Marnie Riches - The Girl Who Got Revenge - The addictive new crime thriller of 2018

Not wishing to get too close, George craned her neck to see a tiny inking of a lion that had faded presumably from black to navy blue over time. The lion wore a crown and carried a sword. ‘I wonder what the S and the 5 stand for?’ She sniffed and took a step back. ‘Looks like a prison tattoo. Ink and a needle. Something really old school.’

Van den Bergen raised an eyebrow and treated her to a wry smile. Was he being patronising about her turn of phrase? Or was she overreacting because she was already so mad at him?

‘Well,’ he said, grabbing surreptitiously at his throat, ‘Marianne has had more than one old guy in here lately who’s died of a meds-induced heart attack and sported one of these tattoos.’

Breathing in sharply, all the cynicism and defensive, studied boredom fell away from George like a layer of dead skin, revealing the questioning machine of her intellect and curiosity beneath. ‘Really?’ She unfolded her arms and looked again at the tattoo. ‘You got photos?’

‘What do you think?’ De Koninck said, taking a file from her desk and opening it to reveal post-mortem shots of another old man. ‘Brechtus Bruin. Another ninety-five-year-old. I did his autopsy a couple of weeks ago. He’d been taking Demerol and OxyContin as prescription painkillers. And guess what he died from?’

‘Heart attack,’ George said.

De Koninck nodded, raising both finely plucked eyebrows with a wry smile. ‘You guessed it.’

George studied the shots of Brechtus Bruin’s neck, feeling the hairs rise on the back of her own. ‘The same tattoo! Marie’s going to have a field day searching for the background to this on the internet.’ She was undeterred by the sight of the lifeless nonagenarian in the pictures. It was far easier than cosying up to the discoloured, slowly decomposing neck of the actual corpse before her.

‘Both Bruin and Van Blanken had the same superficial cause of death and the same tattoo,’ Van den Bergen said, peering over her shoulder at the regal lion. ‘There’s a definite link.’

The pathologist switched tabs on her computer screen to another report. She scanned the notes, tapping the screen. ‘Though Brechtus Bruin took ill at home, so there were no witnesses. As I understand it from the ambulance team who brought him in to me, he’d been lying dead in his house, undiscovered, for several days before his neighbour realised he wasn’t picking up his grocery deliveries. But the painkillers he was taking are also notorious for causing heart attacks in the frail in high doses.’

George ran through the implications in silence. ‘Are you sure it’s not all just conjecture and coincidence? The tattoos and heart attacks, I mean. Or do you think you’ve got a Harold Shipman-style serial killer of oldies running riot in the city?’ She bit her lip in horrified anticipation.

Van den Bergen turned to her with a grim smile. ‘Worse than that. I think we’ve got someone who’s clearly targeting just one specific group of old men. We need to find out why and we need to find out who else is on the hit list. And you’re closer than you know with that Shipman analogy, Georgina. Both of these men were prescribed these meds by the same GP, and I don’t like it one bit.’

George let out a long, low whistle. Suddenly, she didn’t give a hoot about abandoning a bickering Letitia, her father and Aunty Sharon and her brood to a three-star poolside with only a partial view of the freezing cold Med. She thought about her ailing bank balance, and grinned. ‘Think you can use a freelance criminologist on the usual day rate?’

‘Where are you with the illegal immigrant situation?’ Maarten Minks asked, sitting bolt upright, as though the chief of police had personally rammed a pointy-ended paperweight up his young commissioner’s rectum. Minks was flushed. He was only ever red in the face when he was wetting his big boy pants with excitement over a development in a case or if he had been given a dressing-down.

Suspecting the latter, Van den Bergen folded his arms over the maelstrom of griping wind and acid indigestion that raged in his beleaguered stomach. He sighed. ‘Frederik den Bosch is an unpleasant character with some really disgusting views, but you can’t arrest a man for that unless he acts on them. And his record is squeaky clean. His claim that the lorry containing the Syrians was stolen checks out. He called in a theft in a couple of days before the find. Uniforms went and took a statement from his office manager, and Den Bosch contacted his insurers soon afterwards.’

‘Was it stolen from the yard?’ Minks asked, smoothing the leather padded arms on his captain’s chair. ‘Surely an international exporter with acreage like that has got decent security. A guard? Dogs? Cameras?’

Van den Bergen nodded, wondering if he should mention the two old men and their suspicious deaths. But with a little girl dead, the Syrian refugee case was a murder investigation that warranted his full attention. If Minks got wind of the two nonagenarians with their mysterious tattoos, the overzealous stickler for rules would cry conflict of interest and immediately pass the case on to one of the other senior detectives. No way was Van den Bergen willing to let that happen. Especially since Arnold van Blanken had breathed his last only a few feet from where he had been uselessly sitting in the doctor’s surgery.

‘Marie has the CCTV footage from Den Bosch’s premises and has yet to find anything.’ He rubbed his stomach and belched quietly, trying to picture the inside of his ulcerated gullet.

‘You seem distracted, Paul. Is there anything you’d like to share with me? Are you…’ He leaned forward. ‘ Well ?’ Minks cocked his head in the semi-concerned fashion of a careerist who often practised being human in front of a mirror.

‘What kind of a question is that?’ Van den Bergen asked, straightening in his seat until, thanks to his long torso, he could see the top of Minks’s head. Thinning hair, since he’d whipped Kamphuis’s old job from under Van den Bergen’s nose.

‘A suspected heart attack and collapse at the scene of an arrest?’ Minks examined his perfectly clean fingernails. Clearly, the man was not a gardener. He failed to make eye contact with Van den Bergen. ‘Seems your little adventure in Mexico has knocked the stuffing out of you.’

‘I brought down the Rotterdam Silencer, and not for the first time!’ Van den Bergen could feel irritation itching its way up his neck. He regarded his superior officer with some cynicism. The smug arsehole was showing signs of turning into his predecessor. ‘I think you might find it physically testing to have anthrax thrown in your face.’

Minks’s eyes narrowed. He touched the stiff Eton collar on his shirt. ‘It wasn’t anthrax.’

‘I didn’t know that at the time, did I?’

The silence between them made the air feel too thick to breathe. Finally, Van den Bergen relented and spoke.

‘I’ve put Dr McKenzie on the payroll. She’s an expert in trafficking of all sorts.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Paul! I’m trying to keep departmental costs down. Not let them spiral out of control, and all because you want to play the generous sugar daddy with your girlfriend. Why the hell can’t you co-opt some junior detective from another station? McKenzie’s expensive.’

Van den Bergen closed his eyes momentarily and swallowed down the scorching poker of bile that lanced its way up his oesophagus. ‘Dr McKenzie is a specialist consultant. Even if I didn’t have a relationship with her outside of the workplace, I’d still hire her. Pay peanuts, get monkeys.’

‘I’ve studied your expenditure. It’s gone through the roof in the last few years.’ There it was. Spreadsheet King had been getting his rocks off after hours with a five-knuckle shuffle over some ancient Excel files.