Little Sister

by David Hewson

  Vos stared at him and said, ‘A sign?’

  ‘Did I say something?’ the detective asked.

  60

  The halfway house was nothing like Marken. The staff wore ordinary clothes. There were no locks on the doors, no obvious security.

  No need, the man who introduced her to the place said. Did she understand why?

  Oh yes, Kaatje Lammers told him earnestly. Very much so. It was all a question of trust.

  They gave her new clothes and she put on the ones she liked best: blue jeans, black boots, a red patterned cotton shirt. Then she looked at herself in the mirror. All in a room of her own giving out onto the tree-lined street. A single bed, a tiny shower and toilet. The TV worked though the channels were limited. The Internet was downstairs, a single PC in a study with strict rules on where to roam and how much time to spend there.

  The residents were all temporary, the man said. If things went well she’d be here a few weeks, no more.

  ‘And after that?’ she asked.

  ‘After that you go back to your family,’ he said too quickly. Then he apologized. He hadn’t read the file. In the reception office he pulled up something on his laptop and went through it, murmuring to himself.

  ‘My family?’ she asked.

  ‘Still reading,’ he said and waved at her to be quiet.

  She knew that look. Puzzlement. Something was wrong. It always turned out that way.

  ‘Family,’ she repeated.

  ‘I need to look into this, Kaatje,’ he said. ‘Did Marken tell you why you were being released?’

  ‘Should they?’ she asked, trying to sound sweet.

  He typed away on the laptop. Sending an email she guessed. Veerman was a stiff old bastard. Someone who always wanted to play by the rules. Perhaps just once he’d tried to bend them and discovered he didn’t quite know how.

  She waited. His face had turned grim.

  ‘I will behave,’ she promised. ‘I’ll do anything you ask. I’m . . .’ It was a struggle not to laugh. ‘I’m better. The doctors said so. All those things in the past. I was a kid—’

  ‘We’ll look into it,’ the man cut in. ‘Everything will be fine. Make yourself at home. Use the facilities. This is a liberal facility. We trust you to be responsible, Kaatje. Trust is important. Once broken . . .’

  A wan smile then.

  ‘Once broken?’ she asked.

  ‘Then things change,’ he answered.

  ‘Just the once?’

  ‘Just the once. We’ll know. You understand that?’

  She nodded.

  ‘I’ll be on my very best behaviour then.’

  A single small act of rebellion could bring this to an end. They’d said things like that in Marken. Did you clean your teeth? Did you muck out your room? Do you understand what privileges are? And how easy it is to lose them?

  Most of all . . .did you go where the men told you and submit to what they wanted?

  Sometimes. But not always. If you gave in completely you lost yourself in their wishes. What they stole from you wasn’t just any precious innocence you still possessed. It was your identity. The thing that lived inside.

  Kaatje went to the window and stared out across the tree-lined street. She was there in the shadows of the alley. Purple-red hair and a fake black leather jacket. They weren’t allowed to look like that in Marken. Everything cool was banned.

  Kim was looking up at her. Kaatje did her subtle finger wave.

  No locks. No obvious boundaries. Didn’t need them, did they? And out there were the Timmers sisters free as birds. Life, as always, was innately unfair.

  She went downstairs. The man was in his office typing away. Finding something wrong the way they always did. Not that it was needed. Somewhere, somehow Kaatje knew she’d fail the system, and when that happened the inevitable followed: incarceration, cruelty, despair.

  He was right about one thing. The door was unlocked. She walked out into the quiet street. The girl across the way came and stood beneath a lime tree opposite, leaning against the trunk.

  Kaatje wandered over, looked at her and felt her purple-red hair.

  ‘You’re beautiful,’ she said and kissed her quickly on the cheek then, just for fun, nibbled at Kim’s earlobe.

  ‘Don’t do that!’ Kim giggled. ‘We’re not in Marken now.’

  ‘No.’ Kaatje looked back at the red-brick house. ‘But I’m still in jail. They make me stay there.’ She stared at Kim. ‘Won’t be long before it starts all over again.’

  Breathless, excited, perhaps frightened, Kim took hold of her and whispered, ‘We have a house. A place. You can come. You can stay.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘Who knows?’ Kim answered. ‘It’s there now. It won’t be forever. What is?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  She kissed Kim again, more gently this time. A lover’s kiss. Soft and intimate.

  ‘Don’t do that,’ Kim said and meant it.

  ‘What’ll Mia say? She hates me.’

  ‘She doesn’t hate you. Besides . . . she does as she’s told.’

  ‘’Kay,’ Kaatje said and off they walked, hand in hand, down the narrow street, across the busy canalside road, over the bridge to Leidseplein.

  61

  ‘What if it wasn’t anything to do with the girls?’ Vos asked. ‘If they just left him there? Trussed up, naked. A kind of lesson. Then they went into the city and that was it.’

  Van der Berg groaned and thumped his fist on the table.

  ‘Because that’s not possible. He was their uncle. He had the car. The knowledge. The gun. And also . . .’ The detective waved his finger in the air as if he’d won the argument. ‘How would someone else know? A naked man stuck out in the middle of nowhere?’

  ‘Visser’s phone—’ Vos started.

  ‘Made just the one call,’ Van der Berg broke in. ‘To the wife and he didn’t get through. Strange number so she didn’t twig. I’m sticking to my theory. He was doing that when the sisters and Stefan marched in. Then . . . bang.’

  Vos was rifling anxiously through the documents.

  ‘If you told me what you’re looking for, Pieter,’ Aisha said.

  ‘The call log.’

  It took a while but eventually she found it. He ran through the lines. No one had got round to looking at this closely. There didn’t seem any good reason and they simply didn’t have the time.

  He found the entry, placed the sheet on the table, stamped his finger on it.

  ‘That’s the call. Made from Waterland at twenty-one minutes past eight in the evening.’

  ‘And?’ Van der Berg demanded.

  ‘Bereaved wife. Upset. Angry. We just took her word. We never checked the duration.’

  The call had connected for two minutes and thirteen seconds.

  ‘Could that be wrong?’ he asked Aisha. ‘Or does it mean what I think it means? He found Visser’s phone and called home. He got through. He talked to her.’

  ‘He talked to her,’ she agreed.

  Van der Berg nodded, a big light coming on.

  ‘If you wanted to kill your philandering husband and blame it on the Timmers girls what better way to do it than hire their uncle for the job? Then shoot him too.’

  Vos was on the phone already.

  ‘Laura’s out there,’ he said, listening to it ring. ‘She was going to try and talk to Sara Klerk. I want her pulled back.’

  They waited a moment then Van der Berg went to the computer and called up the location system. Vos gave up. There was no answer.

  ‘Where is she?’ he asked.

  Van der Berg finished typing in Bakker’s details, looked at the screen and mumbled, ‘That can’t be right.’

  There was a map of Waterland, then the Gouwzee running out between Marken and Volendam. Laura Bakker’s position showed up as a green dot moving slowly across the water, further and further from land.

  Vos grabbed his jacket and told Aisha to order out a police boat from Volend
am.

  ‘Get a helicopter in the air too.’

  ‘What are they looking for?’ she asked.

  Van der Berg was checking his gun, grabbing the car keys.

  ‘A boat,’ Vos said then ran for the stairs.

  62

  They were somewhere out on the water in the cruiser from the hideout called the Flamingo Club. Face down on the composite deck, hands tethered with nautical rope, feet still free, Laura Bakker tried to think.

  No point in yelling. The lake would be empty on a weekday morning. All she could do was argue. When her head cleared enough she rolled over, looked up. Sara Klerk was at the wheel of the boat, hand on the shiny silver throttle, shotgun set against the cabin window to her side. The green jut of land on which the boathouse sat was receding faster than seemed possible. Soon they’d surely be beyond the Gouwzee in the vast and empty Markermeer.

  Bakker shuffled upright against the wheelhouse and tried to make herself heard over the sound of the engine.

  ‘Sara!’

  The woman turned for a moment and shook her head.

  ‘Sara!’

  Think this through, she told herself. Most of all . . .stall.

  ‘You can’t do this,’ Bakker shouted. ‘Marnixstraat know where I went. A team was following me out there.’

  The Klerk woman glared at her.

  ‘You’re lying. Sticks out a mile.’

  ‘They’ll find me.’

  She laughed.

  ‘Don’t kid yourself. You know how big this lake is?’

  ‘I know what your husband did,’ Bakker yelled.

  Sara Klerk eased the engine into a steady cruise.

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘I know he was abusing those girls.’

  She notched the throttle back. The engine fell away more. This was bad.

  ‘Everyone will sympathize—’ Bakker began.

  Furious, Sara Klerk grabbed the shotgun and pointed it straight in her face.

  ‘Do you think I want your damned sympathy? What use is that to me?’

  ‘Shoot a police officer and you’ll never set foot out of jail. Kill a faithless abusive husband and—’

  ‘Didn’t just kill him, did I? That pig Stefan . . .’ But she put the gun to one side and blipped the throttle up again. ‘Point taken though.’ She laughed. ‘No need for a gun out here, is there?’

  The cruiser picked up speed as Sara Klerk began to talk. A solitary gull swooped over the boat thinking maybe there were fish getting gutted. It made one low pass then left.

  Soon the salt smell of the greater lake was all around them, nothing else at all.

  63

  Mia heard the front door, left Vera and went downstairs. Kim was there grinning. Kaatje Lammers by her side.

  ‘What—?’ she started to ask.

  ‘I rescued her,’ Kim said. ‘I set her free.’

  Kaatje started wandering round the ground floor, grinning at everything there: the computer, the cosy living room, the kitchen. She went to the fridge and took out a beer.

  ‘You look different too, Mia,’ she said, cracking the can.

  ‘We have to look different. They’re searching for us.’

  Kaatje raised the can in a toast.

  ‘And now they’re searching for you,’ she added in a quiet, worried voice.

  ‘Not yet,’ Kaatje added. ‘Veerman sent me out to that place you were supposed to go. The halfway house. Near the museums. Daft idiot running it. He doesn’t lock the doors. We can go wherever we like.’

  This didn’t ring true at all.

  ‘I can pop back home tonight if you like, Mia. If you don’t want me here.’

  ‘We do,’ Kim cut in. ‘You can stay. As long as you want.’

  ‘Vera—’ Mia began.

  ‘She’s a bloody old bitch.’

  ‘Who’s Vera?’ Kaatje wondered.

  Before Mia could get in, Kim told her. Everything.

  ‘Vera’s getting better,’ Mia said. ‘We have to . . . we have to think this through.’

  Kaatje laughed at that.

  ‘What’s there to think about? You’ve got a place. You’ve got money, haven’t you? Make the most of it. They’ll take it away soon enough.’

  Mia couldn’t think of anything to say. The two of them wandered off, Kim showing her around the house. Downstairs only. She was staying away from the upstairs floors, and that was good.

  Something was wrong here. Mia went up the steep staircase to their room and found the bag they’d brought with them from Marken. There were papers about the halfway house Klerk was supposed to take them to. An address, details. And conditions. What would happen when they arrived.

  Mia scrabbled through their clothes trying to find the envelope. It had to be there somewhere.

  64

  Out in the endless expanse of Waterland, blue light flashing, Van der Berg at the wheel, hooked through by voice to the helicopter about to get airborne and the police boat leaving Volendam, Vos struggled to picture what was happening.

  She was in a boat. Sara Klerk was at the wheel. The green dot kept moving out from land. Now it was past the long finger of dyke stretching out from Marken, headed for the vast grey emptiness of the Markermeer.

  ‘I should never have let her go out there on her own,’ he grumbled.

  ‘Oh for God’s sake,’ Van der Berg cried. ‘Don’t blame yourself for every damned thing that comes along.’

  ‘She shouldn’t—’

  ‘It was a routine call. No need for two officers. No one had a clue—’

  The helicopter crew called in. They were airborne. Control patched Vos through to the patrol boat. It was still in the Gouwzee, tracking the moving dot everyone could see on their screens.

  ‘How long?’ Vos demanded. A crackle across the radio. ‘How long?’

  ‘Ten minutes,’ the helicopter pilot said.

  ‘Same here,’ the boat replied.

  Silence then.

  ‘Where exactly am I going?’ Van der Berg asked.

  ‘The harbour,’ Vos replied. ‘They’ll bring her back there.’

  One way or another, he thought.

  65

  Kaatje had opened more beer. Kim was with her. The two of them looked ready to get drunk. Mia had found the letter and read it through, then checked on the computer just to make sure.

  The house was too hot for comfort. The atmosphere was wrong. She walked into Vera’s room and found the woman sleeping. Her ankle was barely swollen now. It wouldn’t be more than a day before she could get around. Perhaps less. And then?

  They had no plans, no ideas, no direction for the future. The simple promise of freedom was insufficient. If they could solve any one of the riddles surrounding them that might be different. But Mia had no idea how to approach that problem. She doubted the dilemma even occurred to her sister.

  Still, a decision had to be made and if it meant a confrontation that was that.

  She walked into the kitchen and looked at the two of them, the empty cans on the table. Kim was bleary-eyed, Kaatje mouthy and full of herself.

  Mia thought about her clothes. The red shirt. Long blue jeans that almost reached the ground.

  ‘What did they say?’ she asked. ‘When they took you to the safe house?’

  ‘Just what I told you. I can do what I like now. They trust me.’

  Kim giggled at that.

  The letter they’d been given went on the table.

  ‘They told us we’d have conditions,’ Mia said. ‘Times we could go out. Never more than an hour or there’d be trouble.’

  ‘Said the same to me,’ Kaatje agreed.

  ‘They were sure they’d know,’ Mia went on. ‘They’d tag us. They could tell we’d gone. And where we were.’

  Kaatje put down her beer.

  ‘A tag? What’s a tag?’

  She crossed her legs then. Mia looked at her long blue jeans. Then she crouched down by the table and tried to roll up the bottom of the left leg. Kaatje snatched
her feet away and snapped, ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

  Kim had put her beer down too.

  ‘Just looking,’ Mia said. ‘I’d like to see.’

  ‘See what?’

  ‘What?’ Kim added.

  ‘See what’s there, Kaatje. If they tagged you.’

  The girl got up, stroked Kim’s garish hair, grinned, went to the back window by the cutlery drawer and stared out at the kebab bar and the coffee shop behind. Summer in Amsterdam. Mosquitoes were rising everywhere. She squished one on the window, slowly, pulling off its wings while the creature struggled.

  ‘You pair kill me,’ she said, to the glass not them. ‘Stuck up little cows. No better than me or anyone else. But you thought that . . .’

  ‘We didn’t,’ Mia replied, going to Vera’s handbag, emptying out all the money there, stuffing it into her pocket. She’d packed the case Simon Klerk had given them, the one with Disney characters on the side. It sat in the hall, near the front door.

  Kaatje turned. There was a kitchen knife in her hand.

  ‘You stopped playing their games, didn’t you? Simon told me . . .’

  ‘That was our choice,’ Mia insisted.

  ‘We thought we could use it. To get us out of there,’ her sister added. A promise. Do that. Get this.’

  ‘Yeah?’ Kaatje came closer to the two of them, the blade shining under the bright sunlight. ‘Well I’m just a born scrubber, aren’t I? Gave in every time. And where are we now? You two out here, doing what the hell you like. And me . . .’

  She put her right leg up on the spare chair by the table then rolled up the jeans around the ankle. A grey plastic bracelet was locked there, what looked like a watch without a face stuck on the side.

  ‘One hour,’ Mia whispered. ‘When did you walk out?’

  ‘Bit more than that,’ Kaatje said with a grin.

  Mia stared at the knife and said, ‘Kim. The bag’s by the door. We’re leaving. Just the two of us.’