The Wrong Girl

by David Hewson

  Yilmaz was wearing a black leather overcoat that fell all the way down to his shins. In his right hand he had a carrier bag from one of the nearby oriental supermarkets.

  ‘Do you like Thai food, Mrs Bublik?’

  ‘Not hungry.’

  ‘Better than Chinese. Healthier.’

  She folded her arms and leaned against the wall.

  ‘Do we have something to discuss?’ he asked.

  ‘You tell me. Have you heard anything?’

  The laugh again.

  ‘How many times must we go through this? There’s business to transact before I can become involved.’ He pulled an apple out of the bag and took a big bite. ‘Otherwise you’re wasting your time and mine. And yours is even more precious I imagine.’

  Yilmaz reached out and keyed a code for the door. She watched. Carefully.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘OK,’ she said. ‘I’m yours.’

  He grinned.

  ‘Good. Finally you’ve seen the light. You won’t regret it.’

  ‘You’ve got some news?’

  He pushed open the door.

  ‘There are formalities we must go through first. Come inside please.’

  She hesitated. Not scared. Never that.

  ‘Please,’ Yilmaz said again and took her arm, pushing her into the lift, keyed in another code as she watched. ‘It’s cold out here. I have a log fire. You must make yourself at home.’

  Back in the office Vos got the details. The man talking to Martin Bowers in the pictures on Ferdi Pijpers’s missing phone was Saif Khaled. There was a file on him in intelligence. They suspected AIVD might have more but Mirjam Fransen wasn’t taking calls. Her assistant said she was back dealing with the family of Thom Geerts and no one else was much minded to help Marnixstraat at that moment.

  He got the impression they blamed the police for the shooting at Schiphol the previous night, not that they dared say. There didn’t seem much point in pressing for more information about a wiretap on Henk Kuyper either. The intelligence agency had done nothing about that as far as he could see.

  Khaled was forty-seven, born in Egypt, active in Palestine and Syria before seeking political asylum in the Netherlands ten years before. Like Henk Kuyper he called himself an ‘activist’. Just as with Kuyper it was unclear what that meant. The intelligence Vos could find indicated he was a sympathizer who’d offered vocal support for a number of extremist groups over the years. But there was no indication of illegal activity, of fundraising, or any public statements that might result in prosecution. He’d been vocal in the press too, speaking out at public meetings. According to one of Ferdi Pijpers’s neighbours that was how the former soldier came to be following him and the people he met in the first place. It had become something of an obsession.

  His home was a narrow terraced house on the edge of Chinatown. The property was owned by a shell company based in Yemen. From time to time men stayed with him. Never for long. That was it.

  ‘Well?’ Bakker asked when they got to the end of the skimpy details on the PC.

  Vos turned to Van der Berg and asked if intelligence had come back with any link between Khaled and the local crime gangs. Or some gossip about one of the mobs having a new candidate for extortion.

  ‘All they hear out there are Christmas bells,’ the detective replied with a sigh. He put a fat finger on the photo of Khaled on the screen. ‘Like it or not he’s all we’ve got.’

  ‘True,’ Vos agreed. ‘You stay here and see if you can dig up any more.’ He got up, nodded at Bakker. ‘Put some discreet surveillance around Khaled’s place. Get them asking questions. We’ll take the bikes.’

  It was almost twelve.

  ‘What if your man rings early?’ Bakker asked.

  Vos took the old Samsung out of his pocket and showed her. The battery was nearly full.

  De Groot walked in with a couple of men from operations. They were carrying a small red suitcase. The commissaris asked them to place it on the desk and unzip the thing.

  The top layer was fifty euro notes. Just enough to look convincing. Under a thousand in real money.

  ‘I take it this is inked?’ Vos asked.

  ‘Every last piece,’ one of the operations men agreed. ‘Ultraviolet. We can trace it back.’

  He pulled on a latex glove and gently moved aside a few of the genuine notes. Underneath lay plain pieces of paper cut to the same size.

  ‘It only needs to fool them long enough for us to get in there,’ De Groot said, a touch of regret in his voice. ‘That’s all. When we know where the handover is we’ll have teams in place.’

  Silence. Then a protracted sigh from Bakker.

  ‘Unless you have other ideas,’ the commissaris added.

  ‘We’re still chasing leads,’ Vos replied. ‘I’d rather track her down if we can. Laura?’

  ‘Where . . .?’ De Groot began.

  ‘Dirk,’ Vos said, heading for the door. ‘Fill him in.’

  Renata Kuyper didn’t go into her husband’s office much. He didn’t like it. Said he needed space and room to think on his own. Except when she came up the stairs with coffee. That was OK.

  So she brought him a cup, put it on the desk by the window and pulled up the spare chair. The top room of the house, right beneath the crow steps. Tiny. He seemed to love being locked in this place looking out over the Herenmarkt, the kid’s playground, the trees and the ancient pissoir.

  His eyes stayed locked on the computer. He’d been unusually quiet that morning. Maybe there was a nagging conscience there, one he’d buried. Which would only make it hurt more, though being a man he probably never understood that.

  ‘Henk . . .’

  ‘I don’t have the energy for another argument. Sorry.’

  She reached out and touched his arm for a moment. Smiled at him in a way that tried to say sorry for both of them.

  The room was always cold in winter. He seemed to like it that way. There was something solitary, almost monastic about the way he hid himself away here.

  ‘I don’t want an argument. We need to talk.’

  He closed whatever he was working on – a short email, not that she saw the contents – then pushed his chair back from the little desk.

  ‘If you want me to nag my dad about letting you live with him just say. You shouldn’t be forced to stay here. Not if you don’t want.’

  She might have guessed Lucas would call him. They were father and son. And there was still a kind of closeness between them, in spite of all the differences. She felt sure Lucas would tell him about the conditions behind the ransom money. There was no way out of this. Nor, in a sense, did she want one. His father was probably right. It was worth one more try.

  ‘I really don’t have any secrets, do I?’ she said. ‘Anyone here I can confide in?’

  ‘He’s worried about us. What do you expect?’

  She picked up some papers from the desk. Boring environmental reports. The stuff he always kept around. For show probably.

  ‘What are you working on?’

  ‘Another damned logging case in Sumatra. There’s an orang-utan charity asking for help.’ A grimace. ‘They can’t afford to pay, of course.’

  He went to Borneo not long after they married. Or so he said. She never really knew where he vanished to when he was travelling. The things he brought back, presents for her and Saskia, were just the usual airport crap. He might have picked them up at Schiphol.

  ‘I wish we could retrace the way we got here. Don’t you?’

  He folded his arms.

  ‘Find the place we took the wrong turning,’ she added. ‘Go the other way instead.’

  He sighed, stared at his hands.

  ‘I can’t undo what’s done.’

  Everything was so literal for him.

  ‘We could work at putting it behind us. For Saskia’s sake. Ours too.’

  Henk Kuyper nodded.

  ‘Is that possible?’

  ‘Lucas thinks we should try. He
seems very certain of that.’

  He laughed, was briefly young again.

  ‘My dad’s never troubled by doubts. About anything. Is he?’

  She didn’t let her eyes leave him.

  ‘I want to raise money for this girl. Lucas says he’ll help. I want us to hand over what we can too.’

  To her surprise he didn’t break into a scowl. Or tell her she was stupid.

  ‘We don’t have much in the bank, love. Without my dad . . .’

  Love.

  When did he last say that? How hurt would he be if she laughed in his face?

  Instead she said, ‘I’ve checked the statements. We could free up thirty thousand. It’ll hurt. We’ll survive.’

  He didn’t shriek.

  ‘Have you mentioned this to the police? Do you really think it can do any good? Dad seems to think the authorities won’t allow it.’

  ‘Maybe it’s not their choice. I’ve talked to Hanna. The woman.’ A caustic observation so nearly slipped into her speech. ‘She’s got no one else.’

  He leaned forward and took her hands.

  ‘They won’t let you pay it. They’re the police. The state. They run things here.’

  ‘They don’t run me,’ she said firmly. ‘Or you. Do they?’

  Again he didn’t slap her down.

  ‘You mean you’ll pay it without telling them?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘How?’ he asked.

  ‘She moves in those circles. She thinks she can come up with a way. We have to try. I can’t just sit here knowing her daughter’s out there . . . and it should have been Saskia. I won’t.’

  There was a sound. A new email on the computer. He didn’t even look at it.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Go down the bank. Take out what you can. Bring it back here. I can talk to people. Your father. See what we can do.’

  He seemed amused.

  ‘There’s nothing funny about any of this,’ she said.

  ‘Isn’t there? Here we are. The king and queen of lost causes. Me trying to save a few endangered animals in the rainforest. And you . . .’ He retreated, took his fingers away. ‘Trying to help . . . someone . . . who . . .’

  His hand went to his forehead. She wondered if she’d ever seen him in such obvious pain. And whether she was enjoying it too.

  ‘Just run down to the bank and do it, Henk.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said and got up straight away, kissed her shyly on the cheek, then set off down the narrow stairs.

  The front door closed with a slam. The walls of the old house trembled with the shock as always. She went to the window, watched him walk down the Herenmarkt, saw him look back and wave.

  So she did too. Nothing special or obvious. That wouldn’t have been right.

  There was a sound on the computer again. Another email coming in. Normally he was so careful. He always logged off, never left his phone without a number lock in it.

  Not now.

  She shuffled over and took his chair at the desk. Worn, creaky, overused. So many hours spent here working. For places he never talked about. Seeing people she never met.

  Renata moved the mouse and brought the window alive. Then memorized the position of everything on the screen. It was important he didn’t think she was snooping. This side of him, ‘the work’, was his alone.

  Slowly, carefully, she went through his files. There wasn’t much apart from the emails and a few documents. Some photos of Saskia. A couple of her on honeymoon by a courtyard in the Alhambra in Granada. One shot that tugged at her heart: the two of them on a Spanish beach, his arm around her shoulders. He looked young, handsome and fit, bare-chested in skimpy trunks. She wore a bikini. One of her favourites though she’d left it behind. It wouldn’t fit her now anyway.

  Long before he came back she withdrew from the computer, went downstairs, started to make coffee again.

  To think about what she’d seen too.

  Nothing about Sumatra or orang-utans anywhere.

  She wondered whether that should be a surprise.

  Vos stopped at Kaashuis Tromp and bought a couple of cheese croissants. Then the two of them rode past the Drie Vaten, over the gentle hump of the Berenstraat bridge, into the centre of the city, spilling flaky crumbs along the way. A few metres short of Spui he finished his, kept riding, balled the paper bag, aimed it straight into the nearest bin without even breaking speed. Bakker tried the same, missed, got off her bike cursing, padded over and picked it up then tidied it away.

  Feet on the ground he watched.

  ‘I’ll never get the hang of that,’ she moaned.

  ‘Yes, you will. It takes practice. Like everything.’

  She didn’t move. There was something that needed to be dealt with here.

  ‘Where’s the mother?’ Bakker asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Vos answered honestly. ‘I wish I did. I wish we could just reel her in and keep her safe with some uniforms around her. But we can’t. She’s not like that. Can’t make her either. Too smart for that.’

  She stayed silent. That was unusual.

  ‘What would you do in her position?’ Vos asked.

  ‘Anything I could. Not sit around waiting for us to get on with it. I mean . . .’ She swept back her hair and gathered it with a band. ‘We haven’t done much so far, have we? Except get it all wrong.’

  Laura Bakker so wanted the world to see her as a confident, capable young police officer. Which she was for the most part. But there was still an insecurity about her. It was there from the beginning, when she thought she was about to be thrown out of Marnixstraat as unsuitable for the job. He’d yet to find a way to deal with that.

  ‘This isn’t an exact science. We’re not filling in a spreadsheet. Sometimes things don’t add up. At least not in the way they should.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then we go back to the beginning and try again. If there’s another way of doing this I’m too stupid to know.’

  Still she didn’t move.

  ‘I can’t bear the idea we won’t find that little girl, Pieter. I don’t know what . . .’

  ‘We will find her.’

  ‘And if we don’t?’

  ‘How can I answer that question?’ he demanded. ‘What do you expect me to say?’

  She didn’t move. Might have been a teenager at that moment.

  ‘Does it get easier? Do you just get . . . hardened to all this shit? I mean—’

  ‘No,’ he broke in, checked his watch. ‘You don’t. Stop scaring me. In three hours I’m supposed to find out how we deliver a ransom that’s not a ransom and save a young girl’s life. I’d much rather we didn’t have to face that. Can we go, please?’

  She bristled.

  ‘You were the one who stopped for a cheese croissant. Not me.’

  For once Vos swore, quite mildly and under his breath. Then before she could ask another question he couldn’t possibly answer, he pedalled on.

  Cem Yilmaz’s living room was too hot. She could smell the logs on the fire. Taste the dense smoke they were putting out. In the bottom of her bag the stolen gun sat whispering to her. She knew how to use it now. Had looked that up on a PC in a cafe not far from home.

  It was obvious he wanted something. An act. Proof of her devotion. Pimps all did and Yilmaz was one of the busiest, most powerful, in the city. Not like the rest, or so he thought. A ‘businessman’. Legitimate. There to give other men what they wanted.

  She sat down and drank his too-strong coffee. Listened as he outlined what he was going to do. Put out feelers to his contacts offering to pay the ransom direct, without any police intervention. None of them, Yilmaz emphasized, were part of the criminal community. But they knew people. Heard things.

  If she was lucky one of them would come back with a link into whoever was holding Natalya. And then they could try to set up a handover.

  She told him what Vos had said about the new demand. Not once did he question Vos’s assu
mption that the original kidnappers had passed Natalya over to criminals more versed in the complexities of extortion. Either he knew something or wasn’t saying. Or it really was as obvious as Vos seemed to think.

  ‘I’ve a little sister back home,’ Yilmaz said when she finished. ‘I know about family. What else is there?’

  ‘I just want her back.’

  He nodded.

  ‘Of course. I’ll do what I can.’

  ‘The money . . .’

  ‘This sum they ask for’s ridiculous and they surely know it.’

  ‘They’ll want something. Now that preacher’s dead.’

  He smiled. Big teeth. Round face. A muscular, commanding man.

  ‘Everyone wants something. That’s what makes the world work. Let me see if we can establish a line of contact. Get them to talk to you direct. Then . . .’ He turned his dark, intelligent eyes on her. ‘You’ll have to come up with something?’

  ‘I’ll try. Can you help?’

  ‘You want a gift?’

  ‘No. A loan.’

  Yilmaz looked her up and down.

  ‘You’re an attractive woman. All the more if you could learn to smile. You’ve four, five, maybe seven years of work left in you. For my purposes anyway. How much do you think you could earn in all that time?’

  She wanted to fly at him.

  ‘No idea.’

  The searching eyes again, as if she were a business proposition being examined.

  ‘You might net me ten thousand a year in pure profit. If I give you a living allowance would you turn over every cent to me? To save your child?’

  ‘Every cent,’ she said without a moment’s hesitation.

  ‘And work as a waitress in the evening if I ask? You don’t make private calls. That I won’t allow.’

  ‘If that’s what it takes.’

  ‘Good.’ He thought to himself. ‘Seventy thousand euros is a lot of money.’

  ‘Not enough,’ she mumbled.

  ‘Then find some more. And I negotiate.’

  Yilmaz got up and stood in front of the fire, warming his backside. She knew that look.

  ‘I need to know what I’m paying for,’ he said with a wry shrug. ‘I’m sure you understand.’

  She took off the black jacket and said, ‘What do you want?’