Sleep Baby Sleep

by David Hewson

  Annie Schrijver glared at her but didn’t speak.

  ‘The drink . . .’

  ‘It was a drink. A beer. No. A cocktail. And then I don’t remember. What—’

  Bakker jabbed a finger at the screen and said, ‘Wait . . .’

  ‘Laura,’ Vos warned. ‘Will you keep quiet?’

  ‘But—’

  ‘They taste funny,’ Annie Schrijver said. ‘Don’t they?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Lucie Helmink answered. ‘What kind of funny?’

  ‘Like someone put salt in them.’

  ‘But you didn’t notice?’

  ‘It was a cocktail. They taste funny anyway. A—’

  The audio bleeped out something.

  ‘Missed that,’ Loderus complained.

  ‘A fuck-me cocktail, she said,’ Bakker told him.

  Annie Schrijver was laughing at her strange little joke, a short, mirthless sound. It was painful to see.

  ‘What do you think he did?’

  There was a long pause then nothing. Helmink asked again.

  ‘Maybe you should ask the police. Or the doctors. They’ve been prodding and poking me.’

  ‘You think he raped—’

  ‘What do you reckon?’ she cried. ‘We played cards? He did what they always do. It’s not like this was the . . .’ She stopped herself and there was sudden colour in her cheeks. ‘Not like I’m the first.’

  There was a break then as if something had been cut. Helmink returned, face to camera. It wasn’t even clear if she was talking as part of the interview at all.

  Vos had his phone out and looked ready to go.

  ‘It’s very brave of you, Annie, to talk about this,’ the TV woman was saying very slowly. ‘What’s your message to women like yourself . . .’

  ‘Laura,’ Vos cried. ‘Come on. We’re off. Let’s find the car.’

  ‘But, but . . .’ She pointed at the screen. ‘It’s not finished.’

  ‘Seen enough.’

  He shook Rik Loderus by the hand. So did she. The butterfly man was blushing and seemed to be mumbling something about her number.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Bakker grumbled. ‘Not now.’

  Outside they headed through the back of the zoo into the staff car park. Vos was on the phone, through to Jillian Chandra.

  ‘The interview—’ he began.

  ‘Wasn’t so great, was it? You’d think that TV woman could have made more—’

  ‘Annie Schrijver was lying.’

  They got to the car. He nodded at Bakker to take the wheel.

  ‘Any directions, sir?’

  ‘The hospital.’

  Chandra was listening.

  ‘What is this, Vos?’

  ‘I said. She’s lying. She knows damn well where they went. Maybe she’s got a good idea who did this. Who that corpse in the morgue is too.’

  ‘Oh, please. Once again the great detective sees something the rest of us are blind to. Shame you didn’t manage this four years ago.’

  They began to edge out onto the road by the narrow canal, past the building site and the houseboats. From somewhere behind an animal bellowed.

  ‘Can’t believe we never got to see a giraffe or an elephant or something,’ Bakker complained with a shake of her head.

  ‘No,’ Chandra barked down the phone. ‘This is not a priority. We’ve interviewed Annie Schrijver. He gave her that date rape drug. She knows nothing.’

  ‘I’m telling you—’

  ‘Listen to me. I want you at Bijlmerbajes for when De Graaf returns from the clinic. I want a name from him. That’s something solid. Not you playing detective with some amnesiac victim while we still have that bastard out there.’

  Bakker bounced over the speed bumps too quickly. It took a moment for him to get his breath back.

  ‘De Graaf won’t be back for an hour at least. There’s time. Maybe I can grab him when he comes out of the clinic. I’ll let you know how it goes.’

  ‘Did you hear me?’

  He cut the call and put the phone in his pocket. Then to be sure took it out and turned the thing off.

  ‘It could just be an awkward interview,’ Bakker said. ‘You might be reading too much into it, Pieter.’

  He wasn’t listening.

  ‘She lied,’ Vos said. ‘Though why . . .’

  For the life of him he couldn’t imagine.

  The Copernicus Cancer Centre was a two-storey block tacked to the side of the public hospital complex, close to the rising forest of towers of the financial district. The ambulance pulled into the small car park at the back. The doors opened and Vincent de Graaf caught his first sight of evening sky outside Bijlmerbajes since three months before, when Kloosterman last sent him to the public hospital next door for a scan.

  The lights were on in the Zuidas buildings. As they manoeuvred his wheelchair he found the familiar silhouette reaching up into the darkening sky like a giant concrete finger and said, ‘You see that one? Third in. I built that. The De Witt Trust. Paid some stuck-up architect. Had to. But I built it. Ten floors, all rented now. Upwards of three hundred and fifty a square metre last time I checked.’ He grunted. ‘Not that it’s much use to me.’

  ‘You’re talking to yourself, pal,’ the nurse said.

  The chair bounced on the hard car park ground. The Zuidas was different four years on. The financial centre must have doubled in size, eating up the green polder fields, replacing meadow with asphalt, glass and brick.

  It didn’t smell sweet any more. There was smoke and tar on the rainy breeze and the noticeable whiff of pollution. He liked that.

  ‘I know I’m talking to myself. Do you think I’d waste my precious breath on you? Christ . . . !’

  The idiot had gripped him hard around the shoulders and by accident dragged out the needle-like cannula in De Graaf’s left arm. The pain was brief but sharp.

  ‘You want me to put that back?’ the medic asked, reaching for his gloves.

  ‘I’ll wait,’ De Graaf snarled. ‘For a doctor.’

  They pushed him to the rear doors of the Copernicus clinic. A figure in blue scrubs was waiting there half-hidden in the shadows. He came out with a clipboard, a pen, a steady, knowledgeable manner, walked behind the wheelchair, signed the forms the ambulance man gave him, then pushed De Graaf up the slope.

  They went into a tunnel by what looked like a private staff car park in the bottom of the building.

  ‘Stop,’ De Graaf said, raising a weak hand.

  He told the man to turn the wheelchair round. He wanted to see the Zuidas again. The tower he’d built. The way the place was rising out of nothing but green meadow.

  Vincent de Graaf stared at the urban landscape before him, all lights and glass and concrete. He’d been praying to see it again for months. Now he was here it seemed disappointing. This was once his world, a place he ruled, where he did whatever he felt like. But carelessness had robbed him of that prize and now a wicked, cruel thing inside would take the weak and flimsy husk that was left.

  ‘We have to go,’ a confident male voice said from behind.

  ‘How did he find you?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  The messages he’d received in Bijlmerbajes were vague invitations. Difficult to interpret, hard to refuse. That need he had for freedom, albeit briefly, had consumed him. Just the thought of seeing the night sky without those damned prison blocks around . . .

  ‘We need to go.’ The wheelchair squeaked into motion. ‘The time—’

  ‘I know about time,’ De Graaf cut in, shocked by the sound of his own voice, how close it was to breaking. ‘I know more about that than you ever will.’

  Around the corner stood what looked like a white golf buggy. When he worked down the road De Graaf had seen them use these to transport patients around the hospital complex, from X-Ray to MRI, theatre to intensive care.

  Strong arms came down and lifted him gently from the chair. De Graaf’s hands reached out like those of a sickly chi
ld, rising to the neck of a parent. Then stopped as he felt foolish, and clutched them instead to his bony chest.

  ‘I don’t know you,’ he said, looking at the face above him. Then wondered, ‘Do I?’

  ‘Doubt it,’ the man said as he carried him to the buggy.

  The fake leather cushion of the back seat was at least soft. The stranger found a blanket, laid it over him, up to the chin, and gingerly raised it to his face.

  ‘No,’ De Graaf said, surprised to find that suddenly he was scared. Now. When he was free. ‘Don’t cover me.’

  ‘I’ve got to.’ He lifted the blanket over De Graaf’s sweating, trembling face, went to the front, brought the electric motor to life, and trundled out into the night’s steady rain.

  Annie Schrijver’s parents were with her when Vos marched through the door, Bakker at his heels. Her father looked up. Her mother didn’t. The room was full of the flowers the TV people had placed there for effect. Roses, lilies and tulips, their heady scent filling the air.

  ‘She wants some peace,’ Bert Schrijver said, glaring at them. ‘You people have done enough already. Leave her be.’

  He came and stood in front of Vos.

  ‘You hear me?’

  ‘Bert,’ Nina whispered. ‘Remember what they said when they let us in. No more . . .’

  ‘They think they bloody own us. Put Annie on the TV like that . . .’

  ‘Not our decision, Mr Schrijver,’ Bakker broke in. ‘We did our best to fight it.’ She looked at him hard. ‘She could have said no.’

  ‘But people don’t, do they?’ he yelled. ‘Not when they’ve got all manner of clever folk like you standing round, telling them what to do.’

  Vos eased past, caught Nina Schrijver’s eye, took a seat, pulled it up by the bed. Her daughter wouldn’t look him in the face.

  ‘I’m Brigadier Vos, Annie. I was the one who found you that night . . .’

  ‘The one who saved your life,’ her mother added.

  ‘I’m sorry you were pressured into this. I wish it hadn’t happened. All the same . . .’ His phone was still switched off. In his head he could see Jillian Chandra getting mad somewhere, perhaps even on her way here already. ‘A very dangerous man’s still out there. We need to find him. To stop him. For that . . .’ She looked at him then. ‘For that you have to tell us the truth.’

  ‘What do you mean, the truth?’ Bert Schrijver roared.

  A nurse stopped by the door, looked in, asked if everything was OK. Bakker flashed her ID and got her out of there.

  Schrijver seemed to get the point. More quietly he said, ‘She told you everything she knew. That bastard doped her. She doesn’t know what’s happened. If she did . . . if . . .’

  He went quiet. Something in his daughter’s face had stopped him. Vos put a hand in his pocket and turned on his phone. Nothing Chandra could do to stop him now.

  ‘Guilt’s a funny thing,’ he said, watching the way she hung on his every word. ‘We all get it. We all think we understand it. We’ve got it under control. But then it comes out from nowhere and bites us. Tells us however innocent we think we are really it’s us to blame. For being careless. Or stupid.’

  Nina Schrijver’s hand went out and took her daughter’s fingers.

  ‘It doesn’t matter how often you say . . . you’re not to blame, it’s not your fault. Nothing that happened was down to you. You’re forgiven. That sense of shame just stays there like a stain inside. One no one else can see. Just you.’

  ‘Stop it, please,’ the mother whispered.

  ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘Annie knows something. I need her to tell me.’

  ‘What in God’s name is this about?’ Bert Schrijver asked, voice low for once.

  ‘Where did you go, Annie?’ Bakker asked. ‘Who with?’

  Head down, chin on her pale neck, glassy eyes staring up at them, childlike and full of resentment, she mumbled something.

  ‘Can’t hear,’ Vos said.

  When she spoke her face was contorted, full of pain and anger like a child.

  ‘The Mariposa! It’s where they all go. All the rich ones from the Zuidas. Ten-euro cocktails and clothes I’ll never afford. Lives I’ll never have.’ Just saying that seemed to lift some weight from her. ‘He was a foreigner who chatted me up in the market when he bought some flowers. I just went for a drink . . .’

  ‘We need a name.’

  ‘If he told me I don’t remember.’

  ‘There’s more,’ Vos said.

  ‘Is there?’

  She wasn’t going any further so Vos said straight out, ‘You stumbled over your words, Annie. You were going to say this wasn’t the first time it happened.’

  ‘Wasn’t,’ she snapped.

  ‘He’s still out there,’ Vos added. ‘If you can help us find him . . .’

  Bert Schrijver let out a low and mournful groan, long and pained, just one word after, ‘What?’

  ‘We’ve all got secrets,’ Bakker added. ‘It’s just that yours are about more than you. We need—’

  ‘Rob did it just the once!’ she cried. ‘Years ago. When me and him first met. He put something in my drink. It wasn’t . . . wasn’t like you think.’

  Schrijver turned to his ex-wife, face full of thunder and shock.

  ‘Sanders? That bastard was part of this? You knew and never told me.’

  ‘Of course I didn’t know! How could I? Christ, Annie. He did that and you still . . .’

  ‘It was just one of those things! Happens all the time. For God’s sake, Dad, don’t look so fucking angry. You got mum pregnant while you were pissed, didn’t you? The pair of you . . .’

  ‘Not the same,’ Nina whispered.

  ‘You’re sure about that? It would have happened anyway. I wanted him.’ More quietly, ‘Rob never tried anything like that again. Never needed to. He said sorry. He meant it. Dad!’

  Schrijver was out of the room. Vos told Bakker to find any uniforms around and keep him away from Sanders.

  ‘How many years ago?’ he asked.

  ‘Four.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘In the city. De Wallen.’ She peeked at her mother. ‘The kind of place I wasn’t supposed to go. It was different. I was on my own. Nothing to do with this. Nothing . . .’

  ‘It was just him?’ Vos asked. ‘Just Rob? You’re sure?’

  Annie was hesitating over her answer when Vos’s phone rang. Chandra, he guessed, picking it out of his pocket. He’d try to get the news in before the argument started.

  ‘Pieter,’ said a gentle, concerned voice in his ear.

  He had to think for a moment. Then it continued, ‘It’s Marly. What’s going on?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I just got a call from the Copernicus people. De Graaf didn’t show up for his appointment. I checked with the paramedics. They’re still in the car park. They say they dropped him off with a nurse almost an hour ago. In his wheelchair. They don’t know where he is. He can’t just vanish . . .’

  Nina Schrijver was back at the bed, arms around her daughter.

  ‘Can’t he?’ Vos whispered.

  Outside in the corridor he heard the commotion. Two uniforms wrestling with a furious Bert Schrijver, Bakker with them. He called control and told them to bring a search team to the hospital, then assign some people from the night crew to pick up Rob Sanders.

  ‘Where’s the CCTV room?’ he asked the woman on reception.

  Same floor, four hundred metres along the corridor. Restricted access.

  ‘Get us in there,’ he ordered. ‘Laura.’

  Thirty seconds later they were in a small office watching a security guard flick through the screens. Cameras covered the sprawling complex, more than a hundred in all. Vos got him to look at the Copernicus car park and scroll back an hour. It took a little while but he found it. An ambulance turning up, two men unloading a wheelchair. They vanished into a blind spot, came back, just the medics, pulled out cigarettes, little red lights darting on the scre
en.

  ‘Get me inside,’ Vos said.

  Up came a view of a corridor to the lift that was supposed to take De Graaf to Copernicus reception. Nothing.

  ‘Where could someone push a wheelchair from there?’ he wondered. ‘Without being seen?’

  ‘Not inside, that’s for sure.’ The security officer scratched his neat hair. ‘It has to be the other side of the staff parking area.’

  He played with the keyboard and brought up another gloomy exterior. Cars glistening under the rain, splashes of light on puddles. Then, in the dark, something like a golf buggy moving steadily down the pathway between the vehicles.

  ‘That goes nowhere,’ the guard said, baffled. ‘In this weather? In one of those things?’

  ‘Let me see it live,’ Vos ordered. ‘Pull back and give me the area.’

  The screen changed. No buggy. No movement.

  ‘Pieter,’ Bakker said, pointing at the picture. ‘There.’

  A neon sign on the tower block at the very edge of the screen.

  De Witt it said, in vertical red neon letters.

  ‘That was his company, wasn’t it?’

  He went for the door. She followed, checking her weapon.

  His phone was ringing. It had to be Jillian Chandra this time. She could wait.

  Holding hands in the flower-filled room, listening to the whir of the air conditioning, the dwindling yells and cries down the corridor, the silence between them.

  ‘They’re going to throw Dad out for good, aren’t they?’ Annie said finally.

  Nina Schrijver was there already, thinking of how she’d handle things.

  ‘Probably. Doesn’t matter. You’ll be out of here before long.’

  ‘He’ll hate me for not telling him. You too . . .’

  ‘All I knew was you and Rob had a bad start. Not the details. Never wanted them. Don’t now.’

  ‘Dad’s going to hate me—’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ Nina Schrijver snapped. ‘Your father doesn’t have it in him to hate anyone. Except maybe himself. We’ll get you home soon.’

  ‘Home.’

  There was a message in that single word.

  ‘Come to my place, then. Or maybe we could go away for a few days. I’ve got the money.’

  Annie glared at her, something in that look: I’m a Schrijver. I don’t run.