LITMIR.BIZ

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he said.

      But suddenly, Letitia’s grimace blocked up the picture. ‘Hey! Don’t you be thinking I don’t know you’re having a pop at me, you cheeky lickle rarseclart.’

      Her mother snapped her fingers at the camera, and even with the breadth of the North Sea between them, George winced inwardly at the castigatory gesture. She knew she was in the wrong for bitching so blatantly in front of her, and felt instantly guilty for it. Wouldn’t let on to that horrible old cow, though.

      ‘My internet’s down,’ she said, slamming the lid of her laptop shut. Ending a conversation that had quickly soured – though she had been trying her hardest to keep it sweet.

      Glancing at the clock, she just registered the fact that it was gone 11 a.m. and she still hadn’t heard from Van den Bergen when her phone rang. It was Marie on the other end.

      ‘What’s up?’ she asked. ‘Has he forgotten his reading glasses again?’

      But Marie’s voice was thin and stringy, stretched to its limit with angst. ‘The boss has been rushed to hospital. You’d better come quick.’

      The taxi seemed to drive too slowly down the s100, though George could see from the driver’s speedometer that he was flooring it.

      ‘Please hurry!’ she said, reaching forward to grab the man’s shoulder. She withdrew her hand when she spied the navy jumper full of dandruff.

      They took a sharp right off the motorway and left the canal, speeding down Rhijnspoorplein. The clusters of high-rise office blocks blurred into the less densely built-up dual carriageway of Wibautstraat. A tram approached from the left and the lights were changing.

      ‘Put your foot down!’ she shouted.

      ‘No way, missy. Sit tight. I’m not going to kill us both to save thirty seconds.’

      The driver eyeballed her through the rear-view mirror. She could see from the stern promontory of his brow that he wasn’t going to yield. In sullen silence, she sat with folded arms, imagining Van den Bergen breathing his last in the high-dependency unit. Marie, being Marie, hadn’t gone into any great detail and had hung up all too quickly. George ruminated on what gut-wrenching drama might greet her when the taxi finally swung into Eerste Oosterparkstraat.

      The brutalist mid-century-modern block of the hospital sprawled on their left.

      ‘Drop me here.’ George thrust money at the taxi driver and sprinted into the Onze Lieve Vrouw Gasthuis, arriving at the information desk with a tight chest. ‘I’m looking for Chief Inspector Paul van den Bergen,’ she wheezed, determining to quit the clandestine cigarettes she was still snatching when nobody was watching.

      The receptionist looked her up and down. The smile didn’t quite reach her eyes as she gave George the ward location and reminded her that it wasn’t currently visiting time.

      When George arrived on the specialist heart ward, she found Van den Bergen’s bed empty. Grabbing a passing male nurse by the arm, she was dimly aware of tears pricking the backs of her eyes. She shivered with icy dread. ‘Where’s the patient? Where’s Paul van den Bergen?’ she asked. ‘I’m his partner. Please tell me he hasn’t—’

      The male nurse looked down at her hand with a disapproving expression. He gently withdrew his arm from her grip and patted her knuckles sympathetically.

      ‘Don’t worry,’ the nurse said. ‘He’s not dead. He’s too busy grumbling about the “service”, like we’re some kind of hotel and not a hospital. He wouldn’t believe the doctor when he was told he hadn’t had a heart attack.’

      George shook her head. ‘I don’t understand.’

      ‘He’s on the guts ward. Stomach, bowels and liver.’

      With a thundering heartbeat and unsure what to expect, George finally found her lover, looking pale and ruffled in a bed, surrounded by patients who looked far worse than he did, wired up to rather more than a simple blood-pressure cuff and oxygen monitor. She glimpsed the stickers from an earlier ECG on his chest.

      ‘Jesus, Paul! Marie called and told me you’d been rushed in here. She put the fear of God into me. What the hell’s going on? You look like shit.’

      Van den Bergen sighed heavily and bypassed her lips to give her a cheek that was rough with iron-filings stubble.

      ‘Not on the lips. My tongue’s like a fur coat. You wouldn’t believe what they did to me, George. It was inhumane.’ He reached out to caress her face but pulled his finger free of the oxygen cuff, sending the machine’s alarm into overdrive. ‘I thought I’d had a heart attack.’

      George pulled up a chair to his bedside. ‘Why are you on the guts ward if you’re not dying? Have you been poisoned?’

      Van den Bergen’s sharp grey eyes seemed to focus on something far away that George couldn’t see. ‘There was this truck full of trafficked refugees. A little girl had died.’ His hooded lids closed, the lines around his eyes tightening. ‘One minute, I’m trying to get some information out of the bastard of a driver, next minute, he’s pulling an envelope out of his pocket. I don’t know how the hell he did it, the sneaky, agile bastard. He was cuffed!’

      ‘What was in the envelope?’ George took his hand and gently put the oxygen monitor back on the end of his finger.

      ‘It was full of powder.’ His eyes opened and locked with George’s, the ghost of fear still evident in pupils that had shrunk to pinpricks. ‘Anthrax, he said. He threw the stuff all over me.’ Van den Bergen swallowed hard. The digital beep of his pulse sped up. ‘I thought I was a goner, George.’

      Backing away slightly at the thought of contamination, George inhaled sharply. ‘And was it? Anthrax, I mean?’

      He shook his head. ‘Talcum powder, apparently. But I didn’t know that at the time. I felt this unbelievable griping pain in my chest and I just hit the deck. I have a vague memory of medics in biohazard suits and breathing apparatus crawling all over the place. Maybe they tested the powder on site. I have no idea.’ He exhaled heavily. ‘Obviously, it was a hoax.’ He ran a shaking shovel of a hand through the white thatch of his hair. ‘Maybe the arsehole had been using it to blackmail the refugees. How else, as a lone operator, could you get a large group of poorly treated people to be compliant on a long journey?’

      ‘Easier to conceal than a gun,’ George said, suddenly flushing hot as anger engulfed her on behalf of the dead little girl. She imagined the child, sick, terrified and whimpering for help as some moron of a driver threatened her with poison. She pushed the thought aside. For now. ‘But never mind all that. Why did you collapse?’ She stood and poured Van den Bergen a glass of water. Proffered it to him.

      He sipped and winced. Belched audibly. ‘Panic. I thought I’d had a heart attack, but it wasn’t. It was bloody stomach acid, would you believe it? They gave me a gastroscopy.’

      George threw her head back and laughed. ‘At last! About bloody time! And?’

      Van den Bergen growled, pushed the glass back towards her and threw the flimsy hospital covers off the bed.

      ‘Where you going, old man?’ George asked in English, standing quickly so that the blood rushed to her head.

      As he began to rummage in the cabinet beside his bed, George could see that the invalid had been replaced once again by a chief inspector. He pulled out the clothes he had been wearing that morning and plonked them onto the bed. Dark trousers and a plain blue shirt. He stripped off the ugly fawn-coloured support stockings that covered his long, long legs. ‘Gastroscopies are no laughing matter,’ he said, taking out his size thirteens – gleaming from George’s ministrations with shoe polish. He made a spitting noise like a cat with a fur ball stuck in its throat. ‘They shoved a hosepipe down me. A damned hosepipe! With a camera on the end. And I was awake.’

      Taking his arm, George tried to usher him back into bed. ‘Look. Give it up, will you? They

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