by Mark Hobson
“You’ve come to see the crime scene, you say?”
“If it was a crime and not just a road accident.”
“Oh, it was definitely deliberate, my friend. We’re sure of that. Come along, we’ll take my car. It’s not far, but I wouldn’t want you getting yourself lost and in a dizz.”
He led Pieter to a small police patrol car parked alongside the church. Pieter climbed into the front passenger side, and when Geert dropped his bulky frame behind the steering wheel the car on that side dipped right down and Pieter’s head nearly hit the roof.
They drove down the narrow lane past the church and turned left at the end, passing over a swing-bridge. Geert drove surprisingly fast in spite of the covering of snow, almost racing down Ransdorp’s main street, flashing by the guest house and yet more colourful houses, their red-tiled roofs shining brightly in the morning sunlight. Pieter had the impression that he was doing it for his benefit. If he could get away with it, he’d probably like to switch on the light and siren as well.
Five minutes later and they were away from the village and driving through the countryside, the road here narrow and straight, with a frozen ditch running parallel with it. Then Geert was pulling over and he pointed past Pieter through the passenger window.
“That’s where he was found, just there. You can see where we had to smash the ice to get him out.”
Pieter climbed out just as a snow flurry threw itself at him, and the icy wind took his breath away.
Geert sensibly decided to stay in the car, so their conversation was conducted through the open door.
“Who was he?”
“A chap called Eric Fischer, a house painter. Forty-eight years old, married with twin boys.”
“Was he local? Did you know him?”
“Oh yes, he’d lived around these parts all of his life. One of the good ones he was, and his missus, but his lads can be a pair of cheeky monkeys, I tell you. They go around the place spraying graffiti everywhere, thinking they are ghetto kids - out here?” He shook his head with a rueful look on his jowly face.
“So he would have known the area well then, even late at night? Enough to find his way around in the pitch dark?”
“Oh, you can bank on that, Officer Van Dijk. He had eyes like a wily old fox did Eric.”
“What was he wearing at the time? It’s Inspector Van Dijk by the way.”
“Oh yes, sorry. What was he wearing? A coat and scarf, I think.”
“Was it a dark coat? Did he have any reflective armbands on, or those running shoes that light up? Was the light on his bicycle switched on at the time?”
When there was no response, Pieter turned back from gazing at the icy ditch and glanced back into the car. Geert Blom just looked at him and shrugged.
“Well, you need to find out. Perhaps it was an accident, and the driver failed to see him if he was dressed in dark clothing.”
“But I’ve already told you it wasn’t an accident,” Geert responded defensively. He pointed ahead through the windscreen, and Pieter followed where the stubby finger indicated. “You see that lay-by up ahead? That’s where we saw the tyre marks where the van driver swung around to face back the way he’d just come, back towards Eric on his bike. And you’re standing where the skid marks were as he swerved across the road to deliberately hit him.”
Pieter stepped backwards and looked down, but he could see nothing because of the covering of snow.
He climbed back in and dusted the snow off his hair.
“Do you want to see the body? We still have it if you do - although it’s not a pretty sight.”
“No need. We can head back now.”
Back in his own car outside the town hall Pieter checked his phone and saw he had an email.
Some initial data had been retrieved from Tobias Vinke’s mobile phone, which they had fished out of the canal by the boatyard.
Tracking a mobile phone was relatively easy, if it were turned on. Changing the SIM card after every call would negate this to a certain extent, but not completely. Some criminals used cheap phones, known as burners, and after using them once they would ditch them somewhere, dropping them in a litter bin or throwing them over a wall.
Once police had a suspect’s number they could zone in and locate the general areas that it was used in.
Having found Vinke’s phone in the canal, they soon established a number of sites of interest.
According to the email, most of these spots were in central Amsterdam itself, which didn’t really help them an awful lot. But on several occasions over the past week, the signal from his phone had pinged off two masts outside the city. One in the town of Edam, which was about fifteen kilometres further north of Ransdorp, and the other at Hoorn, which was around twenty kilometres north of Edam. Both towns were strung on the main coastal road out of Amsterdam, the N247, which suggested that Vinke had his phone turned on whilst driving into this part of North Holland. The death of the cyclist here in Ransdorp, if it were indeed the work of their prime suspect, seemed to back up this theory. And if they took this hypothesis forward, and continued Vinke’s probable route along the coastal road, it suggested that he had holed up with Nina Bakker not at his previous home in Warder, which they had raided without success on Sunday, but somewhere closer to Hoorn.
It was still a large area, but the digital forensic cyber-cops who specialized in the field of mobile phone data extraction were trying to shrink this area still further by checking as many phone masts as possible in the vicinity.
The net was starting to close.
Vinke may have been dead, but Pieter felt sure they were very near to finding the spot where Nina Bakker was being held captive.
He was also convinced this would lead them to Lotte and her accomplice, the sniper.
◆◆◆
On his way back to Amsterdam Pieter made a quick call to Prisha Kapoor to check up on the situation with Kaatje.
It was still quite early, and the road south was growing busy with morning commuters heading for work. Prisha told him that Kaatje was fine. She had taken a sleeping pill at her suggestion and was still sleeping soundly.
“I’m going to work from home today, and Rowan is taking some more things down to Utrecht soon, but she’ll be back just after lunch. So there’s going to be someone with Kaatje all day. It’s best to let her sleep. You get on with the case. Everything is good here.”
Pieter thanked her and ended the call, and followed the flow of traffic south to the city.
Chapter 23
Mission Briefing
Pieter sensed the tense atmosphere as soon as he arrived at the main Police HQ on Elandsgracht. There was a strange hush throughout the large building, which he recognized from the few previous occasions he’d experienced it. It was the nervous anticipation when a major breakthrough on a big case was in the offing.
As he climbed the stairs to the squad room a junior clerk intercepted him and directed him to the conference room on the second floor, next door to the media suite. He was just in time, the man told him. Something was definitely going on.
The large room was filled with people. Pieter stood in the doorway momentarily and glanced around.
A set of tables and chairs had been arranged in a large horseshoe-shaped cluster in the centre of the carpeted floor. At the open end, most of the wall was taken up with a large Smart projector screen, which was used either for briefings before a big operation or for video conferencing calls. Above the screen was a camera, and to either side a pair of speakers. At the moment the projector screen was blank.
There was room for about twenty people around the tables, and each place was equipped with a laptop and a Wi-Fi hub, plus a small microphone. More chairs had been arranged around the walls, while in one corner there was a desk for serving tea and coffee and pastries.
It looked like they had been busy while he was gone.
Most of the seats were already occupied, but looking around he noticed somebody waving him over to
a vacant spot. It was Floris de Kok, and Pieter moved across and sat down next to him.
“What the hell’s going on?” he asked under his breath. It was strange to see Floris here in the main building: he spent most of his time down in the basement, filing away his beloved paperwork. The fact that he was here at the centre of things, like a troglodyte blinking in the daylight, filled him with apprehension.
Floris couldn’t stop grinning, enjoying himself immensely.
“I think we might have found them, Boss. I did as you said and told the people over at Surveillance Command at Bos en Lommerplein to go through all the cameras en route from Amsterdam to Ransdorp, with instructions to track the van they picked up in relation to the hit-and-run. They weren’t too happy with the sudden workload, especially as it meant they had to put in an early shift, but it looks like they came up trumps.”
Pieter saw the door open and Commissaris Huijbers come through, hunched over and rolling his shoulders in an attempt to look all menacing and streetwise, mealy-mouthed and frowning, his baseball hat pulled down. Two members of his personal security team came with him, though why he thought he needed them in here escaped Pieter, and they trailed after the police chief as he made for the chair at the head of the table, two or three places along from Pieter. He lowered himself into his seat and clasped his big, meaty hands together on the tabletop. His bodyguards stepped back.
Huijbers gave a nod of his head and the lights in the room slowly dimmed and the projector screen flickered to life.
The familiar figure of Dyatlov appeared from the shadows, the ex-Spetsnaz commando and head of the Armed Response Division sporting his usual buzz-cut, and his short, squat and muscular frame drew the room’s whole attention and the general chatter ebbed away.
Behind him, the screen was now divided into six smaller squares, each segment showing either a still photograph or moving video footage taken from various CCTV cameras. Pieter saw the familiar-looking black van from the photo-still that Floris had sent him several hours earlier, and each frame was time-stamped with a slightly different time, but all dated from the night of the hit and run at Ransdorp.
“Right ladies and gentlemen,” Dyatlov began in his thick Russian accent. “Time is short so let’s commence the mission briefing. This is a very time-sensitive situation.”
He strolled over to the screen and turned sideways on, looking at the flickering images. In his hand, he held a tiny remote control.
“Our colleagues at NCSC have come up with some excellent work at very short notice. This was their target.” He indicated the black van in one of the video clips. “This first image was taken at the passenger ferry terminal at Buiksloterweg, on the north side of the river. It’s dated Friday evening, at a little after 6pm. It shows our suspect – and we are fairly sure the driver is Tobias Vinke – leaving the car park next to the old Toll House building. We then pick up the same vehicle at various points as he drives through the suburbs towards the ring road. As he leaves the city the camera network switches over from city district to the motorway network, but we can still follow his progress northwards for several miles.”
The set of images flickered and then disappeared, to be replaced by six more, each one following the black van, and each one showing a change of the time in sequence from shortly after six in the evening.
“However, at some stage after crossing the main ring road, Vinke branches away to the north-east, using minor roads as he hits the more rural areas beyond the city limits. We lose him for a short time until we pick him up again here.”
Dyatlov pointed to a picture in the top left corner of the screen, and Pieter recognized it as the same image that Floris had sent him, showing Vinke driving through Ransdorp shortly before the hit-and-run.
Dyatlov continued.
“We follow him at various points along his journey. Here re-joining the N247, here driving around Edam, and again at Oosthuizen. If you would like to switch on your laptops, I have provided each of you with an interactive map plotting his route.”
There was a flurry of movement and clicks as each person seated around the desks powered up their laptops and scrutinized the screens, their eyes panning back and forth from the maps to the projector screen.
“He travels around Hoorn on the N307 as far as the town of Enkhuizen right at the very tip of the Ijsselmeer Peninsular. After that, this camera here,” and all eyes were fixed on the big projector screen, “shows his driving up onto the road along the Houtribdijk, the 30km-long dam across the Ijsselmeer stretching to the shore at Lelystaad way across the water to the southeast.”
Dyatlov paused for dramatic effect, his eyes taking in each face in the dimly-lit room, his gaze lingering slightly on Pieter’s and giving him a nod.
“We have checked the cameras at the other end of the dam. They show nothing. No sign of the van whatsoever. So, people, he drove up onto the road across the water here, but did not exit from the far side. Which means, when this footage was taken, he stopped overnight somewhere in between the western ramp onto the dam road and the eastern exit ramp. He holed up on the dam itself.”
The split-screen CCTV images disappeared from the big screen, to be replaced by a single satellite image of the Houtribdijk Dam. Pieter leaned forward in his seat to study the large photo. The atmosphere in the room was stretched taut.
The Houtribdijk Dam. Built between 1963 and 1975 to hold back the North Sea from flooding Amsterdam, it was one of the biggest building projects in the world, and is still a marvellous feat of engineering to this day. Seen from above like this, it resembled a thin crooked brown line anchored on the two towns at either end, with the huge expanse of grey water, part of the North Sea to all intents and purposes, all around. The sea had frozen in places where the water ran up to the edge of the broad road that ran along the top of the embankment, creating a silvery sheen to the image, and Pieter realized they were actually looking at a real-time live satellite feed. They’d spared no expense in setting this operation up, and in double-quick time.
Dyatlov went on, his own eyes now fixed on the screen, his features etched with concentration.
“There is actually only one point on the dam where he could have been staying. One place where he could have been holding Nina Bakker. One location where the woman Janssen and the shooter could now be. And that is here, right at the very centre of the dam.”
He operated a button on the remote control and the picture zoomed in, focusing down to a small shape alongside the roadway. It showed a pair of concrete jetties, and a number of tiny buildings, either houses or sheds. Vehicles on the road nearby continued to move east and west.
“This is Trintelhaven. A former dock where small fishing vessels and cargo ships would stop off at one time, years ago, to either refuel or unload their cargoes. There used to be a windsurfing place there once, and a roadside café, and a junkyard, but now the place is rundown and empty – or so we thought. There are a few buildings there, but from what we’ve learned today there is only one site that is habitable.”
Dyatlov looked across the room.
“Floris de Kok. Would you care to tell everybody what you have learned?”
Pieter spun in his seat, open-mouthed and looking at his companion in surprise.
Floris glanced at him out of the corner of his eye, and then nervously cleared his throat as he pulled his microphone towards his mouth. His arm was shaking slightly, either from nerves, or perhaps from his long-term medical condition.
“Erm, yes,” he began, and then remembered to press the button. There was a high-pitched whine of feedback, and then he started again. “Sorry. Yes, I decided to check through the records, going all the way back to the mid-seventies when the dam was completed. I wanted to see who owned the land there, as I believe the small boatyard was a private business back then.”
Everybody was looking at Floris, and when Pieter saw him lick his lips nervously he gave him an encouraging smile and a nod.
“In more recent times, actual
ly up to about two years ago, as Mr Dyatlov said, there was a small diner there, but this has since closed down. The same with the watersports club that held meetings at Trintelhaven. So I decided to go further back.
In 1976, a year after the dam and the road crossing opened, the land was first rented and later purchased by a family, a Mr and Mrs Huisman. They later had a child, a boy, and they lived there for quite a few years, from where the husband ran several small businesses.
Then, when the child was about eleven years old, the family was involved in a road accident in Belgium. They had gone on a small holiday, travelling around in a camper van, when they were hit by a truck near Brugge. Mr Huisman, it later turned out, had a bad drink problem and this was thought to be the cause of the crash. Anyway, both the parents were killed and their son was badly hurt with a serious head injury, a blow to his frontal lobe. He survived, after spending a month in hospital, but the injury seemed to have a long-term effect on him. His personality changed, he suffered from violent mood swings, was expelled from various schools and finished up in a care home for a period of time. Up until his early teens, when he was adopted by a couple who were unable to have children of their own, and he went to live with them.”
Floris glanced around at the sea of faces looking his way, and he averted his gaze to look down at the tabletop.
“His new family’s surname was Vinke. So the boy became Tobias Vinke.”
The room suddenly erupted in conversation, the loud buzz giving the place a charged atmosphere. Dyatlov’s voice called out over the hubbub.
“Let him finish please.”
When the last of the murmurs died away, Floris went on.
“It seems that after the death of his natural parents, the land and house at Trintelhaven passed on to Tobias Vinke, although the place remained empty for many years. Apart from allowing the diner to open and the watersports club, he doesn’t seem to have done an awful lot with it, until a few months ago, in fact. Following the suicide of his daughter Elena Vinke and the breakdown of his marriage, Tobias Vinke must at some stage have moved back to his old family home, where he lived and, we assume, readied the building in preparation for his kidnapping of Nina Bakker. That must be where she was being held, and where Tobias Vinke was heading to after the hit-and-run at Ransdorp last week, and where he was going on Monday, before he was shot dead.”
