The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die (37 page)

There was a tiny, lucid part of George that wanted to tell him to run; to scream that she was wired up and ready to blow. But even if she hadn’t been silenced by the tape across her mouth, when tears of relief and regret came hard, she was barely able to form coherent thoughts, let alone speak.

Van den Bergen squinted at the tangle of wires, duct tape and packages on chest. She could see he was calculating something. Weighing it all up.

George felt sweat pouring from her armpits, down her back and the sides of her head.

‘Step away from the box, sir,’ came a man’s voice through a loudhailer. ‘Step away or we’ll shoot.’

‘I’m Dutch police,’ van den Bergen shouted. Agitated. He held up his ID. ‘
I
called
you
. Has your bomb disposal operative arrived?’

‘No. ETA is forty minutes.’

‘Forty minutes?’ George heard van den Bergen swearing to himself in Dutch. ‘Stay back,’ he shouted. ‘I’ve had military training in explosives.’

Has he? Has he really?

Van den Bergen lunged inside the box with those shovel-like hands and tugged one wire free. He ripped the tape from George’s mouth. She let out the scream that she had been bottling up. She knew it was futile but she did it nonetheless.

‘Help me!’ She knew tears were streaming down her face. She wanted to be a strong woman. A heroine. But she conceded that, right now, she needed to be rescued. Just this once.

Van den Bergen nodded at her. ‘It’s going to be okay, George.’

More fumbling at her chest, despite the rifles cocked in the direction of his head and the tinny voice that screeched through the loudhailer, imploring him to step away from the box.

Then the mobile phone strapped to George’s sternum rang.

Close up, Ad saw that the man was just a little older than he was. Powerfully built. Shaven head. Tattoos on skin darker than Ad’s. But pop star looks. Plucked eyebrows. Designer casual clothes. A vain man. He seemed out of place in a scarred serial killer’s house.

The man pulled out a gun. Ad knew nothing about guns but this was a large dull metal pistol affair and did not look like a toy. Ad stared into the nose of the weapon and tried to swallow down spit he simply didn’t have.

‘Drop the hammer, arsehole,’ the man said.

Ad dropped the hammer, regretting he had not risen to the occasion when he’d had the chance.

‘Do you owe me money?’

Ad shook his head.

‘What happened to your head?’ The man pointed to Ad’s bloody scalp.

‘Serial killer,’ was all he could manage. ‘Please help me.’

The man frowned. ‘Why are you here? Where’s Jez?’

If the man was asking questions, perhaps Ad had a shot at escaping. He forced himself to speak. To appeal to whatever charitable spirit this man might have. ‘Let me go. Please. He’s going to kill me. He’s coming back. There’s fingers in the freezer.’

‘Fingers? Fish fingers? What the fuck are you talking about?’

Ad held up his bloody stump. ‘Human fingers.’

The man shrugged. ‘Are you or aren’t you a dealer?’

‘No. I’m a student. The man who lives here is the Bushuis bomber. He’s killed my friends.’

The man frowned again, stooped down and helped Ad to his feet.

‘Please let me go,’ Ad said.

‘Hang on, mate,’ the man said, raising his free hand but still pointing the gun at him with the other. ‘I’ve got to think about this.’ He screwed up his over-groomed face as though thinking were an effort.

‘Look in the freezer if you don’t believe me. He’s a psycho.’

‘Oh, I know he’s a psycho,’ the man said. ‘But Jez ain’t no serial killer. I don’t think, anyway.’

‘You’re wrong.’

‘Am I? How do I know you don’t owe me money? You could be feeding me a pile of bullshit. You got any ID?’

Ad shook his pounding head and immediately regretted it. He steadied himself on the hall table. His eyes were drawn to a small, black lozenge-shaped object sitting on the tabletop next to his good hand.

The man snatched the thing up. Ad squinted until he understood what it was. Something he had not noticed before, even though he had been frantically searching for it. His phone.

‘What’s this then? This ain’t Jez’s. It’s yours, yeah?’ He switched the phone on and a picture of George appeared as the wallpaper.

Open-mouthed. Flabbergasted.

‘Ella?’ The man stared at George’s photo. His skin paled. The muscles in his neck and jaw tightened. He glowered at Ad. Poked the gun into his chest. ‘What the fuck are you doing with my bird’s picture on your phone?’

Ad shook his head desperately so that the room spun. The metal of the gun was cold and hard on his skin. ‘No. She’s George.
My
girl.’

The man held up the phone for Ad to see. ‘She English?’

Ad nodded.

‘That ain’t no George, mate. That’s Ella Williams-May. She’s
my
bird. I thought she was doing time for me.’

‘Time?’

‘Prison. For drugs.’

‘But she can’t be.’

‘Well, she wasn’t. Turned out she was a grass.’

‘A what?’

‘An informant. So, I told that old slag, her mother—’

‘George’s parents died in a car crash.’

The man snorted with derision. ‘That what she told you?’

Ad looked at the man and wondered briefly if he was still asleep on the slab.

‘Who are you?’ he asked the man. Hell, if the gun was poking into his chest, he had nothing to lose.

The man cocked the safety off the gun. ‘Danny. That mean anything to you, Dutch boy?’

Ad shook his head.

The two men stared at each other in awkward silence.

When Danny’s face buckled with hatred, Ad’s heart quailed.

‘You cheeky bastard. Nobody fucks my bird.’

Ad’s last thought before the bullet from Danny’s gun punched its way into his body was that he had been played for a fool by everyone.

George looked at van den Bergen. The laughter lines around his eyes and his mouth were furrowed deep but devoid of all humour. He was wearing his reading glasses.
Funny what you notice.

She peered down at the buzzing, chiming phone.
I’m going to die right now. Say something.

‘I’m sorry,’ she told him.

Van den Bergen’s mouth opened. The phone continued to ring.

Nothing happened.

He reached into the box and yanked the phone from George’s chest. She shrieked, more from the shock of what he had dared to do than anything else.

‘I’ve disarmed it,’ he said, sounding shocked. ‘Or maybe it was wrongly assembled.’

George gently took the ringing phone from him and answered it. Jez’s eerie, laboured voice spoke to her.

‘Have I got your attention now?’ he asked. She could hear amusement in his voice.

The phone shook in her hand. Her brain searched frantically for the right words to say. She wanted to convey the depth of her loathing. She wanted to make him feel small. ‘You’ve failed,’ she said. ‘I’m still alive.’

‘You thought I was really going to blow you up like the others.’ He said it like a statement.

There was a pause. She realised. Jez had not set out to kill her. He just wanted to subjugate her using terror; make her docile and listless and his.

She switched off his voice; hurled the phone to the ground so hard that the casing came apart. The battery and sim card scattered. George looked down at the packages that formed a ring around her middle.

‘Get them off me!’ she cried. ‘Get me out of here!’ She could hear her voice was quaking with emotion. She wanted to control it. Control this ludicrous situation. Get Jez.

Van den Bergen tore the packets from her chest and offered them to an armed policewoman standing two metres away now. ‘Take these,’ he snarled. ‘The response of your explosives experts has not been rapid. Bunch of fucking amateurs.’

But George was not interested in the delicate handling of Jez’s possibly real, possibly fake handiwork. She was already looking around at the bookshop, at the café, at the bank. Where was that creep? Her heart slugged against her ribcage. Red mist had descended. She no longer feared for her own safety.

‘He’s here somewhere,’ she said. ‘He’s watching.’

It didn’t matter that she was only wearing a short nightdress. Whose fucking nightdress was it anyway? Not hers, that was for sure. It had Disney’s Tinkerbell on the front. It was a crime against adult bed attire.

She zoned out from van den Bergen, who was now engaged in an indignant argument with the barrel of a rifle and its black-clad, Kevlar-vested owner.

Pacing down the street with bare feet, she looked into every shop window. The place was deserted; an elegant Marie Celeste now that the early morning crowds had been evacuated right down to Caius College. She scanned the expectant faces behind the blue and white police cordon. Animated chatter ricocheted off the stone buildings on either side as they spotted her.

‘Oi! Come back here!’ a young policeman bellowed at her. He shouted into his radio that a barefoot woman was padding along the empty street. He started to give chase but fell back as advice crackled back to him.

She retreated towards Trinity Street, careful to cling to doorways and avoid the sharp-eyed scrutiny of the police gathered by the main gate. Where was Jez? Not in the empty shops. Not in the deserted cafés.

Rounding the corner, she looked up. And there she saw him, perched behind the parapet of Trinity College’s Great Gate. He had eyes for everything. Clearly on the lookout for her. He momentarily stared down at van den Bergen, who stood with his hands in the air, surrounded by five armed British police, while the rest of the boys in blue scurried like startled rats, trying to work out what to do with the abandoned box and dismantled bomb.

Jez had not noticed her yet.

George skulked along the college’s outer wall. Darted into the Porters’ Lodge. Unseen. Everybody seemed to have been evacuated. Where were they? She entered the Great Court expecting to see a muster point for the students and staff but saw not a soul there. She had no idea how to get up to the roof of the great gate but she knew there must be a staircase. There was a flagpole behind the castellated facade after all. Porters somehow got up there to raise a flag when necessary.

Instinct told her where to go. She climbed a steep, winding staircase. At the breathless summit, she found a door she felt certain would lead outside.
I’ve got you now, you son of a bitch.

She tried the handle. It opened. There he was, crouched low. Watching. Not anticipating that the hunted had become the huntress.

‘Bastard!’ she shouted as she lunged at him.

She knocked him to the ground, punching him repeatedly on the side of the head until her own knuckles felt like they had shattered. His toupee flew off to reveal a hairless scalp, scarred and wrinkled like skin that had been in water too long. When her blows seemed not to hurt him, she realised that he must have no feeling in his face at all. Was he medicated?

She kneed him in the groin. Then, at least, he had the decency to buckle up, groaning.

‘Why? Why did you do this?’ she cried.

But Jez glared at her through those deadly black eyes. She could see bloodlust rising within him. Wished to God van den Bergen and the police below knew they were up there.

He overpowered her easily for the second time that morning. George was forced up against the low stone barrier that stood between a blistering view of Trinity College’s courtyards and rooftops and her own certain death by broken back on the cobbles below. But she was on the wrong side of the parapet for the police in Trinity Street to see.

She screamed as Jez tipped her further and further backwards over the periphery of the abandoned Great Court. Fighting back, now, scratching and kicking whatever she could.

Unexpectedly, he pulled her close to him. Away from the edge.

‘I took everything I wanted,’ he hissed in her ear. ‘The fire gave me the power. I took everything Danny had. I earned it. I’m the better man. But there was one thing I still wanted and that was you.’

She spat in his ruined face, plastering him in ill-intentioned mucus. She wished it had been acid but he probably wouldn’t even have felt its sting. ‘Why did you kill all those students? All my classmates. What had they ever done to you?’

He slapped her hard. ‘Spitting’s not very ladylike, is it? But then, you’ve never been a lady. Just a lovely dirty whore.’ He wiped the spit away and stood back for a moment, as if in contemplation. ‘Your classmates were just college-boy wankers, buzzing round you like bees round a bloody honey pot. An Indian. A Jew. Two over-privileged arseholes. No loss there.’

‘You’re evil!’ George said. ‘Demented! Have you been stalking me all year? Did you follow—’

‘I was already there. Working at the faculty for Fennemans. A nice little cover for my European business enterprises. There was me and Danny, thinking you was doing time for us. Then you showed up. What were the chances of that? Little Miss Erasmus, walking straight back into my arms. That’s fate, that is.’

George rubbed at her stinging cheek. She righted herself and started to edge away from him. Adrenalin pulsed through her body, but she had no plan.

‘Those boys didn’t deserve to die,’ she said.

He seemed not to hear her. Looked wistfully beyond her to the rooftops. ‘You rejected me all those years ago. You were the only woman I really wanted. I needed you to see the power I can wield. The power of life and death. I’m a craftsman, Ella. A king. I knew you’d eventually beg me to make you mine.’

His arrogance and utter absence of remorse dumbfounded George momentarily.

‘Beg?’ she said, blinking hard. ‘You think I’d beg to be with you?’

Jez grinned. He sidled up to her and stroked her breast. She pushed him away, sneering into his mouldering face.

‘Get your filthy hands off me. You make me sick.’

‘I’ve got your loverboy in my workshop,’ he said.

George felt the blood drain out of her legs. Felt her knees give way.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I told you I sent you a text from his phone, didn’t I?’