by David Hewson
She pointed to a bar that had opened down the street. A new place for the new crowd. Cocktails and burgers. He’d never been in. Never thought about it. He slept on the other side of the building and didn’t go near the shop till the morning.
‘You know the Mariposa?’
‘What?’
‘The cocktail joint. Really popular.’
He cursed himself for not looking there the night Annie went missing.
‘Not with me.’
‘Right. Not with you. They’re open till three in the morning some nights. You’d need to be deaf to live here. This place is a shop. Nothing else.’
‘If it fetches more that way . . .’
She shook her head, walked back into the courtyard and looked around. There was nothing there but grey grubby walls, mostly belonging to people he didn’t even know.
‘Would you want to carry out the conversion yourself?’ she asked and looked as if she knew the answer.
‘How much?’
He loathed these people. They could size up something, anything, and turn it into money in their heads.
‘The place at the front needs refitting even for commercial use. Proper heating for one thing. They’ll make you put in a toilet and basin. The back?’ She scowled. ‘The thing is . . . people want windows. Maybe you could get two places out of it. At a push three.’
‘What about here? The yard?’
‘The yard’s a place for dead pigeons. Share it between the apartments. Or hand it over to the biggest. Won’t make any difference to the price.’
‘How much?’ he repeated.
That wince again and she said, ‘Permission, plans, architect, builders, materials. Big job. Got to be two fifty up. Four if you want it premium. Not that I’d go for premium. Lipstick on a pig as they say.’
‘I’m handy. I can manage.’
She looked straight at him.
‘We don’t handle do-it-yourself, Mr Schrijver. Besides, the city will want major work like this signed off. Electricians. Plumbing. Plans. Proper architect ones. You can’t bring in your drinking mates and let them scrawl something on a beer mat.’
He was struggling to imagine how he might make this happen.
‘I’d need to raise that money before I started?’
‘Would you work for someone who wasn’t going to pay you till he’d sold the place? You could always take out a loan set against the property.’
Debt. That was the answer they offered for everything. He was drowning in it already, every penny willingly given with a smile. Schrijver took a deep breath and asked, ‘How much would I get for them? Finished? All of them?’
There was a deliberate and professional pause. Then she said, ‘The front wouldn’t go for much. Market retail. It’s not big enough for a restaurant or a bar. If you’re lucky two fifty. If we got two units out of the storeroom about the same, maybe a bit more. Squeeze in a third and perhaps I could get the whole deal up to about seven or eight hundred. I can’t guarantee that of course.’
Numbers usually foxed him but not these. He’d lazily counted in the yard and thought the whole block was worth two million. On what she was saying he’d be lucky to clear a fraction of that. After selling costs and bank debts there’d be barely three hundred thousand to split between them.
‘I need to share this with my ex-wife. My daughter. She lives here right now. I’d hoped she’d buy herself a place close by. If she had maybe two hundred . . .’
‘You might find a little studio. There are better deals if she’s willing to move further out. Some real bargains in the north.’
‘This is her home. Where she grew up. She shouldn’t have to live in a shoebox.’
The estate agent shrugged and looked around her as if to say: She’s putting up with this dump, isn’t she?
It was a pipe dream anyway. He’d no idea how he could raise the money to convert the place. Or supervise the work without getting ripped off.
Hoogland had come back in from the street and was lighting a cigarette on the other side of the yard, juggling the keys to the van. The young, dark-skinned man he’d found, the Afghan, Schrijver presumed, was working the stall now.
‘Sorry I wasted your time. I need to get to work. Got to see someone in hospital soon.’
The woman didn’t move. He knew what that meant. There was an offer coming.
‘Your other option is to sell up lock, stock and barrel to a developer. Let them take the risk on planning. Pick up all the hassle and the bills.’
‘How much?’
She suddenly looked interested.
‘Actually now I think about it there is someone on the books who’s been looking for an opportunity round here. A Chinese investor. It’s a lot rougher than they wanted but they’ve got ready cash. You’d need to move quickly. They don’t like hanging about.’
‘How much?’
She smiled at that in a way that told him she’d been angling towards this moment all along.
‘They’re new to the market. Still a touch . . . naive. What if I could get them up to half a million? Quick and easy money. Probably as much as you’d make doing it yourself anyway. Without the pain.’
‘Without the pain,’ he murmured.
‘Your choice.’ She looked round the scruffy yard. ‘Buildings are funny. They always carry memories with them. But you can’t live off memories, can you? Best pass these old bricks on to someone else to find their own.’
‘Five fifty,’ he said and knew straight off it should have been more.
‘Let me see what I can do. If I get an offer in a matter of days will you settle it swiftly? There are no . . . impediments? Nothing I need know about?’
‘He can have it tomorrow if he comes up with the money.’
‘It’s a woman actually.’
‘I don’t care who the hell it is.’
Already he could picture the end of the business. More than half a century of the Schrijvers selling flowers gone for good, all because he wasn’t up to the job his father and grandfather had managed without a second thought. There’d be people picking over the pallets and the crappy office furniture seeing if there was anything they wanted. New locks, the smell of fresh paint, not tulips, lilies and roses. He’d be loath to walk through the market after that. It hurt just to think about it.
The woman rattled off some commercial details, commission and other charges, not that he listened. Then she left by the shopfront, stopping to buy something from the kid on the stall.
Schrijver watched, interested. She was smiling for the first time, had her purse out, looked more engaged than she had for a single moment with him.
Schuurman was back in the morgue after a night spent out by the Amstel. He was a dapper middle-aged man of studied manners, little humour and precise language. Long hours never seemed to dim his determination. Vos liked him. Laura Bakker feared him a little. But so did most of Marnixstraat.
The resting place for the dead lay in the station basement and possessed an atmosphere of its own: cold, chemical, noisy with the racket of old air conditioning and the beep of many machines. Vos found there were usually answers here, if only one could frame the right question.
Aisha Refai was tapping at a keyboard as the two of them approached.
‘I can’t tell you yet,’ Schuurman said without looking up. ‘There’s no guarantee I’ll be able to next week. Or ever.’
This was the game and it had to be played.
‘I don’t recall asking a question,’ Vos pointed out.
The pathologist looked up and raised a bushy eyebrow.
‘But you will. And knowing you it will always be an impossible one.’
‘Sorry.’ Vos bent over the PC to see what Aisha was entering there. ‘I don’t suppose you have a time of death for our friend Braat? Or is that too difficult?’
The young forensic officer showed him a photo. A watch, stopped at five to midnight on Tuesday.
‘Very cheap timepiece, the kind you’d buy for fiv
e euros down the market. The case leaked. Seems pretty obvious it stopped when he went into the Amstel.’
‘Obvious,’ Vos agreed.
‘And then he drowned?’ Bakker asked.
‘And then he drowned,’ Schuurman agreed.
‘Any sign of sexual activity?’ Vos wondered.
Schuurman wouldn’t commit to an answer on that. Still, they knew Annie Schrijver and the unidentified victim had been in his boat. The man’s blood was on the sheets and walls in quantity, hers in smaller amounts. Braat’s too, as if there’d been a fight. There was physical evidence both victims had been in the back of his van. Vos was beginning to understand why Jillian Chandra, anxious as she was for answers, felt she’d found her man.
‘Why would you kidnap two people, kill one, then commit suicide?’ Bakker asked.
‘I deal in facts. Not interpretation,’ Schuurman replied without looking up from the desk.
‘What else?’ Vos wondered.
‘What else do you want to know?’
‘Did he have GHB in his blood?’
‘Traces,’ Aisha said. ‘Very small traces.’
Laura Bakker was going through some of the photos on her desk. A crumpled corpse on muddy grass, illuminated by floodlights. An old van dripping water.
‘What does that mean?’ she asked.
‘It means he had traces of GHB in his bloodstream at the point we checked,’ Schuurman replied with mock patience.
A short lecture followed. The drug never stayed long in the body. Especially one that had been sitting in the murky waters of the Amstel river for more than a day.
‘So there’s no way of estimating what kind of state he was in when he went into the water?’ Vos asked.
Schuurman nodded.
‘None. He might have taken a small dose to . . . enhance his fun. If indeed there was fun. A bit more to help him sleep.’ He had a craggy, academic face. It was turned on both of them. ‘The question you really want to ask is one I wish I could answer. Was he conscious when he went into the water or doped like the Schrijver woman and the others from four years ago? I can’t tell you. Sorry.’
‘The commissaris felt sure he killed himself,’ Bakker pointed out.
Schuurman gazed at her and said simply, ‘Such are the prerogatives of power. May we return to our work now? If we know more you’ll hear it.’
Then he went back to his notes.
Bakker kept shuffling through the photos from the previous night. Vos picked up a couple too, looked at them then announced it was time to leave.
Out in the car park they picked up a pool Volvo. She could drive, he said. It was a bright morning, sunny and still unusually warm. TV vans were lined up all around the station. Bakker had to bark at one to let them out.
‘You saw something,’ she said as they turned into the heavy traffic along Marnixstraat.
‘Did I?’
‘Yes. You did. And I didn’t. Care to tell me?’
It was easy for him. He’d been there the previous night when the van had come out of the water. The vehicle was old. But it still had airbags. He’d checked the make and year when he got home. Neither of them had blown. So the van had gone slowly into the water, with no real impact.
Maybe people killed themselves that way. Especially if they were drowsy with GHB.
‘When Chandra opened the door I was there. Braat was wearing a seat belt. One of the uniforms popped it open after she started screaming blue murder. It was dark. People were panicky. Maybe it was just an automatic reaction. Get the man off her. Next thing you know he’s on the grass. Very dead.’
A tram loomed up ahead of them. Vos leaned over and gently turned the wheel to ease them away from it. Laura Bakker still struggled with city traffic from time to time.
He waited. She was thinking and that was what he wanted.
‘Who puts on a seat belt to kill themselves?’ she wondered.
‘Someone’s who’s doped up? Running on automatic? Not thinking straight?’ He recalled Van der Berg and the discovery that morning. ‘Someone who forgets his hat?’
A young man on a bike wobbled in front of them. A tourist. Bakker wound down the window and yelled at him.
‘So Jef Braat got strapped into the driver’s seat doped up then someone pushed his van into the water?’ she asked when the chastised cyclist rode past.
‘That would appear to be one possibility.’ He pointed out another oncoming tram. Her fingers stiffened on the wheel. ‘Though it seems Commissaris Chandra has other notions. As she’s about to tell the world.’
‘Oh dear,’ Bakker said. ‘That is a shame.’
The foreigner Hoogland had picked up from the market had scribbled out a sign and stuck it to the front of the stall: bouquets made up on the spot for five, ten, fifteen or twenty euros. In all the years Schrijver had worked the flower trade they’d never done that. Bouquets had to be ordered or bought ready-made. If you just turned up, you got flowers out of the buckets or what was there already.
The young man had a pleasant, soft and gentle foreign voice. Schrijver listened as he upped the estate agent from the five-euro bunch to ten then whipped together a pretty little bouquet so quickly he could only have done this before.
The flowers on their own were worth maybe half that. But put together neatly . . . she seemed happy enough.
When she wandered off Schrijver walked outside and introduced himself. The kid wasn’t a kid really. He looked early twenties, maybe more close up. Skinny, smiling, but with the dark, weary eyes a lot of the recent immigrants had.
‘I’m Bert,’ he said, holding out his hand. ‘Thanks for helping out.’
He had hard hands, leathery from labour, and said his name was Adnan.
‘You’re from Afghanistan?’
He laughed at that.
‘No, sir. Syria.’
‘Sorry.’
‘No need to be sorry. You give me work. I’m glad of that.’
His father had run a florist’s shop in Aleppo, lived above the place, he said. A bomb took it out during the war, his parents with it. Schrijver glanced back at the building behind him. In some ways he’d been lucky, he guessed.
The Syrian pointed to the sign he’d made about the bouquets, asking if it was OK.
‘You do what you want, Adnan. If it shifts flowers it’s fine with me.’
Then he ambled back inside and moved a few empty boxes into the yard. Hoogland stopped loading the van and came out. He didn’t look happy.
‘That kid’s from Syria,’ Schrijver told him. ‘Not where you said.’
‘So what?’
‘So he knows flowers. If he can pay his way, I’ll keep him while Annie’s away.’
‘Fucking hell,’ Hoogland snapped. ‘I’m having to work alongside a rag head now, am I?’
He was casual, not even on the books. Paid in cash the way he wanted.
‘You can do what you want, Jordi. You found him. If he makes my life easier—’
‘That why you’re selling the place?’ Hoogland nodded at the building. ‘Giving up? Too hard for you?’
‘I didn’t realize it was any of your business.’
‘Been working here off and on forever.’
‘Plenty of other people who’ll have you.’ He looked Hoogland in the eye. This was something he should have said years ago. ‘Just keep your hands out of the till. They might not be as forgiving as me.’
That brought a bitter scowl.
‘True. But if you weren’t so desperate you wouldn’t have let me, would you? And if you paid proper wages I wouldn’t need to.’
This moment of frankness between them felt strange, unwanted. They were friends of a kind. Or rather men who’d grown up together and never quite escaped each other’s company. Different in many ways, Schrijver with his scruffy work clothes, Hoogland with the thuggish black leather and ponytail, the look he’d affected as a teenager, one that was ridiculous now. It had worked with the women once. But that was long ago.
‘I don’t have time for this shit,’ Schrijver said. ‘The hospital’s going to want us back.’
This time he’d try to keep a handle on his temper. Whether Rob Sanders showed up or not.
Hoogland came and stood in his way. He was just a touch shorter than Schrijver but beefy, strong like all the market porters.
‘You’re doing all this for that girl of yours, aren’t you?’
‘Maybe. Some of it.’
Hoogland looked around, nervous suddenly.
‘Do you think she’s worth it, Bert?’
‘What . . . ?’
The remark, said in half a whisper, was so strange, so unexpected, he couldn’t even get angry.
‘Do you think she’d do the same for you?’
Schrijver pushed him away and walked outside. The market was getting busy. A tall man with a ridiculously coiffured beard was at the front of the bar called Mariposa chalking up specials for the day. Cocktails or food maybe. The names were so foreign Schrijver had no idea.
To his astonishment there was a small crowd around the flower stall. The Syrian was running up a bouquet for a bunch of women tourists wearing matching T-shirts for a hen party. He was a good-looking kid. Nice smile even though there must have been more pain packed into his years than Schrijver could begin to imagine. If it had damaged him he hid it well.
‘Abracadabra!’ Adnan cried and finished the spray with a flourish. It was a good mix, well done, attractive, put together so quickly Schrijver could scarcely believe it. Then, as he passed it over, he reached up with his left hand and placed a single dwarf lily behind the ear of the woman at the front.
‘You should let us do your wedding, lady,’ he said in good English. ‘Excellent price, beautiful flowers.’
‘You’d need to ship them to Scotland, love,’ she answered with a laugh.
‘All things are possible, with a little effort,’ he replied in a deep and sincere voice.
They laughed. They ordered another ten-euro bouquet to take with them. Out of pity more than need, he thought.
On the way out Schrijver stopped and patted him lightly on the back.
Adnan looked a little scared at that.
‘I just try to sell flowers, boss. You OK with that?’
