shook his head. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down. ‘Gas pipe, maybe?’
George felt questions bubbling up inside her. She had been in Amsterdam for only five months but the library was an old friend to her now. A place where she could stroll through the halls of her mind in its book-clad gallery; a place where she could sit on the grand stone staircase and be reminded of Cambridge. The eastern wing of East India House – Bushuis library to the students – had stood on the canalside for over a hundred years and had never before, to George’s knowledge, spontaneously combusted.
‘Gas leak? I don’t buy it,’ she said.
Her eye was caught by pieces of A4 paper as they fluttered down from an office on the third floor. This solitary office had been left almost intact, as though somebody had just opened the doors of a doll’s house to reveal what went on inside. George followed the paper’s trajectory downwards until her gaze fell on a middle-aged man in a beige woollen coat with overstuffed shoulder pads that said 1990s Vroom & Dreesman: department store to the middle aged and woefully unimaginative. He looked grimly on the scene and spoke to a uniformed policeman. He made notes in a small pad.
‘Come on,’ she said, pulling Ad from their hiding place by his hand.
George steeled herself to walk towards the man, ignoring the flaming carnage.
A policeman barred her way.
‘Get back behind the cordon, Miss!’ he shouted.
‘I want to speak to the detective,’ she said, mustering as much authority in her voice as she could.
‘This is not a sightseeing tour,’ he said.
George did not hesitate even to look into the policeman’s face. She lunged forward and tapped the man in the beige coat on the shoulder. He turned around. Dark eyebrows arched above large, steel-grey, hooded eyes. He had thick, straight white hair, and the sunken-cheekboned, strong-jawed face of a typical Dutchman, complete with a sharp, triangular nose. She did not know him but she knew his kind.
‘What happened?’ she asked.
‘Get these kids out of here,’ the man said to the uniformed officer.
‘Please tell me,’ George said.
She could see the man appraising her then with those piercing eyes. ‘You’re a detective, right?’ she asked. ‘I’m a student. Social and Behavioural Science. I was meeting people here.’
The uniform placed a heavy hand on her shoulder. ‘Do you want me to arrest you? Because you’re going about it the right way, Missy,’ he said.
‘Please,’ George asked the man in the beige coat. She gave him her big eyes. That usually worked on male tutors his age when her essays were late. ‘They might be hurt.’ She shrugged the uniform off.
Ad tried to pull her away. ‘Come on, George. Let’s go.’
The man cleared his throat and pulled something from his breast pocket. George caught a glimpse of a service pistol strapped close to his armpit. She also noticed he wore no wedding ring and had missed a patch on his neck when shaving.
‘Did you see anything?’ the man asked her, proffering a battered business card.
‘No. I got here after … this.’ She took the card and read it. It said, Senior Inspector Paul van den Bergen, National Crime Squad.
Van den Bergen simply said, ‘Call me if you think of anything,’ and turned away.
Ad pulled George back to the safety of the cordon and their bicycles. He took off his glasses and wiped his streaming eyes. Then he touched her on the chin gently.
‘How did you know he was a detective?’ he asked.
George looked at his soft, pale olive skin, streaked as it was with dirt. He was a wistful country boy in a bad, confused city. He could not have looked more different to Paul van den Bergen. She pulled away from his touch.
‘A lucky guess,’ she said.
He blinked hard at her and put his glasses back on. She knew he knew she was lying.
From his vantage point, high above street level, he could see her returning home. Waving up at the blonde prostitute neighbour. The shutter on his camera clicked as he caught her turning round, unwittingly peering in his direction. He was careful to back out of sight swiftly. It wouldn’t do to rouse her suspicions at this point. And yet he yearned to let her know he was there, thinking of her with both loathing and lust in his heart. Perhaps he could leave her a message … a sign.
He slipped on his jacket and hared down the uncarpeted staircase to catch a glimpse of her before she entered the building and was out of sight. Patting down his hair, he wondered briefly if she would find him appealing if she discovered his obsession with her. She was magnetic. Irresistible. He saw it in other men’s hungry eyes too and that was the problem. They were his competitors. Each and every one of them. They had to be destroyed like the Indian; negated, scratched from life, absorbed into the hellfire. Now you see him. Now you don’t. An angry red cloud of flesh made vapour.
How invincible he had felt when he had pressed the button and made the call. The effect of that small act was monumental. One minute the cardboard box was sitting there, innocently enough. The next … boom. A symbol of Amsterdam’s colonial might had been razed to the ground. The inferno had filled him with joy. It was a curtain of smelted gold, reaching heavenward, casting a holy incense of cordite and human ashes to and fro along the canal. His heart had beat too fast, just how he liked it; adrenalin rinsing the disappointment and stinking mortality from his body.
Now he was observing his muse. His nemesis. He had plans for her.
The laptop’s monitor glared at George, daring her to begin writing her guest post for Het Ogenblik – The Moment. She dragged hard on her cigarette, praying it would somehow peel away the tension to reveal the inspired thoughts beneath.
‘Coffee?’ Jan asked, brandishing a glass percolator jug in her direction.
She hadn’t realised he had been standing over her. The coffee at the bottom of his jug looked black and oily. It had been sitting there all morning.
‘Go on,’ George said.
Jan poured the jug’s contents into the special mug that she insisted he keep behind the counter only for her. George sipped it and grimaced.
‘You make shocking coffee,’ she told him.
‘Nobody comes to the Cracked Pot Coffee Shop for the coffee,’ he said. He peered over her shoulder through smudged Trotsky glasses at the masthead for the blog. ‘What are you writing about?’ he asked.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘That’s the problem. I’m supposed to have done a blogpost about political unrest in the Middle East. I can’t concentrate with everything that’s going on.’
She
