by Mark Hobson
Dyatlov moved away to re-join his men, so Pieter went back along the roadway to where Lotte was sitting and leaning with her back against the rails.
She looked up as he approached.
She smiled at him, and her brown eyes seemed to reach out to him, as though trying to convey they shared some common bond, some secret unbreakable alliance only they knew about. Once again an invisible spark flitted briefly, a connection, and Pieter quickly averted his gaze to break it.
He’d had enough of her games.
Unfastening her from the guardrail and then cuffing her wrists back together once more, he marched her towards the nearest police vehicle.
◆◆◆
Harderhaven was a tiny fishing community east of Amsterdam built on land reclaimed from the sea. It was early evening by the time Johan Roost arrived in the beat-up pickup truck. After slipping through the net closing in around him, he had driven hell-for-leather through the large town of Lelystad. Then he had cut further east, trying to put as much distance between himself and the chaos on the dam, hoping to lie low for a few days while he worked out his next move.
Lotte had told him about this place. She owned a small bungalow out here, in this backwoods part of Holland so-to-speak. It was a bolt-hole, a safe place to come should things go bad for them. Considering what had gone down today, the bloody mayhem followed by his last-ditch escape (aided somehow by Lotte, and he tried not to think too much about that) then he thought this certainly qualified. So he found himself driving out here to wait things out.
Following the quiet coastal road through the small cluster of homes and holiday lets he cut the headlights and slowed down to a crawl, looking into the darkness for the turning.
He saw it just beyond an empty industrial estate and found himself moving along a narrow lane with a small yachting marina on one side. Further on it swerved left past a line of whitewashed stones on the grass verge, and then he was driving slowly along a narrow strip of land close to the water’s edge.
There was hardly any lighting here, just a couple of small security lamps casting out a feeble glow, and the track was slippery and covered in snow, making his path even more treacherous.
A row of overturned rowing boats ran parallel with the track. Johan counted them, and when he reached the seventh one he drew the pickup truck up alongside, cut the engine, took a flashlight from the glovebox and stepped out.
Crunching quietly through the snow he grabbed a hold of the wooden boat and tried to flip it over. It was much heavier than it looked, so he lay the flashlight on the ground and bent and gripped the wooden side with both hands and, grunting and cursing, he rolled it over.
On the ground beneath was a flat piece of corrugated plastic weighed down with stones. He kicked these away and slid the plastic to one side, revealing a shallow pit dug out beneath. Taking the flashlight again, he shone the strong white beam of light into the hole.
At the bottom lay three green metal boxes with black numbers and letters stencilled on the side. One box was longer than the others, and this one he knew contained a variety of different firearms, all military-grade weapons such as C10 and C15 assault rifles, RPK light machine-guns and Uzis, CZ Scorpion machine pistols and K-100 handguns. The other two boxes contained hundreds of rounds of ammunition as well as blasting caps and plastic explosives.
This was one of three similar arms caches in the local area and he would be visiting the others over the coming days to retrieve even more firepower, but for now this would do. The weapons had all been smuggled into the country from Slovakia over a year ago, and much of the same stock had been used during the gunfights at The Weeping Tower and The Waag during Lotte’s ambitious but ultimately doomed plot several months ago. These arms dumps out here contained the leftover guns, and they should be more than adequate for his task.
Heaving the heavy boxes out of the hole one by one, he dragged them across to the pickup truck and lifted them into the back, working as quickly and quietly as possible. Then he covered the hole over again and flipped the rowing boat back into position to hide the spot.
Climbing behind the wheel of the truck, Johan started the engine and slowly navigated his way along the trackway as it followed the icy watercourse out across the swampy and frozen marsh.
Five minutes later and it came out by the bungalow. The place was barren and desolate, and there was a smell of seaweed on the gusty breeze. Outside were a tiny and dilapidated wooden landing and a small boat, which was half-submerged beneath the frozen water.
He’d phoned ahead, using one of his burner phones, to check if the place was occupied. He’d been slightly surprised when somebody did actually answer, impressed that any of the survivors from the clinic had made it this far, blind and hardly dressed for the conditions as they were. But then again, he reminded himself, these weren’t normal people anymore.
He’d told them to leave a light on, not for their benefit but as a beacon to mark the spot for him, and he was gratified to see an orange glow shining through a single window.
Parking up outside, Johan switched off the engine and sat looking through the windscreen and checking his mirrors, trying to see into the shadowy undergrowth around the house. When he was sure that all was clear he slipped out and hurried along the pathway, up onto the porch, and pushed open the door and stepped into the main living area.
There were four of them, sitting on chairs and huddled around a log fire, two men, a woman and a very young child, a boy of five or six.
They had changed into proper clothes, he saw, having switched their pyjamas for thick woolly jumpers and trousers.
In the background, he heard a radio playing quietly, tuned to a news station.
Feeling suddenly apprehensive, Johan hesitated briefly and then strode further into the room, and he coughed gently to get their attention.
“I need a hand outside. We have some gear to bring in. Charlotte is in trouble and she needs our help.”
In perfect unison, the three adults and child came to their feet and turned to face him, and he vaguely noticed the boy’s nose was all crooked as though it had recently been broken. Across his throat was a large white plaster, right where his voice box once used to be.
The child’s mouth opened, emitting a peculiar mewling sound that made Johan’s skin crawl.
Then his gaze flicked up over the boy’s face, expecting to see the strange eyeless gaze staring blindly back at him, the way Lotte had described.
Instead, a pair of new eyes watched him, and they made him squirm with revulsion. They were huge, and bulbous, and looked like they had burst out through the skin, and were pure white, with tiny jet-black pupils at their centre that seemed to bore right through to his soul.
God, what the hell kind of unholy mess had Lotte left him with now?
◆◆◆
Pieter stayed until the police truck holding Lotte pulled away with a pair of Spartan APCs acting as escort.
He needed to call Prisha Kapoor and speak with Kaatje, to hear her voice. It would ground him back in reality. But when he pulled out his phone he saw it was damaged beyond repair from his tumble down the embankment followed by his icy swim. So he made his way back along the roadway, skirting the wreckage of the downed chopper. The fire was out, but the heat of the inferno had melted the snow for a hundred yards around. The road’s surface was now covered in fire-retardant foam. He re-trod his route back down the winding pathway to the small dock and Tobias Vinke’s old home. It was fully dark by now so he had to pick his way carefully.
The mobile command centre was still parked near the ruins of the three-barred gate and he wearily climbed up the two steps and pushed open the rear doors, and asked one of the communications operatives if he could use a phone line to place a quick call.
Prisha was in the kitchen, making three mugs of hot chocolate and listening as Rowan and Kaatje talked quietly in the other room, when the doorbell rang.
Since Pieter had dropped her off in the early hours of that morn
ing, Kaatje had slept through most of the day. The sleeping pill, as well as the strain of the past few days, seemed to have totally knocked her out. So she and Rowan had left her snoozing on the couch, tip-toeing around her but keeping a close watch. In the middle of the afternoon, the young police officer had stirred and rolled over and then sat up. They had then eaten a light meal – salad sandwiches – and then chatted and waited for any updates from Pieter Van Dijk.
So, when Prisha heard the doorbell ring she naturally assumed that he was back, and so she hurried across the living room and swung the door wide.
She stopped dead and then stepped back one pace when she saw the diminutive little man standing in the hallway in a long grey trench coat with a black trilby hat on his head and glasses perched on the end of his nose. He carried a small leather bag in one hand, looking a little like a doctor on call she thought.
“Oh, hello,” she said. “Can I help you?”
The man gave a tiny smile and a curt nod of his head, and he looked up at Prisha with steely eyes that flitted back and forth.
“I’ve come for Miss Groot. Kaatje Groot.”
Somewhere behind her the phone began to buzz.
Pieter heard the line ring and ring, and just when he was about to give up and try Kaatje’s mobile number, someone finally picked up.
There was a long drawn-out silence, and then a rustling noise and a loud bump.
“Hello, is that you Prisha?” he asked. “It’s Pieter. I’m calling to see how Kaatje’s doing. Can you put her on for a moment?”
Another pause, and then a voice he didn’t recognize.
“Hehehehehe.”
Author’s Note
This is of course a work of fiction, but as with the first book in the series - WOLF ANGEL - some parts are based on actual events and real-life crimes.
For a brief period during the 1970s and 1980s, Amsterdam became the world’s most favoured location for high-profile kidnappings. With the influx of drugs and the arrival of underworld figures from Eastern Europe, abductions came to be seen as the route to easy riches for crime kingpins. The most famous case involved the kidnapping of Freddy Heineken, one of the world’s richest men and CEO of the famous brewery company.
In 1983 he and his chauffeur were snatched off the street outside the main Heineken Headquarters in Amsterdam, bundled into the back of a van, and driven away. Their kidnappers, a group of failed bank-robbers, kept them prisoner in an old, disused boatyard in the docklands area of the city for three weeks, demanding a ransom of 35 million Dutch guilders. The money was paid, and the two men were later released unharmed. The kidnappers were eventually caught and served prison terms, however one of the men escaped to Paraguay and another, after finishing his sentence, went on to become one of the most notorious ‘mafia-style’ crime bosses in The Netherlands. He was assassinated in 2003.
The year before, in 1982, Toos van der Valk, wife of the hotel magnate Gerrit van der Valk, was kidnapped and held prisoner for several weeks and likewise released, this time after the payment of 13 million guilders.
Although the abduction of twelve year old Nina Bakker in this novel was not carried out by organized crime kingpins, or for monetary gain, I have drawn parallels from these two famous cases and the subsequent bungled police investigations. Our kidnapper, Tobias Vinke, may have been a dangerous psychopath but he did carefully plan and execute his crime and held his victim in a spot eerily similar to the Freddy Heineken case. Sometimes true crime is just as fascinating as any fictional book!
Once again, all of the locations that I have used throughout the story are real places, and many are worth a visit:
The Vrije Geer Nature Park at Osdorp, where I have based the eye clinic visited by Inspector Pieter Van Dijk and Officer Kaatje Groot, is a beautiful location and perfect to sit on a bench for a couple of hours to read a book or to watch the wildlife. It is a little away from the city centre but due to Amsterdam’s excellent public transport system, getting there is easy. Amsterdam can get a bit crazy, so if you are staying for several days and fancy escaping the noise and the crowds, then hop on a tram and ride out here.
Café Zoku, where Kaatje goes after her dressing-down from Commissaris Dirk Huijbers, is about a ten-minute walk from the central hub of Dam Square. Between the two is the 9 Streets area which many locals regard as one of the most beautiful parts of the city (it’s certainly one of the most photographed by tourists). Also on the way is Anne Frank’s House, and Westerkerk. The café itself serves excellent lunches, and the window seats upstairs offer lovely views of the canal and trees just outside.
Hollandche Manege is the prestigious riding school on Vondelstraat attended by Nina Bakker and the place where her friend Elena Vinke has her tragic accident. It dates back to 1744 and was modelled on the famous Spanish Riding School in Vienna. Members of the public are welcome, either to ride the horses or to take a cappuccino on the balcony café. Over the road is the wonderful Vondel Park and on sunny days horses are taken there to ride and exercise. The park is home to a small flock of parakeets, and they make for a somewhat bizarre sight flying around at the heart of the bustling city.
The Western Islands, where Tobias works intermittently at the NV Damen Boat Yard for his fat slob of a boss and where his work ‘mates’ rolled him around in a barrel full of rats, is a great place to just wander and look at the old wharves and swing bridges. Many of the warehouses have been converted into luxury apartments or art galleries, attracting a young and ambitious class of residents, but if you explore the smaller nooks and crannies it is still possible to discover the remnants of the area’s maritime past. Most tourists don’t even know of the place even though it is just a stone’s throw from Centraal Station.
Bickersgracht is a cobbled and narrow lane, poorly lit at night and with the overgrown allotments where Pieter hides encroaching across the fence, creating a creepy atmosphere of shadows and danger. It is not unusual to see the odd rat go scuttling across your path, on its way to and from the nearby canal and boatyard. However, during the daytime, the area is safe to explore… mostly.
The passenger ferries across the river IJ are a great way to get to North Amsterdam, and they are completely free and operate 24hrs per day. Just follow the pedestrians through the tunnel below Centraal Station to the embarkation point; you can’t miss the small blue boats! The journey time across to the A’Dam Lookout tower (and the amazing film museum next door) takes just 5 minutes and you can enjoy superb views back towards the city centre just like Tobias. Alternatively, if you take the boat to the NDSM Pier further upriver the crossing takes 20 minutes, and once again it is free.
The Begijnhof is one of Amsterdam’s oldest historical sites and best-known almshouses, home to the Beguine Sisters since the fourteenth century. The peaceful little enclave has been a women’s refuge ever since the Protestant Takeover of 1578, when the city came under Calvinist rule. It lies at medieval street level and at one time was completely surrounded by water on all sides. One of the oldest wooden houses in Amsterdam can be found here, very close to Lotte’s apartment. I based her home on that of a friend who allowed me to stay for a number of days in 2019, however the pentagram on the floor and the strange wooden carvings are added for the purposes of the story.
Moving away from Amsterdam we venture north into the flat and watery landscape of Waterland, a place of beauty and calm during the summer, but a bitterly cold and frozen world of ice in the winter.
The huge Houtribdijk Dam is one of the most spectacular feats of human engineering, a 30km long dijk connecting the western and eastern shores of the Ijsselmeer and constructed to hold back the North Sea from flooding Amsterdam and huge swathes of northern Holland. At the centre are the tiny docks of Trintelhaven, Tobias Vinke’s lair and the place where he holds Nina captive. His bungalow is there, as is the scrapyard and motor launch on the pebble beach. However, this is private property so ask permission before having a look around.
Finally, if you did enjoy A State o
f Sin, it is always helpful as an author to receive short reviews on Amazon or Goodreads. Your words are as important to an author as an author’s words are to you.
You can keep up-to-date on The Amsterdam Occult Series as well as other upcoming projects and novels on my website
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Pieter and Lotte will be back soon.
Mark Hobson
October 2020 – April 2021
Real-Life Terror in Amsterdam
During the writing of the first two books in the series, I visited Amsterdam on many occasions to conduct research, wishing to explore the city and find some great locations, and to try and better understand what makes the people of the place tick. I thought to myself that there is only so much you can learn by using the internet from the comfort of my own home and that I needed to get there for myself.
In 2018 and 2019 I spent nearly three weeks in Amsterdam. For the purposes of writing the novels and settling on good plots, I quickly learned that I needed to get away from all of the usual tourist sites and explore the darker side of the city, to wander down the creepiest alleyways, call in for a drink at the most notorious of cut-throat pubs, to go to the places that all of the travel guides tell people to avoid. After all, this is a horror story, isn’t it? I needed locations that felt suitably frightening. I wasn’t there to look at tulips.
So that is what I did, and I kept telling myself: what could possibly go wrong?
I had my mobile phone with me, in case I found myself in difficulties.
I had a set of excellent maps, in case I got lost.
I even learned how to scream for help in Dutch (well, not really).
Big mistake.
On two consecutive evenings, I faced my own real-life frightening episodes. Not of the supernatural kind – which would have been quite fun for a horror writer – but of the more human, down-to-earth and quite nasty, but still unsettling, variety.
