The Girl Who Got Revenge

by Marnie Riches

  George watched with interest as the daughter’s body language changed from naked grief to frightened defensiveness. Van den Bergen held his hand aloft in a placatory gesture.

  ‘Nobody’s accusing you of anything. And I know you can vouch for your whereabouts at the time of your father’s death. But the fact is, there have been a few recent deaths of very elderly gentlemen – all aged ninety-five, in fact. They’ve all suffered heart failure, despite having no previous weakness in that department. And they all had the same tattoo on their necks.’ He removed a close-up photo of Verhagen’s neck from his notebook.

  Gasping, Kaars Verhagen’s only child took the photograph and studied the discreet lion with its crown and sword. Bit her lip. A tear tracked its way down her cheek. ‘That’s him!’

  ‘Yes,’ George said. ‘But it could just as easily be one of the other elderly men. They all had the same mark in the same place, hidden by their shirt collars.’

  Van den Bergen took the photograph back, slotting it into his notebook. ‘I watched another of the men die in a doctor’s waiting room. Arnold van Blanken. Have you heard the name before?’

  Cornelia’s eyes widened. ‘Yes,’ she said almost inaudibly. ‘He was one of my father’s oldest friends. They grew up together. Don’t tell me he’s also passed on!’

  ‘I’m afraid so. There are three dead old men in total, all with the same tattoo, including your father.’

  George felt cynicism start to nibble away at her sympathy. ‘How come your dad didn’t mention Van Blanken’s death, if they were so close and you saw him every day?’

  ‘Well, as it happens, I hadn’t actually been over for a week.’ Cornelia started to wring the handkerchief between skinny fingers. ‘I am entitled to a break. I went away.’ Racking sobs took George by surprise as the woman’s shoulders started to heave up and down.

  Guilt. She knew it when she saw it. But guilty of what? George looked over at Van den Bergen and wondered if he was thinking along similar lines: that perhaps this poorly dressed, modestly salaried teacher had grown sick of waiting for her inheritance and had somehow conspired with her father’s GP to bring about the end and that shower of pennies from heaven sooner, rather than later. Now, she was making out to all and sundry that she had always been the dutiful daughter and that her father’s passing was a loss of biblical proportions. But then, that wouldn’t explain away the other old men’s demises.

  ‘How well did you know your dad’s GP?’ George asked.

  ‘Very well,’ Cornelia said. ‘Well, reasonably so.’ She swallowed back down her gushing words, as if she’d let slip too much. ‘I liaised with Dr Abadi over Dad’s treatment. Took him to the doctors’ on a regular basis. That kind of thing. He’s been looking after my father for the last fifteen or so years. They got on. Why?’

  Van den Bergen scribbled in his notepad. ‘Would it surprise you to know that Abadi was the GP for all three of the men who died? All tattooed in the same way. All reliant on the same medical professional. All dying of heart attacks. That’s why I’m here, Dr Verhagen. As fishy goes, this is one hell of a big bag of battered kabeljouw. The entire stocks of the North Sea couldn’t match it.’

  George watched, rapt, as Cornelia rose from her father’s easy chair – markedly more worn than the leather sofa – which still bore the greasy doily where his head had presumably rested. She strode over to a box on the wooden floor, crouched down and started to rummage through the contents. After a moment, she produced a battered leather photo album, its leaves edged in gold. With a glimmer of a satisfied smile playing on her lips, and tears in her eyes, she stood. Flipped through several pages of old black and white photos, reverentially lifting the protective parchment that covered each leaf. Finally, she held the album out, open at a page displaying one large black and white photo, professionally taken, by the look of it. Beneath it was written, in a beautiful cursive hand, ‘Dagelijkse Amsterdammer krant, Kerstmis 1939.’

  ‘Look at this photo from the old local paper, the Daily Amsterdamer. They were full of triumph and hope for the future. Fresh out of school. They’d set up some kind of support for the poor who were freezing and going hungry. Handing out blankets and free meals. It was apparently a humdinger of a winter. Even Hitler had to shelve his plans to invade France because it was so darned cold. Anyway, these fellows were celebrated as local heroes. That’s why they were in the paper. Now they’re all gone.’ She shook her head, as if in disbelief that the five young men who smiled out from the image should be merely a footnote in history.

  ‘I take it your father’s among these men?’ Van den Bergen gently took the album from her.

  George stood on her tiptoes to absorb the detail of the portrait from close quarters. All of the men were wrapped in thick woollen sweaters. One of them – a tall lad with fair hair, a prominent chin and a pinched nose – bore a clear resemblance to Cornelia. ‘Is this your dad?’

  ‘Yes.’ Cornelia ran a finger tenderly over the monochrome image. ‘And these are his best friends. Brechtus Bruin, Arnold van Blanken, Hendrik van Eden and Ed Sijpesteijn.’

  Van den Bergen breathed in sharply. ‘Brechtus Bruin and Arnold van Blanken also died—’

  ‘From heart attacks. Yes, you said. And so did Hendrik van Eden, earlier in the year,’ Cornelia said.

  ‘A fourth?’ Surprise on Van den Bergen’s face. ‘I didn’t— Was Abadi his GP?’

  She shrugged. ‘How should I know?’

  ‘What about Ed?’ George asked, feeling that the number of young men was somehow significant to this case – if it was a case.

  ‘My father’s first cousin. He went missing during the war years,’ she said. ‘Everyone assumed he’d been shot by a Nazi; that he’d been found out.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ George asked. ‘What had he been doing?’

  Flicking to a page further into the album, Cornelia drummed her index finger on another photo of the young men, all posing topless with their fists raised like boxers. Each man inclined his neck to the camera’s lens, revealing their identical lion tattoos. Crown, sword, the letter S and the number 5.

  ‘They were the five!’ George said, feeling her pulse quicken.

  ‘Yes. De Strijdkrachten Vijf,’ Cornelia said, smiling sadly. ‘S5 for short – the self-titled “Force of Five”. They gained a reputation in the city for being the most fearless resistance fighters.’ She flicked to another photo of the young men, standing with about ten other people – four of them women. They posed as a group in a forest, all carrying rifles. Kaars Verhagen was grinning from behind an anti-tank gun. All were wearing ragged, baggy suits and overcoats.

  ‘That’s some serious-looking hardware,’ George said, whistling softly through her teeth. Her gaze moved from the heavy-duty weaponry to their attire. There, she spotted the resistance armbands that they wore. ‘Oranje,’ she said. The crowned, sword-wielding lion was visible, superimposed onto the Dutch flag. The stripes of the flag were hard to make out in the black and white photos, though the lion was crisp and clear. ‘So they were all the same age. All reached their nineties.’

  ‘Ninety-five,’ Cornelia said, nodding. ‘Celebrated as the city’s finest sons throughout their adult lives, and deservedly so. All except poor Ed. Who knows what end he met?’

  Van den Bergen cleared his throat and rose from the sofa. ‘May I take a look around?’ Methodically, he prowled the length of the large study, and then moved into the hallway and beyond, examining the half-finished building work, where a wall had been removed here and a doorway expanded there.

  With Cornelia dogging his footsteps, still holding the album, Van den Bergen stopped short at the single bed – still unmade – in a dining room that had been partially converted into a bedroom. He turned to the doorway that led to the kitchen. ‘He died in the kitchen, didn’t he?’

  ‘Yes. That’s where I found him. He was on the floor by the little breakfast table. He’d fallen out of his wheelchair.’

  George watched Van den Bergen,
imagining him as a large bloodhound on the trail of some deadly intrigue. She turned to Cornelia, who placed the photo album on the dining table and closed it reverentially. ‘Looks like your old dad had grand plans. He certainly didn’t have death on his mind when he started all this.’ She waved her hand to describe the sprawling warren of half-renovated rooms.

  ‘He started the work a couple of years ago. Dad had been in a wheelchair whenever he went out for a good month or two. He managed on sticks indoors. His arthritis was finally getting the better of him, or so we thought. The house has always been a jumble of rooms and narrow doorways. Obviously, there’s a lot of steep stairs for an infirm man to contend with, and suddenly, he’s confined to the ground floor. He decided he’d have this level reconfigured so it’s a bit more open-plan, and all the doorways widened to accommodate the wheelchair.’

  ‘Fiercely independent, I’ll bet. I’ve got a mother a bit like that. You say black; she says white just for the hell of it.’

  Cornelia nodded. ‘Dad was never giving up, despite being in his nineties. Except it turned out his arthritis hadn’t been playing up at all. He went to Dr Abadi with other symptoms, and when they gave him a few scans, they realised he had secondary cancer in his bones. Took us all completely by surprise.’

  Van den Bergen coughed and pointedly stared out of the window. Hand around his neck as though he were trying to placate some malignancy that hid in his throat.

  ‘That’s when the building work halted,’ Cornelia said. ‘It’s just stayed like this all that time. Dad was so worn out by the treatment that he didn’t want the builders banging and making a mess around him. Mind you, that hasn’t stopped the dust getting everywhere constantly.’

  George scrutinised Cornelia with narrowed eyes, wondering what sort of a woman she was. ‘You didn’t get it finished for him, then? Looks a bit dangerous and uncomfortable to me.’ She felt instantly guilty for judging this bereaved woman. There were plenty of things she refused to do for Letitia the Dragon. Accompanying her on holiday was just one.

  Cornelia shook her head. ‘He just wanted it to be left. He said he’d do it when he was better. Didn’t want any fuss.’

  They moved back to the study at the front of the house. While Van den Bergen asked some additional questions about Kaars Verhagen’s regular friends and acquaintances, his state of mind shortly before his death, George stole out of the room and took a look at the kitchen, keen to see where the old man had breathed his last…not that she anticipated there being any clue remaining as to how he had spent his final hour.

  Returning through the dining-room-cum-bedroom to the hallway, she was struck by the sizeable length of blank wall between the doors of the dining room and living room, which didn’t seem to correspond to any kind of chimney breast or alcove in either room.

  ‘Weird,’ she muttered, moving back and forth between the rooms to see if she could solve this architectural puzzle. All those years spent living and working at St John’s College in Cambridge had taught George that old buildings could hide many a surprise. ‘What quirky shit’s going on here?’ she muttered in English, tap-tapping on the blank wall. It sounded solid enough. But then she extended her efforts into the dining room, tapping until she reached a tall rosewood sideboard that supported integrated shelving above it. It was stacked with books. Except the books seemed to be stuck to the shelves. Looking down at the wooden floor, she spied scuffmarks that described an arc. ‘Someone’s been playing silly buggers with the furniture.’

  Trying her hardest not to attract the attention of Cornelia Verhagen, who was still deep in conversation with Van den Bergen in the study, George pulled the hefty piece of furniture out, following the trajectory that had clearly been used time and again by someone else. Behind the sideboard, she found a door painted the same colour as the walls, with only a recess for a handle. It had been cunningly crafted – easily missed by the casual observer.

  Pulling the door open, the blood rushing in her ears so she could no longer hear the low rumble of Van den Bergen’s voice, George sneezed as the stale air of a poorly ventilated room billowed out to greet her. A secret room.

  ‘Paul! Have you got a minute?’ she asked.

  The curious space pulled her inexorably inside, as if it had been waiting for decades to be discovered. The floorboards squeaked. Her breath was loud. Not a stick of furniture. Not a photo or painting on the wall. And yet, George sensed that the room had a story to tell. And there, above her in the murk, was a light.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ Cornelia asked, the tone of her voice so sharp, George felt her every consonant as a scratch. She fumbled for something on the wall and switched on the light. Too bright. It was a bare bulb, shining on a room full of nothing. ‘How dare you rifle through my father’s house without permission? Or a warrant!’

  George swung around abruptly, hand on hip, pretending moral authority, though she knew that she and Van den Bergen didn’t have any jurisdiction over Cornelia Verhagen whatsoever. There was no case at all – yet. They were merely acting on Van den Bergen’s conviction that there was no such thing as coincidence, and his suspicion that something was decidedly amiss. ‘Er, excuse me, but aren’t we talking about the probable murder of four friends? Elderly they might have been, but murder is murder, lovey.’

  Van den Bergen stood beneath the unforgiving light, his white hair almost glowing – a beacon in its own right. ‘Jesus,’ he whispered. ‘I’ve heard about secret rooms like this in old houses.’

  ‘Dad wanted it all knocked through,’ Cornelia said. ‘There’s nothing to see here. It’s just a box room. So if you don’t mind, let’s go. I think it’s time you left.’

  But as George retreated, she stood on a loose floorboard that cracked, rather than creaked, beneath her boots. A hollow sound. Crouching, she swallowed down disgust at the thick layer of dust and grime that covered the wood, digging her fingernail between the planks. Levering the rotten pine board up was easy. When she saw what lay beneath, she gasped.

  ‘An old journal!’ she said, reading the neat hand that proclaimed this was the diary of Rivka Zemel. She took the green, canvas-backed book out.

  ‘Give that to me!’ Cornelia shouted, grabbing at the book. A scuffle ensued where the bereaved daughter trod heavily on George’s foot and yanked at the book so hard, trying to prise it free of George’s grip, that she thumped her inadvertently in the arm.

  But George held the book steadfastly to her chest. ‘Look, I appreciate you’re grieving, but back the hell off, lady,’ she said in English.

  ‘Dr McKenzie! Dr Verhagen!’ Van den Bergen laid a hand on the women’s shoulders. ‘Please!’ He gently manoeuvred them apart. Turned to Cornelia, with a placatory softness to his voice. ‘I’m afraid we’re going to have to take the book. Old men keep long-forgotten secrets and something about this room and this book has my policeman’s senses tingling. It might turn out to be evidence in a murder case. We’ll return it as soon as we’re done with it. I promise.’

  Nodding, Cornelia wiped an angry tear away. ‘Okay. I don’t know what came over me.’

  ‘There’s nothing that frustrates and angers more than death. Don’t be too hard on yourself. If there’s been foul play, we’ll uncover it.’

  Outside, George turned to Van den Bergen and beamed. ‘Looks like I’ve just found myself some new bedtime reading.’

  CHAPTER 12

  Van den Bergen’s apartment, later

  The TV was overly loud, niggling George to the point where she noticed everything that was wrong in the room: the misaligned coaster; the scuffs on the coffee table; the messy fringing on Van den Bergen’s rug; and the place on his jaw where he’d missed with the razor.

  ‘Jesus! Do you have to have that on so high?’ Wriggling, George tried and failed to get comfortable on this sofa she hadn’t chosen in this apartment that wasn’t hers.

  At her side, Van den Bergen was slouched with his trousers unzipped, holding a bowl of blueberries on a belly that
was full from a tasteless yet solid dinner of risotto. He shovelled them in whilst watching a platinum blonde, perma-tanned anchorwoman on NPO 1 news reel off a list of misdemeanours that had taken place downtown that afternoon. From the corner of her eye, George could see her gesturing to some blurry live footage that was being beamed from the epicentre of the upheaval.

  ‘As you can see, the right-wing protestors who align themselves with Geert Wilders’ VVD party have been throwing bricks at the anti-racist movement. The clashes that have been raging over the last couple of hours having been both shocking and violent…’

  George slapped the arm of the sofa. ‘Are you bloody deaf, old man?’ Standing abruptly, she turned away from the images on the TV of angry shorn youths and bloodstained, weeping white kids with dreadlocks. Studiously ignoring the fat talking head and token ‘immigrant community leader’ now being interviewed in the studio about racial tension. ‘Turn the fucking thing down!’

  Tutting, Van den Bergen hiked the volume by a couple of notches. ‘Sorry. What?’

  ‘Childish bastard!’

  ‘Either I’m old or I’m childish. Which is it, Dr McKenzie?’

  ‘You tell me. You’re sitting there with a glazed expression on your face. Are you even listening to that shit?’

  ‘If you must know, I’m thinking about how I can investigate the deaths of those old men without Minks taking the case off me. And I’m wondering how I can get Den Bosch’s tenants to speak to me about their shifty landlord. Multitasking. See? You’re not the only one can do that.’ He treated her to a grin and winked.