Before the Dawn

by Jake Woodhouse

  ‘The problem is this: as we discussed earlier, you don’t have an alibi for Kaaren Leegte’s death because after leaving Vlieland you were staying at your cabin, and according to your statement you were there till I found you.’

  ‘I don’t even know this other girl you’ve talked about. But if you want to find out who killed Heleen then you should be looking for whoever was mutilating her. All along I thought she was self-harming, that’s what she told me, only I find out when we’re on Vlieland that she has someone do it for her. That’s the guy you should be looking for.’

  ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The man who was mutilating her, Daan Brouwer, is dead.’

  Jaap flips across a photo. Vink takes it in.

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yeah, he’s definitely dead.’

  ‘No, I meant are you sure that’s the man?’

  ‘Who mutilated her? Yeah, I’m sure. Why?’

  Vink purses his lips, thinks. ‘Because I saw someone hanging around the cottage a couple of times, I assumed he was the one.’

  ‘What did he look like?’

  Vink shrugs again. ‘Y’know, average. But there was something, one of his eyes was a bit weird.’

  ‘Weird how?’ Jaap asks, the whole room swimming in déjà vu.

  Vink bends his head down towards his cuffed hands, and with a forefinger and thumb pinches together a bit of cheek and eyebrow, narrowing his eye.

  ‘Kinda like that? Like he’d got a bad cut and scar tissue built up.’

  Jaap’s thinking hard. Then he gets it.

  The man leaving the hospital room where Pieter Groot had bled to death.

  55

  Built in the eighties, the AMC hospital is considered Amsterdam’s best. So stuffed full of specialists both practising medicine and doing cutting-edge research, it really is the place to be if you’re sick.

  At least that was the perception, until three years ago a junior doctor had been caught emptying out the saline from the drip bags, filling them instead with a solution which contained a particularly nasty strain of gram-negative bacteria. The bacteria themselves were dead, but gradually released endotoxins, a nasty substance officially known as lipopolysaccharides. Patients who’d been admitted for simple procedures were dying and no one knew why. Until a young student pathologist noticed all the bodies showed a bunch of markers for endotoxin poisoning.

  It’d taken months of work to find the culprit, and since then the hospital had incorporated a raft of new procedures and protocols to stop anything like that happening again. One of them had been the deployment of CCTV throughout the hospital, an expensive option but one deemed necessary by a governing board alarmed by their slide in the hospital rankings.

  It’s the CCTV Jaap’s banking on.

  Arno’s really stepped up and got them there in record time. Once inside Jaap sends Arno to work on Personnel whilst he tackles Security. The chances the man is actually a nurse here are low, but Jaap’s feeling like he’s been slack and wants to cover everything.

  But before he goes to Security he finds his way to the corridor Pieter Groot’s room had been on. He checks the corridor, fifty metres or so long, Groot’s room almost exactly at the halfway mark. There are cameras at either end, blinking red lights showing they’re working.

  Once at Security he explains who he is and what he wants and things move fast. Soon enough he’s sitting in front of a screen with a bald techie beside him manning the controls.

  Down the corridor people move at double-quick time, trolleys – both empty and patient-laden – speed through until Jaap sees himself zoom up the corridor, the movements oddly stiff.

  ‘Now.’

  The screen slows down, fluidity returns, and a man steps out of Groot’s room. Jaap watches as the collision happens, and the man carries on.

  But instead of heading to the end of the corridor he turns left after about ten paces and heads through another door. The sign on the door is visible as it opens, the international stick man.

  ‘Cameras in there?’ Jaap asks.

  ‘Nah,’ the bald techie says. ‘They talked about it but I seem to remember there was a human-rights issue or something. Privacy. I mean, they got a point, who wants to be watched while you’re trying to heft out a big ’un?’

  They keep watching. The door swings open and a surgeon steps out, full hospital gown and facemask hooked round both ears. The bald man’s clicking his thumb and first-finger nails together. Jaap’s not finding it therapeutic.

  Time ticks on, but the nurse doesn’t appear.

  Jaap watches himself burst out of Groot’s room and the subsequent flurry of activity once he’d roused a few nurses.

  And still the man hasn’t left the toilet.

  ‘Back up to that surgeon.’

  Once they’ve got him on screen and freeze-framed the best shot they can get, Jaap leans in.

  But because of the way the man has angled his head as he’s walked towards the camera, only the right eye is properly visible.

  ‘Follow him,’ Jaap says.

  They spend the next ten minutes tracking the man’s movements through the hospital. To Jaap it looks like he clearly knows where the cameras are, as he seems to keep ducking his head when in range.

  They’re on the final stretch now, just heading towards the main exit, the suspect walking past a man on crutches. The man is obviously new to them, and a crutch suddenly slips away from him. He sprawls out, tripping the surgeon up. The surgeon recovers and makes it to the exit, not even checking on the man who’s still on the floor, clearly in pain.

  ‘Rewind.’

  They play through the fall frame by frame, catching the surgeon’s face in full as it twists on the way down.

  And although the man’s lower face is covered by the mask, and even though the image is black and white and blurred from the movement, Jaap can still just make out the eye. The left eye, the layered scar tissue giving it a half-closed look.

  Jaap had bumped, quite literally, into the killer.

  And I let him get away, he thinks.

  56

  Who is he? Jaap thinks as he opens the door onto the roof and is blinded by the sun, a half-circle cut by the horizon, hanging right in front of him.

  He steps into it, then turns north, walking to the edge, hoping that being out here will clear his mind. The air’s humid, evaporation from the canal below managing to reach five storeys up, making his skin feel sticky. All summer it’s there, like a form of tinnitus, a background fug which you get used to but which you suddenly notice at random points throughout the day.

  He’s been working like someone possessed, getting the team onto the killer’s image. They’re still below, working phones, the internet, trying to piece together just who this man is.

  The sun’s sinking fast, basting the sky a golden-yellow. An invisible hand smears a few thin clouds above him.

  Amsterdam’s his city, he knows her streets and canals like they’re part of his biology, almost as if he were part of her and she part of him.

  The same way that he’s a cop.

  It’s part of him.

  A plane banks in the sky, the wings suddenly glowing as it tilts and catches the last rays. He watches as it circles south.

  The thought strikes him that he’s been an inspector all these years for the same reason the drunk drinks, the junkie jabs the needle into their arm and the sex addict chases those blinding moments of nothingness at orgasm – obliteration of the ego, however transient.

  He glances across the tops of buildings, spotting Bloemgracht where their houseboat is moored, and further up on the corner the small café they sometimes go to for breakfast, on the odd occasion they both have a late start.

  The sun’s slipping away now, abandoning the world, light giving way to dark.

  The baby’s going to change things, he doesn’t know how he’s going to feel, how it’ll be. And it’s all mixed up with Floortje’s death. He’d been
a father for a brief few months which had ended in tragedy.

  For a moment he feels giddy, like all his life he’s been searching for something, though he doesn’t know what.

  It had taken him to Kyoto, the hours he’d spent there driving himself crazy with obscure Zen koans set for him by Yuzuki Roshi, which had eventually seemed to pay off. He’d come away from Japan with what seemed a better understanding of himself, of life.

  Floortje’s death shattered that particular illusion.

  He relives that night, staring at the flames of a burning boat, Floortje dead, the realization that he didn’t understand.

  He still doesn’t understand.

  A craving for Arno’s home-grow hits him with a sinuous intensity.

  Down below a tram screeches to a halt; Jaap suddenly realizes it’s fully dark. He glances over the edge, sees a man lying on the tram tracks – a metre more and the tram would have hit him. Several people cluster round, trying to work out what’s going on.

  He turns away and starts back towards the door when a thought mushroom-clouds in his head.

  Pieter Groot was in police custody, he thinks. So how did the killer know where to find him?

  He’s standing still now, the question like an invisible wall he’s just walked into.

  The night shudders around him.

  How did he know?

  DAY FIVE

  * * *

  57

  Jaap wakes with an elbow in his eye.

  He turns over, Tanya hardly stirring when he gently pushes her arm away, and lies in the fragile stillness of the morning, as if any sudden movement could break it all.

  It’s just before dawn; outside the porthole he can make out the outline of the canal-side houses, roofs rhythmically jagged against the sky.

  Water laps against the hull. The boat creaks as if in pleasure, urging the water on.

  He’d been at the station late, the team adding the question which had hit him on the roof – how had the killer known Groot had been transferred to hospital from the station? – to the long list of unknowns.

  Jaap’s never seen anything like it. The vast majority of cases are pretty straightforward, a linear progression of facts which lead you from the victim to the killer, often in only a few steps.

  But this one’s not like that. If a normal case is two-dimensional this one’s like a multidimensional string-theory nightmare where everything is constantly shifting and changing, where each move he makes seems to open up multiple possibilities which spiral off on more tangents, spinning his mind into a tangled, twisted mess.

  No wonder his head’s pounding.

  He gets up quietly. Tanya moves as his weight lifts off the bed but then settles again. After dressing he steps through to the main area, closing the bedroom door softly behind him.

  A large window makes up one side of the boat’s living area, and he stands at it, watching the water. In a house opposite a light flicks on, the window ablaze, then goes off again. A distant tram rumbles.

  Last night, when he’d finally made it home, they’d held each other for a long time. He’d been wound tight, but gradually all the stress and fear which had built up in him slowly began to dissipate.

  In it’s wake, guilt flowed freely.

  Because it was his fault.

  His fault Tanya’d been put in that position.

  He’d apologized, but she’d brushed it off. Part of the job, she’d said.

  The door opens behind him and he feels warm arms round his chest. Tanya reaches up and kisses his neck.

  ‘Hey,’ she whispers as she holds him, placing her face on his back. He feels her ear between his shoulder blades.

  ‘Hungry?’ he asks.

  ‘Yeah, and seeing as I’m convalescing now, officially, I’ll let you fix me some breakfast.’

  She sits at the table whilst he clatters around the kitchen. Gas ignites under the frying pan with a soft thwump; then the brittle click of eggs on the side of the pan, the hiss as they hit foaming butter.

  Next he gets the coffee going. He’d never drunk it until Tanya moved in. The morning after their first night together she’d been dismayed at the lack of coffee on board ship. He’d learnt pretty quickly that to avoid mutiny, it was wise to always have some on hand.

  Tanya likes coffee. She likes it with a kind of raw passion, and he’d gradually picked up the habit. Initially it’d given him the jitters, but when he’d switched up to having it with a boat-load of sugar, as per Tanya’s instructions, he found caffeine now makes him calm and focused. One of Jaap’s colleagues had taken to having black coffee with coconut oil mixed in, some internet health fad which, apart from looking disgusting, didn’t seem to be doing his health much good. Jaap had suggested sugar to the guy instead, and got a look like he’d just suggested shooting up heroin with his morning brew.

  When the eggs have changed from liquid to a soft solid he slips them onto a couple of plates, pours the coffee, and reaches for the Tabasco.

  Red dots hail down on the eggs and they start to eat.

  ‘So what are you doing today?’ she asks between mouthfuls.

  ‘Briefing the team, then I’m seeing Haase.’

  ‘Haase? You’re really stuck then,’ she says, reaching for the coffee and pouring in quantities of sugar which would give a nutritionist a diabetes-induced stroke just from witnessing it.

  ‘Yeah, I guess I am. I’ve never had a case like this.’

  ‘Take me through it.’

  ‘Uh … no. You’re supposed to be resting, you said so yourself. Convalescing’s the word you used.’

  ‘That was just so I could get breakfast made for me.’

  ‘Like I never do it.’

  ’Don’t remember it ever happening before.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he says. ‘All right, what do you want to know?’

  ‘Everything.’

  He goes through it all, and by the time he’s finished the sky’s lightening, his voice running hoarse.

  ‘Shit,’ she says, when he’s finally finished.

  ‘That your professional opinion?’

  ‘My professional opinion will cost.’

  ‘Well, I’d rather be paying you than Haase.’

  ‘My fee’s not monetary. I don’t think you’ll want to be paying him the same way.’

  ‘I think I’m going to throw up,’ Jaap says.

  58

  Turns out Sander Nuis does have a phone.

  Jaap’s walking along Elandsgracht, two minutes away from the station, when he gets the call and Sander gives him the name of the man who’d sold him scopolamine.

  And had suggested the tattoo.

  ‘Thanks,’ Jaap says. ‘Have you thought about laser treatment?’

  ‘Pricey. Might have to though, it’s really starting to fuck with my head. I wake up at night in a cold sweat thinking about it. Then I was tripping the other day and all I could see were thousands of them, all … all doing the same thing. That’s not good.’

  Once in the office, a good forty minutes before the team’s due to meet for his morning brief, Jaap gets on the database.

  And there’s a hit, proving that Sander hadn’t merely hallucinated the name.

  Jaap clicks on ‘Bernard Kooy’, waiting for the mugshot to appear on screen. He wills it to be a face he recognizes, the man from the hospital. But as the image comes into focus it’s clear it’s not the same man. He scrolls down a long list of his interactions with the police over the last fifteen years. Of which there are ten pages.

  The office is virtually empty; a rash of calls had come in, cleaning out most of the inspectors currently on duty. The only one left is on the phone right in the middle of a domestic, which, from what Jaap’s heard over the last ten minutes, sounds like it’s on a fast track straight to the divorce courts. He tries to tune it out and dig down into Kooy’s past.

  Kooy was brought up in Den Haag, and before he’d even left school he’d been known to the local force. The trajectory of his crimin
al career is one Jaap has seen before. First it’s a warning or two, possession of narcotics, supply of the same, before the first full arrest at the age of eighteen. And from there things go downhill: drugs, violence, the same old story, his run-ins with the cops and justice system almost as regular as clockwork. Arrested, jailed, let loose. Then repeat it all again like some criminal groundhog.

  Until three years ago when it all suddenly stops.

  No more mentions of him on his file. Which might lead someone to think he’d either gone straight, or was dead. But given that Sander claims to have bought scopolamine from him well after the last arrest date, neither of those can be true.

  Seems like he got smarter, Jaap thinks.

  In the corner of the room a water cooler gurgles. He looks up to see the inspector he’d heard arguing on the phone sitting at his desk, head in hands. For a split second Jaap feels he should say something. But what is there to say? He leaves it.

  The last mention for Kooy on the system is a driving offence, logged by two uniforms in Maastricht. A vehicle, a two-tone XKR, had been spotted driving erratically and reported by a member of the public. A patrol car was dispatched. They found a vehicle matching the description on a side road just off the A79. It was easy to spot, the report stated, because the car had somehow nosedived into a ditch. The driver, clearly not in the best state of mind, was still sitting in the vehicle, tipped well past forty-five degrees, revving the engine, the back wheels spinning uselessly in mid-air. When one of the uniforms stepped down into the ditch and knocked on the window, Kooy had apparently wound it down and asked him if he could see what was stopping his car from moving.

  ‘Yeah, I remember him,’ the officer says when Jaap gets him on the phone. ‘He was out of it that day. But like you said, he seems to have cleaned up his act, we’ve not heard from him for a few years now at least. I figured he’d probably killed himself somehow, but there was a rumour going round he’d got a job.’