The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die: The first book in an addictive crime series that will have you gripped. Marnie Riches

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СКАЧАТЬ her bright red hair back in a ponytail and quickly turned her attention to Jan’s food preparation. ‘But what the hell is that you’re cooking, darling? It looks like a dish of festive turds.’

      Katja peered over Jan’s shoulder and into the large crock pot that he was stirring. George sidled up on his left and saw that he did in fact seem to be preparing stewed turds.

      ‘Is this some vegetarian crap?’ George asked, wrinkling her nose.

      Jan banged the spoon on the side of the crock pot and looked at her with a raised eyebrow through his steamed-up Trotsky glasses. His roll-up cigarette hung artfully out of the corner of his mouth.

      ‘It’s sausage surprise,’ he said in an exasperated tone.

      ‘But I thought you were a veggie,’ George said.

      ‘Vegan.’

      ‘Vegan?’ shrieked Katja. ‘That’s a crime against nature, you hippy.’

      George could see a hurt expression on Jan’s face. He pushed his glasses up to his forehead, revealing large, puffy eyebags beneath red-rimmed, small blue eyes. He spoke with his cigarette still in his mouth.

      ‘I’m cooking pork sausages just for you, you judgemental Polish tart. I knew you wouldn’t understand the finer philosophical points of veganism.’

      George felt frivolity wash over her as she watched her landlord threaten Katja with a drippy spoon. He was wearing a batik kaftan today with his stick-thin hairy ankles clearly on view. The fact that he was cooking in bare feet made George feel slightly itchy. The fact that the kitchen floor was strewn with lentils, what appeared to be Rice Krispies and garlic peelings made her positively twitchy. But Jan in his own natural habitat full of ethnic handicrafts, burnt-down candle stubs and second-hand pockmarked furniture was still a comical sight.

      ‘How can a vegan cook meat in his own pots, Jan? Let alone eat it,’ George said.

      Jan was still stirring conscientiously. ‘I’m a practising hypocrite. Now go and fetch me my packet of Drum from the sideboard.’

      As George returned to the cooker with Jan’s pouch full of tobacco, she noticed the inch of ash from Jan’s cigarette fall into the stew. For a split second, he looked blankly at the ash, sitting on top of the sauce. Before she could comment, he sniffed and stirred it in.

      George opened a bottle of strong Duvel for herself. The only way she was going to survive the food hygiene non-standards of Jan’s Christmas dinner would be to down as much beer as possible. She reasoned that the alcohol would kill off any germs in her stomach.

      When George’s phone pinged with a text from van den Bergen, Katja was busy explaining how a woman could still breastfeed if silicone implants were inserted through the nipple. Jan was assembling pudding. George was busy chasing the last of the surprisingly tasty sausages around her plate, more than half way on her journey towards being medicinally drunk.

      ‘What do you want, Senior Inspector?’ George asked her phone’s display.

      What do you know about this girl?

      Van den Bergen had sent an accompanying attachment, which was a photo of a blonde woman. George did indeed recognise her face. She was a drop-out politics student in the year above. George had met her once briefly in a bar where some of the other students hung out. Joachim and Klaus had been all over her like a rash. The evening was memorable because the woman had thrown a glass of beer all over Joachim but had left with Klaus.

      She texted van den Bergen back.

      She’s called Janneke something or other. She’s one of Fennemans’ old students. Why?

      The answer came back as George was enjoying her pudding of hash-cakes and ice cream.

      She has been murdered.

      ‘Cheers,’ Fennemans said to his mother.

      They clinked glasses together. He watched as the elegant matriarch of the family sniffed the contents of her champagne flute.

      ‘Asti spumante?’ his sister asked, staring at the rising bubbles. ‘At Christmas?’

      ‘It’s prosecco. And a good one at that,’ Fennemans said.

      His mother swept her carefully coiffed white hair to the side, sipped the sparkling wine cautiously and swallowed in what appeared to be a reluctant manner. ‘Oh, Vim. I wish you’d let me open the Laurent Perrier. The Italians are far better left to their chiantis and barolos. Did you buy this at the supermarket?’

      His mother turned to his sister. ‘Vim has never had much of a nose for wine, has he? Not like us, darling. You get your palate from me.’ She patted his sister’s manicured hand. The two of them exchanged self-satisfied smiles.

      Fennemans had been feeling celebratory when he had arrived. That feeling had long since evaporated. With every bite of his foie gras on toast, he wanted to tell them both to drop dead. Drop dead, drop dead, drop dead.

      Every Christmas, the enmity surged inside him like a noxious, mushrooming cloud. Mother would be condescending and would take his sister’s side in some ill-informed debate about politics, made tedious by the fact that his mother and sister were intensely conservative and ignorant of anything that happened outside of the Netherlands. His sister would belittle him at the dining table and then spend the evening boasting about how well her legal practice was doing and how successful her Swiss paediatric consultant husband was (he would be there, of course, if it weren’t for the fact that he was saving precious little lives on Christmas Day).

      ‘I said, when are you going to get yourself a woman, Vim?’ his mother asked.

      Her beautifully made-up eyes peered at him over her Bulgari spectacles. Fennemans realised she had been waiting for an answer for more than thirty seconds. He had been too lost in a labyrinth of his own hostility to hear her.

      His sister snorted and collected up the empty starter plates. ‘Vim get a woman? Come on, Mum!’ She turned to him with an unpleasant smile. It was as though he had never grown beyond the age of ten, with Sofie, the favoured twin; older by fourteen minutes, preferred by a country mile and indulged without temperance once his father, the erstwhile arbitrator, had been taken by his dicky ticker that Mother had fed to bursting point with butter and cream and fatty pork. ‘Who’d have him with his cheese feet and boring jazz collection?’

      ‘Okay. That’s it. I’m going,’ he said, rising from his chair quickly.

      Last year, he had contemplated doing this but this year, he was really doing it. He was walking away.

      ‘Sit down, Vim. I’ve made venison,’ his mother said.

      He slammed the door behind him. That felt good. He crunched down the gravel drive. That felt better. Got into the car, drove around the corner out of sight and parked up. He pressed the buttons on his mobile phone.

      ‘It’s Fennemans,’ he said. ‘Look, you’ve got your money now. We’re straight, aren’t we?’

      ‘I suppose so.’

      ‘Well, can I see the girls this evening? I need to unwind.’

      ‘I’m away on СКАЧАТЬ