Sleep Baby Sleep

by David Hewson

  DAVID HEWSON

  SLEEP

  BABY

  SLEEP

  MACMILLAN

  To Rienk Tychon, my Dutch editor,

  without whose guidance, support and local knowledge

  Pieter Vos could never have been brought to life.

  Hartelijk dank.

  CONTENTS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  The House of Dolls

  The Wrong Girl

  Little Sister

  ONE

  The note was waiting for him, pinned to the door of the houseboat, when he came home that Wednesday night.

  You’re a clumsy man, Vos.

  You miss things.

  Two lines out of a printer, the page folded over then stuck to the rotting wooden frame with a drawing pin. Sometimes it seemed most of Amsterdam knew a solitary police brigadier lived in the run-down black-painted barge by the Berenstraat bridge. Sometimes that meant the odd act of vandalism. More often people knocking on his door asking for help. Or, worse, following him into the Drie Vaten bar across the road and trying to bend his ear when all he wanted was some peace and quiet away from the occasional tumult of the job.

  ‘These things happen, Sam,’ he told the white and tan fox terrier seated patiently on the grubby planks, watching him with keen, bright eyes. The dog didn’t disagree.

  Just after eight. Night was falling over the quiet stretch of the Prinsengracht where Vos lived. He’d slunk out of the medal ceremony at the police headquarters in Marnixstraat at the top of the street, tired, hungry, eager for a beer. Jillian Chandra, the new station commissaris, a stern woman recently arrived from national headquarters in Zoetermeer, hadn’t much appreciated having a dog in the station garden for the presentation.

  Vos wasn’t sure Chandra appreciated much about him either, his attitude, his scruffy clothes, the long dark hair in need of a barber, something Vos was aware of and would get round to soon. But the event was to hand out long-service medals to a number of officers, among them Dirk Van der Berg, one of Vos’s oldest colleagues, a firm friend of Sam’s. The terrier had to be there.

  Commissaris Chandra, faced with a curious message like this, would doubtless have reached for some disposable gloves and popped it into a plastic evidence bag just in case. She was a manager, not a front-line officer. Straight from the bureaucrat hive in the south where people looked at computer screens more than they did people, she didn’t appreciate Amsterdam was different, a mutable, living metropolis where there was always something to catch the eye of the curious. What mattered was choosing your moments then picking at the threads that merited attention.

  Two cryptic lines of text didn’t. Vos tore the paper from the door, left the pin stuck there to make sure it came nowhere near Sam, then balled up the page and tossed it into the waste bin by the gangplank.

  The lights of the Drie Vaten beckoned. It was getting dark. Just one person sitting at the little tables outside, a man in a long coat, fast asleep beneath a wide-brimmed hat.

  Beer.

  Jillian Chandra didn’t approve of alcohol on police premises. They’d been offered coffee and soft drinks instead, and if she’d noticed the look of horror on Van der Berg’s face she didn’t show it.

  ‘Let’s have supper with your friend Sofia tonight, shall we?’ Vos said, and the dog was tugging at the end of the lead before he’d finished the sentence.

  At the door his heart sank. A sudden sharp bark from inside the brown bar stopped them in their tracks. In an instant Sam was yelping wildly, pulling hard on his lead. Like most of his breed, he was firmly convinced he was more human than animal. Other dogs he usually didn’t like. The one that was yapping a desperate falsetto just then, a muscular black and white mongrel belonging to a large and equally vocal widow from a terraced house round the corner, he loathed in particular, as the mutt hated him.

  With Vos struggling to hold Sam back, the pair set up a to-and-fro cacophony of angry, explosive barks. Four customers at the counter covered their ears, the widow among them, fixing Vos with a furious stare that said: We were here first.

  True, he thought. He was still hungry and in need of female company. The rippled reflection of a three-quarter moon was already visible in the still black waters of the Prinsengracht by the gentle humpback bridge. But it wasn’t cold and Sofia had Leon, her second-in-command, helping out behind the counter. He could get some beer, some bread, liver sausage and cheese, then the two of them would sit outside with Sam for a while, enjoying the evening.

  ‘Can I help?’ asked a voice by the door as Vos hesitated there. ‘I’m good with animals.’

  It was the man in the long coat. The broad hat was still over his face but he was awake enough and didn’t sound drunk or stoned. His hand was raised, ready to take the lead.

  Sam looked at him and to Vos’s amazement stopped barking.

  ‘Thanks. Won’t be a moment.’

  The stranger put out a long arm and led Sam beneath the table. Vos walked in, ordered a beer, some food, then tried to catch Sofia’s attention. It wasn’t easy. There was a big party at the back. He hadn’t seen them from the door, or realized how busy the Drie Vaten was at that moment.

  She came with the drinks and the liver sausage he’d ordered.

  ‘We could sit outside if you like . . .’ he began.

  Sofia Albers was thirty-five. She’d rented the bar a few years earlier, just before he moved into the ramshackle boat outside the door. A brief marriage lay somewhere in the past, and a few boyfriends along the way. The Jordaan was her home and always had been. It was second nature to be generous to the motley band of customers who wandered through the Drie Vaten’s worn wooden interior, young and old, rich and poor, decent and occasionally crooked. With a cheerful, inquisitive face, sun-tanned all year round and framed by a head of straight dark hair, she attracted plenty of admirers too, none of whom seemed to stay long.

  The widow’s dog started up again. Sofia shot it a savage glance. Sam was as much hers now, given how often she looked after him when Vos was working.

  ‘Can’t, Pieter,’ she said briskly. ‘Too busy.’

  The mongrel stopped barking as suddenly as it had started.

  ‘Can’t Leon . . . ?’

  ‘Another night.’ She winced and he knew he wouldn’t press her. ‘Oh . . . one of your colleagues came down from Marnixstraat half an hour ago. He was trying to find you. His name was . . .’

  She riffled through a set of scribbled notes next to the beer pumps.

  ‘Ruud Jonker . . .’

  ‘A police officer? I don’t recall anyone called that. What did he look like?’

  Still, he knew the name from somewhere.

  ‘I didn’t really notice. He had police ID. Hasn’t he phoned?’

  ‘No.’

  A pair of British tourists interrupted, pushing their way to the bar, demanding a couple of beers then asking if she minded them smoking dope. They always put an imaginary joint to their lips with that question. Vos had seen it so often and still didn’t understand why.

  Sofia poured two Heinekens and told them to take it outside. There was a guilty look on her face at that moment, as if she’d realized she’d made a mistake.

  ‘I’m sorry. He showed me a card and said he needed to talk to you. He’d lost your phone number.’ She tugged at a lock of brown hair. ‘I think it was a police ID. It had a photograph on it. I was trying to serve someone.’

  ‘Don’t worry . . .’

  ‘But I gave him your number. I shouldn’t have done that.’ She smiled, nervous. ‘Rushed off my feet for once. He sounded like one of yours. Still . . . At least the dogs have quietened down a bit
.’

  Vos glanced at the mongrel. It was curled up beneath the widow’s sturdy legs, seemingly fast asleep. This seemed odd. The arguments never ended so easily.

  A sudden flash of guilty panic struck him. He strode out through the Drie Vaten’s battered wood and glass doors. The tables were empty apart from the two tourists giggling over weed.

  Heart thumping, he walked onto the cobbled street by the boat, stood at the corner of Elandsgracht and Prinsengracht, close to the bridge, calling the terrier’s name.

  No answer.

  No sign of a man in an overcoat and hat.

  No Sam.

  Something trembled against his chest. Then the trill of the phone reached him.

  A new text there, from a number he didn’t recognize.

  Like I said, Vos. You miss things.

  He dialled back straight away and got voicemail.

  The phone trembled and sounded again. The second message was nothing more than a cryptic set of numbers.

  52.366258, 4.896299.

  The man put the phone on the passenger seat and pulled out into the night traffic on Marnixstraat, trams and buses, the bustle of the city.

  The dog was a gift he hadn’t expected. It had scraped its claws against the black Prinsengracht cobbles as he dragged it to the van, not barking, too proud and grumpily puzzled for that.

  He’d meant what he said. He was good with animals. It was just people that got to him.

  A red light came up on the way to Leidseplein so he checked his watch. Eight twenty-seven. It was important to manage every second. This was a kind of game after all. Hide and seek. Catch me if you can. Ninety minutes or less from hooking his quarry outside his houseboat on the Prinsengracht to the end of the first act.

  He drove with the window down. The late September evening was unusually hot, close to cloying. The long coat lay on the passenger seat, a hat beside it.

  An odour rose from the back, one he didn’t much like.

  Not a dog smell either.

  Laura Bakker was still at the reception when Vos called, listening to the last of the speeches, the sound of the event coming down the crackly line like the buzz of surly bees. Late twenties, a tall and striking young woman with long red hair, an unusual taste in clothes and a loud, sometimes confrontational voice, she worked as a detective in Vos’s team.

  ‘You might have waited till the end . . .’ she scolded him. Bakker had dressed for the occasion: a black flared trouser suit and white shirt. Conservative for her. ‘Commissaris Chandra expected that.’

  ‘I didn’t know half those people. Why should I?’ He looked up and down the Prinsengracht again. ‘I think someone’s stolen Sam.’

  ‘Oh my God. Why?’

  A ridiculous question in the circumstances. Not that he was going to say it. Vos forwarded her the mysterious text.

  ‘Someone came into the Drie Vaten to get my phone number. Sofia barely saw who he was. He walked off with Sam and sent this message. It means nothing to me.’

  He could hear Jillian Chandra’s booming voice diminish as Bakker walked away from the ceremony. Then a beep as his text turned up.

  ‘Numbers,’ she said.

  ‘I know that. But—’

  ‘I’m thinking.’

  There was a short pause then she said, ‘Looks like decimal degrees.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘They use them for computer maps. Instead of latitude and longitude. You know what a map app is?’

  ‘I suppose . . .’

  He barely used the phone for anything but messages and calls. Why would he need a map? Amsterdam was where he’d lived and worked all his life. He knew just about every street and alley and canal.

  ‘It’s for a place. You put those numbers into the app and it takes you there.’

  ‘I don’t know how.’

  He could hear her breathing, picture her nimble fingers tapping at the phone.

  ‘Doesn’t matter. I’ve got it. Rembrandtplein. The tram stop going west. If you . . .’

  A dog barked. The mongrel was at the door of the Drie Vaten, staring out into the dark, looking for something to yap at.

  ‘I’m on my way,’ Bakker said as Vos looked to hail a cab.

  The Albert Cuyp market had been Bert Schrijver’s life for as long as he could remember. At the age of eight he’d started working for his father, shifting boxes of flowers and bulbs around the warehouse on Govert Flinckstraat, selling what they could through the stall one block away. The building ran all the way from Flinckstraat to the market, a sprawling terraced mansion in its day with a courtyard, storerooms, apartments, a shopfront and a flourishing wholesale trade. The ‘castle’, the family called it, home to the Schrijvers for more than sixty years since his grandfather started the business just after the war. Not that the old man would recognize the area now.

  While Flinckstraat stayed quiet and allowed his solitary van to make the delivery rounds, the Albert Cuyp filled each morning, with tourists mostly, meandering around the stalls looking for cheap clothes, home-made cookies and pastries, all kinds of cheese, all manner of fish, fresh and cooked to order. Fancy restaurants offering expensive burgers and exotic food were springing up everywhere, along with cafes that sold kinds of coffee Bert Schrijver didn’t even recognize. The quarter was coming to be occupied by a new, international crowd who’d decided De Pijp was the next corner of Amsterdam to patronize, to fill with trendy cocktail bars and organic bistros and pizzerias, to pillage for housing until the prices for working-class locals went through the roof.

  Flowers they bought too, but not as many as before, nor were the commercial customers as easy to find as they used to be. Since the divorce Schrijver’s meagre income had been stretched close to breaking point. As usual of an evening he was totting up a long day’s paltry takings surrounded by the heady scent of tulips, lilies and roses, many of them wilting, unsold and unsaleable around him.

  On his deathbed his father had delivered a damning verdict on his son: he was good at giving people what they wanted. The trouble was, as any born retailer understood, most of the time Joe Public simply stood there scratching its head, never knowing what it was looking for.

  His son could haul around crates of blooms and bulbs all day long with his strong and tireless arms. But he could never spot that moment of hesitation in a customer’s eyes then dash to fill it: buy this, try that. So they walked on, to settle for a crummy T-shirt from the foreigner down the way or throw silly money across the counter for a bag of cookies twice the price of the baker’s round the corner.

  As their income fell, Schrijver had been forced to butcher the castle piece by piece, sold off like a precious carcass over the years. When Schrijver was young they’d owned everything, all five floors on both sides, Flinckstraat and Albert Cuyp, top to bottom. The attics had gone a decade before. Now the upper floors were private apartments, most not even occupied by their owners at all but rented out, often by the day to tourists.

  After the divorce he’d been forced to sell the family flat where three generations had grown up, then move a single bed into the ground-floor office. His daughter, Annie, the flower girl as all the locals called her, had the larger, smarter studio at the front across the small, dark courtyard. And still he teetered on the verge of bankruptcy each month, fending off creditors, begging early payment from the many who owed him.

  That constant air of uncertainty affected his daughter. She craved escape from the grim, cramped warehouse where they lived cheek-by-jowl. Even if it was just for a night or two with a friend somewhere or on the couch at her mother’s housing association apartment facing the open green space of Sarphatipark.

  Bert Schrijver was forty-six, Annie twenty four years younger. He didn’t mix much with the other market men any more. Couldn’t afford the bar bills. And he missed her whenever she vanished. There was nothing left then except the accusatory bookkeeping, the dying flowers, the cloying scent of failure. He was typing the last line of the day’s takings into thei
r ancient laptop when the doorbell went. Schrijver was up in an instant. Sometimes she forgot her spare set of keys and had to be let in.

  But it was Nina, her mother, who stood there clutching a cheap black jacket around her, looking the way she always did when she was forced to see him: miserable and disappointed. She was still the woman he’d fallen for as a teenager when she was selling kibbeling, raw herring and fried mussels on one of the market stalls. He’d long ago given up any hope she’d take him back.

  ‘I can’t find Annie,’ she said, not looking at him. ‘Haven’t seen her since Monday.’

  He tried to clear his head of numbers and the constant battle to juggle dates for paying bills.

  ‘Come in.’

  She peered round him into the dark interior, past the buckets of drooping flowers.

  ‘I don’t need to come in.’

  ‘She said . . .’ He was a slow man and knew it. ‘She told me she was staying round your place last night. Today’s her day off anyway. I thought maybe the two of you had gone shopping. Had to do the deliveries myself before I opened the stall. Jordi called in sick.’

  Nina scowled at the mention of Schrijver’s old bar mate, the only part-time help he could afford.

  ‘Jordi Hoogland. I can’t believe you’re still throwing money at that bum.’

  ‘Not much. Less than anyone else would take. Annie said she was at your—’

  ‘She wasn’t staying with me last night. How many times do I have to say it?’

  The look he knew. It said: You’re being stupid again.

  ‘That’s what she told me.’

  ‘I’ve been calling her all afternoon.’

  The phone came out of her pocket. She dialled. A cheery young voice came out of the tinny speaker and said, ‘Hi, it’s me. Just leave a message for the flower girl. She’ll get back to you real quick.’

  Schrijver got a familiar cold feeling in his stomach.

  ‘She’s not been hanging round with that bastard Sanders again, has she?’

  Nina glared at him.

  ‘Right. Blame Rob. She’s twenty-two. Not your little girl any more. You’ve got to stop hating any man she—’