‘That’s not allowed in here,’ the desk sergeant tells me as I’m trying to sign in.
‘He’s a highly trained dog,’ I tell him. ‘It’ll be fine.’
‘Yeah? So why’s he peeing on that chair?’
I turn to see the dog cock-legged. He swings his head round. From the way he’s holding his mouth, teeth visible, I swear he’s grinning.
‘I dunno. I don’t know anything about dogs.’
Jansen saves the day and this time we go to the canteen, leaving the desk sergeant muttering that the last time he checked his contract it didn’t say anything about mopping up dog piss.
‘What’s this about, sir?’
‘I’m not going to tell you unless you stop calling me “sir”.’
‘Okay, s—’
‘There, not too hard is it?’
Once I’ve taken him through everything he gets his phone out.
Five minutes later we’re in the incident room upstairs and I’m telling the story again, this time to Vermeer. The dog takes a liking to her instantly, rubbing against her leg and nuzzling her hand. She pushes him away.
‘So Robert Huisman’s alibi could be false?’
‘It was never corroborated properly; doesn’t actually mean it is false. But given how Marianne Kleine died it’s starting to look like a very strong possibility.’
‘You liked him for it at the time?’
‘Look at it this way, on character alone you’ve got a small-time dealer funding his own habit, and he and a friend tricking women into having sex with them on camera. What’s not to like? I was sure he was the one, until the alibi surfaced. At which point there wasn’t much we could do.’
‘So this all hinges on the report not being done properly. Any evidence of that?’
I pull out Wilders’ spiral-bound diary, open it to the right page and slide it across the desk in a rather showy way. She reads it then passes it over to Jansen.
‘So the day Wilders was doing his report on the video tape happens to be the very day he gets a call saying his sister was rushed to hospital and he left early. And as a result he didn’t complete the full report, like the verifying of the time stamp?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Lucky for him he died this morning, otherwise I’d have him brought up on a disciplinary.’ She picks up the notebook again. ‘What did Wilders die of?’
The chances of his death being related to this crime are slim to none, but I’d checked anyway. Seems Vermeer has as suspicious a mind as I do.
‘Heart attack apparently. I did ask for the full report, just in case.’
‘Jansen,’ Vermeer says, turning to him, ‘run Huisman through the system. I want to know everything about him.’
‘And Akkerman too,’ I tell him. ‘You potentially fake an alibi for a friend, starts to make it look like you might actually be involved yourself.’
Vermeer gives Jansen the nod.
Once he’s gone Vermeer cranks up the charm.
‘If this turns out to be significant, it’s a pretty major fuck-up.’
It’s hard to disagree with her assessment. And it happened on my watch. Though it’s not strictly speaking my fault. Hank de Vries was the one in charge of that particular piece of evidence, and he reported to me that it was solid. I didn’t go and check his work; we were equals, and he was a good cop. I can’t believe this is happening.
Jansen walks back in with a laptop. The dog, which has been lying at Vermeer’s feet, gets up and wants to check out what Jansen is carrying. It jumps up and puts its front paws on the table. Vermeer brushes it off without even looking at it. Claws hit the floor.
‘Nothing on Akkerman, but I’ve got Huisman’s file. Arrest for heroin possession two years ago, then nothing.’
‘Known address?’
‘None.’
‘Get Roemers onto it,’ Vermeer tells him. ‘I think it’s time we had a chat with Messrs Huisman and Akkerman.’
‘When you find either of them I should be there,’ I tell Vermeer as Jansen disappears again.
‘Why?’
‘Because I’ve interviewed them before, and it’ll unnerve them if I suddenly turn up on their doorstep.’
Deep in space planets spin and photons speed through nothingness and black holes suck matter into their mysterious cores. And still Katja Vermeer stares at me.
‘I don’t think that’s necessary,’ she finally says. ‘Thank you for your help, though. It’s appreciated.’
She gets up and heads for the door.
‘C’mon. You wouldn’t have this if I hadn’t brought it to you. I can help.’
She stops and stands with her back to me for a few seconds, as if trying to make up her mind. She turns and looks at me.
‘Before I let Jansen contact you I read your file.’
So it’s come to that, has it? People reading my file before dealing with me. And I’m not even sure just how much is in there. Though I’m sure there’s enough.
‘Then you’ll know I’m serious.’
‘I know you’re trouble.’
‘Is it true you made a grown man cry?’
A flicker of a smile. It’s not much but it’s something I can work with.
‘You want me to beg?’ I ask.
There’s that flicker of a smile again. Or maybe it’s an unconscious twitch.
‘No. Wouldn’t make any difference anyway.’
‘Look, if this turns out to be related to the Muller case, then I want to be involved.’
‘I thought you were about to officially leave the police? You’ve cut your deal, you’ll get your early retirement and you can go off and do whatever it is you do. We asked you to go over the file, but that’s it. Leave this to the professionals.’
The door closes behind her and the dog stands watching it in case it opens again, his tail gradually winding down from a full wag to being still. I think of the interviews Hank and I had done with Huisman, the feeling we’d both had that he was the killer, then the alibi which made it impossible, even though it went against our instincts. Something I’ve learnt over the last year is that ignoring your instinct occasionally isn’t going to do you any harm. But ignoring it again and again and again can land you in a very dark place. And right now my instinct is trying to tell me something. I’m just not sure what.
‘C’mon,’ I tell him. ‘We’re not wanted here. Let’s go and see Nellie.’
Nellie de Vries turns her head to look out of the window onto the IJburg, the vast waters separating Amsterdam from Amsterdam-Noord. I follow her gaze. A cargo ship looms on the horizon, dwarfing the ferry that runs between IJplein and Centraal station. Above it all a plane dives fearlessly towards a bank of cloud. I watch as it emerges unscathed on the other side.
At my feet the dog stirs as if he’s just felt a disturbance in the Force.
Which he probably has, given what Nellie’s just told me. The words she’d uttered creep through me like a kind of cold death.
She still lives in the same house she and Hank bought back in the early 2000s, when they both knew the future held nothing but joyful opportunity, a place where nothing bad would ever happen. It’s a floating structure, purpose-built and tethered to a quay at IJburg, part of a range of artificial islands constructed to ease pressure on Amsterdam’s ever-expanding housing crisis. We’re in the large downstairs, an open-plan area with views out over the water, sitting at the table where Hank and Nellie had eaten for years, where now she eats alone.
On the kitchen surface behind her is an empty bottle of wine. If you stare through it, the tiles beyond become curved, magnified. I suddenly know that in the bin there are going to be many more bottles. Some inspector I am, I think to myself, not having spotted that earlier. I’d always thought she had the kind of fragility only the truly strong allow themselves to show the world. Now I’m not so sure.
‘When?’ is all I can manage, the word catching in my throat, the cold creeping further through me.
‘They said it will be put before the committee and I’ll have an answer the next day. If it’s approved, then it has to take place within four days or another application will have to be made.’
Jesus. I’ve lost people; it feels like more than most. But their deaths all happened. I’ve never had to face the decision Nellie’s been wrestling with for months now. I wonder about the first time the idea popped into her head. Did she hate herself for even thinking it? How did she gradually come to decide it was time?
Nellie’s a paediatric neurologist, working with the worst cases of childhood epilepsy, including two of the most devastating, Lennox-Gastaut syndrome and Dravet syndrome. We’re talking kids who have twenty to thirty fits a day, kids for who the standard medications simply don’t work. Frustrated, she researched heavily and has for the past three years been treating with a phenomenal success rate. The prescription is cannabis, small doses of which reduce the frequency of episodes down to a couple a month, sometimes less. Say you have the choice of watching your child fit upwards of thirty times a day, or a couple of times a month, what are you going to do? Unsurprisingly her waiting list is over a year long now, with desperate parents bringing their children from countries all over Europe.
Her main clinic is at the same hospital Hank lies in. She has lunch with him every day, where she talks to him, tells him about what’s going on, about her patients, her life without him. When she’d first told me she was doing that I wasn’t sure it was a good idea, but I’ve changed my mind. I think it’s brought her to this point now, which although terrible, is maybe for the best.
I reach down and scratch behind the dog’s ear. It would have been easier if the shots had killed Hank outright, but instead they hit his leg, and I’d staunched as much of the bleeding as I could until the ambulance got there. But by the time he arrived at the hospital he’d slipped into the coma he’s lain in ever since. I’ve often wondered if I should have left him to bleed, if it would have been better that way. But hindsight’s always twenty-twenty.
And irony on top of irony, we were busting a grow room.
It’s been years now, and there’s never been any change in his condition. Nothing that hinted at a recovery. Whoever said hope’s a cruel mistress was understating it. Hope will tear you apart, prey on your nerves till you’re a wreck. I can only imagine what it must’ve been like for Nellie, second by second, waiting for the call telling her that Hank’s woken up. Or that he’d died.
This isn’t what anyone signed up for.
‘Will you be here when –’
The emotion takes over, forcing the tears she’s been holding in for so long. I reach out for her hand and she grasps it tight. We sit like this until she’s cried it out. The dog makes his move, pushing into her leg. She reaches down, strokes him and he lets out a low growl of pleasure.
I’m feeling sick now, and guilty too, because this isn’t really the time to ask, and yet I need to. She takes it well, though, and tells me Hank’s old case notes are up in the spare room on the first floor. I leave her with the dog and go upstairs.
The room looks back towards the shore, a narrow window framing the golden minaret on top of the turquoise-tiled Elmouhssinine Mosque. The walls are covered with framed photos; one of them is of Hank and me the day we graduated posing in our uniforms. It strikes me that we look like kids. If only we knew what was coming, we probably wouldn’t be grinning like idiots. It prompts one of those moments where I don’t even know who I am, how I got here. The rest are of Hank and Nellie, their story played out in pictures from when they first met to their marriage at De Koepelkerk, and beyond.
Until that day.
The black wolf shudders. It’s hungry. It needs the anger and the sorrow and the pain.
I turn away to the boxes and I find what I’m looking for quickly. There’s a desk and chair by the window and I take the book of Hank’s notes on the Muller case over and sit down. They’re handwritten, the letters slanting forward as if leaning into the wind. A few pages in I decide I’m going to need more time. Back downstairs Nellie’s sitting on the sofa, looking out at the water. The dog is right next to her, head resting on her lap. She’s gently stroking him and he’s lapping it up.
‘He’s nice. What’s his name?’
‘So far it’s just “dog”; haven’t really had time to think.’
She strokes him a little more before she speaks again. ‘I saw Tanya the other day.’
Words which suck all the air from the room.
‘How is she?’ I finally manage.
‘I’d like to say she’s fine, but really she’s not. I can tell.’
All I’d ever tried to do was the best for her, and yet somehow I ended up hurting her, the last person in the world I’d want to harm. How did it get to this? Why was I such a fuck-up?
‘I think you should talk to her, Jaap. I know things were bad, especially after the miscarriage, but I’m seeing you both, and you’re both miserable. Being apart clearly isn’t working. For either of you.’
The reality is I tried, though. Tried several times but she wouldn’t see me, said that it was over, we were done. I’d got angry, which hadn’t helped. And then I began to wonder if she wasn’t, in fact, right, that maybe it was over and I just had to accept it and move on. I think of Sabine.
‘Did she say anything?’
‘She didn’t have to, but it’s clear she’s hurting and I think she regrets how it ended.’
Regret is such a small word for how I feel about it all. Regret doesn’t even come close. On the kitchen table Nellie’s phone rings and she gets up to answer it. I feel like I need some air, so I walk over to the door, which leads to the balcony overlooking the water. Seagulls mock me with their cries as I step out. My fingers tremble when I’m filling the vape, and I lose some of the bud over the rail.
I hear Nellie’s footsteps behind me. ‘Feeding the ducks?’
I take a couple of draws, and it starts to dampen the swelling wave of anxiety I’d felt inside. It strikes me that without this stuff I might not even still be alive.
‘You think if I tried to contact her she’d respond?’ I finally ask.
‘What have you got to lose? At worst she’ll just ignore you. But I think it’s time.’
I take a few more inhales just to steady me off. Several ducks float by, though they don’t seem interested in what I’d dropped. Probably just as well. They seem pretty stress-free; don’t look like they need it. Suddenly I hate myself for being weak, for having to medicate just to survive. Another swelling wave: this time it’s self-pity.
‘Jaap, I really think you should call her. Before it’s too late.’
Too late. The saddest words in any language.
As we walk to the door I ask her if I can take Hank’s notes and she agrees. She opens it and we see a harried-looking courier racing back to his white van and speeding off.
‘I feel like I’m failing,’ she says.
I hold her for a few moments. She seems so delicate, even though she’s probably the strongest person I know.
‘You’re doing the right thing. Hank would say the same.’
‘So you’ll be here if it happens?’ she finally asks.
I tell her I will. Even though I can’t think of anything worse.