Before the Dawn

by Jake Woodhouse

  Harry laughs. ‘You know, you’re the first person to get that reference. I’ve been using it for years and I think everyone so far just assumes I’m being an asshole.’

  ‘Surely not.’

  ‘Yeah, hard to believe.’

  He turns to look out across the harbour. A large crane plucks shipping containers off the quay and places them onto the deck of a waiting ship with a kind of balletic delicacy.

  ‘So … I’ve got a small team working tonight, all people I completely trust.’

  ‘How come?’

  ‘How come what?’

  ‘You trust them all.’

  ‘I’ve borrowed them from stations all over, they don’t know anything about the operation. As far as they’re all aware it’s a training exercise they’ve been specially selected for.’

  ‘I got a call the other day,’ Tanya says. ‘They said I’d been specially selected for the opportunity to invest in some luxury flat development somewhere on the harbour front.’

  ‘I got one of those as well, think they overestimate how much we get paid.’

  ‘Mind you, this goes down right … who knows?’

  His phone goes off, he feels like a slave to it. ‘So,’ he says, checking the screen, ‘you in?’

  ‘Sure,’ Tanya says, with a creeping sense that she should really be saying no. ‘When are we going?’

  He looks at her, having to squint into the sun which is over her left shoulder.

  ‘Right now.’

  18

  Kees stares at the foil blister pack.

  There are ten individual blisters, and all of them have been punched out bar one.

  He hates them, hates that he’s dependent on them to keep his own body from destroying itself.

  But the alternative is … well, there is no alternative.

  He also hates that they are in packs of ten. It makes no sense; seven yes, fourteen yes, but for fuck’s sake why do they do them in tens?

  He pushes his finger under the last one, watches as the pill’s shape starts to form and then, as the foil splits, the pink pill itself emerges, like some sick alien life-pod.

  He flips it into his mouth, the bitter pill, quite literally, bitter.

  He upends the Coke he has clutched in his hand, downs the lot, and gives himself a bad case of brain freeze.

  The bar’s quiet, dark and smells of exhaled alcohol and the ghost of dead cigarettes. It’s the ideal place to field calls. Which is what he’s doing, waiting for incoming.

  They have a complicated system set up: he calls and leaves a message, then he gets a text message with a time to be at the bar and he has to confirm or deny to another number, via text. Then he deletes the text message itself.

  At first Kees thought it overkill.

  Now he’s worried it’s not overkill enough.

  He finds his finger drumming on the bar’s surface, like a woodpecker on crack.

  The strange thing is, he doesn’t remember asking it to do that. He tries to stop it. Nothing happens, the finger carries on – a touch faster, if anything. None of his other fingers are moving, he notices, it’s just the one. Now it’s going so fast it’s like a blur. Sweat oozes down his back, and his neck feels like a long thin pole, his head teetering dangerously on top. It’s taking all his concentration to keep it there, thousands of micro adjustments a second.

  And his scalp’s shrinking fast.

  The sound’s getting louder, he can hear it now, hear little else, and he glances round to check if anyone else is noticing, see if the bottles are shaking on their shelves, or jumping off to certain death on the floor below.

  Is this it? he finds himself calmly wondering. Is this how it ends?

  ‘Hey, for you.’

  The voice snaps him out of whatever it is he’s locked into.

  He swings his vision back to his finger. It’s still, innocent, like it hasn’t moved.

  The barman’s holding out a phone to him on an oversized curly cord, something uncomfortably umbilical about it.

  He takes the receiver, the plastic slicked up with a sheen of sweat from the man’s hand, and steps round the corner, stretching the cord as far as it will go.

  Suddenly he doesn’t know what to say.

  ‘We … we …’ he says.

  ‘You need to piss?’

  ‘We need to talk,’ Kees says. ‘Face to face.’

  And hour and a half later Kees is scrambling down a tree-covered slope. It’s steeper than it looked from the top, and he slips, reaching out a hand to steady himself on a nearby trunk. The bark is rough and dry against his palm.

  He’s in a wood outside Gouda, and in less than three hours is supposed to be gearing up for the job Van der Pol’s put him on.

  Unless … he thinks as he reaches the bottom of the slope.

  The ground’s covered in dry leaves, and he looks around, spotting the man leant up against a tree less than ten metres away, acting like it’s perfectly normal to be meeting like this.

  Kees has not seen him for over a year, and he looks fitter, younger somehow. Looks like he’s taking good care of himself whilst Kees is just rotting away.

  He steps over, the rustle and crunch of leaves almost deafening in the quiet wood.

  ‘Hey,’ Kees says. ‘Didn’t think you’d come.’

  ‘Oh ye of little faith,’ replies Station Chief Henk Smit, stepping away from the trunk. ‘But charming as this all is, I would like to know why it’s necessary.’

  Not changed a bit then, Kees thinks.

  A bird chirps behind him, a rapid-fire series of notes at the same pitch, the last one longer than the rest. It does it again. And again. For some reason it reminds him of a speeded-up version of Dirk’s scream as the secateurs plunged into his neck.

  Kees thinks of his finger, drumming insanely.

  ‘I need out,’ he says.

  Smit looks at him, eyes unreadable.

  ‘Suits you,’ he says. ‘The whole biker thing. Looks good. Earring’s a nice touch too.’

  For a second everything around Kees seems to freeze. He feels empty, present, but only as an observer.

  It feels good, like there is a respite from it all.

  From life. His own life.

  But then it all speeds up, anger surging, bubbling in his blood like a diver with the bends. He explodes forward, grabbing Smit and ramming him up against a tree.

  ‘This isn’t funny, you fucker,’ Kees screams in his face. ‘I’m the one doing this. I’m the one risking—’

  Smit stomps on Kees foot hard and the pain makes Kees loosen his grip just enough for Smit to get free.

  Before Kees can react he’s face down eating leaf, with Smit’s knee pushing into his spine. His right arm’s twisted up behind his shoulder blades, held there tight.

  Oddly, Kees is finding it hard to breathe.

  ‘You’re getting soft,’ Smit remarks, voice steady, no emotion.

  ‘I need out.’

  Smit releases his arm then stands up, lack of knee freeing up Kees’ breath.

  But he doesn’t feel like breathing now. What he really feels like is crying.

  Jesus.

  Something crawls past his ear.

  He rolls over onto his back and looks up at the branches clawing at the sky.

  A lone raptor, wings outstretched, spirals upwards on a lazy thermal.

  ‘I don’t understand why you don’t just arrest him. Surely I’ve given you enough for that? Just arrest him and get it over with.’

  ‘Soon, but I need a bit more.’

  ‘So what’re you going to do, wait till he finds out who I am and kills me? Arrest him for that? Will that be enough for you to take him down?’

  ‘Kees, listen,’ Smit says. ‘I know it’s tough. You’ve done well so far, I just need you to stick with it a bit longer. A few more days.’

  ‘I could just walk,’ Kees says. ‘Walk away right now.’

  Smit holds his hand out. Kees looks at it, then struggles up on his own. S
mit inspects his palm, as if to see why Kees refused it.

  ‘A couple of days,’ Smit says, finishing the inspection and swinging his eyes back to Kees. ‘That’s all I’m asking.’

  ‘Then I’m out?’

  The repetitive cry of the bird starts up again, piercing the quiet. Kees listens to it.

  ‘Then we’ll talk,’ Smit says.

  19

  ‘Ready?’

  Jaap’s standing on a small mound swelling out of the grasslands behind Daan Brouwer’s house, the only place he could find strong enough reception. As a result his view is wide-screen, ultra HD. Turning in a circle he can see the whole sky, bruised by the sinking sun.

  ‘Hit me.’

  ‘Not really my kind of thing,’ says Roemers. ‘But anyway, I’ve looked pretty much everywhere and I couldn’t find any real connection between Kamp and Brouwer.’

  Jaap breathes out. It must be audible because Roemers carries on.

  ‘But … one of my guys came across something.’

  Jaap stops turning, finds himself facing the beach where Heleen was found.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Check your phone, I’m sending you a file right now.’

  Only it gets stuck downloading, the wheel spinning tirelessly. He calls Roemers back. Roemers has gone AWOL. Probably plugged in headphones for his fix of late-sixties Krautrock.

  Jaap decides to speak to the neighbours while the ones and zeros sort themselves out.

  Of the two remaining houses the first has no one home, the other’s occupied by an old woman. She answers the door and Jaap notices the skin on her inner wrists, marbled with veins like mature blue cheese. He talks to her, she’s surprisingly lucid considering she’s just turned ninety-one – the number gives Jaap a passing touch of vertigo – and she tells him what little she knows about Brouwer: he’s quiet, keeps himself to himself, and she can’t remember when she last saw him.

  Not revelatory. He thanks her and checks his phone again to find the file is finally there. He heads back to Brouwer’s house, reading it.

  Up until now there was a slim chance the killings weren’t related. Granted the whole suffocation thing could be passed off as a coincidence, and maybe the scopolamine could as well at a massive pinch. Say some entrepreneur imported a load and put it on the market, telling clients exactly what it’s good for.

  But given what’s on the screen in front of him, the chances that they’re not linked are slipping rapidly away. Because it looks like Francesco Kamp and Daan Brouwer had, briefly, lived on the same street in Haarlem back in the early nineties. It’s not proof of anything, nothing which could stand up in court, but for Jaap it means that there is something to dig at.

  Back at Brouwer’s house Jaap finds Arno slamming his phone down on the desk.

  ‘I didn’t mean for you two to argue over it,’ he says.

  ‘Not Kim, Stuppor,’ Arno says. ‘On his way over, mumbling something about how we’re making a mess of it. Due here any minute now.’

  The only surprise Jaap feels is that it’s taken so long. Sure, the man was insulted by having Jaap sent in, but if he’d been cooperative from the beginning …

  Jaap brings Arno up to speed then asks, ‘The last ferry has gone, right? So even if Brouwer left right after the newsflash he’d not’ve had time to get there.’

  Arno checks his watch. ‘There’s one more ferry due in about half an hour’s time. It’ll take another forty to turn it round.’

  ‘We can get there before then?’

  ‘Take us ten. We’ve got time. Look at this though, all sorts of stuff on his computer – ready?’

  Arno clicks on a file, a new window opens on the screen, and he starts opening individual files.

  Brouwer’s politics are based on what could loosely be called hate. There are articles about neo-Nazis, anti-Islam groups, a whole subfolder dedicated to the killer who’d gone on a shooting rampage in Norway, and another on Theo van Gogh, the filmmaker shot and stabbed to death by a Dutch-Moroccan Muslim now spending life in jail. A third is on Pim Fortuyn, the gay far-right anti-Islam politician who in the early 2000s was making such significant inroads that he was on the cusp of becoming a major political power. Pundits thought the post of prime minister was within reach, and the bookies’ odds reflected this.

  That is, it was within reach until he was assassinated by, of all people, a militant vegan, whose beef with the politician was never quite clear. Jaap had been the arresting officer, the case a media spectacle only outdone by his current one.

  He leans in and takes over the track-pad, clicking on a few more files. He finds what they are looking for: a video, taken from who knows where on the internet.

  Jaap hits play.

  A girl’s thigh is centre camera, already slashed by multiple cuts.

  Like Heleen’s, some are healed over, just raised scar tissue, and some are fresh.

  Particularly the one which is trailing behind a blade, blood dripping in its wake.

  They watch the whole thing in a kind of suspended silence.

  ‘Money shot,’ Arno says.

  He’s right. A head moves into view, face pixelated, tongue reaching out like a starving alien.

  It licks a trickle of fresh blood off the knife’s edge.

  20

  ‘Tanya, we’re ready.’

  Tanya nods, gives Harry the one-second gesture.

  She’s been on hold for over ten minutes now and is starting to wonder if she’ll have to go back to the hospital for radiation poisoning. And yes, she knows that using a phone whilst pregnant isn’t good, but with life today, what can she do?

  A voice comes on the line, the same nurse who’d put her on hold.

  ‘Dr Bruggen’s been called away urgently, but I’ve left him another message so I’m sure he’ll call you back as soon as he can.’

  ‘OK, but is there anyone else who can have a look at it? I was in first thing and … and I want to know if anything’s wrong.’

  ‘There’s no one available, but I’m sure Dr Bruggen won’t be too long.’

  Tanya thanks her, even though she doesn’t feel like thanking anyone, and hangs up. She walks across the cracked concrete, tiny oases of weeds pushing through the gaps, to the low warehouse with the corrugated roof where Harry’s standing, waiting for her by a red metal door.

  ‘Everything OK?’

  ‘Just some personal stuff.’

  Inside, eyes adjusting quickly to the relative lack of light, she follows Harry through a series of flimsy partitions. There’s a fat seam of rancid fast food in the air. They track it down to an area with ten or more people inside, all looking uncomfortable. The partitions, which look like they’re made of asbestos, are too thin to lean against. The lucky few have managed to rest up against a small desk with tubular legs. On the desk is a box labelled RAT POISON.

  There are seven or eight men and three women, Tanya counts. One of the men is shovelling down the source of the smell, some kind of meat which has been rendered, processed, stuffed with chemicals and then finally encased in puff pasty. Flakes scatter on his shoes.

  ‘Where are the chairs?’ Harry asks to a general round of shrugging.

  He makes a call, argues with someone, then hangs up.

  ‘OK, we’ll start without.’ He picks up the box and hands it to the nearest man. ‘Phones,’ he says. ‘All of them. You’ll get them back once the operation is over.’

  The first man hesitates then draws his out, drops it in then passes it on. It circles round, reaching Tanya. She has no choice but to drop hers in.

  As she does she can’t help thinking about Dr Bruggen.

  Harry’s already talking. She resolves to speak to him later.

  ‘… the thing about it being a training operation isn’t true. You’re here to work.’

  He has their attention now, even the man with the sausage roll stops mid-chew.

  ‘We’re short on time, so I’m going to give you a quick briefing then lay out a plan for the oper
ation, for which I’ll be assigning you into teams. Once we’ve done that we’ll be moving out to the location. Questions before we get started?’

  ‘What’s the operation?’

  ‘We’re intercepting what could be one of the biggest drug hauls in the Netherlands’ history. Good enough for you?’

  ‘Why us?’ one of the men says. He’s taller than the rest with a moustache melting down either side of his mouth.

  ‘Well, it wasn’t for your looks,’ Harry says to laughter from all but the moustache. ‘Seriously though, two reasons. The first is you’ve all had at least partial Arrestatieteam training.’

  Tanya had started the SWAT training several years ago before deciding inspector was a better route for her; she’d completed the first round but not taken it any further.

  ‘And the second is none of you have any prior connection to this case.’

  ‘You’ve got a leak,’ says one of the women, short and stocky with military hair, dyed blonde.

  Harry shrugs. ‘It’s possible, and this operation is too important to take a risk. So now we’ve got that out of the way, let’s look at exactly what we’ll be doing.’

  The noise of someone banging on a door reverberates around the space.

  ‘That must be the chairs,’ Harry says. ‘Let’s get them in, then we can make a start.’

  They’re taking a break, and Tanya manages to catch Harry out on the expanse of concrete. The sun’s not far off the horizon now, the increased angle taming its earlier ferocity.

  ‘What do you think?’ Harry asks as she approaches him.

  ‘Uh … about what?’

  ‘The plan? The whole thing we’ve just been going over?’

  ‘Oh, that.’ She forces out a laugh, which even to her ears rings false. ‘Yeah, it’s good. I think it’s going to work.’

  ‘I hope so, I’ve been trying to catch him for years. I really don’t want this to get fucked up.’ He glances at his watch, as if undecided about something. ‘Listen,’ he says, ‘this isn’t really the right time, but I’ve been thinking, or wondering …’

  Tanya’s heart sinks. Harry is forthright and confident. So his sudden dithering can only mean one thing.

  ‘How about a drink sometime,’ he says before she can think of a way to head it off.