The Wrong Girl

by David Hewson

  The kid from Anatolia would come back. They had to bring food. Take away the bucket she used for a toilet.

  Waiting.

  Cold.

  Scared.

  Night had fallen. She could just make out the flashing of the neon signs from the restaurant across the road.

  Then there was a noise at the door upstairs and voices. Angry ones it sounded like.

  Still she clutched the little knife. Now was the time. The only time. It had to happen. She wanted home.

  In the narrow house in the Herenmarkt, at the table in the dining room, another eight-year-old girl sat facing an unwanted confrontation.

  Saskia Kuyper shivered in a T-shirt and jeans. Her mother, coat on, breathless from stomping the chill night outside. Candles on the table. Food, uneaten. Christmas lights alive in the window, red, green and blue.

  ‘Where is he?’

  A shake of the head. Excuses.

  I’ve been doing my homework. Busy in my room.

  ‘Saskia!’

  She reached out and took her daughter’s small, cold hands. There’d never been much love between them. It was a horrific pregnancy. Painful, difficult, with Henk working most of the time. From the moment they came back from the hospital there was always a distance between them. Reasons for it too. That happened sometimes.

  ‘Dad went out,’ the girl said, snatching away her hands. ‘I don’t know where.’

  ‘You’re eight years old. He shouldn’t leave you on your own. It’s against the law.’

  ‘The law,’ the girl snarled. ‘Who cares about that?’

  She phoned him. Just voicemail again.

  ‘You don’t own us,’ the girl said. ‘Even if you think you do.’

  It had to be said.

  ‘Why do you hate me? What did I do?’

  Her eyes were small and shifty. She took after Henk so much. Physically and in other sly ways.

  ‘I asked a question.’

  ‘Why do you hate Dad?’

  ‘Things don’t always work out the way you’d like.’

  ‘He said you wanted to leave. To take me away with you.’

  ‘People say things when they’re arguing. Things they don’t mean.’

  A sudden look of childish fury.

  ‘At least Dad cares . . .’ Saskia murmured.

  ‘And I don’t?’

  No answer.

  ‘Who was it took you to see Sinterklaas when he was busy? Who gets your clothes? Fetches you from school? Sees you to all those parties?’

  A nasty little scowl.

  ‘Dad could get a servant to do that if he wanted.’

  Henk’s words. Thrown at her more than once when they were fighting.

  ‘No, he couldn’t. We don’t have the money.’

  ‘Grandpa can pay.’

  Renata had heard that too.

  ‘Why should he? We’re grown-ups, aren’t we? Lucas helps us enough as it is. Perhaps too much.’

  Then, with a savage, childish sneer, ‘It’s not Dad’s fault you’re always miserable.’

  She was silent for a moment, wondering how they came to make her like this. Bitter, surly. Deeply unhappy. That was the worst thing.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘So why do you blame him?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  She took the girl’s cold hands again, bent down and looked into her pained, embarrassed face.

  ‘How can I make things right with you? How can we be friends again?’

  Again?

  The word just slipped out and they both knew it was a lie.

  ‘I’m not leaving,’ Saskia insisted. ‘You’re not taking me to Grandpa’s. I’m staying here with Dad.’

  She nodded.

  ‘So am I. We should be together. Like a family.’

  Again.

  The little fingers stayed where they were. Renata squeezed them and smiled.

  ‘We should do things this Christmas. Go places. Wherever you want. You tell me. Let’s be happy for a change. No one likes being sad.’

  Eight years old. God, she thought, what will she be like when she turns teenager?

  ‘’Kay.’

  It was a small, conciliatory sound. But there was a little hope in it.

  ‘I guess Dad’s gone for a beer. He’ll probably come back stinking drunk. And singing.’

  She belted out a snatch of one of the rude songs she’d heard in a bar down the Jordaan. Saskia laughed then. Her teeth were so even. Those of a toddler almost.

  ‘Dad doesn’t get that drunk!’

  ‘Oh he does. It’s just you don’t see it. Sometimes . . .’ She stroked the girl’s blonde hair and Saskia for once didn’t recoil. ‘Sometimes he’s so funny. We need to make him laugh again. We all need that. Don’t we?’

  The girl picked at her food. She didn’t eat enough. Too skinny. Maybe there’d be problems with that before long.

  ‘You know the other night,’ Renata added, ‘when we came back from all that nonsense in Leidseplein we got drinking together. After you went to bed.’

  A shake of the blonde head.

  ‘You don’t drink, Mum. Don’t tell lies.’

  ‘I did that night. We’d lost you. I couldn’t think straight. And Dad was so fed up because that little girl was missing.’

  The knife went down. The fork too. Renata kept smiling as if this was all in the past and didn’t matter much at all.

  ‘Dad told me what happened,’ she added.

  ‘Told you what?’ Saskia asked in a quiet, nervous voice.

  Head down. A conspiratorial smile between them. The way a mother and daughter were supposed to speak, in secret confidences.

  ‘About the trick you played. You vanishing in the square like that.’

  Her eyes shot wide open.

  ‘It was just a game, Mum. He said you wouldn’t mind.’

  Renata laughed and patted her hand.

  ‘Of course I didn’t. I get too serious sometimes. You should take me down a notch or two. There . . .’ The smile again. ‘I said it.’

  ‘He just said to run away and see the Black Pete. But I picked the wrong one, didn’t I? He wasn’t Dad’s friend. Not nice at all.’

  ‘The wrong one,’ she agreed. ‘So many Black Petes around that afternoon. Easy mistake.’

  The girl looked worried. Ashamed too.

  ‘Wasn’t our fault that other kid went missing. Dad said so.’

  ‘No. It wasn’t.’

  ‘But. But . . .’ Saskia’s little hand came out and gripped her arm. ‘You mustn’t tell, Mum. They’ll blame him. The police. They hate him anyway. It wasn’t our fault.’

  ‘Of course I won’t tell! Why would I do that?’

  ‘To get him into trouble.’

  She shook her head.

  ‘And why would I do that?’

  The girl looked a little guilty.

  ‘I don’t hate him, Saskia. I love your father. He loves me. We both love you. But sometimes love goes wrong. It’s like a . . . a bike. You pedal it everywhere. You get used to it. You take it for granted. Then one day it breaks down and you think . . . it’s the bike’s fault. When really it’s yours for not looking after it.’

  ‘My bike broke down.’

  ‘And we fixed it, didn’t we?’

  ‘Dad did.’

  True, she thought. But that’s what they were for.

  ‘Well we’ll fix this too. You and me and him.’ A smile. ‘OK?’

  The softest, meekest answer.

  ‘OK.’

  She bent down and stared intently into her daughter’s face one last time.

  ‘And you don’t talk about what happened in Leidseplein again. Not with me. Not with Dad. Anyone. It’s done with. Forever. If you mention it . . . to him even . . . he’ll just get upset again. We don’t want trouble, Saskia. We’ve had too much already.’

  Saskia nodded.

  ‘That girl he took? The one who had a jacket like mine? The one on the TV?’

  ‘What abou
t her?’

  ‘Is she dead?’

  Renata shook her head.

  ‘No one said that, did they?’

  ‘Dad . . .’

  ‘Dad doesn’t know, sweetheart. No one does except the bad men who did it.’ She tapped the plate of food with her finger. ‘Eat your supper. We’ll get a game for your iPad if you like. Or a video.’

  ‘Dad said . . .’

  ‘What happened then’s over and done with. Let’s think about Christmas. Sinterklaas. Tomorrow we’ll buy Dad a present to cheer him up. And you can write a poem to go with it too.’

  Saskia giggled.

  ‘When he comes back drunk I can say we saw him!’

  It was an odd Dutch custom. With the feast day came verses, cheeky ones sometimes, naughty prods about past misdeeds forgiven.

  ‘You can.’

  There was a nice kid somewhere in there, she thought. Not a bright one. She’d never be that. And it didn’t matter at all.

  Renata looked at her watch, went back to wondering where he was.

  ‘You have to keep that a secret too. Like what happened in the square . . .’

  Her finger went to her pursed lips.

  Saskia did the same. Then through them whispered, ‘Ssshh-hhh . . .’

  Vos watched the four entry officers go to work and wondered whether they did anything in their spare time except watch action movies.

  It was all noise and fury. Then the door was down. They were in. Pushing back Saif Khaled as he yelled at them balling his fists.

  Dirk Van der Berg followed it all from the pavement, shuffling from his big left foot to his big right one. Laura Bakker much the same.

  When they had Khaled on his knees, face up against the wall, Vos entered, his two colleagues behind them.

  There was a door at the end of the corridor. Probably a set of stairs there leading down to the basement. The Egyptian was yelling all kinds of abuse. None of it obscene. That was new.

  One of the specialist men checked the rooms ahead, guns out, as if expecting trouble. Then he tried the door at the end of the corridor. Locked. He called for the weighted ram again.

  ‘Wait, wait, wait,’ Vos said and intervened, hand out, stopping them.

  He looked down at the angry man on the floor. Western clothes. Western haircut. Good Dutch.

  ‘Khaled. We’re going to take a look. Like it or not. We can break the door down if you want.’

  There was a curse then. Or something that sounded like one.

  ‘I think there’s a little girl down there,’ Vos added. ‘I don’t want to scare her any more than she’s been scared already.’

  ‘Fuck you, Vos! Why can’t you leave us alone?’

  ‘Because we’re looking for a child who got snatched from her mother,’ Bakker told him. ‘What do you expect?’

  Vos held out his hand. Then nodded to the officers holding Khaled to release his arms.

  They did. The man leapt for him, screaming, fists flying. The biggest specialist team man was there in an instant. One hard punch to the face that sent him down to the floor. Then a boot to the gut for good measure.

  Blood was pouring from his nose. It looked broken.

  ‘Wonderful,’ Vos muttered then glanced at the door. ‘Take it down.’

  It was old. Solid. Harder to defeat than the more flimsy, painted thing on the front of the house.

  ‘I’ll go first,’ Vos said as it started to shatter on its hinges.

  Too late. This was their moment. And the big one seized it.

  A shape on the stairs. Natalya Bublik hid in the shadows and watched. Then slid to the side as he came down the steps. Looked up. He was holding out his hand, calling her name. The way her mother did. The way grown-ups did everywhere, wanting to take you away like property, anywhere they liked.

  The knife came out, firm in her fingers, slashed sideways, found flesh. A shriek of pain. A figure stumbling on the stairs. Like a lithe cat she stole past him, dodging his falling legs. Raced up the stone steps, into the cold night.

  People there. Lights. Noise.

  No idea where she was. Which direction to run.

  Away.

  That was all. Flee this place. Find warmth. Find someone living in the light and ready to listen.

  Back in Marnixstraat Frank de Groot returned from his meeting with AIVD. One he could have done without. There was nothing there he wanted to hear. Nothing he could change. And these people had sway over him. The ears of politicians and shadowy security figures south in The Hague.

  In the end they won. One way or another.

  He went straight to Vos’s office, found it half-empty. Got briefed by one of the juniors on the raid at Saif Khaled’s house. Fought to hold on to his temper.

  Koeman was in the interview room with Hanna Bublik. The suitcase, the Samsung phone on the table. No one had called. No one had heard back from Khaled’s place.

  He dragged the detective out of the room then down the corridor, out of earshot of the woman.

  ‘I’d be really grateful if someone filled me in on what the hell’s going on around here,’ he said then put his face so close to Koeman’s he could smell the man’s cheap aftershave.

  ‘We didn’t hear from anyone,’ the detective told him. ‘Some stuff came in about the Egyptian. They thought it better to be there than here.’

  De Groot had the gift of being able to turn an intimidating nature off and on at will.

  It was on full now.

  ‘Did anyone point out to Vos that Khaled’s on AIVD’s watch list? And that we’re not supposed to go near him without their say-so.’

  Koeman nodded down the corridor.

  ‘Someone ought to stay with her. She doesn’t much like me but Vos said—’

  ‘Mirjam Fransen told me about that raid,’ De Groot cut in. ‘I was in the AIVD offices when she got a call to say it was happening.’ He slapped Koeman on the back. ‘When Vos gets back here it had better not be empty-handed.’

  Koeman said something that didn’t mean a lot. Then went back to the office. Hanna Bublik was gone. A woman police officer was picking up the empty coffee cups.

  ‘Where the hell is she?’

  The question seemed to offend her.

  ‘She took a call and said she had to leave.’

  The Samsung still sat on the table. Silent.

  ‘On that?’ he asked.

  ‘Do I look stupid, Koeman? On her own phone. She wasn’t in custody, was she?’

  ‘Get her back,’ he ordered. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Do I look psychic?’ the woman asked.

  No answer.

  ‘Well?’ she persisted. ‘Do I?’

  ‘What is this?’ Vos asked when he forced his way through.

  Saif Khaled’s basement wasn’t the grim cellar he’d expected. The place was well furnished, with bright walls, lamps, a sofa, a double bed. A TV set and a computer. Everything shut off from the street by the black plastic taped to the front windows.

  ‘Fetch him,’ he ordered and listened as Khaled was dragged down the stairs.

  A woman in a long black dress sat in the corner, terrified, defiant, her arm round a child. A girl. No blonde hair. Just a yellow headscarf. They both looked foreign. Middle Eastern. The kid’s eyes were on the floor. She seemed even more scared than the woman.

  Vos walked up, Bakker followed. Van der Berg came with the Egyptian.

  ‘We’re police,’ Vos said, taking out a card, approaching the woman slowly, carefully. ‘Making inquiries. And you are?’

  ‘Guests,’ Khaled interrupted, dabbing at his bloody nose with a tissue as he pushed his way to the front. ‘Guests who’ve no need to be intimidated by the likes of you.’

  Bakker smiled, crouched down in front of them, looked at the little girl. Held out a hand.

  ‘Can I see your hair?’ she asked gently. ‘Just that and we can go.’

  The girl looked up at her mother. She glared at Bakker but nodded anyway. Then gently unwound the yellow s
carf from the child’s head.

  Laura Bakker must have guessed. There was no hair. The girl, her face pale and skeletal, was completely bald.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Bakker said and squeezed her hand anyway.

  ‘Upstairs,’ Vos ordered, and followed Saif Khaled all the way.

  The Egyptian was at full rant by the time they got into the front room.

  No more secrets now. It all came out. The mother was Syrian, the daughter born in Amsterdam. The girl was being treated for a brain tumour. Chemotherapy had led to hair loss. They’d been kicked out by the father, a Dutch national, who’d lost patience with the cost of private treatment. Khaled had taken them in, found someone to keep paying the medical bills.

  Probably from his own funds, Vos thought. Not that he was saying.

  ‘Why in God’s name didn’t you tell us?’ Vos demanded.

  The question didn’t infuriate him at all.

  ‘The husband’s a pig. A violent bastard. She’s terrified of him. It’s the last thing she needs right now.’

  ‘She should have come to us,’ Bakker complained. ‘That’s why we’re here.’

  Khaled closed his eyes for a second, shook his head.

  ‘She did come to you. Five times. When he was threatening to hit her. You said there was nothing you could do. Not until he did.’

  Van der Berg took a call and went into the corridor.

  ‘Look . . .’ Khaled was struggling to be reasonable. ‘We really don’t need this.’

  Vos told the specialist team to get the front door fixed.

  ‘They’re going to stay here for a couple of days,’ the Egyptian added. ‘Then I think we can get them out to a safe house in Leiden. Two more sessions at the hospital. After that Lisa can take a break.’

  ‘Is she going to be OK?’ Bakker asked.

  He nodded.

  ‘With a little luck. And a lot of prayers.’ He waited. ‘I don’t suppose you do prayers, do you?’

  Van der Berg came in and took them to one side.

  ‘We need to get back to Marnixstraat. De Groot’s going berserk. Hanna Bublik walked out of the building. They can’t find her. AIVD are mad we came here.’

  Vos walked into the street and called her number. The rain was steady and determined. Across the road the Chinese restaurants were getting busy.

  Three rings and then she answered. Firm voice. Determined as always.