Little Sister

by David Hewson

  Here they seemed unobserved. Anonymous. It was almost as if they didn’t exist at all.

  At a quarter past eight there’d been a knock on the door. Vera, the Englishwoman, stood there, gasping from the effort of climbing the steep staircase. Her lined face no longer seemed the colour of walnut, more that of a dull and fading parchment. Still she smiled the way the nurses did back in Marken. Genial but in control.

  There was a tray in her trembling hands, two cups of coffee on it, two glasses of orange juice, two pieces of cake.

  ‘Best you have breakfast in your room, girls,’ she said in English. ‘I’ve got to go and see some people. You don’t want to be wandering outside without me.’

  Mia took the tray and asked why.

  ‘Because,’ Vera said. ‘I may be a while. I’d like you both to stay here until I get back. I’ll bring us a nice lunch. We’ll have a little chat. OK?’

  It was almost nine when the woman left. Gone eleven when she returned. They used the time to explore. The house was narrow but so tall the wooden staircase sloped perilously from floor to floor. They had a cramped, scruffy bathroom next to them. The Englishwoman seemed to occupy all of the floor below. The ground was given over to a kitchen, a living room with a TV set, a music centre and computer, and a dining room with a table, four chairs around it, a single window looking out onto the courtyard where an old refrigerator was slowly rotting away.

  Vera had locked the heavy front door behind her. They wandered around, tried the computer, couldn’t guess the password, and hunted for a spare set of keys without success.

  Then Kim remembered something and they clambered up the staircase, using their hands and feet like children, and went back to the bedroom to search for the phones they’d brought from Marken. Two. One for each of them. Both were missing.

  ‘They’ve got to be here somewhere,’ Kim insisted, going through the case Simon Klerk had given her.

  ‘You put it in your pocket,’ her sister said.

  Kim found her jacket. There was nothing there. They talked about it and agreed. When they reached Vera’s house they’d found just one phone, the handset with the message from Little Jo. The other must have fallen out somewhere along the way. Now the second one was gone and they knew: the Englishwoman must have taken it while they slept.

  ‘I’m clumsy as hell,’ Kim said, suddenly furious with herself.

  There was no need for an argument, Mia told her. No point in trying to assess blame. Things happened to them, things that required no explanation. They knew life was like this and accepted it.

  ‘At least in Marken we could go for a walk,’ Kim grumbled.

  ‘Marken’s behind us,’ Mia insisted.

  ‘She shouldn’t take things like that. Not when they’re ours.’

  When Vera came back she had fresh orange juice, eggs and ham and cheese. She cooked them pancakes too and then the three of them sat down for lunch.

  Kim asked for her phone back. Vera grinned.

  ‘What phone? I don’t know anything about phones, sweetheart. Have you got one then?’

  ‘I had one. We both did.’

  Vera took out a plastic pill box, checked the time, fiddled with the lid, rolled a couple of white tablets onto the table and swallowed them with some juice.

  ‘You must have lost them somewhere.’

  Mia said, ‘We’d like to go for a walk soon. We always have a walk.’

  Vera laughed and shook her head.

  ‘Not yet, luvvies. I mean . . . there are people out looking for you, aren’t there? Give it a while. When I get the word . . . then it’s OK.’

  ‘Who from?’

  The smile on the Englishwoman’s face never cracked.

  ‘So you don’t know who sent you here?’

  ‘They just . . . we just got the map. And a note.’

  ‘One step at a time, eh? You just take it easy. Don’t have to worry about a thing. This is a nice house. A safe house. Enjoy yourself. Until we hear.’

  ‘Hear what?’ Kim asked.

  ‘What we have to do,’ Vera told them. ‘I mean . . . everyone’s here for a reason, aren’t they?’ She reached over and touched the sleeve of Mia’s T-shirt. Something about the way she did this seemed . . . wrong. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

  The sisters kept quiet.

  ‘Until we’re sure where you’re going . . . until someone’s said,’ Vera added, ‘best you two keep your heads down. Watch the telly. Listen to some music—’

  ‘Can we use the computer?’ Mia asked.

  ‘I’d let you if I could,’ the woman said with a shake of her dyed hair. ‘But it’s been playing up lately and I don’t know how to fix it. You finish your lunch. I’ve got to go out again. Won’t be long. I’ll have you out there soon enough. It’ll be like a new world for you two, I bet. There’ll be a treat too. More than one.’

  She got up from the table and the smile fell from her face.

  ‘You can manage the washing-up I’m sure. We’re all in this together, aren’t we? You and me.’

  They gave her ten minutes after she left just in case this was a test. Then, very gingerly, they went to the front door and tried it. Locked again. After that the two of them tested all the windows on the ground floor. Every one was sealed shut and refused to move.

  Kim wandered back into the living room and turned on the TV. Nervous, together on the sofa, holding hands, they watched the news. There was no mention of two sisters escaped from an institution on Marken. Or anything else about Waterland.

  They switched off the programme and sorted through the CDs by the side of the music centre. Finally Kim found something they recognized. The Love of a Stranger. The penultimate album by The Cupids.

  ‘I don’t want this,’ Mia said and threw the thing into the corner.

  Her sister retrieved the disc, put the music on, and the two of them listened in a dull and angry silence.

  All they’d done was exchange one prison for another. They didn’t even need to say it.

  12

  First thing in Marnixstraat Pieter Vos dispatched Laura Bakker to look for the missing papers concerning the Timmers case. When she came back with nothing he told Van der Berg to join her. Normal service was resumed in the Drie Vaten so Sam had stayed with Sofia Albers. The office remained quiet. It was August. So many people on holiday. So little to do.

  After three hours of tedious paperwork Vos went and joined them in the archives. The duty officer was getting sick of the sight of them.

  Bakker said, ‘I told you, there’s hardly anything here.’

  ‘You did,’ Vos agreed and led them back to the office and the coffee machine.

  Frank de Groot, the commissaris whose name was on the file deletion records, was off for the day. His daughter was getting married in Utrecht.

  ‘We could always phone him,’ Bakker suggested, more in hope than expectation.

  ‘They’re just missing files,’ Vos said. ‘There’s probably a simple explanation. It can wait a day.’

  He handed out the coffees and they went to sit around his desk. Vos listened to their ideas in his customary non-committal fashion.

  ‘Besides,’ Van der Berg added, ‘if we didn’t know those files were missing we wouldn’t even be bothered. The case is as good as dead . . .’

  ‘You said we never found who killed that family,’ Bakker pointed out. ‘This Ollie Haas screwed it up. How can it be closed?’

  ‘It’s not closed,’ Vos said.

  ‘If there are no files how can it be open?’ she wondered.

  Bakker smiled, preened her long red hair at that. A persistent young woman, she was never shy of an argument and both Vos and Van der Berg had learned to avoid these unless they were absolutely necessary.

  ‘How about Haas?’ she added.

  Van der Berg sighed and said, ‘We don’t know where he lives. If that old girlfriend of his hadn’t phoned yesterday we wouldn’t even be—’

  ‘Ollie Haas has a house on the ou
tskirts of Volendam,’ Vos cut in. ‘Quite an expensive one. He retired there just under five years ago. I checked.’ He pulled a sheet of paper out of his drawer. It was a page from an estate agency website. ‘The place is valued at three-quarters of a million euros. He lives there alone. It’s up for sale.’

  He passed Van der Berg the printout.

  ‘That’s a lot of bricks for a police pension,’ the detective noted. ‘Ollie Haas is an Amsterdammer. He was brought up in Oud-Zuid. Why the hell would he move out to Volendam? The locals won’t even talk to you until you’ve been in the place thirty years or more.’ He slapped the page on the desk. ‘Something’s wrong. I’m with Laura. If we’ve nothing better to do – and I don’t see we have – I think we should poke our noses round a bit. Talk to Haas again. Find out what happened to those files.’

  Bakker retrieved one of the few folders still remaining from the Timmers case and opened it. There were photos of the parents, a gruff-looking man, angry, coarse face, faded blue fisherman’s smock. A pretty fair-haired woman, too good-looking for him most would think. Then three little blonde girls in tight scarlet satin shorts and white shirts grinning for the camera.

  ‘What a way to dress up kids of that age,’ she grumbled.

  Gus and Freya Timmers were thirty-nine when they were killed. The mother and daughter died of multiple stab wounds in their tiny fisherman’s cottage behind the Volendam seafront. Her father suffered a single shotgun blast. Freya and Jo were found in the parents’ bedroom. He was in the room the triplets shared. Ollie Haas believed Mia and Kim only survived because they were at the waterfront collecting a prize in the talent contest from Gert Brugman, the singer with The Cupids. He could find no motive for the crime and no likely culprit.

  Brugman had stayed on the waterfront all night, drinking. Rogier Glas left the event for a meeting with the band’s manager, Jaap Blom, in the cafe Blom ran in the town. Frans Lambert had taken a cab to Schiphol as soon as the contest was over and flown to Bangkok. He’d never been heard of since.

  ‘That’s odd,’ Bakker said. ‘Why didn’t he come back?’

  ‘It is funny,’ Van der Berg agreed. ‘But they have him on camera going through Schiphol at six in the evening. He couldn’t have been anywhere near Volendam when it happened.’

  Bakker wasn’t giving up.

  ‘Blom?’ she said, pointing a finger at the report. ‘That’s not the same as . . .’

  ‘The politician,’ Vos cut in. ‘Yes. That’s how he made his money. Media. Pop music to begin with. Now . . .’

  Bakker turned to the nearest PC and did a quick search. It was all there: Jaap Blom, fifty-six. Former pop group manager. Founder of an advertising and online media company sold to an American corporation six years before. Rich as Croesus, now a member of the Tweede Kamer, the second chamber. When he wasn’t in The Hague on political business he lived in a mansion in Edam, Volendam’s more affluent neighbour just two kilometres away.

  ‘Irrelevant,’ Vos said and went back to the papers.

  Glas was found murdered in the front seat of the band’s van three hundred metres from the Timmers’ home. The two sisters were there with a bloodied knife. Haas believed they wrongly thought they saw the musician leaving their house just before they turned up and found their parents and sister Jo dead. So they followed Glas to his van and killed him there.

  ‘Bit extreme,’ Van der Berg commented. ‘Two kids. Eleven years old. I mean . . . why?’

  Bakker pointed to the concluding paragraph of the report. It said the Timmers children had been reported for disruptive behaviour by their school. Social services had been planning to talk to the parents to try to find the cause.

  ‘Perhaps they were in shock,’ she suggested. ‘Rogier Glas just happened to be the first victim they saw. I found a newspaper cutting that said he was really popular with all the kids. Used to go to charity events. Hospitals.’

  She put it in front of them. Glas surrounded by happy children. The headline read, ‘The Candy Man’.

  ‘It says he always carried sweets with him. Used to hand them out to the kids all the time.’ She was thinking. ‘I’m assuming this is all harmless? I mean . . . just because he handed out stuff to children. It doesn’t mean . . .’

  Bakker left it there. Vos said nothing. Nor did Van der Berg.

  Haas could find no evidence to place the musician at the scene of the crime. Jaap Blom was adamant that he’d walked with Glas from the talent contest, talked to him about management matters in his cafe below the recording studio The Cupids used and seen him head off back towards the van afterwards.

  Forensic believed the murder of the Timmers family and Glas’s death happened around the same time. They were unable to trace the owner of the shotgun but there was no record of Glas ever owning a firearm. Whatever the sisters thought it seemed impossible he was responsible. Vos shuffled through the few documents they had.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ Bakker asked.

  ‘The interview with the sisters. This is just a summary.’

  ‘De Groot deleted all that stuff. Lots else besides.’

  Vos stared at the red document folder. These murders had taken place outside Amsterdam. It wasn’t unusual for city police to get called into serious investigations in rural areas. But there had to be a reason.

  ‘Why did we handle this?’ he asked. ‘Why didn’t we leave it to the locals?’

  ‘I asked at the time,’ Van der Berg told him. ‘There was all that terrible publicity. Two parents. A child. That pop singer dead, killed by kids. The locals were pleading with us to take it on. Ollie Haas had worked in Waterland before. He couldn’t wait to get his paws on it. I was hoping I could steer it our way.’

  He looked round the office. It was almost deserted.

  ‘Frank de Groot was deputy commissaris back then. He gave it to Haas. He said Ollie knew the ropes out there and we didn’t.’

  ‘Can we pick it up now?’ Bakker wondered. ‘Do we have the right to barge in? I mean—’

  Vos’s desk phone rang. He took the call and listened.

  The other two watched, sensing something from his manner.

  The conversation lasted a minute, no more. Vos put down the phone, thought for a moment, then said, ‘Mia and Kim Timmers were allowed out of a secure institution in Marken yesterday on some kind of . . .parole or something. They never turned up at the halfway house where they were supposed to stay. The male nurse who was driving them is missing. Perhaps with them. Perhaps not.’

  ‘Yesterday?’ Bakker cut in. ‘What time yesterday?’

  ‘About half past five. Not long after we got that phone call.’

  ‘Those kids have to be high-security detainees,’ Van der Berg said. ‘They’ve been missing nearly eighteen hours and they tell us now?’

  Vos got his jacket. He’d have to call the bar and ask Sofia Albers to look after Sam for longer than usual.

  ‘The institution said they wanted to make sure. They have to inform us when prisoners abscond. This is our case now. Laura?’

  She leapt to her feet, grabbed her phone, her bag.

  ‘Get someone here to deal with chasing that phone call. I need a car.’

  ‘You mean we need a car?’

  ‘We need a car,’ he agreed. ‘Dirk can drive.’

  Her big eyes widened.

  ‘What’s wrong with me?’

  ‘Nothing. But Dirk knows the way.’

  13

  Twenty minutes later they were in an unmarked police saloon, Van der Berg at the wheel, Vos and Bakker in the rear, going through the suburbs on the way out to Waterland. She was a country girl, Vos said. She ought to feel at home with the people there.

  ‘At home?’ Bakker wondered.

  ‘What he means,’ Van der Berg suggested from the front, ‘is they might open up to you in a way they won’t with us. These places aren’t like Amsterdam. They’ve got their own way of living. And talking, too.’

  ‘And because I come from the count
ry I’m supposed to . . . empathize with them?’

  ‘That would be helpful,’ Vos added. ‘Dirk’s right. It’s never easy when you come out here. They keep everything to themselves. Perhaps . . .’

  He stopped. A sudden idea had struck him. What if Marnixstraat had been called into the Timmers case in the first place precisely because someone knew they’d struggle in the foreign, hostile environment of Volendam?

  ‘Perhaps what?’ Bakker asked.

  ‘Perhaps nothing.’

  At Broek they left the main road and travelled east into Waterland, not more than a kilometre from the narrow channel where the Kok brothers laboured over a yellow SEAT nose down in thickly weeded water. Then they rejoined the main road to Marken along the margin of the dyke and finally drove onto the causeway that linked the island to the mainland.

  A breeze kicked up sending a couple of gulls scuttling into the bright blue sky. There were yachts bent over in the wind on the lake. Across the water sat Volendam. To its right their destination, a ragged skyline of rooftops set on what was once so obviously an island.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Laura Bakker said with a smile. ‘I never knew there was anywhere like this so close to the city.’ She clapped her hands then let down her long red hair. ‘We could cycle here one day.’

  Van der Berg’s eyes widened. In the driver’s mirror he looked terrified.

  ‘One day,’ Vos agreed.

  They navigated the winding streets of Marken as Bakker laughed at the cute wooden houses. Then they found the single-track lane to the institution and came up to the security gate by the wooded entrance. Two minutes later they were in Henk Veerman’s office watching the TV news. The disappearance of Mia and Kim Timmers was the lead item.

  ‘Who released this?’ Vos asked.

  ‘Not us,’ Veerman replied. ‘Why would we?’

  ‘You didn’t tell us for eighteen hours that two dangerous prisoners were missing,’ Bakker broke in. ‘Now it’s on the news—’

  ‘They’re not dangerous,’ Visser insisted. ‘We don’t believe that for one moment. I’d never have allowed them out of here if they were.’

  There was a knock on the door. The psychiatrist wandered over wearily to answer it. A sturdy young woman of about thirty stood there. Short black hair, eyes red from crying, plain blue dress, something almost military about her bearing. She marched straight in, introduced herself as Simon Klerk’s wife, then asked Veerman what he was doing.