Читать книгу The Girl Who Got Revenge: The addictive new crime thriller of 2018 - Marnie Riches, Marnie Riches - Страница 14

‘Where are you with the illegal immigrant situation?’ Maarten Minks asked, sitting bolt upright, as though the chief of police had personally rammed a pointy-ended paperweight up his young commissioner’s rectum. Minks was flushed. He was only ever red in the face when he was wetting his big boy pants with excitement over a development in a case or if he had been given a dressing-down.

Suspecting the latter, Van den Bergen folded his arms over the maelstrom of griping wind and acid indigestion that raged in his beleaguered stomach. He sighed. ‘Frederik den Bosch is an unpleasant character with some really disgusting views, but you can’t arrest a man for that unless he acts on them. And his record is squeaky clean. His claim that the lorry containing the Syrians was stolen checks out. He called in a theft in a couple of days before the find. Uniforms went and took a statement from his office manager, and Den Bosch contacted his insurers soon afterwards.’

‘Was it stolen from the yard?’ Minks asked, smoothing the leather padded arms on his captain’s chair. ‘Surely an international exporter with acreage like that has got decent security. A guard? Dogs? Cameras?’

Van den Bergen nodded, wondering if he should mention the two old men and their suspicious deaths. But with a little girl dead, the Syrian refugee case was a murder investigation that warranted his full attention. If Minks got wind of the two nonagenarians with their mysterious tattoos, the overzealous stickler for rules would cry conflict of interest and immediately pass the case on to one of the other senior detectives. No way was Van den Bergen willing to let that happen. Especially since Arnold van Blanken had breathed his last only a few feet from where he had been uselessly sitting in the doctor’s surgery.

‘Marie has the CCTV footage from Den Bosch’s premises and has yet to find anything.’ He rubbed his stomach and belched quietly, trying to picture the inside of his ulcerated gullet.

‘You seem distracted, Paul. Is there anything you’d like to share with me? Are you…’ He leaned forward. ‘Well?’ Minks cocked his head in the semi-concerned fashion of a careerist who often practised being human in front of a mirror.

‘What kind of a question is that?’ Van den Bergen asked, straightening in his seat until, thanks to his long torso, he could see the top of Minks’s head. Thinning hair, since he’d whipped Kamphuis’s old job from under Van den Bergen’s nose.

‘A suspected heart attack and collapse at the scene of an arrest?’ Minks examined his perfectly clean fingernails. Clearly, the man was not a gardener. He failed to make eye contact with Van den Bergen. ‘Seems your little adventure in Mexico has knocked the stuffing out of you.’

‘I brought down the Rotterdam Silencer, and not for the first time!’ Van den Bergen could feel irritation itching its way up his neck. He regarded his superior officer with some cynicism. The smug arsehole was showing signs of turning into his predecessor. ‘I think you might find it physically testing to have anthrax thrown in your face.’

Minks’s eyes narrowed. He touched the stiff Eton collar on his shirt. ‘It wasn’t anthrax.’

‘I didn’t know that at the time, did I?’

The silence between them made the air feel too thick to breathe. Finally, Van den Bergen relented and spoke.

‘I’ve put Dr McKenzie on the payroll. She’s an expert in trafficking of all sorts.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Paul! I’m trying to keep departmental costs down. Not let them spiral out of control, and all because you want to play the generous sugar daddy with your girlfriend. Why the hell can’t you co-opt some junior detective from another station? McKenzie’s expensive.’

Van den Bergen closed his eyes momentarily and swallowed down the scorching poker of bile that lanced its way up his oesophagus. ‘Dr McKenzie is a specialist consultant. Even if I didn’t have a relationship with her outside of the workplace, I’d still hire her. Pay peanuts, get monkeys.’

‘I’ve studied your expenditure. It’s gone through the roof in the last few years.’ There it was. Spreadsheet King had been getting his rocks off after hours with a five-knuckle shuffle over some ancient Excel files.

‘The world’s a bad place, Maarten, and every year it gets worse. Ten years ago, we didn’t have half the violent trafficking-related crime that we have now in the city. Or at least we weren’t aware of it. You want me to keep solving cases? Then I need the right people. Georgina has come in on our most complex and dangerous cases – multiple murders and organised criminal networks that have had international reach. Can you think of a single one that my team didn’t solve?’ He folded his arms triumphantly. ‘She’s got a criminologist’s insight – something that we lack. Dirk and Marie are the best officers I’ve ever had working for me, but there’s a limit to what—’

Minks balled his fist, clearly ready to thump the table. His wrinkle-free face seemed even tauter than usual. ‘My priority is to crack down on crime committed by immigrants, Paul. Many influential Amsterdamers are not happy with the city being over-run by ISIS bastards, masquerading as refugees from these far-flung, bombed-out shitholes. The great and the good of Amsterdam are taxpayers, Chief Inspector! They’re our bloody bosses!’

Listening to the alt-right bilge that Minks was spouting from between those too-tight lips of his, Van den Bergen was suddenly tempted to take the bottle of Gaviscon from his raincoat pocket and neutralise the commissioner’s acidic mouth with it. But he knew this edict had come from on high. It was in the papers daily: panic, prejudice and paranoia.

‘I’m not getting into a political point-scoring contest, Maarten,’ he said, standing abruptly. ‘That’s why I’m not sitting on your side of the desk. I’m a policeman. I put the bad guys behind bars. Let me find the bastard who landed a bunch of vulnerable people in hospital and killed a twelve-year-old. If I say I need Dr McKenzie’s help, just pay the invoices, will you? There’s a good lad.’

Minks scowled at him. Van den Bergen could practically hear the potential responses that were being tried for size in his mind. But he merely gripped the desk, his fingernails turning bright pink; white at the tips.

‘You got a mandate to keep illegal immigrants out of the city? Let me find the trafficker that’s bringing them here.’ And whoever’s bumping off those poor old sods with the tattooed necks, he thought, already walking through the door.

Flinging himself into his desk chair, Van den Bergen growled when the lever mechanism that allowed him to adjust the height of the seat gave way, dropping him to only inches above the floor.

‘Damn thing!’

On the other side of the cubicle, he could hear Elvis sniggering.

‘Have you been pissing about with my chair?’

‘No, boss. Do you want me to show you how you adjust it…again?’

‘Get your jacket on, smart-arse.’

Elvis appeared, red-faced, from behind the partition, which was covered with photos of the Den Bosch truck, its beleaguered occupants, the driver and their prime suspect – Frederik den Bosch himself.

‘Sorry, I didn’t mean—’

Van den Bergen merely pulled on his raincoat. ‘De Pijp.’

‘Den Bosch’s home turf? Nothing came of the door to doors,’ Elvis said, buttoning his leather jacket. ‘Me and Marie knocked every single neighbour up within a quarter of a mile radius. Most weren’t even keen to open the door to us, let alone say anything about the man down the street.’

Tossing the key to his Mercedes into Elvis’s hands, Van den Bergen took a final slurp of his now-cold coffee. ‘Wait for me in the car. Anyone who seemed overly reluctant to talk about their charming tattooed neighbour…they’re the ones who will have the most interesting tales to tell. You mark my words.’

Striding with apparent purpose down the corridor, though everything was still tender from the gastroscopy, he entered the fug of Marie’s dedicated IT suite. She was sitting with her back to him, sucking on the ends of her fingers, an empty packet of paprika-flavoured Bugles on the desk by her keyboard.

‘I’m going to tell George to stop bringing you those from England,’ he said. ‘She’s enabling you and it’s wrong. Too much salt in the diet can lead—’

‘I’m a big girl, boss.’ Marie gave him a watery smile, watching as the gust of wind that Van den Bergen had brought in with him wafted the crisp packet into the air. It drifted to the floor like a misshapen parachute, landing softly amid the flotsam and jetsam of Marie’s previous snack attacks. She regarded it impassively, scratching at the new spot that had appeared on her cheekbone – the same size and milky hue as the cultured pearls in her ears. ‘Now, what can I do for you?’

‘Did you find anything at all from Den Bosch’s CCTV footage?’

‘No. I’ve gone through backups from the last three weeks and there’s nothing that could disprove what he’s said. The heavy goods vehicle in question shows up several times per week, gets loaded up, heads off with the produce. Then, after the theft is reported, you don’t see it again.’

‘And the driver?’

‘Definitely not the same man the port police arrested. The usual driver is a young guy in his early thirties, blond and overweight.’

Van den Bergen scratched at his stubble. ‘The bastard with the anthrax was in his fifties and dark-haired. If Den Bosch is somehow in the frame, maybe he’s not mixing his legitimate staff with his dodgy hired help.’ He closed the door to her room quietly. Approached her desk. ‘Listen, there’s something else I want you to look into.’

Marie hooked her red hair behind her ear and smiled knowingly. ‘Oh, here we go. Are you trying to get something below Minks’s radar?’

Grimacing, Van den Bergen reached into his trouser pocket and took out a USB stick. ‘Check out the photos on here.’ He cleared his throat, desperately trying to shake off the sensation that something was blocking his airway. ‘Two old guys, dead, with identical tattoos on their necks.’

Plugging the USB stick into her PC, Marie uploaded the files. Morgue photos of Arnold van Blanken and Brechtus Bruin filled the monitor screen. With a flurry of mouse clicks in rapid succession, she zoomed in to reveal the crowned lions, flanked by the S and 5. ‘Never seen that design before.’

‘Neither have I,’ Van den Bergen said. ‘That’s why I want you to look into it. We’ve got two guys – both ninety-five and both registered to the same doctors’ surgery – who have died within days of one another.’

‘Coincidence? Serendipity?’ she asked. Opening her desk drawer, she pulled out a bar of chocolate. ‘At ninety-five, I bet they were feeling bloody smug that they’d made it to such old bones or else just waiting for God.’ She peered thoughtfully at the photo of the smiling baby boy by her keyboard. ‘Not everyone’s lucky enough to make it to such old bones.’

Had a glassy film suddenly appeared on her eyes? Van den Bergen couldn’t be sure. He lifted his hand, ready to pat her supportively on the shoulder, but realised that perhaps she didn’t want to dredge up the subject of cot death and loss over a bar of Verkade creamy milk.

‘Both had been prescribed wrong doses of medication by their doctor, leading to death from heart failure. Same GP. Do me a favour, will you? Can you also do a little digging into Dr Saif Abadi’s patient list and see who’s died recently – elderly people and those suffering cardiac arrest or sudden death. In fact, pull the register of deaths and make a list of everyone who’s keeled over in similar circumstances. It wouldn’t be the first time someone’s decided to start bumping off the old and vulnerable.’

‘If that’s what’s happened,’ Marie added.

‘Yes. If. Oh, and don’t breathe a word about this to anyone until I know more. Okay? Minks is giving me heat about the refugee case.’

‘Has anyone even reported suspected foul play with these old men?’

He shook his head. ‘George is going to help me make discreet enquiries. I have a hunch…and I can’t let it go.’

Snapping her chocolate in two, Marie treated him to a yellow-toothed smile. ‘Leave it with me, boss.’