by David Hewson
The boat seemed more like a modern and elegant apartment. Tasteful furniture, abstract paintings on the freshly painted timber walls. A view out to the canal from the French windows he’d seen but never entered. And then, one tantalizing last picture, a shot the photographer must have coaxed out of her.
She was sitting cross-legged on the double bed, laughing, blue eyes shining, arms around the knees of her silk pyjamas, short fair hair ruffled and spiky as if straight from sleep. There was a soft toy on the pillow. A lion it looked like. And a line of photos on the bedside cabinet.
Family. They’d never talked about that in any detail. Vos zoomed in to see her face more clearly. She had crow’s feet around her eyes, perhaps from the smile. Perhaps from something else. An air of melancholy seemed to hang around her and she’d doubtless say the same for him. Perhaps that had drawn them together, like attracting like.
He shifted his attention to the pictures by the neat silk pillow, aware that this was prurient even if half of Amsterdam must have seen the glossy spread.
In a silver frame stood a posed shot of a young woman in university graduation robes: a long black cloak, white collar. She was holding her mortar-board cap, grinning, looking ready to launch it into the air. A torn-off yellow note was stuck to the glass. He could just make out the writing there: We will always love you, Hanna. Always.
Next to that . . .
Vos looked, blinked, tried to clear his thoughts.
A long minute later he called down to forensic. Aisha Refai was on duty. He asked if they’d run a detailed check on the halffull bottle of spritz found in Lucas Kramer’s costume pocket. They’d already established it contained GHB, she said. More than that . . . she’d need to check.
Then he got the number for the Amstelpark administration office. The woman on the other end didn’t sound helpful to begin with and turned even more surly when he said he was from the police.
‘I need some information on the driver who was working the kid’s train on Thursday afternoon,’ he said.
‘Why?’
‘It’s just routine. He’s worked with you a long time, hasn’t he?’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘He said he saw me there with my daughter years ago.’
‘You got that wrong. Toine Brouwer’s a volunteer. Does the odd afternoon. Maybe started here a month or so ago. A nice man.’
‘Is he working now?’
‘This isn’t an odd afternoon.’
‘I need his address.’
She growled down the line.
‘I don’t know who you are, friend. Anyone can say they’re from the police. I’ve no idea where he lives and even if I did I wouldn’t tell you.’
‘A phone number then.’
The line went dead.
Two quick searches and the fog was starting to clear.
Aisha Refai rang back with the analysis report of the drinks bottle.
‘Absolutely dripping with GHB. Would have knocked out an elephant. Is that what you wanted to know?’
‘Kind of.’ He kept thinking. ‘You mean it was more than normal?’
‘I’m not sure how you’d define normal for something like this. Wait a moment.’
He heard the phone go down and then a distant but clear curse.
‘Yuk,’ she said when she came back. He could hear her spitting. ‘You can’t even taste the Campari and that’s saying something.’
‘I didn’t ask you to try it, Aisha.’
‘I know. It was just a drop. Sometimes it’s easier to take the direct route. You’d need to be seriously drunk not to notice the junk in that. I guess they are usually. Can I go and find some mouthwash now please?’
Van der Berg was still in the canteen with Bakker.
‘Is it early beer time?’ he asked when Vos called.
‘No. I need you back here. Both of you.’
The two of them listened as Vos told them what he wanted.
‘There’s a man called Toine Brouwer who drives the train part-time at the Amstelpark. I think he killed Launceston and Braat, not Lucas Kramer. Abducted Annie Schrijver too, did his best to make sure she didn’t die.’
Van der Berg started clattering the keys of his computer straight away. Bakker, always the one to ask questions, tugged her red hair and didn’t move.
‘I’m being slow here. It was Kramer working with De Graaf. He spiked Marly’s drink and attacked her, for God’s sake.’
‘It was Kramer with De Graaf,’ Vos agreed. He got up and picked the photo off the wall. A young woman in her late twenties, eyes closed, mouth open, saliva dripping from the corner. One of the sleepers. ‘I think this is Toine Brouwer’s daughter. Hanna. She survived Vincent de Graaf and his friends. For a while.’
He showed them the cutting he’d found online. It was from the Leidsch Dagblad, the local newspaper in Leiden. The suicide of a postgraduate student at the university there. Two portraits ran alongside the piece, next to a shot of the tower block from which she’d jumped. The first must have been from the graduation ceremony. She looked young, happy, elated as she looked into the lens. The second, taken a week before her death, was very different. Face haggard, eyes staring, cheeks hollow, a shaky, insecure grin. The picture was a mug shot taken after she was arrested following a hysterical outburst at Leiden police headquarters.
‘According to the paper she was a bright postgrad student. Won prizes. Then went to pieces on hard drugs.’
Van der Berg came off the computer.
‘There’s nothing in criminal records for that name. I can try the news archives. Just out of interest how did you . . . ?’
‘Let’s find him first. Explanations later.’
‘Leiden, Leiden, Leiden,’ Bakker muttered, dashing to her desk.
Vos wasn’t listening. Something Marly had said off the cuff when he’d called her on Saturday came back to him. Perhaps with her guard down.
I’ve got a bit of police blood in me too. But that’s a story for another time.
‘Maybe he’s a police officer. Let’s try the internal directories. I’ll take the present. You . . .’
Van der Berg didn’t need to be told. He set about accessing the historic records.
Ten minutes later Bakker was still on the phone and Vos was getting nowhere. Then there was a groan from Van der Berg’s direction.
‘Looks like you’re right. Toine Brouwer’s one of us. Or was. This has to be him.’
On his screen was an article from the internal police news magazine the year before. It was brief and recorded the award of a bravery medal to an undercover officer referred to as AB. Antoine Brouwer, he guessed.
‘They kept his full name out of it but I cross-referenced with the force retirement records from that quarter. He was undercover drugs squad in Rotterdam. According to the papers there was a shootout during a raid down the docks. He got a bullet in him. Lucky to get out alive. Had to take retirement.’
He scrolled through some more pages.
‘You need some balls to work that beat. I wouldn’t want to mess with a guy like that. The only address on the system is old, in Rotterdam. Not much use. Sorry.’
Bakker came back clutching her notebook.
‘How do we know all this?’ she asked. ‘How does a man from Rotterdam we’ve never heard of suddenly become prime suspect?’
Laura Bakker to a T, Vos thought. Come straight out and ask.
‘Because Marly Kloosterman’s his daughter. Hanna Brouwer’s sister. That’s her married name.’
They stared at him in silence.
‘This has been about revenge from the start. Lucas Kramer was the last man standing. She must have offered herself as bait. When he lured her into the zoo—’
‘Pieter,’ Bakker interrupted. ‘Are you going daft? He doped Marly. We found that bottle in his pocket. There was that date rape drug in there. The hospital—’
‘She took it herself. Timed it before she killed him. Then she added more to his bottle. Ma
rly didn’t know whether he was going to try to dope her or not. So she had to make sure. Turns out he had it in there too. So it was a double dose. Undrinkable. Aisha tried.’
She placed her notes on the table and said, ‘Where did Commissaris Chandra go, Dirk?’
He peered at her, baffled.
‘What kind of question is that? I don’t know. A date maybe. You saw how she was dressed.’
‘We really need to find her,’ Bakker told them.
She’d been on the phone to Leiden about the dead girl. The case was well known in the station. Hanna Brouwer had been coming into the station, distressed, for weeks trying to complain about a sexual assault. But she was so out of it on drugs the acting commissaris refused to take her seriously.
‘That was when Jillian Chandra was there on secondment from Zoetermeer. Acting commissaris,’ Bakker went on. ‘It was her decision. Wasn’t hard getting the story out of the locals. They wanted to take up the case. Chandra refused to let them. She said they weren’t there to waste their time on delusional dope heads.’
‘So,’ Van der Berg said, reaching for his phone, ‘we didn’t just get that poor bastard shot on duty. We ignored his little girl when she was going off the rails too. Wonderful.’
Chandra’s number came back with a personal voicemail: leave a message.
‘Do we have any idea where she’s gone?’ Vos asked.
Van der Berg grimaced.
‘If she’s not at home? Single woman. Stranger in Amsterdam. No friends. Needle, meet haystack.’
‘Get on it,’ Vos ordered. ‘We’re going looking.’
They’d arranged to meet in a restaurant called Klein Kalfje on a sleepy stretch of the river beyond the Amstelpark. The place was empty on this quiet weekday. It was just about warm enough to sit at an outside table by the water’s edge. Jillian Chandra knew central Amsterdam well enough but this part of the city was new to her: remote, rural, deserted. Lush fields stretched away from the Amstel, cattle and sheep grazing on thick meadow. The occasional jogger puffed and panted up the quiet lane by the river. A fisherman was bent over his rod, watched by bored wildfowl and dozing cows. Marnixstraat with its traffic and its worries was just four kilometres away. But here she might have been in the countryside, away from all those cares.
His name, he said, was Pieter. That was all. Nothing like the awkward, slippery Vos she had to work with, or so she hoped. When she’d answered his message on the dating app – a middle-aged, recently retired police officer looking for company – they had, she felt, hit it off from the very beginning.
She didn’t even mind when he asked for a photo. They all did and often that was the end of things. But not this one. He’d come back keen and said she looked . . . nice. After that they’d chatted and he’d offered to send her his picture too. Something about the shy way he’d said it made her say no. They were adults, surely able to meet one another, have a congenial lunch and decide afterwards whether it was worth pursuing the matter further.
Chandra had started using dating apps in Zoetermeer and knew her way around them. It was like a game, a tease, hide and seek, kiss but never tell. Most of the men – she assumed they were men – she corresponded with were time wasters. Only a few she met, occasionally checking them out surreptitiously against criminal records first. Very rarely she’d gone back to his apartment or hotel, slept with someone there and then. Got it over with, knowing she’d never see him again.
This one sounded different. So easy-going she’d never asked for enough details to check him out at all.
He wasn’t there when she turned up in a taxi from Marnixstraat. She didn’t want to take the unmarked saloon that came with the job. There were footprints that way. If things worked out . . . if there was the possibility of a permanent relationship, who knew?
That was always the distant promise, not that she was sure she wanted it at all. Brief intimacy was easy. A longer closeness required commitment, dedication, patience. A selflessness she found difficult, a distraction from the greater prize: work, promotion, the challenges that lay ahead. From impoverished immigrant’s daughter to commissaris in Amsterdam was a leap beyond her imagination even five years before. Who knew where the next decade might take her?
The waiter came and made small talk about how slow the day was, how lovely the river. There were boats here, some for pleasure, a few residential. The place wasn’t far from the point where, the previous Thursday, they’d swung Jef Braat’s van from the water and his corpse had sent her screaming into the dark. An unpleasant memory she’d already begun to thrust aside. The Sleeping Beauty case was closed at last. She would take the lion’s share of the credit. Vos could be contained until he stepped out of line once more. Which would happen, she was sure of that. It was in the man’s nature to go his own way, hoping the results would excuse him in the end.
A time would come . . .
‘Your order?’ the waiter asked.
A glass of water, she said. For now.
Ten minutes later she saw him loping along the path. A tall, muscular man, late fifties she guessed, older than she’d hoped. He was wearing a tweed sports jacket, grey trousers and brown shoes, the colours clashing somewhat. A bachelor’s outfit. He had a broad, handsome face, short silver hair, very closely shaven as if he’d taken a razor to it only minutes before. The fact he’d walked here suggested he lived nearby. Perhaps an invitation would be forthcoming. And perhaps she’d accept it readily. She was a stranger in Amsterdam, and days off could be long and empty.
‘Jillian,’ he said, taking her hand.
He had a firm, warm touch and an astute, fixed gaze.
‘I am very bad at these assignations,’ he confessed. ‘In fact.’ A comical grimace. ‘This is my very first.’ He took a seat and looked at the river as he spoke. ‘I’m nervous, you see. A complete virgin in these things. What must you think of me?’
‘I don’t know. That’s why we’re here.’
He grimaced and clutched at his right leg.
‘You’re hurt.’
‘Just an old wound. A physical thing. There are worse.’
In their brief exchanges she’d never asked much. Divorced. A bachelor. Widowed. The last, she guessed. He seemed a strong, fit man, active probably, but he had that worn-down look about him. As if there were cares that never went away.
‘First of all . . .’ He took out his phone and made a show of turning it off. ‘Enough of this. You don’t know a person through one of these things.’
‘No,’ she agreed. ‘You meet them.’
His eyes were incisive and on her then. She got the message, took out her own phone and turned that off too.
Still no sign of the waiter. He asked her if she knew what she wanted.
Something light. Shrimp croquettes with mayonnaise and fried parsley.
He nodded.
‘A glass of white wine, I suggest. They have a Marsanne. Wonderful. Normally it only comes by the bottle. But . . .’ He tapped his nose and winked. ‘I have my ways. If you like it there’s always more . . .’
‘That would be good,’ she said, amused by this man, touched by the air of sadness about him too. It would be an interesting lunch.
‘I’ll go inside and get it,’ he said. ‘Easier that way.’
Vos drove. As they crossed the river Van der Berg called. Chandra was still untraceable, phone off, apartment empty, car still in the garage, not a soul who knew her in Amsterdam, no one to talk to, no one to ask. Brouwer’s old colleagues in Rotterdam said he’d retired to a place in the country after he got out of hospital. No one knew where. Divorced years before. His wife couldn’t take the strain of being married to an undercover officer incapable of leading a normal life. No one had a mobile. The man had had few friends to speak of inside the police, none after he left injured and bitter.
‘They say he was quite a guy. Got inside one of the Rotterdam rings. As far as most people down there knew he was a criminal. Deep cover. You know what I’m saying, don’t y
ou?’
‘We’ll be careful. Don’t worry.’
A long pause then, ‘I think you should have armed backup. I can send one. If—’
‘I’ll deal with it,’ Vos said and ended the call.
Bakker was listening as always.
‘Maybe Dirk’s got a point,’ she said and checked her own weapon. As usual Vos was unarmed.
‘Let’s find him first,’ he said and parked a little way along from the tidy green houseboat in the placid waters of the canal.
They could just make out someone beyond the French windows.
Vos strode up and called for one uniform patrol car to wait outside until they were summoned. Then he stepped across the gangplank, remembering the pleasant, awkward conversation they’d enjoyed here only the day before.
She was inside with her back to him. Jeans and a jacket, packing a small suitcase on the table by the kitchen range.
Vos slid open the doors and walked straight in. She turned then, looked surprised. Offended. Her face was swollen, the cuts and bruises obvious.
‘Pieter. I’m sorry. I thought I said—’
‘Going somewhere, Marly?’ Bakker asked, gun out low, checking the cabin to her right. ‘And you just out of hospital?’
‘Paris,’ she answered, watching her wide-eyed. ‘My cousin lives there. She’s in one of the theatre companies. I thought I’d spend some time with her. I don’t understand—’
‘Is she good at playing pandas by any chance?’ Vos wondered.
She shook her head.
‘What on earth are you talking about?’
From her face he could see: she knew.
‘I’m talking about timing. About how a young woman sent me out to Zorgvlied. And yesterday dispatched me to Artis, to you.’
No answer.
He walked into the bedroom, found the photos, brought them back. A man in a striped train driver’s hat. Close up now he looked as if he was pretending to be happy, hiding something, forcing the smile. And the other photo of the happy young woman.
