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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Ad tried to pull her away. ‘Come on, George. Let’s go.’
The man cleared his throat and pulled something from his breast pocket. George caught a glimpse of a service pistol strapped close to his armpit. She also noticed he wore no wedding ring and had missed a patch on his neck when shaving.
‘Did you see anything?’ the man asked her, proffering a battered business card.
‘No. I got here after … this.’ She took the card and read it. It said, Senior Inspector Paul van den Bergen, National Crime Squad.
Van den Bergen simply said, ‘Call me if you think of anything,’ and turned away.
Ad pulled George back to the safety of the cordon and their bicycles. He took off his glasses and wiped his streaming eyes. Then he touched her on the chin gently.
‘How did you know he was a detective?’ he asked.
George looked at his soft, pale olive skin, streaked as it was with dirt. He was a wistful country boy in a bad, confused city. He could not have looked more different to Paul van den Bergen. She pulled away from his touch.
‘A lucky guess,’ she said.
He blinked hard at her and put his glasses back on. She knew he knew she was lying.
From his vantage point, high above street level, he could see her returning home. Waving up at the blonde prostitute neighbour. The shutter on his camera clicked as he caught her turning round, unwittingly peering in his direction. He was careful to back out of sight swiftly. It wouldn’t do to rouse her suspicions at this point. And yet he yearned to let her know he was there, thinking of her with both loathing and lust in his heart. Perhaps he could leave her a message … a sign.
He slipped on his jacket and hared down the uncarpeted staircase to catch a glimpse of her before she entered the building and was out of sight. Patting down his hair, he wondered briefly if she would find him appealing if she discovered his obsession with her. She was magnetic. Irresistible. He saw it in other men’s hungry eyes too and that was the problem. They were his competitors. Each and every one of them. They had to be destroyed like the Indian; negated, scratched from life, absorbed into the hellfire. Now you see him. Now you don’t. An angry red cloud of flesh made vapour.
How invincible he had felt when he had pressed the button and made the call. The effect of that small act was monumental. One minute the cardboard box was sitting there, innocently enough. The next … boom. A symbol of Amsterdam’s colonial might had been razed to the ground. The inferno had filled him with joy. It was a curtain of smelted gold, reaching heavenward, casting a holy incense of cordite and human ashes to and fro along the canal. His heart had beat too fast, just how he liked it; adrenalin rinsing the disappointment and stinking mortality from his body.
Now he was observing his muse. His nemesis. He had plans for her.
The laptop’s monitor glared at George, daring her to begin writing her guest post for Het Ogenblik – The Moment. She dragged hard on her cigarette, praying it would somehow peel away the tension to reveal the inspired thoughts beneath.
‘Coffee?’ Jan asked, brandishing a glass percolator jug in her direction.
She hadn’t realised he had been standing over her. The coffee at the bottom of his jug looked black and oily. It had been sitting there all morning.
‘Go on,’ George said.
Jan poured the jug’s contents into the special mug that she insisted he keep behind the counter only for her. George sipped it and grimaced.
‘You make shocking coffee,’ she told him.
‘Nobody comes to the Cracked Pot Coffee Shop for the coffee,’ he said. He peered over her shoulder through smudged Trotsky glasses at the masthead for the blog. ‘What are you writing about?’ he asked.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘That’s the problem. I’m supposed to have done a blogpost about political unrest in the Middle East. I can’t concentrate with everything that’s going on.’
She punched ‘De Volkskrant’ into Google. The latest headline from the broadsheet stared at them.
‘“Maastricht terror cell claims responsibility for suicide bomb”,’ she read.
‘What about De Telegraaf?’
Her fingers sped over the keyboard until the monitor revealed: ‘Jihad waged on Amsterdam.’
Scanning the text, there, within the third paragraph, she spied Senior Inspector van den Bergen’s name. She tapped the screen.
‘I saw this guy. He says the blast victim toll stands at twelve injured, two critically. One set of human remains has been found in amongst the wreckage.’
Jan tutted. ‘Do they know who it is?’ he asked.
‘The dead body?’ George read on, then shook her head. ‘He doesn’t say. Nobody saw anything suspicious. The cops are on the trail of a prime suspect.’
‘“It’s a miracle more weren’t killed”,’ Jan read. ‘Understatement of the bloody year. Hey, shall I roll you a joint?’
‘At eleven am?’ she said. ‘Seriously? Is this so you can bump up my rent?’
Jan hooked his long, fuse wire hair behind his ear and wheezed with wry laughter. He turned to the murals painted in neon oranges, pinks, yellows and greens on the walls. Jimi Hendrix, a VW Camper van, Bob Marley, Jim Morrison and the peace sign. They were lit by a UV lamp that gave all the customers a Hollywood smile as a no-extra-cost bonus.
‘I’m going to paint a new one in your honour,’ he said. ‘Our Georgina. An English hottie, smoking a joint and wearing nothing but hotpants and an afro. They’ll come all the way from Brabant to buy my skunk and look at you.’
‘Go and make some fresh coffee, you old pervert,’ George said.
Jan was still laughing as he disappeared between the giant cannabis plants into the back office.
George frowned at the screen. She punched ‘Amsterdam suicide bomb’ into the search engines, draining the dregs of her coffee as she scanned the results: student discussion forums, more newspaper articles, some left-wing, some right-wing. She found scores of jihadist blogs listed, showing pictures of young men, holding replica guns with their heads wrapped in black fabric or Arabic shemagh scarves so that only their angry eyes were visible. The same name appeared on all of them, claiming responsibility for the Bushuis library explosion in bold type and large font.
‘Abdul Youssuf al Badaar,’ George said aloud. ‘You don’t look much.’
His photograph showed that he was an ordinary middle-aged Muslim man with the obligatory beard and mosque hat. He looked benign.
‘Why in God’s name would you organise a suicide bombing outside an almost empty student library on a Saturday morning?’ she asked al Badaar’s photograph.
She stared at the laptop screen for too long.
‘I’m going to be late,’ she said, glancing at her watch.
In a city full of architectural romance and finery, the faculty in Nieuwe Prinsengracht sat like an ungainly, stout Aunt by the canalside. Inside, Ad was alone at a cafeteria table for four.
‘George!’ Ad shouted. ‘Over here!’
George could see the other students’ heads bob up like curious meerkats as she approached. Joachim Guttentag said something to Klaus Biedermeier about her – she could tell – and started laughing too loudly. Dumkopf bastards,