Checking up on a victim’s identity wouldn’t normally require such a rush.
But this wasn’t normal.
All he could think about was the image of himself, taken earlier that morning as he walked to work.
He needed to find out why. If he told anyone about it he’d be off the case; Smit would assign someone else. And he figured no one else would have quite the same motivation to find out what was going on as he did.
He stood for a moment before entering the building, aware suddenly of the bleakness of the place, uniform concrete blocks designed by an architect with the express purpose of crushing people’s souls.
The flat was on the third floor of four. He rang the bell having taken the stairs two at a time – his muscles stiff from the six-minute Tabata workout he’d done the previous evening – but wasn’t surprised when no one came to the door. A baby was crying somewhere, possibly the flat next door, and he could smell spices being cooked up somewhere else in the building. Music pulsed through the ceiling, and he could hear voices, an argument behind closed doors.
He pulled out the bag with the keys in he’d taken from the crime scene, and shifted the keys round so he could unlock the door without touching the key itself. The lock clicked when the key turned.
Inside, boiled meat and cigarette smoke thickened the air. There was a small kitchen, a bedroom, bathroom and a living room which looked out on to the ring road, the dull roar of traffic noticeable despite the closed windows.
Everything was neat.
His phone rang; it was Frits.
‘What have you got?’ Jaap asked.
‘Forty-three years old. Works at the Dronken Brewery by Vondelpark. The only reason he’s on our system is a speeding ticket about three months back. Apart from that he’s clean as far as we’re concerned.’
‘There should be a copy of his driving licence on the file; get it scanned over to me.’
Jaap hung up and started going through the living room. A pillow lay crumpled up at one end of the sagging leather-effect sofa, shiny textured black nastiness, and a single bookshelf held a bunch of bootleg DVDs, mostly porn and an original Dr Zhivago.
Eclectic tastes, thought Jaap as he turned his attention to the bedroom.
The single bed was half made, the sheets a dirty yellow, and there was a bedside table with an ashtray full of ash and twisted butts. Inside the wardrobe was a bunch of clothes; mainly tatty tracksuits, one pair of jeans, and no white T-shirts.
Under the bed was more interesting. He pulled out a small metal box with a padlock. It was heavy, and something inside slid from one side to the other.
Jaap inspected the padlock. He tried the keys on the fob but none of them worked. He took it to the kitchen, placed it on the table and riffled through the drawers. He found a spatula, the plastic tip melted, but with a thick metal handle.
His phone started up again.
‘Yeah?’
‘I’ve got the driving licence photo on the arrest report.’
‘And?’
‘You can’t see anything. It’s a really bad photocopy of a photocopy. Looks like the original got lost.’
‘Okay, get on to whoever issues them and try and get a better image. I want to see what this guy looked like.’
He hung up and worked the lid. It popped off. Inside, nestling among scrunched-up newspaper, was a stack of photos – and a gun.
Jaap didn’t like guns; he carried his own reluctantly and only when he had to. But he really hated to see them out in the wild. He didn’t trust half his colleagues with them, let alone random members of the public.
He recognized it, a Walther P5, the model he’d carried since first becoming an inspector, the same model he’d shot and killed with …
He stopped his thoughts there. That was past. He had to focus on the present.
The gun was old, but it had that oily smell which spoke of a recent reconditioning. He bent down and sniffed the muzzle, but there was no hint of a recent firing.
Maybe if he’d been carrying this, he thought, he’d still have his head.
He’d have to get a trace run on it, check the serial number, and he bagged it up, feeling from the weight of it that the clip was loaded.
He had a photo of me and a loaded gun, he thought. Why?
The first thing was the murder itself, the sheer brutality of it shocking. Why had the head been removed and the hand burned? What could it hide, seeing as whoever had done it had left the keys, allowing Jaap to find out the identity of the victim quickly? Or was it a message, a sign to someone else?
The only two groups who tended to use beheadings were jihadists, who periodically posted videos online of Western journalists, and the Mexican cartels.
There are people pushing for sharia law here, thought Jaap. Is that what this is about?
He turned to the photos, flicking through them. There were about fifteen, and they seemed to be of men with guns. In some photos they were hanging around some kind of old Land Rover, painted dark green and splattered with mud, and in others a few were shooting at targets. The background was always wooded, the trees a kind of conical pine.
He knew men who did this; went off at weekends to live out some childhood fantasy, or to escape the wife and kids and pretend to be heroes.
Men with guns.
Idiots.
The kitchen sink gurgled once. A shot of sun streamed through the window on to the table in front of him.
He put the photos down and pulled out his three brass coins and copy of the I Ching.
He thought of his tutor in Kyoto, Yuzuki Roshi, who would, in the quiet of the early evening before the last meditation session of the day, devote a few moments to the I Ching. He’d even shown Jaap how the I Ching worked, how to convert coin throws into the lines which made up the hexagrams, despite the fact Yuzuki Roshi’s fellow Zen monks thought the I Ching was not an appropriate topic of study, seeing it as little better than ancient Chinese superstition.
At first Jaap had been unimpressed, but just before he’d left Japan Yuzuki had slipped him a small parcel, telling him not to open it until he got home. Months later Jaap had rediscovered it on a shelf in his houseboat – he must have put it there while unpacking and forgotten about it – and he’d unwrapped the delicate plain paper to find a small cloth-bound copy of the I Ching.
He’d started using it, just for fun, and it quickly became a habit.
But ever since Karin had died, Jaap had been using it more and more.
Something told him he shouldn’t, and he’d started to feel uneasy every time he did it, but he still couldn’t stop himself.
The coins flashed in the light as he threw them up, and he let them clatter on to the table’s surface. He noted down the first line of the hexagram, then threw five more times until it was complete.
He looked up the hexagram in the I Ching. The bottom three lines represented Lake, the top three Fire.
He read the overview of Fire over Lake.
OPPOSITION.
Jaap stared at the word for a while.
I need to stop this, he thought as he scooped up the coins and replaced the I Ching in his pocket.
His phone rang again. It was Frits.
‘Yeah?’
‘You on Twitter?’
‘Twitter? Do I look like I have time for that kind of shit?’
I’ve got time to flip coins though, he thought.
‘I dunno, but I think you’re going to have to make time.’
‘I’ve got a headless body; why would I want to fuck around—’
‘There a TV where you are?’
‘Yeah …’
‘Turn it on. Channel 1.’
Jaap stepped back into the living room towards the TV. He hit the button on the top and the standby light came on but the screen stayed blank. He looked around for a remote but couldn’t find one.
‘Just tell me what it is.’
‘The news, they’ve got this story going. A tweet got picked up sayin
g there’s a man without a head.’
‘Yeah, I’ve seen him already, remember?’
‘Not this one. The tweet says the body’s out towards Amstelveen, there’s a photo too. And the thing is, the journalists are at the scene already.’
5
Saturday, 8 May
15.15
Tanya was in the basement, a series of interconnected rooms which the Computer Crimes unit operated out of. The rooms themselves were below canal level, and smelt like it.
Everything was buzzing: computers, people, air.
Smit had commandeered the whole unit, telling them to drop everything and get on with scanning the CCTV on the hard drive Tanya had brought in. So far no one had been able to make another sighting of the man who’d shoved the homeless woman in front of a train.
The homeless woman who’d been having a conversation with someone on a brand-new phone.
She’d remembered the phone halfway to the station and called Piet, getting him to check on it. Unregistered, and all the incoming calls were from a blocked number, came the response. And there were no outgoing calls at all.
It was all too weird. Nothing was making any sense.
And the thing was, she needed to get away, hand this over to someone else.
I’ll try and get Smit to reassign it, she thought.
‘I’ve got something,’ said one of the computer team. Tanya rushed over and looked at the screen.
‘Upper right corner. It’s kind of blurred, but the time would be about right.’
Tanya watched as a figure wearing a baseball cap, jeans and a dark jacket dropped off the end of one of the platforms and ran across the tracks, and then off screen.
The image was low-res and in black and white. But even so, the word on the back of the man’s jacket was clear.
POLITIE. Police.
‘Okay, let’s get a map of the station up, we can try and trace him back from this,’ she said as Smit stepped into the room.
I’ve got to get him to give this case to someone else, Tanya found herself thinking.
‘What have we got?’ he asked.
She told him.
‘Virtually nothing then,’ he said when she’d finished.
He was famous for making his inspectors feel like everything was their fault.
‘I’ve also got people working on the phone, the blocked calls I told you about?’
Smit just grunted, then glanced round the room. ‘Let’s have a word,’ he said jerking his head towards the corridor.
Once outside the room Smit closed the door.
‘You contained this at Centraal?’
‘The guy who operated the CCTV saw it. I impressed the need for secrecy on him, and I took the hard drive it was saved on to.’
‘So it’ll probably be on the news already. You know what parasites journalists are,’ he said, checking the watch on his pale hairy wrist. Tanya noticed a thin gold chain she’d not seen before. ‘Probably the only reason no one’s rung me about it yet is they’re all over this other case. Some fucking lunatic running around taking people’s heads off, then tweeting about it.’
‘I heard. Jaap’s on that one, isn’t he?’ said Tanya just as her phone started ringing. It was the phone company. She glanced at Smit, who nodded.
‘Where have you got to?’ she said into her phone.
‘It’s going to be tricky, the calls came from the Internet,’ said the young-sounding woman.
‘So can you trace them online?’
‘Not really our kind of thing, we haven’t got the expertise here.’
They just don’t want to get involved, she thought. Can’t blame them really.
‘Hang on,’ she said to the woman and covered her phone. ‘Have we got people who can trace calls made over the Internet?’ she asked Smit.
‘Fuck knows. There must be someone among that lot in there who can.’
The strip light above them flickered once, then died. The corridor went dark.
‘We’re going to get someone to call you back,’ she said and ended the call, wondering how she could hand the case over to someone else.
It’s now or never, she thought. And never’s not really an option.
‘There’s something else, I—’
‘And this other thing, the cannabis farm.’
‘Yeah, I think we need to discuss that.’ She looked around, checking no one was in earshot. ‘Third time? Too much of a coincidence.’
‘I agree, and I’ve got an idea on that.’ He checked his watch, squinting to see it. ‘Let’s talk about it later; right now I need you to concentrate on this.’ He waved a hand towards the room they’d just stepped out of.
‘The thing is, I’m supposed to be on leave, and—’
Smit’s phone started ringing. He looked at the screen and held it up to Tanya.
The contact’s name was the chief crime reporter on De Telegraaf.
‘Want a bet, headless lunatic or killer policeman?’ said Smit before he answered and strode off down the corridor.
Great, she thought. Handled that well.
She opened the door and stepped back into the room.
‘Anyone here able to track calls made over the Internet?’ she called out.
A young guy wearing some kind of heavy metal T-shirt leaned back in his chair, waved his hand. The skull leered at Tanya.
‘Depends,’ he said.
‘On what?’
‘Oh, a whole load of stuff. Like, for instance, did they go through a proxy server first? Were they routing round some other—’
‘Tell you what,’ said Tanya pulling out her phone. ‘Call this number and speak to the phone company. And this is top priority now.’
She gave him the number and left the room, noticing the time on the wall clock as she did. Coming up for twenty-five past.
I’ve got to get away, she thought. I can’t get sucked into this.
Now that she knew her foster father’s new name was Staal, she didn’t want to waste any time before confronting him. She’d held it back for years, and now that she’d made the decision to do it, she couldn’t wait any longer.
It felt like a fire in her chest. And there was only one way to douse it.
She made her way up two floors to where Smit’s office was, hoping he’d managed to get rid of the journalist.
The police tried to be as open as possible, which meant that although press contacts were usually handled by press officers, for big stuff the station chiefs had to show their faces and assure the journalists that they were doing everything in their power, and all the other clichés which got trotted out at such times.
She knocked on his door but got no answer. Listening for a moment, she was sure he wasn’t there and turned to go. Someone called her name from the end of the corridor, and she turned to see the tech with the skull T-shirt.
‘Yeah?’
‘I’ve got something, but you’re not going to like it.’
If it keeps me here any longer then I’m sure I’m not going to like it, she thought as she followed him back down to the basement.
At his computer he flopped into the chair and pointed at the screen.
‘You want the simple version?’
Tanya was torn between telling him that just because she was a woman didn’t mean she didn’t understand computers, and her hatred of techie-speak.
‘Simple’s good.’
‘Whoever placed the calls over the Internet wasn’t very careful about hiding what they were doing. In fact they probably just assumed that what they were doing wasn’t traceable.’
‘So you’ve got them?’
‘Not quite, but I’ve got their IP address, and when I run it …’ He pointed to a number on the screen.
‘What?’
He pushed back in his chair and turned to look at her. A stud earring caught the light. A phone was ringing off to her right; no one was picking it up. She suddenly felt sick.
‘It traces back to here,’ he said lowering h
is voice, glancing around. ‘Someone made all those calls right from this building.’
6
Saturday, 8 May
15.37
‘Are you fucking kidding me?’ said Smit once Kees had finished.
It was all going to shit.
He’d had no choice but to call it in, but not before he’d cleaned the place up and got rid of every trace of white powder he could find. Every speck of dust had made him paranoid, and every surface now glinted like new.
He was standing in the flat, phone jammed up against his ear, moving it away when Smit had started shouting.
His hands felt weird, painful, but he was getting used to that. Or if he wasn’t yet, then he was going to have to real quick.
‘Like I said, I turned my back, and he assaulted me.’
‘You let it happen.’
‘I thought I was there protecting him from someone else, that’s why it’s called witness protection, not guarding a suspect—’
‘I don’t give a fuck what it’s called. He was the main witness in a major trial, and you’ve just lost him.’
Kees was looking out the window. A few clouds had formed high up and were moving fast. His head was hammering, the pulse at his temples felt like it might explode on each beat.
Shit shit shit.
‘I’ve put the call out, so with any luck—’
‘I know you put the call out, that’s how I heard about it.’
It was like the adrenaline had cleared his system out. He wasn’t high now.
‘So what do you want me to do?’
‘I’m dealing with a whole heap of shit today, and now I’m going to have to call ICTY and tell them you’ve lost their main witness.’
Kees didn’t have anything to say to that.
‘Get back to the station and start doing your fucking job,’ said Smit before the line went dead.
Modern management style, thought Kees as he headed down the stairs and out to the canal side. He stood by a bin, overflowing with rubbish, and looked down at the canal. The breeze picked up a blue plastic bag from the top of the pile, and floated it down to the water.
It settled on the surface.
He’d given him some of his coke, and Isovic sat there and took it.
Into the Night: Inspector Rykel Book 2 (Amsterdam Quartet) Page 3
