by David Hewson
Every day it happened. Smokers, drinkers, people who just wanted to chat. They got in the way between the street and the building and he didn’t have the heart or the will to move them.
What added to the bustle was the young Syrian. He was loving the job Schrijver had given him, chatting up the women shoppers, flourishing bouquets at strangers, offering to make one for them. Schrijver heard him flit between English, French and Dutch. He was bright, enthusiastic, a born salesman. The business hadn’t seen anything like it since Schrijver’s father was around.
He had ideas too. A lot.
Not long after the lawyer headed off to her office, and Nina and Annie for a coffee somewhere, Adnan was inside going through the storage area. Schrijver was cautious about stock. There was little he could do with a bloom that was past its prime except send it off for recycling. But Adnan had been selling so hard they were running out of several key lines: roses, lilies, chrysanthemums. There was even a limited range of tulips left. By the time it came to break the stall at five he’d probably be out of most of his reserves, something that hadn’t happened in years.
‘Boss,’ the Syrian cried, hunting through the flowers. ‘We need more roses.’
‘My name’s Bert. Don’t call me that.’
‘Bert. I’m out of . . .’
‘The stock you see is the stock we’ve got. Live with it.’
Adnan was always busy, always anxious, always thinking. Different ways to keep the boxes to make them more accessible. Another range of flowers to stock for more ambitious – and expensive – bouquets.
‘Back in Aleppo we used to do things a bit different.’
‘This is Amsterdam. It’s how we do things here.’
Adnan looked a bit taken aback by the sudden caustic tone.
‘Sorry,’ Schrijver said. ‘Bad time. Lot going on. Don’t suppose you read the papers either?’
‘Papers are full of stories about people like me. Not easy reading. And why? I know what happened. Even if they don’t.’
Put in my place again, Schrijver thought. This time by an immigrant Jordi Hoogland had picked up off the street.
Adnan pulled a slim dog-eared photo album out of his pocket and found a picture of a young dark-haired woman and a toddler with a round and smiling face. His wife and little girl, he said. With him now in Amsterdam and grateful a kind local had offered him some work. Schrijver didn’t have the time to deal with all that.
‘You’ve got a customer,’ he said and nudged the Syrian back out into the street.
Twenty minutes later the estate agent called again. The Chinese woman wanted an answer by Monday. If he was still dithering then she was out.
He didn’t say a thing.
‘You could decide now,’ Lies Poelman told him. ‘Just say it. I’ll get on with the paperwork.’
It was tempting, but of all his many faults rashness wasn’t one of them.
‘I’ll call on Monday.’
‘It needs to be the morning. I’m out in the afternoon.’
‘I’ll bear that in mind.’
The bank emailed asking about the overdraft. Then the wholesalers wondering when they might get paid. Nina came on the line and said that Annie didn’t want to work the shop again. Didn’t much feel like being in the public eye after what had happened with the TV people. The Albert Cuyp had awkward memories. The little room on the ground floor behind the shop she used as a bedroom Schrijver could turn to storage or something else. Soon she’d be looking for a job. ‘A real job’, as Nina put it.
‘Are you all right for money, Bert?’ she asked.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘I mean . . . that place looks like it’s on its uppers.’
‘I’m not bankrupt. May not be the brightest spark around but I can manage money well enough to know that.’
‘Good,’ she said. ‘Will you be OK on your own? Till we get things sorted?’
Been on my own for years, Schrijver thought. What’s the difference now?
‘Forget about me. It’s Annie we need to worry about.’ He had to say it even if this was the coward’s way, over the phone. ‘You knew something was wrong with Rob Sanders, didn’t you? You never told me. I had the right to know.’
There was a long gap. He wondered if she was getting mad. But she didn’t sound it when she came back.
‘I knew there was something funny there. That’s all. If she’d told me what it was I’d have been as mad as you. Except I’d have tried to talk it through with her. What would you have done?’
‘Don’t know really.’
‘I do. You’d have gone round and kicked his head in. Told yourself you’d done what any loving father would. In the circumstances.’
That was true.
‘Maybe.’
Then Adnan was back at the street door, waving something in his hand. Schrijver walked outside. This conversation seemed better surrounded by the busy babble of Saturday.
‘You need to get to grips with this, Bert,’ Nina said, still nagging. ‘Some things start off bad and turn good. Some go the other way.’
The Syrian was waving a US fifty-dollar bill.
‘Annie loved that man,’ she added, an audible note of regret in her voice. ‘For better or worse. Doesn’t matter what you think. Or me. Something in him, something maybe in what he’d done . . .’
‘What he’d done! You know what he did! He drugged her. And then . . . then . . .’
He hadn’t meant to shout. The shock and embarrassment were obvious on the Syrian’s face. Adnan wasn’t waving the note any more. He didn’t know where to look.
‘I don’t really know what happened, Bert. I won’t ask either. It was a long time ago. The young . . . they do things we don’t understand. Always have done. Same with you and me . . .’
‘I never slipped something in your drink. Never would have.’
‘No. We just got stinking drunk a couple of nights and next thing I know I’m pregnant. For quite a while Annie and Rob seemed happy enough. Did you really never notice?’
Too busy, he thought.
‘I hope they find him before I do. Bye.’
Adnan just stood there, the fifty-dollar bill in his hand.
‘What is it?’ Schrijver snapped.
‘An American, boss. I mean . . . Bert. She don’t have euros. Just this. Can I take it?’
‘What did you do in Aleppo?’
That came out all wrong, with an aggression he’d never intended.
‘We took people’s money. Didn’t matter what kind. Money’s money. Better in your pocket than theirs.’
‘Do what the fuck you like,’ Schrijver muttered, desperate to go back to the computer, to moving boxes of flowers, getting in the van for the afternoon run, a mindless, boring circuit of the city.
Head down, worried, maybe even scared, Adnan went back to the stall.
And there was Jordi Hoogland, tugging a cart through the sea of shoppers. He’d witnessed the angry exchange with the Syrian. Too far away to hear, thank God.
Hoogland smiled for a moment, an expression Schrijver couldn’t interpret. Then tipped him a brief salute and moved on.
Louise Warren was European CEO of the software company Syclamen, fifteen people, all men except her, occupying the top floor of the De Witt building. A sharp-featured, brisk English-woman in her early thirties, elegantly dressed, cautious, she spoke to them in her office overlooking the car park that adjoined the hospital. Police vehicles filled it now. Half a kilometre away another team was going over Greg Launceston’s plush penthouse in a new Zuidas block. Information was starting to come in from the US too, after his mother and the authorities had been told of his murder.
Launceston grew up in Palo Alto, son of a family wealthy from tech investments. After Stanford he went into marketing with a number of web start-ups, one of them successful. According to the police he’d fought off a date rape charge after a Halloween party in San Francisco the previous year. A young woman tourist ou
t for the night claimed Launceston had drugged her then taken her to his apartment. When she woke up the next morning she couldn’t remember a thing. Launceston was adamant, to her and to the police, that the sex was consensual.
The police team who worked the case had every reason to believe he was guilty. As they were preparing an indictment the victim withdrew her statement. They felt sure she’d been paid off by Launceston’s family. Mud stuck though. No one would employ him locally afterwards. The move to Amsterdam and a company backed by his own family appeared to be the only way he could find work.
Warren didn’t read the Dutch papers or watch TV. She knew nothing about the deaths that week, hadn’t seen the photofits the media had carried in an effort to identify the body in the Marnixstraat morgue.
‘Sorry,’ she said with a shrug. ‘I don’t speak Dutch. How would I know?’
‘Because he didn’t turn up for work?’ Vos suggested.
‘He was Greg. He’d go missing for days on end. I’d never hear a thing.’ She smiled. ‘I preferred it that way.’
‘Did you know you were employing someone who’d faced a rape charge?’ Bakker asked.
She wriggled on her leather chair and glanced out of the window.
‘He was accused. It never went to court. Twenty-five per cent of the equity for this company came from his parents. Need I say more?’
Beyond the glass partition of the office a young team was working. Men in their twenties, casual clothing, beards, more time spent looking at screens than faces.
‘What did he do?’ Vos asked.
‘Greg was executive vice president, marketing.’
‘What did he do?’ Bakker repeated.
‘Not a lot. To be honest he didn’t come into the office much at all.’ She hesitated then said, ‘The security guard says there was some secret basement here. You think he found it?’
He must have, Vos told her. Somehow.
‘You’d no idea?’
She shook her head.
‘Greg was on the payroll because he had to be. I didn’t mix with him. No one in the office did, as far as I know. We had work to do. Lots. He didn’t. He’d come in with his laptop from time to time. Get his head down. Research, he called it. Mostly as far as I can gather he was chasing up the story of that creep who built this place. What was his name? They said he died here last night or something.’
‘Vincent de Graaf,’ Bakker said.
‘Him. Greg kind of got obsessed. He used to show me the press cuttings he’d found. He’d even taken to mapping out the bars he’d used. The places the victims were found.’ She shuddered. ‘I never dreamed he’d actually do anything. I just thought he was a rich kid on the payroll to keep mummy happy.’
Friends, Vos asked. He didn’t have any. As she said, he barely mingled with the office.
Bakker didn’t quite believe this.
‘You didn’t socialize with him at all?’
Warren shook her head vigorously.
‘No, I did not. Once he asked me to join him for a drink. I found an excuse. I think I was a touch outside his age range. Whenever I caught a glimpse of the photos he liked to ogle on his laptop they were . . . young. Almost childlike.’ She thought for a moment then added, ‘His family had better not think about pulling funding on us now I can’t babysit their little boy. If they do, I’ll run his name through the shit everywhere. I don’t see why we should lose our jobs because of that creep.’
‘Nice thought,’ Bakker noted.
Warren wasn’t impressed.
‘You never met Greg. If you had—’
‘I think he found out about that basement,’ Vos said. ‘It looks as if it hadn’t been used for years. Since De Graaf went to jail. Any idea how?’
She shrugged.
‘Like I told you. Greg was obsessed with all that Sleeping Beauty stuff. He seemed to think the fact we’d wound up occupying his old offices was fate or something. Smart guy. I’ll give him that. When he wanted something he usually got it. Had the time too. Wasn’t as if he had to work or anything.’
Something jogged her memory. She turned to her laptop, tapped the keys, then dragged the screen round so they could see. It was a digital map of the city covered with blue and black dots and three red crosses. A legend said the blue dots were for bars, the black ones for places victims who survived the attacks were left. The three red crosses were where the murdered women had been found. A skein of lines connected them all.
‘Stats were Greg’s thing,’ Warren said. ‘He sent me this when he still thought I might be interested in his little obsession. You get the picture? He’s trying to form a mathematical analysis of the places involved to see if they tell him anything. See this?’ Like the radials of a spider’s web, the lines led to a shaded area over the Zuidas, around the De Witt building itself. ‘He told me he thought the location of the attacks and the placing of the bodies suggested they originated from somewhere nearby.’
‘So that’s what led him to the basement here?’ Bakker said.
‘Maybe,’ Warren agreed. ‘Greg was always poking around the place. He was quite keen I joined him for a while. Then . . .’ She shrugged. ‘He just stopped pestering me.’
‘He’d found it,’ Vos said. ‘And lots more besides.’
Bakker passed over an email address and asked for the message to be forwarded, along with everything else they had from Launceston on their system. Warren shook her head.
‘You can have this one. You’ll need a warrant for the rest and I’ll fight it. I’m not handing out our private correspondence just like that.’
‘But . . .’ Bakker began.
‘But nothing. Listen to me. I put up with that foul bastard because I had to. I paid him. I listened to his creepy stories. I did my best to keep him away from decent people working here who didn’t want to know him either. Now I’m going to have to deal with this car crash and try and keep this company afloat.’ She tapped the laptop screen. ‘That’s what you get.’
Two minutes later they were outside. Bakker wanted to take another look at the basement. Vos waited for the beep on her phone. Louise Warren had been as good as her word. It was Launceston’s map.
‘So,’ she said. ‘He was probably a serial date rapist to begin with. Sent over here by his mummy to keep him out of trouble. As luck would have it he lands up in the office of someone even better than he is. Someone he can try and emulate.’
Vos was looking at the entrance into the underground room. With the tramp of forensic the way in was now obvious. It hadn’t been before. But a man who went hunting could surely locate it. Find how to get inside too.
‘He must have felt he was that archaeologist getting inside Tutankhamen’s tomb,’ Bakker said, echoing his thoughts. ‘Finding all those treasures.’
True, Vos agreed, then zoomed in on the part of the map that interested him. One of the blue dots was in the middle of the Albert Cuyp. He showed it to Bakker.
‘At a guess I’d say that’s where the Mariposa bar is,’ she said.
‘Me too,’ he agreed. ‘One problem there.’
‘It wasn’t around four years ago, was it?’
Vos called the team going through Launceston’s apartment. The place wasn’t looking promising apart from one thing: they’d found a phone number scribbled on a beer mat there. It was Jef Braat’s mobile.
When he came off the line he told Bakker.
‘So Greg Launceston was trying to pick up where Vincent de Graaf left off,’ she said. ‘His habits. His right-hand man. His little lair here.’
But De Graaf wasn’t alone. There was another partner. The name he’d promised them in return for the slim chance of a few more months of life.
‘We need to take a look at that bar in the Albert Cuyp.’
His phone rang and he heard the angry tones of Jillian Chandra.
‘I want you two back here straight away,’ she said. ‘No diversions. No excuses.’
Twenty minutes later they were in her office. D
en Hartog was twitchy, Van der Berg making notes, still not looking anyone in the eye.
Eleven of the twenty-seven individual women in De Graaf’s photographs were now known to be missing, murdered, they had to assume. Doubtless with the tattooed words on their shoulder, ‘Sleep Baby Sleep’. The victims came from all over the Netherlands: Eindhoven, Rotterdam, Dordrecht, one from a small village near the Belgian border. Subtle differences in the pictures suggested they’d been attacked and murdered elsewhere, then snapped. Afterwards their pictures were taken back to the De Witt crypt to be part of De Graaf’s collection.
Of the remaining sixteen women a dozen had been accounted for. Five had been spoken to. None was willing to give a statement about what had happened to them.
‘So,’ Chandra said, ‘four years ago we had the worst serial killer in living memory active here and no one noticed.’
It was bad, Vos thought. But in the circumstances understandable. The women were listed as missing persons in various parts of the country. There was nothing to connect them with Amsterdam or Vincent de Graaf.
‘We put the man in jail,’ he said. ‘For life. Life meaning . . . life in this case.’
‘He wasn’t the only one, Vos! Was he? What about Braat?’
Braat was part of the game, he said. De Graaf confirmed that before he left for the Zuidas.
‘They had Annie Schrijver’s photo. Does that mean Sanders was part of all this too?’
‘Commissaris . . . I have to get Annie in here. She’s out of hospital. She knows something she’s not saying. There’s no reason for her to refuse an interview. If need be I’ll arrest her for withholding evidence if it comes to—’
‘No,’ Chandra said emphatically. ‘You won’t go near her.’
Bakker was on that in an instant.
‘What? You saw her on TV. There’s a photo of her in that basement, wide awake, which means she ought to be dead. We’ve got to talk to her.’
