‘Talk to me,’ Vos repeated, the volume of his voice rising. ‘Your kid’s missing. Mine’s gone.’ His hands gripped Prins’s sleeve. ‘Talk . . .’
The ambulance lurched forward. They were leaving the taxiway. Laura Bakker pulled down a tiny seat built into the back door, sat there arms folded, stony-faced.
‘Vos . . .’ she said.
He wasn’t listening. Had the stricken man by the arm and the medics were getting uppity now.
‘You need to get back,’ the nearest said.
Vos took out his ID.
‘I’m a police officer. This man’s in the middle of a kidnapping. A murder. I don’t know—’
‘You don’t know?’ the medic said, shoving him out of the way. ‘That’s so interesting. Now . . .’
‘Pieter!’ Bakker called.
The monitor flatlined. Prins’s eyes turned blank. A long continuous beep. One of the medics swore, called for the defib. Bakker reached out, grabbed Vos’s flailing arm, pulled him to the back of the ambulance. Kept hold of him while he flapped until finally she said, ‘He’s gone. Can’t you see . . .?’
‘No.’ Vos tried to get free from her, but not much. ‘He can’t be . . .’
‘He threw himself out of the bloody plane, for God’s sake!’ she yelled at him. ‘You saw it. What the hell do you think . . .?’
The medic walked over, leaned down, said, ‘If you two don’t shut up I’ll stop and throw you out in the road right now.’
One of the others said something about standing back. A sudden jolt, a bang. Prins’s bare chest jumped with the shock.
Still the continuous drone. Flat line.
‘He’s dead,’ Bakker said. ‘I know what that looks like. So do you.’
The argumentative medic was back at the table, working, no longer saw them at all.
‘He’s dead,’ she repeated. ‘Not your fault. There’s nothing we could do.’
‘I should have got his name out to immigration as soon as Zeeger walked into the office.’
‘If De Groot wouldn’t let you bring him in how could you?’
‘Not waited till I heard Liesbeth. Not . . .’ Something in her face silenced his aimless fury.
‘You don’t look back,’ Laura Bakker said in her plain, flat northern voice. ‘You don’t ever look back. He’s dead and that’s it. Start thinking, will you? What the hell do we do now?’
He’d never asked about what happened to her parents back in Dokkum. De Groot said she’d seen them after the car crash. Asking questions seemed an embarrassing imposition. And yet he’d so easily thrown all his tortured history in her direction.
‘That’s all there is to it?’ Vos asked. She wrinkled her nose.
‘What else is there?’
Twenty minutes it took to the hospital. The medics never stopped trying. Pumping drugs into the man on the table. Going back with the defibrillator time and time again.
Then they were there. The doors opened. Bright midday sun poured into the ambulance, onto the blood and the discarded ampoules, and the exhausted medics crowded round the body in their midst.
One of them was drawing a sheet over Prins’s corpse.
‘Sorry,’ the nearest one said and started to tidy away the wires and the syringes. He nodded at Bakker. ‘She was right. He didn’t stand much chance after a fall like that.’
A glance at his stained and gory tunic. A shrug.
‘Still. You’ve got to try.’
19
They didn’t keep Hendriks long in Marnixstraat. Better things to do once the news came in from Schiphol. When he returned to the council building he walked straight into Margriet Willemsen’s office. Waited until she slowly raised her head from the papers in front of her.
‘Prins is dead,’ he said.
Nothing.
‘Did you hear me?’
His voice was fractured, high.
‘They called,’ she said. ‘Do you know what happened?’
The briefest of details. Prins had failed to show for the ransom meet, tried to flee the country instead. Flung himself from the plane when it was stopped on the taxiway just before take-off.
‘What the hell were you doing there?’ she asked.
‘I got a text. From Til Stamm. I think she was the kid who got into my account. Took that video. She said to meet her there . . .’
Willemsen thought about this.
‘Did you tell the police?’
A shake of the head.
‘Of course not. They’ll be back though.’
She put down her pen, pushed away the papers in front of her. Went and stood at the window. Much as Prins had done the day before, when everyone was scheming behind his back, plotting to bring him down.
‘Let me get this straight?’ she asked. ‘Some temp here raided your files and got those videos?’
‘Looks like it,’ Hendriks agreed.
‘And she wanted to meet you where?’
‘Chinatown,’ he said. At the same time Prins had been summoned to hand over his daughter’s ransom money.
Willemsen rarely looked lost. But at that moment . . .
‘I need to sit down and clear this up with Marnixstraat,’ Hendriks said. ‘It’s out of hand. You can have my resignation. I know I should never have spied on the pair of you. I just wanted to stop this idiotic Nachtwacht nonsense—’
‘Don’t be so stupid!’ she yelled at him.
Hendriks bridled at that.
‘Wim’s dead,’ he said. ‘His daughter’s still missing. Til Stamm must know something—’
‘You’ve no idea who sent you that message,’ Willemsen broke in. ‘Jesus, Alex. You really don’t think things through, do you?’
‘We’re out of our depth here. People are dying. Wim. That reporter woman. Marnixstraat are starting to think he killed her too. That he had something to do with his daughter going missing. I don’t want any part of this. Have my head . . .’
She sat down again, stared at him so hard Hendriks shut up.
‘It’s not just your head, is it?’
‘We can’t bury this, Margriet . . .’
‘Of course we can. Wim’s dead. It can go in the coffin beside him.’
He laughed and wished he hadn’t.
‘That’s ridiculous. We’ve got to tell them—’
‘Do that and I’ll cut you off at the knees,’ she snarled. ‘You could face criminal charges for putting that camera in my bedroom. You don’t just lose your job. You wind up in jail. Ruined.’ She glanced round the office, out of the window at the rooftops of De Wallen. ‘If I lose all this you lose a whole lot more—’
‘Katja Prins is still missing, for Christ’s sake! What if we know something that can help?’
‘Like what?’ she asked. ‘Truly? What?’
He was wavering. Til Stamm knew Katja. The police had said that. Til Stamm, or someone using her name, had led him to the crossroads in Chinatown where Prins was supposed to hand over the ransom money. Except he was sitting on a plane at Schiphol at the time, hoping to flee the country.
‘You know what I think?’ she said with the briefest of smiles. ‘I think Marnixstraat’s right. This was down to Wim. He was deceiving all of us. He never worried much about that girl of his, did he? You saw that. I think . . .’ She made a note. ‘That’s our position. We don’t sit in judgement. We were just . . . puzzled.’
‘Puzzled?’ he repeated.
‘Correct. We draw a line under it here and now. Let’s—’
‘If you say “move on” I think I’ll scream.’ She laughed.
‘Let’s move on,’ Margriet Willemsen told him.
20
Frank de Groot’s top-floor office. The day darkening beyond the windows. Spring rain on the way. Vos, Mulder, Bakker and Koeman going through the latest case notes.
The hunt for Theo Jansen was getting nowhere. Mulder had made no progress with the search for Rosie Jansen’s killer. A woman officer had taken a statement from Liesbeth Prins. She�
��d no idea where her husband was the night before. Had seen no corroborating evidence to suggest the kidnap plot was real. Prins had been coy and cool about Katja’s disappearance throughout, something noted by his colleagues in the council too.
The street entertainers who’d turned up in Chinatown dressed as devils had been released. Someone had put an envelope through their front door the previous day. It had five hundred euros in it. Promised five hundred more if they turned up at the junction of Zeedijk and Stormsteeg at eleven thirty the following day. Birthday surprise. It was hard getting them out of Marnixstraat; they wanted to know when they’d get the rest of their money.
‘If Prins was behind Katja’s disappearance,’ Bakker said, ‘surely he’d play the distraught father. Wouldn’t he?’
‘The man was a cold fish,’ De Groot said. ‘He couldn’t put on an act like that if he wanted. We have to look at this as the first option.’ He stared at Vos. ‘You do see that, don’t you?’
‘Looks that way,’ Vos agreed.
De Groot laid out a possible version of events. Katja Prins had come to believe Prins had murdered her mother. Bea had introduced Katja and Vos’s daughter to the Doll’s House for some reason. Anneliese had been seized there.
‘Are we saying Prins was one of the customers?’ Koeman asked. ‘If so I have several problems . . .’
‘I don’t know,’ De Groot interrupted. ‘You find out.’
‘So you think the mother and the father were using the same teenage brothel?’ Koeman asked.
‘You tell me!’ the commissaris barked. ‘Get Jaap Zeeger back in here. Talk to the Thai woman again.’
‘That council guy, Hendriks,’ Koeman grumbled. ‘We shouldn’t have just let him walk. He knew something. What the hell was he doing hanging round Chinatown just when Prins was supposed to be handing over the money?’
De Groot muttered a curse. Nodded at Mulder, said, ‘You tell them.’
‘I got a call from the council offices before we came in here. I was their contact for that Nachtwacht crap. I guess the Willemsen woman didn’t know where else to go.’
Koeman glared at Mulder, heaved a long sigh and stretched back in his chair.
‘Til Stamm used that cafe on the corner,’ Mulder went on. ‘The council’s been looking for her. They were worried when she disappeared. Hendriks wondered if—’
‘He runs the council’s general office,’ Bakker broke in. ‘Why’s he wandering the streets looking for a temp?’
‘Priorities,’ Mulder said. ‘Hendriks isn’t one of them right now. Here’s something else Willemsen told me. Anna de Vries came to see Prins about the kidnapping. She had some kind of information. He was agitated afterwards. They’ve checked the CCTV, the internal courier. No one delivered anything for Prins that morning. It had to come from her.’
‘This was yesterday!’ Koeman cried. ‘Why are we finding out now?’
‘They only just looked,’ Mulder said with a shrug. ‘Work it out. Prins’s daughter thought he was a murderer. She’s missing. Something that reporter said shook him up. He invents these photos. The ransom note. He was out when she got killed last night. Then this morning he gets all the money he can from the bank and tries to hightail it to Aruba. Works for me.’
He looked round at each of them in turn.
‘Works for me too,’ De Groot agreed.
‘In that case . . .’ Vos said and got up from his chair.
‘Where the hell are you going?’ Mulder asked.
‘Van der Berg’s found Bea Prins’s car,’ Vos said. ‘It’s in the forensic garage. Got sold on afterwards.’ He picked up a folder.
‘I’d just like to take a look. Read the original case notes. Unless anyone. . .?’
‘So you’re going to make me out to be a fool?’ De Groot asked.
‘You said I could look at the files.’
‘You . . .’ De Groot jabbed a finger at Mulder. ‘Keep looking for Jansen. Let’s get more on his daughter too. Work on the assumption these two things are separate now. The Jansen side of things is down to the gangs. Katja Prins . . .’ He sighed. ‘We’ll see.’
Bakker shook her head.
‘What is it now?’ De Groot asked.
‘Someone left Rosie Jansen next to Vos’s boat. Left a photo for him inside the boat. How can they not be linked?’
Red-faced, the commissaris ordered everyone out of the room except Vos and Bakker. She got up and stood, arms folded, against the wall.
‘Listen to me, girl,’ De Groot barked. ‘This isn’t Dokkum . . .’
‘I’m not a girl and I’m aware where I am, thank you.’
‘I could take you off this case now. Send you back home. We don’t need to wait for the assessments—’
‘No, Frank,’ Vos cut in. ‘You can’t. Not if you want me in too.’
The commissaris glowered at them.
‘This is the new team, is it? One aspirant and someone who’s been out of the force sitting in his houseboat, smoking himself stupid for the last two years?’
‘You asked me back,’ Vos pointed out. ‘If you want to change your mind—’
‘Here’s what I want!’ De Groot yelled. ‘Something tied up round here. I’ve got the mayor, the Ministry of Justice and the media breathing down my neck. Four unsolved murders . . .’
‘Two,’ Bakker said. ‘We know Theo Jansen killed Menzo and his girlfriend.’ She held up a couple of slender fingers. ‘Two. Rosie Jansen. Anna de Vries. Wim Prins didn’t kill Rosie. He was at home that night if his wife’s to be believed. And why? The reporter . . .’
She looked at Vos. He was checking the messages on his phone.
‘Hello?’ Bakker said. ‘Anyone home?’
Vos put the phone away.
‘Rosie Jansen’s Mulder’s business, Laura. The commissaris has made that clear. Let’s do what he asks, please.’
De Groot brightened a little with that.
‘If it turns out this was down to one dead politician,’ he said eagerly. ‘That would make everyone’s day. Just a thought.’
‘Just a thought,’ Vos agreed.
De Groot still looked uncomfortable.
‘Somebody’s got to talk to Liesbeth,’ he said. ‘She knows he’s dead. But . . .’ His big shoulders seemed to dip beneath an invisible weight. ‘It’s got to be done, Pieter. If you’d rather it wasn’t . . .’
‘No problem,’ Vos said.
21
Jaap Zeeger wasn’t sure where they’d taken him. Somewhere industrial. Near the water. He could hear the sound of traffic. Distant ships. There were three of them with him in what seemed to be a cold empty warehouse, bare dusty floor, a single table. Chairs. One square barred window set in the wall. Bright spring sun shining through.
He was nervous. They watched him pee into a bucket, sent out the third man, a swarthy thug with a foreign accent, to empty it.
That left him with Theo Jansen and the man he knew only as Maarten.
Zeeger sat on the flimsy chair they’d given him trying not to shake.
‘I’m sorry about Rosie, Mr Jansen,’ he said. ‘She was always good to me.’
Jansen sat stroking his stubble, smoking a cigarette, not looking at him.
‘And all that nonsense back when that bastard Mulder got hold of me . . .’ Zeeger added. ‘I didn’t want to say that stuff. He beat me up. Said he’d do things.’ A shake of his head. The memories. ‘Horrible man. I was dead scared of him.’
‘You’re dead scared of me, aren’t you?’ Jansen asked, turning his hard, cold eyes on him.
‘I am that,’ Zeeger agreed. ‘More than him. You got reason to be mad at me. I sent you to prison, didn’t I?’
Maarten swore. Jansen nodded, said nothing.
‘Well I’m sorry,’ Zeeger added. ‘I really am. I shouldn’t have done it. If it had been now . . . I wouldn’t have.’
Jansen looked up and asked, ‘What’s changed?’
‘Me. I’m different. Clear and clean. I don’t drink
no more. Don’t do drugs. I got a job. Only part time. But I’ll go full before Christmas they said. So long as I keep my nose clean. And I will.’
‘You’re a hero, Jaap,’ Maarten said in a gruff, disbelieving voice.
‘No I’m not,’ Zeeger spat back. ‘I know exactly what I am. Know what I was too. A chump for you lot. Doing the crappy jobs that didn’t count much or earn much. And what did I get for that?’ He wondered whether to say it. Why he even dared. ‘I got someone fitting me up for Mr Vos’s girl, didn’t I? Putting what looked like her clothes in my flat. And a doll too. They nearly pinned that on me—’
‘Wait,’ Jansen cut in. ‘What are you talking about?’
Zeeger got close to cross.
‘I suppose you were too busy to notice. I’m talking about someone trying to blame me for that kid’s murder. They sent that stuff . . .’
‘Not us,’ Maarten told him. ‘Why would we do that? Honestly, Jaap—’
‘Well someone did it, didn’t they?I know who I am. Just a bug on the street to you lot. Who else knew me?’
Silence.
Then Jansen asked, ‘So when Mulder came along . . . you were already pissed off with us?’
‘Might say that,’ Zeeger agreed. ‘I don’t rightly remember. I was a mess back then. I said I’m sorry, Mr Jansen. Truly I am. Can’t change it—’
‘Tell us about Katja Prins,’ Maarten interrupted.
So he did. Everything he’d said in Marnixstraat that morning.
Theo Jansen listened carefully then, when Zeeger was finished, laughed. Looked a little like his old self, genial and threatening at the same time, when he did that.
‘You’re saying the stuck-up bastard who thought he was going to clean up Amsterdam murdered his own wife?’
‘I’m not saying it. Katja did,’ Zeeger answered. ‘She seemed pretty sure.’
‘He’s dead now anyway,’ Jansen said. ‘Guess she is too.’
Zeeger blinked. They told him what had been on the news.
‘Makes sense then, doesn’t it?’ he said when Jansen had finished. ‘If he was running away with all his money.’
Then they asked about the privehuis on the Prinsengracht and Jaap Zeeger started to fidget on the shaky seat.
The House of Dolls Page 24
