The Copycat

by Jake Woodhouse

  ‘Yeah, it all seems a bit different around here.’

  ‘You don’t know the half of it. Beving got promoted to station chief.’

  ‘Whoa.’

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  I make the introductions, and Jansen takes us through the airport-style security, another new addition, and into the building itself. Jansen’s talking to Rashid, explaining what’s going to happen, and I lag behind, shaken by the flashback, already regretting my decision to come here.

  We turn the corner, past the first of two main incident rooms, and down the corridor to the stairs which lead to the basement, where the main interrogation suite is. Jansen and Rashid are ahead of me, their heads just disappearing down the steps when the lift door opens. Lazy man’s option. Two uniforms get out and I duck in and hit the basement button. The lift pings, and the doors slide shut. Next to me a female officer holds a large pile of papers. The top one catches my eye – a crime-scene photo. In it a naked body is kneeling on the ground in a pool of blood. The tag across the top reads MARIANNE KLEINE. I stare at it and all of a sudden I’m stepping into a room in another time, another place. The victim, Lucie Muller, is naked, kneeling on the ground in a pool of blood, her torso bent forward over her knees. Her forehead touches the ground in a weird parody of worship, and her arms are straight by her sides, hands by her feet. I move forward on weightless legs, moving round to try and see her face. But her hair is covering it, falling down into the blood, spreading out like roots.

  ‘Sir, you all right?’ The voice jolts me back. I’m standing in the lift, the officer with the photo gone, another one holding the lift door open and looking at me with concern.

  I can’t believe I’ve had a second flashback within minutes of the first. That’s unusual. And doesn’t bode well. I need to get out of here and get to Joel’s as soon as I can.

  ‘Yeah, fine,’ I say, taking a couple of breaths. ‘Never been better.’

  I catch up with them in the basement, after another uniform has scrutinized my pass to make sure I’m not a terrorist, or worse, an undercover reporter.

  ‘There you are, thought I’d lost you.’ Jansen’s just opening the door to interview room number five.

  ‘Listen, there’s something I need to tell you. That case you’re working on, is it the Kleine case?’

  He stops and turns, hand on the door knob. ‘Yeah, why?’

  But suddenly I don’t know what to say. Or rather, I know what to say, I just don’t want to say it. I feel as if I’m perfectly balanced between two worlds. Jansen’s looking at me with raised eyebrows.

  ‘Look, we’re on the clock here,’ he says. ‘I’ve got less than twenty minutes before I either have to charge the guy or release him so …’

  ‘Okay, let’s get this over with first.’

  He gives me a sceptical look, then nods. ‘Rashid’s in the viewing room.’

  I join Rashid and we watch through the two-way mirror as Jansen enters the interview room. Gangsta-slumped in a chair is a North African man, Moroccan most likely. The suspect’s wearing a white tracksuit, with double gold stripes snaking down the arms and trouser legs. He’s got tramlines buzzed into his hair and a single stud winks from his ear when he moves his head.

  Jansen steps into the room, pulls out the chair and sits down. He flips open a file and after quickly scanning it starts talking. Almost immediately the Moroccan shakes his head in response.

  We’ve got no sound so I find the audio switch and flip it on.

  ‘So then what?’ Jansen’s saying. ‘Then you just happened to be there? Right at that moment?’

  ‘Bro, like I told you already.’

  Jansen nods slowly, a sage pondering great insight. A good interviewer is like an actor, the role you play dictated by the situation, by the suspect themselves. Sometimes it takes playing several roles before you find the one that unlocks something in them.

  Jansen pulls out a couple of photographs from the file and slides them across. He taps one of them with his forefinger.

  ‘See, the thing is we’ve got these images of you less than two streets away from the place where the burglary and assault took place.’

  Tracksuit refuses to even look at them. Suddenly Jansen jumps up from his chair, shoots his hand across the table, cups the man’s skull and forces his head forward so his nose is millimetres from the images. Fair to say Jansen’s just switched roles to bad cop.

  ‘And you see that time stamp?’ he shouts at him. ‘Can you see that? Huh? It fits exactly. Exactly.’

  He releases him and sits back as if nothing’s happened, flips further through his file.

  ‘And the money that was found at your flat …’ Jansen is all calm business now, as if he’s a civil servant rubber-stamping traffic-light legislation. He finds the photo he’s after and slides it across. Rashid and I lean forward, just enough to catch the image of two evidence bags with fat rolls of notes. ‘This money, where did it come from?’

  Tracksuit sucks his teeth, but just stares at the wall behind Jansen.

  When it’s clear Tracksuit has nothing to say, Jansen exits the room and pops his head into ours.

  ‘Okay, zero hour. I’ve got to charge or release. But what we’ve got is pretty circumstantial and without something else I’m most likely going to have to release him.’ He gives Rashid an expectant look.

  ‘If he convicted, do I get money back?’ Rashid asks.

  ‘That’s hard to say at this stage, but to be honest it will take a while for this to get to court and –’

  ‘Yes,’ Rashid says, still staring through the mirror. ‘It is him. He is man who assaulted me and stole my coffee machines.’

  Rashid seems to have gone from unsure to very sure in a quick space of time. Jansen throws a questioning glance my way. The only answer I can give is a shrug.

  ‘Okay. We’ll charge him now.’

  By the time it’s all wrapped up and I’ve sent Rashid off into the night Jansen suggests we get a drink. Up in the deserted canteen we grab a seat by the window overlooking the intersection. The glass is frosted with condensation and changes colour with the traffic lights just outside.

  ‘So …’ Jansen says as he blows on his coffee.

  The Red Bull hisses as I pull the ring. I take a couple of large gulps. Tastes of chemicals, but they’re always promising wings, and right now I need all the help I can get; flashbacks and a lack of the one thing capable of stopping them, cannabis, is not a good combination. Coming here was a mistake, and I should have left just now with Rashid. But I can’t unsee what I saw.

  ‘The case you’re working is the Marianne Kleine case?’

  Jansen nods and very discreetly checks his watch.

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Have you heard of Lucie Muller?’

  ‘No, should I have?’

  One of the canteen staff drops a tray, and cutlery jangles and clatters to the ground.

  I suddenly feel split in two: one part urging me on, the other telling me to get up and walk out, leave all this behind. Because the last thing I want is to get sucked back in. But I think of Lucie Muller, and the man I put away for her death, Sander Klaasen. I take a breath, then I begin to talk.

  Lucie Muller

  ‘Fuck,’ Jansen says as I finish. He breathes out, shaking his head and grimacing all at the same time.

  The canteen staff are clearing out the last plates of unwanted food and a man in a dark blue boiler suit is mopping the floor morosely. Jansen leans back in his chair and stares at the ceiling, trying to take in all that I’ve just told him. My throat’s dry and I shake the can, upending it for the last tiny warm dribble. The window cycles between green and red.

  ‘How sure are you?’ Jansen finally asks.

  ‘About the way she was killed? Hundred per cent. The victim in that case was found exactly as your victim was, naked, same posture, and I’ll bet all the blood came from a cut across the throat?’

  ‘Yeah, it did. So the first question’s going
to be has the man you put away been let out of prison?’

  ‘He got thirty years, so it’s unlikely. I guess if he’d been on best behaviour, there’s an outside chance he might just have got an early release. But the victim in the case was the daughter of a judge, and I doubt there’s a parole board anywhere in the country he couldn’t influence, if it ever came to that.’

  ‘Who’s the judge?’

  ‘Koen Muller.’

  Jansen’s pensive, processing the info I’ve dropped into his lap. Which on the one hand is potentially good, a lead in a stalled case. On the other, the implications are anything but.

  ‘So what have we got on our hands here, a copycat killer?’

  Copycat. Not a word anyone wants to hear in relation to a murder. People kill for all sorts of reasons, usually money and sexual jealousy of one type or another. But killing just to imitate another murderer indicates a special kind of warped mind. Not one I want anything to do with. I’m about to tell him I need to go when he speaks again.

  ‘Listen, I’m working this case with Inspector Vermeer. She needs to hear this –’

  ‘But not from me. You can look up the case to get the full details.’

  ‘It’s so weird we didn’t get any red flags; we ran all the details through the system and no match came up. I can’t believe no one here remembers the case either. Surely someone would?’

  I don’t know about that. I worked it with my friend and colleague Hank de Vries, and later on in the investigation with Station Chief Smit. Right now, the only thing keeping Hank breathing is a life-support machine at the AMC, the Academic Medical Center, and Station Chief Smit … well, he isn’t breathing at all. I brace for another flashback which thankfully doesn’t come.

  ‘Because of the bizarre way she’d been killed the circle was kept very small,’ I tell him. ‘There were probably only a handful of us who knew the full story. I imagine Judge Muller had a hand in that as well.’

  ‘Makes sense. Vermeer’s managed to keep the details of Kleine’s death out of the press so far. How long that will last, though, I don’t know.’

  ‘Good luck with that. We managed it back then, but seven years ago was like a different age.’

  ‘The system, though, that should have alerted us. That just feels wrong … like someone was trying to hide it.’

  ‘And I thought I was paranoid. You know what systems are like, someone didn’t enter the details correctly or screwed up some field or other.’

  Jansen rubs his hands over his face before breathing out another long sigh. I wonder how much sleep he’s been getting.

  ‘You’re right. Fucking overworked is all. But I really need to get Vermeer; she’ll want to hear this.’

  ‘First thing I’d check is if there’s any link between Lucie Muller and your victim.’

  ‘Yeah, I’ll look into that. Unlikely, though. Marianne Kleine would still have been a teenager during your case.’

  ‘How old?’

  ‘She was twenty-five. And she was already the founder of a tech start-up that investors have put millions into. Kids these days … If you haven’t made yourself into a billionaire with some world-changing idea by the time you’re thirty, then you’re basically a total loser.’

  ‘If you haven’t managed that you can always become a cop.’

  We both do the mirthless laugh at that one.

  ‘My dad told me not to,’ Jansen says. ‘Maybe I should have listened … Anyway, Vermeer. I’ll go get her.’

  ‘Listen, there’s a bit of paper at home waiting for me to sign,’ I tell Jansen. ‘Once I do I’m out, for good.’

  ‘All the more reason for you to stay now and speak to her.’

  I should walk out now; my arm’s throbbing again, I’ve just had two bad flashbacks, and unless I get going soon Joel will have gone to bed. So I open my mouth to tell him no, only to hear it betray me. ‘You’ve got ten minutes.’

  Every investigative cop gets one.

  One case that seeps into you like a devastating chronic disease. For some reason I got more than one, but of those Lucie Muller’s death was probably the worst.

  The case broke just after three p.m. The station was quiet and I was engaged in a classic bit of work avoidance. The work I was avoiding was a final report on a pointless theft case I’d been assigned, which I had no hope of ever resolving, and the avoidance consisted of scrunching up bits of paper and trying to lob them into the bin three desks away. My score at the point the call came in was zero, paper balls scattered far and wide, everywhere but the bin itself. So I was all over the new distraction.

  The body of a young female had been found in a flat in the Nieuw-West. The officer on scene gave me the rundown: a neighbour had noticed blood seeping under the door to flat seven on the second floor of a four-storey block. I got there less than twenty minutes later.

  She was lying in a misshapen pool of her own blood, slumped in the pose that, when it’d been described to me over the phone hadn’t made any sense, but which made even less when I actually saw it. The reason for all the blood became clear when the forensics arrived and lifted her body – the slit across her throat like an awful grin. I kept thinking of abattoirs and couldn’t get the word ‘slaughter’ out of my mind.

  I called into the station, spoke to Station Chief Smit, and he put Hank de Vries on it with me. We were young, we were outraged, we were the Gods of Righteousness and we worked the case like it was everything.

  But right up front we hit a complication: the victim turned out to be Lucie Muller, daughter of the prominent judge, known for his hardline attitude to criminals in a system that was famous worldwide for its softer approach, favouring rehabilitation over incarceration. Such a cruel death as Lucie Muller suffered doesn’t leave any room for irony, but still.

  The first question to tackle was why Lucie would be living in an area better known for immigrant unrest than housing the well-heeled offspring of a rich and powerful man such as Judge Muller. After a bit of digging it turned out the answer was she’d rebelled against her privileged upbringing by slumming it the way only rich kids can. A rebellion that brought her into contact with the kind of people she probably had no real idea, ironically given her father’s occupation, of just how dangerous they were.

  One of whom, the man we suspected was her killer, had been caught on CCTV entering the building prior to her murder, and leaving not long after. But as he’d taken the precaution of wearing a cap and hoody, and knew exactly where the cameras were angled, we had no image of his face.

  So we started with Robert Huisman, Lucie’s on/off boyfriend and rising star in the local heroin scene. At one point we found evidence she may actually have been involved, playing bagman, or bagwoman, for him on occasion. Needless to say that never made it into the trial documents. It didn’t take us long to establish that given the height and build the hoodied man could easily have been Huisman.

  Only Huisman himself seemed to have skipped town, and he proved hard to find, further upping him on our list of People We’d Very Much Like To Talk To. In the end it took us two days to track him down and by the time we had him in custody we were sure we’d have the case wrapped up in a matter of hours.

  Which is when Huisman kicked back in his chair and slapped down his alibi with a smirk on his greasy low-browed face.

  He claimed he’d been spending a few days with a mate of his down in the countryside just north of Maastricht. Now I’m not saying that inspectors have a monopoly on sniffing out bullshit, but over the years your nose gets pretty attuned to it. And his alibi was filling both our noses with that pungent, freshly laid scent that often permeates suspect interviews. But process dictates, so we followed up, driving all the way down there and locating the friend in question.

  Which is where things got tricky.

  The friend, a vermin-like creature called Jan Akkerman, swore Huisman had been with him the whole time. We applied pressure, telling him about things such as Obstruction of Justice and Perjury and Acce
ssory to Murder, but Akkerman didn’t budge, wouldn’t change his statement, and sat there like a self-satisfied Buddha grinning down on our folly from the fucking Bodhi tree itself.

  Because, he’d said, he could prove it.

  He unearthed a video, complete with time stamp, which was subsequently checked and verified. On it, and at almost the exact same time that Lucie was bowing her head into a pool of her own blood, another woman was bowing her head, only this time the destination was Huisman’s dick. As Lucie Muller slipped out of this world her boyfriend was getting sucked off by one of two young women 200 miles from the crime scene. Turned out both men pulled a scam several times a year where they held auditions for women to ‘star’ in their latest porn films. They claimed to own an online portal for which the lucky candidates would make videos and receive a share of any profits. Of course, to get the job all candidates would have to get past the interview stage. The men saw to it that the interviews were rigorous, interactive and in-depth, filmed by one whilst the other took a more hands-on role in the process.

  We had no choice but to hand it over to Vice and move on. The old cop cliché of the first forty-eight hours being crucial is sort of true, and we were well over that. The case started floundering. We felt like fish in a drying riverbed. First there were leads that went nowhere, then there were just no leads. Desperation started to grip us. We were inching closer to the unthinkable, an unsolvable murder. And the pressure weighing down on us from above, pressure that was undoubtedly initiated by Judge Muller himself, was increasing exponentially. It felt like gravity itself was suddenly no longer obeying its own law.

  ‘Finished with that?’

  I look up to see mop man pointing to the can in front of me. I pick it up and toss it into the black bag he’s holding open. He ties it up and shuffles away.

  We’d had to go back to the drawing board. Alternative theories were tossed around, some plausible, some just about possible, some utterly preposterous. We pushed ourselves to think outside whatever box we were obviously trapped in, but still we were going nowhere. Joel once told me it’s hard to see what’s on the label when you’re in the jar itself. Then Station Chief Smit, under pressure himself, took the unusual move of joining our investigative team. We didn’t like it, but then again it was clear we needed help.