by Mark Hobson
Rolling over, he reached for Kaatje, seeking her warm body. But when his arm touched the empty mattress alongside him he raised himself on one elbow, and twisted around to flick on the bedside lamp.
Blinking his eyes and scratching the stubble on his chin, he threw back the covers and came to his feet, wondering where on earth she was. The bedroom door was wide open, hence the chilly draught. She must have gone to the bathroom, he guessed, but she should have woken him. She shouldn’t be stumbling around in a strange house, not until she had a better sense of the layout.
“Kaatje!” he called, still half asleep, and he shuffled tiredly out through the door in his shorts and t-shirt.
The bathroom was next door, at the end of the passage and thankfully away from the top of the stairs, and he gently pushed open the door, softly calling her name. Pulling the light cord, he saw the tiny room was empty, and so he turned and headed along the landing. He walked by the doorway to the kitchen and around the wooden pommel at the head of the flight of steps, thinking she must be in the lounge: perhaps she couldn’t sleep and had decided to pour herself a drink.
He heard a faint noise then, a tiny scraping of bare feet on the carpeted floor behind him, and he was just about to turn back when there came a terrible screeching that made him jump out of his skin. His heart missed a beat, giving him a sickening feeling like the floor had just opened up beneath him, and he twisted just in time to see Kaatje launch herself at him from the kitchen doorway.
Her features were almost unrecognizable, all twisted with anger and her lips peeled back, and the bandage over her face was hanging loose so that he could see her stitched-up and watery eyes. She flew through the air towards him, and something in her hand caught the light from the kitchen and flashed brightly, and Pieter stumbled back and threw up a protective arm as he realized she was holding a knife.
She slashed down and the blade cut into his forearm, drawing a thin line of blood in the skin. Pieter twisted to the side as her feet landed on the floor, and he used his arm to swing her away from him, using her weight and momentum so that she tottered sideways.
It gave him enough time to duck as she swung the knife back towards the top of his head and the sharp blade embedded itself in the doorframe. Kaatje tried to tug it free but it was stuck fast, and Pieter hunched his shoulder beneath her slender frame and lifted her up. She lost her grip on the knife, and she screamed in frustration as he hefted her into the landing wall and pushed her down to the floor, his weight bearing down on her.
“Kaatje! God damn it! Stop!”
For half a second he wondered if she was sleepwalking.
“Wake up, please!”
Again her face twisted in hatred, and she spat and hissed at him.
Somehow she managed to lift her leg and plant her bare foot on his chest and he felt her push with superhuman strength, and then he was being propelled backwards, and he yelled in fright.
His back struck something hard and he realized it was the railing around the top of the staircase, the only thing that had prevented him from plummeting down to the floor below.
Badly winded, and still stunned from the suddenness of her attack, and wondering how the heck she could even see where he was, just like the patients at the clinic he thought, Pieter looked up.
Once again Kaatje was coming through the air towards him, her nightdress billowing around her.
Pieter rolled sideways and Kaatje landed with a grunt onto the landing floor. Quickly recovering, he slammed his elbow into her back to pin her there, and then he wheeled himself back over and lay across her body, using his arms to hold her shoulders and head down, the blood from his wound soon smearing her white nightdress red.
Kaatje kicked and twisted beneath him, bucking sideways to try and throw him off, but Pieter sprawled himself widely over her thrashing body, refusing to let her slip out from under him. He held on, hoping she would tire, for he didn’t want to have to hit her: the mere idea gave him a feeling of revulsion.
Leaning his face down towards the back of her head he whispered into her ear.
“Kaatje, stop now. Calm down. Wake up and stop struggling.”
Slowly her struggles grew weaker. Perhaps it was his soothing voice that had penetrated through to her, perhaps it was exhaustion, or maybe she just snapped out of whatever freaked-out spell she was under. Whatever it was, Pieter felt her thrashings and kickings gradually subside, become more and more feeble, and he gently shushed her, coaxing a calmness back into her thoughts.
Finally, her movements ceased, to be replaced by quiet sobbing.
“Pieter?” she implored. “Pieter, please help.”
Lying there and trying to regain his breath from the violent struggle, he was vaguely aware of his mobile phone ringing insistently from the bedroom.
◆◆◆
Having checked on the girl in the basement and then done a quick circuit outside to make sure everything was secure, Johan strode back into the lounge, shivering and dusting the snow from his coat and looking forward to getting the log fire going.
He stopped dead at the sight which confronted him.
His niece was lying on the floor, twisting and thrashing, grunting like some beast, having some kind of fit he thought in alarm. But when she turned over onto her back and he saw her eyes, which were rolled back into her head so they bulged out of her face like white marbles, Johan faltered and drew in his breath.
He looked at her in dismay, wondering if he should help.
Yet when he saw a strange white mist coming out of her mouth, a little bit like smoke but all shiny and sticky-looking and flecked with black, and he smelt a pungent stench like rotten food or corrupted flesh, then, slowly, he drew away and quietly backed back out of the room, his fingers all shaky and sweaty as he pulled the door gently shut.
Chapter 22
Waterland
Pieter looked down at Kaatje’s sleeping form on the large bed.
Exhausted and mentally drained, confused and scared and tearful, she had fallen asleep in his arms on the landing, and he had carried her back to the bedroom.
He was still breathing hard but more from shock than anything. His arm throbbed painfully and the tips of his fingers felt numb, but thankfully the blade of the knife had not slashed his arm too deeply. The injury seemed to only be superficial. He’d washed it underneath the bathroom taps to stem the bleeding and wrapped it in a towel.
God, what the hell was going on? his confused mind demanded.
None of this made any sense, this whirlwind of bizarre events and incidents.
He heard his phone start to ring again and, glad for the distraction, he walked around the bed and picked it up, glancing at the CALLER ID.
Floris de Kok. He was one of the civilian desk-jockeys at HQ, a good man who had offered invaluable help during the Werewolf case, and who specialized in organising the files department as well as working in the surveillance unit.
It was shortly after one in the morning, so whatever he was calling for it must be something important.
◆◆◆
Prisha Kapoor and her partner Rowan, who hailed from Dublin, currently still lived at their place in Amsterdam, a neat little corner-apartment overlooking Erasmus Park. Most evenings and weekends were spent shifting their belongings over to their new place in Utrecht, but their lease here still had a month or so to run, and so luckily for Pieter they were in town when he rang in the early hours of the morning.
Surprisingly they were still up – watching old repeats of The X-Files, Prisha told him. When he explained his situation and stressed the urgency of it, he heard Rowan call out, “what’s he waiting for? Tell the eejit to get his arse round here. To be sure to be sure,” she added for his benefit.
Twenty minutes later and Pieter pulled up on the quiet street just outside the building’s glass door, and helped Kaatje out of the car. She was half asleep, dressed in his thick winter coat over her jeans and shoes, mumbling to herself, with the bandages back over her
eyes. She seemed very docile and subdued now, as though all of her strength had evaporated away, and this left Pieter more concerned than relieved.
But he didn’t have time to think about it right now. Later, in the cold light of day, he could assess the events from earlier and try to make sense of them, but for now he needed somewhere Kaatje could stay, with somebody who he could trust.
Prisha buzzed him in.
She was waiting in the doorway to their apartment, and she ushered them inside.
The TV was off. In the background, some calming meditation music was playing, which sounded like whale noises to Pieter. On the wall was a framed print of MC Escher’s impossible staircase. Rowan was in to all this wacky stuff, he remembered.
“What happened to you?” Prisha asked upon seeing the long strip of fabric dressing on his forearm.
“I’ll tell you later,” he told her, and she didn’t press him on it.
Rowan led Kaatje away and sat her down on an armchair close to the fireplace, tutting and fussing over her.
“Look, I appreciate this. I’m very sorry for springing this on you both like this, at this time of night, but I didn’t have-”
“Say no more,” she interrupted him. “It sounds like something serious is happening. Is it connected to the Nina Bakker case?”
Pieter swallowed and nodded.
“You’d best get going then. We’ll take care of Kaatje.”
Back out on the street Pieter took out his mobile and rang Floris de Kok back.
“Talk to me,” he said as he climbed into the car.
“Boss. Something important came in about an hour ago, and I thought you should know. We’ve had a hit on the ViCASnl system which looks very promising.”
Floris was referring to the national crime-linkage database. Pieter had put in a request for any suspects or vehicles that matched their own to be flagged up and referred over to them, for cross-checking.
“Go on.”
“Well as a matter of fact it was the people over at NCSC, the security camera nerve-centre at Bos en Lommerplein, who spotted it.”
“They sent us something the other day, which turned out to be useless,” Pieter pointed out, remembering the CCTV footage outside the Bakker’s house.
“Yeah I know. But I did a little checking of my own this time, just to see if this had anything going for it, which it does. Enough for me to ring you and wake you up anyway.”
Pieter tried not to let his irritation show; sometimes de Kok was slow at getting to the point.
“Give me a few more details will you?”
“Right. Several nights ago there was a hit-and-run fatal road accident out at Ransdorp. A guy riding his bicycle was found dead at the side of the road early in the morning. Hit by a vehicle a few nights before it seems. The dead chap has been identified and his family have confirmed he’d popped out on an errand and not come home, so they reported him as missing, and the spot where his body was found points to the fact that he was on his way back when he was hit. He was lying in a ditch, which had frozen over, hence the reason he wasn’t spotted for a while.”
“Okay. But hit-and-runs happen all of the time.”
“True. More often than people realize. If you are driving along late at night, say for example out in the sticks like in this case, where it might be dark and with no street-lighting, and suddenly a pedestrian or another car or a cyclist appears from nowhere and, boom, you have no time to react, before you know it you’ve hit them. Now, most people would stop to help, phone for an ambulance, or give them first aid or whatever. Do the right thing. Sadly, however, not everybody. Some people panic and drive straight on, shitting themselves but making a snap decision not to stop, to head straight home in the hope that maybe they just hit a cat or something. And even if they know that isn’t the case, that they’ve just in fact run over another person, they don’t always think rationally. They don’t want to ruin the rest of their lives and go to jail all because of a few seconds of inattention. Especially if a child is involved. So they go home and spend days, weeks and sometimes years having to live with what they’ve done, and unless there are witnesses, they get away with it. As you said, it happens all of the time.”
Pieter, sitting in his car outside Prisha’s apartment, sighed loudly.
“Look, I already know all of this stuff Floris. But what does this have to do with our case? Why has it been matched up?”
“Because the local police don’t think that this was simply a hit-and-run. They think it was intentional.”
Pieter switched his mobile to speakerphone and clipped it to the holder on the dashboard.
“They spent a whole day at the scene studying the tyre marks on the road, and they’ve come to the conclusion that the driver turned his vehicle around, and then swerved straight into the guy on his bike. They say the skid marks prove this. They are also fairly sure that the body was moved. It was found about fifteen feet back from the edge of the road, and the position it was in – laid straight out nice and neatly beneath the ice – makes them think the corpse was rolled into the ditch. Plus the bike was in there with him too.
Okay, so they decided to check around, gathering any footage from nearby CCTV cameras. Anyway, they came back with something interesting. An image, of a man wearing overalls and driving a dark van. He was snapped driving through the village itself, very near the accident scene, and the time display on the image matches up roughly with the time the victim’s family say he was away from home on his errand.”
Pieter heard his mobile chime quietly.
“I’ve just sent the pic over.”
Pieter snatched hold of his phone and tapped on the MMS text. He leaned forward in his seat, his eyes screwed up as he studied the tiny image. It showed a profile view of a man in the driver’s seat of a black van. Although the shot was grainy, it was in colour, and must have been snapped just as the van was driving by a streetlight in Ransdorp so that it was easy to see the brown overalls he was wearing. And even more promising, he had a baseball cap on his head, exactly as Mr Clegg, the resident at the nursing home on Vondelstraat, had described.
“The police out there decided to put the details into ViCASnl to see if anything came up at their end, and hey presto, the people at NCSC struck lucky. Not bad for a bunch of hick cops, eh?”
Pieter said nothing back initially.
“What do you think Boss? Is he our guy? What are you going to do with this?”
“I think I need to go out there and see for myself, Floris. I also think you should do more checking. Get in touch with Bos en Lommerplein and have them do a trawl of all the cameras around that general area. Also tell them to start from the Amsterdam ring road and work northwards, as far as Ransdorp and then beyond, to see if they can pick up this van and find out where he was setting off from and where he was headed to.”
“They’re not going to like it, being told to get out of their beds at this time, on a cold night. You know what they are like, that lot? Most of them are just seeing their days out to retirement, a nice and easy number.”
“Floris, I really don’t care what they think.” Then he added: “But well done on this.”
The skies over Holland always have a washed-out quality to them, like the colour has been rinsed away. The flatness of the land seems to suck out any warmth or vitality, even in the middle of a hot summer. At this time of the year, in the middle of a freezing winter, as the sun reluctantly wakes from its slumber, creaking and groaning like an old man, the clouds overhead seem to settle over the countryside like a shroud over a corpse.
This area of the country to the north of Amsterdam was known as Waterland. Driving towards the village of Ransdorp, Pieter could see why it was christened thus. With the lightening of the sky the flat expanse stretching off to the horizon seemed to sparkle with ribbons of silvery ice as far as the eye could see, the thousands of frozen canals and ponds and lakes and marshes creating the illusion that he was driving along a narrow causeway straight out
into the North Sea.
He enjoyed getting away from the smothering claustrophobia of the city, if it were only for a few hours like this morning’s little trip. Whenever he did, it always gave him a feeling of lightness, like he was walking on the balls of his feet and bouncing along, light as a feather, which was wonderful, until it came time to return. Then he would feel his mood darken, his body would draw into itself like a boxer flinching and waiting for a punch, and his mind would switch back, from day-tripper back to city cop.
Ransdorp itself was tiny, a hamlet rather than a village if truth be told, with beautifully painted houses and neat gardens behind white-picket fences. It was little more than just a one-street kind of place, with a small Brown Café pub and a guest house, a hardware store, a few shops selling postcards and fridge magnets during the summer season, and not much else.
It was too tiny to warrant its very own police station: instead, the three police officers assigned to this part of the Waterland region worked from out of the town hall, just across from the church.
Pieter had arranged to meet the most senior officer in the car park, and when he pulled across the gravel he immediately spotted Geert Blom waiting for him. He couldn’t really miss him because he was grossly overweight, the buttons on his uniform threatening to burst free and become lethal projectiles.
He was sitting at the top of a very high set of steps that led to the town hall’s front entrance, looking down on the village like he was expecting a flood at any second. He had a shock of blond curly hair on the top of his head, and a pleasant face with a full smile.
Geert came down the steps to greet him, lumbering across to the car as Pieter climbed out.
He held out his hand, and Pieter shook the sweaty palm.
“Good morning. I’m Geert Blom, but you can call me Barry if you like.”
Pieter raised his eyebrows.
“After Barry Foster, the actor? He played Van der Valk in the TV series? Some people say I look like him.”
Pieter nodded and smiled.
