The Wrong Girl

by David Hewson

  Pieter Vos saw some of this, as did Laura Bakker retreating from the bloody scene in the alley, and Dirk Van der Berg walking from the square. Antennae tuned for trouble, the three detectives homed in on the odd little group.

  There, by the side of the girl, her mother, the distraught woman, Bakker looked at Vos and said, still struggling to believe this herself, ‘They shot him. Just like that.’

  ‘Where’s my girl?’ Hanna Bublik yelled in broken Dutch as she clutched at the child in the pink jacket until Renata Kuyper snatched Saskia from her clawing fingers.

  Van der Berg glanced at Vos. A nod. He seemed to know.

  A sound. High-pitched. A jaunty childish tune, the kind set for a specific caller. Renata Kuyper took her phone from her pocket, checked the screen, turned to her daughter and asked, ‘Saskia . . . ?’

  The girl stayed silent, eyes on the canal and the returning wildfowl.

  ‘It’s from your phone,’ said Renata.

  Vos retrieved the handset from the mother’s cold fingers. ‘It’s a video call,’ he said, and tapped the screen.

  There was a face on the little screen. Dark with make-up. Scarlet lips. White teeth.

  ‘It’s the mother I wish to talk to,’ this new Black Pete said.

  ‘My name’s Pieter Vos. I’m a brigadier with the Amsterdam police.’

  The face laughed then, the teeth perfect and even.

  ‘Then you’ll do.’

  An ambulance tore round the corner, siren shrieking, down to the street where the men with guns were gathered.

  ‘My brother Mujahied’s a martyr, isn’t he? We listen to your radios. We know your schemes. You murdered him.’

  The speaker was turned to full so they could all hear and see. The voice was foreign. The accent hard to place.

  ‘I don’t know what happened. We’re police. There’s a girl . . .’ Vos began.

  ‘You’re all the same. Dogs and criminals.’

  ‘What do you want?’

  ‘We have the Kuyper child,’ Black Pete said. ‘Granddaughter to your bloody soldier . . .’

  ‘No,’ Vos cut in.

  The white eyes grew large with fury.

  ‘Don’t argue with me! Two decades on from Srebrenica, eight thousand dead there. So many more in Iraq and Afghanistan. Do you think we can’t count? This murderer’s offspring is with us now.’

  Vos looked at the little girl, clutched to her mother’s legs by caring arms. Then at the other woman. Foreign. A mark of desperate poverty about her.

  Pink jackets.

  ‘Saskia Kuyper’s here with me. Safe with her mother. You’ve got the wrong kid. It’s the same clothes but . . .’

  Hanna Bublik seized the phone from him, glared at the face on the screen.

  ‘She’s eight years old. From Georgia. No father. No money. No . . .’

  A wagging finger, a bossy hand, waved her into silence.

  ‘I speak to the man now,’ Black Pete said. ‘Him only.’

  One more time she tried and got the same. Vos looked at her, nodded, and she gave him back the phone.

  ‘What she says is the truth,’ he insisted. ‘You’ve got the wrong girl. Let her go. Do this now. Make yourself scarce before we find you . . .’

  The black face was laughing again. Then the picture changed. A brief view of what looked like a small room. Wooden walls. Something familiar about it for Vos.

  Finally a shape in the corner.

  Perhaps it was an easy mistake. She looked a little like the Kuyper kid. Prettier if anything, with long straight blonde hair and bright, anxious eyes.

  There was red tape round her mouth, rope round her slender wrists, drawing them together on her lap. The pink jacket looked grubby and stained.

  Hanna was snatching at the phone again, screaming like a banshee.

  ‘Hurt her and I will kill you. I swear . . .’

  A sudden move on the screen. A hand grabbed the little girl, dragged her to the camera, ripped the tape from her mouth.

  When she cried it seemed more with fury than pain. Tough kid. Tough mother. But the woman was silent now.

  ‘Name!’ the Black Pete bellowed.

  Nothing.

  ‘Name!’

  ‘Natalya Bublik,’ the girl said in a firm, defiant voice.

  Vos was looking at the walls. The timber planking. Not her. Trying to imagine where this place might be. Not far away. There wasn’t time for that.

  Black Pete stripped fresh tape around her mouth, pushed her back into the corner. Cushions there. Perhaps a makeshift bed.

  ‘She’s an innocent kid,’ Vos pleaded. ‘Let her go.’

  ‘There were innocent children in Srebrenica. In Iraq. Afghanistan. Somalia. Men and women too. Do you beg for them, policeman?’

  ‘What . . . do . . . you . . . want?’

  ‘I want my brother Ismail freed and flown to a country that won’t kill him.’ A shrug. A glance in the corner. ‘And some money too. I’d have preferred to hold your murderer Kuyper’s offspring to ransom for his freedom. But a child’s a child.’

  The dark face peered into the camera and smiled.

  ‘I’ll keep this girl instead.’ He laughed. ‘Why test the mettle of a bastard like Kuyper? When I can try the conscience of you good and ordinary people?’

  ‘Let her go now,’ Vos begged. ‘There’s no justice in kidnapping a child . . .’

  ‘Justice is what we make it. This kid will do. Tomorrow I return with instructions. This phone. No other.’

  Gone then. Hanna Bublik cursed. The Kuyper girl held on to her mother’s legs and closed her eyes.

  The ducks and coots were returning to the water, bickering as if nothing had happened. Vos looked at Laura Bakker and Dirk Van der Berg.

  ‘She’s on a boat,’ he said.

  Four hours later in Marnixstraat Mirjam Fransen briefed them on Ismail Alamy, the Moroccan whose fate was now linked to that of Natalya Bublik. Fifty-one years old, an active recruiting agent for terrorist causes over the Internet. Resident in the Netherlands for six years. Suspected by AIVD of connections with a number of outlawed groups in the Horn of Africa, Al-Shabaab among them. Trained in Afghanistan, wanted in three Middle Eastern countries to face criminal charges for conspiracy, bomb plots and attempted murder.

  Alamy was one of the few recognized members of an elusive terrorist cell led by a figure known as Il Barbone. Saudi by birth, but based in Italy for years. The nickname came from there, and the rumour he had a heavy beard. Fransen didn’t want to talk about that much. Classified, she said. All they needed to know was that Barbone was behind something quite unlike the standard Islamist terrorist grouping: noisy, visible, relatively easy to track. Instead it was a well-organized operational unit dedicated to planning and funding, one that worked silently, often through conventional channels, to move money, people and intelligence around western Europe. Terrorism as a business process, everyday, difficult to detect.

  For the last twenty-four months Alamy had been fighting a protracted battle against extradition. At that moment he was in a solitary secure cell in the detention centre at Schiphol airport awaiting one final appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. The moment that was lost – days away – Fransen predicted he’d be placed on a military plane and shipped out of the country to face trial in a friendly Middle Eastern nation.

  ‘You can’t do that until we’ve found the girl,’ Vos said.

  Bakker had joined them in De Groot’s office. Fransen brought along her deputy, a taciturn, hefty man called Thom Geerts, grey raincoat and a crew-cut bullet head. Marnixstraat had almost sixty detectives working on the case already, going through CCTV and phone records, interviewing potential witnesses. The call to Saskia’s phone was made through a Net connection. Untraceable. The black van had been found abandoned near Centraal station. They’d used a counterfeit security pass to allow them to take it close to Leidseplein.

  These men were prepared.

  ‘We don’t base government policy o
n the actions of criminals,’ Geerts said with no emotion.

  ‘You’ve been trying to ship this man out of the country for years,’ De Groot told the pair from AIVD. ‘A few more days won’t hurt. He’s not going anywhere. We need the time.’

  Geerts was about to argue when Fransen put a hand to his arm, smiled without much warmth and said, ‘That’s fine. We can wait. A few days anyway.’

  Laura Bakker sat silently fuming throughout the briefing. Fransen had admitted at the outset they’d received some prior warning of a possible attack during the Sinterklaas parade. Not details. Only chatter. She said it was insufficient to brief the police. They should have been aware the threat level was raised that morning. Standard practice in such circumstances.

  ‘If we’d known . . .’ Bakker said a second time.

  Mirjam Fransen shrugged.

  ‘What would you have done? We had teams of officers in place. That was enough. We couldn’t cancel Sinterklaas.’ A brief smile. ‘Could we?’

  Commissaris de Groot glared at her.

  ‘I should have been better informed. We won’t pursue that now.’

  ‘No you won’t.’ She looked at her watch. ‘I need to go back to the office. I want you to handle the practical matters. Deal with the family. This Georgian prostitute . . . does she have the right papers?’

  Hanna Bublik was being interviewed downstairs by Dirk Van der Berg and a female officer. She didn’t seem to have much to say.

  ‘Her legal status isn’t one of my priorities right now,’ Vos said. ‘The room where the girl was being held. It looked like a boat.’

  Fransen frowned.

  ‘You’re sure of that?’

  ‘I live on a boat. You get to know what they’re like. Low walls. Timber planking . . .’

  ‘There are a lot of boats in Amsterdam,’ she said. ‘Good luck . . .’

  ‘Why did you shoot that man?’ Bakker asked.

  Fransen shrugged.

  ‘You wouldn’t have asked that if you were there.’ She stared the young policewoman in the face. ‘Bouali had a handgun. He looked ready to use it. We gave the standard warning.’

  ‘I didn’t hear any warning,’ Bakker pointed out.

  Mirjam Fransen waited a moment then asked, ‘Do you think I’m lying?’

  ‘I’m saying I didn’t hear it.’

  ‘And I’m telling you it was given. Bouali had a weapon. The idiot was turning it on us. I wanted him alive as much as you. Maybe he had things he could tell us.’

  The dead man was a Briton by birth, had changed his name when he fell in with a radical preacher in the north of England. Vos’s team had already talked to some of the people in the grubby tenement in the red-light district where he had a tiny room. His housemates were mainly foreign restaurant workers. He was a stranger, there for only a few days, had spent most of his time elsewhere and didn’t talk much.

  The AIVD woman turned to Vos and held out a hand.

  ‘I need that phone now. We’ll deal with the calls.’

  He did nothing.

  ‘The phone,’ she repeated.

  Frank de Groot got up and sat on the edge of his desk.

  ‘Whoever this man is he insisted he’d only talk to Vos.’

  ‘They don’t make the conditions,’ Geerts said.

  ‘When they’re holding an eight-year-old girl hostage they do,’ De Groot replied. ‘We keep the phone. Vos does the talking. We’ll let you know what happens, naturally.’ A pause. ‘It would be nice if we got the same in return.’

  Mirjam Fransen glared at him.

  ‘Do you really want me to take this to the ministry?’

  ‘No. I want you to work with us. So we bring Natalya Bublik home. This Alamy creature at the airport . . . that’s up to you. We—’

  ‘I can go over your head, De Groot.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Yes. You can. And I wonder how that will look. However this falls out we’ll both be under scrutiny when it’s over. Do you want it said we started with a turf war? When a young girl’s life’s at stake?’

  They didn’t like that. But they backed down and left for their own offices not long after.

  ‘We should have been told,’ Vos said when they were gone, and got a ‘damned right’ from Bakker straight away.

  ‘We should,’ De Groot agreed. ‘But we weren’t.’

  The Kuypers were having dinner in their neat little terrace home by the Herenmarkt. A table by the window. Christmas lights, red and green and blue, blinking in a pattern against the glass.

  Outside there were people dining in the West-Indisch Huis. A couple of drunks hanging around in the children’s playground, messing about on the swings.

  Saskia had gone to bed, exhausted, morose. As if she’d been cheated of something.

  Henk Kuyper said little and drank a lot. He couldn’t wait to get back to his computer.

  Picking at the remains of a pizza she’d bought from the organic store round the corner she gently asked him about that afternoon.

  ‘It was a mistake,’ he said. ‘We were lucky.’

  He poured more red wine and gazed at her. A handsome man with long, flowing dark hair. Didn’t smile much of late.

  ‘Where were you?’ she asked.

  He groaned, glanced at his watch.

  ‘Do we have to go through this again? I had work to do. I’m sorry.’ He reached over and took her hand. This was the kind of look that softened her when they argued in the past. ‘You’ve no need to blame yourself.’

  ‘I wasn’t.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘I meant where were you when that woman turned up?’

  His mood could change so swiftly. It was black and cold again.

  ‘I told you. I had to make a call.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘No buts. I found Saskia. I went back into all that . . . damned mess and she was there. I saw that jacket I bought her. Then I got her out. What more . . . ?’

  The doorbell saved them from an escalating argument. She went downstairs and answered. His father, Lucas, stood there, stiff and tall. More burly than his son. Just past sixty. Still the military officer, always smart, clean-shaven.

  A decent man, his life had almost been destroyed by a single, flawed decision with terrible consequences. Henk and Lucas hadn’t been on good terms for years. Not that it stopped his father bankrolling their lives.

  ‘Will he speak to me?’

  Henk came and stood behind her on the stairs and asked curtly, ‘What do you want?’

  The older man stepped inside without being asked. His son scowled down at him.

  ‘I want to help. What do you think? You and Renata and Saskia . . . you need security. I can organize something.’

  ‘Security? You? Really?’

  What happened in Bosnia twenty years before would never leave either of these two men. She understood and accepted that. Henk had been a child at boarding school. He’d had to live with taunts as the papers went to town on his father. Lucas was a major with a NATO mission at the time, caught between two sides, charged with keeping the peace but lacking the authority and force to impose his will. A mistake had been made. Thousands of innocent people had died as a result. An official inquiry had cleared Lucas Kuyper of any blame. But that didn’t stop the opprobrium and the hatred towards his family name.

  ‘Not again, Henk,’ the older man warned.

  ‘Why? Because you don’t want to hear it?’

  ‘I don’t. I’m happy to pay for some discreet security around the house . . .’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Henk . . .’

  He came all the way down the stairs and faced up to his father by the door.

  ‘We don’t need you. We’re Kuypers. Amsterdam aristocracy. Not some poverty-stricken Bosnian Muslim you should have been helping years ago.’

  Lucas Kuyper closed his eyes for a second, a look of pain on his lined, grey face.

  ‘AIVD called. They told me what happened. And why.’


  Henk folded his arms and grinned.

  ‘Well there’s a surprise. Those bastards never let you go, do they? Did they give you a file on me too?’

  ‘What you do with your life’s your own business. Saskia and Renata . . .’

  Henk Kuyper walked up and held open the door.

  ‘I can look after my own family.’ He nodded at the dark street outside. ‘Next time call ahead. I’d like some notice. Even better . . . don’t bother.’

  There was a brief flash of anger on Lucas Kuyper’s stern face.

  ‘Can’t I even see my own granddaughter?’

  ‘She’s in bed. Tired.’

  ‘Henk . . .’ Renata intervened. ‘We can always—’

  ‘It’s been a long day. For all of us.’ He nodded at the street again. ‘We’ll cope.’

  The stiff man in the long raincoat walked out into the drizzle. Widowed, he lived on his own in a mansion in the Canal Ring. Renata took Saskia to visit him regularly. He was lonely. Always pleased to see them. Henk never came.

  ‘We’d be screwed if he cut off the money,’ she said, and regretted immediately the mercenary tone of the remark. It wasn’t how she meant it.

  Henk shooed her back up the stairs.

  ‘He’ll never do that. Imagine the shame. A Kuyper on the breadline.’

  She followed him back into the dining room, watched as he sat down and reached for the wine bottle.

  ‘Saskia loves her grandfather. She doesn’t understand why you don’t.’

  He nodded.

  ‘One day, when she’s older, I’ll tell her. About Srebrenica. About power and war and what soldiers like him do. Then she’ll understand.’

  ‘You’re too good for the rest of us,’ she said as he poured himself more wine.

  ‘You could drink with me,’ he suggested. ‘That might help.’

  ‘Would it?’ she asked.

  ‘Maybe not.’

  She still didn’t understand why he’d found Saskia then made himself scarce.

  ‘Don’t open a second bottle,’ she said then went to the living room and turned on the TV.

  A few minutes later she heard his footsteps clumping up the stairs to his little gable office.