The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die (11 page)

‘What’s your point?’

George looked to the pathologist for a reaction but found none. She looked back to van den Bergen’s hungry eyes.

‘Have you thought this could be the work of neo-Nazis trying to make Muslims look bad?’ she said. ‘Maybe Joachim was going to blow the whistle on something he was privy to. Instead, he got popped himself. Just saying …’

He followed the boy down the street with phantom-light steps, calculating how he might best take this one. This was just part of his reconnaissance, but preparation was always key, he found. He liked to observe how they moved first; to gauge their strength and agility. It would influence everything from his choice of weapon to the time of day he would make his move.

This one would not present a challenge. In fact, none of them would really. They were all physically inferior and psychologically unprepared.

As he made his way to the faculty on Nieuwe Prinsengracht, thinking about his craftsman’s tools and revelling in being the hunter hiding deliciously in plain view, he noticed that she was not there. He felt a mixture of frustration and panic kindle inside him. Here the rest of them were. Chatting about their Christmases. Scandalised by the Utrecht bomb. Bemoaning their academic responsibilities or nagging parents or how stony broke they were. But no sign of her.

As people greeted him lethargically, wishing him a Happy New Year – a sentiment which was almost certainly not backed up by genuine interest and certainly not affection – he quickly switched from planning his next abduction to wondering how he could hurt her for standing him up.

‘So, tell me. What were Joachim’s religious leanings?’ van den Bergen asked the red-faced German boy in the visitor’s chair. The harder the tone he used, the brighter the boy’s ears became. Other than that, van den Bergen could see he was like an impenetrable Black Forest fortress.

‘He was Lutheran. Of course. Like every good white German should be.’

Van den Bergen shifted in the borrowed desk chair of Vim Fennemans, grimacing at the pervasive smell of unwashed feet. It was ironic that he should have requisitioned this office for the interviews, given that Fennemans and the university’s board were now making noises about suing him personally for harassment and slander. Kamphuis was only half-heartedly trying to intervene. At this rate, he could lose his job, his flat and his allotment. Screwed on a grand scale. But panic over that would have to wait.

He leaned forward to try to assert physical dominance over the boy. Biedermeier was, after all, big in that meaty, almost American, way.

‘Come on! Joachim was the perpetrator in a suicide bombing. A group of Muslim fundamentalists are claiming it as a planned triumph in a religious war on Europe. Think, Klaus! Who could Joachim have become pally with without your knowledge? What were his links to Ratan Patil?’

The boy shrugged and looked blankly out of the window. ‘I told your detectives when they rudely descended on my pad, I don’t know a thing. This tragedy has come as a terrible shock. My personal loss is enormous.’

Van den Bergen scribbled in his pad that the boy’s response sounded flat and rehearsed. Biedermeier was completely lacking in the sniffling symptoms of grief. Come to think of it …

‘Your flu seems to have cleared up,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘You told my detectives that you had been suffering from flu.’

Van den Bergen wondered what his gut was telling him, when Biedermeier started to chuckle almost silently.

‘I have a strong German constitution,’ he said.

Perhaps his gut was merely telling him he was due another antacid. Biedermeier’s body language was utterly unfathomable. And yet, van den Bergen felt certain that this boy’s story was more complex than being a case of, ‘It could just as easily have been me, if only fate hadn’t intervened to save my Aryan hide with man-flu.’ Van den Bergen didn’t believe in fate.

There was a knock at the door.

Van den Bergen looked at his watch. ‘Enter!’

When the door opened and he saw the figure silhouetted by the harsh, corridor strip light, he felt a stabbing pain in his chest.

‘Excuse me. Excuse me. Sorry, can I get through?’

There was a flurry of politesse within earshot and George looked up to see Ad, making his way to her, along the line in the lecture theatre. He was wearing her favourite navy cable-knit jumper and reefer jacket. She imagined him a Dutch sailor on shore leave. Exotic in her mind’s eye.

‘Howdy, partner,’ Ad said to George, dropping his pens from his unzipped bag. He bent double to pick them off the ground, banging his head on the desk’s underside on the way back up. Not so exotic.

‘Howdy,’ George said, feeling her spirits lift slightly. She mimed blowing the smoke from her finger pistol and put it in her imaginary holster.

Throat clearing and a cough over the PA system. Fennemans. George caught sight of him down the front, preparing to hold court in his too-tight jacket over his too-large gut.

‘When you’re ready, Mr Karelse,’ Fennemans yelled into the whistling microphone. ‘The whole of Year Three has been waiting for your arrival. Perhaps we can begin now.’

George could see the flush of hot embarrassment creeping into Ad’s hairline as the girl next to her willingly, gladly, moved to let Ad sit down.

Fennemans embarked on his monotonous adventures into the politics surrounding the first Gulf War. The lecture theatre fell almost silent but for his voice. Only pens scratching away on pads could be heard.

When Ad started to write in her notebook, George was only dimly aware of it. He clicked his fingers and delivered her from her studious reverie. She looked down and read what he had written. His hand was easy to read, neat, straightforward, uncomplicated.

Biedermeier is sitting over there.

She looked at Ad and furrowed her brow. She mouthed, ‘Where?’ He pointed to the far side of the lecture theatre.

She peered over the heads of the other students, strained her neck to scan the tiers full of conscientious scribblers. Then she spotted him. Dark blond cropped hair. Florid, sow-like neck. The smart casual clothes covering the bulky, honed body that screamed upper-middle-class jock. His type looked the same in mainland Europe as they did at Cambridge.

She started to write on her pad, enjoying the intimacy it created between her and Ad. Her writing was tight and hard to read but she knew Ad would decipher it.

Why’s he not locked up?

Ad shrugged. More writing.

V. d. Bergen has questioned him about Joachim. Everyone’s being pulled into Fennemans’ office to be interviewed this morning.

George frowned.

And?

Remko told me Klaus cried off going to Heidelberg at the last minute.

George narrowed her eyes and looked over at Klaus. Had it been an
et tu, Brute
moment for Joachim and his lost head? Was poor, sweet, legless Ratan’s only crime the crime of being brown?

Ratan had stood up to Klaus at the start of the year. It was in the cafeteria at Bushuis. Klaus had started pestering Rani about being Sri Lankan. Why wasn’t she wearing a headscarf like the other good little Muslim girls? How come countries like Sri Lanka, which had been colonial outposts in grand, European empires, had done nothing but tear themselves apart with civil war since the white man gave them back to the natives? Weren’t they, like children, incapable of ruling themselves?

Rani had blanched. Tears stood in her eyes. Then Ratan had stood on his tiptoes and fought her corner, publicly reviling Klaus and branding him indelibly as an ignorant bully.

Had that been the start? Had Klaus delivered Ratan and Joachim as incendiary mouthpieces for a rhetoric that Hitler had started and Biedermeier’s pals wanted to finish?

A rustle of whispers sparked up among the students around her. George blotted out the peripheral white noise. But Fennemans had started to walk and talk with his roving mic headset. Madonna with a paunch and a small dick heading straight for her. Ad nudged her but it was too late.

‘This is a whole heap of shit,’ van den Bergen said to Elvis. He rubbed his face and sipped sourly at his coffee. He started to flick his Biro against his front teeth in a way he knew annoyed everyone but which was somehow useful for marshalling his thoughts. ‘Okay. We’ve got an academic pervert who has potentially murdered a student, strutting round like some fucking bantam cock, parading his
legal
immunity. And we’ve got a really bloody strange right-wing German kid—’

‘Possibly the most likely prime suspect yet,’ Elvis interjected. ‘I’m hearing from the other students that Biedermeier and Joachim had a falling out before Christmas. There’s your motive.’

‘Yes. Young Klaus arose from his timely deathbed better than Jesus or The Terminator put together. Now he’s parading his amazing
flu-busting
immunity around the same department.’ He grabbed at his stomach, although really it was his head that hurt. ‘What do you think?’

Elvis sat in the corner chair, behind the door. He swung his thin right leg over his left knee and fingered his sleek, dark sideburns. ‘Did you see Fennemans’ face when he showed up in the middle of Biedermeier’s interview? Pretending he’d forgotten something for his lecture. If looks could kill … He’s out to crucify you, boss. Sorry.’

Van den Bergen could see a cruel glimmer of schadenfreude behind Elvis’ eyes. He shook his head. ‘I know. But what bothers me more is there seemed to be some kind of connection between Fennemans and Biedermeier.’

There was a knock on the door. Elvis opened it and told the girl who was next to wait in the corridor.

‘’Course there’s a connection, boss. Biedermeier is Fennemans’ student,’ he said when the door was firmly closed to prying ears.

Van den Bergen stretched out until his hip cracked. ‘No. I mean there’s something complicit between them. For a fraction of a second there, I could see … Shit. I just don’t know. And in the meantime, we’re wading through taking alibis and statements from hundreds of kids and staff in this building alone. What if there’s another bomb because we were just too slow with the paperwork?’

He thumped the desk. ‘Bollocks!’

‘Give me that, McKenzie,’ Fennemans said. He held his hand out for the pad to be passed along the line.

George looked up at him. He was looking more teddy boy than Barry Manilow today.
Down with the kids. Giant anus.

‘It’s just notes,’ she said, putting her arm across the writing.

‘Pass it.’

Think before you speak. Don’t rise to it. Think.

‘Why? So you can read it out to everyone and take the piss? This ain’t nursery school. I don’t have to give you nothing.’

As soon as George had said the words, she regretted it.
Stupid, stupid, stupid!
The words had trotted out on prickly, hairy legs.

Fennemans looked at her with a face that rippled merrily with smug satisfaction.

‘Get out of my class, McKenzie,’ he said. ‘Now!’ He pointed to the door emphatically.

George sucked her teeth and started to pack her belongings into her rucksack. Excitement blistered up on everybody’s faces. Heads turning round. Softly spoken exchanges. Shocked at the English girl.

Ad stood abruptly and hastily packed his notepad and pen into his bag too. George paused momentarily to watch him.

‘Hey!’ she whispered. ‘You don’t need to—’

‘Come on,’ he said.

The students sitting between George and the end of the row all stood to let her and Ad pass. All eyes were on them. George felt emboldened by Ad’s support. Proud. And at the same time, utterly annoyed at herself.

As she reached Fennemans, he folded his arms and treated her to a mean smile that turned the corners of his thin-lipped mouth downwards.

‘If I don’t have you thrown off this course, at the very least I’m going to have you excluded from lectures, Little Miss,’ he said. ‘I’m going to put you under my personal, beady-eyed supervision. You won’t be able to shirk so easily then, will you?’

Don’t play into his hands
, George counselled herself.

She felt Ad place a reassuring hand on her shoulder and she bit back the words.
Fuck you, Fennemans. You bouffant ponce.

‘Sit down, Karelse!’ Fennemans barked at Ad.

‘No,’ came Ad’s response.

George felt lightheaded. Adrenalin picked her up like a rabid dog and shook her body around. She couldn’t remember anybody in her twenty years fighting her corner before. Certainly not in front of a room full of her peers, aching to see a gladiatorial show-down.

As she left the lecture theatre, George caught a glimpse of Klaus. He turned his scarred face towards her. His eyes locked with hers for a shred of a second. She felt fear blossoming in her stomach like bindweed. Her confrontation with Fennemans was instantly shelved. Breathing more quickly now, she pushed the doors to the lecture theatre open and broke the connection with Klaus.

George marched straight to Fennemans’ office, with Ad following at a brisk pace.

‘What are you doing?’ Ad asked. ‘I thought we could go for a coffee.’

George said nothing. She kept walking until she was there. She could hear van den Bergen’s rich, tired voice beyond the door. She didn’t knock.

Van den Bergen was sitting behind Fennemans’ desk with legs outstretched. Collar open, outdated, double-breasted suit. The beginnings of a white goatee today, which she liked. A butch-looking girl with shorn hair, whom George didn’t know personally but recognised from the odd lecture, was sitting in one of the institutional imitation leather armchairs by the door. A man, roughly in his thirties wearing a leather jacket and jeans, sat and took notes in a pad. A detective probably. One of van den Bergen’s flock, George decided.

‘Didn’t you see the sign?’ the younger detective asked. ‘Do not disturb.’

Van den Bergen leaned back in the chair and folded his arms behind his head.

‘Detectives Cagney and Lacey. Good morning. You know, you’re interrupting official police business?’ he said.

George spied the mirth behind his grey eyes. The butch student shuffled forward on her seat, uncomfortable.