by David Hewson
She said, ‘I did this. I made him lose it like that. My fault. Whatever that policeman said . . .’
Nina’s fingers tightened on hers.
‘Don’t think that way, love. It won’t help.’
Annie nodded, closed her eyes, took a long, pained breath.
‘What will?’
It had to be said.
‘The truth. Like that police man told you.’
Annie laughed, a short, dry, mirthless sound.
‘The truth? No one tells you everything. There’s stuff you don’t even say to yourself.’
‘Someone did this to you. Someone put you in here.’
‘It wasn’t Rob. What’s Dad going to do to him?’
‘Nothing. I’ll make sure of it. Make sure he understands.’
She was close to tears.
‘You think you do? Or me? I’ve screwed up everything . . .’
‘I understand,’ Nina Schrijver answered, ‘that you and Rob had a difficult relationship. It started bad. It ended bad. You’re not the only one it’s happened to.’
‘Guess not,’ she whispered.
‘Do you really not know his name? The one who . . .’
She couldn’t say it.
‘The one who doped me? Raped me?’
‘Him.’
Annie hesitated. She was better at lying than her father. But Nina Schrijver had raised her. She recognized that glance to one side, the sly and culpable cast in her eye.
‘I asked a question. You’re going to have to face it some time—’
‘His name’s Greg Launceston. American.’ She nodded at the window. ‘Works for a computer company around here somewhere. Loaded. More money than you could imagine. Thought it could buy him everything.’ She sighed. ‘In the end I guess it did.’ A brief and bitter laugh. ‘And if he did rape me I don’t remember a thing. Or feel it.’
‘He’s dead.’
‘Am I supposed to be sorry?’
Nina couldn’t think of an answer to that.
‘Anything else you want to know?’ Annie asked.
‘Save it for the police—’
‘He’d been coming to the market nagging me for ages. I went out for a drink with him last week. He tried it on. Had his little bag of coke with him. Full of himself. I played along for a while then told him where to get off. He got all shouty. Called me a . . . prick teaser. Lots of other names too. Not so nice ones.’
Nina squinted at her, trying to work this out.
‘And you still went out with him again?’
A sarcastic nod then, ‘And I still did. What a little slut your daughter is, eh? Why couldn’t I have stayed home in that tiny little room of mine watching the TV?’
Old fingers tightened on clammy young skin.
‘You weren’t to know. Don’t torture yourself—’
‘I really have to tell them, do I? When they come back.’
The doubt in Annie’s voice amazed her.
‘Of course. Everything. Get it off your chest. Once you’re out of here we’ll start again. I’ll help Dad get back on his feet. You don’t have to work until you want to. We’ll cope.’ She bent forward and peered into her daughter’s face. ‘That’s what we do. Market people. We manage. We get by.’
‘Everything.’ Annie Schrijver spoke so softly the word was barely audible.
‘It’s like poison. You want it out of yourself. You heard what they said. There’s a monster out there somewhere.’
Annie was staring at her, not pleasantly.
‘There’s always been monsters. Nothing new there. No one’s got the right to know everything. Not even you. Stuff happens, Mum, and you wish it never did. Wish you could forget it . . .’
Words were funny. Sometimes they came so easily. Sometimes they wouldn’t form at all. With strangers. With people you’d known all your life.
Then occasionally they lurked at the back of your head, daring you to utter them, wondering if you had the guts to hear the answer you dreaded in return.
The question she really wanted to ask was . . . And what the hell does that mean?
Nina Schrijver lacked the courage to say it. Instead she asked, ‘Is there anything I can get you?’
Her daughter sniffed, wiped her face with the sleeve of the gown and looked around.
‘A bedpan might come in useful.’
A blustery wind greeted them when they emerged from the Copernicus car park, biting rain in their face, nothing moving ahead. The De Witt building seemed a long shot. A coincidence too many.
‘Could have got him in a car,’ Bakker said.
‘Could have,’ Vos agreed. ‘But where’s the wheelchair? Where’s the buggy?’
She looked around, scanning the hospital perimeter, the finance blocks further on.
‘I don’t get it. The man’s sick. Dying. He must need medical treatment every single day. He can barely walk. What possible motive could he have for doing a runner now?’
‘“Do not go gently . . .”’ Vos murmured.
‘Pardon?’
‘It’s a poem. Nothing.’
Vincent de Graaf was counting down the days. Immobile, dependent on others. Dying slowly, certainly, trapped inside a clinical prison cell. Vos felt he could usually think his way into the minds of the people he was chasing. But one in that position . . . he didn’t know where to begin.
The phone trilled. Another text message, another obscure foreign number.
Are you suffering, Vos?
He looked around, wondering who might be watching them from the many shadows, then tapped the number to make a call.
Three rings, nothing he could hear nearby. An answer. Silence except for the wind somewhere.
‘Are you suffering, Vos?’
The voice was digital, robotic. There had to be some kind of software between them, an app that changed the way he – or perhaps even she – spoke.
‘No. I’m lost.’
The thing laughed. It sounded like a creature out of a child’s cartoon.
‘You’re closer than you think for once,’ it said and then was gone.
The entrance to De Graaf’s office building was a black glass frontage with a desk and one lone man in uniform behind it. The floors above were mostly in semi-darkness. The Zuidas worked twenty-four hours a day, buying and selling financial services around the world. But not, it seemed, the De Witt Trust.
Vos pressed his police ID to the door until the guard came.
‘We’re looking for someone,’ he said. ‘A patient in a wheelchair. Someone with him. Perhaps . . . more than one.’
The man stared at him and said, ‘Is this a joke?’
‘No joke,’ Bakker told him. ‘Vincent de Graaf, the man who started this company, has just gone missing from the hospital. We wondered if maybe he came . . . home.’
‘De Graaf?’ the guard asked, wide-eyed. ‘He’s supposed to be in jail. Murdered some girls. You let him out?’
‘No,’ Vos answered. ‘We didn’t let him out. When did you last admit someone to the building?’
He was heavily built with a sour, florid face, a thick dark moustache above a mouth that seemed set in a permanent sneer. The kind of man who wouldn’t admit the Pope without seeing a photo ID.
‘Just before six. Two cleaners. They’re still in the downstairs office behind me. Next question?’
Bakker grunted something and wandered outside into the dark.
‘So who else is still here?’
‘Five or six people working on the top floor. Software outfit who rent space from the management company. They work any hours they feel.’
‘I meant for De Witt . . .’
‘De Witt barely exist any more. Not since you lot put the boss inside. It was a trust company and who’s going to trust someone like that? They just own the building and rent it out. Only Mr Strick’s left from the old days.’ He sniffed. ‘Used to be De Graaf’s partner. One of the rich blokes. More like office manager now. Hate it when that happens, don�
�t you?’
Somewhere in the distance rose the angry wail of a siren. Marnixstraat was sending out the troops. They could flood this area. But it was a faceless, labyrinthine place, half office and hospital complexes, half building site. In the dark, without a clue where to look, it was going to be hard.
‘Is Strick here?’
‘No. Left at five as usual.’
The phone in Vos’s jacket rang.
‘I’m round the back,’ Bakker said. ‘Found a hospital buggy in the bushes. Near what looks like the tunnel for an underground car park.’
‘Coming,’ he said and looked at the security guard. ‘There’s a car park beneath the building?’
‘Well spotted.’
‘We need to check inside.’
The guard shrugged.
‘Can’t help. Don’t cover that bit. Not on my round. Different company and—’
Vos reached out and tapped him on the chest.
‘I want to go in there. I want to go in there now. If you can’t open it up find someone who can.’
The man laughed at him.
‘In that case I’ll give you a number you can call.’
Before he could take it further Bakker was on the line again.
‘Pieter? There’s a set of steps hidden behind the bushes. They go down to a fire door or something. It’s open. I can just about make some light. I think there’s someone’s inside . . .’
‘Stay where you are,’ Vos ordered.
‘I’m not sure but—’
‘Stay where you are!’
She was waiting for him by a thick stand of conifers set by the sloping drive to the underground garage, gun out low by her side. A white and blue hospital buggy sat halfway up the pavement, driven into the hedge, front wheels deep in mud.
The rain was turning denser, heavier.
A line of steps ran down from behind the trees. Perhaps fifteen or so, slippery with algae and rain. At the foot was a narrow metal door, half-open.
He took out a torch, set off first, ignoring her bleats about the fact she was the only one with a weapon.
At the foot of the greasy steps he pushed open the metal door, listened to it creak on dry hinges then turned the beam down a corridor so narrow they’d have to walk single file. Ten metres ahead lay another door, just cracked open. No sound of machinery ahead, no heat from any boiler. There seemed little purpose to the place at all.
Then, faint on the dank breeze, it came to him: a man’s laboured, shallow wheezes.
He flashed the torch round the walls. Bare cement, thick cobwebs dangling from the low ceiling. Then the floor. Grubby concrete, deep with dust marked by recent footprints as if the place had been unused for years then recently rediscovered.
He thought of De Graaf struggling for breath on his prison hospital bed. A ghost of what he once was.
A man in that condition couldn’t walk down these steps.
Vos got to the second door and poked it open with his foot. Bakker squeezed beside him, gun in one hand, torch in the other. Their two beams swept the space ahead.
‘Jesus,’ Bakker murmured.
Three uniformed officers had Bert Schrijver in the back of their van. Cuffed, manacled to the side rail, unable to move much, which meant he banged his big feet on the metal floor, shouting and screaming all the time.
When he stopped for a moment one of them said, ‘You know. We’d really like to be sympathetic here. But you’re making it very hard.’
‘Screw your sympathy,’ Schrijver bellowed. ‘What use is that to me?’
The oldest of the officers sat down opposite, looked at him and sighed.
‘We don’t want to arrest you, mate. We certainly don’t want to charge you. But if it goes on like this we will. If you could just cut the threats . . .’
‘That bastard Sanders raped my daughter!’
The men exchanged glances.
‘We are looking for him, you know,’ the officer told him. ‘May take a while but we’ll find him. Vos is on his case. Bit of an oddball but he’s the best man we have.’
That calmed him a little.
‘If Rob Sanders isn’t here why am I in this bloody van? In handcuffs like a criminal?’
‘Because you’ve been yelling and screaming blue murder all day. The hospital told us. They don’t want you on the premises.’
‘My girl—’
‘Your daughter’s coming out tomorrow. You can wait for her at home. Or in the station. You choose.’
He didn’t answer.
‘Do you want me to phone your wife? She says she’ll come and help.’
‘Ex-wife,’ Schrijver snapped. ‘We’re divorced. She never told me. Never told me—’
‘For God’s sake,’ one of the younger men broke in, exasperated. ‘Make it easy for us, will you? Else we can chuck you inside a cell for the night, shut the bloody door and see what you look like in the morning.’
The sirens were everywhere, their radios alive with chatter. From what he’d heard the commissaris was on the way. The big boss. These men thought they had better things to do than deal with the likes of him, Schrijver guessed. They were probably right.
‘You say you haven’t found him?’
‘No,’ the officer moaned. ‘We only just put out the call. You got any idea where he might be?’
Schrijver thought about that.
‘You might want to try some dive called Mariposa in the Albert Cuyp. Seems popular with that sort from what I can gather.’
One of them got on the radio with the tip straight away.
‘Thank you,’ he said when he’d finished. ‘Cooperation. That’s what we like to see.’
A rattle of the cuffs then, a silent plea.
‘If I get your wife . . .’
‘Ex-wife.’
‘She still uses your name. If I get her here and she takes you home do you promise to stay there? To behave? Like a good boy? Who knows? When you wake up tomorrow it might be a bright new day.’
‘Fat chance.’
The man growled, ‘Well in that case it’s a cell for you—’
‘I meant . . . fat chance about . . . the day.’ He rattled the cuffs again. ‘You can let me go. He’s not here. I won’t go looking.’
‘Fetch her,’ the officer told the other two. ‘I’m going to find out what’s going on. Don’t let him free until the wife’s turned up. Sorry . . .’ He corrected himself before Schrijver could. ‘Ex-wife. If we’ve got a spare car someone can drive them home. If not . . . Get them in a taxi. I want them gone and I don’t want to hear another squeak from him this side of Christmas.’
‘Your fault . . .’ Schrijver muttered.
The man came and crouched in front of him.
‘What was that?’
‘I said it’s your fault. Police were supposed to have dealt with all this years ago. The papers said. If—’
A hefty fist came out, strong fingers grabbed Schrijver’s jacket.
‘Don’t push it.’
Silence then, on both sides. Bert Schrijver hung his head, kept his mouth shut and waited.
The chamber hidden deep in the dark Zuidas polder was as cold as the tomb and stank of mould and damp, of earth and rank decay. At its centre, beneath a single fluorescent tube, a man lay on a red leather barber’s chair much like the one Vos had seen in Ruud Jonker’s tattoo parlour in De Pijp four years before, a corpse dangling from a rope by its side. A dusty mattress, stained with fungus and filthy drips of water, was set on a bed by the near wall. Next to it was a row of rusting green metal cabinets with narrow drawers, most of them open, contents strewn everywhere as if by a child playing a wicked game.
The man was Vincent de Graaf and he was naked, a yellow skeletal shape reclined on the dusty leather, ribs sticking through waxy skin, one hand at his groin though the fingers were covered by sheets of cards scattered like leaves across him. For a second Vos couldn’t take his eyes off the filing cabinets. He’d seen something like them before, and recently.
Then it came back: the dead butterfly collection in the zoo.
There were faces on the cards, photographs, all of them women, naked, some eyes closed, some half-open with black and staring pupils. Their mouths stood agape. In a few a hand intruded, the back of a man’s head, a penis erect like a fleshy exclamation mark there to insult the sleeping and the dead.
These were his prizes, Vos thought, and this the place he liked to win them. Not Ruud Jonker’s dismal den in De Pijp at all. Being an organized, meticulous man he kept his trophies for future enjoyment in his own private Cabinet of Curiosities, the proof of them pinned to card like trapped insects, a record of his conquests to be enjoyed at leisure. Though surely never, even in his febrile imagination, in circumstances like this.
De Graaf’s face was half-turned in their direction, a gaping grin halfway between terror and ecstasy; it was impossible to tell. The man’s right arm was caked and smeared with blood. Midway between wrist and elbow stood the red plastic mark of a cannula, its needle straight into the vein. Above was a medication stand, a bag of clear liquid, some kind of machine, a pump Vos guessed, hooked onto the metal rig, beeping, lights flashing, feeding the drug into him much as something similar would once have done in Marly Kloosterman’s clinic.
There was more blood on his naked shoulder as well and Vos understood what he’d see when he looked there. Beneath the gore and scratched skin a fresh tattoo, crude and hasty.
Sleep Baby Sleep.
‘Does it suit me?’ De Graaf whispered in a voice that was weak but full of venom. ‘I ask because I can’t quite turn to see.’
Vos ignored him, looked at the label on the clear plastic bag attached to the stand. It was a tag with a brand name and a declaration of the contents: morphine. The thing was half-empty. It seemed to be working overtime.
He bent down to the man on the chair, put his head to his chest, listened to his shallow breathing.
‘You need to see this,’ Bakker said.
She was going through the cabinet drawers, pulling out more pieces of card.
‘Not now. Do you know anything about morphine?’
‘Not really. I . . . This is where he took them, isn’t it? And he came back here . . .’ She glanced towards De Graaf’s right hand, where it was, what it seemed to be trying to do in the midst of all the photographs, the naked faces, submissive skin. ‘Christ. The sick bastard—’
