The Girl Who Got Revenge

by Marnie Riches

  ‘Most of the time, you’re not even home,’ she said. ‘You’re working or at Tamara’s, playing Action fucking Opa. When you are here, you’re a million miles away. What happened to our passion? Our togetherness? Grandfatherhood has changed you. I feel lonely, Paul. And I’m not even in my own space!’

  But he was staring at the box, frowning. Clearly deep in thought once again.

  Sucking her teeth in her lover’s direction, George took Rivka Zemel’s diary and repaired to the relative peace of the spare room. She heard Van den Bergen’s voice drifting in from the living room: ‘Maybe this community leader guy on the TV can help…’

  Closing the door, she plumped the pillows on the spare bed, careful to turn the dusty side down so that there was only pristine bedding between her and the headboard. Imagining dust motes and germ spores hanging in the air, waiting to colonise her lungs, she cracked the window open. Finally made herself comfortable on the creaking bed, making a mental note to clean the room in the morning.

  ‘Come on then, Rivka Zemel,’ she said, opening the green diary and running her finger over the yellowed pages and blue-black ink. It was in Dutch, written in an old-fashioned, looping, sloping hand. ‘Let’s see what you’ve got to say. What part did you play in Kaars Verhagen’s life and why did your story end up buried beneath the floorboards?’

  The first entry was dated Monday, 5 February 1940.

  Yesterday was my birthday. I hadn’t really been looking forward to it at all, because of what’s been going on. Everybody says that if Germany invades France and the Netherlands, we’ll be made to wear stars like the Polish. The papers say Jews over there are getting arrested if they forget to put on their special armbands. Mainly, though, the news is full of speculation about there being war with Germany. Papa’s very afraid for us all – especially Shmuel, because he’s always so ill and can’t stick up for himself. Kaars says the Germans are deluded if they think they can simply walk into Amsterdam and take over!

  I’m trying not to think about it. I just get on with my work. Anyway, even though I had to polish the silverware – deathly dull and goes on forever – my birthday turned out to be much better than anticipated! I brought in a cake that Mama had baked to celebrate during my break. Famke made coffee and we were just about to sit down with Jan in the scullery when the Verhagens came downstairs and presented me with a gift! It was a beautiful hairbrush, made from ivory, I think. Mr Verhagen said it had come from the tusk of a giant elephant he had hunted as a much younger man on the Gold Coast of Africa. Fancy that! Ed was there too, looking terribly handsome, as ever. He said the brush would be perfect for taming my curls.

  The Verhagens are good people. I feel lucky to have got this job, though Mama keeps warning me not to get too attached. I’m sure she thinks I have feelings for Kaars. He is rather dashing and great fun to be around. She doesn’t realise, however, that his cousin Ed is the apple of my eye. I realise he’s not Jewish and that he’s from a wealthy family, so there’s no way we could ever be together. He probably doesn’t even like me in that manner.

  The diary entry ended abruptly with a sentence that had been written and then scribbled out with such determination that George couldn’t read it. She remembered back to her own teen years – some ten years ago now – and the intensity of emotion that had ruled her every waking moment. Most of her sleeping ones, too. She smiled at the thought that there should be some kind of a connection between Rivka Zemel from 1940 and Georgina McKenzie of the twenty-first century.

  But then, she remembered that her own teen years had been a dysfunctional fiasco of intimidation, incarceration and incursions of the council-estate kind. Not so similar. Rivka Zemel’s mother had baked her a birthday cake. George had been lucky if Letitia had even bought her a shit card and a past-its-sell-by-date chocolate bar from the cheap shop. What fate had befallen this hopeful Jewish girl? And what light could this diary shed on the life and secrets of the Verhagen family?

  She delved further into the dairy’s musty pages, feeling like a voyeur as she read how Rivka’s feelings for Ed Sijpesteijn developed apace, and how he apparently cared for her, using his friendship with Kaars as a ruse to drop in regularly on this self-deprecating, unassuming housemaid, making her laugh with jokes about the idiot Germans.

  ‘Poor dim bastard,’ George said, feeling certain that this simple love story would inevitably veer down a sinister path at some point. Wondering if Rivka’s words were somehow connected with the mysterious deaths of four nonagenarians.

  She flicked forward to 25 May 1940.

  Bombs were dropping for days on Rotterdam, and apparently the city is now in ruins. The Germans were determined to invade our beloved country and they have! What I can’t believe is that the government gave in so quickly and accepted Nazi occupation. Kaars and Ed were here just now and they think it is a cowardly disgrace. They’ve resolved to band together with some of their other pals – Brechtus, Arnold and Hendrik – to trip the Germans up whenever they get the chance. Apparently, there’s already a resistance movement gathering strength in secret. I think they knew this invasion was inevitable.

  Famke and I went into town today to buy some food. We had no idea that German tanks were actually rolling into Amsterdam, so we got caught up in the ranks of onlookers. The Nazis seem to have brought out the worst in Amsterdamers. I was horrified to see people cheering them on! You never really see things like that in Waterlooplein, where the Jewish Quarter is, but then, I suppose that’s because we’re all Jews. Yet even where the Verhagens live, I’ve never witnessed any unpleasant bullying or name-calling personally. Famke said there are a lot of Nazi sympathisers around who are excited to have the weight of the German army behind us in war. There’s already talk of them rounding up and arresting German Jews who had escaped to the Netherlands. What will happen to my family if they start to single out Jews in Amsterdam? Mama hopes that good old Dutch common sense will prevail, but Papa isn’t so sure. Only time will tell.

  Feeling sleepy, George pushed herself to continue reading, keen to discover how the German occupation of Amsterdam had shaped the life of a young Jewish maid, and if this journal would reveal more of the five young men who were now all gone. As Rivka wrote of her burgeoning love for Ed, George felt as though she were watching an old black and white film of a packed train with excited holidaymakers on board, heading full pelt for an unfinished bridge over a ravine. It was heartbreaking to read, and yet, she wanted to know what sort of people the missing Ed Sijpesteijn and the possibly murdered Kaars Verhagen, Arnold van Blanken, Brechtus Bruin and Hendrik van Eden were.

  3 October 1941

  The Nazis are pretending that they’re the best thing to happen to the Netherlands. They talk about us like we’re Germany’s favourite Aryan cousin. Everything has been carrying on as normal at the Verhagen house. I work hard and Famke is pleased that I’m learning to cook under her tutelage. Maybe when she retires as the housekeeper in the next few years, I’ll be able to take over her job. Papa says not to hold my breath, though. He’s been saving up to get us safe passage to England, but Shmuel is too poorly with his chest at the moment to leave the house. Mama says he should be in a sanatorium, but there’s no question of that happening right now.

  The newspapers are full of the triumphs of the Fatherland. Now that Hitler has defeated Stalin and his Soviets in battle and Russia’s burning, the Nazis are boasting that the war is practically won. Yesterday evening, Kaars, Ed and the others appeared just as I was about to go home after a long day. They gathered in the scullery to tell us the latest news from the resistance meeting in the country. Apparently, the Germans have marched into Kiev and have shot thousands and thousands of Jews dead. Mr Verhagen says he thinks that tale is far-fetched, but Papa also heard tell of it from old Kramarov, the barber. Mr Kramarov’s aunt was still living in Kiev, even though the rest of the family left in the Twenties to come and live over here. Tragically, she and two of his cousins were shot dead and their bodies, along with ever
yone else’s, pushed off a cliff. A third cousin managed to escape and was smuggled by kind non-Jewish folk to Amsterdam in a grain truck. If he says it happened, it must be true.

  Ed is such a brave sort. He says he will fight to the death to defend our family. Hendrik was boasting that his sniping skills are so refined that he could kill an entire battalion of Nazis with one packet of bullets. He also says he’d make the best spy and that he has infiltrated some Nazi sympathisers – whatever that means – so that he can pass on information about the Germans to the rest of the freedom fighters. Kaars says he’s the organiser of the band of five, as it’s always the Verhagen house where the boys meet. Arnold and Brechtus are obsessed with tactics. They’re the ones always trying to second-guess what the Allied forces are going to do next to thwart the Germans. Brechtus is really good at making radio equipment. He says if he can cobble together some kind of eavesdropping device, he’ll be able to listen in on the Nazis’ communiqués and feed the information back to the English. Arnold speaks German, so he’s going to help translate. What a band of excellent souls they are! I said we’d have to come up with a code name for them.

  George tried to make out a list of slogans and names that Rivka had thought up, but all had been scribbled out. All except one: De Strijdkrachten Vijf – the Force of Five. Next to it, she had doodled the sword-bearing, crown-wearing lion that appeared on their Oranje armbands. She’d added an S on the left and a 5 on the right.

  ‘Aha!’ George said, patting the diary with a smile. ‘So you’re responsible for the design of those tattoos!’

  Tempted to call it a night, George was just about to close the diary and return to her cantankerous lover on the sofa when she scanned the next entry. Her pulse quickened as Rivka wrote…

  Just when I thought that things might remain as they are in Amsterdam, this morning has been dreadful. There’s talk of the SS stepping up their activities to make the Netherlands more like Germany, but I didn’t expect this. It was early. Mama was making breakfast. Papa and Shmuel were at the synagogue for morning prayers before he went to work and Shmuel went to school. Mama and I were chatting about a new dress she is making me when there was a loud knock at the front door. It was more of a violent thump and I could hear shouting – no Dutch voice that I recognised. The fear that gripped me made me shake with cold as Mama went to answer the door.

  ‘George! George! Have you been listening to a word I’ve been saying?’

  Still holding her breath, George was jolted out of Rivka’s story by the sound and sight of Van den Bergen looming over her, demanding a reaction. The pupils of his grey eyes were black pools of feverish enthusiasm.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Marie’s just called,’ he said. ‘I’d asked her to go through the wills and financial records of the Force of Five.’

  ‘And?’ George closed the diary, stroking its cover with her index finger. Promising Rivka that she would be back.

  ‘I’m bringing Abadi in for questioning. Right now! They left him money, George. If it turns out he’s another Shipman and is bumping off the old men on his books for pennies from heaven, we’re going to have another death on our hands if we don’t act fast.’

  CHAPTER 13

  Amsterdam, police headquarters, 17 October

  ‘How can you explain this?’ Van den Bergen asked, pushing the stapled sheaf of printouts across the table towards Abadi.

  In the interview room, which had already taken on the cabbagey fug of Marie, George was seated at the very end of the bolted-down, battered table, observing this unassuming middle-aged doctor. Abadi wore conservative slacks, a V-neck jumper over a crisp white shirt, open at the collar, and had stubble that attested to a long day in the surgery. His hair was starting to thin, though George was certain he must dye it black, since there was no grey to be seen. It was the only obvious sign of vanity in an otherwise unobtrusive-looking, diminutive man whose accent barely hinted at his Middle Eastern origins. Was it possible that this guy was a serial murderer of elderly patients?

  Abadi took his tortoiseshell glasses from the case on the table with trembling hands. Pushed them up his nose and started to leaf through the papers. ‘I don’t know what these documents are. Why are you showing them to me? Lawyers?’ He examined the headed paper, clearly seeing but not reading in his barely concealed panic.

  This doesn’t look like some hardened criminal or con man to me, George thought. But she knew better than that as a criminologist – especially given some of the cases she had helped Van den Bergen to solve. The worst predators were almost always the least obvious and most intelligent of suspects. She opened up a stapler and started to run her finger over the chunks of staples so that they formed an unbroken phalanx. Watching. Half-thinking about Rivka Zemel’s adulation of the Force of Five. Wondering how it had all panned out and knowing that four of the men, at least, had made it to old, old bones. Had Dr Saif Abadi deliberately composed the ending of their fascinating and epic stories?

  Marie rotated the pearls in her ears, fixing the suspect with her stark blue eyes. ‘You know exactly what these are, Dr Abadi, because they’ve been read out to you by the solicitors who drafted them, haven’t they?’ Her voice was small but retained a certain steel to it. Though Marie didn’t look like much, George knew she was far from a pushover.

  Abadi shifted in his seat. Swallowed hard. ‘Have I?’

  ‘Stop flirting, Dr Abadi,’ Van den Bergen said. ‘This interview tore me away from some very important health-maintenance involving a bowl of blueberries and ten millilitres of Gaviscon. Now, my detective here has asked you about these legal documents. Why don’t you explain to us all how you came to be named in the wills of Brechtus Bruin, Kaars Verhagen and Arnold van Blanken.’

  George considered the hundreds of prison inmates she’d interviewed as part of her academic research; the women she’d been banged up with as a girl when she’d fallen foul of the law, thanks to an almighty administrative cock-up and one ailing detective. Most of them either denied, denied, denied or wore their crimes like an extravagant tattoo to be feared and revered. As Abadi wiped the sheen of sweat from his upper lip and blinked hard behind the thick lenses of those glasses, she wondered which kind he would be if he turned out to be guilty. A denier or a boaster?

  ‘You look like a man who’s been caught with his fingers in the till, Dr Abadi,’ George said, leaning forward to make eye contact with him.

  He shook his head. ‘No. It’s coincidence, that’s all.’ His placatory half-smile faltered.

  ‘What’s coincidence?’ Van den Bergen asked.

  ‘The money. The fact that they were my patients. I turned it down, you know!’

  Marie pushed a sheaf of bank statements towards him. ‘But it still managed to turn up in your account, didn’t it?’

  The doctor opened and closed his mouth, but no explanation was forthcoming. He looked at George with pleading in his eyes. Then, it was as if his fear switched off, replaced by exasperation. ‘The sums were hardly massive! A couple of thousand here and there. I’ve told the families I’m returning it or donating it to charity. It’s a gross conflict of interest.’

  ‘Yes. It is,’ Van den Bergen said. He leaned back in his chair, drumming a pencil against his teeth until Abadi’s lower left eyelid started to flicker. ‘And what about the manner in which the men died, Dr Abadi? All ninety-five years old. Hendrik van Eden was the first. We haven’t yet been able to get hold of his will. Were you in that as well, I wonder? Then, a month later, Bruin and Van Blanken within days of one another. Now Kaars Verhagen. Poor Kaars. Left for days, undiscovered and slowly spoiling on his kitchen floor.’

  ‘I can’t believe you’re insinuating that a respectable man of my standing would murder his patients for a few thousand euros. For God’s sake! As jumping to conclusions goes, that’s…that’s nothing short of appalling.’ He toyed with the cuff of his shirt. Buttoning. Unbuttoning. Buttoning. Clearly agitated. ‘Hasn’t it occurred to you that perhaps my pati
ents were just expressing gratitude in some small way for over a decade of dedicated service? These are men I respected and tried my best for. For old guys who became socially isolated once their mobility started to go, you could say that they saw me as a friend. I liked them! They were heroes. The sort of men this city needs today! Men who didn’t turn their backs on their kinsmen just because they believed in a different god and maybe their faces didn’t fit with an idealised notion of…Dutchness.’

  Van den Bergen thumped the table. ‘Don’t mistake the Dutch police for a bunch of idiots, Abadi. We’ve got your bank statements. It doesn’t take an economist to work out that you’re a shocking financial manager. You must be the only doctor I’ve ever heard of who’s got such a hefty overdraft.’

  Abadi’s lips thinned to a line. He studied Van den Bergen’s stern face, blinking rapidly. ‘You’re adding two and two and making five. I give almost every penny that I earn to Syrian charities that provide shelter and food for those who have lost everything in the war. Have you arrested me for caring about refugees who are fleeing Assad’s bombs and Daesh’s brutality?’

  ‘No. I’m investigating the suspicious deaths of old men who were prescribed medication in doses that killed.’ Plucking his reading glasses from their chain and perching them on the end of his nose, Van den Bergen read extracts of Marianne de Koninck’s post-mortem reports aloud. She speculated that the men’s heart failures had been caused by the regular ingestion of drugs that were notoriously dangerous and in fatal quantities. ‘What have you got to say to that?’ Van den Bergen asked, looking pointedly over the tops of his lenses at Abadi.

  From an evidence baggie, Marie produced several bottles and packets of tablets. She lined them up on the table in front of the doctor, reading out the contents and dosage instructions that had been printed on the pharmacy labels.

  George strained to catch a whiff of bullshit on the stale air, above the bouquet of Marie’s armpits. The evident surprise and ensuing confusion in Abadi’s face was unexpected.