The Girl Who Wouldn't Die Part 31

Resigned now.

George thought of her mother. Oddly. Unexpectedly. If only she had said something to her in the Copper Kettle about how she had loved her as a child. How she wished dearly they could claw back that innocent time; that bond. Let.i.tia in her fun fur. So close and yet so far.

And Ad. George knew, now she was going to die, that she loved him more than anything else. He had penetrated the defensive wall that she had so carefully built. But she would not be able to tell him. She just prayed that he would get away, go to ground, be safe.

Suddenly, she was aware that she was clothed. How did that happen? Didn't he rape me?

George knew she should be preparing herself for the end, but instead found she was checking various areas of her body for signs of intrusion. She felt normal in those intimate places. Only her inner thigh stung from his toxic bite. b.a.s.t.a.r.d.

It was at this point that George's temper unexpectedly took her fear hostage. How dare Jez violate her? How dare he track her down to her safe place and take everything from her? Her future. The safety of these pa.s.sersby.

She started to rock back and forth. She reasoned he had jostled her around to get her there in the first place. It was her only chance.

Suddenly, screams around her. Police car sirens. Heavy, thunderous footsteps.

'Get back. This is a terror alert. Clear the area.'

More screaming. The sound of dogs barking. Sniffing near her. Snuffling.

Then: 'Get out of the way, you idiots!' A Dutch voice. An older man's authoritative voice.

Frenzied growling.

'Get that f.u.c.king dog off me. If you don't all want to die, move it.'

Tearing at the cardboard by her left ear. A shaft of light blinded her abruptly. George blinked. Above her was van den Bergen's flushed face, framed by strong fingers that were busy peeling back the thick, corrugated walls of her musty prison.

There was a tiny, lucid part of George that wanted to tell him to run; to scream that she was wired up and ready to blow. But even if she hadn't been silenced by the tape across her mouth, when tears of relief and regret came hard, she was barely able to form coherent thoughts, let alone speak.

Van den Bergen squinted at the tangle of wires, duct tape and packages on chest. She could see he was calculating something. Weighing it all up.

George felt sweat pouring from her armpits, down her back and the sides of her head.

'Step away from the box, sir,' came a man's voice through a loudhailer. 'Step away or we'll shoot.'

'I'm Dutch police,' van den Bergen shouted. Agitated. He held up his ID. 'I called you. Has your bomb disposal operative arrived?'

'No. ETA is forty minutes.'

'Forty minutes?' George heard van den Bergen swearing to himself in Dutch. 'Stay back,' he shouted. 'I've had military training in explosives.'

Has he? Has he really?

Van den Bergen lunged inside the box with those shovel-like hands and tugged one wire free. He ripped the tape from George's mouth. She let out the scream that she had been bottling up. She knew it was futile but she did it nonetheless.

'Help me!' She knew tears were streaming down her face. She wanted to be a strong woman. A heroine. But she conceded that, right now, she needed to be rescued. Just this once.

Van den Bergen nodded at her. 'It's going to be okay, George.'

More fumbling at her chest, despite the rifles c.o.c.ked in the direction of his head and the tinny voice that screeched through the loudhailer, imploring him to step away from the box.

Then the mobile phone strapped to George's sternum rang.

Chapter 31.

Later

Close up, Ad saw that the man was just a little older than he was. Powerfully built. Shaven head. Tattoos on skin darker than Ad's. But pop star looks. Plucked eyebrows. Designer casual clothes. A vain man. He seemed out of place in a scarred serial killer's house.

The man pulled out a gun. Ad knew nothing about guns but this was a large dull metal pistol affair and did not look like a toy. Ad stared into the nose of the weapon and tried to swallow down spit he simply didn't have.

'Drop the hammer, a.r.s.ehole,' the man said.

Ad dropped the hammer, regretting he had not risen to the occasion when he'd had the chance.

'Do you owe me money?'

Ad shook his head.

'What happened to your head?' The man pointed to Ad's b.l.o.o.d.y scalp.

'Serial killer,' was all he could manage. 'Please help me.'

The man frowned. 'Why are you here? Where's Jez?'

If the man was asking questions, perhaps Ad had a shot at escaping. He forced himself to speak. To appeal to whatever charitable spirit this man might have. 'Let me go. Please. He's going to kill me. He's coming back. There's fingers in the freezer.'

'Fingers? Fish fingers? What the f.u.c.k are you talking about?'

Ad held up his b.l.o.o.d.y stump. 'Human fingers.'

The man shrugged. 'Are you or aren't you a dealer?'

'No. I'm a student. The man who lives here is the Bushuis bomber. He's killed my friends.'

The man frowned again, stooped down and helped Ad to his feet.

'Please let me go,' Ad said.

'Hang on, mate,' the man said, raising his free hand but still pointing the gun at him with the other. 'I've got to think about this.' He screwed up his over-groomed face as though thinking were an effort.

'Look in the freezer if you don't believe me. He's a psycho.'

'Oh, I know he's a psycho,' the man said. 'But Jez ain't no serial killer. I don't think, anyway.'

'You're wrong.'

'Am I? How do I know you don't owe me money? You could be feeding me a pile of bulls.h.i.+t. You got any ID?'

Ad shook his pounding head and immediately regretted it. He steadied himself on the hall table. His eyes were drawn to a small, black lozenge-shaped object sitting on the tabletop next to his good hand.

The man s.n.a.t.c.hed the thing up. Ad squinted until he understood what it was. Something he had not noticed before, even though he had been frantically searching for it. His phone.

'What's this then? This ain't Jez's. It's yours, yeah?' He switched the phone on and a picture of George appeared as the wallpaper.

Open-mouthed. Flabbergasted.

'Ella?' The man stared at George's photo. His skin paled. The muscles in his neck and jaw tightened. He glowered at Ad. Poked the gun into his chest. 'What the f.u.c.k are you doing with my bird's picture on your phone?'

Ad shook his head desperately so that the room spun. The metal of the gun was cold and hard on his skin. 'No. She's George. My girl.'

The man held up the phone for Ad to see. 'She English?'

Ad nodded.

'That ain't no George, mate. That's Ella Williams-May. She's my bird. I thought she was doing time for me.'

'Time?'

'Prison. For drugs.'

'But she can't be.'

'Well, she wasn't. Turned out she was a gra.s.s.'

'A what?'

'An informant. So, I told that old slag, her mother-'

'George's parents died in a car crash.'

The man snorted with derision. 'That what she told you?'

Ad looked at the man and wondered briefly if he was still asleep on the slab.

'Who are you?' he asked the man. h.e.l.l, if the gun was poking into his chest, he had nothing to lose.

The man c.o.c.ked the safety off the gun. 'Danny. That mean anything to you, Dutch boy?'

Ad shook his head.

The two men stared at each other in awkward silence.

When Danny's face buckled with hatred, Ad's heart quailed.

'You cheeky b.a.s.t.a.r.d. n.o.body f.u.c.ks my bird.'

Ad's last thought before the bullet from Danny's gun punched its way into his body was that he had been played for a fool by everyone.

George looked at van den Bergen. The laughter lines around his eyes and his mouth were furrowed deep but devoid of all humour. He was wearing his reading gla.s.ses. Funny what you notice.

She peered down at the buzzing, chiming phone. I'm going to die right now. Say something.

'I'm sorry,' she told him.

Van den Bergen's mouth opened. The phone continued to ring.

Nothing happened.

He reached into the box and yanked the phone from George's chest. She shrieked, more from the shock of what he had dared to do than anything else.

'I've disarmed it,' he said, sounding shocked. 'Or maybe it was wrongly a.s.sembled.'

George gently took the ringing phone from him and answered it. Jez's eerie, laboured voice spoke to her.

'Have I got your attention now?' he asked. She could hear amus.e.m.e.nt in his voice.

The phone shook in her hand. Her brain searched frantically for the right words to say. She wanted to convey the depth of her loathing. She wanted to make him feel small. 'You've failed,' she said. 'I'm still alive.'

'You thought I was really going to blow you up like the others.' He said it like a statement.

There was a pause. She realised. Jez had not set out to kill her. He just wanted to subjugate her using terror; make her docile and listless and his.

She switched off his voice; hurled the phone to the ground so hard that the casing came apart. The battery and sim card scattered. George looked down at the packages that formed a ring around her middle.

'Get them off me!' she cried. 'Get me out of here!' She could hear her voice was quaking with emotion. She wanted to control it. Control this ludicrous situation. Get Jez.

Van den Bergen tore the packets from her chest and offered them to an armed policewoman standing two metres away now. 'Take these,' he snarled. 'The response of your explosives experts has not been rapid. Bunch of f.u.c.king amateurs.'

But George was not interested in the delicate handling of Jez's possibly real, possibly fake handiwork. She was already looking around at the bookshop, at the cafe, at the bank. Where was that creep? Her heart slugged against her ribcage. Red mist had descended. She no longer feared for her own safety.

'He's here somewhere,' she said. 'He's watching.'

It didn't matter that she was only wearing a short nightdress. Whose f.u.c.king nightdress was it anyway? Not hers, that was for sure. It had Disney's Tinkerbell on the front. It was a crime against adult bed attire.

She zoned out from van den Bergen, who was now engaged in an indignant argument with the barrel of a rifle and its black-clad, Kevlar-vested owner.