The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die (2 page)

‘What time is it?’ George smacked her dry lips together and felt a draught on her back coming from the window. She wanted Ad to go away. She wanted her guest to get the hell out as well.

‘Gone nine,’ Ad said. ‘Come on. You’ve got to see this. Let’s go.’

Ad pushed the door open, taking George by surprise. He peered into her room and she knew then he had seen everything.

‘Filip?’ he said.

She could hear the ridicule in his voice. She flushed hot with embarrassment.

‘Don’t,’ she said. ‘Meet me downstairs in two.’

As she closed the door on Ad, she was sure she could see hurt in the intelligent brown eyes that hid behind his steel-framed glasses. She drew back the brocade curtains in sharp, angry movements, annoyed with herself for letting Ad see what she had done. Whom she had done. Why did he care so much anyway? He already had his blonde, Milkmaid childhood sweetheart back home. What was she called? Astrid or Margo or something like that. Screw him.

Feeling like her brain was packed with cotton wool, George peered out over the steep rooftops of Amsterdam’s red light district. It had rained in the night, and now the roof tiles glittered in the morning sun.

She had the best view in the world; an exclusive view, hidden from those below. The judgemental. The respectable. The petty-minded. The paying punters who had eyes only for red-lit booths and the bongs in coffee shop windows.

Yes, it was a lovely morning. But then, on the horizon to her far right, George spotted a plume of black smoke. Thick and acrid, it curled up into the delicate blue of the morning sky like an angry fist. The explosion.

‘My God!’ she said. ‘He’s right. That’s some fire.’

Wishing she had the time to scrub away the blunted memory of her conquest in a hot shower, she hastily sprayed deodorant over her body. She threw on freshly ironed jeans and a T-shirt, quietly chiding herself for putting clean clothes on a dirty body. She dragged her fingers roughly through her curly black hair.

‘Lock up on the way out,’ she said to a stirring Filip. ‘Drop the keys in the coffee shop downstairs. Ask for Jan. Only give them to Jan, okay?’

‘Are you leaving?’ Filip asked, shielding his eyes from the glare of the day.

George answered him by closing the door behind her, relieved that she did not have to have the stilted ‘let’s just be friends’ conversation over coffee made with almost sour milk.

Perhaps her imagination had been over-stimulated by the violent events that were unfolding just down the road. Or possibly it was just a paranoia hangover from the previous night’s revelry. George was not entirely sure why, but as she undid the clanking, rusted U-lock that fastened her bike to the bike-rack, she felt inclined to look up.

She saw nothing but the unremarkable scene of dark, still water, the gnarled limbs of winter-bare trees, pointing to tempting shop windows that would later be crammed with sickly eye candy, dressed only in thongs and bras to satisfy the sweet, rotten tooth of the common, kerb-crawling Homo sapiens.

Flanked by Ad, George rattled on her old Dutch bike along the canals and through the slowly waking streets. Suddenly the awkward silence between them was punctured by the wail of sirens; the sound of screaming. Her heartbeat quickened. She felt the heat; smelled diesel.

‘We’ve got to stay together, okay?’ Ad said, looking back at her with watery eyes and a red, pinched nose. ‘It’s like hell on earth,’ he said. ‘You’ll see.’

They rounded the corner of Bethanienstraat onto Kloveniersburgwal. Not yet cordoned off, the scene was spread before George like a poisoned feast.

Where the elegant period facade of the old library should have been was now a ragged, gaping mouth, belching fire and fume over the canal. Masonry and glass had been spat out into the street and into the oily water. Between the flashing lights of the emergency services, queuing like impatient customers along the narrow stretch of road, George glimpsed a blackened crater in the pavement the size of a bus. It looked as though demons had tried to swallow the place whole.

‘Stand back! Move back!’ Policemen shouted, waving away the crowd that had started to gather and gawp.

‘Nightmare,’ George said.

Two paramedics hurtled towards her, pushing an ambulance gurney with somebody strapped to it.

‘Get out of the way!’ one of them shouted at her.

Dumbfounded, she stepped up to the canal’s edge to let the trolley through, hardly daring to look at its charred and screaming cargo.

The upper storey of the building exploded suddenly, hurling masonry and roof tiles into the sky. Screaming. Running. Horns honking.

‘Get behind the fire truck,’ Ad yelled, pulling her by her upper arm as brick rained down, bounced off the road and into the water.

She jumped over the fat fire hoses that snaked along the ground. Together, they squatted beside giant wheel arches of the red Brandweer fire service shelter.

‘Jesus,’ George said. ‘What the fuck happened here?’

She peered out at the flaming building as it coughed up more and more of the injured on stretchers, some walking, clutching bloodied faces with lacerated hands.

Ad shook his head. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. ‘Gas pipe, maybe?’

George felt questions bubbling up inside her. She had been in Amsterdam for only five months but the library was an old friend to her now. A place where she could stroll through the halls of her mind in its book-clad gallery; a place where she could sit on the grand stone staircase and be reminded of Cambridge. The eastern wing of East India House – Bushuis library to the students – had stood on the canalside for over a hundred years and had never before, to George’s knowledge, spontaneously combusted.

‘Gas leak? I don’t buy it,’ she said.

Her eye was caught by pieces of A4 paper as they fluttered down from an office on the third floor. This solitary office had been left almost intact, as though somebody had just opened the doors of a doll’s house to reveal what went on inside. George followed the paper’s trajectory downwards until her gaze fell on a middle-aged man in a beige woollen coat with overstuffed shoulder pads that said 1990s Vroom & Dreesman: department store to the middle aged and woefully unimaginative. He looked grimly on the scene and spoke to a uniformed policeman. He made notes in a small pad.

‘Come on,’ she said, pulling Ad from their hiding place by his hand.

George steeled herself to walk towards the man, ignoring the flaming carnage.

A policeman barred her way.

‘Get back behind the cordon, Miss!’ he shouted.

‘I want to speak to the detective,’ she said, mustering as much authority in her voice as she could.

‘This is not a sightseeing tour,’ he said.

George did not hesitate even to look into the policeman’s face. She lunged forward and tapped the man in the beige coat on the shoulder. He turned around. Dark eyebrows arched above large, steel-grey, hooded eyes. He had thick, straight white hair, and the sunken-cheekboned, strong-jawed face of a typical Dutchman, complete with a sharp, triangular nose. She did not know him but she knew his kind.

‘What happened?’ she asked.

‘Get these kids out of here,’ the man said to the uniformed officer.

‘Please tell me,’ George said.

She could see the man appraising her then with those piercing eyes. ‘You’re a detective, right?’ she asked. ‘I’m a student. Social and Behavioural Science. I was meeting people here.’

The uniform placed a heavy hand on her shoulder. ‘Do you want me to arrest you? Because you’re going about it the right way, Missy,’ he said.

‘Please,’ George asked the man in the beige coat. She gave him her big eyes. That usually worked on male tutors his age when her essays were late. ‘They might be hurt.’ She shrugged the uniform off.

Ad tried to pull her away. ‘Come on, George. Let’s go.’

The man cleared his throat and pulled something from his breast pocket. George caught a glimpse of a service pistol strapped close to his armpit. She also noticed he wore no wedding ring and had missed a patch on his neck when shaving.

‘Did you see anything?’ the man asked her, proffering a battered business card.

‘No. I got here after … this.’ She took the card and read it. It said,
Senior Inspector Paul van den Bergen, National Crime Squad
.

Van den Bergen simply said, ‘Call me if you think of anything,’ and turned away.

Ad pulled George back to the safety of the cordon and their bicycles. He took off his glasses and wiped his streaming eyes. Then he touched her on the chin gently.

‘How did you know he was a detective?’ he asked.

George looked at his soft, pale olive skin, streaked as it was with dirt. He was a wistful country boy in a bad, confused city. He could not have looked more different to Paul van den Bergen. She pulled away from his touch.

‘A lucky guess,’ she said.

He blinked hard at her and put his glasses back on. She knew he knew she was lying.

From his vantage point, high above street level, he could see her returning home. Waving up at the blonde prostitute neighbour. The shutter on his camera clicked as he caught her turning round, unwittingly peering in his direction. He was careful to back out of sight swiftly. It wouldn’t do to rouse her suspicions at this point. And yet he yearned to let her know he was there, thinking of her with both loathing and lust in his heart. Perhaps he could leave her a message … a sign.

He slipped on his jacket and hared down the uncarpeted staircase to catch a glimpse of her before she entered the building and was out of sight. Patting down his hair, he wondered briefly if she would find him appealing if she discovered his obsession with her. She was magnetic. Irresistible. He saw it in other men’s hungry eyes too and that was the problem. They were his competitors. Each and every one of them. They had to be destroyed like the Indian; negated, scratched from life, absorbed into the hellfire. Now you see him. Now you don’t. An angry red cloud of flesh made vapour.

How invincible he had felt when he had pressed the button and made the call. The effect of that small act was monumental. One minute the cardboard box was sitting there, innocently enough. The next … boom. A symbol of Amsterdam’s colonial might had been razed to the ground. The inferno had filled him with joy. It was a curtain of smelted gold, reaching heavenward, casting a holy incense of cordite and human ashes to and fro along the canal. His heart had beat too fast, just how he liked it; adrenalin rinsing the disappointment and stinking mortality from his body.

Now he was observing his muse. His nemesis. He had plans for her.

The laptop’s monitor glared at George, daring her to begin writing her guest post for
Het Ogenblik –
The Moment
. She dragged hard on her cigarette, praying it would somehow peel away the tension to reveal the inspired thoughts beneath.

‘Coffee?’ Jan asked, brandishing a glass percolator jug in her direction.

She hadn’t realised he had been standing over her. The coffee at the bottom of his jug looked black and oily. It had been sitting there all morning.

‘Go on,’ George said.

Jan poured the jug’s contents into the special mug that she insisted he keep behind the counter only for her. George sipped it and grimaced.

‘You make shocking coffee,’ she told him.

‘Nobody comes to the Cracked Pot Coffee Shop for the coffee,’ he said. He peered over her shoulder through smudged Trotsky glasses at the masthead for the blog. ‘What are you writing about?’ he asked.

‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘That’s the problem. I’m supposed to have done a blogpost about political unrest in the Middle East. I can’t concentrate with everything that’s going on.’

She punched ‘
De
Volkskrant
’ into Google. The latest headline from the broadsheet stared at them.

‘“Maastricht terror cell claims responsibility for suicide bomb”,’
she read.

‘What about
De Telegraaf
?’
Jan asked.

Her fingers sped over the keyboard until the monitor revealed: ‘
Jihad waged on Amsterdam
.’

Scanning the text, there, within the third paragraph, she spied Senior Inspector van den Bergen’s name. She tapped the screen.

‘I saw this guy. He says the blast victim toll stands at twelve injured, two critically. One set of human remains has been found in amongst the wreckage.’

Jan tutted. ‘Do they know who it is?’ he asked.

‘The dead body?’ George read on, then shook her head. ‘He doesn’t say. Nobody saw anything suspicious. The cops are on the trail of a prime suspect.’

‘“It’s a miracle more weren’t killed”,’
Jan read. ‘Understatement of the bloody year. Hey, shall I roll you a joint?’

‘At eleven am?’ she said. ‘Seriously? Is this so you can bump up my rent?’

Jan hooked his long, fuse wire hair behind his ear and wheezed with wry laughter. He turned to the murals painted in neon oranges, pinks, yellows and greens on the walls. Jimi Hendrix, a VW Camper van, Bob Marley, Jim Morrison and the peace sign. They were lit by a UV lamp that gave all the customers a Hollywood smile as a no-extra-cost bonus.

‘I’m going to paint a new one in your honour,’ he said. ‘Our Georgina. An English hottie, smoking a joint and wearing nothing but hotpants and an afro. They’ll come all the way from Brabant to buy my skunk and look at you.’

‘Go and make some fresh coffee, you old pervert,’ George said.

Jan was still laughing as he disappeared between the giant cannabis plants into the back office.

George frowned at the screen. She punched ‘Amsterdam suicide bomb’ into the search engines, draining the dregs of her coffee as she scanned the results: student discussion forums, more newspaper articles, some left-wing, some right-wing. She found scores of jihadist blogs listed, showing pictures of young men, holding replica guns with their heads wrapped in black fabric or Arabic shemagh scarves so that only their angry eyes were visible. The same name appeared on all of them, claiming responsibility for the Bushuis library explosion in bold type and large font.