by David Hewson
‘That’s why—’ she began.
He reached forward, lifted the latch, put his shoulder to the door and pushed. The timber moved with a crack then came to a halt against something solid. There was just darkness beyond the door. A smell came to them, organic and vaguely foetid.
‘I really wish we could wait for a team,’ she said in a low and determined whisper.
Vos put his shoulder harder to the wood. It gave easily, sending something metal crashing to the floor, and after that came the sound of breaking glass. Everything happened so quickly he stumbled forward into the warm, rank darkness ahead.
Something soft and hot and alive met him as he fell forward. Hit Laura Bakker too as she rushed in behind. There was a sound like a million tiny creatures stirring into motion. Soft wings rose to meet their faces. She screamed. A tiny furry body fell into her mouth and then she screamed some more.
‘Light,’ Vos said as they struggled against his lips too.
‘Can’t take this,’ Bakker cried. ‘Sorry.’ And rushed outside, kicking the old door wide open.
Now he could see. A little anyway. The thing he’d bumped into was a metal rack for hatching insects, the kind they’d noticed in the pavilion in the Amstelpark. He’d knocked it over, shattering the panes that kept the creatures trapped. Freed from their prison, a cloud of whirring anxious insects rose to swamp the interior of the old barge in a cloud of soft and feathery wings. The butterflies that should have been in the pavilion. Here they’d been for a day or two at least, hatching, filled with hunger and a need for sun. All the colours of the rainbow as they reached daylight, some large with ornate markings, some small, almost plain, they fought among each other to race into the brightness ahead of them.
They’ll die, Vos thought, watching them. They were exotic, tropical creatures meant for another climate on the other side of the world.
A bright beam broke the darkness ahead. Bakker was back, still coughing, right hand over her mouth, a tissue to it. In her left she held an LED torch, the pure white light stabbing into the cabin interior.
‘Just butterflies,’ she said through her fingers.
‘Or moths,’ he added.
‘Oh, thanks for that. I really . . .’ Bakker fell silent. The beam had fallen on something by the far windows. Vos took the torch and asked her to go outside, take a few deep breaths, then call in a team.
‘We should get out of here,’ she said without moving. ‘They’re going to want to look at every inch of the place.’
Then she was coughing again. He led her out of the door, got her seated on the grass, tried not to look while she gagged on all the things that had found them: the flimsy, fibrous insect wings, the stench from the dark maw of the rotting hulk called the Sirene.
Bakker was in no fit state to talk to anyone at that moment. So he phoned Marnixstraat himself as he walked back, shone a light inside again, took in what was visible there. Straight through to control he asked for Jef Braat’s photo and description to be circulated immediately to all stations and patrol beats throughout north Holland, with an order to detain immediately with caution.
‘Should I inform the commissaris?’ the operator asked. ‘She seemed very anxious to hear if you called.’
Jillian Chandra’s presence appeared to have worked its way through the entire building.
‘I’ll tell her myself soon enough. Put me through to forensic.’
Aisha Refai answered. He gave her the rough address. There was no road here, just a lane. The scene of crime team would arrive in a small fleet of vans. Very soon the place would be overrun with people in white bunny suits, elbowing everyone to one side while they pounced with their cameras and evidence bags, their chemicals and probes.
‘What is it?’ asked the voice on the other end of the line. ‘Another body for me?’
‘Hundreds,’ he said. ‘Thousands.’ The butterflies were swarming over the river bank. Bakker was feebly trying to swat them away with her arms. ‘But not the kind you think.’
He went back inside and swept the cabin. The torch beam fell upon a big office chair, beside it on a table what looked like a drill, a couple of needles shining in the dark.
‘This is where he inked them. Did lots else besides, I guess.’
Beyond the chair were more metal frames full of chrysalises, some still emerging, some hatched, giant wings beating against the glass. Next to that was a double bed covered in crumpled sheets. Dark stains on the grubby cotton. Blood on the fabric, blood spattered up the cream timbered walls.
‘You’re going to be here a while.’
Bert Schrijver was fast asleep in his office when she woke him. Nina looked different. Clean hair, neat and tidy, smart skirt, white blouse.
‘I seem to recall I asked you to get a shower. Smarten yourself up,’ she said.
He’d been so exhausted when he got back he’d just gone straight to the computer, checked for messages, put his head on the desk and that was it. Schrijver glanced at the clock on the screen. It was almost six.
‘Any news?’ he asked.
‘She’s stable. They’re pissed off with you for picking a fight with Rob Sanders. We can still go back there when they let us but you’ve got to behave.’
‘I will,’ he mumbled.
Jordi Hoogland opened the office door and stuck his head through. He’d done the rounds, he said. Caught up with some of the late orders. But because it was just him making the calls more than half the day’s stock still hadn’t been delivered.
‘I’ll freshen it up with the hose. They won’t know the difference.’
‘Chuck out anything that’s bad,’ Schrijver said automatically. ‘I don’t want people paying because I fouled up.’
Hoogland frowned at that and said he’d spray the flowers anyway. They could talk in the morning. Then he went back into the warehouse and soon after they heard the sound of water, could smell it in the air along with the sweet scent of roses and jasmine.
Schrijver got out of the chair, stretched, felt old and weary.
‘I don’t know why you keep him around,’ Nina said.
‘Because he works for peanuts. And that’s all I’ve got to pay people with these days.’
‘Do you trust him?’
‘With what?’
‘He’s got the run of this place, Bert. Money. Stock. Your computer.’ She hesitated. ‘Annie’s never liked him.’
He threw up his arms in despair.
‘What is this? I can’t do everything.’
She seemed to back down at that.
‘Go and get showered,’ she repeated. ‘Find some fresh clothes.’
Thirty minutes later he came back to the office. Hoogland was still out in the warehouse, sweeping up, washing down the one van Schrijver had left.
Nina was at the PC. He hadn’t bothered to lock it down. All the records were there. Sales and expenses. Nagging emails from the bank.
‘I hope you’re not paying him overtime,’ she said without looking up.
‘Couldn’t run this place without Jordi. Especially not now.’
‘Oh Christ, Bert.’ She pushed the mouse to one side and blanked out the screen. ‘I’ll come in and help out if you’ll let me.’
Three generations of Schrijvers had sold flowers from this place. Now the castle was in its death throes. He’d realized that already, not that he’d told them. A woman from an estate agency was due round the following morning.
‘I can cope. I’ve got customers to think of.’
‘They’ll drop you like a stone if you keep screwing them around. And anyway,’ she gestured at the PC, ‘you’re not making anything out of them. I just went through the numbers. They’re worse than ever. This whole place is leaking money. Pretty soon . . .’
‘Hard times all round. For everyone.’
She laughed and there was a cold and unsympathetic timbre to her voice that disappointed him.
‘Hard times? Do you actually walk around here with your eyes open? There are
fancy hipster restaurants out there charging ten euros for a cocktail you and I have never even heard of. Foreigners with cafes selling fast food shit for more than I used to get for fresh kibbeling I’d cooked myself. It’s just hard times for people who are too dumb to move with them. Annie knew that.’
‘She never told me.’
Beyond the door Hoogland started the industrial vacuum to sweep up the dust. Schrijver wanted to tell him to pack up, go back to the little studio he rented on the other side of the Albert Cuyp, do whatever he did of an evening. Sell dope. Steal. Rip off a few tourists. Everything away from the shop was his business.
‘What the hell happened to her?’ he wondered. ‘If that bastard Rob Sanders did this I swear to God I’ll kill him. Coming up to us in the hospital like that. Like he cares . . .’
‘How do you know he doesn’t?’
‘He . . . hit . . . her!’
His voice had turned too loud. Jordi Hoogland opened the door, broom in hand and asked if everything was OK.
‘Everything’s fine,’ she said. ‘You should go home.’
Hoogland was muscular, gruff, ugly. He didn’t like being told what to do, especially by a woman.
‘If Bert doesn’t need me—’
‘Go home,’ Schrijver said. ‘And thanks.’
‘I’ll be back in the morning.’ Hoogland glowered at her. ‘You just say what you need, Bert.’
There was a tense silence for a while. Then they heard the sliding door to the warehouse open and close and she said, ‘No one knows what happens between two people. Not even themselves sometimes. We didn’t.’
‘I know I’m stupid. You don’t need to tell me. That bastard hit her. Him a nurse too . . .’
She reached forward, took his hand and that silenced him.
‘No one knows, Bert. No one’s got the right to judge. Rob wouldn’t really harm her. He wouldn’t dream of it. I’m sure.’
He wanted to ask the obvious question: how?
But then his mobile rang. Only a handful of people ever called: customers, suppliers, the bank, Annie and Nina mainly. He had their numbers in the address book so he knew who it was before he answered.
The phone didn’t recognize this one.
‘Is Mr Schrijver there?’ asked a woman who sounded busy, as if she’d rather be doing something else.
‘Speaking.’
‘It’s the hospital. We need you to come. And your wife too.’
‘What’s happened?’
‘There’s a change in your daughter’s condition.’
‘What kind of—?’
‘The doctors say you should come here straight away if you can. Both of you.’
‘If—’
‘It’s quicker if you go straight to intensive care reception. I’ll tell them you’re on your way.’
Then she hung up. He looked at Nina. Her face was lined now and sometimes he thought she hated him. But she was still the woman he fell in love with when she served fried fish in the market, trying to ignore his pathetic attempts at courtship.
Pity was the reason she went out with him in the first place. Then Annie came along by accident and with her a marriage that happened almost without thinking. The Schrijvers were big in the Albert Cuyp then. His father wasn’t having any bastards fouling up the line. If it hadn’t been for the pregnancy Nina would never have become his wife in the first place. She’d have dumped him and gone back to serving kibbeling, pretty face, white nylon coat, plenty of men, better, smarter, more handsome, begging for her hand. That knowledge, the certainty of his own inferior status, ate at him daily when they were together.
‘They want us,’ he said. ‘The hospital. They wouldn’t say why.’
Night was falling over the river. Clear sky, faint moon, a stiff chill breeze running through the ragged trees. The sounds here were quite unlike those of the city. Somewhere in the hedges busy owls hunted, hooting. Along the banks wildfowl squawked. Cattle lowed in the adjoining fields. By the boat, beneath harsh floodlights, the team of forensic officers talked in low tones, lost in the tasks before them.
This was their stage now. Vos and Bakker were spectators waiting on results. His mind had drifted to the houseboat and the Drie Vaten, to taking Sam for one last walk along the canal. He’d no idea when that would happen again. The terrier would stay with Sofia Albers for the duration. This case was going to be protracted, he felt, even if they managed to pull in the fugitive Jef Braat from wherever he’d fled.
To his surprise he’d heard nothing from Jillian Chandra’s office at all. Or Dirk Van der Berg. This didn’t worry him. He had Bakker, quickly recovered from the shock of the swarm of insects that flocked to them as they broke into Braat’s barge. And as good a forensic team as he could have wanted: Schuurman and Aisha Refai at its head. There was blood on the sheets and walls. A tattoo machine and needles. The scene of crime people had almost whooped with joy when they saw how many promising prospects there were for DNA inside the wreck called the Sirene.
Perhaps there would be answers. There ought to be, Vos knew. But something about this case bothered him, much as the Sleeping Beauty murders had four years before. Sometimes homicide refused to fit the templates. It could be like life itself, asymmetrical, unpredictable, reluctant to dance to the tunes the legal and investigative systems preferred. There were rough edges, dangling threads. Occasionally they were visible. More often they lurked unseen, nagging doubts in the back of an officer’s mind, chafing there for years however hard you tried to dismiss them.
The media were carrying warnings about spiked drinks and advice for women to take care in nightclubs. It was a logical and understandable reaction to the possibility that one of the killers from the Sleeping Beauty case had now re-emerged, undetected over the years. Yet crimes carried their own watermarks, like fingerprints and DNA. And this was different. A man was dead, a young woman lucky to survive. Not dumped in the Amstel river in the hope they’d disappear but laid out almost for exhibition in Paradiso, the curious corner of Zorgvlied where one of the original murderers, Ruud Jonker, was buried in a colourful tomb.
Odder still was his own involvement. The night before he’d been tempted into the discovery in Zorgvlied in an intricate and deliberate manner. Jillian Chandra, who’d never worked homicide in her career, could not comprehend this. But there was another story building here, one he had yet to begin to recognize.
Bakker filled the empty hours by nagging forensic for information and, when that proved fruitless, calling back to Marnixstraat to chase for updates. Mostly Vos sat on a decrepit wooden bench seat by the path, watched and waited, taking in the shape of the boat’s interior, trying to imagine what might have happened.
All the clues were there. A crumpled bed, not that there seemed any evidence of sex from the forensic sprays and lights and probes. There was violence though. The needles and the ink were used, just as they were four years before, a teasing line of text but only on an unidentified man.
The logical narrative was that someone – Jef Braat, perhaps in concert with the unidentified man – had taken Annie Schrijver to the houseboat after spiking her drink. She was attacked, doped again and the second man murdered. The following evening a message had been left on Vos’s houseboat and Sam snatched from outside the Drie Vaten.
After that . . . Rembrandtplein. Artis and the panda girl. Then Zorgvlied.
But why? He hadn’t a clue and that offended him because the why mattered more than anything. It was the knowledge, the line that led from deed to doer. Understanding the train of that narrative eluded Vos entirely at that moment. A man had hoodwinked two young people, abused them, damaged them, killed one and left the other struggling for life. The obvious recourse was to dump their bodies somewhere distant. Instead he’d lured a police officer into the web, perhaps stolen his dog on a whim to reel him in. Run such unnecessary risks. Then fled.
You’re a clumsy man, Vos.
You miss things.
The man’s spoken words were ed
ucational too. Loud and firm and confident they had rung out over the graves of Zorgvlied through the dark the night before, taunting him.
Another day, Vos. You will hear from me again. That I promise.
An educated voice.
Someone nudged his shoulder. It was Bakker, phone in hand.
‘Anything?’ he asked.
‘They can’t find Braat anywhere. Artis don’t have any other address for him. Can’t find any relatives yet.’
There was still no word on the identity of the dead man found with Annie Schrijver.
‘You may as well go home, Laura. We’ll pick this up in the morning. Bang your head against the wall for too long and it just ceases to work.’
He tugged at his long hair, realized he did need a trip to the barber, and perhaps he’d been putting it off because Jillian Chandra had been scolding him on the subject. That thought prompted another puzzle: why had she not been nagging him now? Why so silent all of a sudden?
‘Have we heard anything from the commissaris?’
‘Not a squeak. Nice, isn’t it?’
Vos phoned Van der Berg. He was in a bar somewhere. It sounded as if beer had been taken.
‘You got me sent off with a flea in my ear, Pieter. She really didn’t like you running round all over the place and never a word back on what you’re up to.’
‘We had good reason, for God’s sake. We found Braat’s place. Annie Schrijver and that man were here. I’ve got forensic. Chandra knows that.’
‘Yes but she wants to be told. By you. Directly. Don’t you get that?’ Van der Berg stopped for a swig. Vos could picture him. He’d seen this often enough. ‘Also you’re not the only one who can swan off on their own.’
‘What do you mean?’
Van der Berg’s voice, normally so calm, rose in volume.
‘Jillian Chandra is the boss, remember? She calls the shots. When that call came in telling us to look for a van in the water she said she’d deal with it.’
‘And you didn’t think to tell me?’
That was as close to a yell as Vos got. Aimed at someone who was much more than a colleague too.
There was a long silence then Van der Berg said, ‘No. Sorry about that. She said you were obviously too busy to be disturbed. For once I did as I was told.’
