The Girl Who Got Revenge

by Marnie Riches

  ‘Do you think we’ll find anything?’ she asked.

  He leaned on her, stealing a surreptitious kiss on the side of her head while the ground-worker and the landlord weren’t watching. ‘I’ve got a tingling feeling.’

  George looked at his crotch and raised her eyebrows. ‘I’m not sure here is either the time or the place. But if you order in pizza tonight, you might get lucky.’

  Their light-hearted exchange was brought to an abrupt halt as the digger’s engine fell silent.

  ‘What is it?’ Van den Bergen asked, swinging himself forward on his crutches.

  The ground-worker was out of his cab, standing at the edge of the newly dug hole, not more than four feet or so deep.

  ‘See for yourself,’ he said, taking a cigarette out of the pocket of his high-vis jacket and lighting up with shaking hands. ‘There’s your cracking and drainage problem. How old do you reckon that is?’

  Van den Bergen looked down at the muddied, grinning skeleton. There was no trace of clothing but for leather shoes, still on the feet, a watch around its wrist and the glint of a gold pinkie ring on the thin bones of the little finger of the skeleton’s right hand. He could see large chips had been hacked out of the skull. Next to the skeleton, though the handle was still buried in unexcavated earth, he spied the unmistakable blade of a hatchet.

  ‘Oh, I think our friend has been sleeping here fitfully since 1943.’ He felt tears prick the backs of his eyes, certain that this was Ed Sijpesteijn and that the ring on his finger had been given to him by Rivka Zemel. ‘I think it’s time we found this young fellow a proper resting place.’

  CHAPTER 41

  Amsterdam, Schiphol airport, then police headquarters, 8 November

  Picturing the Facebook profile photo Marie had shown her only days earlier, George wondered if she would be able to spot the elderly lady as she emerged from baggage reclaim. The flight to Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport from New York had landed a good forty minutes earlier. She yawned, holding the plaque aloft, clearly inscribed in thick black felt tip with the traveller’s name: Rivka Levy.

  ‘Come on. Come on.’

  A grey-haired woman, clearly in her late eighties or early nineties, came towards her, walking slowly, spine bent as though she suffered badly with osteoporosis, wheeling a suitcase that was almost as big as she was. George’s heart started to race as she prepared to meet the author of the diary that she had found so captivating. But the elderly woman walked straight past George towards three middle-aged women who waved and stretched out their arms to greet this weary traveller.

  Considering all that Marie had found out, George didn’t know what to expect. It was hard to tell from a profile photo, which had obviously been taken a good twenty years earlier, how the woman would look now. The friend list of Rivka Levy, née Zemel, had revealed hundreds upon hundreds of men and women, most of whom who had presumably been taught by her at one stage. Rivka Zemel, retired high school history teacher. It made sense that somebody who had played such a fascinating role in such a key time in recent history should teach younger generations about the perils of national arrogance, militarised rule and institutionalised hatred. George smiled at the thought, hoping she would like the only surviving cast member of the Verhagen drama when she emerged through those automatic doors.

  There was a tap on her shoulder. ‘Are you looking for me?’

  George did a double take at the sprightly, beautiful old woman who stood before her. Her hair was cut in a short, platinum-blonde bob. She wore a fur-trimmed parka, the funkiest jeans George had seen in a while and gold sneakers. If this was what the bleakest phase of life’s winter looked like, George resolved not to dread it quite so much.

  Rivka Levy took off her Dior shades to reveal almost smooth eyes, which had most likely seen the surgeon’s knife.

  ‘Are you Marie from Facebook, sweetie?’ She spoke with a thick New York accent. ‘Are you the Dutch cop?’

  ‘No.’ George clasped Rivka Zemel’s liver-spotted hands inside hers and started to gabble excitedly. ‘I’m Dr McKenzie. A criminologist. Please, call me Georgina. George. I work with Marie and Chief Inspector Van den Bergen. I’m the one who found your war diary in the Verhagen house. I read it cover to cover.’ Inexplicably, George found it was all she could do to hold back a sob. ‘I never thought—’

  Rivka Zemel wrenched her hand free and patted George’s arm. ‘That’s nice. I gotta pee, honey. Where’s the restroom? At my age, a nine-hour flight plays havoc on my bladder like you wouldn’t believe.’

  She was nothing like the woman she’d been expecting. George realised that life may have stopped for Ed Sijpesteijn in 1943, but it had moved on by some seven decades for this one-time fugitive. She smiled at the thought.

  Van den Bergen was waiting in the pickup area in the Mercedes, Elvis at the wheel. He introduced himself formally, reaching behind to shake Rivka’s hand. ‘We’re so glad to have found you, Mrs Levy. You’re the final piece in our puzzle.’

  Rivka was eyeing the casts on Van den Bergen’s legs. ‘What kind of puzzle leaves you in such bad shape? Have you been playing extreme Twister or something? Looks like you do things differently in Amsterdam these days.’ She laughed heartily but it was clear from the tightness around her eyes that she was dreading what was to come.

  George tried to imagine what it must feel like to have to travel halfway around the world to finally lay to rest the one-time love of your life.

  ‘Have you been back since the war?’ she asked.

  But Rivka was not listening. She stared out of the window of the Mercedes at the surrounding countryside as they sped away from the airport. Miles and miles of flat green, punctuated only by giant wind turbines.

  ‘It hasn’t changed that much,’ the old woman said, dabbing at her eyes. When she caught Van den Bergen looking back at her, she hastily donned her sunglasses and treated him to a curt smile.

  At the station, Marie rolled up in her wheelchair to greet the woman who had proven so tricky to track down.

  Sitting around the oversized table in the meeting room, Rivka Zemel nursed a scalding, barely drinkable coffee that Elvis had made.

  ‘I’m sorry to have brought you back under such tragic circumstances, Mrs Levy,’ Van den Bergen began.

  ‘How do I know it’s him, after all this time?’ She turned to Marie. ‘You said there were items on his person that survived. Can I see them?’

  Van den Bergen placed the watch and the pinkie ring carefully on the table. All eyes were on the elderly woman who, if their assumptions were correct, had not seen these pieces since they were last worn by a living, breathing Ed Sijpesteijn.

  Spreading her wrinkled hands on the table, she slowly reached out to stroke the watch. Speaking in her native Dutch tongue, she sounded more like the Rivka who had written those diaries. ‘His father gave that to him on his eighteenth birthday,’ she said. Removing her glasses, she started to weep freely, clutching the watch to her chest. Next, she picked up the ring and gasped. ‘I gave this to him.’ Nodding. ‘It was Papa’s. We exchanged rings as a betrothal of sorts. Mama and Papa hadn’t wanted me to marry out of the faith. Before the war, they’d hoped they’d find a nice Jewish man for me to settle down with. Start a family. It meant a lot to them because I think they realised Shmuel was never going to enjoy a full life. He was just so delicate. All their hopes were pinned on me. But when we were cooped up in Kaars’s house and Ed was such a gentleman – so doting and thoughtful… Such a mensch.’ The words caught in her throat. She took a sip of coffee. ‘Oy.’ She looked over at Elvis and spoke as a New Yorker. ‘As a barista, you make a good street-sweeper. Don’t give up being a cop.’

  ‘Please…’ Van den Bergen popped a painkiller onto his tongue. Swallowed some of his own drink, grimacing. ‘Go on.’

  Rivka took out a stiffened envelope from her handbag. From inside, she produced an old black and white photo in almost pristine condition. It was of a young couple with their arms around each other, b
eaming into the lens of the camera. They were standing on a path in a park, where the trees were in leaf. A horse chestnut bloomed behind them, garlanded with upright clusters of pale flowers that seemed to glow against the canvas of dark foliage, even during the daytime.

  ‘Me and Ed. Look! Weren’t we young?’ She patted her chest gently, then sniffed and tutted. ‘Kaars took this of us both. It was one of those days when I’d snuck out. Hendrik’s girlfriend, Anna, had dyed my hair blonde, you see, and I was lucky enough to have falsified papers.’

  ‘Hendrik had got those from Bruno Baumgartner,’ George said. ‘We found a reference to them in a box that you mentioned in your diary. Do you remember? The last time you saw Ed, he told you to keep the box safe, and you hid it behind the skirting board in the room between rooms, didn’t you?’

  Rivka’s face took on a faraway expression. ‘It’s like it was only yesterday. He came running in, red in the face, and told me someone in the Force of Five had turned. I never got to see what was in that box because the Nazis came that night. Ed had promised to move us, but I never saw him after that last visit with the box. Papa said he’d run away to avoid capture, but I knew Ed would never abandon us like that. He had the heart of a lion. And he loved me.’ She locked eyes with George, as if she sought corroboration. ‘He did.’

  ‘What happened to you and your family that night?’ George asked, desperate to know how the blank pages of the diary might have been filled had young Rivka continued to write. ‘After the Nazis took you? Did the rest of your family escape? What happened to the Verhagens?’

  ‘The Verhagens were lined up against the wall at gunpoint as we were dragged from our hiding place.’ Her voice cracked. ‘Shmuel was so ill by that stage that he could barely walk.’ She inclined her head so that George could no longer see her face clearly. Fat tears dropped onto her jeans, spotting the denim with dark patches. ‘They shot him dead before he reached the train and left his body in the street. I don’t know— I…’ She held her hands up in a gesture of despair. ‘Poor Shmuel deserved so much better. And Mama and Papa…’

  George leaned over, placing a hand on Rivka’s heaving shoulder as she quaked with grief. ‘Go on. If you can.’

  ‘We were piled onto a train to a transit camp in Westerbork but we were ultimately destined for Auschwitz. I knew it would be the end for Mama and Papa. Papa was stiff from so long spent in the hiding place. Mama’s mental health was in ruins. They weren’t strong.’ She lifted her face. Even more than seventy years on, she was a woman racked with guilt.

  ‘Did you all survive the war?’ Van den Bergen asked, peering down at the photo of her and Ed Sijpesteijn through his reading glasses. Holding it with obvious reverence.

  ‘As far as I know, my parents, may they rest in peace, met their end in Auschwitz. The train was packed like a cattle truck, so who knows? Maybe they died en route. I hope so. I hope they were spared the horrors of the gas chambers. I’ll never know, because I managed to escape, of course.’

  George leaned forward. ‘How?’

  ‘I worked away at some rotten planks in the carriage. Another girl from Utrecht helped. The Nazis took everything from me, including the little ring Ed had given me. But the girl’s father had polio and they’d missed his leg irons completely. We stripped his leg of the supports to dig into the wood. It was so riddled with rot that it didn’t take us long to open up a hole we could drop through.’

  ‘While the train was moving?’ Elvis asked, wide-eyed. He scratched at his shoulders, disbelief in his horrified expression.

  Rivka shrugged. ‘What choice did we have? We had to risk death on the tracks or face the gas chambers in Auschwitz.’

  ‘Weren’t you frightened?’ Marie asked.

  ‘Of course. I seem to remember peeing my pants. But Papi more or less pushed me through the hole when the train slowed near a junction. His final words to me were…’ She seemed to peer into the past as though through a patch of thick fog. ‘Do you know? I can’t remember them. Oh, that is sad.’ Staring into her unpalatable coffee, she raised an eyebrow, wiped a tear away and swallowed the brew whole. ‘A lifetime ago, now. But I remember how my parents felt in my arms as we hugged for the last time. I was so young, so unlucky to lose them, but luckier than six million that I survived.’

  She closed her eyes and lifted her head as though she were having a private exchange with the spirits of her mother, father and brother. ‘It was a miracle that me and Hannah, the girl from Utrecht, made it out alive. We just dropped down and lay still until the train passed over us. It was dark, luckily. Then, we ran and ran into a forest until we thought our lungs would burst. God must have been watching over us because we came across members of the resistance in that forest. They smuggled us both onto a cargo ship bound for the States. Hannah said she had plans to go to California. I’d had enough of travelling, so I made a new life for myself in New York. Met my husband, Harold, when I was training to be a teacher.’ She smiled wistfully. ‘I’ve had a good life. A different life than the one I’d hoped for, though. If you’d told me when I was in the room between rooms that I’d spend most of my adulthood on a different continent with a man other than Ed, I’d have laughed at you. My plan was always to wait the war out in that stinking hidey-hole. All that time, we hid patiently. But the SS found us in the end. We were betrayed.’

  From the box, George produced a piece of paper, stamped with the Deutches Reich insignia. A receipt made out to Hendrik van Eden, signed by Bruno Baumgartner.

  ‘Hendrik van Eden sold you out for a fist full of guilders.’

  Rivka took the document and snorted. ‘I saw him, you know. As we were being dragged out of the house. He was standing under a tree, watching. I could just about make him out in the streetlight. For years, I wondered if I’d been mistaken, but I should have known. Of course it was him. The others were beyond reproach. Ed said one of the group was a turncoat. I knew it was Hendrik. And you say his son and grandson were behind a trafficking ring? The apple didn’t fall far from the tree, then.’

  Van den Bergen cleared his throat. ‘Precisely. André Baumgartner – Hendrik and Anna Groen’s biological son, despite the confusion over the name – was the mastermind behind the operation. He’s dead now. Frederik Den Bosch is behind bars, awaiting trial, but we’ve got a raft of slave labourers and slum tenants that he’d trafficked—’

  ‘And an actual truckload of recovering refugees,’ George added.

  ‘Yes. They’re all willing to testify against Den Bosch now that he’s off the streets. We’ve also arrested an imam in conjunction with the case. He was supplying them with willing customers in Syria and other parts of the Islamic world that have refugee crises. It’s ironic that a known fascist should bring immigrants into the country, but where there’s big piles of cash to be made and free labour to be exploited… Like the Jews during the war, people will happily give everything they own to secure a safe passage to a new life.’

  ‘Ed and Kaars were doing it for free. Any gifts they were given were just that. Gifts.’ There was a defensive tone to Rivka’s voice.

  ‘The reputations of Kaars Verhagen and Ed Sijpesteijn are absolutely not in question, Mrs Levy. Marie here has corroborated that the artwork in Verhagen’s house was not stolen. There are no Verhagen grandchildren, so we’re repatriating the paintings to the descendants of the Jewish families that owned them originally, where possible. The rest will go to the Rijksmuseum. I believe that four of the Force of Five were genuine heroes. Hendrik, though…he was a snake in the grass – and a murderer.’

  In silence, Rivka dabbed at her eyes. ‘How did it happen? How did my Ed die?’

  Van den Bergen folded his arms and sighed. ‘Perhaps it’s best you don’t know.’

  ‘No. I need to.’

  ‘We’ll never know the exact circumstances, but forensic evidence points to Ed having been killed by multiple head wounds. It was a frenzied attack. I’m so sorry.’

  ‘And Hendrik was the culprit? You’re sur
e of that?’

  ‘He had motive to kill Ed. With that box, Ed had enough evidence to shame Hendrik in his little social circle of freedom fighters. Hendrik was the landlord of the pub where Ed was presumably killed, and then buried, along with the murder weapon. The concrete covering dates from the mid Forties, according to our forensic archaeologist. We don’t have paperwork showing that Hendrik paid for that yard to be resurfaced once Ed had been buried there, but I’d put money on it that he did. I’m fairly certain that Hendrik murdered Ed to silence him and then had you and your family arrested. His betrayal remained undiscovered for decades because nobody knew a thing about that Pandora’s box until Kaars happened upon it recently during building work.’

  Rubbing her gnarled hands over her mouth, Rivka sighed deeply. ‘At least now we can lay my Ed to rest. I’ve already buried one husband in this lifetime. Now, it’s time to say farewell to the man who was meant to be my first.’

  CHAPTER 42

  Van den Bergen’s apartment, 30 November

  ‘You need to decide if you’re gonna start living your life or if you’re gonna keep on living his.’ Letitia’s words had been her parting gift as she’d left George’s bedside in the hospital. Now, it was the oft-repeated nugget of wisdom that she bludgeoned her with during every single Skype session. Worse still, Aunty Shaz and her father agreed.

  Throwing clean underwear into the suitcase, George decided that she couldn’t bear the mess. She took everything out, refolded it and set it back in its proper place. Better. As she packed the stack of well-worn T-shirts, her attention was diverted away from the suitcase to the letter. It sat crisply on the duvet of the guest bed.

  Dear Dr McKenzie,

  Thank you for coming to be interviewed last week. It is with great pleasure that I am offering you the role of Senior Lecturer in Goldsmiths Sociology Department…