Night Market

by Daniel Pembrey

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Found dead.’ There was a pregnant pause. ‘Do you want to accompany me to the scene?’

  *

  Franks drove us across night-time London quickly in his unmarked police car, which reeked of stale cigarette smoke. Outside, the skyline had a restlessness to it – new, glaringly lit structures erupted from the low-rise sprawl. In such an old city, it had an unsettling effect.

  We sped westward. I eyed Franks’s dark profile, his curiously old-fashioned moustache.

  ‘Care to elaborate on what’s happened?’ I asked.

  ‘I only got half the story myself. Seems that Karremans was staying at Maritime House…’ I hadn’t heard of the place. Franks must have caught my puzzled expression, as he added: ‘It’s a hotel that recently opened on the South Bank.’

  So Karremans had preferred to stay in Central London, away from the site of his latest architectural oeuvre.

  ‘He was found alone in a suite there,’ Franks added.

  ‘And foul play hasn’t been ruled out?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Does the death appear natural?’

  ‘Let’s see.’

  ‘Who’s handling the case?’

  ‘Given who he was, and his almost diplomatic status… Let’s see,’ he repeated.

  We were approaching a wide bridge over the Thames, from the north.

  ‘Are we close?’

  ‘Yep.’ He pointed to a large, boxy building on the far side of the river. The hotel’s name was just visible above it, in elegant aquamarine neon with an art deco feel.

  ‘Do you have any hunches, if it turns out to be foul play?’

  Franks shrugged. ‘I don’t know yet. But there’s always the risk of vigilantes.’

  ‘In connection with Night Market?’

  ‘Maybe,’ Franks replied. ‘Karremans could even have fallen victim to another site user. Someone involved in that scene, who’d come to mistrust him…’

  This sounded more like a working hypothesis than idle speculation. Perhaps Franks had read my expression once more, as he said, ‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves.’

  On the other side of the bridge he turned right, then accelerated again, heading west. ‘One thing’s for sure,’ he said, changing gears. ‘Karremans was a key guy in the investigation into Night Market. Without him…’

  I waited for him to finish, but he didn’t. It felt like he’d been about to reveal something significant, then decided against it.

  I made a mental note to come back to that, asking, ‘How did you get to hear about his death?’

  ‘A contact inside the force.’ He shot me a look. ‘Come on, Henk, you know how it goes.’

  I returned the look. ‘What I know is that you wiped out three vigilante cops in the forest, Tommy. How could you get away with that?’

  ‘And you’re above it?’

  Did he know about the battered body of Hals, in a submarine on the floor of Amsterdam harbour? Was that possible, or was he just making guesses? He remained as unreadable as ever.

  We swerved towards the front entrance of the hotel and pulled up behind a police car with a faint screech. Franks reached for the door handle, pausing to say, ‘Let me do the talking.’

  *

  Every hotel has its own procedure for handling a death on its premises, but central to that procedure – in luxury hotels at least – is the need for discretion. This brings both advantages and disadvantages to police investigations. It helps with the preservation of evidence, yet often hinders its disclosure.

  The reception area of Maritime House was dressed in hammered copper, flush-riveted – the kind of place that might appeal to a world-famous architect, I sensed. There was a knot of men to one side. They looked serious, professional and uneasy. There was a knot in my stomach, too, tightening all the while.

  ‘Wait here,’ Franks told me, heading towards the group. I guessed that they were some combination of hotel management and plain-clothes detectives. Edging closer, I could hear snatches of conversation… ‘Took his own life,’ muttered one.

  Suicide is the most common cause of death in hotels. Those planning to kill themselves usually prefer to be discovered by an anonymous professional rather than friends or family. This all sounded plausible in the case of Karremans, after one of the newspapers had broken the story online about him being suspected of abusing kids. The paper had in fact retracted the article with an apology, but the damage had surely been done.

  Franks moved towards the lift with two of the men. A lift car arrived and they vanished into it. I ambled through to a lounge area, then the restaurant, approaching the floor-to-ceiling windows with views of the Thames – imagining Karremans making use of these same amenities, only hours before. There was a strongly nautical theme to the place: a glass case featured a pair of giant ship’s binoculars… and a grey model submarine hovered above the bar, would you believe it. I tried not to see connections where none existed.

  Waiting for Franks back in the lobby, I acknowledged that it was common enough for those planning suicides to pick hotels far from home… in foreign countries, even. It lent a further degree of separation between those who died and the real victims of suicide – the friends and family left behind, wondering. Over the years, Amsterdam had become a popular choice for ‘tourist suicides’.

  There is often a practical problem left behind, too: the repatriation of the body. Post-mortems can take weeks.

  ‘Henk.’ Franks was back, beckoning me from beside the lift car. I followed him inside, and we ascended to the top floor.

  The suite was decorated in muted golds and soft greys. I walked through the entrance vestibule behind Franks, feeling a growing sense of anticipation, a compression building again in my upper chest. It would be the first and last time that I’d see the famous architect up close. There was a chemical smell and a dryness to the air.

  He lay naked, sprawled on a double bed facing the windows, his pale skin saggy over his pectorals and stomach. A crime scene investigator in a blue face mask was photographing the body, his camera clicking softly. The dead man wore a scuba diver’s face mask, which covered his nostrils and magnified his staring eyes.

  Clamped between his puckered lips was a regulator. There was no oxygen tank on the other end – rather, a duty-free bag.

  Auto-erotic asphyxiation.

  I wondered why a duty-free bag, then remembered that Karremans had most recently been in China. Perhaps he’d flown direct to London from there.

  ‘Did he have company here?’ I asked.

  ‘No sign of any,’ Franks replied.

  The CSI went round to the other side of the body, interested in something on the neck.

  ‘What a way to be remembered,’ Franks said.

  I hoisted my eyebrows, words eluding me.

  Hypoxia – oxygen deficiency – can induce hallucinogenic, euphoric states. I’d experienced something like it on the submarine not even twenty-four hours prior.

  Only here, it had been used to a different effect.

  ‘Any sign of sexual climax?’ I asked.

  ‘Come again?’ Franks said.

  ‘Orgasm,’ I replied too fast, not catching his wordplay in English.

  The CSI guffawed as he repositioned himself to photograph the neck and the carotid artery which – among the living – carries oxygen-rich blood to the brain.

  I took a step towards the CSI. ‘What’re you seeing?’ I asked.

  He lowered his camera. ‘Maybe nothing,’ he said, extending a gloved hand to point out the faint marks on the neck. ‘But see these indentations? The circular discolourations there? They look like finger marks.’

  ‘Did you manage to lift any prints?’

  He shook his head and brought the camera back up to his eye.

  No fingerprints, ye
t finger marks.

  A thinly gloved hand, perhaps? A competent assassin, but no master of his craft? Someone in the process of perfecting his trade – on those associated with Night Market?

  It was all just speculation.

  I stepped back to the foot of the bed. Karremans’s genitals were barely discernible in the snowy hair between his legs. No sign of the death erections occasionally seen in those whose oxygen supply has suddenly been cut off; several hung at the old gallows in North Amsterdam had exhibited that macabre phenomenon, according to local lore.

  But not Heinrich Karremans.

  ‘Do you think the scene’s been staged?’ I asked.

  Franks looked on distantly, not responding.

  ‘It’s possible,’ the CSI replied for him.

  ‘Anything’s possible,’ Franks said with finality. ‘We’d better get out of here.’ Then he turned to the CSI: ‘Ta, Josh, won’t be forgotten.’

  Josh nodded and carried on taking photos.

  As we exited the bedroom, I shot a final glance at the dead man’s staring eyes. What had they witnessed here?

  Outside the suite, in a corridor resembling an ocean liner’s, I experienced a powerful sense of déjà vu. More than déjà vu, in fact – there were three men coming towards us, and the tall one in the middle was familiar. I dipped my head, shielding my face from view.

  The tall man was the Dutch ambassador to London. Not so surprising, given Karremans’s status. The case would be locked down now. Franks had got me in to see the body just in time.

  The lift door pinged. Franks swiped a key card that he’d apparently been loaned by hotel management. We had the lift to ourselves.

  ‘On the way over here,’ I said, ‘you were about to tell me something.’

  Franks frowned, unsure what I was referring to.

  ‘In relation to Night Market,’ I prompted. ‘You said something about how, now that Karremans has gone…’

  One thing’s for sure, Karremans was a key guy in the investigation into Night Market. Without him…

  He seemed to remember his words, saying, ‘There’s only one lead left on your side of the sea now, Henk.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Let me see if I can get the pronunciation right.’

  I waited.

  The doors opened again. The hubbub of the lobby rushed in.

  ‘Joost van Erven.’

  Franks had used a hard ‘J’ instead of the correct Y-sound, but the name drove straight into my core like a blade: Joost van Erven, my former boss – a man I was now determined to visit justice upon.

  27

  THREE WEEKS LATER

  ‘Come in, Henk,’ the justice minister said.

  I was back in Willem van der Steen’s office in The Hague. It was just down the road from Internal Investigations, my new place of work; I was commuting there from Amsterdam.

  ‘You remember Wim?’ he asked.

  Wim Rijnsburger, my former AIVD handler, was sitting at the circular glass table, next to the minister.

  ‘I do,’ I said. Rijnsburger watched me, rheumy-eyed and silent.

  ‘OK,’ van der Steen said. ‘Let’s get down to it: we’ve looked at your report. You’ve got balls, Henk. Not even a month into your new role, and you want to indict the police force’s most senior Internal Liaison member?’

  ‘Or take a step towards it,’ I qualified.

  There were limits to how much senior-level support I could expect this soon into my new job, but I at least had their full attention.

  Van der Steen said, ‘Everything you’re describing here relates back to Rem Lottman – and he’s gone.’

  ‘Indeed,’ I accepted.

  ‘So you’re recommending going after Joost instead, eh?’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it quite that way.’

  Joost had agitated to lead the investigation into Lottman and his disappearance. However, he’d been denied by the cabinet – in particular by the energy minister, Muriel Crutzen, I’d later learned.

  Had van der Steen also been involved in the thwarting of Joost? This was becoming complicated.

  ‘It’s going to be a question of evidence,’ van der Steen was saying. ‘Let’s dive deeper. You’re claiming that there was a scheme to reward the foreign diplomats of countries providing oil and gas to Holland on favourable terms.’

  ‘Yes.’ Surely he’d been told this by the energy minister?

  ‘And that those rewards were distributed out of Amsterdam – facilitated by the police force. Diamonds, valuable paintings, escorts, even underage ones… Joost being implicated.’

  ‘Right. It happened on his watch.’ Joost had been the Amsterdam police commissioner at the time.

  ‘Our watch,’ the minister corrected me.

  Rijnsburger was scrutinising me all the while. I hadn’t expected the AIVD veteran to be in this meeting, and couldn’t help feeling unnerved by his presence. A file on Joost in Internal Investigations, which I’d only just consulted, revealed that Joost himself had started his career in the AIVD. It made sense – it explained how he’d come to run an informant network for the Amsterdam police, which I’d first stumbled across after discovering a body in Amsterdam harbour…

  Now another question was starting to surface: did Joost and Rijnsburger know one another? Were they old allies, rivals… or some combination of the two, according to circumstance?

  ‘So, let me get this straight,’ van der Steen was saying. ‘You contend that Joost failed to support an investigation into a Ukrainian woman savagely attacked at the Royal Hotel in Amsterdam, because – you hypothesise – she was an escort provided to an Emirates sheikh as part of this favours-for-energy scheme. You then go on to speculate that Joost arranged for the burglary of a Verspronck painting from a Norwegian diplomat’s house in Amsterdam, after the Norwegian government reneged on an energy-related agreement. A local gangster, Frank Hals – now deceased, I note – arranged for the burglary of the painting, only it went wrong, and the Norwegian diplomat died in the process…’

  ‘It’s a lot to take in,’ I said, wondering how and when the minister had become aware of Hals’s death.

  ‘Indeed,’ the minister continued. ‘And the painting was later discovered as a rolled-up canvas in a Schiphol storage locker, and misappropriated by Joost – you say.’

  Something else was striking about pulling the files on Joost: being able to pull them. I wasn’t allowed to pull my own file, nor others who’d worked for me. That would have constituted a conflict of interest. Checks and balances. And yet, in my new role, my former boss’s file was freely available to me. Was I secretly being aided and abetted in going after Joost? Van der Steen knew of the grudge between us…

  ‘Finally, you speculate that Joost may have become involved in a website catering to paedophiles. You cite the testimony of an unnamed London police detective – who you say must remain anonymous – who alleges that Joost frequented a website called’ – he looked down – ‘Night Market.’

  I remained silent.

  He sat back. ‘That’s quite a charge sheet.’

  ‘They’re not charges. They form the basis of probable cause, warranting the allocation of resources towards an investigation.’

  ‘Hmm.’ He reached for the conference phone and pressed a button.

  ‘Sir,’ his assistant’s voice crackled.

  ‘Get Marc up here, would you?’

  ‘Marc Vissering?’

  ‘The same.’

  *

  Marc Vissering was a public prosecutor who’d risen rapidly to the top of his profession – and he was also Liesbeth’s husband. Tall, light-eyed and youthful-looking, his clean-cut demeanour belied a killer instinct when it came to bringing cases before judges.

  He arrived in the minister’s office and we nodded our hellos to one another.<
br />
  ‘Ah,’ van der Steen said, acknowledging his arrival, ‘we’re talking about the Ukrainian woman at the Royal.’

  So Marc knew all about the matter – from the minister, or his wife? Both, probably – Liesbeth had worked on the case when I’d been her team leader. At that time, Marc had also been working closely with Joost, in a prosecutorial capacity.

  Were Marc and Joost in contact? It was all too much to keep track of…

  ‘You’ve had a chance to look into it?’ the minister asked him.

  Marc nodded. ‘Yes, I think I’ve got a reasonable sense of the dynamics here. The odds don’t look good.’

  ‘Go on,’ van der Steen said.

  ‘The victim at the Royal Hotel never came forward,’ Marc summarised. ‘She was never interviewed –’

  ‘At Joost’s direction,’ I interjected. Joost had directed Liesbeth away from the case after she had tracked down the Ukrainian escort in question.

  Van der Steen raised a palm in my direction, silencing me.

  ‘There were no witnesses,’ Marc said, continuing his assessment.

  I opened my mouth to say that a maid – a fellow Ukrainian – had found the woman beaten into unconsciousness. But I stopped myself. Strictly speaking, Marc was right. There were no known witnesses to the alleged assault itself. While there is no jury to persuade here in Holland, the judges take their impartiality seriously, of course.

  ‘If no victim steps forward,’ Marc was saying, ‘and there’s no witness to the incident…’

  It was uncannily like a remark that Liesbeth had made at the time.

  If a tree falls in the forest…

  ‘Given those circumstances, I don’t believe that the then police commissioner could legally be considered to have acted negligently in deciding not to pursue an investigation,’ he concluded.

  Van der Steen nodded, accepting Marc’s assessment.

  I sat back, thinking about the chessboard here: who really held power over whom? Clearly the minister was the king. But as on the chessboard, his scope of movement was limited – by public scrutiny and the media, among other things. It would take relatively little to topple him, in certain circumstances.