by David Hewson
‘He was bad for her.’
‘And what do you know about that?’
Her voice had grown loud and high and shrill.
‘I know Rob Sanders made her miserable.’
He brought this anger out in her. It was a talent he’d never wanted.
‘I can’t find her, Bert. I haven’t seen her for two days. Two days.’
He had to think.
‘She was here when I went out yesterday. When she said she was going to your place. Gone when I got back. Just Jordi round then.’
Nina stood by the green warehouse door. Schrijver went inside and found his jacket, wallet, phone and keys. When he returned she had her phone out again.
‘I’m calling the police.’
‘Do that.’
‘Where are you going? Don’t you want to be here?’
There were so many bars the young frequented in De Pijp. Annie knew every one of them, and plenty beyond too, in the Jordaan, the centre.
He’d start in the nearby places, the tavern in the square down the road, the beer cafe along the way, then, if he got nowhere, the streets around the park. Someone had to know. She was the flower girl of the Albert Cuyp.
‘I’ll find her.’
‘Don’t you go near Rob. I talked to him already. He’s not seen her in days. They finished. Remember?’
Schrijver scowled at her and dragged on his jacket.
‘And he always tells the truth, doesn’t he?’
Then he slid the green door shut, put on the padlock, and looked up and down the half-deserted market street. Trash and scavenging birds. A bunch of young out for the night, happy, as if the Albert Cuyp belonged to them. This had been his world once. Local families, growing up together. A sense this was a place people shared and cared for, a village that just happened to be set on the edge of the city. It was a community still, he thought. Just not his.
Rembrandtplein looked much as it did most summer evenings. Full of tourists brimming with drink or woozy from weed. The air was heavy with the smell of dope, the square littered with spent frites cones and beer cans. Vos’s cab couldn’t get close because of the crowds so he got out at the perimeter and headed for the westbound stop. Where the road gave way to pedestrians Laura Bakker was walking down the metal tram rails in the street, a tall figure, red hair loose down her back.
They reached the glass and metal shelter almost together, Bakker scanning the interior, looking for a piece of paper the moment she turned up.
Ruud Jonker.
The name kept nagging him.
‘Pieter? How did it happen?’
‘Outside the Drie Vaten. I asked someone to hold his lead. Went in to get a beer. Wasn’t thinking. Next thing . . .’
There was a loud blast of rock from a band in one of the bars. A bunch of young men were stripping off their shirts and beating their bare chests.
‘Maybe it’s a horrible joke. They’re just trying to scare you.’
‘Some joke.’
There was no obvious piece of paper stuck inside or outside the tram stop.
‘Does the name Ruud Jonker mean anything?’ he asked. ‘Is there someone called that in Marnixstraat?’
‘Not that I know.’
An ambulance cruised along the pedestrianized square, headed for a bunch of men in the corner. A drunk was rolling round, throwing up violently amidst the trash on the ground. His mates seemed to think it was funny. Then a marked police car followed. She watched it and said, ‘Stealing a dog’s a crime. We could call in . . .’
He just looked at her.
‘I’ll do it,’ she promised. ‘If you won’t.’
Vos didn’t answer. He was staring at the advert next to the route map and timetable inside the stop. It was for a brand of jeans he’d never heard of before. One called ‘Ruud’.
A handsome kid in too-tight denims stood in front of a boat in a harbour on a perfect sunny day in Spain or somewhere. He grinned with perfect white teeth and thrust out his muscled, tanned chest.
The only word printed there was the brand name. But beneath it someone had scrawled in thick black felt tip, ‘Jonker’.
Then, in a balloon coming out of his mouth, ‘Remember me, Pieter? If you don’t, you will.’
In smaller letters below . . . 52.366466, 4.917661.
‘There,’ Vos said, pointing at the numbers.
Bakker yanked out her phone and started stabbing at the keys.
‘Who the hell is he?’ Bakker asked as she began to tap in the numbers.
Someone little, he thought. Someone he’d forgotten about altogether. Investigations were like that. The only live ones were the cases in front of you. The past was past. Dead and meant to stay that way.
‘I think he was supposed to be a monster,’ Vos murmured. ‘Not that I ever really knew.’
He was grateful she wasn’t listening.
‘There,’ Bakker said and presented him with the phone.
The place was close to the Artis zoo in Plantage. Vos liked trams. He used them all the time and knew every line in the city. Two services running through Rembrandtplein went close to there, the nine and the fourteen.
‘Thanks.’
Bakker’s fists went straight to her hips. He got what he now thought of as the trademark glare.
‘What the hell is this about?’
There was the clang of a bell. A number nine rounded the corner.
‘Me, I think,’ Vos said, watching the blue and white carriage approach. ‘Go back to Marnixstraat. Tell the night team I may call.’
She held out her phone.
‘From the zoo?’
The tram came to a noisy halt in front of them. The doors opened with a familiar hiss and a gaggle of girls in short skirts and skimpy tees stumbled onto the Rembrandtplein cobbles.
‘I very much doubt that,’ he said and stepped inside.
The reception in the Marnixstraat garden was drawing to a close. Vos had slid out without anyone spotting. Bakker seemed to have copied the same trick, there one moment, gone the next. Dirk Van der Berg envied them both. But Commissaris Chandra had told him to hang around until the end so he did, clutching a plastic cup of cold coffee, nibbling at soft, stale biscuits and bad sandwiches.
Twenty-five years he’d spent in the police. A tall, heavy, worn man with a melancholic grey and pockmarked face, he had the paunch, the scars, the inner and outer wounds to prove it. All of them told him: getting ordered to wait behind like this wasn’t good.
The new commissaris didn’t look much like anyone else in Amsterdam police headquarters. Just turned forty, always smartly dressed, she had the sturdy build of an athlete and wore a permanently unconvincing smile. Her father came from Jakarta and had worked as a cook in an Indonesian restaurant. Her mother was Rotterdam born and bred, a civilian executive in Zoetermeer police headquarters for a while, though Chandra was quick to emphasize this was not how she came to enter the service.
She was, as far as anyone knew, not so much unattached as aloof from everyone around her. When she wasn’t working she seemed to spend most of her free hours in the gym, a habit she recommended at every possible occasion. Van der Berg had joked once that his fitness regime largely consisted of cycling to any of a number of the preferred bars he knew in the city. Her smile had remained frozen throughout but he’d got the message.
A single woman with few friends in Amsterdam would usually have attracted some sympathy. People might have tried to show her around, invite the new boss for dinner, offer to introduce her to a few places outsiders rarely saw. But no one had yet plucked up the courage or the enthusiasm. Jillian Chandra came across as polite, intelligent, and deeply committed to the job. She wrote morale-building memos that included every buzzword of modern policing. Eight weeks into her posting, she still seemed a stranger to most around her.
‘So . . .’ she said in her low southern voice after she guided him to the edge of the dwindling crowd.
Van der Berg tried to stop himself staring
at her immaculate uniform with its too-shiny buttons.
‘So?’
‘Twenty-five years. If you had it all again what would you do differently?’
‘Nothing.’
She laughed and wasn’t amused.
‘Surely . . .’
‘Not a thing. I’ve made some mistakes. Who hasn’t? But I’ve got a good wife. A nice home. Colleagues who happen to be friends. No complaints.’
Her green eyes flickered at that last.
‘Vos,’ she said, and nothing more.
‘Among them.’
‘I suppose I should be grateful to him. Vos is why I’m here, isn’t he?’
Not exactly, Van der Berg thought.
‘If there’s anything I can do to help, Commissaris. This isn’t Zoetermeer.’
‘Same country.’
‘Different place. Amsterdam’s not black and white. It can turn prickly if you think that.’
She had a pleasant face, broad, with high, full cheeks, flawless olive skin, shrewd and interested eyes. He found it hard to work out how much sincerity was there but then you didn’t step onto the management up escalator by being too open with your feelings.
‘Vos was out of the service altogether for a while,’ Chandra said. ‘For more than two years. He’d still be in that grubby houseboat of his, smoking himself stupid, if it weren’t for Frank de Groot. And how did he repay that?’
He’d half-expected this. Chandra’s predecessor was still at home waiting to hear whether he’d face a criminal trial for covering up evidence in a sex scandal in Volendam. The grapevine said he’d get away with a caution and the loss of a big chunk of his pension. People were pulling strings, but a long and largely praiseworthy police career was over in disgrace.
‘You can’t blame anyone but Frank for that. Besides . . .’ He so wished he was in the Drie Vaten clutching a decent glass of tripel, not a half-full plastic cup of weak coffee. ‘What were we supposed to do? Turn a blind eye?’
‘No blind eyes on my watch. If this place was being run properly De Groot would never have tried a stunt like that. It’s a sign of laxity. Carelessness. Insufficient discipline. No rigour. From now on we do things by the book.’
‘Which book is that, Commissaris?’
She smiled more broadly, pleased by the question.
‘Mine, of course. All this time and you’re still at the foot of the ladder.’
He nodded.
‘Suits me. I like going out onto the street. Meeting people. Looking them in the eye. All this . . .’ He glanced at the building behind them, the windows dotted with computer screens everywhere. ‘It’s important. But if people don’t see us out there . . . you run a risk.’
The smile diminished.
‘What risk?’
‘The risk they forget we exist.’
Jillian Chandra thought for a second and said, ‘Good point. But the book . . .’
‘Your book, you mean?’
‘It’s what matters. I don’t think Vos appreciates that. He seems to feel he can carry on the way he did with De Groot. Doing whatever he wants and informing me of it afterwards. Turning up dressed like a bum. That damned dog with him.’
Sam she’d tolerated in the office for a while until an unfortunate incident with a waiting-room sofa. Now he was banned and Vos forever on the end of sly comments about his scruffy jackets, the jeans, the unruly hair.
‘Pieter’s focused on what counts. Not the small things.’
‘I’d never have handed him his job back the way De Groot did. You walk out of these doors and that’s it. No second chances.’
This he believed to be true.
‘In that case we would have been deprived of one of the smartest men I’ve ever worked with.’ He glanced at her uniform and didn’t care whether she noticed or not. ‘Perhaps not Zoetermeer smart. But Amsterdam smart. Which we still need, whatever the people down south may feel.’
‘Loyalty.’ Her hand came out to his arm. ‘A fine quality. Admirable. But only a fool wants to go down with the ship.’
She came close and whispered in his ear.
‘We both know you’re no fool.’
‘At the risk of repeating myself, he’s the best officer—’
‘All the more reason for him to follow the book. All the more reason for you to tell me when he doesn’t. One way or another he will toe the line. Or I’ll have him back in that barge of his, staring at the walls, smoking weed. Have no doubts.’
He didn’t. That had been coming all along.
‘Good.’ One last squeeze of his arm. ‘I’m glad we understand one another. Now you can go.’
The van crossed the river by the ugly brown block of the Heineken brewery, kept to the busy road then, after a little way, bore right into De Pijp. He cruised slowly past the long straight street that, during the day, was given over to the Albert Cuyp market. The rubbish trucks had done their best. Most of the day’s trash was gone. A couple of workmen were hosing down the asphalt, watched by a pack of hungry herons, stiff and straight as soldiers, wondering if there were any scraps left in the waste from the fish stalls.
Briefly the scent of flowers came to him: lilies and roses. Perhaps it was that odd perfume that summoned a sad, pathetic whine from behind. The van had no back windows and a cage-like mesh separating the front seats from the rear. It was important no one outside saw, and no one inside could move.
‘This isn’t about you,’ the man muttered. ‘You are . . .’
The word briefly eluded him.
‘An innocent.’
Though innocents died too.
He’d never been quite clear how he could get Vos on the hook that night. Perhaps through the cruel bastard called fate. Or luck. Or coincidence. The note on the houseboat door was meant to be a start. After that a call. Another tantalizing breadcrumb, a message left at the bar, a place everyone knew the man frequented most nights.
Then opportunity had presented itself. Vos had handed him the dog’s lead. Decision made.
In the back the little animal whimpered again.
He bore left and found the river. It was a circuitous route but a pleasant one.
The dog let out a low crooning yowl.
In a while the road called Amsteldijk would turn into a modest cobbled lane, not much more than a track beside the still, deep waters of the river that gave the city its name. There were places he could stop and leave the terrier. He could knock on the door of any number of houseboats, tether the lead to the railing and then flee.
But that meant risk, all for the well-being of a creature too simple to understand anything of what was at stake.
As the dog’s claws scuttled round the bare metal floor the man thought of what lay by the animal’s side. Bare flesh, warm and cold, and blood. He hadn’t expected he’d be putting something else in there.
‘Keep those sharp fangs to yourself,’ he ordered and wondered why. It was a dumb creature and surely couldn’t understand his words.
Something did though.
There was another sound from the back, a shuffling, mumbling moan.
‘What’s there’s mine. No one else’s,’ he said, to whom he didn’t know.
Trying not to worry about the conversation with Chandra, Van der Berg wandered down Elandsgracht to the Drie Vaten. The bar was heaving with some kind of party, people he’d never seen in his life. Sofia Albers was too busy to talk. Vos’s houseboat was empty, all the lights off, which was odd.
For a moment Van der Berg thought of calling him and got far enough to take out his phone. He didn’t like Jillian Chandra one bit, but then bosses of her ilk weren’t there to be liked. Their purpose in life was to manage, to control, to be seen to be in charge. Not investigate or put themselves in the way of harm. Commissaris Chandra simply wanted to shepherd the men and women beneath her into the paddocks and enclosures the distant bureaucrats of Zoetermeer demanded then turn around to her own bosses with a triumphant flourish and say: Look, job done.
&nb
sp; Vos was intelligent enough to know all this for himself. So Van der Berg stashed his phone, fought his way to the bar, got a beer out of a harassed Leon and found a rickety spare seat out by the pavement.
Drinking by yourself wasn’t such fun. He avoided it normally, but not now because tonight, as summer gave way to autumn with one last burst of sweaty metropolitan heat, the city felt odd. It must have been Chandra’s thinly disguised threats that affected his mood. There could be no other reason.
Van der Berg shifted his big legs beneath the table and his right foot found something soft. He reached down and picked it up.
A man’s suede bush hat – Australian, he saw from the label inside the brim. The kind of thing a tourist wore he guessed, glancing back at the busy bar.
There were two British men smoking themselves stupid a couple of tables away, taking no notice at all. This was a fine hat in search of an owner.
Van der Berg tried it on and found the thing a decent fit.
Finders keepers, he thought, placing it back on the table. If someone came to claim it, fine. If not . . .
It took the tram four minutes to cross the Amstel, wind its way into the quiet residential quarter of Plantage, then work down the broad road by the side of Artis, the sprawling zoo that occupied much of the central area.
The coordinates were for what looked like a building site next to the public car park. Vos vaguely remembered there’d been construction going on hereabouts for some time. By the gates stood a couple of diggers and a small crane parked next to a set of corrugated iron hoardings and a large sign that spoke of a new apartment complex coming the following year.
The fencing was down at the front, revealing what must have been a yard for the builders, an expanse of concrete surrounded by low workers’ cabins. A party was going on outside them, one of the improvised and illegal events the city had to deal with from time to time. Rarely with great success. They came and went like mayflies and it was never easy to pin down an organizer to take to court.
The long-established institution officially known as Natura Artis Magistra was as much a scientific body as a zoo for the curiosity and amusement of the public. It was obvious from the moment Vos pushed his way into the heaving midst ahead of him the event was designed to mirror the location.
