28
The whole concept of pain as simply the body’s way of alerting you to something which needs attention had been explained to Kees when he was a kid by a doctor with grey hair and a gruff manner which fooled precisely no one.
It’d been during the summer holidays, on one of those days perfectly balanced between the end of school far behind him and the start of the new term miles out in front, and he’d decided that climbing the tree at the end of their road was the only thing he wanted to do in life. It was an old oak, and held its branches with a lazy solidity, its bark pitted and rough like the surface of an alien world.
The thought of climbing it hadn’t developed over time, or at least not consciously. As far as Kees remembers, it came fully formed one day as he passed it on his walk to the bus stop, like someone had simply beamed the ready-made thought into his head. He’d stopped, looked up, and realized that one day he was going to sit in its higher branches, see what the world was like from there. He’d kept the thought secret, not telling anyone, and he’d been nursing it for weeks until he woke up one morning and knew that today was the day.
The hardest bit was getting onto the first branch, but as Kees walked towards the tree, which now seemed twice as big as it’d ever seemed before, he could see someone had parked a car right under the lowest branch. Before he knew what he was doing he was standing on the metal roof, not feeling quite safe, and hauling himself up onto the branch itself. From there it had been easier going, and he’d managed to reach about two-thirds of the way up before anything went wrong.
Which it did, in the form of a weak branch, hollowed out by insects or fungi or just cruel fate.
He’d been found by a passerby on the pavement, with scratches all over him and a leg which didn’t move.
At the hospital, lying on a stretcher with a doctor examining his leg, he’d complained of the pain, cried and said he just wished there was no pain in the world. The doctor had stopped what he was doing and told him that pain was simply a message, simply a way of the body saying, ‘Hey, I need a bit of attention here,’ and that in a world without it you’d end up dead very quickly.
And now, years later, with his leg feeling like a nuke has gone off in it, Kees wonders again if ending up dead wouldn’t be the most attractive proposition. As long as it meant the pain went away.
His leg has taken on a life of its own, throbbing with every heartbeat.
Though Kees hopes it’s not, because nobody’s heart should be going that fast. Should it?
He tries to sit up, propping his elbows against wooden boards, and looks around. He’d been brought here last night by one of Van der Pol’s crew who he’d seen around but never knew what he did. Now he knows.
The guy had laid him on the sagging sofa, given him a shot of something, then told him to get some rest.
Which was a fucking joke if ever he’d heard one.
Get some rest, like he’s Florence fucking Nightingale.
Only Kees isn’t laughing as the shot’s worn off and he feels like a nuke has gone off in his leg. Has he already thought that?
Fuck it. His mind’s not working properly.
He hears voices, movement, footsteps and a door scraping open.
‘This the one?’ a voice Kees doesn’t recognize asks.
‘I don’t see anyone else with their leg shot to shit, do you?’
‘OK,’ says the first voice, coming into view.
Kees can see he’s scared, youngish with short brown hair and a politician’s face, instantly forgettable. Probably a junior doctor who owes someone a favour.
The man snaps on blue gloves and starts unravelling the remains of the T-shirt Kees had tied round his leg the night before.
He tries to tell the man that he wasn’t in pain last night, so he doesn’t know why he is now.
‘Shock,’ the man says, working efficiently despite the fact he’s clearly scared out of his wits.
‘I’m going to have to do some work here,’ he says, having finally got the fabric off. He gently probes the wound with a finger. Kees sucks air.
Once finished, the doctor leaves Kees propped up on the sofa. The guy who’d brought him here has gone out, saying he’ll be back later. As he left Kees heard a key turning in a lock.
A TV across the room is on silent, a news show, words scrolling fast along the bottom. The view changes from the anchor to a street scene, a row of houses, one of them taped off with police tape.
Kees sits up a little straighter.
He knows the street – that’s where he and Bart had been two days ago. He looks around for the remote, finds it and hits unmute.
Now the screen’s changed again, the face of a man, black curly hair unmistakable. It’s the man they’d gone to meet.
‘… and sources close to the police are saying that the man shot and killed yesterday at his home in Amsterdam-Zuid by police was being arrested for the deaths of Dafne Kosters and Nadine Adelaars. As with any shooting, an internal investigation has been launched, though when the results of that will be released remains, as yet, unclear.’
Kees brain is in overdrive. He doesn’t know what’s going on, but he needs to call Smit. Only he’s locked in a room, fuck knows where, and has no way of getting him a message.
Across the room there’s the noise of a key being inserted in a lock. The door opens and the man steps back in.
‘Boss wants to see you,’ he says. ‘Now.’
29
Can it be as simple as this? Jaap wonders.
They’re in a car driving towards a milk-processing plant located in the countryside east of Apeldoorn where a man called Pieter Groot works. Frank’s been taking Jaap through the steps which have led him to believe Groot’s their main suspect. CCTV images caught near Kaaren’s house turned up five cars within a time-frame which could work, given that she’d got back home at just after five yesterday and had been found dead at half-past nine, when one of the park rangers was doing the final round, checking no tourists were wandering through the park lost and about to be locked in.
Of those cars, three were listed as belonging to locals. A Citroen and a Fiat were registered to people Frank didn’t consider serious contenders. The Citroen’s owner is known to Frank’s men, an eighty-year-old who causes endless road-rage incidents by driving no faster than twenty-five kilometres an hour, dogmatically sticking to that speed, never wavering, as if it’s his final fuck you to the world. The Fiat is owned by a single mother, one of whose three children is seriously disabled. Which leaves the Audi.
‘Pieter Groot, does he have a record?’
‘Nah, face of it he seems clean, got a young kid, steady job. No reason to think he’d do something like this. Though his wife left him not long after the child was born, so he’s on his own.’
‘Anything on why she left?’
‘Far as I can work out she joined some kind of yoga cult, moved to India, an old tea plantation in the Keralan hills.’
‘Pretty unusual – the man walking I can kind of see, but a new mother?’
‘Post-natal depression. I knew someone who had it, they didn’t run off and join a cult, but I think it was pretty rough on them.’
Great, thinks Jaap. Something else to worry about.
He puts thoughts of Tanya aside, she’s too strong for that kind of thing he tells himself. She’s not really a quitter.
‘But,’ Frank says, pulling out a stick of gum – Jaap didn’t know they even made them any more – ‘given what you told me earlier I had one of my men do some checking and he discovered that two days ago Pieter wasn’t at work, he’d booked a day off.’
‘Could have driven up to Vlieland and back.’
Frank shrugs. ‘Just sayin’.’
Jaap thinks a minute, then gets Arno on the phone.
He gives him Groot’s details and the car reg, and asks him to check for sightings, not least on the ferry over.
‘I’m going to get you a photo of Groot, when it comes through can yo
u check with the people who saw Heleen being filmed dancing, see if any of them recognize him?’
The plant rises off the flat land ahead of them. When Frank said Groot worked at a milk co-op, Jaap’d had images of a small farm, happy cows grazing in pastures and occasionally ambling over to a small shed to willingly give up their cow juice.
But this is something totally different. For a start it’s vast, a metal building the size of at least six football pitches, with tall conical tanks two storeys high clustered in a section to the south of the building. The road leading to it glints with a tailback of tankers. The ones at the front of the queue have large tubes attached as if they are metal cows being milked themselves.
They nose past them, heading for the main car park, where they take a slow cruise round until Jaap spots the Audi.
‘Let’s go and have a word,’ he says.
Inside they’re greeted by a guy on reception who has attitude but not enough intelligence or drive to get out and find a better job. He treats their request for an audience with the manager with a massive dose of silent contempt. Frank administers a lesson in civic responsibilities and gets him jumping, and soon they’re being ushered into the office of the woman who runs the plant.
She’s early fifties, grey hair pulled into a tight bun, and is shockingly like an old neighbour Jaap used to have, one houseboat over. The woman – he’s not sure he ever knew her name – had lived there for years with a white cat, and had suddenly vanished one day. The cat, sensing a lack of food, transferred its affections to the nearest person available, Jaap, and he’d left it scraps on deck every day for a year until it developed leukaemia and got booked on a one-way to the local euth society. Jaap had teared up like a baby when that went down. And he’d not even liked the cat that much; despite taking Jaap’s food it’d always eyed him with frank suspicion, leaving him with the feeling he was being used.
They explain what they’re wanting to do – Jaap having to restrain himself from asking her if she has a sister – and the woman’s eyebrows ride up her forehead. But she keeps calm, gets her PA to pull today’s rota and their file mugshot of Groot. She then escorts Jaap and Frank through the vast plant, having first insisted they don regulation white coats and hairnets. ‘Health and safety,’ she says. ‘Can’t have any hair in our milk. Product recall is pretty much the end of the world around here.’
As they walk, Jaap marvels at the sheer scale of the operation. High-tech, stainless steel pipes are everywhere, and the smell of antiseptic is a constant in his nostrils.
‘Through there is the area he’ll be in,’ she says, stopping at a solid-looking door.
‘How many others?’
‘Three on shift at any one time. It’s mostly automated, but there needs to be a skeleton crew in there just to oversee it. Go past the first set of pipes and you’ll find the computer terminal, most likely he’ll be there. They do have to make occasional rounds though.’
‘This the only exit?’
‘Yes.’
Jaap thanks her and moves forward, pushing open the door and stepping into another vast area, Frank following close behind, the occasional snort letting Jaap know he’s still there. A deep hum pressurizes their ears. Jaap undoes his lab coat so he has easy access to his gun.
As they walk on the polished concrete floor, angled towards a thin drain running along the centre, Jaap hears voices up ahead. A man and woman talking.
‘Seriously, what’s he thinking?’ demands the woman. ‘That’s the whole batch gone to shit.’
‘He’s usually pretty reliable. Maybe he’s ill or something?’ the man responds.
‘Mentally, perhaps.’
Jaap can see them now, two figures standing by a tank, both holding clipboards.
‘You’re harsh, you are,’ he says, turning towards Jaap. ‘Give him a—’
Jaap steps forward. This is not the man whose mugshot he’s just seen.
‘Pieter. Where is he?’
‘The control booth, over there,’ the woman points. ‘Who are you?’
Franks flashes them. Their eyes bulge at his ID.
‘I need you to leave the area now, got it?’
They got it real good.
Once Jaap’s sure they’ve made the door he heads in the direction the woman pointed, following yet another set of pipes to where they right-angle round a corner. He can see the control booth now, a glassed-off section with a massive bank of screens, complicated flow diagrams covering them.
But what interests Jaap is the man sitting in a chair with his feet up on a desk, watching the screen intently. His face is in profile. It matches the mugshot.
The glass door is out of Groot’s current line of sight. Jaap steps over and pulls the vertical steel tube which serves as a handle. His gun is in his hand. Frank is beside him, weapon also drawn.
He steps inside.
Groot doesn’t react.
‘Police,’ says Jaap.
He sees the exact moment Groot’s body primes itself for flight. It’s like an electric shock’s just run through his body, every muscle tense, taut with power.
But he doesn’t run.
His body relaxes, shoulders lowering. He swings his legs off the desk and uses them to propel himself round in the chair.
Jaap’s seen many killers, seen how the killing doesn’t achieve close to what they had hoped for, how often remorse is there, just waiting to burst out.
But as he stares into Pieter Groot’s eyes he realizes he’s never seen something like this. Groot pushes himself up from the chair, weary like he’s an old man, and slowly, as if in a dream, he holds his hands out in front of him, wrists together.
Ready to be cuffed.
Jaap steps up and puts them on.
And this time he quadruple-checks they’re done up right.
30
She’s done this hundreds of times, possibly thousands.
Tanya walks into the cell and sits down opposite the man already occupying the other side of the desk. Over the years she’s honed her interview technique, learning from other inspectors she’s worked with. Jaap’s favourite – the Routine he calls it – is good, a whole elaborate display designed to depersonalize the process, but it’s not the only way.
She likes to play on her feminine charms a bit, assuming the person she’s dealing with is male – and let’s be honest here, the vast majority of criminals she deals with are male – and try and make them a bit comfortable. Like this is all a misunderstanding, we can clear this up in no time if we can be friends. Get them to soften up a bit.
Then she hits them hard. Switches up from girl-next-door to über-bitch.
She’s actually quite proud of it, it seems to get results. But in this case she’s not sure that’s going to work.
Because for the first time ever, she’s the one being interviewed.
The guy opposite is clearly of the Jaap school of thought, totally ignoring her, going through some notes which are probably just some bullshit football league statistics but which look impressive nevertheless.
It starts to dawn on Tanya just how effective the not-knowing-what-they-have-on-you thing really is.
Minutes tick by. She can hear his slightly laboured breathing, like he’s naturally a mouth-breather but has been told about it so tries to breathe through his nose. She focuses on keeping calm.
It doesn’t work; by the time the door opens she’s just about ready to break down and confess to whatever they’ve got going. But when she looks up and sees Harry stepping into the room she toughens up.
They go through the prelims, she learns that the mouth-breather is called Inspector Cremers, and is with Internal Affairs. He’s the one doing the questioning, for now.
He starts with the basics then pulls out a laptop, positions it on the table so all three can see it, and brings up a video.
It’s the same one Harry’d shown her last night, and they watch, Cremers hitting pause just as she picks up the backpack and lets the limping man get away
. Luckily her face is too much in shadow to pick up what emotion it had been displaying, though she’s not even sure herself what it might have been at that moment.
She’s been thinking about this all night, in a way glad to see the video again, hoping that it might confirm or deny her suspicions.
But his face isn’t visible either, so she can’t tell if she really did see what she thought she saw, or if her imagination was simply fucking with her.
‘The thing is,’ Cremers says, ‘we had, as I understand from Harry here, an informant give rock-solid info, and yet it turned out to be a sham. And then we have you letting one of the key players in all of this get away. So you see our problem.’
Tanya sees his problem all too clearly, though it’s nothing to do with the case. She’d been told first thing that everyone there last night is going through a similar debrief, normal protocol for any operation of this size. But now she’s not so sure. Because this is starting to feel like they’re going all Salem on her.
And Harry’s driving it, she’s sure of that. Since the moment he’d shown her the rats he’s been aloof, a coldness creeping into his manner which she knows all too well how to read.
And she gets that, she really does. He’s been working on this for months, years, and the best chance he’s probably ever going to get just blew up in his face.
But it’s not her fault. They’re looking for someone to blame, she thinks. But it’s not going to be me.
And there was the rebuff also, maybe that’s playing a part too? Wounded male pride can be a dangerous thing.
‘I see your problem,’ says Tanya finally. ‘I just don’t know what it has to do with me.’
‘From where I’m sitting—’ Cremers points to the screen ‘—that looks like collusion. You let the guy go. You must have had a reason to. And unless you can tell us what the reason is, it looks a lot like you’re the one who tipped Van der Pol off.’
Before the Dawn Page 13
