The Girl Who Broke the Rules (49 page)
Read The Girl Who Broke the Rules Online
Authors: Marnie Riches
He picked up the box. Set it on his knees. Opened the flaps. Sighed at the sight of the contents.
‘What’s up?’ she asked, wincing as she tried to lean forward and see the cause of this dejected demeanour. Was he still sore about van den Bergen? He had said he’d forgiven her. ‘You got me some clothes, before I freeze to death?
Fixing her with those soft brown eyes, now so hard. Disappointment that ran deep, leaching the happiness that had once come easily to him. ‘All your things from my place. Everything’s in this box. I can’t take it any more, George.’
‘But—’
‘It’s over.’
Amsterdam, women’s prison, 28 February
In the dismal, cramped isolation of solitary confinement, where she had been put for her own safety, Veronica thought about the forthcoming trial. She knew she would be branded a crime against nature. A killer of the vulnerable. A seller of babies.
Maybe she was.
She had failed to save Mama’s life all those years ago. Her donated bone marrow had been inadequate, heightening Mama’s pain; speeding her demise. All she had ever wanted was to win her love. To save her. To reverse time.
Giving a second chance to the sick and needy was the closest she could come to bringing Mama back. Selling the organs of those who didn’t count to those who were too desperate to wait their turn in agony. Selling babies to people who wanted nothing more than to lavish love on a child. It meant, at least, there would be fewer children like her in the world.
Unwanted. Unappreciated. Just like her.
Bitch. She had never really wanted to save Mama. How she’d loved to have sliced open that evil snake with her scalpel and ripped out that ice cold heart. Fuck you, Mama. Fuck all those beatings you dished up over the years and the toxic torment that rolled off your forked tongue so easily. And fuck you, Papa. The dirt-poor boy-made-good who despised the great unwashed, once his surgically lifted butt was sitting pretty on top of Mama’s money mountain. He had given as much of a shit about his own daughter as he did about the needy and vulnerable. And now, his daughter was so much like him. And yet, so different.
The love. The hate. The anger. They effervesced inside her. A confused, tormented mess. Only acts of simultaneous violence and nurture seemed to calm the storm. This was what her parents had turned her into. This was what Silas had made her.
Curled up into the foetal position on her narrow cot, Veronica thought about her lot. Wept openly. Sobbing for the first time in years; perhaps since childhood. She had tried to right the wrongs done to her by being the best mother she could to little Silas. The moment she had seen Magool’s beautiful boy, she had known she would not part with him. He was so tiny. So perfect. So pure. And yet, motherhood had not come naturally to her, as she had hoped it would. Though she had lavished material things on her son, though he had the motherly bosom of Hilal to cleave to, she had felt the same strange detachment from the child perhaps as her father had from her. Now, she would never see beautiful little Silas again. He would be fostered out and then put up for adoption. Ripped from her life, as he had been ripped from his mother’s belly in return for a couple of thousand euros.
She had nothing left, now. Silas,
the son
, was gone. Her liberty would be taken away. Everyone would forget that she had lived her life as a pillar of the community and a physician of repute. All that would be left would be filthy newsprint, where the ink would never wash off, branding her as nothing more than a psychopathic serial murderer.
She still clutched the letter that the English criminologist had brought her in prison. A prune-faced woman with ugly spectacles called Dr Sally Wright. Connected in some way to that beastly midget, Georgina McKenzie. Who the fuck was Dr Sally Wright, with her nicotine-stained teeth and her bad breath, to bring her mail from Silas,
the man
? A man she had been so intimately entangled with, that she had finally agreed to take his leg as payment for her freedom. Now, here was a strange woman in ugly glasses, brandishing the envelope like a bribe, as she asked if she, the great Frau Doktor Veronica Schwartz, would consent to becoming a research subject once the trial was over? Unbelievable!
At first mention of Silas’ name, her heart had leaped, she admitted. The thought that he had been thinking about her during her predicament was cheering. Gave her hope. But then, she read the letter. It wasn’t even addressed to her! It was a photocopy of an outpouring he had written to that slut, McKenzie. An accusation of treachery. Talk of bringing things full circle. She felt like she had been little more than a pawn in the chess game that was Silas Holm’s miserable, corrupt, stunted life. The love she had been denied by her parents had left an aching, gaping chasm inside her. He had always known that. She had thought Silas Holm’s love would fill that hole. He had
promised
her it would, and it hadn’t. Now, he talked of her victims as empty vessels. But it was he who had stripped her clean. She was the empty vessel now.
Checkmate, you bastard. Checkmate.
Amsterdam, the Cracked Pot Coffee Shop, then, the hospital, later
‘It’s so spartan,’ Sally said, peering into the kitchenette, which had been emptied out of George’s bits and scrubbed until it was clinically clean. ‘How have you managed, living here?’ She wrinkled her nose at the sun-bleached, old-fashioned curtains.
‘I lived here for a full year, remember?’ George said, zipping up the suitcase that lay on the bed, stripped of its bedding. ‘It’s fine. It’s just been a temporary measure since me and Ad…’
She sighed. Felt a pang of regret in her heart. It was the end of a long, hard journey. The end of the road for so many things. And here she was. In a bedsit above the Cracked Pot Coffee Shop. Back to the beginning.
‘Check that view, though,’ she said, advancing to the window and peering out so that Sally could not see her tears. ‘I always loved those rooftops.’
She felt Sally’s hand on her shoulder. Her bony fingers massaging her through her jumper as a gesture of solidarity.
‘Got a ciggy?’ George asked, sniffing. Wiping her eyes furtively. Staring into the spring sunshine, hoping Sally wouldn’t judge her.
They lit up together and hung out of the open window, blowing their smoke into the crisp morning sunshine. Watching the flow of tourists beneath them, filing to and fro alongside the canal. Prostitutes perched on their bar stools in the red-lit booths opposite. Bored-looking women who switched on their dazzling smiles like UV lights every time a man walked past, snatching a glance at this forbidden fruit.
‘I love this crazy place,’ George said. ‘Pity I have to leave. But I’ve nothing to stay for, now.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Sally said, flicking her ash into the moss-blocked gutter. ‘You’ve been through so much. For all you’re an utter pain in the arse, dear, you’ve been fiendishly brave. It must be very hard.’
Tears started to trickle in determined rivulets down the sides of George’s face. She could feel her mouth buckle. Felt embarrassed by the show of weakness. Wiped hard at the snot with her sleeve, as though she resented it. Not caring about the mess. She mustn’t cry.
‘I wanted to stay. Until they decide to switch the machines off. But Tamara won’t let them. It could go on indefinitely.’
Sally inhaled deeply. Toyed with her red beads, as though she was saying a rosary silently to herself. ‘Poor, poor man.’
George’s bullet wound ached. Pricking inside her chest. She felt guilty and resentful that she should still be standing, while van den Bergen lay in his impenetrable dreamworld. She hoped that his dreams were, at least, good ones.
‘Come on,’ Sally said, checking her watch. ‘We’ll miss our flight.’
Taking her leave from Jan, Katja and Inneke, George promised to visit. There would always be a piece of her in this building, after all. On the journey to Schiphol airport, she wondered if her heart would ever mend. At the check-in desk, she felt certain she would never laugh again. That she would carry the heavy millstone of her misery for the rest of her life.
And then, her phone rang. It was Tamara. Crying almost to the point of being unintelligible.
‘Oh, George. I’m so sorry. You’ve got to come to the hospital straight away. It’s Dad.’
Leaving Sally standing with their baggage, George ran straight back to the train station. Headed for the hospital. No time to spare. Tamara hadn’t elaborated, but George was certain from the tears that they were switching her friend’s life support off. It would be her last chance to say goodbye. She couldn’t bear it, but she would regret it for the rest of her life if she didn’t see that misanthropic, cantankerous, wonderful fool one last time.
Running down corridors, through automatic doors. She had to get to him. Had to see this through.
Hesitated at the entrance to intensive care.
Fuck it. Do this.
She rubbed alcohol gel into her hands and pushed her way inside. There, in the middle bed, was van den Bergen. Still wires going in. Wires coming out of his skin. But no mask over his face. They had already stopped his oxygen. No Tamara. Only an austere-looking doctor in a three piece suit, reading the clipboard from the end of his bed.
George threw herself into the seat at the side of van den Bergen. Her face, cold with fear. His large hand in her small hand, feverishly warm.
‘Oh, Paul,’ she said. ‘Don’t leave me, you big lanky arsehole.’ Her voice wavered, burdened by the grief of letting go. ‘Please God, don’t let this be the end.’
And though the doctor was standing there, perhaps judging her frailty, eavesdropping on her supplication to a God she had long since parted company with, George wept openly. She wanted to be punished. She deserved to suffer. She had walked this man whom she loved so dearly straight into the valley of the shadow of death. And she had left him there. Alone.
Now, George offered her tears heaven-wards as a show of remorse. Willing her rotten, broken heart to stop beating. An eye for an eye. Perhaps, then, a life for a life. Praying that her star-crossed lover would wake, for never was a story more of woe, than this of Juliet and her ageing Romeo.
Wishing she had never ruined this man.
Wishing he had more to show from half a lifetime lived hard than shattered dreams and a dying body.
Wishing she had never broken the rules.
Winner of the 2015 DEAD GOOD READER Award for Most Exotic Location
HE’S WATCHING HER. SHE DOESN’T KNOW IT…YET
Get book 1 in the George McKenzie series
The final edge-of-your-seat thriller in the George McKenzie trilogy
First came The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die
Then came The Girl Who Broke the Rules
OCTOBER 2015
THE GIRL WHO WALKED IN THE SHADOWS
The response to
The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die
has been wonderful. When the e-book hit the virtual shelves in April 2015, I had no idea that George McKenzie’s and Paul van den Bergen’s adventures would be so popular with readers and critically so well-received, let alone that they would go on to win a Dead Good Reader Award and feature in Amazon’s top 100 bestseller list for weeks! So I’d like to take this opportunity to thank the readers, my friends, my fellow crime authors, supporters in the children’s writing world – especially Carnegie Medal Winner, Tanya Landman, who let me take her name in vain - the tremendous book-bloggers, reviewers – a special thanks to Euro-noir critic, Barry Forshaw, who provided me with a glowing quote for my debut at short notice - and members of book clubs – particularly THE Book Club on Facebook - who have all got behind both George and me.
While I was in the midst of debut-launch mayhem, however, I was penning
The Girl Who Broke the Rules
. The book is a complex one and wouldn’t have come together without the help of the following people: