The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die (27 page)

Buzzing chatter hushed suddenly. The queue moved aside to let somebody through. A big-busted woman in her fifties who looked like she’d had her hair cut with a knife and fork emerged and pushed in front of Ella. Welsh Mavis. Ella knew the woman was on remand for murder but still …

‘Hey, I’m next,’ Ella said.

Welsh Mavis looked at her with heavily medicated eyes. ‘Get fucked, bitch.’

Ella sized up the Thai tattoos that curled out from under the cuffs of Mavis’ voluminous tracksuit top. Exotic, toxic, they inked their way down her forearms to her hands, fringed by
LOVE
and
HATE
on her red, scabbed knuckles. A clichéd fighter’s hands. Ella touched her already bruised eye, fell silent and backed up several feet.

Eventually she reached the phone and dialled Letitia. It was the first time she had managed to get through to her since she had been incarcerated.

‘Yeah?’

‘It’s me. Don’t put the phone down.’

Silence.

‘Listen, I don’t want to know why you’ve not been to visit me in four fucking weeks or tried to help me get the hell out of here but I wanna hear from you why they wouldn’t grant bail. My solicitor said they reckoned I was a flight risk.’

‘Yeah, well.’ Letitia chewed gum noisily down the phone. ‘You know how it is.’

Desmond Dekker serenaded in the background. Ella knew something was up. Letitia only played Desmond Dekker when she had a man on the scene.

‘How can I be a flight risk if you vouched for my accommodation? You didn’t vouch for me, did you?’

Chewing. Rhythmical clicking of molars on tasteless gum.

‘Letitia!’

‘Listen, Ella. I got a new live-in boyfriend since you was arrested.’

‘What?’

‘You was out all the time with Danny and that. I got lonely. So when you got nicked, Leroy moved in for a bit.’

Ella felt hot lava roil around her stomach. A volcano of
why didn’t I see this coming?
About to erupt.

‘You’re letting your own child rot on remand. I did all this to save your arse but you couldn’t wait to see the back of me. Just so you could install brand new loverboy? Jesus, Letitia. When I get out of here, I am never, and I repeat,
never
going to speak to you again. Do you get me?’

Ella smashed the receiver repeatedly onto its hook until two screws gripped her hard by her shoulders and dragged her away.

It was a long time until unlocking at 7.45am. As Ella lay scrunched up like an unwanted foetus in her hard, narrow bed, she listened to the other inmates jeering, joking and thumping on their doors as they were banged up for the night. For the foreseeable future, she was trapped in this nightmare where the wailing of desperate women, seeking ice-cold solace in self-harm, always cut through the few peals of last-resort laughter.

A further two months had passed before Ella had a breakthrough. It was a Tuesday morning when finally she was told she had a visitor. She had not looked for him or expected him after such a long time.

‘Gordon!’

The Gargoyle stood before her, pale and weak. His suit seemed too large for him. His face was sunken. He held out his hands to Ella.

‘Lovey. I’m so sorry. I’ve been in hospital. My ticker. I had to have a triple bypass. They screwed up, didn’t they?’

Ella felt tears flow freely down her face, onto her neck and the collar of the tracksuit. She tried to speak but the words wouldn’t come. Her body shook with emotion as the despair started to work its way free.

‘How can I ever apologise? Listen,’ he said, putting an arm around her. ‘It’s over now. They’re making me take retirement. I shouldn’t be here but the prison psychologist got in touch with me. You see, the arresting officers never told me what happened. I didn’t even know where you’d been sent. But I’m making it right now. I’ve sorted it all.’

Ella looked at his bloodshot eyes and whisky drinker’s nose. It looked too big for his face now. This kindly man had finally come to rescue her; had come to unlock the door to her new life.
Three months fucking late but still …

‘Don’t make me go back to
her
,’ was all she could manage.

Wracking sobs of overwhelming relief. Ella was still crying when the screws handed her back her clothes in a black plastic box with her photograph and name stuck to the lid. It was the same pair of jeans, T-shirt and cardigan she had worn briefly in Amsterdam.

Months later, when the case finally came to court, giving evidence against Tonya and Big Michelle was hard but Ella did it. At no point did she have to come face to face with them. She recorded her testimony in private, silently berating herself for giving up their skins in return for her own. Within the safe confines of her thoughts, she said goodbye to those flint-faced calamity queens and apologised for the betrayal.

Danny and Jez had been picked up by the Dutch police. Ella wondered if they had suspected her involvement. Been tipped off somehow.

‘I wish I’d seen them get nicked. With my own eyes. Like with Tonya and Big Michelle.’

‘Ella, let it go,’ the Gargoyle said. ‘You’ve got to stop worrying. They’re over there. You’re over here. We’ve recorded your testimony. It won’t go off. It’s finished.’

‘We worked for a year to get enough evidence to bring them down.’ Ella sat in the spartan safe house, cradling her heavy head in her hands. Wondering if she had left any loose threads to unravel. ‘I risked everything.’

The Gargoyle patted her hand. ‘Listen, lovey, you’ve got your place at university now. Just get on with your new life. Make it count. As for Danny and Jez, they’ll go down. They’ll get a good long stretch, no danger.’

Ella smiled wistfully as she thought of the university offer letter she had received through the post only two days earlier. It was typed on heavy, quality paper, bearing the lions and fleurs-de-lys of the St John’s College crest.

Yes, Ella Williams-May, we thought you conducted yourself impeccably at interview, despite your frenzied rearranging of the pens on the desk in the office into parallel lines. Your school has stood by you and speaks highly of you. Yes, you may come and join us in a privileged world where people hold their cutlery properly, know which spoon to use for sorbet and where the furniture is not bolted to the floor. We are endlessly impressed by your unwavering self-discipline in the face of adversity and your moral fortitude. In short, Ella Williams-May, we know the score and we like it.

It was a letter Ella would frame and hang somewhere special.

Ensconced in the safe house on her own, she had studied hard for her mock A levels using the books that her school had sent into prison. She knew she would get four A
^*
grades when exam time approached. It was in the bag. But there was still one question left to be answered.

‘What’s my new name going to be then?’ she asked the Gargoyle.

The Gargoyle frowned. He dipped a rich tea biscuit into a cup of coffee and held it to his mouth.

‘What do you want to be called?’

Ella let her eyes wander over the stack of second-hand and library books on the otherwise empty bookshelf of the safe house. Her gaze fell first onto a dog-eared copy of George Orwell’s
Animal Farm.
Then it fell onto an obscure tome she had found in a used bookshop. It was
Redefining the Bonds of Commonwealth, 1939–1948.
The author was Dr Francine McKenzie.

‘Georgina McKenzie,’ Ella said.

The Gargoyle nodded. The end of his limp biscuit fell into his coffee with a plop.

‘Georgina McKenzie it is, then.’

Ella grinned and massaged her scalp with happy fingers. ‘Call me, George.’

From:
[email protected]
09.02

To:
[email protected]

Subject: Disciplinary Action

Morning, George

I have had a written complaint from Dr Fennemans about your behaviour. You told me that you were barred from class but now it seems you are ditching his one-to-one supervisions. I have also had several anonymous complaints about your pro-terror article in the online periodical,
The Moment
. Your mother is also still driving me crazy with repeated phone calls demanding that you return home immediately and meet with her face to face. She refuses to tell me what the urgent matter is.

Given the news about the third faculty student being found dead, I
insist
you come back to Cambridge for a break. If you want to avoid disciplinary action, you and I had better talk. College will pay your airfare and give you a room for a week. I have booked you a flight from Schiphol to Stansted for Monday lunchtime. I will text flight number and times later. Be on it.

Sally

Dr Sally Wright, Senior Tutor

St John’s College, Cambridge Tel … 01223 775 6574

Dept. of Criminology Tel … 01223 773 8023

George read the email and grunted at the laptop screen.

‘Bollocks to Fennemans,’ she said.

Sipping her hot coffee, she thought about the enforced trip home. She missed Cambridge. In truth, it felt like a lifetime since she had been back. She knew that recently her smooth exterior had begun to flake and crumble. Perhaps homesickness played a part in that. But she was in the middle of something in Amsterdam and she wanted to see it through.

She delved into a packet of savoury crackers and ate carefully, trying to avoid dropping crumbs beneath her modest dining table or her keyboard. What the hell did Letitia want? The question that she had put off asking for long enough rolled around inside her like a bagatelle ball of bad blood and unease. It was time to face the music. She emailed Sally back that she would indeed come to Cambridge and she agreed to meet Letitia the Dragon in a public place for ten minutes, and ten minutes only.

Her phone rang. It was van den Bergen.

‘What?’ she asked brusquely.

‘Hello, Cagney. I’m fine, thanks for asking.’

‘You never usually worry about making nice.’

Van den Bergen sighed heavily on the other end of the phone. ‘Come over. I want to talk to you.’ He hung up.

Another person insisting I give them face-time. What the hell have I done? And that bastard Karelse still hasn’t phoned.

Ad leaned against the orange Formica worktop in his mother’s kitchen in Groningen. Fingered the plain steel handle on one of the pistachio-painted cabinets. Looked inside, gripped as he was by an unexpected hankering for a beer. No beer. Just baking products. Mostly out of date. Everything in the house was a relic from the 1970s and early eighties. Frozen in time. Petrified with age.

‘Sit down, dolly. I’ve made your favourite apple tart,’ his mother said, squeezing a steaming flan dish between oven-gloved hands.

‘I’ll pour the coffee,’ he said, remembering to smile at the tart and nod to show his appreciation.

Ad looked at his mother. Her top half was obscured by a pink spotted apron. Her wide bottom was wrapped in an unflattering yellow nylon skirt, which was undoubtedly home made. Mum liked to make clothes. Hadn’t she made him wear those horrible brown polyester trousers as a kid that were always too short in the leg? Hand-knitted jumpers with snowflakes that made him look like the retarded son of a Friesian farmer. Homespun, church hall, bring and buy thrift. Now her swollen, varicose-veined legs looked red and sore through the support stockings. She was getting old.

‘Shall I get the plates?’ he asked.

‘There’s a good boy.’

Ad felt pangs of nostalgia. He had not really paid attention to his mother in a long time. His life at university in the big city had quickly started to unfold before him like the road to Xanadu. He travelled along that road blinkered and intoxicated; a twenty-first century Marco Polo marvelling at Kubla Khan’s riches. Nowadays, coming home seemed like a disappointing dream.

And his parents would never accept George.

‘Mum, I’ve got something to tell you,’ he said, pouring strong coffee into espresso cups from a small cafetiere.

Sitting in the interview room, facing an exhausted-looking van den Bergen, George rocked back on the hind legs of her uncomfortable chair.

‘Well?’ she said. ‘Have you arrested Biedermeier? I presume that’s why I’m here.’

Van den Bergen leaned forward. Under the harsh, institutional strip lighting, his normally lived-in-looking, still-handsome face looked flinty and enigmatic.

‘George. Klaus is dead.’

George blinked repeatedly, looked questioningly at van den Bergen. ‘What? Did he commit—’

‘He was murdered. Blown up by a Second World War hand grenade.’

She wondered how she felt about that. Was she happy? Sad? Relieved? She decided she felt nothing. She just felt dead inside. Maybe disappointed
.
‘Are you sure?’

Van den Bergen produced a folder. ‘I don’t want to show you these but I know you won’t believe me if I don’t.’ He placed photographs from a crime scene on the table with care. One by one.

George gulped. ‘Christ,’ was all she could manage. She looked away. Anywhere but at those photos.

Van den Bergen gathered the photos up. ‘Sorry,’ he said.

George looked at her dry hands, mentally sorting though the information as it came to her; analysing the shifting consequences. ‘Where did it—’

‘The police went to find him at the house where your little armchair-vigilante friend Mr Karelse had been staying.’

George noted the openly scathing tone that van den Bergen used when he referred to Ad. She held her breath for almost a minute while she absorbed the information. Then she spoke her thoughts aloud.

‘Another faculty student, dispatched with fire or brimstone. There’s somebody linking all of the victims. Someone in Amsterdam who mixes on a daily basis with us all. Somebody with a thing for explosives. An arsonist. Back-bedroom bomb maker but not a stereotypical terrorist on a divine mission.’

Van den Bergen ran his finger and thumb along the edge of his unfashionable silk tie.

‘It was your idea for Adrianus to go gallivanting off to Heidelberg, wasn’t it?’ van den Bergen asked, studying her from beneath those angular dark eyebrows. ‘You really are like a dog with a bone, aren’t you? How do you feel now? Do you feel stupid?’