He comes out of the frenzy to find his hands aching like everything else in his body, but he’s got used to that over the last couple of years.
The morning he’d gone to the hospital is a vivid memory, fresh and untainted, presumably because he’s tried ever since not to think about it, kept it in the dark to protect it from scrutiny. But it’s all unwrapping now, unfurling like an evil tentacle, and he can smell the disinfectant, feel the churning in his stomach as he sat next to a man in a large waiting area. The man’s body was contorted like his back had twisted up wrong, curled in on itself, and his breathing was laboured, rasping in and out of his mouth like each breath was a struggle. He had white flecks on the side of his mouth, lips taut in a grimace.
Kees had been on a night stake-out when the call had come in. He and Jaap had been working a case where a woman was suspected of knifing her abusive boyfriend then torching the house to try and hide the evidence. Kees was stuck with watching the woman’s closest relation’s house on the off-chance she’d try and seek refuge there. The night had been long, and although he’d been to the hospital a few days prior, he’d been doing a great job of putting it out of his mind. The uniform who was supposed to be relieving him at 9 a.m. was late, and when his phone had gone off he’d been expecting the person at the other end to apologize and assure him he was just round the corner.
Instead he’d listened as the woman, after verifying who he was, asked him to please visit the hospital as soon as possible. He’d replied he could probably make sometime next week.
There’d been a pause before the woman had wondered out loud if he could make sometime that very day.
So once he’d got off shift, the uniform finally having turned up with some bullshit story about how one of his kids was sick, instead of driving home and trying to get some catch-up he’d motored over to the hospital, his mind trying to block out all the possible scenarios that were crashing around in his head.
And then his name had been called and he’d jumped up and made his way to the specified room, it was all going to be good, because he was young, something minor, nothing like any of the truly sick people he’d been sitting around with in the waiting area. They’d give him a drug perhaps, and then he could just go about his life.
All would be well.
But the doctor’s face when he stepped into the room told him otherwise.
Kees had sat in the chair placed to the side of the man’s desk as he talked. For at least half of it Kees had felt like he was underwater, his ears only picking up a quiet roar whilst the man mouthed his way through something, like he was eating an invisible meal.
He had picked up enough though.
The basic message was that his immune system was attacking his own body. Kees had never heard of such a thing, it didn’t really make sense. Why would it do that? The doctor didn’t know, but said it seemed to be accelerating and that the only thing they could realistically do was give him some drugs to shut it down.
Kees had asked if that wasn’t dangerous long-term.
The doctor had talked about a rock and a hard place.
He’d also informed Kees that long-term was, in his opinion, unlikely.
The stone gives a little. Kees stands up, grabs the spade and wedges it under. He leans on the handle and the stone shifts a couple of millimetres. Then it stops dead.
Kees pushes harder. Still nothing. Jesus fuck.
He goes back to it with his hands, pulling more and more dirt out of the hole. But the more he removes, the wider the stone seems to get, like it’s an iceberg, the tiny tip above the earth, a colossus below.
Something jabs the end of one of his fingers, deep enough to get past the numbness, and he jumps back. He grabs the finger with his other hand. He can feel blood seeping out. The same blood which is transporting whichever part of his immune system is doing the damage round his body.
He feels like howling but snatches up the spade, jamming it under the stone and pushing down with all his weight.
Nothing else is important now. Nothing else matters. He just wants to move the fucking stone and be done with it.
The wooden shaft creeks. Then it cracks.
A bird detonates out of one of the trees behind him.
‘Fuck was that?’ a voice says.
It belongs to Lumberjack, who must’ve got bored of the pair of smoothly shaved lesbians on his iPad licking each other like they’re nutrient-starved.
Kees doesn’t bother to answer as Lumberjack steps up beside him and inspects the hole. He smells of weed and damp clothes. He pulls something out of a pocket. Kees sees it’s a torch.
The beam light-sabers on and is guided towards Kees’ work, sweeping back and forth until it settles.
‘Seriously,’ Lumberjack says, ‘he’s not a pygmy. We’re gonna need a bigger hole.’
42
He sees Smit outside the station, leaving for home.
Jaap doesn’t feel like preamble. He steps over.
‘The killers don’t want to kill,’ Jaap says. ‘They’re being forced into it.’
Smit stops. He stares at Jaap, the orange streetlight making his features look ghoulish.
‘What do you mean, forced?’
‘That’s why none of this has made sense,’ Jaap says. ‘Whoever it is is picking people and forcing them to kill for him. Groot said he had to do it to protect someone, and Stefan Wilders, who shot himself when Tanya tried to question him, said something similar. It’s their kids, someone’s threatened their kids, maybe even held them until they’ve done what they wanted—’
‘Hang on,’ says Smit, his face getting visibly paler. ‘Hang on a minute.’
Jaap hangs on, but Smit seems to be lost in thought. He’s massaging his jaw, eyes looking out over the car park.
‘Fuck. What else?’ Smit finally says.
‘I think he also tells them that if they’re caught and they say anything then he’ll still get their kids. They’re all single fathers, the kids will go into care, so it’d be easy to convince them you could get to their kids somehow, even from prison. That’s why they’re choosing the only way out they can see. They may even have been told to kill themselves rather than talk if they were ever caught.’
‘Fuck,’ Smit says, earning him a glance from an old man walking past, sucking on his vape. Smit turns his back on him, lowers his voice. ‘Why not come to the police when they’re first threatened? That would be the sensible thing to do.’
‘Someone threatens to kill your kids, you don’t think straight.’
Smit shouldn’t need to be told; he knows that Jaap’s own daughter had been kidnapped by a man desperate to get someone released from prison. He’d tasked Jaap with getting that man out, and told him if he spoke to any of his colleagues about it then he’d never see his daughter again. Jaap had done as he was told, busting the man out of the International Criminal Tribunal in Den Haag. Only things had gone wrong, his baby daughter paying the price, along with her mother. Jaap had never felt such fear, and knew that it had clouded his judgement in a way that no one could understand.
They stand for a few moments more, both men feeling like they’re on the edge of a cliff, like the next gust of wind will determine their future, whether they fall off it or move back. A tram clangs its bell, and a distant siren sounds once, dying mid-swoop.
‘Fuck,’ Smit says again. ‘I’m going to have to call the commissioner, we need more people on this.’
43
Jaap had once, at the end of a six-hour meditation session at the temple in Kyoto, caught the most fleeting glimpse of what he’d gone there to find. For a second or so – it was hard to tell as time got so distorted in those long sessions in the main hall – he realized that his ego wasn’t him.
Sure, he knew the theory, knew that this was the kind of lightning strike they called ‘Satori’, the Awakening. But Zen wasn’t about theory, Zen was all about discovering it for yourself.
He’d never managed to get that feeling again, n
o matter how long he meditated. His old Zen tutor, Yuzuki Roshi, would give him the ‘don’t try’ type of Zen bollocks, but that didn’t work either.
And now, holding Tanya’s hand in his own, the hospital room clinical around him, he’s glad he’s not managed to rid himself of ego.
Because if he had he’d not be able to love Tanya as much as he does.
It hurts, it’s true, but it doesn’t matter because, fuck it, life hurts. Without that, without love, what is there?
In the corridor outside a pair of nurses cruise past, laughing quietly at some private joke, looking forward to getting off shift.
He wishes Tanya was awake, but the doctor said not for another hour or so.
He sits there listening to her breathing and before he’s able to stop himself he’s thinking about the case. About the men, bereaved at what should have been the most joyous period of their lives, being manipulated, petrified into killing to save their children.
But by who? And why?
A knock at the door surprises him, so wound up in his thoughts he’s not heard the surgeon’s footsteps. He steps out into the corridor.
‘Good news,’ the surgeon says. ‘One rib had made contact with the lung, but the wound’s minimal. It’ll heal quickly. The rib’s cracked so it’s going to be painful for a bit, but again it’s not really a problem. I was able to do it keyhole as well, so the entrance wound will also heal fast. We’ll keep her in overnight, but assuming all goes well she can probably leave tomorrow. She was lucky. Damn lucky.’
All the tension and fear and worry surge up and Jaap finds he’s got tears in his eyes. The surgeon puts a hand on his shoulder, squeezes it, then walks away before Jaap can thank him.
In the bed Tanya stirs, her mouth moves slightly and her eyelids flicker for a moment before settling again.
Watching her, Jaap makes a promise.
I’m never going to do anything which puts you in danger again.
DAY FOUR
* * *
44
Jaap’s deep underwater, the shimmering surface far above him. He kicks hard, his legs working against the water which seems to frustratingly absorb their force, his lungs burning with the desire for air, fear lighting up his reptilian brain. He knows he’s dreaming, and he knows the surface is the idea which is going to tie this whole case together, knows it’s purely symbolic, knows that once he can break through he’ll find the answer. Just a few metres more and his head breaks through, air filling his lungs. And—
He jolts, like his whole body’s been shot, just before the idea disappears. He tries to chase it, dive back down to the watery depths of sleep, but as he lies there on the hospital floor next to Tanya’s bed, a towel rolled up into a makeshift pillow, he knows that full consciousness has just obliterated whatever it was.
He gets up, feeling heavy and stiff, and checks on Tanya. She’s still asleep, her red hair splayed out on the pillow as if she’s the one underwater, and he reaches out to touch her. She murmurs, seems to be saying something. He leans closer and catches a name, Ruud somebody? Staal, maybe. It means nothing to him, and Tanya’s never talked of anyone called Ruud. Maybe it’s someone she’d met down in Rotterdam. For a second he feels an insane pang of jealousy.
Jaap leaves the houseboat, where he’s pit-stopped for a shower and quick change of clothes, and walks down Bloemgracht, turning left at the bottom. On the Lijnbaansgracht bridge he spots the homeless man out begging for money. He’d first appeared years ago and initially Jaap had ignored him, avoiding eye contact, each pass more guilt-ridden than the previous. Finally, on a thick foggy morning in November, water condensing on the bare branches and dripping into the canal like an insane symphony, Jaap had ducked into a shop and bought the man a couple of pastries and a cup of soup. He’d handed it all to him, a feeling he couldn’t quite categorize, a kind of noble upswelling expanding in his chest.
The man took the goods offered, inspected them one by one and then looked back up at Jaap.
‘What, ain’t you got any bloody money then?’ he’d said.
This morning he’s actually asleep, his accumulated clothes bunched around him like the shell of a snail, and Jaap drops him a couple of euros as he goes past. It’ll probably go on drugs, but if it gives him a few moments of pleasure then Jaap’s not sure he really cares.
By the time he gets to the office the nightshift inspectors are bleary-eyed and clock-watching, willing the phones they’d wanted to ring all night to stay silent long enough for them to get out of there and head home for sleep. They’ve got another hour to go before the sun comes up and their relief arrives, so Jaap doesn’t fancy their chances.
After an intense bout of caffeination Jaap starts scribbling notes, trying to let them flow freely, not to self-censor, hoping that somehow whatever he’d glimpsed in his dream was still there, buried in his unconscious mind, and might emerge on paper. But after a while he has to admit defeat. Whatever it was has gone.
The room’s humming as he steps in.
Smit’s call yesterday to the commissioner had yielded results. Purse strings have been loosened, money has flowed down the chain, and now Jaap has a team of six waiting to be briefed.
He recognizes a couple of them: there’s Lisa Oosterhuis, the youngest in the department and the chain-smoking champion of the whole station, and Erik Verbaan, who’s arrogant but capable of good work. The other four are new to him, he’ll have to learn their names, but right now he doesn’t have the mental capacity for it.
Also in the room are Arno – his clearance had come through earlier from a begrudging Stuppor – Smit and Thomas Haase, the force’s main criminal profiler, who’d once spent a few months with the FBI at Quantico and has built a career on the back of it ever since. It’s never been clear to Jaap what Haase actually did during those months – for all he knows he could’ve been there sweeping the floor or scrubbing the toilets till they shone, ready for some big-dick real agent to swing in and sully the thing all over again. Jaap’s had the benefit of Haase’s expertise on a couple of cases, though none of the man’s insights has, so far, led to an arrest.
None of which stops Haase from frequently appearing on TV, exposing complex aetiologies for crimes which made the headlines, a service he undoubtedly gets well paid for. He’d even brought out a book which for a brief, heady moment had hit the bestseller lists, but though the public seemed to love him the running joke in the station is that you don’t need a highly paid specialist to tell you a sadistic killer is a sick fuck.
Smit’s sitting at the back, arms folded across his chest, and Haase’s managed to get a space slightly apart from the group as if to emphasize his rarity and importance.
‘Right,’ Jaap says. ‘Let’s do it. Two murders in the last three days and two older killings.’
He starts with Dafne and Nadine, takes them through the investigation which led them to Francesco Kamp. After a five-minute break, coffee for all except Lisa who hurries outside for a cigarette, he ploughs on, hoping the team can keep up with all the detail he’s throwing at them. When he gets to the arrest and subsequent shooting he can feel Smit’s eyes on him, but he glosses over it, powers on to Heleen and Kaaren. He pins photos of each on the board and goes through the circumstances of their deaths.
‘From this it all looks like a classic serial killer, but—’ He pulls out photos of Kamp, Groot and Wilders and pins them up as well ‘—meet the killers. Stefan Wilders was seen filming Heleen on Vlieland, and Pieter Groot killed Kaaren the next day. Logically these two must have known each other somehow, or have some kind of link, but we can’t ask them. This guy—’ He points to Stefan’s photo ‘—well, he introduced his brain to a bullet, and Groot, after nearly choking himself with his own T-shirt in our cells downstairs, had a second go at the hospital. He somehow reversed his IV and bled to death.’
He whips out a crime-scene photo showing the mass of blood staining the floor and pins it up too.
‘But before both of them died they eac
h said something. Arno, can you tell us what Wilders said?’
‘ “I had to protect her,” ’ Arno says. ‘ “I had to do it.” ’
‘And then Groot said something similar.’
He pulls out his phone and plays the recording he’d made in the hospital room.
When it’s done the room falls silent.
‘So now we’re getting down to it.’ Jaap points to Wilders’ photo. ‘He had a daughter, just over a year old. Mother died in childbirth. Kamp also had a daughter and Groot had a young son.’
Jaap lets all that settle in.
‘Thoughts, anyone?’
He’s asking because he knows he doesn’t want to be the one to say it out loud, but he feels the time has come to let loose what he, Smit and Arno already know. He’d once heard the most infectious agent of all is a thought, so he stares at the people he’s about to infect.
‘Right, so here’s the theory. Someone is effectively blackmailing these people into killing for them. And I reckon he’s using their children’s lives as the bargaining chip.’
The room sucks the news dry.
Most of the people in here should be pretty much unshakeable, having seen enough stuff in their careers to keep a shrink in business for life, but he can see this is new to them. The infection has taken hold.
‘So—’ He draws a question mark in the centre of the board, lines radiating out to the photos ‘—there is someone out there, a serial killer, who is getting other people to kill for them. And it’s now our job to find who they are.’
‘What about their spouses?’ Lisa asks. ‘I mean, apart from Wilders. What do they say?’
‘That’s where it gets interesting. I think this is going to be our way in. The three killers actually have two things in common: they each have a young child, and their wives are dead or, in the case of Groot, AWOL. So these men are on their own, and whoever is forcing them into killing is targeting them specifically because of this. They’re clearly vulnerable, and angry, and I think the killer is using that to his advantage. But the question is, how is the killer finding them? How is he finding men who have a young child and a dead or absent spouse? Is he looking at death records and screening from there, does he have access to hospital data, how else could he be finding them? Have they been on dating sites looking for new partners? We need to find out how he knows, how he picks them.’
Before the Dawn Page 17
