I’m sat on a bench up by the Lekkeresluis waiting for Sabine to turn up. For some reason I keep thinking that Tanya will appear and see me with Sabine. I try to shake that thought off, but before I can I hear Nellie’s voice in my head telling me to contact her before it’s too late.
Earlier Vermeer dropped me off at the houseboat and the first thing I did was to go on the roof and roll a joint. Being unable to medicate during the day meant I’d succumbed easily to the rage, the black wolf, the thing that isn’t me but seems to be trapped inside. The darkness within. If I’d been able to keep my cannabinoid levels up during the day it wouldn’t have happened with such severity, and the come-up would have been long enough for me to have done something about it. But I’d been caught up in it all, the investigation taking over my mind, and I’d welcomed it, felt good about doing the work again. Part of me thought that I was strong enough now, that I could do this on my own. Seems that part of me was wrong.
Up and down the canal, elm trees are scattering leaves, their delicate forms picked up by the street lights, and Kush has been amusing himself by staring at the waterbirds that float past every so often, their jerky head movements contrasting with their stately glide. He freezes when he spots one and I notice his legs tremble a bit, as if he’s holding himself back from jumping down the metre or so into the water, swimming over and tearing them to shreds.
‘Hey … Jaap?’
Kush explodes into an orgy of barking and I turn to see Sabine. She’s in tight jeans, a long-sleeved tunic which hangs down past her knees and has a scarf wrapped round her throat. Those bruises must have shown up. She looks worried by the ferocity of Kush’s reaction. Strange, I’ve not seen him like this before. Maybe it’s just because he didn’t hear her coming either. I manage to calm him down a bit, though I see Sabine’s still nervous. Whether about meeting me or because of Kush I can’t tell. But then she was the one to contact me, so I just need to get out of my head and say something before she thinks I’m an idiot.
‘Sure you haven’t been followed?’
Sabine laughs and it’s like a musical scale rising up and down. It all seems so surreal. Yesterday I was hauling a man off her and today we’re out on a sort of date.
‘Could all be a plot. First I’ll seduce you and then get you to kill him for me,’ she says.
‘Been done before. Many times.’
She sits down next to me. Kush eyes her suspiciously, then goes back to scanning the water. We chat for a bit, and it seems surprisingly easy given how out of practice I am.
‘So, is it exciting being a cop?’ she asks.
I watch a few more leaves tumble through the air as I think of everything that has happened today, every glimmer of hope fading away to nothing. The knowledge that a man we suspect of being involved in two separate murders has disappeared and we’ve so far been unable to find him is not exactly exciting. Intensely frustrating would be a better phrase.
‘I’m not a cop any more.’
‘Really? You look too young to be retired.’
‘Hormone treatment. Amazing what you can buy off the internet from dodgy Russian websites.’
‘Trouser trouble?’
‘Not those kind of hormones.’
She gives me a playful nudge. God, how I’ve missed this. I manage to stop myself from telling her that. We’ve only been here twenty minutes or so, bit too early for that sort of thing. Just hold off, I tell myself.
A slight breeze blows her hair across her face and she flips it away with a brief shake of her head. Exactly like Tanya used to do. I suddenly wonder how I’ve ended up on a date with a woman who is so similar.
‘Something wrong?’ she asks. ‘You’re looking at me strangely.’
‘Nothing, it’s just …’
‘Just what?’
It would take so long to explain. And I don’t really want to. I’m sure she doesn’t want to hear it anyway. Talking about your ex on a first date isn’t the smoothest of moves.
‘Never mind. Wanna do something fun?’
‘As long as it’s legal.’
‘I’m a cop, remember.’
‘Ex-cop, I thought?’
I think about that for a moment. Kush’s nose is leading him over the canal edge, a floating bird the target. I tighten the leash.
‘It’s complicated. Shall we?’
The resonant, jangling Westerkerk bells strike one in the morning.
‘You mind?’
Sabine pulls a cigarette out of her jeans, now a crumpled heap by the bed. She props herself up on the pillow.
‘Go for it.’
I wonder about joining her with a joint, but I’m startled to realize I don’t feel I need one. The power of a good evening out with an even better end. The only downer was Kush, who’d been in a stroppy mood all night, to the point when we’d got back here I’d put him to bed in the bathroom and closed the door. I wonder if dogs get jealous. He certainly hasn’t taken to Sabine. Well, tough. He’ll have to cope.
Next to me Sabine’s lighter flickers to life briefly.
‘Never slept with a cop before. Not bad.’
Earlier in the evening I’d found out she was ticklish. I apply that knowledge now until she’s squealing for me to stop.
‘That’s police brutality,’ she finally says when she can talk again. ‘I might have to report you.’
‘Good luck with that.’
She finishes her cigarette, taking the butt to the kitchen, and I notice as she steps out of the room a mark on her lower back I’d not seen earlier, a line of raised scar tissue. When she’s back in bed I ask her about it.
‘That guy, Tom.’
‘The one I met?’
‘Yeah.’
The mood’s changed now, and I regret asking.
‘It’s funny,’ she says after a while. ‘When I first met him I had this strong sense of him being the one, y’know? And it was good. We were good together, for the first six months or so anyway. You’d think that would be enough time to get to know someone, but it clearly wasn’t.’
‘What happened?’
‘It was weird. The change came so suddenly. We’d gone to the beach at Zandvoort, you know it?’
I’d been there with Tanya, and I remember with crystal clarity. It was the last time we’d gone anywhere together. ‘Yeah, been there a few times.’
‘I liked it there. I used to go as a kid, and I wanted to share that with Tom. I remember we had grilled fish for lunch, and a beer. In the time I’d known him Tom never drank, said he didn’t like the taste of alcohol. But he didn’t mind if I did, and I was feeling great; here I was on a sunny day, out by my favourite beach with the man I was starting to think I loved. So I had a beer with lunch, and he joined me. I didn’t think much of it, but then he ordered another one, and another. I was a bit surprised, but he seemed happy and we were talking about the future and … Well, you can probably guess what happened. We were heading back. I was a little tipsy but it had hardly seemed to touch Tom. At the station we bumped into an old colleague of mine, a guy I’d worked with a few years before and we’d chatted for a few minutes whilst we waited for our train, just the usual kind of thing. Tom changed during the ride back; he got quiet, sullen almost, and I wondered if he wasn’t feeling well. Maybe the fish, or just the fact he’d had a few beers and wasn’t really used to it. So anyway, later that evening, I was getting a glass of wine from the fridge, and I closed the door and got a real shock: he was standing in the kitchen doorway and there was something different about him, about his face. I asked if he was all right, and he just lost it. I mean full-on-crazy lost it. He started ranting and raving, accusing me of fucking the old work colleague. That’s not normal, right? You might say “seeing” or “sleeping with”, but he was insistent that I was “fucking” the guy behind his back. So we argued. I told him he was just being paranoid, that he needed to calm down, but of course that just made him madder. But he didn’t hit me that night. The next morning he was so sorry, apologized over and over, begged me to forgive him. He blamed the alcohol, said that he couldn’t handle it, which is why he didn’t drink, and that I wasn’t to let him drink again.
‘If I’d known about alcoholics then I would have got out right away, but I didn’t. I told myself he was sorry. I believed him when he said it wasn’t going to happen again, that it was going to be okay. Stupid. But it was okay for a couple of weeks, and I was almost forgetting it when he came home later than usual one night. Which is when this happened.’ She reaches her hand round to her back. ‘I threw him out after that, but he kept coming back late at night, banging on the door. I had to call the police, your lot. Have to say I wasn’t that impressed; this guy just told me to stay inside. So I terminated the rent and got another place. Seemed like the only thing to do.’
‘But then he found you again.’
‘That was just bad luck. I was walking home from work and I heard someone call my name. He was at that bar, standing outside on his own, having a drink.’
‘You think it was?’
‘Was what?’
‘Bad luck?’
‘Well, it wasn’t good luck. Unless you mean because we got to meet …’
I agree with her. But what I really meant was, was it simply bad luck Tom had been there on her route home? Or something else. Something more akin to a plan?
I fall asleep thinking I might just look him up on the system tomorrow.
The whiskey started off rich and full and peaty. A whole world to dive into after the long day. Now, at the bottom of the second glass, it just tastes harsh, tastes like alcohol and little else. He knows he should be going to bed; he has to be back in the office first thing, but with all that’s going on he’s not been able to sleep. The whiskey had seemed like a good compromise. He’s just considering popping a couple of painkillers, the ones he swallowed earlier to stave off the migraine not enough to see him through the night or fend off the assault the single malt is going to mount in a few hours, when his phone lights up.
‘Bad news. My source there says he’s actually on the team now, officially.’
‘Where is he now?’
The words feel a little off in his mouth, not exactly slurred but just … off. He hopes it’s not obvious.
‘He’s been out all evening with a woman, but he’s back at his houseboat now.’
‘I’m beginning to wonder if we shouldn’t act pre-emptively. I’ve been told we can send a little message.’
‘Thing is, the woman’s still with him. At this stage it’s fair to assume she’s staying the night, which kind of complicates things.’
‘Keep watching. There’ll be an opportunity; you just need to be ready to take it.’
He washes a couple of pills down with the last of the liquid and goes to bed, where he finally drifts off right before the alarm sounds, bright and jangling and painful.