. ‘It’s like hell on earth,’ he said. ‘You’ll see.’
They rounded the corner of Bethanienstraat onto Kloveniersburgwal. Not yet cordoned off, the scene was spread before George like a poisoned feast.
Where the elegant period facade of the old library should have been was now a ragged, gaping mouth, belching fire and fume over the canal. Masonry and glass had been spat out into the street and into the oily water. Between the flashing lights of the emergency services, queuing like impatient customers along the narrow stretch of road, George glimpsed a blackened crater in the pavement the size of a bus. It looked as though demons had tried to swallow the place whole.
‘Stand back! Move back!’ Policemen shouted, waving away the crowd that had started to gather and gawp.
‘Nightmare,’ George said.
Two paramedics hurtled towards her, pushing an ambulance gurney with somebody strapped to it.
‘Get out of the way!’ one of them shouted at her.
Dumbfounded, she stepped up to the canal’s edge to let the trolley through, hardly daring to look at its charred and screaming cargo.
The upper storey of the building exploded suddenly, hurling masonry and roof tiles into the sky. Screaming. Running. Horns honking.
‘Get behind the fire truck,’ Ad yelled, pulling her by her upper arm as brick rained down, bounced off the road and into the water.
She jumped over the fat fire hoses that snaked along the ground. Together, they squatted beside giant wheel arches of the red Brandweer fire service shelter.
‘Jesus,’ George said. ‘What the fuck happened here?’
She peered out at the flaming building as it coughed up more and more of the injured on stretchers, some walking, clutching bloodied faces with lacerated hands.
Ad shook his head. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. ‘Gas pipe, maybe?’
George felt questions bubbling up inside her. She had been in Amsterdam for only five months but the library was an old friend to her now. A place where she could stroll through the halls of her mind in its book-clad gallery; a place where she could sit on the grand stone staircase and be reminded of Cambridge. The eastern wing of East India House – Bushuis library to the students – had stood on the canalside for over a hundred years and had never before, to George’s knowledge, spontaneously combusted.
‘Gas leak? I don’t buy it,’ she said.
Her eye was caught by pieces of A4 paper as they fluttered down from an office on the third floor. This solitary office had been left almost intact, as though somebody had just opened the doors of a doll’s house to reveal what went on inside. George followed the paper’s trajectory downwards until her gaze fell on a middle-aged man in a beige woollen coat with overstuffed shoulder pads that said 1990s Vroom & Dreesman: department store to the middle aged and woefully unimaginative. He looked grimly on the scene and spoke to a uniformed policeman. He made notes in a small pad.
‘Come on,’ she said, pulling Ad from their hiding place by his hand.
George steeled herself to walk towards the man, ignoring the flaming carnage.
A policeman barred her way.
‘Get back behind the cordon, Miss!’ he shouted.
‘I want to speak to the detective,’ she said, mustering as much authority in her voice as she could.
‘This is not a sightseeing tour,’ he said.
George did not hesitate even to look into the policeman’s face. She lunged forward and tapped the man in the beige coat on the shoulder. He turned around. Dark eyebrows arched above large, steel-grey, hooded eyes. He had thick, straight white hair, and the sunken-cheekboned, strong-jawed face of a typical Dutchman, complete with a sharp, triangular nose. She did not know him but she knew his kind.
‘What happened?’ she asked.
‘Get these kids out of here,’ the man said to the uniformed officer.
‘Please tell me,’ George said.
She could see the man appraising her then with those piercing eyes. ‘You’re a detective, right?’ she asked. ‘I’m a student. Social and Behavioural Science. I was meeting people here.’
The uniform placed a heavy hand on her shoulder. ‘Do you want me to arrest you? Because you’re going about it the right way, Missy,’ he said.
‘Please,’