Little Sister

by David Hewson

  His fingers flashed across the keyboard. Some scans came up. Stories from a local English-language paper. Behind were more, obscured by the number of documents on the screen.

  ‘What about those?’ Vos asked.

  ‘Those are in Indonesian or something. I can’t read it. If you want me to get a translator . . .’

  Vos took the mouse and moved one of the clippings to the front. It looked like a court scene. Lawyers in black dress. Police officers. From what he could make out from the headline it was the inquest into the missing Bram Engels. Frans Lambert hiding under an alias.

  ‘This one. How do you blow it up?’

  Rijnders was quiet. He could see it too. There was a figure in the background.

  ‘That’s the woman who was with him on the boat,’ he said. ‘I recognize the name. Lia Bruin. She was . . .’

  He made the picture bigger. It was obvious now. The same face, the same hair. Just older.

  ‘Lotte,’ Rijnders said. ‘Lotte Blom. She gets around, doesn’t she?’ He reached for the phone. ‘I’ll fix an interview.’

  Vos’s hand got to his before he dialled.

  ‘Leave it for now. I’ll deal with everything in the morning.’

  Rijnders looked uncomfortable.

  ‘You’re sure about that?’

  ‘Very,’ Vos said and left for the night.

  88

  Maybe they gave Kim two more rums and Coke. Or three. She wasn’t counting. Sitting in the bar, beneath the leering devils, she was rolling back the years. To the time when they met their mother here after school, listened to her sing, joined in if the band let them.

  Their young voices, tuneful mostly, occasionally scolded for missing a note, echoed in her head. She didn’t hear the rock crap on the radio. Or the three men by her side, whispering among themselves. Sniggering. She knew what that meant, what it led to.

  No one else came in. This concrete block on the edge of Volendam never got busy until nine at the earliest. Only once had their mother taken them back in the evening, to perform, nervously, for a prestige audience. The Cupids, their manager, a bunch of men – all men – she said were important people, from Amsterdam and beyond.

  Was that the night just before it happened?

  She wasn’t sure. Everything from that time had a dreamlike fogginess to it and she was happy for it to stay that way.

  Feeling bleary, stupid and a touch drunk, she sat on the bar stool, clinging to the sticky counter. The slowly circling fans above them stirred the hot summer air. The men were getting nervous.

  Finally the youngest came and nudged her elbow.

  ‘We’re going for a ride. Maybe have a smoke. We’ve stuff they won’t let you use around here.’ He looked about her own age, thin with a straggly moustache and crooked teeth. The sweatshirt he’d just bought over the counter: a grinning devil jabbing his fork into a naked girl screaming with glee. ‘Want to come?’

  ‘Why?’ she asked without thinking.

  You never said an outright yes or no. They didn’t like that. You were supposed to be persuaded. Seduced.

  ‘We can have some fun.’ He nudged her arm again. ‘You’ll love it. We’ll run you home afterwards.’ He looked disappointed she didn’t leap at the offer. ‘Where is home?’

  ‘Round here,’ she said. ‘My dad’s a big man. You wouldn’t want to mess with him. He’d rip your head off and chuck the rest of you in a dyke.’

  The kid looked worried by that.

  ‘But it don’t matter,’ Kim added. ‘He’s dead. So he can’t do anything now, can he?’

  One of the older ones was listening. He was chewing gum and kept grabbing at his crotch.

  ‘We’re not from round here, girl. What you lot get up to doesn’t bother us.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said softly.

  He came closer, eyes running all over her.

  ‘So are you coming or what? Might be a bit of money in it for you. If we think it’s worth it.’

  ‘Will you hurt me?’ she asked in a girlish, faint voice, the kind they wanted to hear.

  ‘Course not,’ he said, like they all did.

  ‘’Kay.’

  They waited until she moved then followed her outside. The car park was at the back, hidden from the road and the seafront. Anything could happen there. It was empty except for a dirty red Ford van with the name of a building company on the side and an address in Alkmaar, a town she’d heard of but couldn’t place.

  The third one had stayed silent. He was older than the rest. They seemed family. Not that they talked much.

  Two of them walked ahead and opened the back doors of the van. Then the third ordered her to climb inside. There was a grubby mattress on the floor, some clothes next to it. Boxes of tools. They probably lived in the thing when they were moving round the country working.

  She came to a halt.

  It was the oldest one behind her. He shoved her in the back and said, ‘Get the fuck in. Don’t play the innocent now.’

  That was enough. She jerked the knife out of her belt, let him see it, then swiped the air ahead of her, swearing just as much as he did, trying to stab him.

  Too quick he took a couple of steps back and the others were on her. The young one twisted her wrist until the knife fell from her fingers. The other kicked her shin so hard she screeched with pain.

  They held her arms behind her as she spat and yelled.

  Not a face at a window in the bar. Not a single devil let alone seven.

  The old one wiped the spittle from his face, glared at her and said, ‘This will be fun.’

  They’d dragged her, fighting, kicking, to the van doors when a huge black open-back truck rolled into the car park and came to a halt beside them, tyres shrieking, kicking up dry dust in the hot late-afternoon air.

  The three of them were slow and didn’t move. Kim saw her sister’s concerned face through the windscreen and immediately felt a familiar, sickening stab of guilt start inside her head.

  A big man got out of one side. Another came out of the other. Tonny Kok had a broken double-barrelled shotgun bent over his arm. Willy just kicked the gravel and looked at the three men in front of them.

  ‘Sometimes strangers here make terrible mistakes,’ he said in a casual, didn’t-care-much kind of way. ‘They think we’re stupid. Or we’re just not bothered. They think this is a town where anything goes. And maybe it does.’

  Tonny took two orange cartridges out of his waistcoat, popped them into the barrels then locked the shotgun and lazily pointed it in their direction.

  ‘But not for you,’ Willy added. He held out his hand. ‘Kim? We’re going home now.’

  She threw off their arms and walked away. Mia came out and hugged her. She was crying. That just made it worse.

  The three builders from Alkmaar were still weighing this up. Maybe a fight was as good as the pleasure of dragging a screaming half-drunk girl down a country lane, then leaving her there like a damaged rag doll for someone else to find.

  Tonny seemed to recognize this so he edged the shotgun just a shade to the left, loosed one barrel down the side the van. The pellets scraped the paint and blew the side mirror clean away. By the time the three men had recovered sufficient composure to look again he was breaking the gun quickly, popping in another cartridge, locking it then grinning at them, ready to start all over again.

  ‘We’re going,’ the old one said and they climbed into the red Ford and drove down the narrow lane, back to the road.

  The barman from the tavern was watching from the kitchen door by the bins. Back by the water a dog was barking and an old woman was looking their way.

  ‘Just a friendly discussion, Koen,’ Tonny called. ‘No need for you to worry, is there?’

  The two of them sat in the middle between the brothers, Mia still hugging her in silence. Tonny picked up some pizzas along the way. Then they drove back to the farmhouse. The day was fading. The green fields of Waterland were taking on the colour of a painting, timeless a
nd perfect. Kim recalled dreaming of this moment in Marken, a memory from childhood, the inexplicable belief that somewhere among the grass and the dykes and the flat and endless horizon a perfect world might be waiting, anxious to be found.

  They went into the dining room. Tonny Kok locked the front and back doors then put the keys in his baggy farmer’s trouser pocket.

  The pizzas were undercooked with rubbery cheese, cheap ham and slimy tomato.

  ‘I’ve done my best to lock that window of yours, girls,’ Tonny said. ‘This isn’t a prison though. Not like Marken. It’s a house. Our home. We can’t stop you running away if you want to. Wouldn’t be right.’

  ‘No,’ Willy agreed. ‘It wouldn’t. Can’t guarantee we can save you another time neither.’

  ‘Where would we go?’ Mia asked. ‘We’re home already.’

  The two brothers thought about that. Willy smiled.

  ‘You are. Both of you.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Kim was crying. ‘I remembered that place. I always thought it was . . .’ She sniffed and looked wretched. ‘My head’s not . . .’

  Mia reached out, took her fingers and said, ‘It’s OK.’ She looked at the brothers. ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s fine,’ Tonny said and Willy nodded.

  They ate in silence. After a while the girls went into the living room and watched TV.

  Tonny and Willy Kok cleared the plates and washed them briskly, without much care. A bachelor routine. One they’d grown used to over the years.

  ‘This can’t go on, Brother,’ Willy said. ‘Now can it?’

  ‘No,’ Tonny agreed. ‘Blood or no blood. It cannot.’

  They found a couple of beers and sat staring in silence for a while.

  Willy fetched two packets of crisps from the kitchen, threw one at Tonny, opened his and said, ‘We told them we weren’t going to get involved? Made that very clear.’

  ‘Ja.’

  Willy stared at him, waiting for more. When it didn’t come he added, ‘Well we are now, aren’t we?’

  ‘I reckon.’ Tonny chinked his glass in a grim, reluctant toast.

  89

  Vos picked up Sam from the bar. The place was almost empty. Sofia was behind the counter. The American boyfriend was at a table reading the paper, a cup of coffee in front of him.

  It didn’t seem the hour for coffee. Or the time for conversation.

  He walked Sam to the Italian slow-food place around the corner and ordered a couple of marinara pizzas to take away. One glass of red wine while he waited, staring at the wood oven as the two men threw pastry around and prodded at the logs. The waitress fussed over Sam as usual. Then it was back to the houseboat, the rickety rear deck table laid with the one plastic spread he owned. The only napkins he had bore Christmas trees, reindeer and dancing Santas. They probably went back to when he’d still had a partner and a daughter and a flat, brick walls, no ducks bobbing outside the bedroom at night. A kind of sanity. And that was an illusion too.

  De Groot turned up just as he was opening a bottle of wine.

  ‘Good timing,’ Vos said and poured him a glass. The pizzas were perfect as always, thin, crispy, slightly burnt at the edges, with buffalo mozzarella and organic Tuscan tomatoes.

  Then two men, one late thirties, the other a decade older, sat opposite one another on a shaky table at the back of the dilapidated houseboat on the Prinsengracht.

  ‘I thought we’d be eating in the Drie Vaten,’ De Groot said. ‘We usually do.’

  Vos looked up and down his stretch of canal. He felt he knew every turn of the waterway, all the bridges, the places the cobbles had failed in the pavement, the shops, the couple of dope cafes, a lot of the people too. It was a neighbourhood. A home.

  ‘Things aren’t usual, are they?’

  The night was still warm. Mosquitoes were swimming in the haze coming off the water. Sam, dozing on the deck, snapped idly at them from time to time. The commissaris loosened his tie. His walrus moustache had too much colour. He must have been using some kind of dye. Vos didn’t mind about getting older. Didn’t think about it much at all. When he was trying to recover his life after his daughter’s disappearance he’d made himself swear never to concern himself about matters he couldn’t possibly affect. Age was one of them. Maybe he’d feel differently when he hit the half-century as De Groot had. But he doubted it.

  ‘Look, Pieter. I know you don’t like the fact I suspended her. I understand you’ve got a soft spot—’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ Vos cut in. ‘It’s not true.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really. Laura Bakker’s not like us. Not jaundiced. Not experienced. Not worn down by all the crap we’ve dealt with. She sees things differently. She reminds me why I came into this job. I need her.’

  De Groot picked up a piece of pizza, examined it in the soft evening light, removed a couple of capers, took a bite, then a swig of wine and said, ‘Well. That’s a shame, isn’t it?’

  ‘I want her back. I want Aisha Refai in the office tomorrow too.’

  The pizza went back on the plate.

  ‘Bakker’s finished. She broke into the property of a prominent politician. Don’t be stupid. Refai’s Snyder’s problem. Ask him.’

  ‘Don’t want to. I’d like Schuurman recalled from this course you sent him on. We need to be working with people we know.’ He hesitated then said it anyway, ‘People we can trust.’

  De Groot really didn’t like that.

  ‘Anything else?’

  Vos pulled the tablet out of his bag and put it on the table.

  ‘No. Just that. Then I can find the Timmers girls. Close this case down. Don’t ask why, Frank. I’m begging.’

  ‘Not . . .possible.’

  He turned on the tablet and pushed it across the table.

  ‘You were in Volendam the day the Timmers family and Rogier Glas were murdered. You were with their manager, Jaap Blom. And Ollie Haas.’

  De Groot picked up the thing and gazed at the picture.

  ‘Where did you get this?’

  ‘From a tape in Stefan Timmers’ studio. Whoever broke in there and whacked Dirk Van der Berg around the head ripped it out of the cassette. I guess he thought we couldn’t recover anything.’ A thought and he had to say it. ‘Where were you on Wednesday night? I tried to call. Nothing.’

  That hurt.

  Are you seriously asking whether I assaulted one of my own officers?’

  Vos shrugged and said, ‘Just wondered where you were. As I said to Jaap Blom: you pay me to ask questions. Don’t complain when I do.’

  ‘I went for a walk in the Vondelpark. Felt like some fresh air. These cases get to us all.’

  ‘On your own?’

  ‘On my own.’ He raised the tablet. ‘The reason I was in Volendam back then was very simple. It was a charity event. We were offering some support. A few prizes. Showing the uniform. Trying to build some community spirit. Never easy in that place.’ He turned the screen to show the picture of him behind the cut-out of the fisherman, holding the winking, struggling fish. ‘If there was a nefarious reason do you really think I’d have allowed myself to be photographed like this?’

  ‘You should have mentioned it.’

  ‘Why? I was gone before that talent contest even started. Back here for dinner. I didn’t know anything had happened until the next day.’

  ‘So why did you delete the files?’

  De Groot put down his glass and looked along the street. He seemed ready to leave.

  ‘What?’

  Vos pulled a printout from his pocket.

  ‘These are the holiday schedules from five years ago. I know Ollie Haas has put his hand up and said he killed those records. But he was in the middle of a two-week break.’

  ‘Maybe he came in the office and did it. You ask him.’

  ‘And I’m sure he’ll say that’s what he did,’ Vos replied. ‘Why, Frank? Just between the two of us.’

  A long silence then. The commissaris p
icked up his glass, drained it, reached down and was about to pat the dog when Sam growled without moving a single furry muscle. He always caught the mood.

  ‘How long have we been friends?’

  ‘Long time. As long as I remember.’

  ‘In that case—’

  ‘You want me to look the other way? Never mention it again?’

  De Groot stayed quiet.

  ‘Is that what friends do?’ Vos wondered.

  Some people walked past. De Groot waited till they were gone and said, ‘You never mixed well, did you? Never went out much except with who you wanted. I’m one of the few people you really know and you don’t even realize it. In most ways you’re smarter than me. Than most of us. But here you are, living in this dump. On your own. Never going to get higher than brigadier. Lucky you’ve still got that. I’ve saved your backside so many times. I got you this job when everyone else had given up on you.’

  Vos laughed.

  ‘This job nearly destroyed me. And now you’ve brought me back to it. Why? So you can watch it destroy me again?’

  ‘Because you deserve it!’ Then, more quietly, ‘It’s easy where you are. Simple decisions. Right and wrong. Up and down.’

  ‘This is easy?’ Vos asked. ‘I’d hate to see hard.’

  De Groot seemed old and vulnerable at that moment.

  ‘You don’t know what it’s like. People ask favours. Innocuous ones that don’t really break the rules. Don’t cost you anything. Don’t keep you awake at night. And if you say no someone else says OK and the shit happens anyway. It’s just that you get brought down with it.’

  Vos poured some more wine. It was a good red. A primitivo from Puglia. Before De Groot and Laura Bakker persuaded him back into the police he might have downed the whole bottle in a mood like this. Then looked for something else afterwards and woken up the next morning, flat out on the cabin floor, head thick with hangover and regret, Sam licking his stubbly face.

  ‘I just want to find those girls,’ he said. ‘Put all this to bed. I don’t want to dig up the past.’ He looked across the table. ‘Truly. Just give me Bakker. Get Aisha in the building. Schuurman—’