Читать книгу The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die: The first book in an addictive crime series that will have you gripped - Marnie Riches, Marnie Riches - Страница 13

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-shirt that smelled strongly of washing 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 makeshift Christmas family, would give a shit!

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 hell is that you’re cooking, darling? It looks like a dish of festive turds.’

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 turds.

‘Is this some vegetarian crap?’ 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 glasses. 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 glasses 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 assembling 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 glass 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 glasses 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 dicky ticker that Mother had fed to bursting point with butter 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 buttons 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 glassy 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 hell was he doing here, snooping into another detective’s case when he should have been concentrating on al Badaar?

Quietly, at the back of his mind, van den Bergen acknowledged that she had been a Social and Behavioural Science student. Like Joachim Guttentag, who had just been reported missing by his parents. Both belonging to the same faculty that had been targeted by a suicide bomber. He made a mental note to get Elvis and Marie to look into Guttentag’s disappearance if he still hadn’t showed by the New Year.

He looked through her books. There were no academic texts. Nothing to indicate that she had been a studious girl. There was no makeup. No posters of bands on the walls. No photographs of boyfriends. The room had an impersonal feel to it and yet he could tell from the slept-in bedding and the drawers full of clothes that this was indeed her main abode. He decided that she had stripped from it any trace of femininity or her previous life as a student. Why? What had happened to Janneke Polman?

‘I brought you a coffee anyway,’ her mother said.

Van den Bergen jumped and turned around to see the weary woman standing against the architrave of the door. He smiled at her. ‘Thanks,’ he said. The coffee was black. He hated black coffee but he drank it anyway and steeled himself not to pull a face. ‘It’s good coffee. Listen, Mrs Polman.’

‘Call me Lydia.’

‘Lydia. Why did Janneke drop out of college?’

Lydia pushed a stray lock of hair behind her ear. ‘She was struggling with her studies. Weird really. She’d done so well in her first two years. Then suddenly, she starts doing really badly in class. Had trouble with her accommodation too.’

‘Didn’t she live here with you?’

‘We’re too far out here, really. She wanted to be in the centre, near all her friends. Wanted to be independent, you know. They fly the nest and you never expect to get them back.’

Lydia sighed and wiped a stray tear with shaking, work-worn fingers.

‘I thought she’d do okay when she moved in with Dr Fennemans.’

Van den Bergen cocked his head to the side and held up his enormous hand. ‘Wait. What did you say?’

Lydia was still wringing her hands, except this time, van den Bergen noticed that she was toying with something purple and woollen. A purple bobble hat that he had last seen in Central Station.

‘You?’ George said, trying not to let the alarm show in her face. Despite the calming effects of the beer flowing through her veins, her heart was thumping hard against her ribcage. ‘What do you want?’

She had only just got to the communal door and put her key in the lock. The whole of the red light district was almost empty of punters, neighbours and passersby. Now that the early evening darkness and cold had cloaked everything in semi-silence and shadow, the canal was a black, stagnant blood vessel bisecting a dead street. So, the tap on her shoulder was wholly unexpected. Inexplicably, here was Fennemans, standing two feet away from her, smiling like a creepy fucking idiot beneath the streetlight. His nose seemed more bulbous than usual. Though his bouffant hair had lost some of its va va voom, she noted. And the shaft of yellow light from above revealed the dusting of dandruff on the collar of his overcoat. He smelled of rotten meat and cheese beneath an old fashioned fug of what George recognised as Paco Rabanne.

‘I was passing this way,’ he said, still smiling. ‘You Brits make a big deal out of Christmas Day, don’t you? So, I just wanted to wish you a Merry Christmas.’

George took her key out of the lock and stood perfectly still. She stared at him, willing him to go away.

‘Can I come up for a drink?’ he asked.

George’s mind was racing. This was wrong in so many ways. Fennemans hated her. She hated him. This was her personal space. Her turf. He was encroaching.

‘How do you know where I live?’ she asked, taking a step towards to him so that the gap between them had closed uncomfortably. She was mindful of her body language. Careful to thrust her shoulders forwards and make herself look as threatening and large as possible. This arsehole was not to get any wrong messages. Happily, he took a step backwards.

‘I’m your tutor. I just …’ The childish smile had started to fall from his face.

‘Don’t come to my home,’ George said. She felt bolstered by the 8.5 percent alcohol content in not one, but six Duvel beers. Ordinarily, she knew she would have skirted around the issue and tried to politely brush Fennemans off. But now …

‘This is inappropriate. You’re not welcome here. It’s my space. Do you understand, Dr Fennemans?’

George stood her ground, balled fists on hips. His expression changed. The smile was suddenly replaced by something else. George couldn’t tell if it was weary resignation or annoyance. It was difficult to assess under the streetlight. But all the while she stood there, willing him to walk away without a confrontation, she was seized and held captive by a paralysing anxiety that she didn’t want him to know about. Then, with silence hanging opaquely between them, Fennemans dug one of his gloved hands into the pocket of his overcoat as though he was reaching for something.