Bite

by Nick Louth

  Inside the entrance of the block a section of the lobby was screened off with translucent plastic sheeting, behind which figures in white overalls moved like ghosts. Behind the staircase to the upper floors was the entrance to the apartment. The blue wooden door had been torn from its splintered frame, and bore the wounds of repeated axe blows. More overalled figures in blue baseball caps and white plastic boots crouched inside, wielding plastic bags, brushes and tweezers.

  Voos was standing with her back to Max, listening to an explanation of something from a middle aged figure in overalls and plastic gloves who was holding a blackened kitchen-type fire extinguisher. The young policeman was trying to attract her attention, but he was shushed away. Max couldn’t understand the words but the speaker’s tone and grim demeanour conveyed a sombre importance, jabbing with his finger towards the extinguisher.

  Max edged along the lobby wall until he could see across directly into the apartment. The fire seemed to have been mainly confined to one room. Around its doorframe was a sooty halo. Inside it was pure charcoal, ankle deep in cinders, exhaling a crematorium stink. A V-shaped aerial stuck out of a glassy carbonised blob that may once have been a television. The only truly recognisable artefacts were the springs of a mattress, among which two technicians were crouched. A third was taking photographs from above. Max couldn’t see what it was that they were looking at until one stood aside.

  Underneath, amid a pile of ashes was a matt black skull, its jaw stuck wide, posing ambiguously between laughter and agony for the camera’s merciless flash. Max felt bile rising, and turned away.

  The young cop spotted him, and yelled. It was the kind of inarticulate fury that signals a lack of confident authority. Voos turned around, and when she saw Max her face turned as grey and hard as the building she stood in. ‘Out! You are not supposed to be here,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll go when I know who died in there.’

  The young cop unsheathed his nightstick, shiny and new as a child’s Christmas toy. He advanced, gleeful at the first chance of using it.

  ‘Hold it like that, kid, and you’ll get your wrist broken,’ said Max. ‘Try it and see.’

  Voos reached for the officer’s arm. ‘Reemers. You’re needed back at the tape. I can deal with this.’ Reemers shot a poisonous glance at Max as he slunk out.

  ‘Accident or arson?’ Max asked.

  Voos did not reply as she shepherded Max through the back door of the lobby, down a short tunnel built from timber and polythene sheeting. The tunnel led to a square marquee in which a group of policemen sat on plastic chairs drinking coffee. Around the open sides of the tent were a few police vans, a long caravan, and a big mobile office. Once they were away from the apartment, she began to relax.

  ‘Carver, I know you’re upset, but coming here was crazy. Contaminate a crime scene and you can forget bail. You get locked up until we’re finished, no question about it. Forensics need to know that any fingerprints or hairs, including yours, that we find in there were left last night, not just a moment ago.’

  ‘Come on. You can’t suspect me. I wouldn’t do anything like this.’

  ‘Maybe you wouldn’t. But an innocent person would stay a mile away. Only the perpetrator would want to see forensic findings barred from evidence, which is what would have happened if you had gone in there.’

  ‘Stokenbrand showed me Erica’s credit card which he says was found here. I don’t trust him to tell it me straight, but I would trust you. Are you sure it is Erica?’

  ‘No, not yet. Erica’s card was the only identification in the apartment. Even without it, we would have checked Erica. You always start by matching dead bodies against missing persons.’

  ‘Did they find anything else? Stokenbrand said something about melted jewellery.’

  Voos led him into a police caravan. ‘This is all we can show you at the moment.’ On a table were two clear plastic evidence bags. One contained a ladies’ silver wristwatch, the other a tasselled suede handbag. ‘Are these Erica’s?’

  ‘The suede bag definitely not, the watch I’d have to look at.’ Max held out his hand for the bag.

  Voos held it to herself. ‘Not yet. We’re waiting for fingerprints.’

  ‘What about the melted stuff? Stokenbrand said it was gold. Erica never wore gold.’

  ‘It looks like gold, but it’s melted into the floor, so getting it analysed will take a while. All we know is that the metal blobs are in amongst the bones of the right hand, probably from rings.’

  ‘Erica doesn’t usually wear rings,’ Max said.

  A lot of other items were arranged in bags along the wall. There was a scorched bedside lamp with melted shade, an undamaged series of impressionist prints in clipframes, three pairs of women’s shoes and an electric bass guitar. A new fear began to curdle in Max. He had last seen a metallic red Gibson just like this at Purple Haze, slung around Lisbeth’s slender neck.

  ‘Could this be Lisbeth de Laan’s apartment? It looks like her guitar.’

  Voos pouted at the plausibility of the idea. ‘She’s not the official tenant, but who knows? The apartment is owned by Amsterdam council and the registered tenant is named Gerrit Hoorn. Neighbours say he left months ago, and a woman moved in. She gave them the name Karen, though it could be false.’

  ‘What did she look like?’

  ‘We haven’t got statements yet. All we know is that she was native Dutch. This Karen could not be Erica because she speaks the language and she moved in before Erica went missing.’

  ‘But Karen could be Lisbeth de Laan.’

  ‘Maybe. Or maybe Karen really is a Karen,’ Voos said. ‘We just have to wait for the identification.’

  The Detective Inspector knew that nothing could be taken for granted in Bijlmermeer. The sprawling estates to the south east of Amsterdam marked the point where Dutch social cohesion finally expires in a jumble of crime and poverty. The huge gull-winged apartment blocks boasted the broadest ethnic mix in the city, transit points for illegal immigrants, runaways, asylum seekers and the criminals who prey on them.

  In 1992 an El-Al 747 cargo plane crashed into an apartment block in Bijlmermeer, turning it into a kerosene fireball and burning at least forty people to death. Investigators spent a year trying to put an exact figure on the death toll, and eventually put out a number because it was expected of them. No-one will ever know for sure if it was right.

  Voos displayed more evidence bags. A pair of spike-heeled PVC boots. A pair of leather dungarees.

  ‘Those are definitely Lisbeth’s,’ Max said. Instead of pure relief for Erica, he now felt soiled by guilt for Lisbeth, and a burning anger too. Lisbeth was a thief, sure, but she didn’t deserve this. No-one deserved this. Lisbeth had courted death by offering Max what he wanted. One name. Without that one generous act Lisbeth would be alive and happy; her lovely face unscarred, playing bass for Gradgrind Spine on a Saturday night and conducting a little small-time theft on the side.

  ‘Detective Inspector, I know who did this,’ Max said. If Lisbeth was dead, it couldn’t do any harm now to tell the cops about Anvil.

  Voos stopped replacing evidence bags. She didn’t look at Max, but she was listening sure enough.

  ‘Someone called Anvil. Lisbeth knew him. She was terrified of him. I think he is holding Erica too.’

  When she looked up, Voos’s grey eyes were sharp with concentration. ‘Tell me more.’

  ‘It is what Lisbeth told me. I don’t know any more. He sounds like a big league crook, and he isn’t shy about killing.’

  ‘That’s pretty slim evidence. However, I’ll tell you something. I never did think this kind of premeditated evil was your work,’ Voos said.

  ‘Oh, which kind of premeditated evil is my type?’

  Sarcasm seemed lost on Voos. ‘Someone came here at four in the morning and scouted the place front and back. Footprints in the flower beds match dirt marks in the lobby. That’s why we wanted your shoes. I’m happy to say they don’t match, so my hun
ch was right.’

  ‘I’m happy about your hunches,’ Max said.

  ‘We believe this person found the bedroom’s open casement window, and put his arm in to find a gap in the curtains. Perhaps the victim woke up screaming at that point, or maybe later as the home made incendiary he threw began to burn her. In any case she might have panicked too much to get out.’

  Max felt a wave of nausea as he saw an image of Lisbeth, a writhing human torch because she gave him a phone number.

  ‘What about that extinguisher. Doesn’t that prove she got out of the room to start fighting the fire?’

  ‘That was the same mistake we made. Until one of the Fire Service technicians noticed that it had a modified valve. The residues inside should have been foam. We believe they were in fact a mixture of naphtha and a sticky cooking oil, perhaps palm oil. It was used by the assailant, not by the victim.’

  ‘Home-made napalm in a home-made flamethrower.’ Max shivered at the thought. Commercial napalm is cheap and deadly, the modern army’s weapon of choice for taking out tanks. Dropped in canisters from aircraft, it is an adhesive jelly that burns with such intense heat that even a near-miss boils the crew alive through the vehicle’s armour. Of the many ghastly deaths on the modern battlefield, none are worse than this. That someone chose to recreate this horror in a woman’s bedroom was even more evil.

  ‘The assailant was clever,’ Voos said. ‘Most weapons dropped at the crime scene stand out a mile. But a fire extinguisher does not look out of place at a fire. You don’t expect that an arsonist used it.’

  ‘Was there anyone else in the apartment when it happened?’

  Voos pursed her lips. ‘Possibly. There is only one body in the bedroom, and nowhere else was significantly burned. We did find a window lock undone in the lounge, though there are no second set of footprints we can find.’

  ‘So what about Anvil?’

  ‘I don’t know that name. We’ll look into it. But please, leave the investigating to us from now on. Stay away from witnesses, crime scenes and keep your nose clean.’

  Max shrugged. ‘If you do your job, nothing would make me happier. One final tip, and I’ll leave it all to you.’

  The way Voos looked at him it was clear she didn’t want to hear it.

  ‘There’s a guy who runs some company called Xenix Molecular in Rotterdam. He’s mixed up in all this, and he might want what Erica had found. His name is de Wit, initial L. He may or may not be Anvil. My hunch is that he is.’

  Voos offered Max a ride back to the city in a patrol car. It was a way to make sure he was doing what he was told, but there was nothing more he could do until the body had been identified. There was quite a crowd gathered around the building by the time Max left the caravan. Mostly they were just gawkers, but right at the front by the tape was a multi-ethnic knot of teenagers, shouting at the cops and congratulating each other on whatever it was they were saying. Among them was a rangy tattooed youth, crew-cut except for a single blade of orange hair, gelled over his forehead like a beak. Max recognised him as the one who offered the gun to Janus at Purple Haze, and their eyes met. The boy had barely learned how to shave, but he thought he was a gangster. The curled lip, narrowed eyes and stiff jaw were his ABC of intimidation.

  Max was heading for the patrol car, but dropped his pace when he saw Stokenbrand standing by it, his weathered face ripped by a grin.

  ‘Suddenly I feel like taking the subway,’ Max said.

  ‘I know you enjoy my company, Carver. Don’t play hard to get,’ said Stokenbrand.

  Orangebeak had walked past the car, scowling at Max. Twenty yards ahead he climbed a fat, black motorcycle, stamped the kickstarter and began revving. A thick oily cloud spewed from the bike’s flaking chrome exhausts as the engine growled.

  Max sidestepped Stokenbrand and headed off towards the bike, but the cop stepped in the way. ‘No playground fights,’ he snarled. ‘School’s over. Time to go home to your sugar daddy.’

  As Max was being pushed into the back seat of the squad car, Orangebeak rode the motorcycle slowly past them. He offered Max his upraised middle finger by way of greeting, mouthing obscenities. But Max was looking for only one thing, and he saw it. A modified chrome filler cap on the motorcycle’s tank, shaped like an anvil. It was the Rotterdam bike. The rider must be one of Anvil’s apprentices.

  Stokenbrand squeezed in the back of the car. The driver was a Rastafarian with braids and a gaudy shell suit. Max leaned forward to him and whispered. ‘What’s the name of the guy with the orange hair? You know him?’

  ‘Hey, idiot,’ Stokenbrand said, pulling Max back into the seat. ‘Vendettas we don’t do here, Carver. Not unless they’re mine. Yes?’

  Max said nothing, but he knew he had to come back here. If he could find Orangebeak again than maybe he could find Anvil.

  For three days we have walked through the bush, heading towards a nameless destination. As much as possible I try to stay away from Dakka, but I sense he is hungry for vengeance. I am the obvious target.

  Fortunately, he has had little opportunity. We rise at dawn, we walk almost without a break until sunset and we sleep where we fall, exhausted. Every day we get filthy and sweaty, and then lie in the damp and the leaf litter. We are never dry, even before the rain which comes most afternoons. The sheer misery of this, even in the warm, is hard to relate. I daydream of a hot shower, a towel, a change of underwear. Last night I dreamed I was sleeping in a glorious fluffy hammock crocheted from ropes of pink toilet paper. Two luxuries in one dream.

  We worry most about Jarman. One eye is almost closed and his lips fat and crusted with blood. He complains his back and kidneys ache from the kicking, and he has a pronounced limp. The relentless marching torments him. He took off his right boot to show us why. A rifle butt had been smashed down on his bare foot during the beating. Now three toenails have turned black and fallen off, and the grazes became infected. Amy thinks one of his toes might be broken too. If the inflammation gets much worse the boot will be agony.

  Worst of all, Jarman is becoming withdrawn and fatalist. We can hardly get a word out of him. Sophie’s monkey colony must be wiped out by now. Jarman’s collection of mosquitoes will be dead, his years of research, all left behind to rot in the heat and the wet. I suspect it is his African dreams that are dying the hardest death.

  Conversation with our captors is discouraged. In any case they speak only a few words of English. Rambo-Rambo has some pidgin French which Sister Margaret translates for us. I find their real names unpronounceable, except one Twin who was apparently christened Albert and Dakka whose real name is Leopold. I think they have the same trouble pronouncing Erica Stroud-Jones. When they found out I was English they simply referred to me as Manchester, for Manchester United. Jarman, being Brazilian, was inevitably known as Pele. Amy was dubbed friend, from the French. Sister Margaret was just ‘sister’.

  We drink water as we find it. The guards carry enough only for themselves. For food we have only the random gatherings that the Twins made from our hut: a large bag of Quaker oats, one tin of meat, custard powder, powdered milk and dried sausage. We had no utensils except Sister Margaret’s swiss army knife, and for plates we used banana leaves. Mostly we ate ‘quaker’s grenades’, which was Jarman’s concoction of dried sausage and rolled oats mixed into a patty with a little water. They were difficult enough to eat, but nothing like Amy’s ‘strangulation by custard’, which was custard and powdered milk cupped in a banana leaf and mixed with as much water as the leaf would hold. Unboiled, the custard powder was almost impossible to swallow.

  We eat bananas where we find them, even when green. The lack of fruit is a bitter discovery. Fruiting trees are rarer than I imagined. We are either too early, and risked stomach cramps from unripe fruit and berries, or the trees have been cleaned out by birds and monkeys. This is no Garden of Eden.

  We had high hopes of better food when we surprised a family of warthogs this morning. Rambo-Rambo opened fire from about
forty yards with his automatic weapon. Instead of neatly dispatching a single piglet he blew one to pieces, gravely wounded a sow and another piglet, and hobbled the boar. This huge beast roared into the undergrowth and disappeared while the poor stricken sow whimpered like a child and dragged itself along on its forelimbs.

  The guerrillas were terrified that the enraged boar would charge us. They crammed us into the low branches of a thorny tree, where we sat uncomfortably, guns bristling in all directions, and showered with shit as hungry vultures began to gather in the higher branches.

  Rambo-Rambo’s gun had jammed so we were down to the aged rifles of the Twins and Dakka. For half an hour they blazed away at every shadow that could have been the boar. If we needed further evidence of poor marksmanship, it was the five minutes it took for them to put the sow out of her misery. Then there was one tiny bewildered piglet which refused to leave its mother’s side. They gave up trying to hit the poor thing after something like fifty shots. I think their rifles might be bent!

  The warthogs had been grubbing under a strangling fig tree, and for once I could even smell the ripe fruit weighing down the branches. I edged along a bough, spurred on by the whoops of our captors, until I could grab a higher branch to cross into the fig tree. But when I got closer I discovered the tree was alive with vicious biting ants, which had swarmed over the sticky fruit. I beat a hasty retreat and we were foiled once again.

  Eventually we came down from the tree and dragged a piglet away, leaving the rest of this slaughtered family to the ants and vultures. The Twins hacked open the piglet, and made Sister Margaret and me scoop out the viscera and prepare the meat. Amy scavenged a few figs, which we roasted inside the carcass over a smoky fire. After two days without proper food the blackened, crackling pork was a heavenly meal, even though we had just muddy water to wash it down with.