Little Sister

by David Hewson

  ‘Any ideas?’ he asked.

  ‘There’s no ID on him,’ Van der Berg said. ‘Not that I could find.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Snyder bawled. ‘What am I dealing with here? You don’t touch a damned thing—’

  ‘There are two young women out there,’ Vos said, getting to his feet. ‘Sick. Scared. Maybe dangerous to others. Maybe in danger themselves.’ He pointed a gloved finger in Snyder’s face. ‘Don’t get in my way. And don’t even think of whining to De Groot either. That won’t work.’

  Snyder glared at him.

  ‘Won’t it? You sure?’

  Vos walked outside, beyond the clouds of flies and the team of forensic officers, trying to find fresh air. Aisha Refai was by the door, glaring in the direction of Snyder. She followed the three of them as they left.

  ‘What’s going on, Vos?’

  ‘You tell me,’ he said, checking the pictures on his phone.

  ‘I was off yesterday. Come in this morning. They say Schuurman’s away on some course I never knew about.’ She nodded back at the farmhouse. And here’s this stuck-up prick from Rotterdam throwing his weight around. De Groot brought him in apparently. Wasn’t sure we could cope on our own.’

  Van der Berg shifted on his big feet. Laura Bakker started clucking too.

  ‘Stop it,’ Vos said, holding up his hand. ‘If that’s what the commissaris wants it’s his prerogative.’ He nodded at the farmhouse. ‘Do your job, Aisha. It’s important. If you find anything . . .’

  ‘You’ll know,’ she muttered and tramped back in her suit.

  ‘I’m no expert, as that charmer from Rotterdam will doubtless confirm, but I’d guess whoever our man is he got killed around the same time as the nurse,’ Van der Berg suggested. ‘The flies. The state of him. It is hot.’

  Bakker looked at Vos, who said nothing.

  ‘Is he right?’ she asked.

  Vos shrugged and stayed silent.

  ‘Which raises the question,’ Van der Berg continued, ‘why strip Klerk naked and dump him in Marken? And leave the other one dead in his work clothes on the floor in there? I mean—’

  Another van turned up. Three more forensic officers got out. Vos didn’t recognize any of them. He stopped one and asked where they came from.

  ‘Rotterdam,’ the man said. ‘Snyder called us.’

  Then they went off to the crime scene.

  ‘So just because Schuurman’s away we have to bring in a bunch of strangers?’

  ‘People do go on courses, Laura,’ Vos told her. ‘It’s August. Holiday time. There’s quite a workload. Getting bigger all the time.’

  ‘But—’

  Aisha Refai wandered over. She looked sheepish.

  ‘Progress?’ she asked.

  ‘Not really,’ Vos replied. ‘You?’

  She glanced back at the farmhouse. The teams there seemed intent on setting up their gear. Sheets, lights, cameras.

  ‘I seem to be peripheral to their plans at the moment. I found these in there. I’m guessing they got dropped by accident.’

  She held up a plastic evidence bag. Inside was a Samsung smart phone. Recent. Expensive. It had a faux leather case, red crocodile. And an old, worn ID card.

  The picture looked like the dead man inside. It gave his name as Stefan Timmers, age fifty-four.

  ‘Timmers?’ Van der Berg said, then got on the phone.

  ‘Snyder’s too busy poking round the bloodstains and the body,’ she went on. ‘He doesn’t seem much interested in my ideas. What’s the betting this is your man’s phone too?’

  Vos touched the case through the clear plastic.

  ‘Well done.’

  ‘Why do you say it like that?’ Aisha asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ he told her. ‘Can you check it out?’

  She glanced back at the team at the house.

  ‘Probably best if I sat in your car.’

  They ushered her to the unmarked Volvo. The Kok brothers watched closely then came over and asked if it was OK for them to leave. They looked Laura up and down before they did.

  ‘Wish there were more like you around,’ Tonny said with a cheery leer.

  ‘Bye, bye.’ She gave them a wave.

  After a while Van der Berg returned with some news from Marnixstraat. Stefan Timmers was older brother to Gus. The triplets’ uncle. He lived in a cottage in Volendam and had a string of convictions for theft, assault, drunk driving, threatening behaviour. At least one term in jail.

  ‘Nice man, by all accounts,’ he added. ‘Kind of puts those girls here, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Take a look round his place,’ Vos said. ‘Call if you need any help.’

  Van der Berg headed for his car. They watched him drive carefully down the narrow lane, not far behind the rusty tractor belonging to the Kok brothers.

  ‘What are we looking for?’ Bakker asked.

  ‘Something . . . small. Something that’s probably not here. A million miles away for all I know.’

  The old Ford tractor was belching black diesel as it chugged slowly away. Bakker’s sharp eyes followed it. She was thinking as always.

  ‘You don’t like the way those two look at you, Laura. I’m sorry. I should have said—’

  ‘I can watch out for myself, thank you very much. You get used to it. God knows what it must be like if you’re beautiful. Those two Timmers girls. Did you see the pictures? When they were kids? They were lovely. That . . . I can’t imagine.’

  He wanted to say something but knew it could so easily be taken the wrong way.

  ‘If anyone ever tries that in Marnixstraat let me know. I won’t stand for it.’

  She threw back her head and laughed out loud.

  ‘You’re a bit late.’

  He realized he was blushing.

  ‘What? I mean it. I won’t stand—’

  ‘You really are an innocent sometimes.’

  ‘This job screws you up,’ Vos moaned. ‘You just notice all the wrong things. Never look at what’s right in front of your nose.’

  ‘An innocent,’ she repeated.

  Something grey and heavy flapped above them. It was a heron coming in to land by the dyke. They hung around the city too. One was fond of standing on the back wall behind Marnixstraat, eyeing the canal in the busy heart of Amsterdam, hour after hour. In the vast green wilderness of Waterland, the bird looked different. At home. Unfeeling with its great spear of a beak. Malevolent, if Vos was feeling imaginative.

  ‘We all are out here,’ he said.

  There was a shriek of delight from the back of the Volvo. Aisha Refai had found something.

  30

  Kim crooned the words of another song. This time her sister didn’t follow.

  They were back in their room, up the steep narrow stairs, silent for the most part after the confrontation with Vera. Pigeons seemed to be congregating outside the window. The smell of dope from the back of the coffee shop in Haarlemmerstraat was stronger than ever.

  Sniffing it through the window, Kim laughed then reached up and stroked her sister’s short black hair.

  ‘We’re different now. Aren’t we?’

  ‘Weren’t we always?’ Mia answered.

  They never talked about this. It was awkward, unnecessary. That had been the case ever since the black night, a decade before, when the police came out of the dark screaming at them, staring at their bloodied fingers as they stood by Rogier Glas’s van waiting to see what happened next.

  Something then had joined the two of them, trapped them inside the same shell. But it was all an illusion. As the girls grew the differences became apparent. Physically Kim was a touch heavier, in the face, in the body. Quicker, stronger, bolder too while Mia sat back and watched, waiting for her moment.

  Until now they’d barely quarrelled. It was rare they even disagreed. Decisions came jointly out of nothing. In the first instance from Kim usually and then Mia simply nodded.

  But they were unalike in many ways. Even in the music – Kim the low note
s, Mia the middle – the subtle shifts were there.

  Mia thought about this and sang a snatch of an old hymn. Kim listened, nodded, waited for her moment and came in with a deeper harmony. Just one line and then in unison they finished.

  The pigeons cooed outside the window as if in appreciation. Someone in the kebab-bar kitchen clapped very slowly.

  ‘Did you hear her too?’ Kim asked in a whisper.

  ‘No. Not really. We left that behind in Marken.’

  With the madness, she thought.

  Her sister frowned and stayed silent. Mia gazed at her more intently, more seriously than she would ever have dared before.

  ‘We have to be careful. We both want to be free of this place. But we don’t know where we’re going.’ She shrugged. ‘Or why, really?’

  ‘Because we’re owed,’ Kim muttered.

  ‘We are,’ Mia agreed. ‘I’m going to mess with the computer. Want to come?’

  Kim just shook her head and stared out of the window at the back of the kebab bar and the dope cafe in the street behind. One of the waiters there was waving at them.

  Down the long steep stairs. Three flights of them. Mia sat and idly wasted half an hour looking through the limited pages Vera allowed. The child filter was on. She couldn’t work out how to remove it. The news sites had nothing fresh to say about Simon Klerk. Or them.

  Towards the end of the afternoon Vera returned from the doctor’s. She looked as if she’d been crying.

  ‘What you two been up to?’ she demanded, in an obvious foul temper.

  ‘Nothing,’ Mia replied.

  ‘Where’s your sister?’

  ‘Sleeping, I think.’

  The Englishwoman placed her shopping bag on the grubby carpet at the foot of the steps.

  ‘Keep your nose out of that,’ she ordered, and set off up the flight of stairs.

  Kim wasn’t sleeping. She was waiting, hidden in the doorway of Vera’s first-floor room. She listened as Vera marched up to the top of the house calling out her name. Then the woman marched down, a heavy, angry tread for one so skinny.

  The Dutch liked steep staircases and narrow steps. Some were almost like cliffs or ladders into distant attics.

  Hiding behind Vera’s bedroom door Kim held on to the cord she’d unwound from the curtains. It ran across the shallow landing, tied to a radiator pipe at the other side. When Vera came storming down the familiar steps calling out her name Kim waited, saw a leg, then another, and pulled the rope tight.

  One hand up, stifling a giggle, as the Englishwoman’s shin connected with the trap.

  Vera screamed then, falling head first down the steep incline, arms out waving frantically.

  In front of the crippled computer Mia heard her cries. Then a shocking, physical impact as body met first wood and next hard tiles.

  She raced to the hall. Weeping, looking like a deformed mannequin, Vera lay there. A crumpled, misshapen heap.

  Kim on the steps above, laughing, curtain rope in her hand, snapping it like a whip.

  31

  Aisha marched out of the Volvo, proudly holding up the phone.

  ‘It’s not Klerk’s,’ Bakker said before the young forensic officer could speak.

  ‘I was going to say that,’ Vos objected.

  She grinned.

  ‘The case. I knew that was what you’d spotted when I thought about it. A man wouldn’t have one like that. Not hard, you know.’

  ‘Not hard,’ Vos agreed. ‘So?’

  There was a shout. Snyder had emerged from the farmhouse, pulled down the hood of his bunny suit and started yelling for her.

  ‘I thought the good times couldn’t last,’ Aisha said. ‘I’d better get back to doing what the new boss asks.’ She held up a bag with the phone and the ID card. And give him this. Sorry folks. Happy to help. Don’t want to lose my job.’

  ‘What—’ Vos began.

  ‘There are no prints. Maybe they wore gloves. Or wiped it. Dropped it . . .’

  Aisha pulled out her notepad and handed over a name and address.

  ‘Damn,’ Vos muttered. ‘That can’t be right.’

  Snyder’s shouts were too loud to ignore. She shrugged and went back to the farmhouse, pocketing the plastic bag along the way. Only, Vos guessed, to be found again later when she could slip it in front of Snyder as something new.

  ‘May I?’ Bakker asked when he kept staring at the page.

  He passed over the note.

  Irene Visser. A street name: Kerkbuurt. Marken.

  ‘But . . .’

  By the time she looked up he was already climbing into the Volvo. The car was moving when she reached it. Bakker opened the passenger door and leapt in.

  ‘Thanks for waiting for me!’

  ‘Call in to Marnixstraat,’ he ordered. ‘Get me an update on the Timmers girls. Say nothing else.’

  ‘You wanted to know how they could have moved the body,’ she pointed out. ‘It’s obvious, isn’t it? They roped in their uncle.’

  ‘Nothing’s obvious here.’

  Bakker didn’t argue. There was a look on his face that stopped her.

  Koeman answered straight away. The conversation was brief and finished just as Vos drove the Volvo onto the main road, fighting to get ahead of a bus crawling towards the long stretch of dyke that separated Marken from the mainland.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Not a thing.’

  The white tower of the lighthouse rose ahead. Then, like a low forest appearing out of the ground, the timbered houses of the island. Vos asked her to call ahead to the institution and see if Dr Visser was still at work.

  It took less than a minute for her to get through to Veerman. He sounded more miserable than ever.

  ‘She went home early. Didn’t feel well.’

  They reached the edge of the village. Kerkbuurt. The close near the church. It wouldn’t be hard to find.

  Vos thought of something and pulled in by the side of the road.

  ‘What now?’ she asked.

  He took out his phone and switched it off.

  ‘You too.’

  ‘Sorry?’ she asked.

  ‘I want some privacy for a while.’

  ‘We’re supposed to leave them on, Pieter. At all times.’

  He folded his arms, leaned back in the driving seat, looked at her.

  ‘So Marnixstraat aren’t supposed to know we’re here. Fine,’ she said and did it.

  32

  Vera was still crying at the foot of the stairs, a miserable bundle of pain. Her right foot was turned at an angle. Furious, scared and in agony, she writhed on the carpet, spitting out curses, pleading for help.

  Kim bounced down from the last step.

  ‘Who’s boss now, Vera? Who’s telling us what to do?’

  In a flash she crouched down and retrieved the house keys from the woman’s tatty grey jacket.

  ‘I need a doctor! Christ . . .’ She tried to get up, screamed the moment she put any weight on her foot. ‘You broke my bloody leg.’

  ‘Serves you right,’ Kim spat at her. ‘Asked for it.’

  Mia went and fetched one of the chairs from the kitchen table, helped her up from the floor then held her arm as she sat down. Gently she rolled down the threadbare black sock on the woman’s injured leg. The skin was going livid from a bruise. Gingerly she probed the swelling ankle.

  ‘I don’t think it’s broken,’ she said as Vera squealed. ‘Honestly.’

  The woman’s fingers crept to the purple bruise.

  ‘Bloody painful anyway.’ She shot a savage look at Kim. ‘You could have killed me.’

  ‘Shouldn’t have tried to make us your slaves, should you?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid! I was doing what I was told. What I was paid for. I said. A million times. You two aren’t ready to go out there on your own. Not yet.’

  ‘Who told you? Who paid you?’ Mia asked.

  ‘Not talking about this now.’

  Some items had fallen from her jacket as s
he tumbled down the stairs. Mia walked over and recovered them. Two bottles of pills and a cardboard box of tablets. She held them out.

  ‘Those are no bloody good,’ Vera yelled. ‘I want painkillers. I want a doctor.’

  She took the medication anyway and stuffed it in her jacket.

  ‘You really are what they said, aren’t you? Couple of monsters that look like little angels.’

  ‘Not little,’ Mia pointed out, trying to stop herself getting angry. ‘Not any more.’

  ‘A doctor . . .’

  Mia said, ‘You just twisted your ankle. It’ll be better in a day. I want you to hold on to the chair very tightly. That way it won’t hurt.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Hold on to the chair. We’ll pull you upstairs. You can lie down in the bedroom. We won’t hurt you.’

  ‘I need a bloody doctor!’

  ‘No you don’t,’ Mia insisted and nodded at her sister.

  The two of them positioned themselves around the chair.

  ‘We’re tugging you up here,’ Mia continued. ‘Either you hang on and stay safe until we’re in your room. Or you let go and fall down the stairs again. You choose.’

  She took hold of the back, Kim the side, and together they started to heave.

  Vera screamed to start with. Then holding on became more important than yelling. Step by step they lugged her up the stairs. On the landing Mia helped her out of the chair, let her lean on her as the two of them struggled towards the bed.

  It was only when she got there that Vera realized what they’d done.

  ‘I can’t get down from here now,’ she moaned, collapsing on the duvet. ‘Not with this leg.’

  ‘No,’ Mia agreed. ‘Where do you keep the painkillers?’

  The woman leaned back on the bed, dragged a pillow behind her so she could sit upright, and stared at them. Defeated.

  ‘Kitchen cabinet.’

  Without a second thought Mia went downstairs to get them. Kim stayed in the room, grinning.

  ‘You’re stuffed without me,’ Vera told her. ‘You don’t know how much.’

  She retrieved the bottles and the box from her jacket and, with unsteady fingers, started to shake out some tablets. Kim was there in a flash, seizing the pills, everything.