‘And what about the women, is the killer choosing them as well, what’s the link there?’ asks one of the men Jaap has yet to put a name to.
‘So far there’s nothing which links the women, or the women to the men who killed them, apart from physical proximity. So we need to dig on that front too. Is the killer choosing the women to be killed, or are they leaving that part of it up to the men themselves? There are a ton of questions here, and we need to get some answers. Quickly.’
Jaap breaks the room into three teams of two, assigning Arno to work with him as the fourth. The first team, headed up by Erik, is to work on Heleen and Stefan Wilders, the second, led by Lisa, has Kaaren and Pieter Groot, and the third is to focus on Nadine. They take their assignments and get to it, leaving Jaap with Arno, Smit and Thomas.
‘I want to be kept in the loop every step of the way,’ Smit says, standing up and fiddling with his cuffs. ‘The commissioner’s all over this one, he’s watching us and we need to get it right.’
Jaap waits till Smit’s gone before turning to Haase.
‘I know you’ve only just seen all this, but anything strike you so far?’
Haase, the personification of minimalism from the way he dresses, the trimness of his nails, and his air of detachment, clears his throat delicately.
‘The suffocation is interesting,’ he says adjusting his rimless glasses, the lenses hexagonal – or something with lots of edges on because really, who’s counting? – and clearing his throat again. ‘If the mystery man is forcing the men into killing for him and giving specific instructions as to how to do it, then …’
Jaap and Arno wait, watching him tap a finger gently against his lips.
‘Then?’ prompts Jaap when the tapping gets annoying.
‘Then I’m going to have to think about it. It’ll be more useful to you than if I give an off-the-cuff first impression now which might not be right.’
‘Live a little,’ Jaap says. ‘Sometimes a first impression is the best thing.’
Haase looks at him and nods slowly.
‘OK, my first impression is Smit doesn’t like you very much.’
‘Give the man a prize. Now tell me what you think about the case.’
‘Oh the case,’ he says, allowing himself a little minimalist smile. ‘Well, my first impression of the case is that whoever is forcing people to kill for him in such a specific way is a total sick fuck.’
45
Jaap’s never been much of a team player.
That’s partly him, and partly the department. Because most murder cases are handled by at most two inspectors, mainly for pecuniary reasons.
But now that he has a team backing him up he feels a vague sense, not quite of relief, but a loosening perhaps, a feeling that now he can start to explore more deeply instead of just reacting to events.
His revelation yesterday was a major breakthrough, no question, but there’s still so much he doesn’t understand. Why had the particular women been chosen? Had they been chosen by whoever is forcing the men to kill, or had the men been free to choose their own victims?
He pulls up the files on Heleen and Kaaren. He’s been meaning to go through them again, see if there’s any connection between them, or anything which might point to why they’d been chosen. Yesterday he’d tasked Roemers with getting him access to all the victims’ and killers’ social media accounts, a simple enough task for someone who seems to know how to crack any password online. Jaap checks his email, and, sure enough, Roemers has got passwords for Heleen and Kaaren’s email, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp accounts. He promises the rest later.
Jaap starts with Heleen, tracking her across social media, looking for connections, red flags, anything which might help him progress. He’s just about giving up on it when he comes across some emails – luckily Heleen was quite old-fashioned and actually used the archaic form from time to time – from the address [email protected]. Reading through the string of messages between Heleen and Psychonaut, who signs himself off as ‘RV’, it becomes clear that Heleen is wanting to quit her lifestyle, stop self-mutilating, and that Psychonaut appears to be helping her. There’s talk of progress during their last session and plans for another one soon. But what really catches Jaap’s attention is their last communication, from Heleen, and it simply read
YOU SHOULDN’T BE HERE, LEAVE ME ALONE.
It was sent the day before she died.
So was Psychonaut on Vlieland? Jaap wonders.
He moves on to the men, looking for a way in, looking for something which will crack this thing wide open.
‘Turning into a shit-storm, huh?’
Jaap looks up to see Roemers, clutching a mug emblazoned with the words I’M GREEN. He has the uncomfortable feeling that Roemers has been standing there for ages watching him scribble away.
‘Doing my bit, y’know?’ Roemers says, seeing Jaap’s gaze. ‘Even though it’s kind of pointless, the whole planet’s fucked, we all know that.’
‘You need to do something about your relentlessly optimistic attitude,’ Jaap says, thinking it’s way too early to start talking about global warming and the demise of mankind. ‘Get a bit of balance, see the negative side of things.’
‘Thanks, I’ll try that. Passwords good?’
‘Yeah, thanks. But I notice I don’t have anything for Groot or Wilders yet …?’
‘Fucking hell, only just got here, two hours earlier than usual, I might add,’ Roemers says, before lightly punching Jaap on the arm and promising he’ll have them shortly.
Jaap goes back to his thoughts, the feeling he’s overlooked something lurking in his brain. For the next twenty minutes his mind turns in on itself, twisting and churning, trying to tease it out.
‘Inspector Rykel?’
Jaap looks up. A thin woman with a file tucked under one arm is standing where Roemers was before. She’s tall, fifty-ish, with neat grey hair which frames her face, and a core of steel.
‘Not me,’ says Jaap, recognizing the woman as Superintendent Laura Vetter. ‘I’m just borrowing his desk.’
‘Well, I’ll have to make do with you then, whoever you are. Got a moment?’ she asks in a way that strongly implies yes is the correct, and only, possible response.
46
Small actions have large consequences. There’s the old butterfly theory, something about its wings flapping and causing a hurricane on the other side of the world – which Jaap has never really understood because, let’s be honest, there are a whole load of butterflies around, and yet the world doesn’t seem to be a perpetual clash of competing hurricanes. Or at least not physically. Mentally though, well, Jaap’s starting to wonder if the theory has a point.
‘Finally,’ says Laura Vetter, settling into the chair opposite Jaap.
Jaap knows her only by reputation, he’s never dealt direct. What he does know is that she is seen as fair, her own woman, prepared to stand against the tide, no matter the cost.
The biggest case she’d ever worked on was back in 1992, when a cargo flight, El Al 1862, took off from Schiphol at 16:20 and crashed into a massive housing complex in the Bijlmermeer neighbourhood of Amsterdam at 16:35. A total of 43 people were officially killed, 39 of them on the ground, though that number was thought to be three or four times higher as the housing complex had a high number of illegal immigrants who weren’t on anyone’s records. Given the ferocity of the impact, explosion and resulting fire many of their bodies didn’t leave much of a trace. The investigation never came to much of a satisfactory conclusion. But that wasn’t what Vetter was involved in, at least not directly. The case she ran stemmed from the fact that on the list of victims crushed and burned in the building that day – and whose body, along with many others, was never found in the wreckage – happened to be a police officer suspected of being involved in collusion with a criminal gang. The officer had been trailed for months, and Vetter was just about to pull him in and use what she had on him against the rest of those involved.
&
nbsp; Only he ended up in a building which got hit by a plane and died.
Not even the wildest, most rabid conspiracy theorist on YouTube could formulate a credible story whereby a few bad eggs in the Amsterdam PD had facilitated, or at least known about in advance, a catastrophic plane crash and found a way to make sure a colleague of theirs, who they suspected of turning on them, just happened to be in the building at the very moment 500-plus tons of aluminium, jet fuel and four unfortunate crew would crash into it.
But Vetter could see something else was going on. She had no body, only police logs which showed he’d being going to visit a suspect at the very building that the plane came out of the skies and obliterated. The more she dug, the more she came to believe that he hadn’t actually gone to the building, but had been taken, or worse killed and the body disposed of somewhere else, and the story of him going to see a suspect was being used as cover to hide his murder.
In the end no one was ever prosecuted, but the rumour was that the whole experience had left Vetter with a bad taste in her mouth and, as physiologically impossible as it may be, a hard-on for any hint of a bent cop.
And that’s what she thinks I am, Jaap realizes as he sits down in an office next door to Smit’s. He has a quick image of Smit, an empty glass bridging the gap between the wall and his ear.
‘So this is just a quick chat, nothing formal at this stage, although we will require a full statement later on,’ Vetter says.
She hands Jaap a series of photos, various shots of Kamp dead on the ground, the gun just out of reach.
As he sifts through them a thought hits him. Kamp had held the woman hostage with the screwdriver he’d had on him when he opened the door. But why not just use the gun?
‘Trace on the weapon?’ Jaap asks.
‘Look, in this situation, really it should be me asking the questions. I’m in charge of investigating his death—’
‘The death of someone who killed at least one person, possibly two, and is at the centre of an ongoing case. My case.’
Yesterday Jaap had been ready to step off the case. Now look at me, he thinks.
‘I understand,’ Vetter says. ‘Which is why I’ve cut you some slack on this. Really I should have had you back in on the day, but I realize that the situation is somewhat … unusual. Two things we need to deal with, the gun and the cuff.’ She picks up a sheet and reads something quickly, as if reminding herself of something. ‘So, did you forget to do it up?’
‘Honestly, I’m pretty sure I did it up.’
Having spent years trying to detect lies in others, Jaap thinks that maybe he can get away with it. Because honestly, he’s not sure, the exact moment lost in a stew of adrenaline and anger.
‘You’ve checked the cuffs themselves, right?’ he asks.
Vetter pulls out a pair of cuffs and hands them to Jaap. ‘Go ahead, they’ve been through forensics already.’
They look like the ones Smit tossed him on the day, a black oxide version, less shiny than the nickel-plated ones uniforms are issued with. If you’re not in uniform discreetness is important, and the black oxide finish is non-reflective. As inspector, these are the ones you’ll get issued.
He works each cuff; the action’s normal, the male and female parts joining with a satisfying series of clicks as a central hole reduces. He tries to break them apart, seeing if maybe the latch mechanism’s faulty, but they’re rock solid.
Vetter watches him, a benevolent predator.
‘Would you say they’re fine?’
For some reason, Jaap feels like refusing to speak and asking for a lawyer.
‘Look. I don’t know what to say.’
Vetter watches him for a moment, then writes something down.
‘And the gun. When you arrested him, standard procedure is to check the arrestee for weapons. Did you check Kamp?’
The room feels hot suddenly, way too hot.
Vetter waits a few moments. Once it’s clear Jaap’s not going to say anything more, she again writes something down.
The scratch of her pen on paper is the only sound.
47
His desk has about ten sticky notes on it when he gets back, all callback requests from Berk, the reporter at De Telegraaf. Somehow he’s surprised it’s taken so long, but he hasn’t got time for this now and decides that the best way to dodge any more distractions would be to go down to the basement where Roemers runs the DCU.
It’s a series of interlocking rooms, each housing three techs. Jaap asks for a desk with a terminal and Roemers sets him up with one near him.
‘Only thing is, I’m listening to music now, you’re gonna have to put up with that.’
‘Haven’t you got headphones?’
‘Yeah, but the left one started giving me weird distortions. I’ll keep it low. Ish. And anyway, you’re gonna love it. Group called Can, they’re the—’
‘Roemers, I have to work.’
‘That relentlessly fun-loving nature of yours, you should give it a rest sometimes. Get serious, know what I mean?’
Jaap gives him the finger. Roemers smiles, cranks the music up.
So, accompanied by Can, Jaap starts trawling through everything he can on Kamp.
Francesco Kamp was thirty-four when he died. He’d worked for the NS, the national train service, since he’d left school, first as a ticket-seller before being accepted into the driver training programme. For every place in the programme about thirty people apply; Kamp was one of the lucky ones, getting through that first door.
Reading the reports from this time Jaap can see he did well, he was studious, diligent, polite, all the things the train company wanted, and he passed the course with the third highest marks in his group. That was only the beginning though, because then start the years of shift work, and you can bet the rookies get the jobs no one else wants. So Kamp put his head down – after all, he was getting a decent wage, and so what if the hours were irregular and he often found himself hauling freight up from Rotterdam at four in the morning, or being the man responsible for taking late-night revellers from the centre of Den Haag out to their suburban homes where they could sleep it off.
It was during this period he met Famke Reijn, a social worker from Haarlem who was pretty in a plain way, matching Kamp’s expectations. Their combined salaries were enough to get them on the property ladder, and they had been paying off the mortgage on their property in Amsterdam-Zuid ever since. Kamp steadily rose, his pay now at a level which most people would describe as comfortable, if not stellar.
The couple decided the time was right, they were finally secure enough to start a family. The pregnancy, from the medical records Jaap pulled, seemed to pass easily enough, no drama or hints of what was to come.
Because on a clear night in February, whilst Kamp was on a run down to Leiden, Famke was tidying up the kitchen, clearing away the remains of her meal, when a pain so sharp she caught her breath seared through the left-hand side of her stomach.
The transcript of the emergency call is a dry representation of what actually went on, the operator getting the details as quickly as possible, and goes nowhere near explaining the horror and fear that must have been going through Famke’s head. The ambulance crew were there in three minutes, having just finished a job nearby which didn’t require transporting anyone to the hospital, and within eighteen minutes of placing the call Famke was being wheeled into the AMC in Bijlmer.
Everything had worked as it was meant to. The system, designed to be as efficient as possible, proved itself. She was in the best possible place. But that’s when things started getting tricky. Assessments were made, tests done, she was prodded and measured and questioned, and then the decision was kicked up to the next level, a surgeon named Huisman. There was no hint of the surgeon’s drinking problem in his record at this stage, no colleague raising a flag about gin on the man’s breath as he worked, no complaints from anyone about punctuality or a shaking hand as incisions were made. All that came after. The official investi
gation which ended in him being disbarred didn’t mention the death of Famke Kamp, largely because what had happened wasn’t necessarily the surgeon’s fault. Going under the knife is always a risk, doubled up when the aim of the surgery is to extract a living being from the body of another.
The post-mortem explained that a cut in the bowel wall had bled, and a clot, forming quickly to stem the flow of blood, had broken loose and travelled through her veins until it reached the main artery leading to the left lung, blocking it fully. Pulmonary embolism was recorded as the reason for death.
Kamp clearly saw otherwise.
He saw medical malpractice, and driven by grief, anger and a sense of injustice that his carefully planned life had turned into a world of pain, Kamp pushed his case as far as it would go, all the while caring for his newborn, a girl named after her mother.
So he was angry, Jaap thinks, surfacing from his research, the room coming alive around him with the smell of coffee and stale air and printer dust, and Can still powering from Roemers’ speakers. And anger could be a trait useful to someone looking to force another person into killing for them.
Next he turns his attention to scopolamine. Given its rarity he’d originally thought it would be easy to find the source, but during the months after Dafne and then Nadine’s deaths, he’d not come up with much of anything. There were no mentions of it on the system anywhere in the Netherlands, no dealers arrested with it on them, no other reports of its use. Given he now has four dead bodies with it in their blood, finding out where the stuff is coming from is getting more and more critical.
Before the Dawn Page 18
