Little Sister

by David Hewson

  The VCR tapes they found in Stefan Timmers’ private studio had gone to a specialist lab that had managed to recreate the video from a few. Most of what they had recovered was unremarkable.

  ‘The kind of stuff people took of their families,’ she said. ‘The seaside. Barbecues. Singing. A few things from the TV. Nothing sexual at all.’

  ‘You mean the Timmers family? Gus. Freya. The triplets.’

  ‘That’s some of it,’ she agreed. ‘The lab said the material came from two different cameras. I’m guessing, but I’d tend to think one of them belonged to Gus. The other was Stefan’s. All the other material Stefan had was later. Maybe it was a hobby of his. Going round just videoing stuff that happened there as far as I can see. Carnivals. Christmas parties. Harmless.’

  The Timmers family were murdered. The videos they owned passed into the hands of the brother. He could see how that might happen.

  ‘The camera he was using recently was different. Digital. It didn’t use tape. He’d just plug it straight into the laptop. Not that we have that of course. It looks like he burned DVDs and kept a backup drive underneath the desk. We found the cables. No drive. All gone.’

  Van der Berg tried to follow this. There was no doubt Stefan Timmers was a criminal. He had a pretty hefty record, and that was probably just scratching the surface.

  ‘So he could have been making porn? We just didn’t find it?’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘In that shack Laura found? The Flamingo Club?’

  She took a deep breath then smiled at him.

  ‘I haven’t been entrusted with any details about that place. Snyder’s keeping it with his people.’

  ‘I thought you liked him?’

  ‘I thought so too. But I don’t. As I said. He sent me home. For pursuing avenues he didn’t know about.’ Her dark finger pointed across the table. ‘Your avenues.’

  There was a long silence between them then she sipped at her coffee and gave him a curious look.

  ‘I like my job. I worked damned hard to get it. I’m good. I could end up running that department, running it well too. Just a few years. A few quiet years.’

  ‘Ah.’

  He went to the counter and got himself a beer. Which was wrong but he could live with it.

  ‘Ambition,’ he said, sitting down again. ‘The privilege of the young. An awkward thing, if I’m honest.’

  ‘Awkward? We’re supposed to aspire to something, aren’t we?’

  ‘We’re supposed to aspire to lots of things. Some of them a bit contradictory. Let me tell you a story.’

  It was short on detail and entirely free of names. A tale of when he was a young detective, planning to take the promotion exams. Dreaming of when he’d be a brigadier like the smart and well-paid men above him.

  ‘Then one day someone told me to go and talk to one of the local hoods. Shake him down, but nicely. It was different back then. A few of the guys were . . . over-friendly with the wrong sort of people. The lines weren’t so clearly drawn. The man didn’t want shaking down. He was there to give me a present.’

  She looked shocked.

  ‘What happened?’

  He laughed and said, ‘I took it, of course.’

  Aisha didn’t utter a word.

  ‘Then I went back to the office. Told my boss. Gave him the envelope. Asked what kind of report I should file.’

  It was a long time ago. The brigadier was now dead. He’d seemed a decent enough man. Large family and all of them went to church on Sundays.

  She waited. Finally she asked, ‘Then what?’

  ‘He took the money and said he’d deal with it. I told him I didn’t follow. I saw the hood. I took the envelope. If anyone was going to start dealing with it . . . should have been me. But no. It wasn’t. After that nothing. Nothing at all.’

  She waited again.

  ‘And?’

  ‘And that was it. Some people kept talking to me. Vos would have but he wasn’t around back then. Some of the others . . . not so much. After a while I realized I was standing at the bottom of the ladder looking up. And it was going to stay that way. Forever.’

  ‘It’s not like that now, is it?’

  He thought about that.

  ‘In the sense that we don’t send out junior officers to pick up bribes for their bosses and see which way they fall . . . no. But sometimes . . .’ This conversation was headed in a direction he dreaded. It was too depressing. ‘The point is the world’s different. When I was your age people looked up to us. They were innocent civilians. On our side. We were there to protect them. And their interests. Some of the guys who took those bribes were pretty good at that job if I’m honest. It wasn’t black and white but it was close. Now . . .’

  He took a long swig of the beer.

  ‘Now the civilians aren’t so innocent. They look at all the shit around them and think . . . if everyone else can get away with it . . . why can’t I? Makes life more complicated. Back then it was money in a brown envelope. Now it could be a wink. A glance away. A file that just happens to get lost. Sorry . . .’ She looked so guilty it hit him too. ‘I don’t mean to burst your bubble.’

  ‘You didn’t.’

  ‘I just wanted you to know.’

  ‘So what do I do? Go in there, face up to Snyder, ask for the stuff back? I can do it now—’

  ‘No, no, no!’ He laughed. ‘He told you to go home, didn’t he?’

  ‘I can’t—’

  ‘Course you can. Go to the movies. Watch TV. Do some shopping. Forget about Marnixstraat for a while.’ He smiled at her. ‘Leave it to me.’

  ‘To you?’

  ‘Yes. Detective Van der Berg. Bottom of the ladder staring up and used to it. Nothing to lose.’

  She was silent. Then she reached for his beer and took a sip. He didn’t know what to say. She didn’t drink.

  ‘The trouble is,’ Van der Berg added, ‘you’re thinking . . . but what if he buries this too? What if I can’t trust him . . .’

  ‘If I thought that I wouldn’t have asked you here, would I?’

  ‘So why the hesitation?’

  Aisha reached into her bag and pulled out the tablet.

  ‘Because Snyder’s right to kick me out. I didn’t just take that stuff to one side to get a look without telling him. Before he got there I managed to sneak a picture off it too.’

  This was so unlike her. She was a cautious, ambitious young woman who almost always played by the rules.

  ‘Why would you do that?’

  She shot him a baleful glance, turned on the tablet and stared at the screen as if the answers to all the problems in the world might lie in a piece of plastic and glass. The young could be like that.

  ‘This is a still from one of the VCR tapes. It’s the day the family were killed. I know that because earlier I found some footage of the talent contest. There was a banner, a year. It looks continuous. It has to be then.’

  Her finger stabbed at the touchscreen. An image came up, the colours bright like a vivid nightmare.

  Along the Volendam harbour some of the gift shops had an extra trick. You could walk in and stand behind cardboard cutouts of traditional Waterland costumes – fishermen, women with pointed white hats and clogs, local yokels. You poked your head through the hole above the shoulders, smiled for the camera, and handed over some money.

  Whoever was holding the video must have followed three men into one of the shops and shot some footage as they got their picture taken.

  Van der Berg gazed at the screen and started to feel much as he had all those years ago when he fetched a brown envelope back to the station and never found out why.

  ‘See the problem?’ Aisha asked.

  ‘Leave it with me.’ He held up the tablet. ‘Can I keep this?’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘Go home. Do like I said. Find something to do.’

  ‘I emailed myself a backup, Dirk. That thing’s out of there whatever Snyder thinks. God knows what else . . .�
��

  He reached over and took her arm.

  ‘Go home, Aisha. Please. Don’t call anyone. I’ll talk to Pieter. We’ll see this through.’

  She got up then and left. He thought about another beer but realized it wouldn’t be a great idea. Things were moving now in ways he couldn’t begin to understand.

  He tried to phone Vos but just got voicemail. Same with Bakker. Then, reluctantly, wishing he could draw himself away from the thing, he picked up the tablet and looked at it again.

  Three cardboard figures in a tourist shop somewhere. Seemingly on the day the Timmers family and Rogier Glas were murdered.

  The first figure was a podgy farmer with a beard and a pipe. A younger Jaap Blom poked his head through, smiling reluctantly as if he was too smart, too superior to be involved in such nonsense.

  The middle one was a woman in a flowing black-and-white dress, dancing legs with clogs, a pointed hat. Ollie Haas’s face was on her shoulders, grinning like the idiot he was.

  The last was a fisherman with big galoshes, a striped shirt, a painted-on pipe and burly arms. He was holding a struggling fish that winked at the camera. The face was thinner, younger. But the moustache wasn’t much different. Darker perhaps.

  Frank de Groot in Volendam hours before death came to the town by the sea. He didn’t look happy to be caught like this. But he was there, no mistake, all the same.

  78

  The pictures were everywhere in the tiny wooden fisherman’s cottage. Pinned to the walls. On the small dining table, the sideboard. The Cupids back when the trio were young and handsome, feted everywhere. On stage, in record company offices holding up gold discs. Signing autographs. Larking around. Then later, the slide in the career mirrored in their ageing faces, the dreadful, needy stabs at fashion in their clothes.

  Bakker wandered over and picked up a framed picture from the table. A young woman, short, tubby, embarrassed in an unflattering miniskirt, standing between Frans Lambert and Gert Brugman. They both had their arms round her. Rogier Glas stood behind holding up a sign: ‘Our Biggest Fan!’

  Bea Arends came over and smiled at it.

  ‘I was too. In my own little world. But the boys had so many others. It was daft to say anyone was bigger than the rest. Back in the old days anyway. By the time it all fell apart there were just a few of us left, holding up a couple of candles in the dark.’

  She took the picture from Bakker’s fingers.

  ‘What a mess I was back then. Lots of prettier girls than me around. Still. Nothing wrong with being born plain. No one’s ever going to say you’re losing your looks.’

  The photo went back on the table.

  ‘Had to put all this stuff in storage for a few years. Went away for a while. Wasn’t going to lose it though. Too precious for that. Want some coffee?’

  They said yes and took a seat on a small sofa while she bustled around in the kitchen. Laura Bakker couldn’t stop smiling at the place. Vos quietly asked why.

  ‘It’s so cute,’ she said.

  ‘Cute?’ the woman called from the kitchen. ‘Don’t think you can talk among yourselves. My hearing’s sharp as a cat’s.’

  She came out with two china cups, biscuits in the saucers.

  ‘I suppose it is cute. This is the last place I’m ever going to live. Had a few . . . turbulent years. That’s all over now. I’m settled. Back in Volendam. Never going anywhere else again.’

  It all came out then. How she’d grown up in the town, followed The Cupids from the time they were just a local band playing the bars. She’d started their first fan club, worked unpaid as its secretary while she did odd part-time jobs anywhere she could find. After a while the band became so big that Jaap Blom formed a management company around them. Professionals came in and took over the fan club. Everything grew bigger and bigger for a time and then, just as quickly, began to slide. No one wanted old pop stars, except old people and lots of them had better things to do.

  ‘Were you here?’ Bakker asked. ‘The night it happened.’

  ‘Ten years ago,’ she said straight away. ‘Summer. They’d put on a talent contest for the carnival. Those Timmers girls should have won it. They were lovely.’

  ‘Why didn’t they?’

  A pause and then she said, very carefully, ‘I wasn’t a judge. Why ask me? To think of it . . . The Cupids at a seaside talent contest. How the mighty were fallen. They’d never have stooped to that in the old days.’

  And now,’ Vos noted, ‘you’re a cook in Marken.’

  ‘Not any more. They let us all go this morning. Eighteen months I’ve been working there. Good job. Won’t find it easy to get another like it. Seems there’s the whiff of scandal about the place.’ She smiled. ‘But then I imagine you know more about that than me.’

  He asked the obvious question: what happened the night of the talent contest? The obvious answer came back: someone killed the Timmers family. The sisters, Kim and Mia, thought it was Rogier Glas and attacked him in his van three streets away.

  ‘Poor lasses. God knows what must have been in their heads when they went into that house of theirs. Freya. Gus. Little Jo. All dead. It wasn’t Rogier who did it. Couldn’t have been. He was a lovely man. Only one of that lot who had a proper musical bone in his body if I’m honest.’

  ‘Who then?’

  ‘No idea. I’d had enough after that. Watching them all go downhill was bad enough. Seeing what happened after Rogier died . . . I upped sticks to Spain. Spent a good few years drinking myself stupid. The world here . . .’ She glanced beyond the neatly parted net curtains. ‘Everything fell apart that night. Couldn’t take it any more. And then . . . then I came back.’

  Bakker asked why.

  ‘No friends. Not real ones. My mum and dad are gone but I know a few people here. Nice folk. Volendammers stick together. We have to. No else is going to look after us, are they?’

  The dog came out of the kitchen still munching on some food and settled at the feet of Vos and Bakker.

  ‘He does like you pair,’ she said with a grin.

  It was always a question of choosing the right moment. He wasn’t sure when that was any more. Not out here, so far from the city, where life seemed to run to a different rhythm, to mores and rules he couldn’t begin to understand.

  Vos got up and retrieved another photo from the wall. A younger Bea with the band back when they looked fresh and smart and gleaming with fame. They were presenting her with a plaque. There was a cutting from the local paper by the side. The story had her real name: Bea Koops.

  ‘No pictures of your daughter,’ he said. ‘Maria. Why’s that?’

  Her round, intelligent eyes started to fill with tears.

  ‘Because I as good as killed her, Mr Policeman. That’s why you’re here. Isn’t it?’

  79

  The sisters ate their eggs and ham. Then Tonny drove out to the shop and came back with yoghurt and ice cream, some pastries, fresh soap and towels. Willy had tidied up their mother’s old room at the back of the farmhouse, lugging a vacuum cleaner in there for the first time in years, finding clean sheets for the bed, wiping the dust and cobwebs from the windows.

  ‘We don’t have guests much,’ Tonny said, scratching his head.

  ‘We’ve never had guests,’ his brother added. ‘Two old fools in galoshes and overalls. Who’d want to visit us? I ask you.’

  Seated at the ancient kitchen table the sisters laughed at that. These two men were a part of their childhood. Figures in the hazy uncertain dream about the life that happened before. Quite what they represented Mia wasn’t sure. All she knew was that her mother trusted the brothers. Enough at times to leave the three of them playing with the chickens at the farm when she was working for Mr Blom.

  The one thing Mia couldn’t put her finger on was the connection. Somehow they were always there, on the sidelines. Coming along to gigs. Clapping. Not quite a part of the family. Just two solitary, slightly shy men who hung around, laughing, joking, drinking beer.<
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  There had to be more to it than that.

  ‘What was it like in that place?’ Tonny asked. ‘Marken?’

  Kim said it was okay and left it there. Mia stayed silent so they kept looking at her.

  ‘It was where we were,’ she said when she realized they needed to hear something. ‘Where they sent us after it all happened.’

  Willy shook his head and stared at the table.

  ‘Terrible days. Our old mum died not long before. We were still reeling from that, weren’t we?’

  The other brother looked glum and angry.

  ‘You never forget losing your mum. Like a part of you goes with her. Never forget it. Never.’

  These two must have been thirty years older than her and Kim. Or more. There was still a bond between them she recognized, one not so far from the one that they possessed. Some of it was blood. Another part, a more subtle one, something shared, perhaps not fully recognized.

  Willy looked straight at her and asked, ‘Do you remember what happened that night? With you? And Little Jo and that?’

  ‘Not really . . .’

  Kim stared at the table then got up and walked out into the hall. The place was like a doll’s house, full of tiny rooms. They didn’t seem to mind where the sisters went.

  What was there left to say?

  We went home and walked into a nightmare.

  We rushed out into the street and there he was.

  It was our fault. The policeman said so. We had something, did something that started it all. And if it wasn’t for us . . .

  ‘No,’ Mia said. ‘We don’t remember.’

  ‘Had other people to remember it for us,’ Kim added from the hall in a low and surly voice.

  Willy didn’t seem satisfied with that. He asked, ‘Did someone—?’

  ‘Stop it.’ Tonny put his big elbow on the table and raised a finger. ‘Stop that now, Brother. The girls are our guests. We treat them that way. Don’t get . . . pushy.’

  Willy scowled then nodded.

  ‘Sorry, lass. But don’t it bother you? Not knowing? Would me—’

  ‘I said stop it,’ Tonny cut in.

  She was owed a question then.