‘What is this?’ she demands of the room at large.
Rutte steps up. ‘We received reports of shots being fired.’
‘Here?’ She’s incredulous.
‘The caller said they were here for treatment and one of the other patients has gone crazy with a gun. They said there were shots fired. Have you not heard anything?’
‘No. That’s … No one here has a gun. We wouldn’t let a bunch of druggies … patients walk around with guns.’
‘So you’ve heard nothing?’
‘No, and they’re not allowed phones either. So I don’t know how they could have called. Seems to me you’ve been the victim of some kind of joke.’
Rutte stares at her for a few seconds. Then he gets on the phone and has a quick conversation with dispatch. I’m hoping he doesn’t decide to pack it up and I’m just wondering what I can do to influence his decision when he turns and addresses the team.
‘Right, we’re going in. Be prepared.’
‘No, wait, you can’t do that.’
‘I suggest you both wait outside, for your own safety.’
She looks like she’s going to argue, then gives in. As she and the male receptionist walk past Vermeer moves so that her face is out of view.
We’re soon on the move through the corridors, following Rutte’s team, which is a precision-engineered machine, and we make progress clearing the building. Halfway through we reach a door with TREATMENT ROOMS written on it. We go through to another corridor with doors on both sides. Each door has a clipboard hanging from a hook, and on each clipboard is a name. Rutte’s team clear the first room, checking the patient over for guns or a gunshot wound.
I spot, further down the corridor, a door with Huisman’s name on it. I catch Vermeer’s eye. She nods. By the time the team are at Huisman’s door, one officer each side of the door frame, I’m starting to sweat.
They do their countdown hand gestures, then one of them reaches out and turns the handle. Ten seconds later one of them yells ‘Clear’ from inside and they exit and move on to the next. Soon the FRU are moving round the corner like a human millipede.
‘I think I heard something suspicious in there, did you?’
‘I did indeed,’ Vermeer says.
I close the door behind us. It’s sparse inside, with only a small window set high in the wall. There’s a toilet and washbasin in a corner, and a table with a book on it, and a single bed with a man lying on his back.
By now I recognize him.
It’s been years, and the years haven’t been kind, but it’s definitely him.
This is the Huisman we’ve been looking for.
We’ve found him, I think to myself, the thought repeating in an ever-spinning loop.
I find myself soaring, giddy with it all.
‘Did you send the message like we discussed?’
‘Uhhh … You’re not going to believe this. I got all the gear together, went over there, but …’
‘But what?’
‘It was already done. It’s burning right now.’
‘What? How can that be?’
‘I don’t know, I just don’t know.’
‘Don’t tell me you don’t know. Jesus. Are we still in control of this thing?’
‘Right now, I’m not sure.’
He hangs up and puts the phone back in the drawer. The desk tilts, the room spins. He picks up his desk phone, takes a few deep breaths, then dials a number. One he’d hoped he was never going to have to call.
Fire
It’s definitely Huisman, the man we’ve been chasing all this time.
We step towards the bed and he lets out a low groan before his head jerks up suddenly, as if an electrical current’s passing through him. He’s held there for a few seconds before his muscles go slack and his head drops back down. He groans again and I realize he’s strapped down with thick fabric bands.
‘He looks like shit,’ Vermeer says. ‘Not sure he’s faking it.’
Heroin withdrawal’s no joke. I once sat with an ex-colleague who’d had to shoot up undercover and just couldn’t seem to kick the habit once he returned to desk work. The withdrawal itself broadly fits into three stages. In the first eight hours after the final dose the craving starts to take hold, and people often seem to get irritable at even the smallest things. Then it starts to go downhill in stage two. The stomach cramps, the profuse sweating, the desperate desire to move increasing in intensity over the next day or so, the unbearable knowledge that there’s a simple remedy to stop all this just a needle prick away. The third and final stage can last for days: muscles spasms, diarrhoea, vomiting, your body alternating between a high fever and a death-like chill till you’d claw your own eyes out in despair. Some veterans add in a fourth phase: relapse.
From the looks of it, though, Huisman’s in the second. I step closer and see his T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms are dark with sweat. He also smells like he’s been sweating for some time. He turns his head and opens his eyes slowly like it’s a struggle. The whites of his eyes are heavily bloodshot and have the manic quality of a person seeing things.
‘No …’ he says, his voice like paper sliding off paper. ‘No more.’
You can see from his eyes we’re not getting anything out of him for a while. Maybe even days. Days he’s going to have to spend in the drunk tank, which is a far cry from here. In any other situation, if we weren’t here to arrest a man we suspect of brutally killing two young women, I might even feel sorry for him.
‘You want to do the honours?’ I ask Vermeer.
She reads him his rights, though it’s clear he’s not really taking it in. Once done we loosen the straps, and help him upright. He’s groaning, but compliant. But as Vermeer pulls the cuffs out a change comes over him.
‘No!’ he screams and lunges at me. I sidestep, only my foot lands on something and shoots out from under me. He takes advantage of my loss of balance, coming at me hard, the impact knocking me down. Vermeer reacts fast, grabbing him from behind in a chokehold. He reverses direction, slamming her back into the far wall and then elbows her in the stomach. She gasps and loosens her grip, and he slips out of her grasp and turns to her. I’m scrambling up from the floor as he throws the first punch right at her face. But Vermeer ducks, his fist hits the concrete with a sickening crunch, and she’s already grabbed his wrist and is twisting it down behind his back. It’s swift and clinical. She has him cuffed and on his knees in seconds.
‘You all right?’ I ask.
She shrugs, like it was nothing. ‘More worried about you.’
‘Yeah, just …’ I look round to see what I’d slipped on. It’s a clipboard, the type that hang on the ends of beds in hospitals. I pick it up just as Vermeer’s manoeuvring Huisman to the door.
‘Let’s get this fucker booked in,’ she’s saying just as my heart detonates hard in my chest. The room starts to spiral very, very slowly.
‘Oh shit …’ It can’t be true.
Vermeer stops. ‘What?’
I hand her the clipboard over a vast distance.
‘What am I looking at?’
I point to the date of admission.
It’s two full days before Marianne Kleine was killed.
It takes less than ten minutes to confirm that Huisman checked in when the clipboard said he did, and hasn’t left the property since. In fact, he’d not even left the room, and the CCTV footage the woman in charge had shown me, since Vermeer had decided not to be seen by her again, confirmed that. Huisman is categorically off the hook.
I walk out of there and feel like the world’s dropping away from me. All this work to get to Huisman, only to find he can’t have killed Marianne Kleine. Which in turn means he most likely wasn’t Lucie Muller’s killer either. I feel a deep cold creeping through me. Because we’ve now got two murders, two young women whose lives were taken from them, and no idea of who or why.
Vermeer lets me drive, and we don’t talk. Because what is there to say?
A
few minutes out from the station Vermeer finally speaks.
‘You covered yourself, right?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I mean, they’re not going to be able to trace that call to you, are they?’
I needn’t have worried about her being able to handle the situation after two cocktails. Seems it takes far more than that to reduce her performance. I wonder just how experienced a drinker she is. Then I think of my voice, converted to a series of 1s and 0s, there for anyone to listen to, analyse. The scratching and whispering should be enough. Should. But there’s always a chance some hotshot audio engineer has developed a new technique for clearing up recordings. But I can’t think of that now.
‘No,’ I tell her. ‘Because that would make literally no sense.’
‘It would literally make a lot of sense.’
‘Something I’ve learnt over the years is that the odds are so stacked against you most of the time –’
‘You make your own odds?’
‘– that when you do get a break, sheer good luck, you have to grasp it.’
She stares at me as if by doing so she can reveal the truth.
‘I hope so,’ she finally says. ‘I really, really hope so.’
My phone goes off. I check the screen. Leah. Kush must be barking again. She’ll have to cope. I’ll be back there soon. I let it ring out and it starts again. Again I let it ring, again it finally cuts off then starts afresh.
‘Oh for fuck’s sake.’ Vermeer grabs the phone off me as I’m taking the third exit of a tricky roundabout.
‘Who’s Leah?’
‘My neighbour. She doesn’t like it when Kush barks.’
‘Rykel’s phone,’ she says, imitating a bored secretary. ‘How may I help?’
She listens for a few moments then, ‘What? Say that again.’ She listens then hangs up.
‘What is it?’
‘She said …’
‘What? What did she say?’
‘Your houseboat,’ she says, turning to look at me, her face flicking on and off in the passing street lights. ‘Your houseboat’s on fire.’
Stark Night
I can smell it before I even turn into Bloemgracht, that rich, dry rasp of woodsmoke cut with something more unsavoury: plastic, paint, unnatural things. I run down Bloemstraat, unable to see my houseboat yet, but Rashid’s coffee place across the canal gives me a taster, its windows ablaze with reflected flame. Blue lights flicker too, catching tree trunks and highlighting faces in windows as they watch the firefighters battle from the shore.
I’m running hard into the heavy, ballooning heat and a fireman sees me coming, throws an arm across my chest, stopping me getting any closer.
‘Have you seen my dog?’ I scream over the noise. ‘That’s my boat – have you seen my dog?’
The fireman just shakes his head and holds fast. I can see Leah on the far side of the fire engine, the heat distorting the air between us so she looks wobbly, unreal. I can’t see if she has Kush with her. I think of the electrics, and for a crushing moment realize it’s my fault. They’d been faulty and I’d left them on. With Kush inside. Two men direct the hose, strafing the aft of the boat. The flames roar and crackle, and when the water hits them they hiss too. But the water does little more than dampen the flames down; they seem to come back with increased ferocity. I turn away, back off from the fireman and run behind the fire engine towards Leah’s boat. But as I round the truck I can see she’s standing there alone, Kush not with her, watching my boat burn and hoping the fire doesn’t reach hers. She looks so old suddenly, so old and alone, like she’s the last human on the planet, staring into the cataclysm which took us all.
I step beside her and she turns to look at me and just shakes her head. After a few moments she reaches out a hand and clasps mine, holding it tight. I look at the flames and see something, a shape in the darkness between two flames dancing on the roof. It’s gone in a flash, but it appears again. Then again and again.
It looks like a black wolf, head thrown back, fur standing proud on the back of its neck, as if howling at the moon.
A spark becomes its eye, before it’s gone in an instant.
‘Jaap?’
I don’t know how long I’ve been here. The firefighters left, the fire engine groaning away into the night, Leah back on board her boat, safe as the flames were doused before they got there, and the faces in the windows gone back to their lives, their beds, their dreams. And I’m here sitting on the concrete edge of the canal, my feet hanging over dark water. I notice suddenly I’m shivering. I turn to see Sabine standing close by.
‘Jaap, oh my god. Are you okay? I was calling and you didn’t answer …’
I feel her arm round my shoulders as she sits next to me. We sit there for a long time and eventually my shivering stops. Later, back at her flat, I let the water from the shower pour over my head as I think about what I’ve lost, about how Kush must’ve died in agony – the panic, the fear. I screw up my eyes but the images get worse so I keep them open. I end up counting the number of tiles on the wall, over and over, like I’m stuck in a loop. Finally, when the water’s run cold, I get out and dry myself. I’m in a daze, my movements automatic. Next thing I know I’m standing, staring at myself in the mirror when the door opens and Sabine steps in naked. She kisses me, and yet all I can think about is the shape I saw in the flames.
Sabine’s caressing me now, kissing my neck, my chest. She sinks to her knees and sucks me into her mouth and I try to fade away, lose myself in it.
But as I close my eyes I can still see my houseboat, the flames dancing accross it with glee.
And, worst of all, the eye, staring right at me, a dot of fire in the vast dark of my mind.
Later I wake in bed, the thud of my heart so loud for a moment I think there’s someone hammering on the door. I get up slowly, I don’t want to disturb Sabine, and creep through to the bathroom. There’s a window there, looking out over the rooftops, and I open it and let the night in, hoping it will calm me down. The air’s cool and smells of the city I know so well, the city I’ve always called home. But now? I wonder. Can it be again?
I must be imagining it but I catch the scent of burning and close the window. I go back to bed, where Sabine is mumbling something in her sleep. I gently get in and lean closer, holding my breath. It takes me a while to work out she’s saying something over and over again.
I’msorryI’msorryI’msorryI’m …
I lie here in the stark night and wonder if it ever ends.
ONE DAY BEFORE
* * *
Green
The cold water’s like a stun gun to the face.
I crank the tap off, grab a towel and dry myself. Then I step over to the window, open it and lean out. Grey clouds like a lid over the city, gentle rain. I listen to it trickling in the gutter just below the window and wonder if it would have made any difference. If it had rained yesterday, would it have stopped the fire?
Here I am again, I think.
I was so close to being out, turning my back on the police, the person it’d made me become. But I got caught up in it again, giving in to that part of me that can’t let go, the part of me which has to know, has to find out who killed Lucie Muller and Marianne Kleine, who it was who’d stripped them naked, slit their throats and let them bleed out like beasts in an abattoir.
And now I’ve been punished for it. Punished for being who I am. The darkness within. My mouth’s dry.
I find the note in the kitchen, held down with a set of keys. Her handwriting’s bold, fluid, and reminds me of old parchments and quill pens. It tells me she’s had to go to work but that I can stay as long as I like. There’s not much else around. Sabine had said she was only here temporarily whilst she looked for somewhere more permanent; her stuff is all in storage. I’d found a charger plugged in next to the toaster, so I drift around the place aimlessly whilst I wait for my phone to charge, and try not to think of what I’ve lost. I flick the radio on,
voices arguing about the acid attack, which a fundamentalist group has now claimed responsibility for. Click. Silence. Which gets drowned out by the noise inside my head. I don’t think I can cope with it right now.
I wander around looking for something to distract myself with. In the living area, a small space with little more than a TV on the wall, I move a cardboard box off the sofa and a photo falls out. In it Sabine’s sitting on a stone wall somewhere out in the countryside, her hair flapping about in the wind. I wonder who took the photo. Was it her ex, Tom? The one who’d stabbed me in the arm and shoved me down the steps?
Despite the transience of the place, it still seems like hers, and it starts to feel like an intrusion, more intimate an act than sleeping with her. I force down a coffee laced with sugar, and some sliced cheese I find in the fridge, which I roll up like a cigar before biting off the end. It tastes old. I spit it out and chuck the rest. Next I try to compose a note to Sabine, but after several false starts scrunch it up into a ball I put in my pocket. There’s a first-aid kit under the bathroom sink. I clean off the wound and use a plaster which is only just big enough. I drop the old dressing into the bin. It lands face down, white fabric with a large circle of blood dried in the middle.
Just as I’ve locked the front door I suddenly realize I’ve left the bathroom window upstairs open. Earlier I’d noticed that if someone was able to get onto the roof just below it they could easily reach up to the sill and clamber in. And given Sabine’s ex’s temperament I decide to go back in and shut it. There’s a puddle on the floor, the rain must have shifted, and I mop it up and then make my way out into the city.
I keep expecting to feel anger, but everything around me is distant somehow, like I’m not part of it. Shock can be like that, a cocoon that separates you from the world. As I walk to the station the city seems alien. Another time, another place, but with me as spectator. Raindrops prickle the skin of my face. I’ve been through this before, though, and I made it out. Just.
The Copycat Page 19
