Little Sister

by David Hewson

  ‘We have the police here,’ the director muttered, not meeting her gaze.

  ‘Where’s my husband?’ she demanded. ‘You let him out of here with those murdering bitches. Where is he?’

  Vos waited for their answer. Finally Visser said, ‘We don’t know. I’m sorry. We don’t understand what’s gone wrong.’

  Bakker’s phone went. She walked outside to answer it. Vos kept quiet, thinking about the people in this room. Their attitude. What appeared to worry them. Klerk’s wife, irate, confused, looking for someone to blame. Visser, a thin, nervous woman . . . Veerman, everyone’s idea of a cold, practical manager . . .

  Something remained unsaid between them and there could only be one reason: there were strangers, police officers, present.

  Laura Bakker walked to the door and asked to speak to him. Vos and Van der Berg joined her in the corridor.

  ‘Two things,’ she said. ‘After that TV news item a bus driver called in to say he picked up the sisters from the dyke road on the mainland just after eight last night. We must have come past the place. They stayed on the bus all the way to Centraal station. Got off around twenty to nine.’

  ‘And?’ Vos asked.

  ‘We had a uniform patrol car near the dyke. They went to take a look.’ She took a deep breath. ‘They found a couple of yokels pulling a car out of a ditch. Yellow SEAT. Simon Klerk’s car.’

  A howl of grief broke behind them. The nurse’s wife was there, eavesdropping.

  ‘I’m coming,’ the woman cried, jabbing at Van der Berg with fierce elbows when he tried to stop her. ‘Wherever he is . . . you take me . . . I am coming.’

  Vos grabbed her arm as she tried to push past.

  ‘Mrs Klerk. I need to know your name. We have to talk.’

  ‘Sara,’ she said firmly.

  ‘Sara. I’ll let you know as soon as we find something. But you have to stay here. That will help us . . . help your husband more.’

  ‘I can’t!’ she bellowed. ‘Don’t you understand—’

  ‘Of course I do,’ Vos cut in. ‘Dirk?’

  The detective was on it straight away, saying all the right things, edging the protesting woman into the room with Visser and Veerman.

  She reached out and pointed a finger in Vos’s face.

  ‘Don’t you screw with me!’ Then a jab back at the room. ‘I’m not taking any shit from them either.’

  Vos didn’t budge.

  ‘My officer will remain here and keep you up to date on anything that happens.’ He glanced at Visser. ‘I want your files on the Timmers sisters—’

  ‘Can’t do that,’ the woman said immediately. ‘They’re confidential. Medical records.’

  ‘She’s right,’ Veerman added. ‘Only a court can give you those and we’ll oppose it every inch of the way.’

  ‘My husband . . .’ Sara Klerk wailed.

  ‘Do your best,’ Vos told Van der Berg and left him there.

  This time he drove. Bakker still wasn’t so good behind the wheel. He didn’t want more than one car in a ditch that day.

  Back through the narrow houses they wound, past the sign to the little harbour, out onto the narrow causeway across the dyke to Waterland.

  ‘You can see why Simon Klerk wasn’t keen to go home,’ Bakker observed as they hit the long straight road.

  14

  A solitary traffic car had come across the Kok brothers as they struggled with the yellow saloon almost submerged in the green waters of the channel. When Vos and Laura Bakker turned up Willy and Tonny were standing by the side of their tractor in their faded blue dungarees and waders, both smoking smelly pipes and taunting the young uniformed officer who was watching them.

  Vos introduced himself. The uniform took him and Bakker to one side and told them what he’d found. The two men, both known to the local police, appeared to be trying to recover a crashed car from the dyke when he turned up.

  ‘They never called us,’ the young officer said. ‘God knows what they might have done if I hadn’t come along.’

  ‘Got it out of the ditch?’ Bakker suggested.

  He gave her a caustic look and told them about the Kok brothers. They’d been spoken to regularly about minor offences: drunken arguments in Volendam, poaching, scavenging for scrap without permission.

  ‘Big time hoods then,’ Bakker added with a smile.

  The uniform grunted something and then Willy Kok called over, ‘Whatever that young man’s telling you about us . . . it’s all lies. All we do is have a few too many beers from time to time. You go arresting fellers in Volendam for that and you’ll be building new jails all the way back to that city of yours.’

  Vos and Bakker walked over to them. They were staring at her as if she were some kind of unexpected apparition in these parts.

  ‘That’s a policewoman?’ Tonny asked.

  ‘That is,’ Bakker replied.

  Willy nodded at the uniform officer.

  ‘Don’t suppose you’d fancy his job, would you? They sent that young chap here all the way from Eindhoven. No wonder he don’t look happy. Don’t belong . . .’

  Vos asked about the car and what they’d found.

  ‘We’re paid to clean out the channels,’ Tonny said firmly. ‘That’s what we do. Grass. Weed. Prams. Bikes. Them townies . . .’ He cast a glance at the uniform. ‘Specially ones from down south . . . I reckon they think the countryside’s just one big dump for them to chuck whatever crap they feel like.’

  Vos wandered over to the dyke. The back end of the SEAT was sticking out. The number plate was clearly visible. It was Simon Klerk’s vehicle.

  ‘Do you have a rope?’ he asked the brothers.

  ‘Got two,’ Willy replied. ‘Who’d go working out here without a couple of ropes to—’

  ‘Get them,’ Vos ordered. He looked at Bakker. ‘There’s a bunny suit in the back of the car. More your size than mine.’

  She put her hands on her hips. All four men stared at her.

  ‘Shouldn’t we wait for forensic to bring a team out?’

  ‘We don’t know we need a team, Laura.’

  ‘Laura,’ Tonny Kok repeated. ‘That’s a good name. She seems a nice girl, that lass of yours, sir. Friesland from her voice I’d say. A northerner . . .’ He scowled at the uniform. ‘You can trust people from up there. Unlike . . .’

  Bakker swore, went to the car, got out the bunny suit and was about to put it on. She looked at her neat red shoes. Willy climbed out of his waders and said, ‘Never let it be said the blokes of Volendam aren’t gentlemen.’

  The uniform uttered a pained sigh and said, ‘It’s all right. I’ll do it.’

  She gave him the suit and the giant waders. Tonny Kok tied a thick rope to the frame of the digger, tugged on it and handed the thing over. Then the young officer clambered down the muddy green side of the ditch and half-walked, half-fell into the slimy water.

  ‘If there is something there try not to disturb it too much,’ Vos suggested.

  He smiled up somewhat viciously and said, ‘Of course.’

  ‘Just a quick look.’

  The man in the clean white plastic suit crooked one leg against the submerged saloon, pinched his nose with his left hand then used his right to steady himself as he sank down into the algae and weed.

  ‘Who’d have thought it?’ Willy wondered. ‘The lad’s got manners. When it comes to pretty ladies anyway.’

  He broke the surface with a loud curse. They all went silent and watched. There was something in his hand.

  ‘Rope,’ he cried, tugging on the thing. Willy and Tonny got their leathery hands to it and heaved him to the surface. Green weed and algae covered the suit and his dark hair. He did his best to shake it free then dumped the things on the verge.

  ‘Clothes,’ he said, then kicked off the giant waders onto the grass. ‘Men’s clothes.’

  ‘This boy here’s nothing but a genius,’ Willy declared, patting him heavily on the shoulder. ‘I reckon you should snap him up
swiftish before Interpol or someone nabs him.’

  ‘That’s all there is?’ Vos asked. ‘Just clothes.’

  ‘One man’s?’ Bakker added. ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Willy agreed.

  The uniform shook his head again then pulled a long strand of weed from his hair.

  ‘So you knew?’

  ‘Course we knew,’ Tonny said. ‘We saw Mr Mallard swim in through that broken back window and come out with a pair of underpants. Got to take a look after that, haven’t you?’

  ‘And you didn’t say?’ Vos asked.

  ‘You didn’t ask,’ Willy told him. ‘Not you.’ A nod at the uniform. ‘Specially not him. He just came along here and started yelling at us. Couldn’t get a word in edgeways.’

  He went to the back of the tractor and came back with a pair of yellow underpants, wet and stained with weed, then threw them on the pile of clothes on the grass.

  ‘There you are. Full set.’

  The uniform climbed out of the ruined bunny suit. Tonny looked in a box on the back of the tractor and found a towel.

  ‘The airbag didn’t blow,’ the officer said. ‘The doors were closed. No sign someone was inside when it went in. I’d guess they got out and pushed the car into the ditch. Empty.’

  ‘So where on earth is Simon Klerk?’ Vos asked.

  ‘Simon Klerk?’ Willy asked. ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘The man who owns the car,’ Bakker replied.

  The Kok brothers shrugged.

  ‘Running stark naked across Waterland?’ Tonny flicked a thumb at the young officer in uniform. ‘Though if that were the case I suspect Boy Genius here might have spotted the chap. Him and his sort are dead good at picking up a spot of immorality here and there. A man with a bit of beer in him can’t even take a leak down an alley late one night . . .’

  Vos called Marnixstraat. No one had seen the Timmers sisters. CCTV had lost them after they left the station. There’d been no word of Simon Klerk but his wife had been screaming at headquarters demanding action.

  ‘We can take the car out if you like,’ Willy said when he came off the call. ‘By rights we ought to. It’s blocking the channel. That’s our job. Clearing up crap after people.’

  ‘Leave it there for the moment,’ Vos ordered, scanning the low horizon. Blue sky, green fields. Nothing much else. ‘We may need a forensic team out here. Laura?’

  She was picking through the clothes with a pen.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Where do we start?’ Vos wondered.

  For once she looked lost too.

  ‘Not here, I’d venture,’ Willy Kok said. ‘I don’t understand a thing about policing and don’t want to. But us two know these fields. These dykes. We grew up with them. Fished every last one of them.’

  ‘Illegally,’ the uniform moaned.

  ‘Who owns the water?’ Tonny asked. ‘Who gave you the rights over what creatures live there?’

  ‘Enough—’ Vos began.

  ‘We’re telling you, mister,’ Willy continued. ‘There’s nobody here. Not in that car. Not anywhere we’ve passed along the road. You’re looking in the wrong place.’

  ‘Wrong place,’ his brother repeated.

  Vos called Van der Berg.

  ‘Dirk,’ he said. ‘You can tell Mrs Klerk we’re still looking for her husband. We’ve got his car. He’s not here.’

  Van der Berg’s breathing wasn’t so great. Cigarettes. Beer. Lack of exercise. He sounded rougher than usual.

  ‘OK,’ the detective replied. ‘She won’t like it.’

  Vos shut his eyes, recalling the desperate, angry shrieks of Sara Klerk as she followed them down the corridor in Marken.

  ‘Be gentle with her.’

  ‘I always am. Thing is, Pieter . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s something very odd about this place. I can’t quite put my finger on it.’

  ‘You will,’ Vos told him and wondered where they might look next.

  15

  Three.

  That was the number, the holy number. The only one that mattered.

  Three little girls on the waterfront in Volendam.

  Three, the magic symbol of family: mummy, daddy, children.

  Three for The Cupids too. A drummer, a bass player who sang more than the others, a guitarist who wrote their tunes.

  Listening to them now in the narrow house in Amsterdam the sisters agreed this was a cheat. There were only three of them but they played tricks when it came to music. They had their own studio not far from the museum by the lake. It was upstairs, above a cafe owned by their manager, the big man who smiled a lot and never really looked as if he meant it. Jaap. Jaap Blom.

  He didn’t push himself but The Cupids did. Their fame was on the wane nationally but in Volendam a touch of tacky stardust remained. For some reason they had still had glitzy friends too, celebrities who visited, foreign musicians looking for somewhere interesting to record. Show business people and other rich strangers, from the city and beyond. In the small, insular lakeside town that upstairs studio was a special place. When their mother finally took them there – she’d been hired to sing backing vocals for a demo – she’d dressed the three of them carefully in their school uniforms. It was important to make an impression.

  Did they? This was a lifetime ago, part of a childhood they remembered only dimly and with difficulty. It was hard to divorce what was real from the dream. They were eleven when the bloody evening fell upon them. Its details remained elusive, as much the fiction of others as themselves.

  Some things seemed certain. The Cupids were big men, forceful and full of themselves. They laughed too loudly. They sang off-key. And somehow, in the studio above the cafe that other, quiet, unsmiling man Jaap fixed all their errors with a subtle brand of magic. A wrong note was corrected. A thin vocal got duplicated until it sounded fuller than the three of them could ever achieve in real life. When the girls listened to the tune that came out of the session – technically perfect but lacking in emotion and spirit – it was hard to associate it with the shambling, middle-aged men who sat around the studio drinking beer and smoking dope.

  Freya Timmers and her daughters could sing. Loud and clear and true. The men in The Cupids were charlatans. Not that it stopped them getting rich and famous for a while.

  After a few minutes Kim announced she was bored with the music and made coffee. They didn’t talk much. Since the phones were lost there was no way anyone could get a message to them.

  Especially Jo.

  Cute Jo.

  Clever Jo.

  Lost Jo.

  Kim closed her eyes and sang the first line of an old hymn.

  I will bless the Lord.

  Mia waited for her moment and sang the middle harmony.

  They waited.

  Jo was the soprano.

  Jo completed their harmony. Without her nothing worked.

  Back in Marken they heard her. But that place was familiar. It was theirs.

  Here in the strange cold city she was missing from their lives.

  Kim sang the lower line again. Mia came in on cue.

  Outside pigeons cooed as if they wanted to join in. Someone walked past laughing. A car horn tapped out an angry shriek. A dog barked. Then another.

  They waited for the third voice, so reliable in Marken, but it never came. Instead there was the sound of a key in the front door. The Englishwoman bustled in carrying two blue-and-white Albert Heijn carrier bags, full to the brim judging by the way she struggled with them.

  ‘All set up for the duration now,’ she announced. Then she put them on the table and added, ‘I’ll let you two unpack. You want to earn your keep here, don’t you?’

  Cheese and eggs, bread and milk, ham and packs of ready-to-eat fruit. She watched them carry everything into the kitchen and put the food in the fridge, telling them what went where. They’d never done this in years, not since their mother asked for it.

  When the shoppin
g was put away she asked them what they wanted. Then she told the sisters to take the food out again, cook it and serve it out on plates.

  An hour they spent preparing the meal, eating it, washing the dishes afterwards and cleaning up the kitchen.

  ‘Your Auntie Vera wants to help you back into the world,’ the Englishwoman said when they were done.

  ‘You’re not our auntie,’ Kim pointed out. ‘We don’t have an auntie. Only an uncle.’

  ‘Just a way of speaking. You remember your uncle’s name?’

  ‘Stefan,’ Mia told her.

  ‘Never came to see you in that place, did he?’

  ‘No,’ she agreed.

  Lots of other people did though.

  ‘Do you know why that was?’

  Kim raised her hands, waved her fingers like claws, pulled a wicked face and hissed, ‘Because we’re monsters.’

  Vera laughed.

  ‘That’s right, girls. Monsters.’ She got up and patted them on the shoulder, one after the other, not noticing they didn’t like this. ‘My monsters now.’

  ‘What do we do next?’ Mia asked.

  ‘You do as you’re told. What your Auntie Vera asks.’

  ‘We want to see things. On our own.’

  The woman reached into the pocket of her denim jacket and pulled out two plastic cards then threw them on the table.

  ‘Know what they are?’

  The sisters didn’t speak.

  ‘They’re your passports to freedom. Anonymous chip cards. Weren’t even around when they locked you two up. I’ve put a bit of money on them. You can use them on buses. On trams. On trains if you know how.’ The smile grew more cold. ‘But you don’t, do you? Two little songbirds stuck in a cage. Haven’t got a clue what it’s like . . .’ She nodded at the front door. ‘Out there.’

  ‘We can’t stay here all the time,’ Mia complained, shocked when she heard the whining tone in her own voice. ‘We’ll go mad.’