The Girl Who Got Revenge

by Marnie Riches

  He shook his head. His voice cracked. ‘I didn’t prescribe any of that!’

  ‘Well, who did then?’

  He shrugged. ‘There was nothing wrong with their medications. I knew those men’s health records inside out. And I’m fastidious about dosage and suitability when I prescribe.’

  Van den Bergen held a tub of tablets that had belonged to Brechtus Bruin in the air, twirling the label in front of Abadi. ‘You never prescribed this?’

  ‘No! I absolutely did not. I swear to God. Check the surgery records!’ He took the tub from Van den Bergen, reading the label in silence. Tutted. ‘Our patients don’t even use that pharmacy normally. They use the place two doors down. Who the hell would trek all the way across town to get their tablets if they’ve got a twenty-four-hour pharmacy on the surgery’s doorstep? Especially the infirm! If you were terminally ill and in a wheelchair, like Kaars Verhagen, would you go out of your way to get your tablets?’

  Exhaling heavily through flared nostrils, Van den Bergen folded his arms and regarded his earnest suspect. George watched the two men staring each other down. She exchanged a glance with Marie, trying to read her mind to see what she thought of this unprepossessing general practitioner.

  ‘Nowadays, you can get whatever you want off the internet,’ Abadi said, pulling his cuffs smartly down. ‘Family doctors have no jurisdiction over what patients get online from places like Eastern Europe and China. There’s a global market for anything. Legal or illegal! And there’s the very real possibility that my patients were seeing another doctor. At their age, they’d all been careful to get really comprehensive insurance. Check their insurance details! Or maybe they were paying someone in cash. Who knows? But I’m telling you – I give you my word – that I didn’t prescribe those meds. Look into it! Phone the dispensing pharmacy.’

  ‘I can check, boss,’ Marie said to Van den Bergen.

  ‘Can I go, then?’ Abadi asked. ‘My wife’s expecting me. I don’t like to leave her home alone with our young son. She’ll be worried.’

  ‘We’ve got you for forty-eight hours,’ Van den Bergen said. ‘Your wife will have to cope until we’ve made some further enquiries.’

  As he and Marie gathered their paperwork, nodding to the uniform who waited in the corner to take Abadi back to his holding cell, George studied the disappointed expression on the doctor’s tired and waxy-looking face. She considered what he’d said about his charitable proclivities and interest in Syrian refugees. Rivka Zemel prodded at George’s conscience, bringing the dead twelve-year-old girl who had been carried from the back of the Den Bosch truck to the forefront of her mind. Don’t let the girl in the body bag down, Rivka said. George could almost picture them both. The teenage maid from the Forties standing next to the grey-faced child who had dared to hope for a new life; a life her parents had sacrificed everything to give her. Different circumstances. Different era. But just another desperate young girl relying on the mercy of those around her to save her from war and a terrible fate.

  Wasn’t George one of the lucky ones, having escaped her own hellish youth in an urban warzone of a rather different kind? Didn’t that make her somehow responsible to seek justice for those girls who had fallen, when the very people they’d depended on had steered them down a dangerous path, pushing them over the precipice? She felt a tugging sensation in her chest.

  There had to be a way to infiltrate the guarded and silent ranks of Amsterdam’s illegal immigrants. She felt certain they held answers that would help bring to book the twelve-year-old’s traffickers.

  ‘Hey, Dr Abadi. Before they cart you off,’ she said, ‘you’re active in your community, right? Tell me, do you have much of a hands-on relationship with new refugees coming into Amsterdam?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Syrians. The trafficked ones.’

  CHAPTER 14

  Den Bosch’s house in De Pijp, then a mosque near Bijlmer, later

  Elvis couldn’t help but think he’d drawn the short straw, given that Van den Bergen and Marie were tucked up warm and dry in the police station. Yet, here he was, squatting at the bottom of Frederik den Bosch’s garden in the drizzle and twilight of the early evening, peering into the suspect’s rear lounge window using an uncomfortably heavy and unwieldy long-range camera lens. He thought wistfully of the dinner he’d been meant to have with Arne – a romantic dinner for two at a fine restaurant that Arne had refused to name, booked as a surprise to commemorate their having been together for six months. As he peered through the magnifying lens of the camera, Elvis worked his way through a list of possible eateries that he would now not visit.

  ‘Bloody Frederik den Bosch. You owe me a night out, you ugly bastard.’

  With his legs cramping beneath him, he watched carefully, praying the surveillance stint would pay off somehow. But the back room had been in darkness all day. Den Bosch had not yet returned home or else was restricting his movements to the front of the house. If only he could have watched the front, spying from some neighbour’s window.

  ‘Should have got a damned warrant and just forced them to open up.’

  Glancing up at the adjoining houses on either side, Elvis glimpsed domestic scenes: on one side, a trendy-looking couple cooked something together – the man chopping, the woman stirring the contents of a wok. They laughed at some shared joke. On the other side, a woman was supervising three small children, eating at an undersized table. Middle-class urbanites who had recently moved to the increasingly gentrified area, Elvis assessed. He wondered what they made of the man who lived alone – according to the electoral and utility records – in a shabby, run-down property, where the garden was strewn with car and motorcycle parts, the broken patio furniture thick with green algae-like growth. The flotsam and jetsam seemed to grow like rotten-smelling weeds among the tall grass. The only sign that the garden was ever used was a large ashtray close to the back door, full to the brim with yellowed water and disintegrating cigarette butts. Not the sort of outdoor space Elvis would have expected from a professional horticulturalist.

  He thought of his own father: a builder, when he had been alive, who couldn’t bear to do any DIY at home, much to his mother’s chagrin. He’d preferred them all to live in a tumbledown dump of a house than to take his work home with him. The kitchen had taken ten years to fit. The new central heating system that had been partially installed when Elvis was ten had never quite heated up more than three inches of bathwater at a time.

  In the fading light, Elvis chuckled to himself, then felt a sharp pang of grief as he remembered his long-suffering mother. So frail at the end, thanks to the Parkinson’s. He touched the base of his neck, running his finger along the groove of the scar from where he had been garrotted. For all his loss and pain, he considered how lucky he had been. Unlike the poor bastards in the back of that Den Bosch truck.

  ‘Come on, you tit. Give me something to go on.’

  As if Den Bosch had heard his plea, warm light suddenly shone from the room at the back of the house. From his vantage point, hidden behind an overgrown, sodden bush, Elvis could see that the room was furnished as a kind of sitting-room-cum-study. He zoomed in, using the camera’s lens to see the detail. There was Frederik den Bosch, rolling up his shirtsleeves and sitting at a desk by the window. He started up a PC, swigging from a can of beer. Behind him, Elvis could see bookshelves. It was impossible to read what was written on the spines of the books, or to catch a glimpse of what appeared on the computer monitor. But in a glazed cabinet next to the shelves, Elvis could clearly see a collection of war memorabilia that somehow didn’t surprise him at all. He shivered at the sight of Nazi Wehrmacht helmets bearing the swastika, placed in a row of three; an SS officer’s hat, complete with its skull-and-crossbones badging at the front; a bust of Hitler, perhaps in bronze; an assortment of medals pinned to a framed board, as though a butterfly collector had been given the wrong brief.

  ‘Jesus. I might have known,’ he muttered softly, clicking th
e shutter on the camera to capture the unsavoury montage.

  What else would this cripplingly uncomfortable surveillance session uncover about Den Bosch? How was it even relevant that this grower of vegetables clearly hated anyone who wasn’t white and Christian?

  For an hour, Den Bosch did nothing more than drink beer and sit at his computer. Once, he left the room, returning minutes later with a pizza on a plate. The irony of a fascist who was happy to eat foreign food was not lost on Elvis. He wondered how Den Bosch felt about anyone who wasn’t heterosexual.

  Wishing he could go home to Arne, Elvis downloaded some of the images to his phone and emailed them to Van den Bergen.

  ‘Is this enough, boss? Can’t see the point in hanging around.’

  A short while later, as Den Bosch began to masturbate in front of his computer, Elvis received the curt reply.

  ‘Stay on it. See what he does at night.’

  ‘Wanking!’ Elvis told the screen. ‘That’s what he does.’

  By nine o’clock, he could no longer feel anything from the knees down but had taken a good number of photos of Den Bosch’s study. Sick and tired of being cooped up in the cold and wet with only his sombre memories and wistful longing for home as company, Elvis made the decision that it was now dark enough to go back to the car and watch from the front, unnoticed by Den Bosch or his neighbours.

  ‘Crappy damned job,’ he said, climbing with an unpleasant, freezing squelch into the driver’s seat of the pool car. The floor of the passenger side was littered with the remnants of hastily eaten sandwiches and snacks. Peanuts caught down the side of the seats. The windows steamed up immediately. Wiping the greasy glass, Elvis was just about to call his boyfriend when Den Bosch’s door opened. Almost completely unrecognisable, the normally dapper Den Bosch was dressed in ripped jeans and a T-shirt sporting the South African three-legged swastika, a symbol normally wielded on flags by pro-Apartheid Afrikaners. On his feet, he wore ten-hole Doc Marten boots with red laces – the kind Elvis knew were favoured by British neo-Nazis. On a grim night like this, Den Bosch had opted for a plain black zip-up hoodie, rather than a coat. Hardly dressed for a date or a quiet night in the local pub.

  Starting the engine of the pool car and putting his windscreen demisters on, Elvis was nonplussed to see Den Bosch crossing the road. Coming towards him on foot. Had he been spotted? Bending down as though he were reaching into the glove compartment, with his heart thundering so violently that he wondered if it would pound its way clean out of his body, Elvis waited. He clenched his eyes shut, expecting a thump on the steamy window. When the confrontation didn’t materialise, he sat up abruptly. Dizzy from the sudden movement after hours spent in wet clothing on an empty stomach.

  He watched through the slowly demisting rear window as Den Bosch banged on the front door of one of the run-down properties he owned. Light flooded the street as the door was answered. Elvis could see that Den Bosch’s body language was aggressive and confrontational. Momentarily, he disappeared inside. Would he be there for hours? No. He emerged some minutes later, clutching a bulky envelope, which he slid into the back pocket of his jeans.

  For the next half hour, Den Bosch zigzagged his way along the street, picking up envelopes at every house. From his limited vantage point in the pool car, Elvis could see that the tenants were frightened by this man.

  He thumbed out an update to Van den Bergen:

  ‘Rent day. Who the hell collects rent in a neo-Nazi get-up from a pile of terrified refugees? Prick.’

  Wondering if this was simply Den Bosch’s modus operandi as a landlord and assuming he would go home when the collection was complete, Elvis was surprised when Den Bosch didn’t return to his own house. By now, he had transferred his fat envelopes, presumably stuffed with cash, into an Albert Heijn bag. He eschewed his pimped-up Jeep and climbed instead into a Volkswagen Passat – a strange choice of car for a single, childless man, and yet cleverly unobtrusive, befitting a man who spent his days being outwardly respectable and his nights masturbating at his computer while surrounded by Nazi memorabilia.

  ‘Where are you going, you shifty little ball sack?’

  Careful to keep tucked in a few cars behind, Elvis followed the Passat out of town along the A2, a road studded on either side with industrial units and car dealerships. The landscape changed from redbrick city-centre familiarity in the quirky nineteenth-century streets of De Pijp to a schizophrenic mid-century suburb made up of open green spaces, studded with brutalist concrete apartment blocks. Gone were the independently owned boutiques, trendy bars and bijou eateries that felt like a logical expansion of this glorious Venice of the North that Elvis called home. They had been replaced by graffiti and low-grade shops-full-of-shit, Asian and African minimarts and fast-food joints.

  Den Bosch slowed, pulling in to park on a busy road, at the end of which loomed a giant mosque. Its white stone glowed in the dark; its minarets, stretching nobly heavenwards, beyond the rail-viaduct that bisected the night sky with blunt force. It gave the impression of some Persian palace having been plucked from a hot, distant land and dumped at the edge of a dual carriageway in some Wizard of Oz-style chicanery.

  ‘What the hell’s going on here?’ Elvis muttered, watching Den Bosch hasten towards a hundred- maybe two-hundred-strong crowd of white men. Already parked up, he climbed out of the car, his damp clothing sticking to him, and followed Den Bosch into the fray.

  The throng had gathered outside the mosque, bellowing obscenities, chanting and carrying white placards and fluttering banners. Some carried swastika flags, their shorthand for hatred, waving them at the TV cameras that had gathered to film the mob. Many of the larger banners looked to have been professionally produced, with PEGIDA slogans, telling whoever would listen that Patriotic Europeans Against the Islamisation of the West wanted all Muslims out – no mosques, no halal, no sharia, no Koran.

  The crowd was made up predominantly of men, all dressed in dark, casual clothing like Den Bosch. Several of the jeering men, deep in the heart of the crowd, were wearing fluffy pig hats. Their childish garb with its provocative message seemed at odds with the reverential way in which they carried the Dutch flag. Elvis trembled from top to toe as he marked Den Bosch’s steps into the heart of the jeering mass. He couldn’t recall a time when he had ever felt so alien amongst his own species. Would they sniff him out as a lefty liberal interloper?

  From a safe distance, he watched Den Bosch fist-bumping and exchanging overly butch embraces with several of the men. Observed as he handed the supermarket bag full of cash to a much older protestor, unremarkably clad in a dark anorak.

  He’s funding this crap! Elvis thought. If he’s handing money over, he’s close to the top of this shower of bastards.

  Trying to keep eyes on Den Bosch proved difficult. He moved swiftly towards the mosque, stopping only now and then to shake hands with some of the others – clearly popular and well known in these brutish circles. Distracted by the gruesome and tasteless sight of slaughtered pigs lying open-mouthed on the ground only metres from the entrance to the house of worship, Elvis almost lost sight of Den Bosch entirely. But there he was!

  ‘Hey, you!’ a protestor shouted at him, clamping Elvis’s shoulder in an iron grip. The giant of a man had blue swastikas, iron crosses and other Nazi iconography tattooed over his entire bald head and neck.

  Elvis balked. Smiled. Thought his heart was going to give out. He clocked a placard in the distance and bellowed its sentiment straight into the terrifying giant’s face. ‘Go home, rapefugees!’

  The giant faltered. Drew his cannonball of a fist back, poised to punch some part of Elvis into next week. But suddenly, it was as though the sun had come out. ‘Good lad!’ the giant said, grinning. ‘I thought you looked like a bit of a poof with that gelled hair and those disco-togs.’ He punched him in the shoulder as a gesture of solidarity, and Elvis stumbled backwards from the force. ‘Yeah. Go home, rapefugees! Fuck those krimigrants!’ Laughter then, that came on like a
hurricane, forcing Elvis further into the crowd.

  ‘Aaargh!’ He found himself cocooned in orange. What was this bullshit? Extracting himself from his wrapping, he realised he’d barrelled headlong into an orange flag, ironically bearing the same black lion as had been tattooed on Van den Bergen’s mystery old-timers’ necks. On it was also emblazoned ‘PEGIDA Nederland’.

  ‘Watch it, mate!’ a wiry, weaselly-looking Nazi yelled, spitting with every consonant.

  Making his apologies, almost drunk on fear, Elvis realised he’d lost Den Bosch. And there, only metres from the TV cameras on the opposite side of the road, were the anti-racists. Big men, mainly. Some black. Some white. A lot of brown. Some ferocious-looking white women with dreadlocked hair or beanie hats. All tooled up with rainbow flags and ‘Fuck Racisme’ T-shirts, their stern faces told a tale of anger and violent intent that belied the tree-hugging ‘Queers Against Islamophobia’ banners. A fight was a fight after all for the serial brawlers on both sides, and this was a Thursday night with very little on the television.

  ‘Not good. Not good,’ Elvis muttered, desperately trying to see his way through the fug of testosterone and adrenalin. ‘This is going to kick off. Any minute.’

  He was caught between two tribes: his liberal kinsfolk on one side; Hitler’s genetic offcuts on the other. He had to find Den Bosch or get out of there. And fast.

  Suddenly, Elvis heard the roar of engines and the squeal of a loud hailer. ‘Break it up! Go home or you’ll be arrested,’ shouted the police’s voice of reason. Or was it? The arrival of the cops seemed to throw a match on this already flammable pile of dead wood.

  ‘Flatten the hippy, lefty bastards, lads!’ the tattooed giant screamed by way of a battle cry.

  With no means of escaping, Elvis found himself being pushed towards the police and the anti-racists beyond them. Memories flashing by of being trapped in mosh pits at rock gigs as a teen, where taking the punches and enduring a good trampling was inevitable. Dread roiled around his empty gut.