Little Sister

by David Hewson

  ‘Simon never mentioned it to you? He didn’t belong to any associations? Men’s clubs? Drinking? Fishing? Football—’

  ‘He worked. He came home. We got on with our lives. Then those two devils took him from me. Why don’t you do something about them?’

  The line went dead. Bakker stared at the phone, puzzled. Too many questions. Too few answers. Then she called Vos and filled him in.

  ‘Good work,’ he told her. ‘Get back here with those things. Let’s see what they add up to.’

  ‘I think they add up to Simon Klerk having sex with someone,’ she said. ‘In Marken. Or close by. On a boat. This Flamingo Club.’ That last irked her more than anything. ‘What kind of thing can that be? I tried Googling it. There’s nothing . . .’

  Vos took a look on the police system and couldn’t find anything there.

  ‘Just come back, Laura. Then we’ll work out where to go next.’

  ‘Where we go next will be here, won’t it? It’ll be in Waterland. Where I am now. If this thing’s to do with boats how far away can it be?’

  He was hesitating, which meant she could win this one.

  ‘Tell you what,’ she said before he could butt in. ‘I’ll take a drive along the dyke. Marken to Volendam. See if there’s anything promising.’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘I’ll try and track down Sara Klerk too. She’s not the kind of woman you can talk to over the phone.’

  There were voices in the background. She could hear Van der Berg trying to say something.

  ‘Fine,’ Vos agreed, suddenly distracted. ‘Do that. Then come home.’

  Laura Bakker wanted to laugh but didn’t. Vos sounded ill at ease.

  ‘Home,’ she said. ‘Right. Will do.’

  53

  Van der Berg had a twinkle in his eye. Vos recognized that. They went to Vos’s desk, out of earshot of everyone, and he laid out what he’d found.

  What happened five years before? In Marken two things. On May the 20th that year a thirteen-year-old female inmate at the institution had been found drowned in the Markermeer, half a kilometre offshore. Ollie Haas had investigated. The death had been recorded as accidental, probably suicide.

  ‘What had the kid done?’ Vos asked.

  ‘Damn all from what I can see. She was in care at a kids’ home in the area. There’d been a row. She’d flown at a visitor she said had tried to molest her.’

  Vos reached for the file under Van der Berg’s arm. The detective retreated, wagged a finger and smiled.

  ‘Not done yet. I got the autopsy report. The files didn’t get canned for her. She was recovered by a fishing boat at nine in the morning, face down in the water. She’d had sex not long before she died.’

  ‘DNA?’ Vos asked.

  Van der Berg sighed.

  ‘Haas’s report said she’d been threatening suicide for some time. The kid had been kept in secure accommodation inside Marken. Somehow she’d got out.’

  ‘You still try to find out who she’d been with.’

  ‘Yes, well. He didn’t.’

  Vos waited.

  ‘Two weeks later the director of the place, Kees Hendriks, was found in the woods. Not far from where Simon Klerk was buried. Hanging from a tree. Haas handled the case. Suicide. Again.’

  Van der Berg put the file on the desk and pulled out a photo. A girl who looked no more than twelve. Sad plain face, straight blonde hair, long and tousled as if she didn’t care. There was a cut above her right eye and a bruise on her temple.

  ‘That was taken after she had the fight in the kids’ home. There’s no record of who she was accusing. If it got to the police . . .’

  ‘Wait,’ Vos cut in. ‘They put her in Marken and never even went to court.’

  ‘Protective custody,’ Van der Berg explained. ‘All legal and above board. Kees Hendriks had signed off the papers personally. Her name was Maria Koops.’

  Vos checked the dates against his notes. On May the 20th the girl was found drowned. Two weeks later the director of Marken seemingly killed himself. Fourteen days after that most of the files on the Timmers case were deleted from the Marnixstraat system, by Ollie Haas according to his confession, covering his tracks in order to keep his pension. Two weeks later in Bali the missing drummer for The Cupids, Frans Lambert, living under an assumed name, drowned in a boating accident.

  One other thing. He checked this on the system and didn’t mind if Van der Berg saw. Frank de Groot was made commissaris just after the Koops girl was found dead.

  ‘They didn’t keep any of her clothes. Anything that belonged to her. Just these . . .’

  A series of photos from the time. The dead girl on the pebble beach at Marken, stiff, arms by her side, next to a police boat. Eyes closed, blonde hair drenched. Around her the boots of men. Then another shot. Haas directing some of the officers. A middle-aged man in a grey suit talking to him. He looked worried.

  ‘That,’ Van der Berg said, ‘is Kees Hendriks. His picture’s in the cuttings from the paper after he killed himself. But here’s something that really baffles me.’

  He placed a photo on the desk. A recent headstone. Date of birth, date of death. A name, Maria Koops. And two lines chiselled in the grey stone.

  Love is like a chain that binds me.

  Love is like a last goodbye.

  ‘That’s from a Cupids song,’ Van der Berg explained. Apparently quite a few people in Waterland like it played at their funeral. If—’

  ‘Wait.’

  Burials cost money. The state certainly didn’t want to foot the bill. Prisoners who died in jail were cremated unless their relatives took over the cost of interment.

  ‘Who paid for all this? The parents?’

  ‘She had a single mother. Couldn’t be traced. The father was never named. I called the church in Volendam. Nice guy there, the caretaker. He went out into the graveyard and took that picture on his phone. That’s her. He looked up the records. An anonymous donation put that kid in the cemetery. Someone still puts flowers on her grave—’

  ‘Get the girl exhumed,’ Vos ordered. ‘Don’t let De Groot know. Leave that to me.’

  ‘Are you serious? We can’t just exhume someone like that. On a whim.’

  ‘It’s not a whim,’ Vos replied, sounding a touch fractious. ‘Get on it . . .’

  ‘We need forensic on side, Pieter. If Schuurman was around maybe he’d be willing. But this new guy? And really . . . why? It won’t help us find the Timmers girls. Or who biffed me on the head in Stefan’s place last night. Will it?’

  ‘More than one story,’ Vos said. ‘Maybe you’re right. It doesn’t mean there’s more than one answer.’

  Van der Berg was thinking about that when Aisha Refai marched across the office, sheets of paper in her hand, a big smile on her face.

  ‘I need a favour from you,’ Vos said when she turned up.

  She slapped the pages on his desk.

  ‘Something interesting?’ she asked.

  ‘Exhumation. Female. Five years in the ground.’

  Aisha grimaced and said, ‘You do know how much paperwork that requires? We have to go to court. Get the relatives on side—’

  ‘There are no relatives.’

  ‘That makes it even more complicated. Put it in writing—’

  Vos threw up his hands in despair.

  ‘I don’t have time for that.’

  ‘Then you won’t get your exhumation order. Do you want to look at what I brought you or not?’

  They did. Preliminary reports on Simon Klerk and Stefan Timmers.

  A summary will do,’ Vos suggested.

  She grimaced.

  A summary? Right.’

  54

  Vera wasn’t getting any better. The ankle was more swollen. It probably was broken, Mia thought when she brought her some coffee and a sandwich for lunch. She watched her pick out the ham and leave the bread to one side. There was a sly and calculating look to her now.

  ‘How are you feeli
ng?’

  ‘Can’t put any weight on this ankle. Going to be as big as a football by tomorrow. I need a doctor, sweetheart. How do I get the rest of my pills?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I’ll tell you how. You get me out of here. Get me to the hospital. Let them fix up my ankle. We’ll all be fine then.’

  Mia kept quiet. They couldn’t be fine. They never were. It was impossible now.

  Trying to make conversation she asked about the past. The Englishwoman told her to look in the top of a set of drawers by the window. Another photo album. She brought it over, sitting on the bed just far enough away to maintain some distance.

  Pictures of a younger, healthier woman. Smiling, happy in the city. A few close to the Volendam harbour. Mia could recognize that even though the reality was somewhat hazy and faded now.

  ‘Don’t suppose you have picture albums, you and your sister.’

  ‘No,’ she agreed. ‘We don’t.’

  That black night a decade ago took everything. Mother, father, sister. The few possessions they valued. She and Kim went from the brink of a golden future, to . . . what? Two wretches the world stared at in horror, afraid to touch, to approach.

  ‘Does that mean you don’t have memories?’

  ‘No. Not exactly.’

  Irene Visser was supposed to have conversations like this. Awkward, probing interviews where she pressed at the part of them that hurt. But that wouldn’t happen now. She was dead, in a road accident. It was on the news. So was Uncle Stefan, not that they knew him as anything much but a name and an angry face, coming round the house from time to time, cajoling their father, sidling up to their mother in ways she didn’t like and they hated.

  ‘I was telling the truth, love. When I said I don’t know who it was pretending to be that sister of yours.’

  ‘Who said they were pretending?’

  ‘Oh Christ.’ Vera sighed. ‘Jo’s dead.’

  ‘I know. What I meant was . . . perhaps it’s someone else called Jo. Someone—’

  The woman chuckled, a smoker’s laugh, sick and old.

  ‘Yeah. Someone who just happens to want you out of Marken. Living here with me. Waiting on God knows what. Sending them messages.’

  Mia said nothing.

  ‘Where’s your sister? I heard her go out. I didn’t hear you two talking.’

  ‘She just left.’

  ‘Think she’s all right? In the head I mean. Don’t doubt you are. Not so sure about her.’ Vera waggled her hurt leg and winced with the pain. ‘Hurts like mad if I just move it an inch or so. Got good reason, haven’t I?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Vera. Really I am. I won’t let it happen again. When—’

  ‘Say someone found him. The bloke who killed them. Your mum and dad and Little Jo. What would you do?’

  Another question the dead Irene Visser had never dared ask.

  ‘No idea,’ Mia said straight away.

  ‘I know what your sister would—’

  ‘Kim’s not well. I’ll look after her. Like I did in Marken. I’ll keep her out of trouble.’

  Vera pushed the empty plate back across the bed.

  ‘You’re a good girl,’ she said. ‘It’s a scandal they locked you two up in that place.’ A long pause and then, ‘You didn’t kill him, did you? That man. Glas. I don’t believe it. Not for one minute.’

  ‘We said we did. What more do you want to hear?’

  ‘But why?’

  Mia Timmers closed her eyes.

  A hot summer night. Music, loud and raucous, on the distant waterfront. Blood in the cottage, in the back alley where a man was cut to pieces in his van. A famous musician. Someone they revered. A few people anyway.

  ‘Because we were to blame,’ she said and took the plates downstairs.

  There was no sign of Kim. No way she could get in touch with her. At some point the money would run out. Vera would be mobile. They’d have to think about what to do, where to go.

  There was never a need to face those decisions before. Someone – their mother, their father, another adult – always made them for them.

  ‘Not now,’ Mia whispered, staring out of the kitchen window at the dark figures in the coffee shop and the busy men in the kebab-bar kitchen.

  She closed her eyes again and heard that old, coarse music, saw the black night, the blood, the face, the mouth of Rogier Glas. Then she sat down at the table, alone for once, and did something she’d never managed when Kim was around.

  Mia Timmers began to cry.

  55

  Laura Bakker’s plan was simple. Get off Marken and drive along the lake road to Monnickendam. Then find the single-track lane called Hoogedijk that ran by the side of the Gouwzee, the inner stretch of the Markermeer, all the way to Volendam. Find Sara Klerk if she could. Talk to the woman. Go back to Marnixstraat.

  There was scarcely any traffic along Zeedijk as it ran by the dyke north. She skirted the centre of Monnickendam, past modern housing estates and industrial units, then turned right for the minor road, by a large cheese farm packed with tourist buses. After that came the tiny harbour of Katwoude and a string of houses. According to the map this was the last sign of habitation she’d see until she pulled into the Marina Park at Volendam four kilometres away.

  The lane was so narrow, with bike tracks on both sides, she wondered how the Kok brothers’ tractor managed to do its job. Beyond Katwoude there was nothing except the odd jogger, a couple of cyclists, fields and fields of pasture and rising maize to the left, the low wall of the dyke on her right.

  She came to a sharp left bend for the final stretch north to Volendam. The tiny entrance was so well hidden she drove past at first. Then, carefully in the narrow road, she reversed fifty metres to look again. There was a track wide enough for a car, a white barrier in front of it with a large sign, ‘Toegang Verboden’. No admittance. Next to it, crooked from age and the wind, was a plastic flamingo no higher than a child.

  Bakker pulled up in front of the barrier, climbed out and looked at the keys from Klerk’s spare set. They were inside a plastic evidence bag now. Someone might shriek at her for doing this. But they weren’t there. She was on her own. This was a chance to prove something.

  One key looked too small. The other more promising. She tried it and unlocked the barrier, pushing at the white pole until it reared upright on the counterweight by the gate. Back in the car she looked at Klerk’s phone. It had picked up some charge so she pulled out the cable and pressed the power button. It booted up quickly and came up with a no signal icon.

  With the mildest of curses she took out her own police-issue phone. That was struggling for coverage too. She was at the edge of the lake, in a dip, a black spot perhaps. Nothing to do but drive on. After about a hundred and fifty metres the narrow shingle lane ended at a small car park, asphalt, well made. Though not, perhaps, well used. There was one set of recent muddy tyre tracks and nothing else.

  A path wound through a small thicket of elder and bramble. She got out and made her way past the shrubs. This was natural land, not a man-made dyke. The ground rose a good few metres with bushes and vegetation quite unlike that of the flat, bare Waterland pasture behind. After a minute she could see the Gouwzee to her right, a good five metres below what seemed to be almost a cliff in miniature. This couldn’t run for long. Further along she could see how the spur of land returned to dyke and the narrow coast lane, beyond that the forest of yacht masts that had to mark the Volendam marina.

  Then the track veered sharply to the right and she saw it. A low building, set above the waterline. Green timber to match the vegetation. Two storeys with a single window to the south side. From the lake it would look almost like a large hut. From the road it was invisible.

  There were steep steps leading down to a single door. Climbing down, Bakker realized what she was seeing. A small boathouse on stilts, with what looked like a timber landing stage at the foot beneath a top floor that might be used for storage. Such a building wouldn’
t seem out of place anywhere near water in the Netherlands. Yet this seemed so well hidden. And as she drew closer she realized the windows in the top floor were closed to the outside world by dark, fully drawn curtains.

  She reached the narrow wooden door on the land side of the building. Simon Klerk’s key fitted perfectly. She turned the lock and pushed at the handle.

  Getting nervous she checked the phone again. Still no signal.

  ‘Well. Can’t say I didn’t try.’

  Then she took out her torch and walked inside.

  56

  It was a narrative that Vos needed, a linear sequence of events that led from one place to the next. Without that he couldn’t picture the crime in his head. The details that Aisha had brought out from forensic were like paint and brushes for an artist. It was his job to wield them and create, from the faint sketches they had, the bigger picture.

  Aisha Refai set out the tools for the task.

  From the autopsy that Snyder, the man from Rotterdam, had overseen it was clear that Simon Klerk had been tied naked to a chair in the Waterland farmhouse. For some time, she said. There were abrasion marks on his shins and arms, signs that he’d struggled against the ropes.

  ‘You’re sure of this?’ Van der Berg asked. ‘This Snyder guy knows his stuff?’

  She looked bashful.

  ‘Snyder’s not the most charming man I’ve met. But he’s OK. He does a good job. Honest. I’ve learned a few things. And . . .’ She was a genial woman, mid-twenties with a scarlet headscarf that just about covered her dark hair. ‘He thought it better this came from me. To be honest I think he might be a bit scared of you two. Who can blame him?’

  Vos pooh-poohed that. She spread out a selection of photos on the table. Klerk’s body in the pebbles on Marken. Laid out on the silver table in the morgue. The abrasion marks were obvious in some close-up photos. Then she showed them the rope. Heavy old sisal.

  ‘It was in the farmhouse already,’ she said. ‘Lying around. We found more in one of the rooms.’