My toes are freezing, and I’m due to meet Beving and Vermeer in less than an hour, and I’ll have to drop Kush back at Joel’s before that, but I stand for a while longer, not wanting to rush. On previous visits I’ve gone through memories of times I had with Hank, but today my mind’s quieter, content to just be here.
I take that as a good sign.
Beving and Vermeer are all business. Rein Benner has been officially charged and is awaiting trial, and I’ve been called to this meeting to hear that all charges against me are being officially dropped. It’s a formality, and normally I wouldn’t bother, but there’s something about the prospect of watching Beving squirm that made me turn up. So far, though, there’s not been a lot of squirming.
Because there is a loose end, one which Beving is still tugging on. I’d met with my lawyer, Pieter Roskam, before going into the station where we were shown to the conference room on the top floor. The table probably seats fifteen; today there are just four. A plate in the middle has a small pile of individually wrapped biscuits. The packets are coated in a thin layer of dust.
‘There’s still the problem with the DNA,’ Beving says.
‘I’ve told you, Benner killed Dirk Zeeman.’
‘But Benner says he didn’t. He admits killing Muller and Kleine but not Zeeman; he was very clear on that. He said it was women he wanted to kill, not men.’
‘He’s just bullshitting, you know that.’
‘But there’s no forensic evidence to suggest he was even there. And your blood was found under the victim’s fingernails.’
‘With respect –’ Roskam takes over for me, probably sensing my nascent frustration. Frustration that can all too quickly lead to anger. ‘This has been gone over to death and –’
‘Ha ha. I thought you were a lawyer, not a comedian.’
Roskam glares at him and continues. ‘My client has consistently stated the facts, that the most likely explanation is that Benner had followed Rykel to the flat being rented by Sabine Wester and took a dressing he’d discarded there from the bin.’
‘And yet the agency that rents that flat out has no record of Sabine Wester ever renting it. And, in fact, we can find no trace of Sabine Wester at all.’
‘Apart from the report filed, by one of your officers, stating that she was attacked by a man and rescued by my client.’
‘Yes, but that doesn’t prove that your client then formed some kind of loose relationship with this mysterious woman, and went to stay at her flat, which, as we’ve already established, was in a void period when no one was renting.’
I’ve thought a lot about this. I can’t work it out either. But I didn’t make it up, I’m sure of that. Cut to her whispering I’m sorry in her sleep. It makes me shiver.
But Roskam’s continuing, an unstoppable legal steam train. ‘There’s also the fact that Benner had burned down my client’s houseboat, which proves he knew where he was and was actively targeting him. Has not Benner stated on the record that he wanted to punish Jaap Rykel for putting him away before he could finish what he’d set out to do?’
‘He has. I have the statement here. He fully admits to that. But what he categorically denies is that he placed the evidence on the body, and he denies following Rykel to a flat where he subsequently breaks in and retrieves a used dressing from the bin. That’s a bit odd, isn’t it?’
‘Not really,’ I say. ‘It’s his final fuck-you to me. That’s all it is.’
And yet, what part did Sabine play in this? Why did she disappear? Time seems to be strengthening these questions, not weakening them. I’ve tried to find her as well, but she seems to have vanished into thin air. It suddenly strikes me that Kush didn’t like her from the start. I thought he was just being weird or jealous. Now I wonder if he wasn’t trying to tell me something after all.
Beving sighs, leans back in his chair and folds his arms. I reckon he’s just pissed off because I didn’t get him any dirt on Vermeer.
‘Okay, this is where we’re at. Benner is awaiting trial for the murder of Marianne Kleine. In addition he has been charged with Arson with Intent to Kill, and Attempted Murder in the case of Klaas Blok. But the decision has been made, and at a higher pay grade than mine, I might add, to leave the murder of Dirk Zeeman as open. As of now your client is no longer an official suspect, but that may change as we pursue this case. It would be wise not to book any foreign travel in the foreseeable future. Any questions?’
I glance across at Vermeer, her face unreadable.
‘No. No questions.’
Outta here.
Sliding the key into the lock sets off a crazy scramble. He skids round the corner just as I get the door open, slides into the wall and then launches himself at me, front paws on my chest, claws like nails, tail whacking the designer radiator. Note to self, I need to figure out how to clip his claws. The vet had done it last, but that was a while ago and they seem to have grown. I’d got out of the shower the day Joel was heading to the airport and he’d asked me who the foxy female was who’d scratched up my chest.
I get some food from the cupboard and it’s obviously a religious experience for him. He becomes still, rapt, following my moves with an intense stare. Once the bowl’s on the floor, though, decorum goes out the window. He has his snout in it fast, chomping and crunching, eyes open but unseeing.
My phone buzzes on the kitchen counter, a message from Vermeer asking if we can meet later. In the aftermath of Benner’s arrest and my release we’d discussed going after DH Biotech. We’d assembled everything we’d got and taken it to the prosecutor. She’d taken one look at it and called in her legal advisers. We went back the next day when she told us the advice had been, basically, no way. We’d need so much more than what we’d got.
‘Let’s say for a moment that everything presented here was the work of one individual. They’d set up an experiment in their own house, advertised for volunteers, made them all sign disclaimers and then administered a compound which, although it had been designed as a cure for a specific disease, killed half of them, would we have a case?’ I’d asked. Not because I didn’t know the answer, but sometimes in the face of the insurmountable the only thing we have are questions.
Yes, she’d confirmed, in that scenario we would have a case. But with a company as large as DH Biotech we wouldn’t stand a chance.
So there it is, one law for the people, quite another for companies with large enough reserves.
Kush has finished his food and is looking for more, sniffing round the kitchen just on the off-chance that I’ve somehow left another couple of full bowls around. The day stretches out ahead of me. There are so many things I could do it’s almost overwhelming. I eventually decide on a drive. Kush snaps to attention when I grab the Stang’s keys out of the bowl on the kitchen work surface, and soon we’re heading out of the city towards the coast.
We’ve taken to walks on the beach at Zandvoort, for me to feel the air on my face and watch the ever-shifting muted colours of the North Sea, for Kush to run around and bark at the seagulls. He’s quite far ahead of me when I notice him stop dead. He sniffs something, then tentatively puts a paw onto whatever it is that has caught his attention. He paws it a few more times, then, with a swiftness that is startling, dives onto it, rubbing his neck and shoulder along the ground. As I get close he’s still at it, though now he’s moved onto his back and is wriggling around, paws in the air, tongue hanging loose, a kind of ecstasy in his eyes. Once he’s done I glimpse what he’s just rolled in: the rotting carcass of a seagull.
I text Vermeer back.
The phone rings as soon as I pocket it. Jansen.
‘There’s something you should see.’
The white van had skidded off the road and nosedived into the ditch, back wheels aloft. I park up and a uniform lifts the red and white tape for me to duck under. Jansen’s talking to someone on his phone, so I take a closer look at the van. It’s just a white van, nothing special about it. And yet I get the feeling I’ve s
een it before.
‘Vermeer reckoned you’d want to see this.’ I turn to see Jansen.
I follow him as he scrambles down the slope, hops over the thin trickle of water at the base, and onto the other side. From here it’s possible to see that the van had two people in it when it left the road. Oddly, neither had been wearing seat belts, their foreheads hitting the windscreen as the front end of the van crunched into the solid earth. A halo of dark blood round each head. I get closer. The driver’s face is familiar, but I can’t place it. The whole scene reminds me of an old school friend of mine; she and her boyfriend had lost control in fog and ended up in a ditch very like this one.
‘Foggy out here last night?’
‘Not according to the local station. Said it was as clear as can be.’
I walk further down so I can see the far side of the van. Scraped paint and a series of dents. The whole van’s a little beaten up, but this looks fresher.
‘Run off the road.’
Jansen nods. ‘That’s what we thought too,’ he says just as it comes to me, why the man looks familiar. He was the courier I’d seen outside Nellie’s and then after interviewing Patrick Wust.
‘He was following me.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, saw him twice. Too much of a coincidence.’
‘What about the other man?’ Jansen asks. I get the feeling he’s leading me along, that he knows something he’s not telling me yet. Normally I’d be impatient, but today I just play along and take another look. His face is harder to make out, squashed against the glass which is ready to crumble into a million tiny pieces.
‘I give up.’
Jansen whistles to one of the uniforms who walks over with something in his hand. He tosses it over the ditch, Jansen catches it, then hands it over. It’s a leather wallet. You can tell it’s expensive. I open it up: credit cards, a few receipts and a driver’s licence. I pull it out. I don’t recognize the face, but the name I do, Joost Beltmann.
‘I looked him up, seems he worked for DH Biotech,’ Jansen’s saying as I hand it back.
‘He did. I spoke to him on the phone. Looks like they’ve started cleaning house already.’
He’s thin and frail but there’s the unmistakable air of a man who has come through something and beaten it. The real question will of course be whether he needs to beat it again. But for now Robert Huisman’s off the heroin. One thing I’d missed during the investigation was that the money he’d paid for his rehab had seemed like a lot, and I’d not questioned how he’d got it. When I got Roemers to check further back in Huisman’s financials we found the source of the money, one which had really surprised me.
‘Good to be clean?’ I ask. We’re meeting on the bridge spanning the gap of water by the NEMO building. He’s a different person to when I’d interviewed him years ago. Then he’d been full of arrogance, puffed up with his own self-importance. Now he seems more humble.
‘Honestly? It’s hell,’ he finally says. ‘Needing that next hit makes things easier in a way. Nothing else matters. When you’re clean everything else matters, and that’s harder to cope with.’
‘Lucie’s death?’
‘I know I did some terrible things when I was with her. I cheated on her and I’ll never forgive myself. But despite all that I loved her, you know? I loved her and she was taken from me. Heroin made me do such stupid things. If I could have those days back again, I’d do things differently.’
I wonder if that’s a universal constant, the wish to go back and do things differently. I know there are things I’d change given the chance. Big things. Things that matter.
‘Did you approach Koen Muller, or did he reach out to you?’
‘I called him up. At first he wouldn’t speak to me. I guess he partly held me responsible. But about a month later he called me back and I went out to meet him at his house. We’re never going to be friends, but we talked, and it was good to clear the air, spend some time with someone who also loved Lucie. I think in the end he felt like I was a kind of link back to her. That’s why he suggested the rehab I went to and gave me the money for it.’
Koen Muller was an enigma to me. I couldn’t work out if he was simply the angry grieving father, or his involvement with DH Biotech meant he’d been playing another role. In a way I’m not sure I’ll ever know, but I decide that’s all right. Certainly his move to help out Huisman, a man he’d despised and had at one time believed responsible for Lucie’s death, takes a lot. In the end people are very rarely all good or all bad. If they were, then life would undoubtedly be easier.
Huisman leaves soon after and I’m left staring out into the IJ’s waters, the light glinting off the choppy surface a language just outside of my comprehension.
Later I’m staring at the wreckage of my boat. We’re in that moment between light and dark, just before the street-light sensors kick in. Kush’s lying at my feet, exhausted from the day, and the intense scrub-down he’d been subjected to post-dead seagull. I’m not sure the smell’s entirely gone, though. It’s cold, the air crisp enough to frost again tonight, but I’d borrowed a jacket from Joel which is fit for a Russian winter. The insurance company had called earlier, the chirpy representative bursting to give me the good news that they will be footing the entire cost of rebuilding the boat. For some reason I should have been elated, or at least relieved. But I’d found myself asking if I could cash it in instead, maybe buy somewhere else with it. The rep had told me just how much the rebuild was going to cost, a sum so small in comparison to house prices I’d be lucky to find a kennel in central Amsterdam, far less a flat big enough for a human. I’d agreed to the rebuild.
The evening’s deepening, Vermeer should be here soon, and I reach for my vape before remembering what happened to it. I will have to get another one, but for now I’m going old-style. I crumble some of the white bud I’d raided from Joel’s humidor earlier into a paper and start rolling, the feel of it between my fingers its own kind of therapy. I baptize it. The saliva will make it burn slower and more evenly. Kush perks up, but when he figures that whatever it is I’m doing seems unlikely to immediately yield anything edible he loses interest. I hold the joint up in front of me and guide the flame to it. For a second it looks like my houseboat’s burning all over again. Across the water a light flicks on in Leah’s houseboat.
‘Medicating again?’
Vermeer sits down, Kush between us, and scratches his ear. Kush responds with a long low groan. I’m almost jealous. The dog seems to get so much pleasure from life it’s unreal.
‘Only for the trouble that’s coming,’ I tell her. It’s a quote from a song, only I don’t reckon Vermeer knows that.
‘Either you have a poetic turn I didn’t know about, or your taste in music is better than I thought.’
Huh, Vermeer’s a dark horse indeed.
‘So, here to rearrest me?’
‘If Beving had his way I would be. He knows it’s not you, though. He’s just being a dick. Forbidden me to carry on looking at DH Biotech as well.’
Which is hardly a surprise.
‘Given what they do to their own people, that’s not a bad thing,’ I say, thinking of the two men in the van.
‘Maybe you’re right. Jansen showed Beltmann’s photo to the nurse, and she confirmed he was the one who’d visited her that time. She wouldn’t testify to it, though. And I spoke to Roemers earlier.’
Somehow I thought she might. She has a mind as suspicious as mine.
‘He said you’d been asking him how best to leak information anonymously online …?’
‘Just a theoretical question. Fascinating thing, the internet.’
‘Yeah, well, be careful.’
‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to do that.’
Because tomorrow morning I’m meeting Cheryl Kleine. There are some things best left to the professionals. She’s a journalist with an intense personal interest in what I’ll have to say. I take a pull and the tip glows. I notice Vermeer has a bot
tle of beer. She lifts it to her lips and takes a long sip.
‘So, about when I shot at you. Sorry –’
‘No worries, I didn’t leave you much choice.’
‘– sorry I missed.’
‘Kush, kill.’
Kush flicks an ear, but otherwise does nothing. Nice to see where his loyalty lies.
‘What’s next?’
Which really is the question. One I’ve been trying to avoid for the last couple of weeks. Joel’s not asked me about his proposal, maybe sensing that I need time. Though I’m not sure that’s really what I need.
‘Dunno.’
‘You’re sure you won’t come back to the police? Once you’re cleared. I could use a good partner.’
‘I bet Beving would be thrilled. Tempting, just to see his face. Talking of Beving, you need to be careful of him.’
‘Anything specific?’
I tell her about him asking me to spy on her. She doesn’t look all that surprised. I take another pull, then Vermeer surprises me. She reaches out, and I hand her the joint. She inhales, long and hard, and I wait for the coughing fit. But she’s clearly used to smoke of some sort because she holds it in before blowing out the biggest smoke ring I’ve ever seen. She hands back the joint, finishes her beer and gets up. ‘See you around then.’
I finish it off, and, feeling comfortable, decide on just one more. Just to help me think. I’ve been thinking a lot since my experience out in the woods, trying to tease out what exactly it was. Did I lose it, even if only temporarily? But what would have happened if I hadn’t been able to slip so easily between states? At first I’d been scared it was going to be a return of all my troubles, another breakdown, this time more serious.
But over the last few days it’s all started to settle.
And it comes to me in a heady rush exactly what I need to do. I can’t get rid of the black wolf because in the end it’s not some external thing invading me, taking over – it’s part of me. I just have to learn to live with it, control it enough that I can unleash it when needed. And, really, it’s not like the black and white are opposing each other; it’s more that they are complementary in some way. It’s just a question of having the right balance between them.
The Copycat Page 31
