Little Sister

by David Hewson

  ‘All the same . . .You don’t get kids who kill people. Not like . . .’

  The remaining scraps of files in Marnixstraat told the grim tale of Glas’s death. The man’s throat had been cut then, postmortem, his penis had been hacked off and stuffed down his throat.

  ‘Not like that,’ he finished. He’d felt this way at the time and for some reason believed it more strongly now.

  There was a cafe just opening up down the road. He wandered in, ordered a coffee and a pastry, and tried to converse with the youth behind the counter. All earrings and tattoos, the kid didn’t seem interested in much except the music videos on the TV. If he knew about the Timmers case he wasn’t going to talk about it. That was obvious after the briefest of conversations. Then a figure flitted past the door, a familiar one, a large dog by her side.

  Bea Arends.

  He was always good with names. Especially when they came with giant German shepherds who dug up corpses on the Marken shoreline. Van der Berg rushed outside, catching up with her as she fiddled with her keys by a bedraggled old Hyundai.

  ‘We meet again,’ he said brightly.

  She stared at him. An earnest middle-aged woman who worked as a cook in the institution. People in kitchens got to know everything about a place.

  ‘Found those girls yet?’ she asked.

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Any idea where they are?’

  He smiled. She knew he couldn’t go there.

  ‘Oh well.’ She opened her door. He came closer and leaned against the front of the car. ‘Is there something you want, Sherlock?’

  ‘Just the usual. Answers.’

  ‘What’s the question?’

  He laughed and said, ‘Lots. Did Mia and Kim really kill Rogier Glas?’

  She scowled and looked more fierce when she did that.

  ‘Why ask someone like me? You lot said so. The courts did. Them doctors in Marken. Must be true, mustn’t it?’

  ‘People make mistakes,’ he said with a sigh.

  ‘They were just infants. I think that mother of theirs reckoned they’d be stars one day. Hoped that, anyway. Freya was a nice enough woman but a bit flighty. Pushy too. Pestered everyone to help her. The boys in the band. That manager of theirs. None of what happened made a lot of sense to me. You got paid to sort that out. Are you saying you didn’t?’

  ‘I’m not sure what I’m saying,’ he admitted.

  ‘Are you going to look at it all again?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘Got to find the girls first, haven’t we? You must have seen them in Marken.’

  She closed the car door.

  ‘Course I did.’

  ‘What were they like?’

  Without much thought she said, ‘Like . . . two kids who’d been kept in a kind of jail for most of their lives. No parents. No friends. So they were a bit weird. What do you expect? They love one another. I know that. Close as peas in a pod. Sing like angels too.’ She hesitated. ‘Kim’s the awkward one. She thinks that dead sister of hers is still around. Or pretends she does.’

  ‘And the other one?’

  ‘Mia? She has a name you know. She’s . . . kind. Thoughtful. A bit melancholy, I’d say. Who can blame her? I think she indulges her sister. I’m guessing mostly though.’

  She stared at him.

  ‘You haven’t asked me about Simon Klerk.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I haven’t.’

  ‘Did they really do that?’

  ‘We just need to find them.’ He looked down the street, towards the steps that led to the waterfront. ‘Is there anyone here who can help?’

  ‘Not that I can think of. Good luck,’ she said then climbed in without another word and got behind the wheel.

  Van der Berg saluted and doffed an imaginary hat. He called Marnixstraat. Vos was in a meeting. Laura Bakker managed to tell him what he half-suspected: no one was any the wiser about anything two days after the Timmers girls went missing, apparently after leaving the naked body of their nurse half-buried on the Marken shore.

  ‘You got anyone else to talk to out there?’ she asked.

  Ollie Haas, he thought. He’d driven past the former cop’s house on the edge of the town. Vos had warned him off that encounter, but Van der Berg had stopped by all the same. It didn’t matter. The house was empty. No car in the drive.

  ‘Not really. I suppose I might as well come back.’

  ‘What about the brothers? What were they called?’

  ‘Tonny and Willy Kok. Why would I want to talk to them?’

  She laughed and he realized he was starting to appreciate the way this gangly young woman from the north saw things so differently sometimes.

  ‘You townies. You really don’t know how it works anywhere else, do you?’

  ‘Tell me.’

  She did and it seemed so simple. A couple of brothers like the Koks had lived in Volendam all their lives. They’d know everyone. Hold every last piece of gossip. They wouldn’t give it up easily, especially to a man from the city. But it was worth a try.

  ‘Give me an address,’ he asked.

  It was a farm on the way back to the city.

  ‘Remember you’re a stranger, Dirk,’ she said after she looked it up on the system. ‘They won’t give you anything on a plate.’

  ‘Learned that already,’ Van der Berg grumbled.

  Fifteen minutes later he was in the yard of a dilapidated smallholding. The place looked more like a cemetery for dead farm equipment than a working business. Tractors and trailers and pieces of machinery he couldn’t even name lay rusting everywhere.

  The ramshackle house behind the junkyard looked empty. He was ringing the bell for a third time when an ancient and muddy Ford tractor pulled into the drive, Tonny Kok at the wheel, his brother standing in a trailer behind.

  Tonny jumped off, marched straight over and said, ‘I reckon you must be psychic’

  ‘Why—’

  ‘’Cos you’re just the man we’re looking for. Hop on the back. We’ll show you.’

  Van der Berg looked at the rusted trailer sitting crookedly on barely inflated tyres. Tonny seemed the least grubby of the two, not by much.

  ‘Tell you what. You get in the car. I’ll follow your brother. OK?’

  Tonny lifted his boots. They were covered in thick mud.

  ‘It’s not mine. It belongs to the police,’ Van der Berg pointed out.

  ‘In that case it’ll be a pleasure,’ Tonny said and climbed in, taking care to wipe his boots on the floor mat along the way.

  25

  Irene Visser didn’t show up at Marken until gone eleven. Veerman had been waiting to talk to her all morning, getting more and more furious by the minute.

  He followed her into her office, slammed the door shut and took a seat as she went to the filing cabinets and started to go through some papers there.

  ‘You can take your coat off, Irene. You do work here, remember?’

  She looked thinner, nervier than ever. Black coat. Skinny jeans. Hair still wet from the shower. She lived in a cottage in Marken, half a kilometre from him, close to the dyke road that led back to Waterland. Veerman had been there once only, a year before. A man had just left. There was cigar smoke in the air and dirty glasses on the table smelling of gin. Veerman had been shocked somehow. After his wife’s death he didn’t have a private life. He never guessed Visser possessed one at all. She never spoke of men. Of anything but work.

  ‘I’m doing my job,’ she said.

  ‘Which means what? We didn’t do anything wrong here, remember? We were the ones trying to fix things. So stop running round as if we’re the guilty ones, will you?’

  ‘I suppose that depends how you define guilt, doesn’t it? Does an act of omission count?’

  ‘For God’s sake stop being cryptic, Irene. Say what you mean.’

  Visser had worked at Marken for more than a decade. She was well entrenched when he arrived from Amsterdam. Veerman’s spell with the institution was m
uch shorter, eight years in all, three as deputy, five in charge.

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘We aren’t the guilty ones, are we?’ he asked in a worried, quiet tone. ‘Is there something I don’t know here? Should I—’

  ‘Will you shut up for once?’ she screeched. ‘I’m trying to think. I put my life into this place, you know. I didn’t clock off every day at five o’clock and shove it straight out of my head.’

  ‘Perhaps you should. Helps me stay sane.’

  He was back to where he’d been with the Lammers kid outside that morning. Cold and scared.

  ‘I had that nasty cow Kaatje on my back earlier. She wants an early review. I said she could have one.’

  She stopped rifling through the papers and stared at him.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because she’s not ready.’

  He nodded then said, ‘If we don’t give her that she’s going to talk to the police.’

  ‘And tell them what?’

  ‘I don’t know. I wish I did. I’m starting to think I’m the last person to understand anything here—’

  ‘You can’t let her out. She’s not ready. She could be a danger to herself. And others.’

  ‘We set the Timmers girls free, didn’t we? That was smart.’

  She grimaced, put the papers on the desk and came to face him.

  ‘Why don’t you just . . .go back to your office and add up some numbers or something? That’s all you do here, Henk. You’ve no clinical knowledge. No . . . insight.’

  ‘Seems not,’ he agreed. ‘But I am the director. I answer to the department. I answer for you.’

  ‘Take the day off. Go out on your boat. Drink a few beers. Forget about here for a while. Leave this to me.’

  Are you serious?’

  ‘Yes.’ She nodded, picking up the papers again. ‘I am.’

  Visser walked to the door.

  ‘Irene. Irene. Where the hell do you think you’re going? Get back here. I order it. Get back here.’

  He watched her walk down the corridor, stiff-limbed, tight-arsed. Then she went downstairs. He strode to the window and saw her go into the car park.

  Kaatje Lammers was across the way, exercising next to a picnic table beneath the trees. A police van was close by. Two bored officers were chatting by the back doors.

  Visser caught sight of the girl, went over and led her into the spinney where they talked close up in the shadows. The police didn’t even notice.

  This mess was going to end up in his lap, just like the last one wound up with Hendriks. He should never have let the Timmers sisters go. They ought to have been shipped off to an adult facility and become someone else’s problem.

  Visser walked towards her car, taking out her phone along the way. The girl called something after her, laughing.

  His mobile rang.

  ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ Visser said. ‘I’m recommending Kaatje for an early hearing and immediate release after that. She poses no threat to anyone.’

  ‘You just said—’

  ‘Did you hear me? She poses no threat to anyone. Not if we can get her away from here as soon as possible. Do it, Henk. Set the wheels in motion. You can get her out into the safe house in Amsterdam tomorrow ahead of the hearing if you pull your finger out.’

  ‘You mean the safe house the Timmers were supposed to go to?’

  ‘That’s the one,’ she agreed. ‘See to it. One less problem to worry about.’

  The line went dead. She climbed into her scarlet Alfa Romeo and edged out into the long drive. He watched the security gate rise as she spoke briefly to the guard. Then looked back at the car park. Kaatje Lammers was there, hands on hips, staring up at him.

  As he watched she grinned and waved.

  26

  Out in the green fields of Waterland Van der Berg found himself chugging slowly along behind the tractor, trying to pump Tonny Kok for information. As Laura Bakker had predicted it was a delicate, difficult job. The man insisted he knew no more about the Timmers murders than he’d read in the papers. The family were local but didn’t mix much. The mother, Freya, had something of a reputation from what Van der Berg could gather. A singer with the local bands. A lover of the nightlife.

  The father, Gus, was a fisherman. Didn’t go out much. Certainly didn’t hang around the small round of bars where the Koks liked to drink nightly, when they weren’t barred.

  ‘Could two kids murder someone like that?’ the detective wondered as the tractor veered off to a narrow lane somewhere close to the Marken road. Tonny Kok had been as evasive about what they were going to see as he was about the Timmers. Just something they felt the police ought to know about. That was all he’d say.

  He found Tonny Kok was staring at him, a look on his craggy, stubbly face that was impossible to interpret. The man had the outward appearance of a yokel. But he didn’t think these two were stupid. Far from it.

  ‘You saying they didn’t?’ Tonny asked.

  ‘I’m not sure. The brigadier who looked into it . . .’

  ‘Mr Haas. Lives in that big place all on his own. We done his hedges one time. He didn’t like the work. Didn’t want to pay. Not a man I’d like to deal with again.’

  ‘I just don’t know, Tonny. And I’d like to. Those two girls . . . whatever they did . . . whatever they’ve done . . . it’s been a hell of a life, hasn’t it? Locked up in that jail in Marken.’

  Tonny Kok was pointing to a spinney ahead. There was a decrepit building behind.

  ‘Family that lived there left the place ten, fifteen years ago. Drove past this morning doing more drains. Gate was off. That seemed funny.’

  Van der Berg drew to a halt behind the tractor. He turned to Tonny Kok and asked, ‘A family dead ten years ago. Now this nurse—’

  ‘That stuff’s your job. Not ours.’

  It was said with such vehemence Van der Berg went quiet for a moment. Then he said, ‘Quite. Asking people questions they don’t want to answer. That’s my job too.’ He nodded at the farmhouse. ‘Have you taken a look?’

  Tonny Kok shook his head vigorously.

  ‘No we haven’t. We don’t want no trouble with you lot. Or with anyone. I thought we were doing you a favour, mister.’

  Van der Berg got out and thought about the place. They were perhaps five kilometres from where Klerk’s car was dumped in the ditch.

  Aren’t you even curious?’

  ‘Curious gets you trouble. Round here anyway.’

  The drive was covered in mud hardened by the summer sun. Clouds of mosquitoes were rising like wisps of mist from the stagnant green channels on both sides of the lane. Ahead he could see tyre tracks had cut up fresh earth through the grass verge.

  ‘Someone’s been here, Mr Policeman,’ Tonny Kok said. ‘Maybe just a couple of toe-rag kids looking for somewhere to smoke and shag. But anyways . . . we thought you ought to know.’

  Then he went and stood by the gate. It was off its rusty hinges as if someone had tried to close the thing and it had failed through the unfamiliar effort.

  ‘All yours,’ Willy Kok said, waving an inviting hand towards the decrepit building.

  The back door was half open. Van der Berg found himself pulling a pair of latex gloves from his pocket as he walked. They were on his hands by the time he got there.

  For a moment he wished he wasn’t on his own. That Vos or Laura Bakker had accompanied him to this deserted house in the wide green fields of Waterland. Not two tough, impenetrable brothers for company, men he wasn’t sure he could trust at all.

  Then he pushed open the door and a buzzing cloud of flies came to greet him. Sweeping them away he saw what must once have been a family kitchen. Now there were cobwebs and grime everywhere. An overturned wooden chair next to a battered dining table. Plates and pots on the floor. They looked as if they’d been there for years.

  Van der Berg had worked enough murders to recognize the signs. The bloodstain was on the limewas
hed wall, stretched out like a gory Rorschach ink blot, pellet marks biting into the stone. Forensic would spend hours on this fatal mark but he knew straight away the conclusion they’d reach: Simon Klerk was here and someone blasted a shotgun in his face from close quarters.

  He walked outside. The brothers were standing by the gate idly smoking roll-ups. Van der Berg pulled out his phone. No signal. The world he knew was absent here. He was a stranger. An unwelcome one, perhaps.

  ‘Got a phone that works?’ he asked the brothers. ‘Mine doesn’t.’

  ‘Lots of them city ones don’t,’ Tonny replied. ‘Got to know your way round places like ours. That lanky girl of yours. She could tell you that.’

  The detective held out his hand and waited. Something still bugged him.

  The flies.

  Too many for a dried-up bloodstain that was two days old.

  He turned his back on the Kok brothers and returned to the house. The door that led out of the kitchen was closed, a chair set tight and diagonal against it, as if to trap whoever was on the other side.

  Gloves on, Van der Berg removed it and gingerly started to pull back the handle. What came next he’d never forget. It wasn’t a cloud of flies. It was a black, buzzing, fetid storm, a million tiny wings seeking escape from the dark inside.

  He knew the smell too. With a resigned sigh the detective took out a handkerchief and put it to his nose and mouth then retrieved the police torch from his pocket and shone it into the gloom ahead.

  Yet more flies, the smell of blood and flesh. Van der Berg tripped over something, shone his torch on the thing, tried to work out what it was.

  After that . . .

  He thought he had a strong stomach but he was wrong. He turned on his heels, went outside, gagged then threw up by the back door.

  The Kok brothers stood by the gate watching him. He wondered if one of them was laughing.