The Wrong Girl

by David Hewson

  His phone buzzed. The thing seemed a part of him. It was out in a flash, his fingers racing over the screen as if they knew every millimetre.

  ‘Work?’ she asked lightly.

  ‘I have to go out for a while.’

  This was new.

  ‘Out? You mean . . . in the real world?’

  He grinned then winked at her.

  ‘Good one that. You’re sure you don’t want to take a break somewhere for a week or two? We can cope. I’ll look after Saskia. She’ll look after me.’

  ‘I’m fine here,’ Renata said.

  He picked up the Amarone. Two thirds full. Placed it in front of her.

  ‘Leave me half a glass for when I get back.’

  She pushed it back over the table.

  ‘All yours,’ she said. ‘Just for a change.’

  The boat was a klipper. Not that different to Vos’s own but smarter, a little less old, a lot tidier. It sat near the junction of two channels of water beneath a line of trees shedding their leaves into the winter wind. There was a light on in the main cabin. Behind closed curtains they could make out a figure moving to and fro inside. Then a second, smaller shape came into view. Words they couldn’t hear were exchanged. The diminutive silhouette vanished as if ordered somewhere.

  Vos parked his bike against the house opposite. Bakker did the same.

  ‘Maybe there are things we could put on the walls?’ she said. ‘Microphones? And listen in.’

  ‘I imagine,’ he agreed and set off for the waterfront.

  ‘Pieter!’ she said and put a hand to his arm.

  He turned and smiled.

  ‘I live on a boat, Laura. I know what it’s like. Not a house. It sits below everything else. You don’t look out. You can’t easily. That’s one reason I liked it in the first place. It’s like a . . . a cocoon.’

  The long road looked empty. No one observing them.

  ‘They’re not looking out for us. Besides . . . it’s probably a waste of time.’

  He walked on. Bakker joined him. A few steps from the gangplank she went ahead. Before Vos could stop her she was taking out a forensic glove, putting it on her right hand, dragging something out of a smouldering brazier near the steps to the houseboat.

  Vos pulled out his torch. It was the burned remnants of a Black Pete costume. Green fabric, smoke-stained and charred. A ruff. A black hat.

  ‘We’ll bring in a team . . .’ Vos started to say. Then froze. There was a sound from the boat. Lights there. A voice. Male. Commanding.

  Bakker had her handgun out already. Fresh from firearms training a couple of weeks before. She was more at home with the things than he’d ever be.

  The door opened. The shape of a man there, barking orders. A big man.

  Vos turned, told her to wait.

  But she was young and keen and quick, soon dashing over the gangplank, weapon out. No stopping her.

  Koeman closed the door behind him. The two AIVD officers stared at De Groot. The commissaris leaned back in his chair and rubbed his black walrus moustache.

  A smart, intelligent man. Easy with his own people. Hated dealing with anyone outside the service. Especially faceless agents who’d never worn a uniform, never quite said who was pulling their strings.

  ‘Well?’ he asked.

  ‘In a couple of minutes you’ll be getting an email from The Hague. The minister’s taking a personal interest in this case. She requires a happy outcome.’

  ‘Don’t we all?’ De Groot asked.

  ‘The minister wants the lines to be clear,’ Geerts cut in.

  These two worked like a double act. It was hard to see daylight between the two of them.

  ‘The lines are clear, aren’t they? You deal with national security. We pursue criminal investigations. Kidnapping’s a crime. Finding that young girl’s our job. I want your help. If there’s something you know that can assist us I want to hear it. But . . .’

  ‘Not as simple as that,’ Fransen said with a sigh. ‘This is about Ismail Alamy. He’s in play. Between us. Between the people in the Middle East who want him.’ She paused for effect. ‘The Americans would like a chat too.’

  ‘Then let the Americans talk to him in that cell in Schiphol.’

  ‘This man could take us to Barbone if he wanted,’ Geerts said. ‘That’s about as precious a prize as we could get right now. Vos should never have been out there this morning. Did you know he was in Schiphol?’

  A weak point. He wasn’t going to give them an answer.

  ‘Thought not,’ the AIVD man said. ‘You’re out of your depth here, De Groot. It’s best you know it.’

  ‘Careers die at times like this,’ the woman added. ‘It’s a kind of suicide usually.’

  De Groot looked at them, shook his head and laughed.

  ‘Are you really saying you don’t want us to find this girl?’

  ‘There’s more at stake than the life of an illegal hooker’s daughter,’ Fransen answered. ‘More than you could begin to imagine.’

  ‘Do you have children?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s irrelevant,’ Fransen snapped. ‘I’ve got a job to do.’

  ‘So the answer to my question is . . . yes. You want us to stop looking.’

  They glanced at one another. Then Fransen said, ‘I want to know where you go. I want to hear what you find. I want to be told what you plan to do. Before you do it. And if I say you do nothing. Then nothing’s what you do.’

  The commissaris folded his arms and kept silent.

  ‘Where’s Vos?’ she asked.

  ‘Pieter?’ De Groot said brightly. ‘Most talented man I’ve got. And the most infuriating. Very difficult to manage. Goes off on his own. Doesn’t say where. Doesn’t answer his phone. And then . . . when you’re about to bite his head off . . . he comes back with everything you want, neatly wrapped and tied. Sometimes anyway. So you just want to give him a big hug instead.’

  He released a long and measured sigh.

  ‘And that’s the truth of it. Nothing’s going to change. With either of us.’

  Mirjam Fransen glared at him.

  ‘I’ll take his neck along with yours.’

  ‘You can try,’ De Groot replied. ‘But you keep forgetting. This media blackout on the kidnapping won’t last forever. At some stage it comes to an end. There’ll be publicity. An internal inquiry. Perhaps a judicial one too if we really screw up. Who knows?’

  There was a flicker of concern on their faces then and he knew he’d won. For now anyway.

  ‘When the public realize you’ve been playing games with the life of an eight-year-old girl . . . Georgian, illegal, whatever, I don’t care . . . what do you think? Will they see your bigger picture? Or something a little simpler?’

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘Just a thought,’ he added and looked at the door. ‘When I hear anything of substance I’ll let you know.’

  After they left he phoned Vos. Got voicemail. Then went through to control. They could track him through his handset.

  Westerdok, the desk said. Something was happening. Backup was on the way.

  A tall and hefty figure, reaching for something. Bakker pushed ahead in spite of Vos’s cries, yelling at the man to get down, flat on the damp planks of the houseboat.

  From somewhere nearby came the sound of cars. Headlights. Voices. Running feet.

  Vos raced over the gangplank, wished she’d do as he asked for once. Caught the man’s face as Bakker dealt with him. Moustache. Fifties maybe. Scared in the dark.

  From his fingers something slipped and fell into the black water. A couple of ducks squawked angrily.

  He wasn’t sure but to Vos it looked like a phone.

  Pushing past he got to the door of the boat and strode inside. The lights were on. The place looked tidy. To the right was a small door to what must have been a cabin in the bows. There was a heavy padlock on it, unlatched. The fixture looked new.

  In the stern of the boat stood a diminutive Asian wom
an in a pink cleaner’s jacket. She held a vacuum cleaner and a duster and was staring at him, more than a little outraged.

  ‘Is there a girl here?’ he asked, already knowing the answer.

  ‘No girl,’ she said, baffled. ‘Who you? What you do? Pushing in like this. Mr Smits . . . he gonna be dead mad with you.’

  Vos looked round the place. She must have been busy cleaning for a while. It was spotless. He couldn’t help but wonder what had vanished under her polish and duster. He showed her his badge and asked her to get outside then followed her. The big man with the moustache was seated on the deck moaning out loud. Van der Berg was there with a couple of uniform officers.

  They got Smits off the boat and sat him in a squad car. He was a flabby individual with a beer gut and a grumpy demeanour. The story seemed straight enough. He was the owner of the klipper barge and lived round the corner. An hour earlier he’d walked past the boat and noticed it was empty. When he went inside it looked as if the holiday tenants had cleared out. The place had been booked three days earlier. The agency people had let them in. He’d never seen who was there. But it seemed obvious they’d gone.

  ‘Sometimes people leave early,’ Smits said. ‘They don’t like the area or the boat or something. I saw it was empty. So I called in the cleaner. Maybe we can get a last-minute booking in the morning.’

  He gestured at Bakker.

  ‘Next thing I know this crazy cow’s pointing a gun in my face.’

  ‘You’re the owner,’ Bakker threw back at him. ‘You’re supposed to keep details of people who rent. Copies of their passport for one thing. What do you have?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘I was busy. It was just for a week. They didn’t ask for a receipt or anything.’

  ‘Give us a description,’ Bakker demanded.

  ‘Ask the agency. I told you. They let them in. I never even saw the people.’

  Vos told Van der Berg to cordon off the area and start door-to-door checks to see if anyone had seen who’d been using the boat. Then bring in forensic to go over whatever might have been left behind.

  After that he went inside again. Bakker followed. Forensic gloves on they opened the door to the little cabin at the front and looked inside.

  Black timber planking. The same as they’d seen on the phone.

  ‘This was the place,’ she said. ‘Why did they leave?’

  ‘Maybe they planned it all along.’ Vos was trying to think the way they did. Some steps seemed obvious. ‘They know this could take days. They’d have places all over the city.’ He looked at her. ‘Wouldn’t you?’

  A thought.

  ‘They can only move at night. Too risky during the day. Get onto Marnixstraat and see what they can pull out of the traffic CCTV.’

  She was barely listening. Bakker was looking at something in the tiny cabin. A scrawl in the condensation on the tiny porthole window.

  Ducking down to avoid the low doorway she walked in and looked more closely. The place smelled of disinfectant from the portable toilet in the corner, of stagnant water and diesel from outside.

  Vos joined her. Just four words in the drops of water against the glass, ‘Mum. I love you.’

  Bakker swore and stomped back out into the main cabin, heavy feet hard on the planking.

  Half an hour they waited watching the teams assemble. Vos told Van der Berg to go home and get some sleep. Had to say it twice to Bakker before she listened.

  Then he sat on the bonnet of one of the squad cars watching the team go to work. It could take days to get any DNA out of the place. The burned Black Pete costume might never reveal a thing. There was nothing coming from the rental agency either. All they had was a reservation made using an untraceable temporary email.

  If they’d located the boat sooner they might have found her. He called De Groot and briefed him. The commissaris seemed subdued, as if there was something he wanted to tell him but couldn’t.

  ‘We need to tread carefully, Pieter,’ De Groot said in the end. ‘This Alamy character complicates things. AIVD are pulling strings behind my back. There are people keeping an eye on us.’

  ‘Is an eight-year-old girl important to them?’ Vos asked.

  ‘That preacher is. Maybe there’s more to it than we know about. Go home. Get some sleep. Let’s talk in the morning and see where we stand. And keep me posted. I need to know what’s going on.’

  Vos agreed and ended the call. Then handed back the bike he’d borrowed and started on the long walk home, past the Kuypers’ house in the Herenmarkt, on to the Jordaan.

  He was passing through the Noordermarkt, beside the squat shape of the church there, when Renata Kuyper’s phone rang. The restaurants were busy. A couple of lovers were walking arm in arm on the cobbled pavement by the canal. The city was over the previous day’s nightmare, in ignorance of the legacy it left behind.

  Vos sat down on a bench beneath an ornate street light to take the call.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘I told you. No games. So why are you in Westerdok?’

  Control would be on the call by now, recording it, looking for clues behind the voice. But Vos could hear nothing at all. Perhaps they were getting more careful.

  ‘The girl’s missing. We’re police. Do you expect us to sit on our hands all day?’

  ‘I expect you to free my brother. And give me my money.’

  ‘When?’ Vos asked and wondered: how did he know we were there? How did he find out so quickly? Was it possible they guessed the police were on the way?

  ‘When I tell you.’

  ‘Is she safe?’ he asked. ‘Is she well? Can I talk to her?’

  ‘The kid doesn’t know you from Adam. What good would that do?’

  ‘I could tell her mother. You know who she is. Just another immigrant. No papers. No money. And you’ve taken—’

  ‘Please don’t make me cry, Vos,’ the man cut in with a laugh. ‘I can, you know.’

  ‘Tomorrow . . .’

  ‘Tomorrow I’ll call you. On this number. The afternoon. We’ll make arrangements. If you try to pursue us again all bets, all promises are off. She’s an OK kid. Be a real shame if you let her down.’

  The phone went dead. The pair of lovers were kissing, arms entwined around one another, shadows falling on the sparkling surface of the canal. A winter wind was starting to work its chilly breath around Amsterdam. Somewhere, Vos knew, a small, determined child was trapped, listening, thinking, wondering.

  And there wasn’t a damned thing he could do to help her.

  Twenty minutes later he arrived at the Drie Vaten. Someone from Marnixstraat had taken Sam to the bar. The little dog greeted him. Waggy tail. Bright eyes even though it was gone eleven. Not a moment’s thought for Sofia Albers who’d fed him, walked him, looked after him again.

  Much like his owner, Vos thought. He smiled, said thanks, bought a beer and a toasted sandwich, then took a table by the window and looked out on the canal. No lights in his houseboat. Still there were memories of what happened earlier that year, when his daughter emerged from the darkness eventually and so, in a sense, did he. In the end Vos had saved her. Now she was on the other side of the world with her mother, enjoying the Caribbean sun, reluctant to return to the scene of the nightmare that had torn their family apart. The relief he felt at finding her was real but tempered always by an aching sense of loss.

  ‘You want me to look after him tomorrow?’ Sofia said as she came over with the sandwich.

  ‘If you can. How’s your mother?’

  A shrug.

  ‘Getting old, Pieter. Aren’t we all?’ She looked out of the window at the slumbering city. ‘I know I can’t ask. But . . . this business in Leidseplein. Is it finished with?’

  He smiled and kept quiet.

  ‘I suppose that’s an answer anyway,’ she said with a shrug. ‘Can I join . . .?’

  A shape at the door. Vos looked. Hanna Bublik was there. She’d been to the scene of the houseboat on Westerdok. One
of the uniform men had told her where to find him. It wasn’t a secret.

  ‘I’ll leave you,’ Sofia said after the Georgian woman ordered a coffee and sat down opposite him.

  She was angry. Deserved to be, he thought. So he let her fury expend itself on him, listened, nodded, did what he could to explain. There were explanations too. This was an abduction that was planned. The Black Petes may have snatched the wrong girl but they knew what they wanted and how they would go about it. Some aspects of the case continued to bother him. The demand for money seemed wrong somehow.

  But Natalya’s mother neither knew nor cared about any of this. All she saw was failure. The police had located where her daughter was being held and arrived there too late. When they did they sealed off the boat and refused to let her on board to see the conditions Natalya had been kept in. To her this seemed unnecessary and cruel.

  ‘We have to search the place,’ he said when he had the chance. ‘It’s possible we can pick up some prints, DNA . . . some other material that will help us find her. It’s a scientific process. Even I can’t walk around when that’s going on. But . . .’

  He took out his phone to bring up the photo of the words Natalya had written in the porthole window.

  ‘They probably plan to move her frequently until we get a handover. At night always I guess. Natalya left us this.’

  She peered at the picture, moved by the careful writing in the condensation of the glass.

  This woman didn’t cry much, he thought. But at that moment she was close.

  ‘Your daughter must be a bright girl. She’s thinking about you. Probably wondering how she can escape.’

  ‘She would.’

  The heat had come out of the conversation. She drank her coffee, said yes when Vos asked her if she’d like something to eat. Two more toasted sandwiches appeared. He wished there was something more he could offer.

  ‘Why do you care?’ she asked.

  ‘Because it’s my job.’

  ‘There’s more to it than that. A woman at the police station told me. About your own girl. How you live here now. On the water. On your own.’