by David Hewson
‘I need those, kiddo! I’m sick in case you hadn’t noticed.’
‘Drugs are bad for you,’ Kim said lightly. ‘We learned that in Marken. They’re there to keep you down. To make you something you’re not.’
‘I’m sick!’
Footsteps coming up the stairs. Kim walked quickly to the front, opened the window then lobbed everything out into the street. Vera started to scream. Kim closed the window and told her to shut up.
Mia came in with some paracetamol and a cup of water.
‘What happened?’
‘That bitch only chucked my prescription away. I need that stuff. More than an aspirin . . .’
Kim threw up her arms and laughed.
‘Oh for God’s sake. If they’re that important I’ll get them back.’
She headed down the stairs, Vera’s keys in her hand. The door opened and then was slammed shut.
The woman in the bed was staring at Mia, pleading.
‘I know you’re not as bad as her, love. I know she’s the wicked one.’
Mia sat on the bed and gave her the water and the pills. So many people had done this same thing to them in Marken. Not with painkillers either. It felt odd to be on the other side of the transaction. Good in a way.
‘No, Vera. We’re both the same. You’d best believe it.’
‘I can help you. You need me.’
‘And now you need us.’
‘That I do. So where do we start?’
‘By telling us the truth. Someone got us out of that place. Someone told us to run the moment we could.’
‘And how did they do that?’ Vera asked.
‘They left us messages. Inside Marken. A map. Some money. They said . . .’ This was crazy. Wrong. She knew, but Kim . . . she wasn’t sure. ‘They said we had to run. It was the only way we’d be safe.’
‘And that nurse of yours? The police think you killed him.’
Simon Klerk was a bitter memory.
‘He said . . . he said he wanted his reward. We never hurt him. Just made him look a fool.’
‘Think they’ll believe that, girl?’
‘I’m not a child!’ Mia cried. ‘I don’t care what they believe. It’s true.’ And something else was more important. ‘The messages in Marken . . . they said they were from Little Jo.’
A grim laugh came from the woman on the bed.
‘Snap,’ she said.
‘What?’
‘Same here. Don’t you get it? I just got messages. I thought they were daft nonsense to begin with. Then money started to turn up, and you don’t ignore money, do you? I don’t—’
‘They must have found you somehow!’ Mia cried. ‘Nothing happens by accident. I may be stupid but even I know that.’
‘Search me . . .’ Vera glanced at the door. There’d been no sound from downstairs. ‘I got cash through the post. Those texts telling me to look after you for a while. Get you them wigs. Go and look at that bloke last night.’
‘And you just did it—’
A sudden vicious look then.
‘I’m sick. Don’t have two pennies to rub together. I never meant you no harm. Oh . . .’
She grimaced with pain and it might have been the ankle or something else.
Mia got up and paid no notice.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Wherever I like,’ she said. ‘You can’t stop us now, can you?’
‘It was for your own good!’
She could have been Kim at that moment, ready to hit the stricken woman in front of her.
‘Really? Do you know how many people have told us that over the years? Keep quiet. Do as you’re told. Tell no one. It’s all going to be fine in the end.’ A pause, then softly she added, ‘It won’t hurt really.’
Vera screwed up her eyes in pain and gulped at the water.
‘All I can think of is . . . someone remembers me from Marken. I can’t imagine how else they got hold of me.’
‘Is that the truth?’ Mia demanded.
‘Yes, missy. It is.’
Still no sound from downstairs. Mia left the room, ignoring the Englishwoman’s squawks, and went down to the hall. Kim had to be still looking for the tablets.
The front door was unlocked. Opening it, stepping outside, felt like coming out of prison. Daunting, liberating. Scary.
In the street she looked around. People on bikes. A woman pushing a pram. A couple of youths jogging to the music on their phones.
Vera’s pill bottles were on the pavement. The box was nowhere to be seen.
Nor was Kim.
33
It was close to five by the time they pulled into the lane by Irene Visser’s compact, white-painted wooden cottage near the church. The summer sun had lost its power. The salt tang of the lake hung over the town, fanned by a light breeze. A gull perched on her roof, staring at them with beady yellow eyes as they drew up.
A red Alfa Romeo stood in the drive. The curtains were closed. Vos parked in the road and went to ring the bell, Bakker at his heels.
He wasn’t hopeful. But then hope had been elusive in this case ever since the Timmers girls went missing. He’d spent long enough in this job to know when – and how – investigations turned intractable. Sometimes it was through a simple mistake. Too often, if he was honest. On other occasions they were quite deliberately misled. The police had an odd and uncomfortable job in the complex, morally ambiguous modern world. They were supposed to deliver justice to a society that often cared for it in principle only. To detect wickedness within a community that decried evil in public but was motivated largely by self-interest in private.
He kept his finger on the bell and waited, consumed by a single, depressing thought, a reminder of that awkward conversation with De Groot earlier. Whatever had happened to the Timmers sisters – whether they were guilty of murder or not – the fault lay elsewhere. Innocence was the natural state of humanity and it did not poison itself. Mostly the search for justice was defeated in the end by lies and silence. By people who cared more for themselves than the injured and the blameless around them.
A face behind the frosted glass. Irene Visser answered and immediately he was pulled out of his reverie. Something was different here. Very.
Then he smelled it. The floral aroma of gin, the English kind.
An observant woman, she spotted this and raised a tumbler to him. Full almost to the brim with ice and a piece of lemon.
‘I always wondered what psychiatrists did when they weren’t on the job,’ Bakker observed with her usual tact.
‘If you people ever stopped working you ought to give it a try.’
‘Can we come in?’ Vos asked.
She leaned on the door frame.
‘No. Busy.’
‘We need to know where you were the night before last,’ Bakker said.
Irene Visser groaned, closed her bleary eyes and sighed.
‘Why?’
‘Because that’s when Simon Klerk was murdered,’ Vos said. ‘Along with the sisters’ uncle. Stefan.’
To Vos’s surprise she laughed then said, ‘What?’
‘We found the place where Klerk was killed,’ Bakker told her. ‘Stefan Timmers was there too. Shot. We really need to talk to you .’
‘I didn’t even know the uncle. He never came to Marken.’
‘We can talk here,’ Vos said. ‘Or I can take you into Marnixstraat. Long journey.’ He nodded at the glass. ‘No time to finish your drink.’
She swore then took a long look back at the hallway behind her.
‘Fine,’ Irene Visser said in the end. ‘Come in.’
34
Back in Marnixstraat Frank de Groot wandered out of his office and went downstairs into the serious crimes unit. Koeman, a biddable man, seemed to be in charge. The commissaris asked what news there was from Waterland and tried, with no great success, to hide his anger when he heard.
‘Where’s Vos?’ he demanded.
‘I don’t know. Bakker called
in from that farmhouse to ask if we’d got anything on the sisters. That was almost an hour ago. Haven’t heard from him since. He’ll be there, won’t he?’
De Groot leaned down and grumbled, ‘I don’t know. Call him.’
With stumbling fingers Koeman did.
‘Voicemail,’ he said. ‘Bakker too.’
Force handsets had GPS switched on permanently. It showed Control where officers were.
‘Get a location for them,’ De Groot ordered.
Koeman pulled up the map app and typed in their numbers. Two stars, stationary outside Marken. The colour indicated the position was thirty minutes old and the phones were currently turned off.
‘I’m sick of his bloody tricks,’ De Groot moaned. ‘Keep trying. Tell him I want to talk to him. Now.’
Then he walked back to his office. Ollie Haas was there, grim-faced and angry.
‘This pisses me off no end,’ he muttered as the commissaris returned. ‘My pension—’
‘I told you! You keep your damned pension. We didn’t take it off you for screwing up the Timmers case, did we? Or that . . .that other thing.’
Haas laughed.
‘After that . . .other thing . . . you couldn’t, could you?’
De Groot printed out the statement they’d agreed and pushed it over the desk for him to sign. Haas went through it word by word.
‘Maybe I’ll think about it overnight,’ he said, dropping the pen.
‘Nothing to think about. If you sign that now you keep your pension, you don’t get a criminal conviction . . . don’t go to jail. Don’t hear from us again.’
The old cop’s grin got bigger.
‘It’s not my fault some idiot let those Timmers kids out.’
‘Sign it, damn you!’ De Groot roared. ‘Or I swear I’ll bring this whole place down around our heads. If that happens you’ll be buried deepest beneath the rubble. That I promise.’
Haas mumbled a curse then picked up the statement and started reading it again.
‘Lacks my style,’ he complained.
‘You mean it’s precise, clear and competent.’
‘You were always a very neat man, Frank. That’s what matters today, isn’t it? Being tidy.’
De Groot found the pen and held it out. Haas waited a moment and took it.
The statement seemed simple enough. An admission that he’d accessed old files on the Timmers cases over the network and deleted them.
‘It doesn’t say why I did it,’ he pointed out.
‘I can handle that,’ De Groot said. ‘You were covering up your tracks. Making sure we didn’t kick you out without a penny.’
And I did this five years later? Why exactly?’
De Groot took a deep breath.
‘We both know why.’
Haas pointed to the glass door, smiled and said, ‘But they don’t.’
‘You deleted the files. Then you came in here and put my signature on the records. That’s the story. You get an internal caution and a black mark against your file. No further investigation. No financial penalty. If you know what’s best you’ll put your name to it and never set foot in this place again.’
‘What’s best for me?’ Haas asked. ‘Just me is it? Does Jaap know—’
De Groot slammed his big fist on the desk.
‘Sign it before I pick you up and throw you out of the bloody window.’
‘That was uncalled for,’ Ollie Haas noted then shrugged, picked up the blue ballpoint and scribbled his name.
35
Summer nights in Marken were quiet. Insects buzzing along the shoreline and through the woods. Boats on the lake, uttering the occasional hoot. A radio from the patient quarters. The yammer of the single communal TV.
Amsterdam could not be more different. People, people, everywhere. Bikes coming at you from all directions, on the pavements, along the cobbled streets, by the broad canals.
Mia had no idea where Kim might be headed. Turn after turn she took and soon found herself confused. Was this really the canal corner where they’d stood with Vera the day before watching a battered bike getting pulled out of the grubby water?
She went to a street stall and bought herself a coffee in a paper cup. The girl who served it looked at her, curious.
Black hair, not blonde. They couldn’t know. And even if they did? What crime, exactly, had they committed?
A bad one they said. But that was half a lifetime ago. The two of them, sisters, blood on their hands. Mia closed her eyes and tried to stop the memories coming back. The trouble was they were always there, formless, flitting between the real and the imagined.
A performance on the waterfront, fading evening sun the colour of their mother’s golden wedding ring.
A moment out in the green fields of Waterland watching a bird and her chicks navigate the road.
After you, Mother Duck,’ Mia whispered, staring at the black waters of a city canal she couldn’t name. ‘Take care of your young ones.’
Was that real? It felt it. But then she wasn’t sure of anything much now. There had been a time, the beautiful time as she thought of it, when they were complete: Kim, Mia, Little Jo. The Golden Angels of Volendam singing like larks, all in perfect harmony. Their mother watched and smiled. Their father . . .
A boat went by on the water. A man at the helm, a pretty woman in front. A picnic set out in front of them: water, wine, sausage, bread, cheese. Theirs was a life so distant Mia Timmers could not begin to imagine it.
Their father . . . she couldn’t in all honesty remember.
Life had appeared good but then it was the only life they knew. And one hot summer night much like this the blackness fell.
Bad girls. Bad girls. What have you done?
Whatever you tell us, mister.
They were frightened, lost, so young. What else were they supposed to say?
Guilt.
That was real enough. A dark and shameful ache at the back of her head. A stain that wouldn’t shift. A relentless whisper that hid away and murmured . . .your fault . . . your fault, girl, it has been all along. Then laughed and scuttled back into the shadows.
Whatever else had happened, they were, they knew, to blame. So many people said so. It had to be true.
A noise distracted her, a familiar one, out of context here. Mia looked down and saw a flap of wings on the grubby water. A bird came out from beneath the bridge. A duck, darker, dirtier than the ones in Waterland. Behind her four or five fluffy chicks struggled to keep up. The swimming mother never turned, never slowed for them; she just kept on and on. This was the city. The tiny ones had to follow, to obey, or fail. To do otherwise was to jeopardize your survival.
Your fault, your fault.
It always was. The unbreakable rule.
‘Where in God’s name are you, Sister?’ she whispered, looking round the alien, hostile streets.
And what on earth are you doing?
This wasn’t Marken. Kim didn’t rule any more. The future, whatever it held, was up to her as much as anyone. If she wanted she could find the nearest policeman and throw the pair of them at the mercy of the authorities.
Just the thought of that made her want to laugh and shriek and cry.
Instead she walked over to a tourist booth selling canal boat tickets, begged a map and a cross on it for where she was, then worked out the way back to Vera’s house in Vinkenstraat.
Kim had to return some time.
Had to.
36
Visser’s house was as clean and bare as a hospital clinic. A few modern paintings on the pale wall. A dishwasher chugging away in the kitchen. The faintest aroma of a cat, not that there was one to be seen. Drink in hand she led them straight into the front room and pointed at the steel-and-leather sofa. Then she went to the sideboard and topped up the glass from a bottle of export Gordon’s.
‘Isn’t it a bit early for that?’ said Bakker.
‘I didn’t realize the police had jurisdiction over my alcohol intake.
’ She took a swig. ‘Cheers. Hell of a day.’
‘Why?’ Vos asked.
She took a seat and glared at him.
‘Why? One of our colleagues murdered? Apparently by two young women I signed off for release. I emailed my resignation to Veerman this afternoon.’ The glass went up again. ‘I’ve got an excuse.’
Before Bakker could chip in, Vos asked, ‘What will you do?’
‘Take a holiday. My brother’s a surgeon. He’s doing some voluntary work in Sierra Leone. I thought I might go and help out.’ Another sip. ‘Re-establish my credentials as someone who can actually get things right for a change. Contribute something worthwhile to this shitty world. I need some time away from this place. It gets to you after a while.’
Vos decided his phone had been off long enough. When he turned it back on the handset rang straight away. He looked at the number: De Groot. Then he handed it to Bakker and told her to take the call outside.
‘Busy time for you too, I suppose,’ she said when they were alone. ‘Sorry. I’m being . . . pathetic. It’s not like me. I’ve spent most of my working life trying to fix things here. I should have moved on long ago.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
The question surprised her.
‘What’s it to you?’
‘Just curious,’ Vos said with a shrug.
‘Sloth, I guess. Timidity. I quite liked it sometimes. Where else do you get the opportunity to meet that kind of patient? Kids. The worst we have, supposedly. You wouldn’t take a second glance at most of them if you saw them in the street.’
He frowned. ‘But people always looked at the Timmers girls, didn’t they? They were beautiful.’
‘True,’ she agreed, nothing more.
‘I don’t think they murdered Simon Klerk. Or their uncle. That’s impossible.’
He couldn’t make out her reaction.
‘The uncle?’ She put the drink down for a moment. ‘I don’t remember them mentioning him. It was hard to get them to talk about their family at all. Very.’
Vos was struggling to get the chronology right.
‘So you were there when they were first sent to Marken? Right after the hearing?’
She nodded and looked professional again.
