Читать книгу The Girl Who Got Revenge: The addictive new crime thriller of 2018 - Marnie Riches, Marnie Riches - Страница 8

‘How come the truck was intercepted here?’ Van den Bergen asked Elvis, his voice almost whipped away entirely by the stiff dockside wind and swallowed by the sobs of those Syrian refugees who were yet to be assessed by paramedics and ferried to hospital. He blinked hard at the sight of this desperate diaspora, sitting on the pavement, wrapped in tinfoil blankets, with blood-pressure cuffs strapped to their arms and oxygen monitors clamped on their fingers. ‘Seems a weird place for the driver to have come. It’s all logistics and exporter headquarters in this bit of the port.’

He studied the heavy goods vehicle, which had been cordoned off with police tape by the uniforms. On the side of the truck’s battered burgundy container, the livery of a produce company, Groenten Den Bosch B.V., had been emblazoned in yellow. It looked no different from any other cargo vehicle carrying greenhouse-grown unseasonable fruit and vegetables to the UK and beyond.

‘Apparently the port authority cops were heading this way after they’d been to investigate a break-in over there…’ Elvis gesticulated towards some grey industrial sheds in the distance that bruised the watery landscape with their utilitarian bulk. It looked exactly like the place the junior detective had almost met an untimely end at the hands of the Rotterdam Silencer’s men. Small wonder that he was shivering, his shoulders hunched inside his leather jacket, a pinched look to his face. ‘It was a chance discovery,’ he said, his eyes darting furtively over to the wharf-side warehouse behind them. The scar around his neck was still livid, though he’d covered it up today with a scarf. The quiff and mutton-chop sideburns that had earned him his nickname may have been replaced by a stylish cut and better clothes, but Van den Bergen’s protégé looked positively vulnerable these days.

‘Are you eating right?’ Van den Bergen asked, scratching his nose with the edge of his notebook.

‘What? What’s that got to do with a truckload of trafficked Syrians?’

Van den Bergen coughed awkwardly, wondering how to dress his fatherly concern up as idle curiosity. It wouldn’t do to let Elvis know that he cared… Would it? ‘Nothing. You just look…’

‘I’ve been going to the gym.’ He patted his newly flat stomach.

‘Oh. It’s just…what with you being garrotted and left for dead and—’

‘Can we just not, boss?’ Elvis smiled weakly and pulled his jacket closed against the wind. ‘Anyway, the driver was trying to turn around, can you believe it? Who the hell tries to do a three-point turn with a heavy goods vehicle on a road like this?! When they pulled over to ask him what the hell he was doing, the guy freaked, jumped out of his cab and tried to run away. That’s when they opened up the back and found all these poor bastards inside.’

Van den Bergen belched stomach acid into his mouth and swallowed it back down with a grimace. Wondered how Elvis felt about the black body bag that lay on a gurney by the roadside, having been found inside one himself on the brink of death. He walked over to the gurney.

‘Give me some space,’ he told the uniform – a young lad who looked like he was barely out of cadet school. ‘Let me see her.’

Breathing in deeply, he slowly unzipped the bag to reveal the pale face of the girl inside. Were it not for the blue tinge to her lips and the general grey hue to skin that had certainly been olive in life, she could almost be sleeping. One of the sobbing women who sat on the pavement leaped up and made for him. Tears streamed down her red face. She shrieked something at Van den Bergen – words that he didn’t comprehend, though he understood her anguish perfectly. Bitter, biting grief needed no interpreter. One of the other women pulled the girl’s mother back before two uniformed officers could restrain her.

Thinking of his granddaughter, Van den Bergen’s viscera tightened. He ground his molars together. Turned to the uniform. ‘How many of the refugees are critical?’

The lad touched the brim of his hat respectfully. Visibly gulped. ‘Twenty have gone off with the first lot of ambulances,’ he said. ‘They were in the worst shape. The rest…’

He inclined his head to the remaining ragtag band of chancers sitting on the pavement: about two-dozen men in dusty, cheap suits or hoodies and jeans, yellowed at the knees. They looked like they had stepped straight from a war zone into the truck. The half dozen or so women wore jeans and tunics for the most part – full-length, loose-fitting dark dresses on the older ones. All had their heads covered, though they had oxygen masks fitted to their faces. The remainder were children, ranging from about five years old to young teens, dressed in bright colours. Van den Bergen was struck by how ordinary they all looked. He berated himself for having expected them all to appear like Middle Eastern stereotypes instead of electricians, nurses, teachers, lecturers: people who had simply had enough of certain death in their homeland and had decided to take their chances on possible death in the back of a heavy goods vehicle.

‘Make sure they get whatever they need while they’re waiting,’ Van den Bergen said, swallowing hard and clenching his fist around his pen. ‘If the paramedics say they can eat and drink, arrange it. Good policing is about more than just arresting bad guys. Speaking of which, where’s the driver?’

The uniform pointed to a squad car that had been parked at an unlikely angle across the street, forming part of the roadblock. ‘He refuses to speak. My sergeant’s about to take him in for questioning. You’ll want to sit in on the interview, right?’

The squad car’s engine started up. The reverse lights came on, and the vehicle started to roll back slowly. In Van den Bergen’s peripheral vision, he caught sight again of the body bag that contained the little girl. Her keening mother was now being tended to by a paramedic. A corrosive force stronger than stomach acid welled up inside him. Pushing the uniformed lad aside, Van den Bergen took long strides towards the brightly liveried politie squad car. He wrenched open the passenger door and held up his large hand. Flashed his ID. Fixed the female sergeant with a stern and unflinching gaze. ‘Stop the car,’ he said. Pushing the central locking button on the console, he unlocked the car’s doors. Then he leaped over the bonnet to the driver’s side and opened the rear door. Without pausing to take a look at the greasy-haired trucker, he grabbed the handcuffed man by the scruff of his neck and pulled him out of the car.

‘Who are you working for?’ he yelled at him.

The trucker was a middle-aged man with a bloated, red face and veined nose that spoke to high blood pressure and too much whisky. Puffy beneath the eyes. He stank of stale cigarettes and fried food. A dark band of grease described the collar of his blue sweatshirt, ending in a V above his sternum. This didn’t strike Van den Bergen as a scrupulous or discerning man who might be bothered where the money for his alcohol might come from.

‘No comment. I want a solicitor,’ the man said, holding Van den Bergen’s gaze. ‘You just manhandled me out of that car. That’s police brutality.’

‘You ran, didn’t you? When the port cops pulled you over, you ran, you piece of shit. A kid’s dead on the back of your actions.’ He pushed the trucker hard in the shoulder – a family man’s rage taking over his professional sensibilities.

By the time the trucker had stretched his cuffed hands down towards his baggy jeans, Van den Bergen was too late to realise he was aiming for his pocket. With determined fingers, the man pulled out a white object.

‘Boss! Watch out!’ Elvis yelled, sprinting towards them.

What was it? A note? An envelope? Van den Bergen didn’t have time to put on the glasses that hung on the end of a chain around his neck to work out what the trucker had armed himself with.

‘Stay back!’ the man shouted, wide-eyed. Spittle had gathered at the corners of his mouth, putting Van den Bergen in mind of a crazed bull. ‘I’ll open it. I will. And you’ll all be fucked.’

‘Take it easy!’ Elvis said, holding his hands high.

Trying to make sense of the situation, Van den Bergen’s fingers crept slowly towards the gun in its holster, strapped to his body. ‘Whoa!’ he said. ‘What have you got there?’

‘Let me go, or I’ll throw this shit everywhere!’

‘What shit?’

Van den Bergen took a step closer, poised to draw his service weapon.

‘Anthrax.’