by David Hewson
‘Where, Rik?’ Bakker asked.
He was thinking.
‘The pump room next to the pool. There’s an access passage the engineers use. Lucas used to go there sometimes. There’s a viewing window. He liked to watch them.’
‘There,’ Vos said.
Back the way they’d come was an opening to a long dark corridor. The torch beam fell on algae, brick and metal conduits dripping condensation. Then, in the distance, a faint light emerged, leaking out from beneath a closed door.
The air was still damp and humid but colder now, with a different feel, a different smell: salt, the sea and something alive.
As he approached there were new sounds too, the gentle murmur of running water. Just audible behind it a pained, too-human whimper.
He ran on, the torch flashing, yelling words that came as second nature.
Police. Over and over her name.
One kick and they were through, into a small and tenebrous chamber, pipes and machinery burbling to the left, on the right a plate glass window shiny with blue-grey light. It was built into the side of the pool outside, two sleek black shapes swimming there, turning in the water, their raucous cries sounding through the pane.
The dark spatter running across the damp glass was as long as an arm, as random as a Rorschach stain.
Heart beating hard against his chest, Vos walked forward, felt his foot slip in something greasy on the floor.
Blood, a winding black trail of it, ran across the grubby slate tiles.
A long lounger was set in front of the glass, tipped back like a barber’s chair. He caught sight of a head half-hidden, short hair matted, stained, face turned to one side, mouth agape.
Bakker was on the phone calling for medics.
‘Marly,’ he whispered.
She lay there, a curled and foetal shape on wrinkled black leather, eyes closed, no sign of life. Clothes torn and so soaked and strewn with blood he could barely believe there was no wound visible.
Vos bent down and took her wrist, feeling for a pulse on the cold damp skin. The rhythm eluded his shaking fingers. Then something pushed past, Loderus racing towards the far wall. Doors there. An emergency exit. The zoo man launched himself hard at the bars, stumbled through when they gave.
Daylight flooded in, leaving Vos blinking. Still she hadn’t stirred.
Loderus stood there ashen, hands to his mouth, eyes wide with shock.
Vos bent down, as close to her face as he dared, tried to say something that mattered, to find the words.
Somewhere outside there were voices, taut and high, approaching.
‘Pieter,’ Bakker said, putting a hand to his shoulder.
‘The bastard doped her. Just like the rest. I could have—’
Her hand gripped his arm.
‘Will you listen to me? Will you look?’
He followed her pointing finger. A line of gore, thick and viscous, running into the shadows by the corner. Where it trailed away a body was slumped against the wall, a man half out of a blood-soaked costume, mask off.
Bakker walked over, threw the doors wide open. Lucas Kramer lay there, eyes on nothing at all. Then a sea of bodies swarmed around them, pushing him back until Marly Kloosterman vanished in their midst.
SIX
Monday, midday in Jillian Chandra’s office, running through an update on what looked to be the closure of the Sleeping Beauty case, for good this time.
Marly Kloosterman remained under observation in hospital, recovering from an overdose of the date rape drug GHB along with numerous cuts and bruises from a violent and prolonged assault. The worst wound, a shallow knife slash close to her collarbone, had been stitched but would still leave a scar.
While Vos was at the hospital the night team had broken down the front door of Lucas Kramer’s terraced home by the Amstel, a few streets away from Artis. The butterfly man was separated. His wife now lived in a holiday property they owned outside Antibes.
They’d got through to her eventually, broken the news, received little in the way of a reaction in return. What she did offer was revealing: Kramer had been a close friend of Vincent de Graaf and a client of his trust company. The two had spent time together. It sounded as if De Graaf’s prosecution had brought the marriage to a messy separation, full of unspoken suspicions and threats.
‘Would have been nice if Mrs Kramer had told us something,’ Bakker grumbled as Vos ran through the morning’s findings in Jillian Chandra’s office.
‘Perhaps she was scared,’ he suggested. ‘Perhaps she had good reason.’
‘If scared people don’t talk to us how are we supposed to do our job? And they just keep on being scared.’
Chandra nodded. She seemed to like that idea.
‘So Marly Kloosterman’s going to be OK?’ Van der Berg asked, one eye on Vos as he spoke. ‘You spoke to her last night?’
Not then, Vos said. The doctors wouldn’t allow it. But he got a call from the hospital at seven thirty that morning and went over there. Thirty minutes was all it took, Bakker making notes and recording the interview on her phone.
‘She’s doing fine. She was lucky. If she gets her way she’ll be home soon.’
Bakker sighed.
‘I guess you need to be tough working in Bijlmerbajes. Lucas Kramer picked the wrong woman this time.’
When they’d turned up at the hospital that morning she was already demanding to be discharged. A determined woman, with a professional opinion about her treatment, she seemed mostly recovered. Vos hadn’t needed to press at all. She was desperate to say what she could, almost as if she thought it might be too difficult if she waited any longer.
It was a mundane tale as rapes so often were, and she wouldn’t look him in the eye as she recounted it. Kramer used to stroll past her boat from time to time. He seemed a friendly man, solitary, always keen to talk about his work in Artis. Earlier in the week they’d fallen into conversation when she was coming back with some shopping. He’d asked her if she was going to the Sunday afternoon party. Kramer seemed good with the hangdog look so, more out of pity than anything, she’d agreed she’d meet him there.
After Vos had left the previous afternoon she’d wandered over and he’d tracked her down. They’d laughed at his wolf’s outfit. He’d offered her a drink, talked pleasantly and then offered her a private tour of the butterfly house. A peek behind the scenes.
She’d closed her eyes at that point, angered by the memory, cursing her own stupidity. And Vos had said what he had to: she wasn’t the one to blame. Not that it seemed that way to her.
When Kramer invited her to the pump room to view the sea lion pool she was starting to realize she’d been drugged. She still had the will and the strength to resist as he came for her. When he attacked her with the knife she fought back, as hard as she could, kicking, punching. She didn’t remember wresting the blade from him. Forensic said it was possible the knife was still in Kramer’s hand when it sliced into his neck. He was, the morgue said, half-drunk at the time.
A more obvious case of self-defence it would be hard to find and Vos told her there and then. She’d looked up at him, confused, the bruises turning to yellow, the plasters stained with dried blood.
‘I think I killed him, Pieter. I don’t remember clearly. It was . . . it was a fight.’
‘He had a knife,’ Bakker said. ‘You were lucky. God knows how many weren’t.’
Still the words seemed to inflict a real and physical kind of pain.
Jillian Chandra was barely listening as Vos went through the statement Marly Kloosterman gave from her hospital bed. It was her day off as she’d said twice already. She looked very different. A smart navy jacket, red silk shirt beneath, gold necklace, brown hair down for once. Anxious to get this over with, she listened to him recount the conversation and said, ‘Well, at least we don’t have another dead woman on our hands.’
Van der Berg raised a finger.
‘Actually we don’t have any dead women. Not this pa
st week. Just dead men. Damned risky thing to do as well. Attack a woman in a place like that and—’
‘The butterfly house was closed,’ Bakker interrupted. ‘Nobody there to disturb him. Come nightfall he could have done whatever he wanted. Dumped her in the Amstel like they did with the rest, probably. If that panda kid hadn’t spotted him and come in. If Marly hadn’t managed to drop her phone . . .’
‘Date rapists aren’t scared to use their own premises,’ Chandra added. ‘They think it’s easy. That the woman won’t remember and if she does she’ll blame herself.’ A scowl and she looked at the office clock. ‘Sometimes the way they behave . . . they just bring it on themselves. Then throw the mess in our lap and expect us to fix it. Not that . . .’ They were all staring at her. ‘Not that I’m suggesting that was the case here.’
‘One way of looking at things, I suppose,’ Van der Berg replied and went back to his notes.
There was a stash of porn in Kramer’s house. A number of photos of young women that would, at some stage, have to be checked against the pictures of past victims in the Sleeping Beauty case. He’d died so quickly they couldn’t have saved him even if they’d got there earlier. In the struggle the hunting knife had caught his neck and severed the external carotid artery. Unconscious in thirty seconds or so, dead in a minute or two, Schuurman guessed. Most of the blood they’d first seen on the semi-conscious Marly Kloosterman was Kramer’s, not hers.
‘I want this tidied up by the time I come back to work tomorrow,’ Chandra declared. ‘Can we really not get Sanders in court?’
He’d been released the previous night, striding out of the building with a sly smile. Someone must have leaked that to the media. By ten o’clock they were reporting that an earlier suspect in the case had been freed without charge.
‘Not unless you want that lawyer throwing writs at us,’ Vos said. ‘Annie Schrijver’s adamant she’ll do it if we try to prosecute. Even if we put her on the stand . . .’
She shot him a hard look.
‘That’s what happens when you turn the damned camera off.’
‘And if I hadn’t . . . we might never have known.’
‘Possibly,’ she muttered.
It was, Vos knew, an act. Chandra had abandoned the idea of charging Sanders the moment she heard Annie Schrijver’s offer. Den Hartog was already drafting a statement saying the case was closed with Kramer’s death.
‘Things could have turned out worse,’ she said grudgingly while checking the messages on her phone.
‘A lot worse,’ Bakker noted. ‘Are we keeping you from something, Commissaris?’
‘As I’ve already said, it’s my day off. I shouldn’t even be here.’
Vos got to his feet and said they needed to tidy up a few loose ends.
‘Sit down,’ Chandra ordered. ‘I haven’t finished with you yet.’
Annie Schrijver didn’t wake till ten. After that she sat in her mother’s flat trying not to look at the photos on the mantelpiece. Memories of a different time back when they were a family, struggling together to keep the market stall alive.
She put off listening to the news until midday. The TV said a man she didn’t know was dead. And one she did had been released the previous evening, free as a bird.
No one called. Not the police. Not Rob. She was glad of both. A man had abducted her, saved her, seemed so contrite afterwards that, in her fear and confusion, she’d let him into her life. Later she’d come to believe the two of them had fallen in love. Then, when he’d abandoned her, she’d fought so hard to keep him.
How could you explain that to strangers when it was impossible to explain it to yourself?
Chastened by that thought she walked to the salon round the corner, asked them to change her hair colour to brunette, get rid of the blue streak, give her a new short cut. Maybe the girl who did it recognized her from the TV. Maybe not. It was hard to tell and she didn’t want to know.
‘Are you all right?’ the kid with the scissors asked after a while.
‘Yes.’ Her voice didn’t sound it. ‘Why?’
‘No reason.’
They always had to talk. This time it was about the coming winter, how cold it would be, how miserable. The girl, who didn’t look a day over twenty, was going to escape. Flee south to the Canary Islands and warmer weather, spend the winter clipping the hair of expats there.
‘Is it easy?’ Annie asked.
‘What?’
‘Just going like that.’
The girl stopped cutting and looked at her in the mirror.
‘You mean you’ve never done it?’
‘Not on my own.’
‘You’re not on your own. You meet people.’
Annie didn’t speak and she could see what the kid was thinking: you’re no good at that, are you?
‘Can’t beat it,’ she said, suddenly animated. ‘Out every night, the drink’s so cheap. Late as you like and no one moans. Boys if you’re bothered. And the best thing is . . . a week later they’re gone. Don’t ever need to see them again.’
She had dark hair shaved on one side. Tattoos and piercings. At that moment Annie Schrijver felt old, could see the gap between them.
‘No one minds?’ Annie asked. ‘What about your mum and dad?’
The answer came automatically.
‘Glad to see the back of me. Living at home. On top of each other. I do what I like. Nobody owns me. Back here in April. In this . . .’ She looked around to make sure no one heard. ‘This dump if I can’t find somewhere better. Wouldn’t mind the money to get a place of my own though.’
‘Freedom,’ Annie whispered.
The scissors clipped, the girl nodded at her.
‘You bet. Nobody’s putting any chains on me.’
No need, Annie thought, not when you put them on yourself so easily. You could run halfway across the world if you liked. But if the thing you were fleeing still lived inside . . .
‘Be careful,’ was all she said and something seemed to change then. The kid just got on with her hair. Not another word until a simple thanks when Annie paid. It was a conversation in a hair salon. Words by rote. No one was listening on either side.
Back in the street, without the golden locks that had defined her as the flower girl of the Albert Cuyp, she could feel a stiff breeze swirling round as she wandered back towards the market. In a travel agency along the way there were escape routes everywhere: cheap tickets to Spain and Italy, Florida and the Caribbean. She had enough money in the bank to get her there, keep her for a few weeks while she searched for work and company.
There was a shade of winter in the sky, the wind, her heart. Soon the city would be cold and grey, the days so short you sometimes wondered where they’d gone. It would be so easy to take flight and chase the sun hoping that somewhere different she’d find the elusive thing called peace.
Annie Schrijver looked at all the photos in the window and wondered.
Marly Kloosterman knew doctors made the worst patients. She understood her condition only too well after demanding to see the charts. GHB was only dangerous if the dose was massive, which was not the case. The wounds were minor. The few stitches she could handle herself.
The registrar in the long white coat looked no more than twenty-five. If anyone was going to give lectures here it wouldn’t be him.
‘We’re not in the habit of allowing patients to decide their own treatment,’ he said quietly. ‘Whoever they are.’
We.
In that one word, the quiet and faint-hearted decision not to place the decision on himself, he’d lost the battle before it had even begun.
She smiled at him and thought he softened a little with that.
‘You’re busy. I’m not. I’ve probably dealt with a lot more stitches than you have. The things you see in prison . . .’
‘Same blood. Same bone. Same skin.’
She tapped a finger on her hospital gown.
‘My blood, my bone, my skin.’ The smile weakened. �
�My choice if I want to discharge myself. Which I do. In an hour or so after I’ve made some phone calls. Send in someone with the waivers and I’ll sign them. But thanks for thinking of me all the same.’
He didn’t move.
‘What difference would one more night here make? You’ve got your own room. The food’s not so bad—’
‘I want to go home. I need to be surrounded by the things . . . the things I own.’
He stood there in silence as if his presence alone was enough to change her mind.
Then finally he muttered, ‘On your head be it.’
That morning she’d asked one of the uniform officers in the wing to go to her houseboat and get some new clothes. They’d found her mobile in the Artis pump room where it had skittered across the floor after she hit Vos’s number. Lucas Kramer’s blood still stained the screen. It came off easily with a medical wipe.
The director at Bijlmerbajes had been briefed already. He was all sympathy and readily cleared her for two weeks’ leave.
More calls then. Practical ones. A taxi home. People who needed to know.
One more task she couldn’t avoid.
He’d still be busy, she was sure. And more . . . she didn’t want to talk to him at that moment. It would be easier, kinder, though somewhat craven, to say what was needed in a more impersonal way.
Jillian Chandra checked her watch again, brushed the sleeve of her jacket, looked at Vos and said, ‘I need someone’s head for all this. Bakker’s too junior and besides she shows some promise. So I’ll make it yours.’
‘Commissaris . . .’ Vos began.
Before he could get any further Bakker leapt in.
‘What the hell are you talking about? If it wasn’t for Pieter this case would still be open. You’d have Annie Schrijver’s lawyer at your throat as well.’
‘Loyalty,’ Chandra said with a sigh. ‘So much of it around here. Like dust in the corridors nobody’s swept up. Touching in a nostalgic way. Unnecessary and unwanted too. We live in different times.’
Bakker was starting to fume.
‘Laura . . .’ Vos said. ‘Best you go back to the office.’
