Little Sister

by David Hewson

  DAVID HEWSON

  LITTLE

  SISTER

  MACMILLAN

  Contents

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  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

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  110

  1

  The prison, for such it seemed, was a dun-coloured two-storey block hidden away in a solitary wood on the edge of the island of Marken. Sixteen rooms for young patients with nothing to do but listen to their handlers, read books, watch TV, walk the small enclosed garden and stare out at the still, grey waters surrounding them.

  On this hot summer Monday swarms of insects rose like mist from the scrubland, swallows swooping through the teeming haze, darting, hungry. They hovered above the high electrified fence that kept out any curious walkers who’d wandered away from the village’s cobbled streets and pretty timber-gabled houses. Security ran twenty-four hours a day with cameras at regular intervals along the perimeter. At the end of the long drive stood a barred gate with an entry post, and beyond it a sign that indicated the presence of a justice ministry building.

  People on the island village understood there was some kind of psychiatric institution on their doorstep. Only the few who worked there knew it housed a handful of the most disturbed female juvenile criminals in the Netherlands. The positioning was deliberate. On one side was the Gouwzee lake stretching west to Waterland and the main road to Amsterdam. On the other the larger Markermeer, part of a vast expanse of inland water that ran all the way out to the North Sea.

  Nothing but a grassy dyke joined Marken to the outside world, a narrow lane above it. Any inmate who escaped would have to make their way along that. None had tried in the eighteen years of its existence. Nor did many visitors come the other way. Certainly not for Mia and Kim Timmers, two orphaned sisters forgotten for the most part, out of convenience and an unspoken sense of communal guilt.

  They’d been there since they were eleven years old and detained for killing a man. That was a decade before. Since being committed they’d never set foot out of the place. Lately though the atmosphere had changed. Irene Visser, the psychiatrist who’d been assigned to their care all the long decade they’d been incarcerated, had started putting them through a variety of intelligence tests. Some were boring. Some funny. The sisters approached each steadfastly, earnestly, answering all of Visser’s questions in her office. It was a small, clinical room looking out along the flat green dyke of marshy land that stretched out like a stubby finger towards Volendam across the meer. Four weeks before she’d called them for what they assumed was another set of tests. Instead Visser told Kim and Mia they were getting too old for Marken and deserved better than to spend their days cooped up in a psychiatric institution for a crime committed when they were children. An offence, furthermore, for which most citizens might excuse, if not pardon, them.

  Simon Klerk, their ever-smiling personal day nurse, was there when Visser went through the results. Both he and the psychiatrist agreed. The sisters were easily bright enough to get a scholarship to university if they wanted. Arts. Science. Whatever they felt like. The authorities could help with the exams. In the meantime they would provide books, computers, limited virtual access to the outside world. This was all the start of what the medical team called the ‘process of rehabilitation’. A way of finding them a route back into a society they barely knew.

  But Visser frowned and shook her head when they asked for a visit home to Volendam by way of reward.

  That was a step too far. Because the modest fishing town across the water was where they murdered Rogier Glas. Two young girls of eleven found in a back street next to the musician’s savaged body, a bloody kitchen knife on the ground beside them.

  So instead, when they weren’t at the computer burrowing, thinking, they’d sit in the garden beneath the trees, fingers wrapped in the iron mesh of the high fence, staring out towards home, watching the propellers of the white wind turbines in the water turn like second hands on a gigantic, invisible clock. Volendam’s harbour, the boats, their tall masts taunted them. Sometimes they clung to that perimeter fence so desperately, fingers hard through the gaps, noses pressed to the wire, they came away with its marks upon their flesh. Like stigmata, a reminder of an earthly sin, impossible to dispel.

  Marken smelled like home, salty from the brackish water around them, not fresh, not stale. Just how the placid, endless lake was meant to be. From March to November ferries ran from Volendam taking tourists to and from the tiny port half a kilometre from the institution.

  A thirty-five-minute crossing. They could still picture the waterfront even though they’d not set foot there for almost half their short lives.

  A landing stage.

  Flocks of tourists taking pictures of the few locals wearing traditional dress.

  And in summer, the week of the talent contest, a temporary rostrum next to the museum where, once upon a time, they’d sung together with Jo, the third triplet, youngest by thirty minutes, providing the high notes in their harmonies.

  The Timmers Sisters. One day they’d be famous. Until death came visiting one night and stole Jo, their mother Freya and father Gus from them.

  Two streets behind the picturesque harbour was their shabby black-timbered cottage, the place they died. Gus, a fisherman, worked all hours to pay the rent while Freya sang in local bars for pennies and performed backing vocals for the local bands when she could.

  Volendam was where the Palingsound, the Netherlands equivalent of Beatlemania, began. For decades a bohemian oasis for musicians, far enough from Amsterdam to escape the attention of the authorities. Freya had grown up surrounded by pop tunes and folk songs playing on the radio, in the cafes and bars. Her daughters had inherited their moth
er’s calm, clear singing voice, matched to perfect pitch, and her beauty. The girls – they thought of themselves that way as did everyone in Marken – could still hear Jo in their heads ten years on from the black night that took their family from them. That gift was, perhaps, the only satisfactory legacy they had from their mother, or so some people said when the smoke, the blood and the fury cleared and the inevitable recriminations followed.

  Now they sat in the office of the director Henk Veerman, a dour and bulky man in his late fifties forever playing with a pen over a notepad and glancing at his computer. Next to him was the psychiatrist Visser, a thin, intense woman with cropped blonde hair and a craggy face that smiled too easily. She seemed interested as always, smartly dressed in a blue jacket and skirt. By her side sat Simon Klerk, sweet, handsome, fair-haired Simon with his too-bright shirt and crumpled jeans, caring, curious, the closest thing either of them had to a friend. Or so he wished to believe.

  Mia and Kim had explored their own biological history in depth, going through the books in the library, checking on the web when they were finally allowed access to a limited number of reference sites. Triplets were not unusual. One in five hundred births. They were rarely identical however and in this they were no exception.

  Both tall with natural blonde hair long around their shoulders, cut themselves when necessary with a single pair of not very sharp scissors watched always by Simon. They wore similar cheap clothes for this hot summer day. Cotton shirts, red and blue, jeans and sandals bought by Simon and Visser from a discount store in the city. Their faces as usual were set to neutral, not smiling, not sad either. Mia’s the narrower, with high angular cheekbones, while Kim, the eldest, slower and heavier, possessed the soft round features of their mother.

  Twenty-one, they looked all of seventeen. And they were beautiful. Of that they were certain. Freya, the loveliest woman in town, had said so, promising all three of them, even little Jo, the loudest and most mischievous, that one day they’d be even more bewitching than her.

  The Golden Angels she dubbed them that first – and last – day they appeared on stage alone.

  Three tiny saints from Volendam. Children of the lake.

  They had that magnetic quality. It had been there from the start. The sisters saw it in the way people turned and stared as they walked down the street. They noticed it every day in Marken, in the eyes of the nurses, of Irene Visser and Simon Klerk. There was something special about the two of them. A power in the way they looked, one handed down in their genes. It would have been foolish not to use it.

  ‘Mia . . . Kim . . .’ Visser said in her quiet, pleasant city voice. ‘You know why you’re here?’

  ‘Because we killed Rogier Glas,’ Kim said straight out.

  ‘You’re sure of that?’ the director demanded. ‘No more arguments?’

  ‘There never were arguments. Only regrets,’ Mia added carefully, wishing her sister would think before she spoke, not that she would ever tell her this.

  Simon sighed and glanced at them. This was the wrong answer.

  ‘That was a long time ago,’ the psychiatrist told them. ‘Almost a lifetime for you. And besides . . .’

  ‘We need the details again,’ Veerman intervened.

  Things happened between them without a word exchanged. One would begin a sentence only for the other to finish it. When Mia got a headache Kim did too. Their clothes complemented one another and they never spoke of it. And once a month they bled in unison, sharing the same grim fevered mood in angry silence.

  That was over the week before. Now they were calm. Normal. Ready.

  ‘You’re here because we think it’s time you were given a chance,’ Visser said in that careful, attentive way she had. ‘We think you’re well enough to see more of the outside world.’

  ‘We’re free?’ Kim whispered.

  Visser laughed. Mia sighed.

  ‘Not free. Not yet. Just . . . more free than you have been. We’ve watched you. Both of you. The progress you’ve made this last year is—’

  Veerman picked up a report on his desk, uttered an audible sigh and started to read.

  ‘It’s been wonderful,’ the psychiatrist added.

  ‘Where?’ Mia asked. ‘Where can we go? Home to Volendam?’

  ‘Not yet,’ Visser said. ‘One day, I’m sure. When you’re ready.’

  ‘Not that you have a home there any more,’ Veerman added, staring at his papers.

  The sisters smiled at one another, then at the officials across the desk. Mia reached out and took Kim’s hands, toying with her fingers.

  ‘All we want is to be well, Mr Director. Just to be together. To sing. To be . . . like everyone else.’

  ‘That’s the idea,’ Veerman muttered.

  ‘We will do whatever you want. Where may we go?’

  Simon leaned forward.

  ‘To a place we have in Amsterdam. A sheltered house. Near the museums. You won’t be on your own. I’ll visit you every weekday. There’ll be people there to help. You must do as we say otherwise you’ll have to return to custody. Somewhere else probably. An adult institution.’

  ‘And you have to keep taking your medication,’ the director cut in. ‘That’s a condition. You understand what a condition is?’

  Kim had to stop herself laughing. Even so she rolled her eyes.

  ‘It means doing what we’re told. We do that already, don’t we?’

  The water seemed to stretch forever beyond the office window. The modest fishing town with its boats and houses and memories beckoned from across the lake. It was summer. Perhaps they’d built a stage there, a platform made for singing.

  ‘You can’t go back to Volendam yet,’ Visser repeated, watching them. ‘There are too many bad memories there.’

  Mia nodded. Then Kim.

  Henk Veerman kept fiddling with his pen, turning it up and down, clicking the button nervously.

  ‘I want this absolutely clear,’ he said. ‘If I’m to agree to this request from your psychiatrist you must undertake to do everything you’re asked. No arguments. No excursions outside the sheltered house without supervision.’

  ‘Sir,’ Mia replied with the sweetest smile she could manage. ‘We’ve tried to do our best here for years. Have we disappointed you lately?’

  ‘No,’ Visser answered. ‘Not in a very long time. You’ve been perfect.’ She glanced at Kim, the last to lose her stubbornness. ‘Both of you.’

  The girls nodded. Mia withdrew her hand from her sister’s then ran her fingers through her long yellow hair. Sensing this, Kim did the same.

  All eyes on them. As they usually were.

  ‘When do we leave?’ Mia asked.

  ‘We need to talk about this among ourselves,’ Veerman announced, glancing at the psychiatrist and the nurse. ‘Ladies . . .’

  They hated being called that. It made them sound old and ugly.

  ‘Yes?’ Mia asked.

  ‘Wait outside, please,’ the director said. ‘We won’t be long.’

  The sisters stared across the desk. Two men, one woman. Everything in their lives came in threes. Three sisters. Three adults responsible for their fate.

  Three.

  It was important Visser believed this obsession of theirs was now lost.

  So they got up and walked steadily out of the room, hoping that no one would notice that their steps drummed across the wooden floor in triplets . . . one, two, three . . . one, two, three.

  There were three chairs in the corridor when they got there and no one else in sight. The closed door of Veerman’s office was so far away they couldn’t hear the voices behind.

  Kim tapped her fingers on the thick plate glass of the window. Three times.

  Mia watched and tried to smile.

  2

  August in Amsterdam and the city dozed in the grip of sultry summer. Of an evening people dined on their outside steps above the street, sipping wine, picking lethargically at takeaway pizza and plates of salad. During the day they wen
t about their work with a genial listlessness. It was too hot, too sticky to get mad at anything. Even the bemused tourists who had the temerity to wander in front of cyclists rarely got a curse.

  Nowhere was this sleepy, sweaty lassitude more obvious than the serious crimes office of the Marnixstraat police headquarters where, bang on cue as the heatwave hit, the air conditioning had groaned three times then failed completely.

  Most of the windows were sealed shut so the place was stuffy, overheated and idle. Pieter Vos, the senior officer in charge, sat at his desk, long dark hair uncombed, a threadbare blue jacket over the back of his chair. In his late thirties he still retained a boyish face and a ready smile that fooled people from time to time, especially if he was out with his diminutive wire fox terrier Sam.

  The two of them lived in a shambolic houseboat on the Prinsengracht canal just a short walk away. Sam usually stayed at the Drie Vaten bar opposite the boat when Vos was working. Today that was impossible. Sofia Albers, the owner, had gone to the Rijksmuseum with a friend and couldn’t look after him. So now the green plastic dog basket from the main cabin sat next to the brigadier’s desk. Not that there was much to do.

  Laura Bakker was trying to catch up on paperwork while Dirk Van der Berg, twenty years her senior, the same rank, lobbed a rubber ball up and down the office for the dog.

  Sam chased it into the area near the photocopier and sent the waste bin flying.

  Bakker, a tall and striking woman in her mid-twenties, with long red hair, an awkward Friesland accent, and an occasional attitude looked up and complained, ‘I’m trying to concentrate here.’

  ‘Why bother?’ Van der Berg replied. He was a hefty man with a pockmarked face and salt-and-pepper hair. Beer figured high on his list of personal priorities. He started picking up the mess while Sam ran round the office, head turning madly, trying to shake the ball to death.

  ‘Because it has to be done?’

  ‘You could always finish it tomorrow,’ Vos suggested. He looked at his watch. The minutes were crawling by. Sofia wouldn’t be back in the bar for an hour or more. When she was he’d walk Sam home and enjoy a beer. Van der Berg and Bakker would probably join him.

  ‘I hate procrastination,’ the young policewoman declared.

  ‘I love it,’ Van der Berg cried. ‘Well . . .if it means you don’t have to fill in a load of stupid forms.’