Free The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die by Marnie Riches Page A

drinks and thirty euros.’
    As the detectives stood to leave, Klaus was quick to show them out, deftly pushing the door to his bedroom shut en route.
    Breakfast
à trois
felt distinctly awkward to George. Together, they sat at the kitchen table in silence. Ad stared at the screen of his laptop, intently reading the responses to George’s blogpost. Jasper sat playing with his balls through his pyjama bottoms and slurping his coffee loudly.
    ‘Do you have to do that?’ she asked him.
    Jasper shrugged, stretched out his legs and farted loudly. He laughed heartily at himself. George wished he would go back into his room or go out. Men like Jasper were deliberately provocative. Looking for a reaction. She knew she was an easy target for a wind-up.
    Ad looked up from the laptop. ‘You’re a pig, Jas. You’re making the milk in my coffee curdle.’
    ‘What is all this anyway?’ he asked.
    George told him about her blogpost and al Badaar’s response.
    Jasper gave a low whistle. ‘You shouldn’t be running the gauntlet with such a psycho,’ he said, slamming his coffee cup down onto the table. He didn’t use a coaster.
    George’s eyes locked on the cup like a heat-seeking missile. ‘Use a bloody coaster, Jasper!’ she said. ‘Anyway, this matters. Some lunatic is out there, co-ordinating a bunch of suicide bombers. We’re all in danger.’
    Jasper stood up suddenly. George wondered if he was going to poke fun at her in some way but instead, he left the kitchen. Moments later, he reappeared, clutching a piece of paper.
    ‘Look,’ he said, placing the paper on the table.
    It was a computer print-out of a photo. The colour photo was of a severed foot.
    ‘What’s that?’ Ad asked, grimacing and putting his half-eaten sandwich on his plate.
    George snatched up the print-out. The foot was large and veined. The toenails were neatly trimmed. The owner was clearly brown-skinned. There was an ornate tattoo around the ankle that looked like a pattern drawn by a henna artist.
    ‘It’s gone viral among the med students this morning,’ Jasper boasted.
    ‘Whose foot is this?’ George asked.
    Jasper flung himself back onto his chair and rocked backwards. ‘It’s a photo of the only intact body part recovered from the Bushuis library bombing. They call the tattoo an anatomic variation. Somebody somewhere did that tattoo or has seen that tattoo. The police wanted to keep the foot under wraps until they had identified the bomber. But apparently some old detective pissed off
someone
in the forensics team. So s
omeone
leaked it and it’s doing the rounds on email.’
    George’s heart started to beat wildly. ‘How much do you know about what forensics have found out?’ she asked. Jasper had a propensity to show off. She looked into his bright blue eyes and wondered how well her bullshit detector was working after such a late night, surfing the web for mad Mujahidin, self-defence tactics and celebrity stalkers.
    Jasper shrugged. ‘Apparently the human remains had to be scooped up into bags. Apart from some teeth and this foot. They’ve not found a DNA match on the national criminal database but they’ve narrowed it down to an Asian man.’
    ‘No surprise there if it’s fundamentalist Muslims,’ Ad said. ‘That tattoo looks familiar though. Maybe it’s common.’
    ‘I think they’re going to try to place the fillings in a couple of the molars. Pinpoint the country where they were originally put in the bomber’s mouth. They can tell the bomber’s age from the teeth and ossification of the bones in the foot. They can start to build a bit of a profile from there.’
    Yes, he was showing off now. George could tell. But it didn’t have the feel of bullshit.
    ‘How do you know all this, Jasper?’ George asked, sniffing hard.
    Ad chuckled and pushed Jasper in the elbow. ‘He’s shagging none other than Doctor Marianne de Koninck, head honcho on the forensics team!’ he said. ‘Sender of terrible Santa cards,