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The receptionist looked her up and down. The smile didn’t quite reach her eyes as she gave George the ward location and reminded her that it wasn’t currently visiting time.
When George arrived on the specialist heart ward, she found Van den Bergen’s bed empty. Grabbing a passing male nurse by the arm, she was dimly aware of tears pricking the backs of her eyes. She shivered with icy dread. ‘Where’s the patient? Where’s Paul van den Bergen?’ she asked. ‘I’m his partner. Please tell me he hasn’t—’
The male nurse looked down at her hand with a disapproving expression. He gently withdrew his arm from her grip and patted her knuckles sympathetically.
‘Don’t worry,’ the nurse said. ‘He’s not dead. He’s too busy grumbling about the “service”, like we’re some kind of hotel and not a hospital. He wouldn’t believe the doctor when he was told he hadn’t had a heart attack.’
George shook her head. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘He’s on the guts ward. Stomach, bowels and liver.’
With a thundering heartbeat and unsure what to expect, George finally found her lover, looking pale and ruffled in a bed, surrounded by patients who looked far worse than he did, wired up to rather more than a simple blood-pressure cuff and oxygen monitor. She glimpsed the stickers from an earlier ECG on his chest.
‘Jesus, Paul! Marie called and told me you’d been rushed in here. She put the fear of God into me. What the hell’s going on? You look like shit.’
Van den Bergen sighed heavily and bypassed her lips to give her a cheek that was rough with iron-filings stubble.
‘Not on the lips. My tongue’s like a fur coat. You wouldn’t believe what they did to me, George. It was inhumane.’ He reached out to caress her face but pulled his finger free of the oxygen cuff, sending the machine’s alarm into overdrive. ‘I thought I’d had a heart attack.’
George pulled up a chair to his bedside. ‘Why are you on the guts ward if you’re not dying? Have you been poisoned?’
Van den Bergen’s sharp grey eyes seemed to focus on something far away that George couldn’t see. ‘There was this truck full of trafficked refugees. A little girl had died.’ His hooded lids closed, the lines around his eyes tightening. ‘One minute, I’m trying to get some information out of the bastard of a driver, next minute, he’s pulling an envelope out of his pocket. I don’t know how the hell he did it, the sneaky, agile bastard. He was cuffed!’
‘What was in the envelope?’ George took his hand and gently put the oxygen monitor back on the end of his finger.
‘It was full of powder.’ His eyes opened and locked with George’s, the ghost of fear still evident in pupils that had shrunk to pinpricks. ‘Anthrax, he said. He threw the stuff all over me.’ Van den Bergen swallowed hard. The digital beep of his pulse sped up. ‘I thought I was a goner, George.’
Backing away slightly at the thought of contamination, George inhaled sharply. ‘And was it? Anthrax, I mean?’
He shook his head. ‘Talcum powder, apparently. But I didn’t know that at the time. I felt this unbelievable griping pain in my chest and I just hit the deck. I have a vague memory of medics in biohazard suits and breathing apparatus crawling all over the place. Maybe they tested the powder on site. I have no idea.’ He exhaled heavily. ‘Obviously, it was a hoax.’ He ran a shaking shovel of a hand through the white thatch of his hair. ‘Maybe the arsehole had been using it to blackmail the refugees. How else, as a lone operator, could you get a large group of poorly treated people to be compliant on a long journey?’
‘Easier to conceal than a gun,’ George said, suddenly flushing hot as anger engulfed her on behalf of the dead little girl. She imagined the child, sick, terrified and whimpering for help as some moron of a driver threatened her with poison. She pushed the thought aside. For now. ‘But never mind all that. Why did you collapse?’ She stood and poured Van den Bergen a glass of water. Proffered it to him.
He sipped and winced. Belched audibly. ‘Panic. I thought I’d had a heart attack, but it wasn’t. It was bloody stomach acid, would you believe it? They gave me a gastroscopy.’
George threw her head back and laughed. ‘At last! About bloody time! And?’
Van den Bergen growled, pushed the glass back towards her and threw the flimsy hospital covers off the bed.
‘Where you going, old man?’ George asked in English, standing quickly so that the blood rushed to her head.
As he began to rummage in the cabinet beside his bed, George could see that the invalid had been replaced once again by a chief inspector. He pulled out the clothes he had been wearing that morning and plonked them onto the bed. Dark trousers and a plain blue shirt. He stripped off the ugly fawn-coloured support stockings that covered his long, long legs. ‘Gastroscopies are no laughing matter,’ he said, taking out his size thirteens – gleaming from George’s ministrations with shoe polish. He made a spitting noise like a cat with a fur ball stuck in its throat. ‘They shoved a hosepipe down me. A damned hosepipe! With a camera on the end. And I was awake.’
Taking his arm, George tried to usher him back into bed. ‘Look. Give it up, will you? They clearly think you need observation, so why the hell are you trying to escape?’
‘I want to question the owner of Groenten Den Bosch. That’s the livery on the side of the truck. There’s a girl dead and maybe more on their last legs because of some profiteering bastard who thinks human beings are interchangeable with exported goods. Maybe it’s this Den Bosch guy. Maybe he gets twelve-year-old girls mixed up with capsicums and courgettes.’
‘Paul!’
‘Well, I’m not going to find out why the Port of Amsterdam’s latest cargo is the dead and dying from the war-torn Middle East unless I get out of here.’
George snatched up his clothes and held them to her chest. ‘You’re my priority. You’re the one I love. The girl’s dead and we’ll catch whoever did this to her. But she can wait until tomorrow.’
Van den Bergen grabbed the garments back and hastily started to pull his trousers on. Yanked the ECG stickers off his chest, grimacing only slightly when they tugged at the scar tissue that ran from his sternum to his abdomen. ‘I’ve got a granddaughter, George. This can’t wait. And I’ve not had a heart attack.’ He dropped the hospital gown to the floor and pulled his shirt on over the wiry musculature of his torso. ‘I’ve got a hiatus hernia. A bad one. But—’
‘So you’re not about to die on me?’ George asked as she appraised him. He was still in decent shape for a man of fifty, thanks to all that gardening. She licked her lips and winked. ‘Good. The banks won’t turn you down for a mortgage then.’
Her pointed remark was met with a disdainful harrumph. Van den Bergen pulled a blister pack of painkillers from his jacket pocket and swallowed two with some water. ‘You can sit here feeling concerned for me, like a mother I don’t need, banging on about getting a place together yetagain, or you can come and help me. I’m about to do what I always do, Georgina.’
‘Which is?’ George raised an eyebrow and folded her arms. Irritated by his inferring that she had morphed from red-hot lover into some suffocating, clucky guardian. That she was nagging him.
‘Fight for the wronged. Get justice for the innocent dead.’ He fastened the metal links of his chunky watch and hooked his reading glasses on their chain around his neck. ‘Well? Are you coming?’
CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_ce2e234d-338c-51b8-aecb-b38b010ea05d)
North Holland farmland near Nieuw-Vennep, Den Bosch farm, later still (#ulink_ce2e234d-338c-51b8-aecb-b38b010ea05d)
‘It’s pretty deserted for a big enterprise,’ Van den Bergen said. ‘I don’t like it.’ His voice was even hoarser than usual, George noted. Though his right hand was hidden inside his coat, poised to draw his service weapon, he had wrapped his left hand around the base of his neck.
‘You look knackered, old man,’ George said, wishing the difficult sod had sent Elvis or Marie to check the provenance of the truck.
The slight stoop in Van den Bergen’s shoulders said everything, but he merely pursed his lips and stalked off towards the red steel door of the Den Bosch reception.
Casting an eye over the utilitarian grouping of brick buildings with their corrugated-iron roofs, George could see that there was not a single light at any of the windows. Nothing to see beyond them apart from acres and acres of the Dutch flatland. To the left, the polders had been neatly planted with crops or were festooned with row upon row of grey polytunnels that shone like fat silk worms in the dim sunlight. They snaked away into the distance, their uniformity punctuated only by the inky stripes of dykes. To the right, the horizon was broken by a veritable crystal palace of greenhouses. The place gave her the creeps.
‘Wait for me!’ Crunching the gravel of the courtyard beneath her new Doc Marten boots, she watched Van den Bergen try the handle.
‘It’s locked,’ he said, taking a few steps backwards. Still rubbing his neck. He approached one of the windows and peered inside. ‘Elvis said he couldn’t get the owner on the phone, either.’
‘Look, Paul. I think you should go home and leave this to the others. You’ve just been in hospital, for Christ’s sake! I’m worried about you.’
Waving her away, he took long strides around the side of the reception building. Jogging after him, George wanted to drag him by the sleeve of his raincoat back to his Mercedes. But this was Van den Bergen, and she knew he took stubborn to a whole new level.
‘There is someone here!’ he said, gesticulating at a pimped-up Jeep, an old Renault and two Luton vans bearing the company’s insignia, all parked up by the bins.
‘Maybe they’re in the fields,’ George said.
The wind had started to blow across the expanse of green, flattening the leaves that sprouted in neat rows. She clutched her duffel coat closed against the chill, wistfully thinking that a rum-fuelled family bust-up by the pool in Torremolinos would be infinitely preferable to a bleak afternoon in the agricultural dead centre of the Netherlands. She was just about to suggest they call for backup when a man exited one of the giant greenhouses, carrying a tray of seedlings. He caught sight of them and frowned. Started walking towards them. He moved at a brisk pace and wore jeans and a sweatshirt that were covered in mud at the knees and on the belly.
‘Can I help you?’ he asked. There was a bright glint when he spoke. Braces?
George couldn’t place the man’s accent. He wasn’t an Amsterdamer. But she could tell from his confident stance that he was at least the manager, if not the boss. There was something about the confrontational tone of his voice; this wasn’t someone who took orders. He was big, too. A wall of a man with a thick bush of greying hair that looked like an overgrown buzz cut.
‘I’m looking for Frederik den Bosch,’ Van den Bergen said, blocking the path.
‘Who wants him?’
‘I do.’ Van den Bergen withdrew a battered business card but was careful to give the sapling-carrying man-mountain a flash of his service weapon, strapped to the side of his body. He stuck the card between two swaying plants. ‘Chief Inspector Paul van den Bergen. Where might I find Den Bosch?’
‘You’re looking at him.’ He grinned widely, displaying a perfect set of gold teeth.
Following the proprietor into the main office building, George took in her surroundings, trying to get the measure of Den Bosch. The place was cold and dark, despite the whitewashed brick of the wall. It was cluttered with vintage furniture – more charity shop than antique-dealer cool. It felt damp and smelled of moss and mildew. An earthy, utilitarian place. Den Bosch set the tray of saplings down on the draining board of a sink in a kitchenette area at the far end.
‘Coffee?’ he shouted. ‘Biscuits?’
George’s stomach rumbled.
‘Milk, no sugar,’ she said.
‘Not for me.’ Van den Bergen glowered at her and started to flick through his notepad, perching his glasses on the end of his nose. ‘Let’s get to the point, Mr Den Bosch. One of your trucks was pulled over this morning at the Port of Amsterdam.’ He read out the number plate, watching as Den Bosch’s eyes narrowed. ‘It was found to contain just over fifty trafficked Syrians, all suffering from dysentery and on the brink of suffocation. Several are now critically ill in hospital from oxygen deprivation and dehydration. One – a girl of twelve – died. The driver tried to escape by pretending to throw anthrax in my face. What do you have to say about that?’
As Van den Bergen sat back in a saggy old armchair that was positioned by the beat-up horseshoe of a reception desk – almost certainly a relic from the 1980s – George walked over to the sink. Den Bosch was stirring the instant coffees too quickly, sloshing dark brown liquid onto the yellow Formica worktop. He plopped in thick evaporated milk from a bottle that looked like it had seen fresher days.
Turning to face Van den Bergen, Den Bosch shrugged. ‘I reported that truck as stolen the other day. Didn’t you know?’ He treated them yet again to that bullion smile, eyebrows framing an expression of apparent confusion. ‘Jesus. I can’t believe some scumbag was using it to smuggle Arabs. But at least they were smuggling them out of the country, eh?’
‘Come again?’ George said, snatching up her coffee and eyeing the chip in the mug with distaste. She threw the coffee down the sink. Stood too close to Den Bosch. ‘Sorry. Just remembered I’m allergic to coffee.’
Her gaze travelled down his tracksuit top to his forearms. She caught a glimpse of colour on his skin, though he yanked the fabric over his wrists so quickly that she wondered if she had imagined it.
‘Arabs,’ he said. ‘ISIS and all that. They come over here but all they want to do is blow innocent Dutch citizens up and contaminate our fair northern land with their Muslim bullshit. Knocking up our women to make brown babies.’ Pointedly looking George up and down, he thrust a packet of biscuits towards her. ‘Chocky bicky?’
Taking several steps backwards, she sucked her teeth at him. Decided to spare him the insults in her mother’s patois. An ignorant shitehawk like that wouldn’t understand it anyway.
‘Dr McKenzie,’ Van den Bergen said. ‘Why don’t you go and wait for me in the car?’
George nodded. But as she left the down-at-heel offices, she heard Den Bosch reiterate that the truck had been stolen.
‘The Netherlands is a world gone mad,’ Den Bosch said. ‘There’s so many foreigners running round, making tons of cash from criminal activities and not paying taxes… They come over here and bleed us dry. You want to think twice before you come and interrogate a legitimate businessman like me over my truck and a bunch of illegals, Mr Van den Bergen. Why don’t you save your police harassment for those terrorist bastards?’
In the luxurious cocoon of Van den Bergen’s car, George got the special cloth and the antibacterial spray from the glove compartment and started to wipe down the dashboard and polish the dial display and gearstick with a fervour bordering on frenzy. Cheeky chocky bicky bastard.
‘What do you think of him?’ Van den Bergen asked some ten minutes later as he lowered himself into the driver’s seat and slammed the door with a thunk.
‘Scumbag, of course,’ she said.
‘Do you think he’s a people trafficker? God knows you’ve met enough of them in your line of work.’
She eyed the deepening creases on either side of Van den Bergen’s mouth and traced the lines gently with her little finger. ‘You tell me, Paul. What do people traffickers look like? The Duke? The Rotterdam Silencer? Or a sprout-growing lout?’
As they pulled out of the courtyard, she glanced back to the reception building. Den Bosch was standing in the doorway, staring straight at her. He pulled up his sleeves, and George was certain she glimpsed a swastika among the complicated designs that covered his forearms in sleeves of ink.
CHAPTER 5 (#ulink_efbd014a-90c1-5312-bffa-df0b6af6c53f)
Amsterdam, Van den Bergen’s doctor’s surgery, 4 October (#ulink_efbd014a-90c1-5312-bffa-df0b6af6c53f)
The display beeped, flashing up the name of the next patient in red digital letters. But it wasn’t ‘Paul v. d. Bergen’. Instead, an Indonesian woman snatched up her bag with a harried look on her face and marched briskly from the waiting room to the doctors’ surgeries beyond. She certainly didn’t look that bloody ill.
Van den Bergen clutched at his throat as a hot jet of acid spurted upwards into his gullet. He exhaled heavily, all thoughts of the Syrian refugees and the racist produce farmer pushed to the back of his mind while the prospect of throat cancer took precedence. Yet again. Rising from his uncomfortable chair, he approached the reception desk.
‘Am I next?’ he asked the bouffant-haired woman behind the counter. He spoke mainly to the wart on her chin – though he tried not to.
She checked her computer screen. ‘Sorry. Doctor’s running late this morning. There’s two in first and then you.’
Leaning forward, he tried to invoke an air of secrecy between them. ‘I might have…throat cancer.’
He expected her to rearrange her disappointing features into a look of sympathy or horror, but the receptionist’s impassive expression didn’t alter.
‘Two more and then you’re in.’ She smiled, revealing teeth like a horse. ‘There’s a new magazine about cars knocking around on one of the tables.’ As if that was any compensation for being made to wait when he was almost certain that his slow, painful demise had already begun inside his burning throat. Just because the gastroscopy hadn’t found cancer yesterday didn’t mean it hadn’t conquered his healthy cells today.
Sitting back down, Van den Bergen folded his long right leg over his left. Thought about deep-vein thrombosis and uncrossed them swiftly. Sitting opposite him was a beautiful blonde young mother, wrestling with a yowling and stout-looking toddler, whose chubby little fists, when he wasn’t clutching his ear, pounded her repeatedly on the shoulder. The fraught scene put him in mind of his own daughter, Tamara, and his granddaughter, Eva. Ah, parenthood. All the joys of making another human being with your own DNA, but the crippling burden of worrying if they’ll make it to adulthood and fearing what kind of person they might become. He was silently thankful that Tamara hadn’t turned out a nagging, self-obsessed harridan like her mother, Andrea. His daughter had inherited his quiet stoicism, but had he passed on his weak genes? Would she too possibly be prone to the Big C that had taken his father; definitely destined for digestive rebellion and constant anxiety?
Batting the thought away, he turned his attention to an old, old man two seats along, who was gazing blankly ahead. Though the man was smartly dressed in a tailored dark jacket that didn’t quite match his navy gabardine trousers, the ring of unkempt white hair around his bald head lent him an air of institutional neglect. Given the rash of freckles on his hairless pate and the translucence of his deeply furrowed skin that revealed the blue web of veins beneath, he couldn’t have been far off a century. The old guy didn’t look too good. He lolled in his chair, his pale face sweaty under the unforgiving strip light of the waiting room. Van den Bergen watched with growing concern as saliva started to spool out of his mouth onto his smart trousers. The angry toddler had fallen silent and suddenly all that was audible above the thrum of electricity from the lights was the man’s rapid, shallow breathing. His colour changed to a sickly grey.
‘Sir! Are you okay?’ Van den Bergen asked.
The elderly patient didn’t respond. His eyes had taken on a vacant glaze. Water began to drip from the seat. Van den Bergen realised the man was urinating.
‘Help!’ he shouted, lurching from his chair and propping up the old man just as he started to tumble forward. His own hands were shaking; a prickling sensation as the blood drained from his own face. ‘Come quickly! This man is very ill.’ Craning his neck to locate the receptionist, he saw nothing but the blonde mother, edging away with her child in her arms, covering the toddler’s eyes. His heart thudded violently against his ribcage.
Alone with the dying man, unable to decide in his panic if he should try to administer mouth-to-mouth or not, Van den Bergen was relieved when his own doctor ran from the consulting rooms to the scene of the emergency. She knelt by the old man’s side, feeling for a pulse.
‘Inneke!’ she called towards reception, with the calm tone of a medical professional. Smoothed her hijab at her temples as though this were nothing more than a routine examination. ‘Bring the defibrillator, please.’
Finally, the receptionist emerged from behind her desk, carrying the life-saving equipment. Van den Bergen was ushered aside as they manoeuvred the old man gently to the floor and the doctor started to work on him.
The panic rose further inside Van den Bergen along with his stomach acid, encasing his chest in an iron grip. The old guy’s colour was all but gone now. He knew that those eyes, now bloodshot and deadened like cod in a fisherman’s catch, were no longer seeing. It was too late. The doctor administered CPR for a little while longer while the receptionist used a pump to simulate mouth-to-mouth. But after a minute they both stood and stepped away from the lifeless figure on the floor, who had only hours earlier clearly made the decision to wear a smart jacket today. The old man, and all his memories and stories and loves from a long, long lifetime, had gone.
In the men’s toilets, Van den Bergen leaned against the mirror above the sink and wept quietly. Drying his eyes, he surveyed his reflection and saw an ageing man. Having a lover twenty years his junior was not going to save him from the rapid physical decline and the premature death that was almost certainly lying in wait for him just around the corner.
Dialling George’s number, he just wanted to hear her reassuring voice.
‘What’s wrong?’ she asked. The sounds of a tannoy announcement and the beep of the supermarket checkout were audible in the background.
‘I’ve just seen a man die. Right in front of me in the surgery.’ He wrapped his free hand around the base of his neck, feeling for the place where the stomach acid was almost certainly eroding the healthy tissue of his gullet. Cellular changes. That’s what Google had suggested. The feeling of constantly being strangled and a worsening hoarseness of the sufferer’s voice. None of it boded well.
‘Oh shit,’ George said absently. ‘Sorry about that. But you’re a cop! You see dead people all the time. How come you’re so cut up? Have you been crying, Paul?’
‘No.’ He looked at his bleary eyes in the mirror, still shining with tears. ‘It’s just…he died right in front of me. It’s different from work. They’re already dead and part of a crime scene. This was so sad and unexpected.’
She didn’t understand. And why would she? George had her foibles, but a constant nagging fear of the end wasn’t one of them. And she was young, with both parents still living. She’d never known what it was to create life, or to accompany one to the very bitter end.
Finishing the call and splashing his face with water, he returned to the waiting room to find the dead man covered by a blanket, being wheeled away on a gurney by paramedics who had arrived on the scene too late. A janitor was already mopping up the old man’s urine, as if he had never been there. With several of the other witnesses dabbing at their eyes with tissues, the funereal mood was normalised only by the shrill noise of the blonde woman’s squalling child.
‘Well, he wasn’t registered with this surgery,’ the receptionist told the others, who had gathered around her as though she were Jesus’s own earthly mouthpiece, disseminating the Word of God to the mortal believers. She patted her hair grandly and folded her arms. ‘Obviously I can’t tell you more because of patient confidentiality.’
‘Oh, go on,’ the blonde woman said. ‘We need to know.’
The receptionist glanced over her shoulder and then leaned in with an air of secrecy. As she started to speak in hushed tones, Van den Bergen’s phone buzzed. A text from Minks.
