The Girl Who Got Revenge: The addictive new crime thriller of 2018

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?’