I feel oddly ambivalent. Maybe that means I’m not ready to marry and I’m not really in love. The whole idea was one of those “what if” moments that doesn’t survive the hangover or the harsh light of day.
The Dutch officer has a vocabulary of four English words and is unwilling or unable to explain where we’re going. Meanwhile, he navigates the narrow streets and bridges, taking us through an industrial area with docks and warehouses. We seem to pass the same gray squares of water several times before pulling up beside a weathered wooden pier. Police cars nose together as though drinking from the same trough.
Spijker is a head taller than the other detectives. He is wearing a dark suit and polished shoes but still seems miscast in life; as though he’s playing dress-up in his father’s clothes.
There is a wooden ramp that slopes into the water from the dock. Halfway down it is a Zodiac made of heavy rubberized canvas with a wooden bottom. Another is already waiting on the water with four men on board.
Spijker hands me a pair of rubber boots and a waterproof jacket to wear over my sweater. He finds similar clothes for Dave and then pulls on his own rubber boots.
The Zodiac launches in a fluid movement. Spijker holds out his hand and helps me step on board. The throttle engages and we pull away. The sky is like a solid gray sheet with no depth at all. A quarter mile off I see the flat of a paddle, lifting and dipping, as a canoeist follows the shore. Farther out is a ferry, snub-nosed and puffing smudges of black smoke.
I try to orientate myself. Some six miles to the west is the North Sea. We seem to be following a western dock. The air smells sweet—of chocolate. Perhaps there is a factory nearby. Dave is beside me. I feel him when I rock sideways, brushing his left arm with my breast.
Spijker is comfortable steering a boat. Perhaps it rubs off, living below sea level, protected by dikes and flood barriers.
“How much do you know about the sea, DC Barba?”
What is there to know? It’s cold, it’s wet, it’s salty…
“My father was a merchant seaman,” he explains without waiting for me to answer. “He divorced my mother when I was seven but I used to spend holidays with him. He didn’t go to sea anymore and he wasn’t the same man on shore. He seemed smaller.”
Dave hasn’t said much since I introduced them to each other, but now he mentions the sailing school he wants to buy. Soon they’re discussing skiffs and sail area. I can actually picture Dave in an Aran sweater, ducking beneath a boom. He seems suited to outdoors, big spaces full of wind and sky and water.
Five hundred yards ahead of us is a container ship. The Port of Amsterdam spent millions thinking they could match Rotterdam as a hub for international trade, explains Spijker. “It is never going to be so.”
Passing the ship, we come to a wooden pier rising twenty feet above the waterline supported by pylons and beams. A floating platform is moored on the nearside.
Spijker disengages the throttle and the engine idles. He steadies the Zodiac and throws a rope around a rusting cleat on the platform, drawing us closer. At the same moment a spotlight is switched on and swings into the darker shadows beneath the pier, searching amid the weathered gray wood. A flash of white appears. A figure suspended above the water, gazing down at me. A noose is looped around her neck. Another rope around her waist disappears into the water, obviously weighted down.
The body swings slightly as if moved by an unseen hand and her outstretched toes seem to pirouette on the surface of the water.
“Is it the deaf girl?” asks Spijker.
Zala’s eyes are open. Two crimson orbs. Blood vessels have burst in the whites and her pupils seem to have disappeared. She’s dressed in the same skirt and pink jacket that I last saw her wearing. Salt in the air has stiffened the fabric.
The Zodiac is rising and sinking on the slight swell. Spijker steadies it and I step onto the platform. A metal ladder, bolted to a pylon, leads up to the pier. Seagulls watch from the navigation buoys and a nearby barge. The other Zodiac has arrived, carrying ropes and a stretcher cage.
Spijker climbs the ladder and I follow him. Dave is behind me. The planks of the pier are old and deeply furrowed, with gaps in between that are wide enough for me to see the top of Zala’s head and her shoulders.
The rope around her neck is tied to a metal bollard normally used for mooring ships.
A police officer in climbing gear abseils over the side. He swings in a harness beside her body and we watch in silence as Zala is lashed into a stretcher cage. The rope around her waist is tied to a cinder block. I can see the cement dust on her hands and the front of her jacket.
They made her jump. The certainty is like a vision. She held the cinder block in her arms and they pushed her the final step. She dropped fifteen feet before the rope stopped her. The cement brick tore from her fingers and kept falling until the second rope, tied around her waist, pulled taut. My stomach shares the drop.
“A fisherman found her just before nine thirty,” says Spijker. “He reported it to the coast guard.” He swivels to a junior officer, seeking confirmation.
“What made you think…?” I can’t finish the question.
“She fitted the description.”
“How did she get out here?”
Spijker motions along the pier. “It’s fenced off. Warning signs. Of course, that only encourages people.”
“You’re not thinking suicide?”
“Your deaf girl didn’t carry that lump of concrete out here by herself.”
In the distance there are whitecaps where the water is less sheltered from the wind. A fishing boat is coming in, its windows flashing in a rare shaft of sunlight.
Despite his veteran’s cynicism, Spijker needs to show compassion and offer condolences. Somehow I have become his only link to this girl.
“She came from Kabul. She was an orphan,” I explain.
“Another one.”
“What do you mean?”
“The list of surrogates from the IVF clinic. At least ten of them were orphans. It’s making them difficult to find.”
Orphans. Illegal immigrants. What a perfect combination of the unwanted and the desperate.
“Samira mentioned a visitor to the orphanage. A westerner who said he could organize a job for her. He had a cross on his neck. I might know who it is.” I give him Donavon’s name and he promises to check the files.
The dock gates have been unlocked at the far end of the pier. A forensic team arrives in a van. A second car is summoned to take us back to our hotel.
As I walk along the pier I feel that Amsterdam has changed and become darker and more dangerous. I long for the familiar. Home.
Dave falls into step beside me.
“Are you all right?”
“Fine.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“What do you know about it?” I snap. Straightaway, I feel angry with myself. He’s done nothing wrong. After a few minutes I try to assuage my guilt. “Thanks for being here. I’m sorry about last night. Forget everything I said.”
“I think we should talk about it some more.”
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
“I love you.”
“But it’s different now, isn’t it?”
Dave puts his hand on my forearm to stop me. “I don’t care. I want to be with you.”
“You say that now, but think about in five years or ten years. I couldn’t do that to you.”
An abandoned crane is rusting on the shoreline. It looks like wreckage from an ancient war. Zala’s body is still spinning in my mind, pirouetting on her toes in the waves.
I have been a fool. My good intentions have set off a chain of events that have led to this. And I don’t know where it ends or who else will be hurt. I am certain of only one thing: I want to spend every waking moment hunting down the people who took Cate from me and who did this to Zala. This is not about an eye for an eye. It’s bigger than that. I want to make their misery more poignant and h
orrific than anything they have inflicted upon others. Never in my life have I felt so capable of killing someone.
Dave’s hair is combed. His bag is packed. A taxi is booked for the airport. The clock hasn’t moved. Not even a second. I swear it. I hate the last hour before someone leaves. Everything has been said and done. Minutes drag out. Statements are repeated. Tickets are checked.
“It’s time to leave this alone,” says Dave, rinsing his toothbrush. “It’s over.”
“How did we get to over?”
“Maybe you think,” he says, choosing his words with care, “that this is about you and me. It’s not. I’d tell you the same thing if I didn’t love you.”
“But that’s why you should understand.”
He picks up his bag and puts it down again.
“You could come with me.”
“I’m not leaving Ruiz.”
He puts on his jacket.
“You could stay,” I suggest.
“I have to give evidence in court.”
“I need you.”
“You don’t need anyone.”
It’s not meant to wound but I flinch as though struck.
He opens the door slowly. All the while I’m hoping he’ll turn back, take me in his arms, force me to look in his eyes, tell me he doesn’t care about anything except me, that he understands.
The door closes behind him. My chest is suddenly empty. He’s taken my heart.
11
For twenty minutes I stare at the door, wishing it would open, hoping that he’ll come back.
When I was lying in hospital with my damaged spine, fearing I would never walk again, I started to say cruel things to people. I criticized nurses and complained about the food. I called one male orderly Fat Albert after the Bill Cosby character.
“New Boy” Dave came to visit me every day. I remember screaming at him and calling him a moron. He didn’t deserve it. I felt sorry for myself because everybody else felt sorry for me. And being cruel to people took my mind off myself for a while.
Dave didn’t come to see me after that. I wanted to call him. I wanted to say I was sorry for being mad and could he please come back. I didn’t. Instead I wrote him a letter. What a gutless wonder! I don’t deserve him.
My mobile rattles on the table.
“You didn’t come to lunch today.”
“I’m still overseas, Mama.”
“Your auntie Meena made kulfi. It’s your favorite.”
It was my favorite at age six.
“All the boys came. Even Hari.”
Typical. He doesn’t show up unless he can show me up.
“Your friend Detective King phoned to say he couldn’t make it.”
“I know, Mama.”
“But another very eligible gentleman was here. He was disappointed not to see you.”
“Whose arm did you twist this time?”
“Dr. Banerjee seems to be very fond of you.”
It cannot be a coincidence. “What did he want?”
“He brought you flowers—such a thoughtful man. And his table manners are impeccable.”
If we get married I’ll have clean tablecloths.
“Where did you tell him I was?”
“I said you were in Amsterdam. You’re being very secretive about this. You know I don’t like secrets.”
She carries on describing the good doctor and a funny story he told her about his baby nephew. I don’t hear the punch line. I’m too busy trying to connect him to Samira.
Banerjee collected twelve viable embryos from Cate. Instead of six cycles of IVF, there were only five, which meant two embryos remained, frozen and stored in liquid nitrogen. He gave them to Cate, which means he knew about her surrogacy plan. That’s why he arranged an invitation to my father’s birthday party. He tried to warn me off.
“I have to go, Mama.”
“When will you be home?”
“Soon.”
I hang up and call “New Boy” Dave, who is just boarding his flight.
“Does this mean you miss me?”
“It’s a given. I need a favor.”
He sighs. “Just the one?”
“When you get back to London, run a ruler over Dr. Sohan Banerjee.”
“He was at your father’s party.”
“That’s him.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Does he have any links with fertility clinics outside of the U.K.? Also check if he has any links with adoption agencies or children’s charities.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
A stewardess is telling him to turn off his phone. “Safe journey.”
“You too.”
Forbes’s cold is getting worse and he’s developed a seal-like cough punctuated by the clicking in his throat. He sounds like a boom box.
“You should have stayed home,” I suggest.
“My house is full of sick people.”
“So you decided to infect the rest of the population.”
“That’s me. Patient Zero.”
“Did you find them—the pregnant asylum seekers?”
“I should have locked you up when I had the chance.” He blows his nose. “They arrived in early July hidden in a shipping container. A Russian, aged eighteen, and an Albanian, twenty-one. Both looked ready to drop any time. They were fingerprinted, issued with identification papers and taken to a reception center in Oxfordshire. Three days later they were taken to a bed-and-breakfast accommodation in Liverpool. They had two weeks to fill out a statement of evidence form and meet with a lawyer but neither of them showed up. They haven’t been seen since.”
“What about the babies?”
“There’s no record of the births at any NHS hospital but that doesn’t prove anything. A lot of people have them at home these days—even in the bath. Thank Christ our tub wasn’t big enough.”
I have a sudden mental image of his wife, whalelike in the family bathtub.
“It still doesn’t make much sense,” he says. “One of the attractions of the U.K. for asylum seekers is free health care. These women could have had their babies in an NHS hospital. The government also provides a one-off grant of £300 for a newborn baby, as well as extra cash for milk and nappies. This is on top of the normal food vouchers and income support. These women claimed to have no family or friends in the U.K. who could support them, yet they didn’t take advantage of the welfare benefits on offer. Makes you wonder how they survived.”
“Or if they did.”
He doesn’t want to go there.
Ruiz is waiting for me downstairs at the Academisch Medisch Centrum. He looks like a kid being picked up from summer camp, without the peeling nose or poison ivy stings.
“The staff wished me a long and healthy life,” he says. “They also told me never to get sick in the Netherlands again.”
“Touching.”
“I thought so. I’m a medical bloody miracle.” He holds up the stump of his missing finger and begins counting. “I’ve been shot, almost drowned and now stabbed. What’s left?”
“They could blow you up, sir.”
“Been tried. Brendan Pearl and his IRA chummies fired a mortar into a Belfast police station. Missed me by that much.” He does his Maxwell Smart impersonation.
He pauses at the revolving door. “Have you been crying, grasshopper?”
“No, sir.”
“I thought you might have been pining.”
“Not pining, sir.”
“Women are allowed to be warm and fuzzy.”
“You make me sound like a stuffed animal.”
“With very sharp teeth.”
He’s in a good mood. Maybe it’s the morphine. It doesn’t last long. I tell him about Zala and can see the tension rise to his shoulders and move to his neck. His eyes close. He takes a ragged breath as though the pain has suddenly returned.
“They’re going to smuggle Samira into Britain,” I say.
“You can’t be certain of that.”
“It happened to the others. The babies are delivered in the same country as the parents lived.”
“The Beaumonts are dead.”
“They’ll find other buyers.”
“Who are they?”
“Yanus. Pearl. Others.”
“What does Spijker say?”
“He says I should go home.”
“A wise man.”
“Hokke says there is someone who might help us find Samira.”
“Who is he?”
“Eduardo de Souza. Yanus used to work for him.”
“This gets better and better.”
My mobile is ringing. Hokke is somewhere noisy. The red light district. He spends more time there now than when he was walking the beat.
“I will pick you up at seven from the hotel.”
“Where are we going?”
“Answers at seven.”
12
An enormous dishwater moon has risen in the east and seems to move across the sky, following our taxi. Even in darkness I recognize some of the roads. Schiphol Airport is not far from here.
This is a different area of Amsterdam. The chocolate-box façades and historic bridges have been replaced by the functional and harsh—cement-gray apartment blocks and shops protected by metal shutters. Only one store is open. A dozen black youths are standing outside.
De Souza doesn’t have a fixed address, Hokke explains. He moves from place to place, never staying more than a night in any one bed. He lives with the people he employs. They protect him.
“Be very careful what you say to him. And don’t interrupt when he speaks. Keep your eyes down and your hands by your sides.”
We have pulled up outside an apartment block. Hokke opens the door for me.
“Aren’t you coming with me?”
“You must go alone. We will wait here.”
“No,” declares Ruiz. “I am going with her.”
Hokke responds with equal passion. “She goes alone or there will be nobody waiting to meet her.”
Ruiz continues to protest but I push him back into the car where he grimaces as he folds his arms across his bandaged chest.
“Remember what I told you,” says the Dutchman, pointing toward a building that is identical to the one next to it and the one next to that. A teenage boy leans against a wall. A second one watches us from an upstairs window. Lookouts. “You must go now. Phone me if there’s a problem.”
The Night Ferry Page 24
