The Girl Who Wouldn't Die Part 5

'Tea bags?'

George had not been able to contain the look of horror. She knew it had usurped the delighted smile and planted a flag of bitter indignation on her face. What had she been thinking anyway? Jewellery and perfume were things a man bought his girlfriend. The Milkmaid got those. She got f.u.c.king tea bags.

Ad had looked instantly wounded. 'Sorry, I thought ...'

Forcing her teeth to show in an encouraging fas.h.i.+on, she had hugged him quickly and a.s.sembled the words of grat.i.tude in the right order before speaking them. 'That's the perfect present for me! Very sweet.'

He looked relieved. 'You're always out of tea.' His face flushed. 'Listen, can I check the train times?'

George had nodded and pa.s.sed him the laptop. It was then that they had seen the headline on de Volkskrant's home page.

'Second suicide blast hits Utrecht. Live footage.'

Now, she focussed her attention on the YouTube video, posted only moments after the explosion. The amateur cameraman was talking fast as he shot the bedlam. He sounded frightened; exhilarated.

Springweg, Utrecht.

As soon as he gave the location, George scrutinised what she could see of the building behind the flames in the early evening twilight. What kind of a place was it? Was it another library? It was too far away from the camera phone for her to see any detail but she was curious.

'It looks central. Let's see,' she said.

She punched up Google Streetview and found the building when it had still been whole crisp in the daylight and discreet. Hebrew writing was just visible on the portico above the door but otherwise there were no discernible religious markings on the facade. No Star of David. But with its high-pitched roof and adjacent tower, it was unmistakeably a place of wors.h.i.+p.

'This is it,' she said to Ad, tapping a fingernail on the screen.

'A synagogue,' he said. 'These b.a.s.t.a.r.ds are making a statement.'

George frowned. She made a rasping noise as she sucked her teeth. 'This isn't connected to the university, though. There's no logic to any of it.'

Van den Bergen drove well in excess of 100mph to bridge the distance between Amsterdam and Utrecht. His tired body was suffused with adrenalin and a grim euphoria of sorts.

Emergency vehicles with their strobing lights beckoned him towards the mayhem.

Teun van der Putte was standing at the scene, backlit by the blaze.

'Paul. Good,' he said, slapping van den Bergen on the upper arm. He proceeded to fill van den Bergen in on what had happened, wincing visibly every time a sheet of gla.s.s from a nearby house blew out onto the street.

'Any witnesses?' van den Bergen asked. The heat was overwhelming. A thick slick of sweat had already started to cling to his body.

Teun looked over at ambulances already swallowing up casualties and at the fire trucks that lined the street mothers.h.i.+ps, connected by hoses to their battling fire crew. He blinked hard and wiped his sooty gla.s.ses on his s.h.i.+rt. 'Not a f.u.c.king thing, would you believe it?'

Van den Bergen nodded sagely. 'Same in Amsterdam.' He watched as evacuees trod gingerly over the gla.s.s that littered the pavement. Grimaced and wept as they looked up at the flames and their ruined apartments. 'How many dead or injured?'

'There's a few neighbours with lacerations from their windows blowing in. But there didn't seem to be anyone walking on the street when the bomb went off.' Teun shouted over the hiss of the hoses.

'Christmas Eve. Everyone's either in with family or out drinking,' van den Bergen said, watching a weeping man as he was ushered to the place of safety beyond the police cordon. Beneath the blanket that covered the man's shoulders, van den Bergen saw that he clutched a little girl of about four to his chest. Her forehead was covered in blood.

'It's impossible to know how many were inside the wreckage until the fire's out,' Teun said. 'But we did find a bit of what we think is the suicide bomber. As soon as we arrived. It had been blown right out of range of the fire.'

'A bit?'

'A big bit.'

Chapter 6.

25 December

As George applied her lipstick, she wondered if Ad had lingered well into the evening, delaying his journey home because of her. More likely because of the Utrecht bomb, she decided.

Wearing her usual tight-fitting jeans, a T-s.h.i.+rt that smelled strongly of was.h.i.+ng liquid and thick Primark cardigan that had started to bobble under the arms, she had made no attempt to look festive beyond the slick of colour on her full lips. Like Jan and Katja, her makes.h.i.+ft Christmas family, would give a s.h.i.+t!

She shrugged at her reflection in the mirror. Then she picked up the framed photograph that she had got an elderly American tourist to take of her and Ad back in October. They had been standing beneath the impressive arched portico of the Rijksmuseum, which Ad had offered to show her around. She was grinning like a fool at the camera. Ad's arm was draped around her shoulder. He smiled uncertainly, as though he had been caught with his fingers in the proverbial cookie jar.

'Merry Christmas, Ad,' she said.

She blew a kiss at the photograph, pulled on her Puffa jacket and left for Jan's in good time. As she undid the locks on her bike, she looked around and missed the pair of eyes that were fixed intently on her.

'Merry Christmas, darling,' Katja said, showering George in sticky pink kisses.

George immediately wiped her cheek with the back of her hand like a horrified child expunging the kisses of a hairy-chinned great aunt.

Katja seemed unaware of the tacit rejection. She took off the tinsel that was hanging around her waist like a belt and wrapped it around Jan's neck. 'I love Christmas. Such a shame it's not snowing. The one thing I really miss about Polish Christmases is the snow.'

Katja gazed towards the window wearing an almost wistful expression. She pulled her bright red hair back in a ponytail and quickly turned her attention to Jan's food preparation. 'But what the h.e.l.l is that you're cooking, darling? It looks like a dish of festive t.u.r.ds.'

Katja peered over Jan's shoulder and into the large crock pot that he was stirring. George sidled up on his left and saw that he did in fact seem to be preparing stewed t.u.r.ds.

'Is this some vegetarian c.r.a.p?' George asked, wrinkling her nose.

Jan banged the spoon on the side of the crock pot and looked at her with a raised eyebrow through his steamed-up Trotsky gla.s.ses. His roll-up cigarette hung artfully out of the corner of his mouth.

'It's sausage surprise,' he said in an exasperated tone.

'But I thought you were a veggie,' George said.

'Vegan.'

'Vegan?' shrieked Katja. 'That's a crime against nature, you hippy.'

George could see a hurt expression on Jan's face. He pushed his gla.s.ses up to his forehead, revealing large, puffy eyebags beneath red-rimmed, small blue eyes. He spoke with his cigarette still in his mouth.

'I'm cooking pork sausages just for you, you judgemental Polish tart. I knew you wouldn't understand the finer philosophical points of veganism.'

George felt frivolity wash over her as she watched her landlord threaten Katja with a drippy spoon. He was wearing a batik kaftan today with his stick-thin hairy ankles clearly on view. The fact that he was cooking in bare feet made George feel slightly itchy. The fact that the kitchen floor was strewn with lentils, what appeared to be Rice Krispies and garlic peelings made her positively twitchy. But Jan in his own natural habitat full of ethnic handicrafts, burnt-down candle stubs and second-hand pockmarked furniture was still a comical sight.

'How can a vegan cook meat in his own pots, Jan? Let alone eat it,' George said.

Jan was still stirring conscientiously. 'I'm a practising hypocrite. Now go and fetch me my packet of Drum from the sideboard.'

As George returned to the cooker with Jan's pouch full of tobacco, she noticed the inch of ash from Jan's cigarette fall into the stew. For a split second, he looked blankly at the ash, sitting on top of the sauce. Before she could comment, he sniffed and stirred it in.

George opened a bottle of strong Duvel for herself. The only way she was going to survive the food hygiene non-standards of Jan's Christmas dinner would be to down as much beer as possible. She reasoned that the alcohol would kill off any germs in her stomach.

When George's phone pinged with a text from van den Bergen, Katja was busy explaining how a woman could still breastfeed if silicone implants were inserted through the nipple. Jan was a.s.sembling pudding. George was busy chasing the last of the surprisingly tasty sausages around her plate, more than half way on her journey towards being medicinally drunk.

'What do you want, Senior Inspector?' George asked her phone's display.

What do you know about this girl?

Van den Bergen had sent an accompanying attachment, which was a photo of a blonde woman. George did indeed recognise her face. She was a drop-out politics student in the year above. George had met her once briefly in a bar where some of the other students hung out. Joachim and Klaus had been all over her like a rash. The evening was memorable because the woman had thrown a gla.s.s of beer all over Joachim but had left with Klaus.

She texted van den Bergen back.

She's called Janneke something or other. She's one of Fennemans' old students. Why?

The answer came back as George was enjoying her pudding of hash-cakes and ice cream.

She has been murdered.

'Cheers,' Fennemans said to his mother.

They clinked gla.s.ses together. He watched as the elegant matriarch of the family sniffed the contents of her champagne flute.

'Asti spumante?' his sister asked, staring at the rising bubbles. 'At Christmas?'

'It's prosecco. And a good one at that,' Fennemans said.

His mother swept her carefully coiffed white hair to the side, sipped the sparkling wine cautiously and swallowed in what appeared to be a reluctant manner.'Oh, Vim. I wish you'd let me open the Laurent Perrier. The Italians are far better left to their chiantis and barolos. Did you buy this at the supermarket?'

His mother turned to his sister. 'Vim has never had much of a nose for wine, has he? Not like us, darling. You get your palate from me.' She patted his sister's manicured hand. The two of them exchanged self-satisfied smiles.

Fennemans had been feeling celebratory when he had arrived. That feeling had long since evaporated. With every bite of his foie gras on toast, he wanted to tell them both to drop dead. Drop dead, drop dead, drop dead.

Every Christmas, the enmity surged inside him like a noxious, mushrooming cloud. Mother would be condescending and would take his sister's side in some ill-informed debate about politics, made tedious by the fact that his mother and sister were intensely conservative and ignorant of anything that happened outside of the Netherlands. His sister would belittle him at the dining table and then spend the evening boasting about how well her legal practice was doing and how successful her Swiss paediatric consultant husband was (he would be there, of course, if it weren't for the fact that he was saving precious little lives on Christmas Day).

'I said, when are you going to get yourself a woman, Vim?' his mother asked.

Her beautifully made-up eyes peered at him over her Bulgari spectacles. Fennemans realised she had been waiting for an answer for more than thirty seconds. He had been too lost in a labyrinth of his own hostility to hear her.

His sister snorted and collected up the empty starter plates. 'Vim get a woman? Come on, Mum!' She turned to him with an unpleasant smile. It was as though he had never grown beyond the age of ten, with Sofie, the favoured twin; older by fourteen minutes, preferred by a country mile and indulged without temperance once his father, the erstwhile arbitrator, had been taken by his d.i.c.ky ticker that Mother had fed to bursting point with b.u.t.ter and cream and fatty pork. 'Who'd have him with his cheese feet and boring jazz collection?'

'Okay. That's it. I'm going,' he said, rising from his chair quickly.

Last year, he had contemplated doing this but this year, he was really doing it. He was walking away.

'Sit down, Vim. I've made venison,' his mother said.

He slammed the door behind him. That felt good. He crunched down the gravel drive. That felt better. Got into the car, drove around the corner out of sight and parked up. He pressed the b.u.t.tons on his mobile phone.

'It's Fennemans,' he said. 'Look, you've got your money now. We're straight, aren't we?'

'I suppose so.'

'Well, can I see the girls this evening? I need to unwind.'

'I'm away on business.'

Fennemans looked out of the windscreen at the sprawling, well-tended houses and gardens that suffocated him on all sides. 'Please. I'm your best customer, aren't I? You said it yourself. Can't you make a call?'

There was a pause and some laboured breathing at the other end of the phone. 'Six o'clock at the house. Bring cash and give it to Aunty Fadilla.'

Fennemans hung up, gripped his steering wheel and allowed himself to exhale slowly through pursed lips. He reached over to the glove box and took out the packet of cigarettes that he kept there as an emergency. One wouldn't hurt. He took out the box of matches and lit up, enjoying the nicotine rush as it slapped him about the head. Smiling to himself, he tossed the match out of the car window.

'Of course you can come in,' Janneke's mother said to van den Bergen, holding the door wide.

Though the rims of her eyes were bloodshot, van den Bergen could see the likeness between the mother and the photo of the dead daughter that had been stapled to the case notes, accidentally left in his in-tray by the Christmas admin temp.

She wrung her hands. 'They've only just let me come back and clear up. I was at my sister's when I heard. I don't really want to be ...' Her words tailed off and headed down a blind alley.

Van den Bergen smelled death and grief in the air. It made his hip ache.

'I'm very sorry for your loss, Mrs Polman.'

He looked around the tidy house and felt empty on the woman's behalf when he saw the Christmas tree with its fairy lights turned off. There was a large dark stain on the wood floor.

'Would you like a coffee?'

'No thanks. Can I see Janneke's room please?'

'But the police have already been.' She looked helplessly towards the stairs. 'I suppose you're just doing your job. You'll find him, right?'

Van den Bergen watched as Janneke's mother's chin dimpled up and her eyes filled with gla.s.sy tears.

'I'll be in the kitchen,' she said.

In the dusty silence of the dead girl's room, he looked around at her things and tried to get a feel for who the girl had been. Who did she know that wanted her dead? Why would somebody want to cut her throat? And what the h.e.l.l was he doing here, snooping into another detective's case when he should have been concentrating on al Badaar?