The Wrong Girl

by David Hewson

  So he told her.

  She listened carefully then said, ‘AIVD. That means deep water?’

  ‘Fathomless,’ Vos agreed.

  ‘And we’re bringing Kuyper into Marnixstraat? Am I allowed to be there?’

  The young always thought in straight lines. That was one reason they found trouble so easily.

  The dog was happy with Sofia Albers, trying to beg cheese from one of the locals who’d just walked in. The outrage in Leidseplein two days before wasn’t forgotten. It still rumbled on in the papers. People talked about the shock and the outrage. But it lay in the past. An event the city had put behind it. AIVD’s blackout was still in place. No one knew a young girl was being kept captive somewhere, her freedom depending on one of three things: the investigative skills of the police, the release of a suspected terrorist from imprisonment, and the payment of an unspecified ransom.

  If they did there’d already be a public collection to raise the money for the last – one that would meet its target in a couple of hours. Amsterdammers were like that.

  ‘Please,’ Bakker said meekly. ‘I need you to tell me what I’m supposed to do.’

  ‘I told you that and you said no.’

  She folded her arms and gazed at him. Waiting.

  ‘You get your bike. We ride to see the Kuypers.’

  ‘Ride?’

  ‘Location matters, Laura. If we drag Henk Kuyper into Marnixstraat he’ll be on his guard immediately. Prepared. Knowing what he wants to say.’

  ‘So we surprise him at home instead,’ she said with a nod and got up. ‘Are you going to tell that woman from AIVD? If he was one of theirs once . . .’

  ‘Seems a touch premature, don’t you think? Later . . . They’re still mad about last night.’

  She laughed.

  ‘Why care about my career? You clearly don’t give a damn about yours.’

  He walked to the counter and paid. Stroked the dog. Didn’t need to ask Sofia to look after him.

  Outside in the bright sun, eyeing the battered houseboat with the dead plants, the windows held together by tape, the dog toys and the silver ballerina on the deck, Vos said, ‘I can always go back to what I was. I wouldn’t mind.’ A shrug. ‘Maybe I’d prefer it.’

  ‘No you wouldn’t.’

  ‘And you?’ he asked brightly. ‘What would you do?’

  Her long pale face fell into a familiar, half-amused scowl. Then she climbed on her bike. The smart new one she’d bought herself when Marnixstraat took her on full-time. A black Dutch-made Batavus, old-fashioned with a looped frame and high handlebars that made her sit upright, head in the air.

  ‘Whatever I felt like,’ Laura Bakker said and pedalled off down the canal.

  Just before ten the AIVD team turned up unannounced at Frank de Groot’s office. He let them in and listened to Mirjam Fransen rattle off a list of questions about the investigation. None of which had easy answers.

  Then she asked, ‘Where’s Vos? Where’s that mouthy girl who follows him around like a tame puppy?’

  De Groot was an easy-going man, aware they were all treading water in dangerous seas. All the same he’d come to develop a marked antipathy towards this woman. She wanted everything he had and was unwilling to give much at all in return.

  ‘Brigadier Vos is out on a call,’ he said.

  ‘You heard the question,’ Thom Geerts grunted. ‘Where?’

  So they had friends in government quarters in The Hague. This was Amsterdam. His city.

  ‘I’m not answerable to AIVD for my officers’ movements. Nor do I follow them every minute of the day.’

  ‘Find out,’ Fransen ordered. ‘We don’t want any more screw-ups like yesterday.’

  De Groot pushed back his chair and stared at them. An unsmiling woman who looked as if she belonged in an office. Geerts was ex-military. He had the stance, the build, the grim and unforgiving demeanour of a certain type of army man.

  ‘I’m not aware of any screw-ups yesterday. Vos had every right to talk to the man in custody at Schiphol. He tracked down that boat in Westerdok. The pity is the bird had flown. If . . .’

  A sudden rap at the door. Van der Berg barged in without waiting.

  ‘I think,’ he said, nodding at the TV set, ‘you need to turn on the news.’

  He looked agitated and that was out of character. De Groot reached for the remote and got the channel.

  The lead item had already started but there was a text summary running underneath the announcer. The appeal court ruling on Ismail Alamy’s expulsion order was due in a few hours. The news channel claimed to have a leak ahead of its announcement. According to their sources the preacher was about to win his case. The judges would demand his release before the day was out. The government had no more avenues of appeal. Alamy was going to be a free man. The outstanding arrest warrants for him in the Middle East would lie on the table on two grounds: that the so-called evidence behind him had been obtained through illicit means, and he might face torture if he was returned to face trial in any of the countries that wanted him.

  ‘A greater embarrassment for the government is hard to imagine,’ said the channel’s legal correspondent. ‘Our understanding is that Alamy will now be able to press for compensation for his imprisonment over the last eighteen months. It could run to hundreds of thousands of euros. In the meantime he could be back in his public housing property, living once again on state benefits, by tomorrow. Or leave the country for a friendly destination. A hero to those who’ve been supporting his case, some of them here in the Netherlands.’

  Geerts reached over, grabbed the remote and turned off the TV.

  He didn’t blink. Neither did Mirjam Fransen.

  ‘You knew this was on the cards,’ Van der Berg butted in. ‘You knew the bloody case was going to get thrown out and you never told us.’

  ‘It hasn’t happened yet,’ Fransen replied. ‘And if it does you can arrest him over the immigrant kid’s abduction.’

  ‘How?’ the detective yelled from the door. ‘He’s been in solitary for more than a year. You listen to every conversation he has. God . . . you couldn’t invent a better alibi.’

  ‘Enough,’ De Groot announced and waved him out.

  When Van der Berg was gone he looked at the two AIVD officers and asked, ‘Did you know?’

  ‘All our legal advice suggested he didn’t have a leg to stand on,’ Fransen said without a moment’s hesitation. ‘I’d no reason to think otherwise. We knew a decision was imminent . . .’ She glanced at her watch. ‘I’ll talk to the lawyers. Find some way we can stall. Rearrest him on something else. There has to be—’

  ‘What about the girl?’ De Groot cut in. ‘Natalya Bublik. Remember her?’

  ‘She’s your concern,’ Fransen replied, a little puzzled. ‘Not ours.’

  He shook his head, as if this might help him think this through. If Alamy was released would the kidnappers do the same for the girl? They’d asked for money, which seemed odd to begin with, as Vos had pointed out. But if Alamy was free why continue to hold her and risk being caught?

  ‘Either they’ll dump her at a bus station or somewhere,’ Geerts suggested. ‘Or if they think she can identify them in some way . . .’ He shrugged. ‘She’s dead.’

  Mirjam Fransen got up, phone in hand.

  ‘Go nowhere near Schiphol,’ she said. ‘I’ll brief you when I’ve got something to say.’

  De Groot watched them leave then called Vos and told him what was going on. He could hear the outside world behind the call. People on bikes. Just another day in Amsterdam.

  Geerts was right. Maybe they would just let the girl go. It was a big assumption though.

  Vos had stopped with Bakker when the call had come. They were in the Herenmarkt, by the playground. Saskia Kuyper was there sitting sullenly on a swing. Her mother was watching. She hadn’t noticed there were visitors. Eyes only for her daughter. There was something dark and unlovely between these two.

  ‘If we’re lu
cky we get a miracle,’ De Groot said, with the tiniest note of hope in his voice.

  ‘We’ve got to find her,’ Vos said straight away.

  ‘You can try.’

  ‘We have to,’ Vos insisted. ‘If Alamy goes free they’ve lost control just as much as us. We’ve got nothing they want. And they’ve got Natalya Bublik who’s worthless to them unless they want to go through the risk of a ransom handover.’

  Silence on the line. De Groot was a decent, kindly man. Trapped in an organized, logical frame of mind.

  ‘You really think Henk Kuyper’s involved?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know. But you read the logs. Henk Kuyper worked for AIVD until they threw him out five years ago for leaking material to the left-wing press. It seems he had sex with Natalya’s mother twice and left her that pink jacket. She thinks he may have asked whether the girl would be wearing that jacket in Leidseplein.’

  ‘She doesn’t know for sure?’ De Groot asked.

  ‘It wasn’t a date, Frank. I don’t imagine she paid much attention.’ Vos couldn’t take his eyes off Laura Bakker. She was watching the children in the playground, her long, plain-pretty face full of fear and melancholy. ‘Keep Van der Berg looking for someone who knew that dead Brit. And I’d prefer it if AIVD stayed in the dark about where I am. For now.’

  Silence again.

  ‘Agreed?’ he asked.

  ‘Agreed,’ De Groot said eventually.

  Vos walked over and caught Bakker’s attention. Renata Kuyper still hadn’t seen them. She was staring at her daughter. Saskia sat on the swing barely moving, looking ahead, at nothing at all.

  ‘I loved my mum,’ Bakker said, her voice cracked and uncertain for once. ‘I still miss her.’

  ‘Mine lives outside Utrecht,’ Vos said. ‘I go to see her once a month. We’ve been getting on since I went back to work.’

  She nodded at the Kuyper woman and her daughter.

  ‘It shouldn’t be like that. Should it?’

  ‘No,’ he said then pushed his bike to the door of the narrow terraced house with the crow-stepped gable, put his finger on the bell, kept it there until he could hear footsteps coming down the stairs.

  Natalya was in another boat, listening to squabbling ducks and the waves lapping against the hull.

  She was starting to feel grubby. At home she changed clothes every other day, sometimes helped her mother take the dirty washing to the launderette, watched the sheets and shirts and underclothes go round and round.

  Here, in this strange and unreal life, it was as if time had stopped altogether. There was nothing but a new cell, this time lit by two opaque glass portholes. A bathroom with a toilet and a small tub. A little dressing table and a mirror.

  She could get in the bath, take a shower if she wanted. Feel clean. Feel different. And perhaps she would. But not now. He was there. Or one of them. She’d logged at least three in her head now. One with a quiet, refined Dutch accent. The kind one, she thought. The other two foreign. Grumpy. Scary. Scared too.

  This was a frightened one. She could sense the fear in his sudden, nervous movements, hear it through the angry grunts of an alien language that came muffled through the bathroom door.

  Scared people are weak. Or so her mum always said. Scared people could be dangerous too. Because the way they tried to hide their feebleness was through a cowardly show of strength.

  But you had to push them. If you didn’t you never knew where you stood.

  Birds beyond the window. A church bell not so far away, chiming every fifteen minutes with a longer, more musical set of notes on the hour. That extended set of sounds was a while ago. Had she still possessed her cheap little watch – the first man took it from her in the van – it would have read, she guessed, half past ten.

  And still they hadn’t fed her. The flight from that initial boat had been hasty and unexpected. As if someone had warned them to snatch her away. A blindfold. A van. A short trip through winding streets. Then bundled again across a gangplank into somewhere new.

  The Dutch one hadn’t turned up at all since then. Perhaps he was scared as well. It was as if she’d become an object. A piece of furniture to be moved around the city without a second thought.

  That idea made her mad. And they had to be tested. Her mum said so.

  Natalya walked to the flimsy wooden door of the bathroom and banged on it with her little fist. She didn’t shout or scream. They’d said they’d gag her if she did that. But they didn’t mention anything else.

  Three times she hammered on the door. Then she waited and listened. He was on the phone. She heard a snatch of something, made a mental note of it.

  Silence. She banged again, twice and the door was thrown open. A tall man there. Black balaclava, beard peeking out of the bottom, bright-blue jeans, a brown leather bomber jacket. He towered over her and asked in a harsh foreign voice, ‘What do you want?’

  ‘You didn’t give me any food.’

  He stood there stiff, embarrassed maybe. They didn’t want to hurt her. None of them. Or so it seemed.

  ‘I’ll get you something, child. Don’t bang on the door like that.’

  Outside she heard the sound of a small boat chugging down the canal and loud, happy voices. American, she thought. Tourists probably.

  ‘Wouldn’t if you fed me,’ Natalya said, trying to give her voice the scolding tone of a teacher dealing with a naughty child. ‘And a book. Some crayons. The other man did.’

  ‘He’s not here.’

  She didn’t move.

  ‘Wait,’ he said and walked away from the door.

  She could see a little of the space beyond. It looked like a low, narrow living room. A television set, a computer on a desk. Chairs and a sofa. In the corner a small kitchen hob and a tiny fridge. The windows were bigger here and clear. Through them she could see the walls of the canal and just make out the bare trunks of trees above the black brickwork.

  And a set of steps rising to what had to be an open door, judging by the flood of light pouring down to the timber planks of the boat.

  She looked.

  He looked.

  A big man. Between her and the world outside. Natalya was quick and lithe and smart. But she couldn’t get past him, not at that moment. And both knew it.

  A supermarket bag stood by the little gas hob. Not Marqt any more. The man bent over the shopping, roughly hunting for something. There was a mirror on the wall. Through that she could watch him closely even though his back was turned. Bad-tempered, worried. He was going through the things someone had bought. The balaclava didn’t fit well. He couldn’t see. Still with his back to her he pulled up the front of the balaclava to peer at the groceries.

  One moment then, so short she didn’t know herself how much either of them saw.

  A face in the glass. Dark-skinned. Unusual. Black eyes glaring back towards her. Beard like a pirate.

  Natalya retreated into the bathroom and waited out of sight behind the door.

  A few moments later he came back, the balaclava pulled down. In his hands a pot of yoghurt, a croissant, a carton of orange juice.

  She took them and said, ‘I told you. The Dutch man promised me a book.’

  Which was a lie. A little white lie. Perhaps he’d know. But grown-ups lied all the time. How else did children learn to copy them?

  He handed her the food. She placed it on the closed toilet lid. Then he went back to the bag, rifled through it again. This time he kept the balaclava on.

  When he returned he had a new colouring book and a fresh set of crayons. She looked at the cover. My Little Pony. Like the jacket she’d got. Too girly. Too young for her. But she took it anyway, watched as the man closed the door and seemed to bolt it.

  That must have been new, she thought. No one locked a toilet from the outside.

  Natalya Bublik wondered what that meant and whether it was any use to her. Then she waited a few minutes, ate the yoghurt, then the croissant, drank the orange juice. Took out the new boo
k and the crayons. Couldn’t think of a thing to write.

  Koeman got called to reception in Marnixstraat to deal with the visitor causing trouble there. He took one look and thought: Why is it always me?

  The man was wearing a suit that must have been smart once upon a time: dark blue with grey pinstripes. A pipe stuck out of his right-hand pocket and a bulge that must have been a tobacco tin. He smelled like an eighty-year-old who lived in an ashtray.

  As he started to talk he offered two ID cards. One standard EU issue. The second an old soldier’s card showing he’d been discharged three years earlier, not long after the Royal Netherlands Army pulled out of Afghanistan. Sergeant with the Regiment Johan Willem Friso.

  His name was Ferdi Pijpers and he’d just seen the TV news. Koeman did a double take on the ID. Pijpers was thirty-nine but looked a good ten years older. His leathery face was lined and tanned, either from dirt or pipe smoke. There was a tic in his right eye and an anxious timbre to his deep voice. War debris, Koeman thought. He knew this type. How they came out of the forces and never managed to make their way back into civilian life.

  He listened as best he could then said, ‘Ferdi, Ferdi . . . calm down. Please.’

  ‘I am calm,’ Pijpers said. ‘Got a coffee?’

  The incident with the Bublik woman still bothered Koeman. He didn’t like to appear rude or unhelpful. It was just that the job brought it on sometimes.

  So he went to the downstairs machine by reception and paid for a cup then watched Ferdi Pijpers take it with shaking fingers.

  ‘There are service charities, you know. People who can help.’

  ‘Who says I want help?’ Pijpers snapped, stung by the remark. ‘You’re the people who need it. Not me.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Because those fools in Strasbourg are going to let that bastard Alamy back out onto the streets. And then we get even more crap like we had in Leidseplein all over again.’

  The detective tried to think this through. The papers had run plenty of pieces about the attack the previous Sunday. Most had extensive profiles of Martin Bowers, the young Englishman who’d changed his name to Mujahied Bouali, fallen into extremist circles then travelled to Amsterdam to die in a back alley not far away from Marnixstraat. But that was it. Thanks to AIVD’s blackout Ismail Alamy wasn’t part of the story. Not for the public.