The Copycat

by Jake Woodhouse

  ‘I’ve seen him around a bit. One night he got rowdy with us and got us all chucked out. Not seen him since, lucky enough for him.’

  ‘We need to speak to him. Any idea where we can find him?’

  ‘No idea, hardly knew the guy. And like I said already, pretty sure I’ve not seen him since then.’

  He resists all further questioning and eventually we let him go. As we’re walking away he calls out to us. ‘Hey, wanna know why I’m called Snake?’

  ‘No.’

  He sticks his tongue out and waggles it around. And there it is, a split making his tongue slightly forked.

  ‘Botched tongue-tie operation when I was a kid,’ he says. He sticks it out and waggles it again, before walking away, his fist raised, middle finger pointing right at the sky.

  Back at the station we each go our own way, frustrated that yet another lead has just crumpled. But a couple of hours later Beernink comes through for us. He gets me on the phone, telling me he’s pulled the files from his offsite storage and is now sitting in his car in the car park going through them.

  ‘Anything which might tell us of Akkerman’s whereabouts?’ I ask.

  ‘We’ve got a correspondence address which was in use just over nine months ago when Akkerman’s inheritance was finally settled. Do you want it?’

  ‘Phone number, email?’

  ‘Not so far. I’ll carry on going through, if you need …?’

  I get the feeling he wants to go home.

  ‘Give me the address, and if you get anything else then call me back.’

  He tells me and I relay it to Vermeer who punches it into her phone.

  ‘Look at that, less than ten minutes away from the flat Huisman rents. Didn’t you say he used to live in Maastricht?’

  ‘Yeah, and now he’s moved close to his old buddy’s place.’

  ‘And then someone else dies in a way which perfectly matches a murder Huisman only got off from because of an alibi given to him by his BFF.’

  I check the time; we’ve got a little over thirty minutes till I’m supposed to be meeting the man who handled the sublet.

  ‘Think we’ve got time to check it out?’

  ‘Let’s do it,’ Vermeer says.

  Soon we’re turning into a street west of the Jordaan. The house we need is one of a row of council houses, many with Turkish flags hanging limp in the windows. Last year the Netherlands government turned away a series of Turkish politicians who’d come to the country to whip up support in their up-coming election, causing the then Turkish prime minister to compare the country as a whole to Nazi Germany. Unsurprisingly there’s been tension here ever since.

  ‘Not the kind of place I’d expect someone like Akkerman to live,’ Vermeer says as we near the number we’re looking for.

  ‘Because he’s not Turkish?’

  ‘Because he’s surely got more money than this, what with his inheritance.’

  We find the number. No Turkish flags on the property, which is a good sign.

  Vermeer presses the doorbell and steps back.

  Footsteps in the hallway, the gravelly slide of a chain, the creak of the door. The woman standing there is my age or older with long brown hair tied up in a loose bun, a harried look about her face. She’s holding a wooden spoon in one hand and a bouquet of supermarket flowers, dead but still in the wrapper, in the other. She also has eyes the same colour as Tanya’s. But I’m not thinking about Tanya. I’m just not. Maybe I should be thinking of Sabine instead.

  ‘Yes?’ she asks, looking between us.

  ‘We’re looking for Jan Akkerman,’ Vermeer says, holding out her ID.

  ‘Who?’

  Vermeer pulls out a mugshot I recognize from the Lucie Muller file.

  ‘Oh, him. He died four months ago. Didn’t you know?’

  Oscar

  The street lights are flickering on as I walk onto the small triangle of grass. The man I’d spoken to earlier about subletting a flat had chosen this place to meet. I’d tried to suggest somewhere but he’d been adamant: his rules or not at all.

  We’d hardly spoken on the drive, the frustration at finding we’d been chasing a dead man keeping us both self-contained. It also threw into stark relief just how much we’ve got riding on this meet yielding results; if this fails, then we’ve got pretty much nothing. Also, I’ve not been able to sneak away and top up today, and I’m starting to feel a little jittery.

  Which is bad because now all I have to do is wait. I choose a bench and try to look the part. Vermeer had earlier critiqued my attire, but as I’d stepped out of the car she’d commented that I actually looked the part. I gave her the middle finger, which just made her smile. All told, I’m starting to like her.

  The air seems to be thickening around me. There’s an overflowing bin nearby and something’s rustling inside it. A young couple stroll hand in hand, oblivious to anything but each other. It reminds me I’m due to meet Sabine in a couple of hours. Which leads me on to Tanya, what Nellie had said earlier. I shouldn’t be feeling guilty about meeting Sabine, and yet there it is: guilt in all its ugly self-torturing, gut-churning glory. It swirls around me, swirls inside me, and before I know what I’m doing I’ve pulled my phone out and am thumb-typing a message to Tanya, which, once started, never seems to end. I read it back, then delete it all. My clammy hands shake as I put my phone away. An old man carrying a crumpled plastic bag shuffles painfully past and a young woman on a moped drones by.

  A few minutes later a man slides onto the bench next to me. He’s short, wearing a similar tracksuit to the man Rashid had ID’d. He smells like he hasn’t washed in a while. He’s got a black string bracelet and doesn’t look at me when he speaks.

  ‘Help you?’

  ‘We spoke earlier about the flat.’

  ‘What you need?’ he asks.

  ‘I need to rent my flat,’ I tell him.

  ‘What you need, heroin, crack, meth?’ he says again.

  ‘I’m good,’ I tell him.

  ‘Heroin?’ he asks one more time.

  I shake my head.

  He finally takes a long, disappointed look at me, then gets up and walks away.

  Half an hour later I send the man I’m waiting for a message, asking where he is. The little bubble pops up so I know he’s typing a response. It seems to take an age before disappearing again. I wait for the message but none comes. I wait a few more minutes, the jitteriness increasing with each passing moment, before deciding I’ve waited long enough.

  I reach the car, parked three streets away to avoid detection, where Vermeer’s just finishing yet another phone conversation. She hangs up when she spots me, and, seeing the look on my face, gets out. Not for the first time I wonder who it is she’s always talking to.

  ‘No show?’ she asks.

  I shake my head.

  ‘This case,’ she finally says. ‘Jesus. What now?’

  ‘I don’t know. I feel like we’re hitting a wall here.’

  ‘There must be a way to find this guy. He can’t have just disappeared –’

  My phone goes off.

  ‘Hang on, maybe this is him.’ I pull it out to see it’s a message from the man. It’s almost eloquent in its simplicity.

  FUCK U COP

  It’s followed moments later by a second message, a smiling turd emoji.

  It starts as a simultaneous pressing in and a swelling up from somewhere deep inside. My heart’s racing, I’m freezing hot, I feel sick as the raging black wolf erupts inside me. The jitteriness goes into overdrive. My vision clouds as I blaze to black …

  I’m trembling, sitting on the kerb. I can hear barking. My heart ramps up again, before I realize it has passed. The barking is Kush in the car.

  ‘Jesus,’ Vermeer says.

  She’s sitting beside me, and she removes her arm, which I now sense was over my shoulders. ‘You okay?’

  There’s a weird taste in my mouth, sour and metallic.

  ‘Yeah … I’m all right.’ />
  She looks at me. There’s concern there. Doubt too. She hands me my phone, the corner dented, the screen snaked with jagged cracks.

  ‘You threw it at the ground,’ she says in explanation. I press the home button and the screen still lights up, the messages still just visible.

  ‘Guess that Oscar isn’t in the running after all,’ Vermeer says, having looked at them.

  I take a big, long breath in. I put my head back and stare at the sky.

  Police Brutality

  I’m sat on a bench up by the Lekkeresluis waiting for Sabine to turn up. For some reason I keep thinking that Tanya will appear and see me with Sabine. I try to shake that thought off, but before I can I hear Nellie’s voice in my head telling me to contact her before it’s too late.

  Earlier Vermeer dropped me off at the houseboat and the first thing I did was to go on the roof and roll a joint. Being unable to medicate during the day meant I’d succumbed easily to the rage, the black wolf, the thing that isn’t me but seems to be trapped inside. The darkness within. If I’d been able to keep my cannabinoid levels up during the day it wouldn’t have happened with such severity, and the come-up would have been long enough for me to have done something about it. But I’d been caught up in it all, the investigation taking over my mind, and I’d welcomed it, felt good about doing the work again. Part of me thought that I was strong enough now, that I could do this on my own. Seems that part of me was wrong.

  Up and down the canal, elm trees are scattering leaves, their delicate forms picked up by the street lights, and Kush has been amusing himself by staring at the waterbirds that float past every so often, their jerky head movements contrasting with their stately glide. He freezes when he spots one and I notice his legs tremble a bit, as if he’s holding himself back from jumping down the metre or so into the water, swimming over and tearing them to shreds.

  ‘Hey … Jaap?’

  Kush explodes into an orgy of barking and I turn to see Sabine. She’s in tight jeans, a long-sleeved tunic which hangs down past her knees and has a scarf wrapped round her throat. Those bruises must have shown up. She looks worried by the ferocity of Kush’s reaction. Strange, I’ve not seen him like this before. Maybe it’s just because he didn’t hear her coming either. I manage to calm him down a bit, though I see Sabine’s still nervous. Whether about meeting me or because of Kush I can’t tell. But then she was the one to contact me, so I just need to get out of my head and say something before she thinks I’m an idiot.

  ‘Sure you haven’t been followed?’

  Sabine laughs and it’s like a musical scale rising up and down. It all seems so surreal. Yesterday I was hauling a man off her and today we’re out on a sort of date.

  ‘Could all be a plot. First I’ll seduce you and then get you to kill him for me,’ she says.

  ‘Been done before. Many times.’

  She sits down next to me. Kush eyes her suspiciously, then goes back to scanning the water. We chat for a bit, and it seems surprisingly easy given how out of practice I am.

  ‘So, is it exciting being a cop?’ she asks.

  I watch a few more leaves tumble through the air as I think of everything that has happened today, every glimmer of hope fading away to nothing. The knowledge that a man we suspect of being involved in two separate murders has disappeared and we’ve so far been unable to find him is not exactly exciting. Intensely frustrating would be a better phrase.

  ‘I’m not a cop any more.’

  ‘Really? You look too young to be retired.’

  ‘Hormone treatment. Amazing what you can buy off the internet from dodgy Russian websites.’

  ‘Trouser trouble?’

  ‘Not those kind of hormones.’

  She gives me a playful nudge. God, how I’ve missed this. I manage to stop myself from telling her that. We’ve only been here twenty minutes or so, bit too early for that sort of thing. Just hold off, I tell myself.

  A slight breeze blows her hair across her face and she flips it away with a brief shake of her head. Exactly like Tanya used to do. I suddenly wonder how I’ve ended up on a date with a woman who is so similar.

  ‘Something wrong?’ she asks. ‘You’re looking at me strangely.’

  ‘Nothing, it’s just …’

  ‘Just what?’

  It would take so long to explain. And I don’t really want to. I’m sure she doesn’t want to hear it anyway. Talking about your ex on a first date isn’t the smoothest of moves.

  ‘Never mind. Wanna do something fun?’

  ‘As long as it’s legal.’

  ‘I’m a cop, remember.’

  ‘Ex-cop, I thought?’

  I think about that for a moment. Kush’s nose is leading him over the canal edge, a floating bird the target. I tighten the leash.

  ‘It’s complicated. Shall we?’

  The resonant, jangling Westerkerk bells strike one in the morning.

  ‘You mind?’

  Sabine pulls a cigarette out of her jeans, now a crumpled heap by the bed. She props herself up on the pillow.

  ‘Go for it.’

  I wonder about joining her with a joint, but I’m startled to realize I don’t feel I need one. The power of a good evening out with an even better end. The only downer was Kush, who’d been in a stroppy mood all night, to the point when we’d got back here I’d put him to bed in the bathroom and closed the door. I wonder if dogs get jealous. He certainly hasn’t taken to Sabine. Well, tough. He’ll have to cope.

  Next to me Sabine’s lighter flickers to life briefly.

  ‘Never slept with a cop before. Not bad.’

  Earlier in the evening I’d found out she was ticklish. I apply that knowledge now until she’s squealing for me to stop.

  ‘That’s police brutality,’ she finally says when she can talk again. ‘I might have to report you.’

  ‘Good luck with that.’

  She finishes her cigarette, taking the butt to the kitchen, and I notice as she steps out of the room a mark on her lower back I’d not seen earlier, a line of raised scar tissue. When she’s back in bed I ask her about it.

  ‘That guy, Tom.’

  ‘The one I met?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  The mood’s changed now, and I regret asking.

  ‘It’s funny,’ she says after a while. ‘When I first met him I had this strong sense of him being the one, y’know? And it was good. We were good together, for the first six months or so anyway. You’d think that would be enough time to get to know someone, but it clearly wasn’t.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘It was weird. The change came so suddenly. We’d gone to the beach at Zandvoort, you know it?’

  I’d been there with Tanya, and I remember with crystal clarity. It was the last time we’d gone anywhere together. ‘Yeah, been there a few times.’

  ‘I liked it there. I used to go as a kid, and I wanted to share that with Tom. I remember we had grilled fish for lunch, and a beer. In the time I’d known him Tom never drank, said he didn’t like the taste of alcohol. But he didn’t mind if I did, and I was feeling great; here I was on a sunny day, out by my favourite beach with the man I was starting to think I loved. So I had a beer with lunch, and he joined me. I didn’t think much of it, but then he ordered another one, and another. I was a bit surprised, but he seemed happy and we were talking about the future and … Well, you can probably guess what happened. We were heading back. I was a little tipsy but it had hardly seemed to touch Tom. At the station we bumped into an old colleague of mine, a guy I’d worked with a few years before and we’d chatted for a few minutes whilst we waited for our train, just the usual kind of thing. Tom changed during the ride back; he got quiet, sullen almost, and I wondered if he wasn’t feeling well. Maybe the fish, or just the fact he’d had a few beers and wasn’t really used to it. So anyway, later that evening, I was getting a glass of wine from the fridge, and I closed the door and got a real shock: he was standing in the kitchen doorway and there was
something different about him, about his face. I asked if he was all right, and he just lost it. I mean full-on-crazy lost it. He started ranting and raving, accusing me of fucking the old work colleague. That’s not normal, right? You might say “seeing” or “sleeping with”, but he was insistent that I was “fucking” the guy behind his back. So we argued. I told him he was just being paranoid, that he needed to calm down, but of course that just made him madder. But he didn’t hit me that night. The next morning he was so sorry, apologized over and over, begged me to forgive him. He blamed the alcohol, said that he couldn’t handle it, which is why he didn’t drink, and that I wasn’t to let him drink again.

  ‘If I’d known about alcoholics then I would have got out right away, but I didn’t. I told myself he was sorry. I believed him when he said it wasn’t going to happen again, that it was going to be okay. Stupid. But it was okay for a couple of weeks, and I was almost forgetting it when he came home later than usual one night. Which is when this happened.’ She reaches her hand round to her back. ‘I threw him out after that, but he kept coming back late at night, banging on the door. I had to call the police, your lot. Have to say I wasn’t that impressed; this guy just told me to stay inside. So I terminated the rent and got another place. Seemed like the only thing to do.’

  ‘But then he found you again.’

  ‘That was just bad luck. I was walking home from work and I heard someone call my name. He was at that bar, standing outside on his own, having a drink.’

  ‘You think it was?’

  ‘Was what?’

  ‘Bad luck?’

  ‘Well, it wasn’t good luck. Unless you mean because we got to meet …’

  I agree with her. But what I really meant was, was it simply bad luck Tom had been there on her route home? Or something else. Something more akin to a plan?

  I fall asleep thinking I might just look him up on the system tomorrow.