Little Sister

by David Hewson

  Mia Timmers stepped out of the dark. Copper hair. Black clothes. Pale, bloodless. Her sister joined her. They held hands.

  ‘It hurts,’ Kim said in the softest of whimpers. ‘It hurts. It always hurts.’

  105

  A ghost. He was now. The famous man. The singer. The kind one all the kids loved because he penned those beautiful songs, patted them on the head and gave them sweets.

  Love is like a chain that binds me.

  They knew that so well. Had learned it along the way as their mother taught them how to deal with harmonies, to dance, to make men watch with greedy glinting eyes. And what to do when the important ones came asking, looking, checking. Wanting.

  Rogier Glas leaned down from the open door of his van and grinned at them.

  ‘What is it, sweethearts? What’s up?’

  They stood there, Kim hiding the bloody kitchen knife behind her back, nothing to say.

  ‘I’m sorry about the contest,’ he said with a shrug. ‘You should have won it but Jaap had other ideas. Still . . .’ The grin got bigger. ‘There’s another one next week. In the city. Big time. How about you come to that?’ A pause then. ‘I’m running the judging. Not Mr Blom. It’ll be fun.’

  The sisters stayed next to one another, too scared to move or speak.

  He reached into the van and took out a bag of something. They’d seen things like this so many times before.

  ‘Tell you what, girls. Have a sweetie.’ He shook the bag and opened it. All the colours of the rainbow. A few more besides. ‘Take as many as you want. Bit of candy. A few sweeties. Won’t hurt, will it? Won’t hurt a bit. I promise.’

  That was all it took. Kim flew at him knife out, stabbing manically, the bloodied blade flashing left to right. He fled into the van. She followed.

  What happened next was a nightmare. Red and vivid.

  When it was over they stayed there, waiting. Minds blankly fearful, wondering if any of this could be real.

  106

  Ollie Haas’s face came up, angry and bitter.

  ‘I told them all this! I told them!’

  ‘And who’d trust lying scum like you?’ Lotte Blom asked. A nod to her husband. Any more than we’d believe him.’

  Bea Arends looked shell-shocked.

  ‘Not Rogier. Never Rogier. He was a diamond. I don’t believe it. He wouldn’t touch—’

  Jaap Blom threw back his bruised and bloody head and laughed.

  ‘Of course he never touched them. He wasn’t on Freya’s list. Jesus . . .’ There was something new in his face. Despair. Resignation. ‘It’s always the men, isn’t it? Always . . .’

  ‘Who was on her list?’ Bakker asked.

  ‘Anyone she wanted to get her talons into.’ He glanced at Lambert. ‘Frans knew what was going on. Why do you think he scuttled off like that?’ Then a look at Brugman. ‘Gert was too drunk to notice. Rogier too damned naive. Promoters. Record producers.’ Then, more quietly, ‘Managers. People who mattered.’

  Lambert said in a quiet, shocked voice, ‘Freya told me she was going to ruin us, Jaap. Wouldn’t even say why. We never . . .’

  Blom laughed in his face.

  ‘You still hopped it, didn’t you? And you never thought to ask? How it all happened? Three semi-pro bums from Volendam. Could barely play a note until I came along and schooled you. Got the work. The deals. Found people to clean up your act. You were dead in the water, the lot of you. Out of date. Old. Pathetic . . .’ His voice died away. ‘If I hadn’t done something . . .’

  ‘How many others?’ Lotte Blom asked. ‘Over the years.’

  ‘You think I counted?’ he bellowed. ‘For God’s sake . . . why? If—’

  ‘Little Jo was going to tell Dad.’ Mia’s clear sad voice hushed them all. ‘Tell him everything we’d done. What Mum . . . asked. To get us out of there.’

  Ollie Haas shook his bloodied head.

  ‘This pair killed Rogier Glas like I said all along.’ More quietly then he added, ‘Gus Timmers stabbed his wife and his daughter. After that he put the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. It was as clear-cut a murder-suicide as you’re likely to get. His prints on the gun. Her prints . . .’ He nodded at Kim. ‘On the knife we found in Glas’s van. You wanted the truth. There. Happy now?’

  Bakker leaned down and looked into his face.

  ‘Then why did you hide it?’

  He struggled against the ropes and glared at Jaap Blom.

  ‘Because this one and his pals made me! I wasn’t part of their mucky schemes. If it had been left to me I’d have thrown every last one of them in jail. Don’t think . . .’ His fierce stare was on Vos now. ‘Don’t think for one moment you’d have done differently either. They got friends. Big men. Try saying no to them.’

  Haas tried his best to sit upright and look at them: Bea Arends, Lotte Blom, Brugman, Lambert and Willy Kok.

  ‘That’s the truth. If I’d put it down as a murder-suicide someone would have started poking around asking awkward questions. The social people were sniffing about already. All they needed was an excuse. As long as there was an inconclusive investigation they said we’d keep it away from Jaap and his mates. If we left the whole thing unresolved some day it would just fade away . . .’

  Haas glanced at Mia and Kim, two hunched figures still to the side of everyone.

  ‘I did as I was told. They didn’t give me a choice. I put these two girls away like they deserved. Got a promise those bastards would pack in their mucky games. No more of this bloody—’

  ‘But they didn’t, did they?’ Bea Arends interrupted. ‘They murdered our kid. Killed Director Hendriks when he was going to rat on them. Five years ago. Not ten. Five . . .’

  Haas nodded.

  ‘I never knew about any of that. Not till . . .’ He turned to the man next to him. ‘You tell them, Jaap. It’s your story. Not mine.’

  107

  The boat that ferried girls from Volendam to the Flamingo Club bobbed up and down on the night waves, lit up just enough for safety, not so much that it was obvious. It was three in the morning. Kees Hendriks was at the wheel. Jaap Blom sat in the back trying to interest the girl in a smoke.

  She crouched on the hard deck crying. A small bundle of misery who seemed to hate herself more than she hated them.

  Guilt was never far away at these moments. But the heat and the excitement that started with Freya Timmers’ games in Volendam five years before . . . they stifled it. Usually.

  ‘Don’t want to do this,’ the girl said finally. ‘Don’t want to go to that place any more. With you two. With Simon. With anyone.’

  Without thinking Blom reached out and touched her bare arm. She recoiled instantly. The night was hot. The evening had been . . . difficult. He hadn’t meant the gesture to be anything other than comforting. These were games. Kids played them. Lost kids, abandoned kids. What else did they have?

  ‘OK. That’s your choice.’

  ‘My choice?’ she asked and in the dim light from the wheel-house he could see such hatred and anger in her young face it made him sick for a moment. ‘My choice?’

  ‘You’ll get over it,’ Blom said and told himself that was true. Then he went to the wheelhouse to find his cigarettes.

  A few seconds later he heard the splash. No cry. Not a word. It seemed impossible her slight frame could make a noise so loud. Hendriks, a better boatman than he’d ever be, was yelling orders in an instant. Lobbing a life buoy into the dark water. Grabbing a boat hook and torches.

  Hour upon hour they flailed like fools in the black night. Finding nothing at all.

  108

  ‘She jumped,’ Blom said, eyes closed, voice close to a whisper. ‘She jumped from the back of the boat. I couldn’t stop her. I didn’t even see.’

  He gazed up at Lambert standing over him, the bat raised again.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that. I didn’t put her in Marken. You did. Both of you. And now you’re trying to fool yourself this is all
about her.’ A glance at the Timmers sisters. ‘About them.’ A grim, short laugh. ‘Yeah. Right.’

  He was blinking, trying to focus.

  ‘And you didn’t call anyone?’ Bakker asked.

  ‘What was the point? She was gone. It was dark. Three in the morning. Black. Endless. We kept looking till daybreak. It was . . .’

  ‘You as good as murdered her,’ Bea Arends broke in.

  ‘Your kid should never have been in that place!’ he bellowed. ‘Where were you? Drinking yourself stupid in Spain. While her father . . .’

  He squinted at Lambert.

  ‘Where were you, Frans? How could you just leave her like that? And then when it all goes wrong you come back and think . . . Yeah. I’m the big man. I can put all our consciences straight. Just find someone to blame.’

  Blom leaned forward on the old wicker chair.

  ‘Let me tell you something. We paid. You never lose that voice in your head. Never. We told ourselves we’d stop then. Hendriks couldn’t handle it. He went to pieces.’ A shrug beneath the ropes. ‘Then he killed himself. That’s the truth. No one touched him. We weren’t . . .’ He was about to say something then checked himself. ‘No more visits to Marken. No midnight rides across the meer. Irene Visser kind of guessed what happened but I managed to keep her sweet. Veerman too. They’d have lost everything if it had all come out. None of us knew that idiot Klerk was still playing those games. I’d have done something if—’

  Lotte Blom marched across, drew back her arm and struck him hard across his bloodied face.

  ‘You promised,’ she yelled. ‘You lying bastard . . .’

  ‘Like you promised you’d stop seeing Frans. You don’t know what it’s like. With your little lives. Your puny dreams. Not me. I got offered things every day. Things you couldn’t imagine. And you know who it came from? The likes of you. All staring at me now as if I’m the only villain here. Do you think I went to Freya asking for her girls? We got them on a plate. Lots else besides. All from you—’

  Lotte Blom withdrew something from her jacket pocket and he fell silent. It was a small handgun, the barrel now pointed straight at her husband’s temple.

  ‘The weapon,’ Vos said carefully, only to see the snub nose briefly point his way.

  Blom looked up at her, eyes half closed, defiant still.

  ‘Go ahead then, Lotte. If it makes you feel good. If it means you can go home and tell yourself none of this was anything to do with you and Frans and Freya at all. You’re all the bloody innocents here. If it—’

  Bakker had edged towards her, feet scuffing quietly through the straw on the barn floor. Before Vos could get there she launched herself at the woman’s outstretched arm. The weapon went up. One bullet fired into the metal roof, rattling round like a pebble in the tin. Then the handgun slipped from Lotte Blom’s fingers and tumbled to the ground.

  Vos was there by then. The two of them dragged her to the floor, Bakker reaching round for the cuffs, Vos bringing the woman’s wrists round ready to be tethered.

  ‘Can’t even manage that, can you?’ Blom yelled, lurching to his feet still tethered to the chair, cursing, trying to reach her.

  De Groot’s armed entry team, on tenterhooks already, reacted to the gunshot straight away. On cue they burst through the barn doors yelling, weapons aimed, combat gear in place.

  Terrified chickens flapped their wings beyond the tin walls. Straw motes flew in tiny whirlwinds in the hot dense air.

  ‘It’s fine,’ Vos started to say, getting to his feet. ‘No need—’

  A single shot. Jaap Blom’s head jerked up with the impact of the bullet and his hefty body fell backwards with the chair. Then four more until the gun rattled empty to the desperate trigger.

  Bea Arends stood above him, the discarded handgun now in her shaking fingers, a look of shock and surprise, satisfaction mixed with shame, on her taut, white face.

  One groan, one last breath from the bloody mess on the grimy floor, head back, mouth open.

  ‘There,’ she said, slinging the weapon at the bloodied body before her. Masked men were drawing all around them, rifles up, yelling all the time. ‘That’s justice now. Done.’

  ‘On the floor all of you. Hands on head,’ the lead officer bellowed.

  Bakker was turning to tell him to shut up. Vos got to her, made her do it.

  Down in the hard straw they lay, just as they were told, faces turned to one another. Jaap Blom was no more than a footstep away.

  Dead eyes open. Gone.

  109

  Outside lay chaos. Ambulances, weapons officers armed to the teeth slowly standing down after the tense anticlimax in the barn. The first of what would doubtless be a succession of TV crews was trying to push past the ‘don’t cross’ tape some uniform officers were placing at the entrance to the Kok brothers’ yard. A couple of medics had Ollie Haas on a stretcher and were ferrying him into an ambulance. Jaap Blom was beyond help. That was obvious from the outset. A corpse getting cold in the old barn, surrounded by medics and forensic officers assembling the tools of their trade.

  Bea Arends was the first to be taken away, cuffed inside a custody van all to herself. Laura Bakker was helping shepherd the others to the edge of the cluttered yard to await a larger vehicle, Tonny and Willy Koks whining all the way.

  There was a conversation coming and Vos dreaded it. Finally Frank de Groot walked over.

  ‘Well this was a mess, I must say. Could you really not stop that woman? What the hell did she think she was doing?’

  Vos looked at him and thought it best to keep quiet.

  ‘Am I speaking out of turn?’ De Groot wondered.

  He told him then. About Veerman’s flight to Istanbul and the documentation he’d left behind. The lost reports. The images and the visitor lists to Marken. The kind of names mentioned there.

  ‘Ah,’ De Groot said when Vos was finished. Nothing more.

  ‘Busy times ahead, Frank.’

  ‘I believe we covered the general principles of this last night,’ the commissaris said eventually.

  Vos shrugged.

  ‘Sometimes you just can’t keep a lid on things. Doesn’t matter how hard you try.’

  De Groot thought for a moment.

  ‘Blom’s name appears on those documents you got from Veerman? Frequently?’

  ‘From what I’ve seen,’ Vos agreed.

  ‘Well there’s your solution.’ He made a cutting gesture with his right hand. ‘There has to be a limit somewhere. We go so far, no further. No fallout . . .’

  ‘I want Haas,’ Vos broke in. ‘I want Kaatje Lammers in an interview room answering for that Englishwoman’s murder. Anyone else on that list I can nail.’

  De Groot looked at the confusion around them. It wasn’t getting much better. Too many people. No one seemingly in charge.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be running this show?’

  ‘Now?’ Vos demanded. It was almost a shout. Some of the nearby officers were starting to notice. ‘When you’ve been trying to rein me in ever since those kids went missing.’

  ‘Those kids murdered a man.’

  ‘Do you know why?’

  ‘No. Do you?’

  ‘Because we failed them. God knows how many more too.’

  ‘Wait . . .’

  ‘No.’ Vos shook his head. ‘I’m not waiting any more. Haas is in an interview room as soon as he’s well enough. I’m opposing bail. We need counselling for those girls. I want a team—’

  The commissaris held out a hand and said something about taking things steadily.

  ‘Too late, Frank. This show is going to run and run.’

  ‘Really.’ His voice stayed calm and quiet. ‘Think about this before you go any further. There were no miscarriages of justice here. No one was convicted of something they didn’t do. No fitups. No one got away with anything that happened that night.’

  Vos almost shrieked.

  ‘Not that night. Just the rest of the time because of who they were
. Kim and Mia Timmers and their sister were kids. Little girls—’

  ‘Little girls getting pimped by the mother, a Volendam tart.’

  ‘And that makes it OK?’

  De Groot came closer, jabbed a finger in Vos’s face.

  ‘Are you suggesting I was part of this? Just because I had my picture taken down there? I told you. I was there on duty. I knew nothing about what went on. Five years later I went along with removing those files on the strict understanding . . . that was all over. Done with. In the past. Never going to happen again. Besides, there was no guarantee we could have got anyone in court. No witnesses. A good lawyer would have wiped the floor with us—’

  ‘Don’t tell me these things, Frank. I shouldn’t hear them.’

  De Groot was back to being commissaris again. Wily and in charge.

  ‘You’re out of your league. You can pursue this as far as you wish so long as it travels no higher than I allow. I’ll make sure Ollie Haas goes along with that. Blom’s dead. Dump what you can on him. But there are limits and if you cross them I will know.’ A pause then, ‘You can’t put everyone in jail. If you try they’ll come for you. Trust me. I’ve been there.’

  The second custody van still hadn’t turned up so Frans Lambert and the Kok brothers were being bundled into the back of a patrol car, cuffed, the uniform officers pushing down their heads the way they usually did. Laura Bakker was arguing with the men, demanding gentler treatment. Willy Kok had started crying openly, gazing round the wrecks of the farmyard as if he’d never see them again.

  ‘We are fine on this?’ De Groot asked again. ‘I’m talking from experience here. You can only tilt at so many windmills, Pieter. Go too far and they start to tilt at you.’

  It took a while but finally Vos said, ‘We’re fine, Frank. Just get out of here.’

  The commissaris squeezed his arm.

  ‘I know. It’s unpleasant. That’s life.’

  ‘Please go.’

  De Groot didn’t move.

  ‘When this is under wraps we should have a chat. I’ll see what I can do for you. Quietly. Bakker too. Van der Berg . . . I don’t know. If only he could stay off the beer. There are pay grades I can play with maybe. Leave it to me . . .’