The Girl Who Got Revenge

by Marnie Riches

  ‘You want an apology, you’ve got it,’ she simply said.

  Professor Sally Wright was sitting with her ski-sock-clad feet up on her desk. She was smoking a cigarette and had been mid bollocking when George had interrupted. A fresher was sitting in the much lower seat on the other side of the desk – a narrow-shouldered lad dressed in a red Adidas top and skinny jeans, whose milky complexion was so hairless that his skin shone as though his gyp-lady had polished him with beeswax. He looked as though he had been hammered further into the seat pad with every word that issued forth from Sally’s nicotine-laced mouth. Drug misdemeanour? Skiving? Puking in the library?

  Feeling only slightly stupid, George cleared her throat and awaited a response. Arms folded. Itchy with discomfort. Apologies chafed against the very fibre of her being.

  Sally took her feet off the table and narrowed her eyes at George. She stuck her cigarette between her brown-stained teeth, turned to the boy and clapped her hands together. ‘I’ll deal with you later. Go!’

  Just the two of them, now. George swayed from side to side, feeling sick as a dog. This was the last thing she’d wanted to do, straight off the red-eye from the Hoek van Holland, but it was a festering boil that needed to be lanced. She needed the money.

  ‘Well, well, well,’ Sally said, offering her a cigarette.

  George felt certain the apology had worked, then, though Sally would still make her endure squeamish words of rebuke. She took a cigarette and lit up in silence. Offered a placatory shit-eating grin – the kind she swore she’d never wear.

  ‘Your aunt spoke down to me like I was some smart-mouthed child, lecturing me about how unfairly treated you are – as though I’m some great, white oppressor! She forgets I’m the one who allowed you to climb this ivory tower, leaving the filth of the gutter beneath you. I’m your boss, George. And yet you saw fit to flout my advice and go disappearing off in the midst of our book launch. All so you could engage in some kind of wild goose chase after ghastly parents who never gave a hoot about you!’ Sally glared at her, breathing heavily through flared nostrils.

  Biting her tongue until the pain lanced through her mouth, George remained silent. A decade earlier, she would have given as good as she got. Let the old bag have her say and burn herself out. Fuck your hurt sensibilities. You need this job or the future’s bleak. No career. No mortgage. No home.

  But Sally Wright was clearly nowhere near finished. Her pruned mouth, paused mid rant, twitched back into life. ‘When you finally do deign to come back from a bout of unsanctioned globetrotting and playing happy families, you give me some impertinent lecture about blood being thicker than water, getting on your high horse about how I’m profiteering from your labour and dead Dobkin’s research.’ Her voice reached a thunderous pitch. ‘Who do you think you are? And what makes you think you can just walk back into your old life with a half-arsed apology like that?’

  Considering her words carefully, George mulled over her approach. Flattery was going to happen over her dead body. The truth might get her thrown out and back to square one. Something in between, then. She kept her voice uncharacte‌ristically small.

  ‘Look. I belong here. You and me go way back. It seemed daft. And I reckon I might be back for good. In the UK, I mean.’

  The woman who had plucked her from prison, where she’d been on remand, and had offered her a fresh start raised a finely plucked, steel-grey eyebrow. Looked down at George over the top of her red cat’s-eye glasses. Stubbed out her cigarette.

  ‘What a sorry sight you are with your tail between your legs, Georgina McKenzie. And what a fucking cheek you’ve got, bursting into my rooms with a bullshit “soz” when there’s not a shred of remorse on your disingenuous face.’ She lit another cigarette. ‘Kindly Foxtrot Oscar and don’t let the door smack you on the way out, dear.’

  Perhaps the apology hadn’t worked as well as George had hoped. The seasickness was exacerbated by the curdling feeling in her gut that told her this chapter of her life might not have quite the happy ending she’d hoped for. She’d jettisoned everyone and everything that had ever meant anything to her. She couldn’t go forwards if she couldn’t go back. She was finished.

  What the hell had she done?

  ‘Let’s get to London as fast as we can,’ George said, buckling up in the Polo. She wished the passenger seat would swallow her whole, so that she no longer had to eat the crap that the universe had served up to her.

  ‘Well, what did she say? It can’t have been that bad.’ Her father averted his gaze from the road ahead, shooting her a bemused glance.

  ‘You were kidnapped by a cartel and forced to work as a slave for years, and now you’re having to live under the same roof as my mother. And you tell me things can’t be that bad?’

  Visualising the walk of shame she’d inevitably have to take to the dole office or Jobcentre or wherever the hell it was people signed on, George acknowledged her feelings of rising panic. For the first time in her entire adult life, she wasn’t gainfully employed or self-employed. Aunty Sharon was the only breadwinner left in the small council-estate terrace that housed her extended family.

  ‘Papa, you’re looking for work, right?’

  He nodded. Sighed. ‘Looking. And looking. It seems nobody wants to employ a Spanish guy with PTSD and skills that are years out of date. There’s not a massive demand from the UK’s engineering firms for drug-smuggling semi-submersibles. And therapy’s not exactly a talking point in a job interview.’ He laughed heartily, though George detected the disappointment that underpinned the gesture.

  As they chugged along the M11 towards London, George’s thoughts turned back to the van driver and little trafficked boy on the ferry. Concern that the guy had taken her photograph had abated now, but she considered the Den Bosch case, wondering if tackling it from a different angle might put that prick Van den Bergen back in Minks’s good books and her back on the payroll.

  ‘Are there any asylum seekers at your therapy sessions?’ she asked.

  Her father frowned. ‘Yes. Come to think of it, there are. Three Somalis. A couple of Syrian refugees… We all get put in the same group therapy because we’re dirty, traumatised foreigners.’ He turned to her and winked.

  ‘Do you know what transit country they came into the UK from?’

  ‘No. Sorry.’

  She visualised the Bosch, Boom & Tuin van; the Den Bosch heavy goods vehicle. There was more than one way to skin this cat. ‘Any chance you can get me in front of them?’

  CHAPTER 23

  Amsterdam, Van den Bergen’s apartment, then the Sloterdijkermeer allotments, then the Drie Goudene Honden pub, later

  Creeping out of the apartment, leaving Tamara and the baby sleeping in his and George’s bedroom, Van den Bergen drove down to the Sloterdijkermeer allotment complex. Stiff from two nights spent in the rather too short guest bed, he had been only too happy throw the towel in at 4.30 a.m. and start the day. Besides, there was much to think about: George was refusing to take his calls and had merely texted a curt ‘London’ in response to his querying her whereabouts. Perhaps there had been a family emergency. No surprises there if that was the case. He’d never known such a bunch of melodramatic lunatics. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Roel de Vries was already rubbing everybody up the wrong way over the Den Bosch case.

  As he parked the Mercedes in front of the allotment gates, he imagined de Vries’ bungling traffic prats interviewing those poor bastards in the hospital, demanding to know who they’d paid to ship them to the UK via the Netherlands, when they were rather more concerned with recovering from oxygen deprivation and dysentery. As if he and Elvis hadn’t already made discreet enquiries and come up with zilch. Thanks to George’s suggestion that a Syrian-born doctor might have a better chance than a white Dutch policeman of gaining the trust of Syrian recent refugees, Abadi was the last card he had up his sleeve. But that was to be played later.

  Right now, Van den Bergen unlocked the gate, closing it carefully be
hind him. In the half-light of a dawn that was but a yellow-grey smudge on the horizon, he made his way along the path, past the other sheds and summer houses, drinking in the good smell of earth and newly rotting leaves that had fallen from the surrounding deciduous trees in a shower of October gold. It was too early to deadhead his giant cosmos or to check how the last of his dahlias were faring in the colder mornings.

  Click, click, click.

  Van den Bergen stopped, some twenty metres from his own plot. Was that someone else’s footfalls on the path? At this time of the morning? Surely not. Gripping his large tartan flask tightly, he turned around.

  ‘Who’s there?’

  The boom of his voice was swallowed by the tall trees. There was nothing to hear beyond the flutter of leaves and the banging of an unsecured shed door, opening and closing in the early morning wind.

  ‘Silly old fart.’

  Van den Bergen continued to his cabin, checking around him. He inserted the key into the stiff, giant padlock. No sign of intrusion. Good. No more imagined footsteps. Better. After Tamara had received the unsolicited box of organic vegetables the same morning that he had been trailed by some weirdo in a green Jag, it paid to be vigilant.

  Making a mental note to upgrade his security arrangements so that he could lock himself into the cabin, as well as secure it from the outside, he switched on the light, squinting in the glare of a bare bulb that buzzed in protest at this pre-dawn abuse. He swept the fine layer of compost off the rickety chair and onto the floor. Pushed up the tray of seedlings so that he could set his flask down. Even though he was dressed in his winter thermals, with his denim dungarees and old fleece, it was cold in here. His toes were numb inside his giant mud-encrusted wellies.

  He glanced up at Debbie Harry, who clung to the damp wooden wall by just one functioning piece of sellotape, her feet curled up to her thighs now, but otherwise still infusing his cold heart of glass with a little nostalgic warmth.

  ‘Right,’ he told Debbie. ‘I’ve had enough of Numb-Nuts to last me a lifetime. George is sulking but I’m damned if I know why. Fanboy Minks hates my guts. All I’ve got left is police work. If I can’t officially work on the Den Bosch case, the least I can do is try to find out what happened to those hapless old farts in the Force of Five. First, Hendrik van Eden. Let’s see what we can find out about him, shall we?’

  Sipping the vile, scalding coffee from his plastic thermos cup, Van den Bergen donned his reading glasses and started to leaf through the file of information that Marie had gathered on Hendrik, the elderly victim that he knew least about.

  ‘Okay, what have we got here? Death certificate.’

  Cause of death had been listed as a heart attack, of course. Nobody was listed as being his next of kin.

  ‘No wife. No kids. No siblings. Nothing but a solicitor. Poor old bastard. Nobody gave a shit about you, did they, Mr Resistance Fighter Hero?’

  As the stomach acid spurted up onto his tongue in protest at the coffee, he contemplated how easily he might be in the same position had Andrea not fallen pregnant with Tamara. But then, had he not failed dismally to take precautions as a spotty-faced student, who was merely amazed that he had managed to get laid at all given his string-bean physique and embarrassing size-thirteen clown feet, he might by now have been the toast of the art world, painting portraits of the royal family. Perhaps he’d have fathered five children to a much nicer woman, all clamouring to be named on his death certificate because they gave an enormous shit that their father had died.

  ‘God help me.’ Memories of his own dying father gnawed away at the back of his troubled mind. ‘What else? Come on, Hendrik. There must be somebody I can bloody follow up with.’

  Several pages in, beyond Abadi’s neatly written medical records for the nonagenarian, Van den Bergen found the deeds to a pub by the Singel in the centre, registered as having been bought by a Gustav van Eden in 1941, but with Hendrik van Eden’s name on the licence.

  ‘A landlord, eh? Maybe he who knows someone who was close to this guy apart from his GP.’ He closed the file, determining to visit Hendrik van Eden’s apartment and one-time pub. This man had mattered enough to someone that they should want to kill him. In the silence of his cabin, the only words Van den Bergen could hear resonating inside his overtired brain were ‘Ed Sijpesteijn’ – the only member of the Force of Five who hadn’t been recently killed by a heart attack. The only member of the Force of Five who was ostensibly still alive, and who might be holding a grudge…

  Knocking up the landlord of the Drie Goudene Honden – the Three Golden Dogs – made Van den Bergen deeply unpopular with the entire locale. At 5.20 a.m., the middle-class homeowners who lived above the smart bars thought nothing of hanging out of their windows, threatening to call the police at best, and take legal action at worst.

  ‘I am the police,’ Van den Bergen said, flashing his badge and a mirthless grin at one particularly confrontational arsehole – almost certainly an entitled American frat boy on an exchange year, paid for by Mom and Dad. ‘And this is a murder investigation. Get your head back in your apartment and mind your own business. This is Amsterdam, son. You can’t call your lawyer every time someone disturbs your beauty sleep.’

  Finally the new landlord appeared, bleary-eyed. ‘Jesus. I only went to bed three hours ago. We don’t open till 10 a.m.’

  ‘Better get the coffee on, then.’

  In the living quarters above an old bar that stank of the 1970s – stale cigars, spilled brandy and bad drains – and which showed no evidence of golden dogs whatsoever, unless Van den Bergen counted the giant, drooling golden retriever that snored gently in its dog basket by a yellowed radiator, the new owner of Drie Goudene Honden filled his kettle and took a seat at a battered kitchen table. He scratched at his baggy pants and rubbed a hairy hand over his grubby vest.

  ‘This isn’t a sociable hour for landlords, you know.’ The landlord looked down at Van den Bergen’s giant boots. ‘Jesus. Are you in porn?’

  Still wearing his gardening gear, Van den Bergen took a seat opposite him and took his notebook out of the vest pocket of his dungarees. ‘I’m in law enforcement. I was too big for porn. Now. Hendrik van Eden. You bought the business from him ten years ago. What can you tell me about him?’

  The landlord rubbed his bulbous, red-veined nose and blinked hard. ‘He was old. Eighty-odd. He wanted to retire. The old fucker drove me into the ground on a deal though.’ He lit a cigarette. Brushed back his greasy hair with nicotine-stained fingers. ‘Still had all his marbles, I can tell you. He ran a tight ship. Only thing wrong with this place when I bought it was a slipped tile on the roof. Oh, and the concrete in the yard’s a pile of shit. Tree roots from a beech on the boundary, Van Eden reckoned. I had the thing chopped down and my concrete’s still breaking up like a bastard.’

  ‘There’s a smell of drains. Maybe you’ve got a cracked drain.’

  ‘I’m not going looking for trouble, pal. Drains cost. Old buildings, you see?’

  ‘Was the place in profit? Did he have friends? Enemies? Anything you can tell me about him. Anything.’

  Nodding, pouring the coffee from an oily-looking percolator jug, the landlord scratched his backside and smirked. ‘Everyone was scared of Van Eden. He was an old war hero, you know. Still came in here to drink, even after I bought the pub from him. Drank like Richard Burton. Quite a man. Quite a temper.’

  Van den Bergen looked at the mug the landlord was pouring the coffee into. Realised there were pink lipstick marks around the rim. George would never drink from that cup. He opted not to either. ‘So, not popular then?’

  ‘Oh, popular when he was in a good mood. But if you got on the wrong side of him…’ He raised a shaggy eyebrow. Coughed. His breath smelled of Marlboros and stale whisky. ‘He was one of those wiry old guys who never lost his potency, you know? If he hadn’t been running a pub, he’d have run marathons. It takes some mettle to throw the drunks and stoners out when they misbehave. Especially the st
ag parties from the UK and Germany. They’re utter wankers. But Van Eden had big balls and charisma. He spun a cracking war yarn. Talked about his old girlfriend, Ava or Anna or some shit. Anna Groen. That’s right. Some wartime chanteuse who was all tits and tambourines. Said he had his heart broken. Talked about a son.’

  Van den Bergen shifted his position in the uncomfortable seat. ‘A son?’

  The landlord nodded slowly, as if his storytelling was still fuelled by single malt. ‘Apparently. Don’t know the details, though. Maybe he had a kid with the songstress.’ He shrugged. Toyed with the curling chest hair that poked through a hole in his vest. ‘He certainly didn’t have a wife. Jesus. I’m only forty and I don’t have a wife! Good women are hard to come by.’

  Questioning the landlord’s response, Van den Bergen looked pointedly at the lipstick on the cup.

  ‘I have a friend who visits,’ he said by way of explanation. ‘She’s got rubber boots and she’s too big for porn, as well. You two should meet.’

  ‘Van Eden ever mention another old war hero called Ed Sijpesteijn?’ Van den Bergen asked, ignoring the comment. Feverishly making notes in his diary.

  ‘No. Never heard of him.’

  The reception he received at Van Eden’s former home was less revealing than the pub. At 7.13 a.m., he arrived at the small mid-century apartment in Bos en Lommer to the west of the city. The door was opened by a bearded man in his mid twenties, who looked the type who did something boring for the council but dabbled in hand-crafted pottery at the weekend.

  ‘Are you related to Hendrik van Eden?’ he asked hopefully, curling his lip only slightly at the cool young man’s bare feet, stuffed into Birkenstocks. There was a fleeting glimpse of a woman who peered out from the doorway leading to another room and immediately retreated.

  Birkenstocks looked Van den Bergen up and down, wiping cereal thoughtfully from his moustache. ‘I’m the new tenant. I moved in a fortnight ago.’