The place is busy, a blur of talk, the clatter of an open kitchen, and a mix of smells which make me realize just how hungry I actually am. Vermeer’s choice, a place on Cornelis Schuytstraat which I’d never been into before. On the outside it looks tiny, but once inside you notice it stretches all the way to the back of the building and spills out into the courtyard as well. A small army of waiters and waitresses wheel platters of food and trays of drinks around at a startling rate. Right now one of them, a girl with a severe undercut, deposits our food in front of us with surprising grace and is gone before we can even thank her.
I’d opted for the burger made from some rare-breed cow, which had been, according to the menu, massaged daily and had Bach’s Forty-Eight played to it during the day and the Goldbergs every night, whilst Vermeer had ordered a pot of mussels. The menu had given a choice, native or Scottish. Being a good Dutch woman she’d gone native.
‘You don’t want any bloody foreign ones,’ she says as she lifts the top off and releases a cloud of steam. She waits till it disperses and starts picking through them, slurping the yellow-orange flesh out of each shell and discarding them into a rapidly growing pile.
‘I still think we should dig a bit further into DH Biotech. Seems too much of a coincidence that both the victims’ fathers have links there.’
‘Coincidence? From what I’ve seen so far I think Huisman’s much more interesting. He was Lucie Muller’s boyfriend, he’s clearly a shitbag, and you yourself said you’d liked him for it at the time.’
‘I know, it’s just …’
Vermeer’s phone rings. She wipes her hands before answering.
‘What do you mean delayed? That’s not good enough. I need it now. Yeah? Really? How about this, I don’t care. I need that warrant and you’d better get it to me.’ She hangs up and goes back to her mussels.
‘They’re saying another couple of hours.’
Which gives me the opening I need.
‘How about we go and see Marianne Kleine’s father in the meantime?’
She slurps down another couple of mussels, discarded shells tinkling as they hit the bowl.
‘All right, anything to make you happy.’
‘It’ll make me ecstatic.’
When we get back to the car we’re met with the sorriest dog in the world, sitting in the back seat with a mournful look which could haunt even the stoniest soul. He perks up when I let him out and toss the remainder of the burger I’d slipped out of the bun onto the ground. On its way down I notice it has a slice of gherkin stuck to the charred flesh. It’s gone in a flash, a greasy stain on the concrete the only evidence it’d ever existed at all.
I let Kush into the back and slide into the passenger seat, only to find Vermeer wiping down the steering wheel. She looks at me like it’s my fault. We move off and Kush sits up, his head almost between ours. He’s panting, then stops suddenly. I turn to look at him just as he burps loudly. The car smells of gherkin the rest of the way.
The doorbell rings and rings. Vermeer turns and shrugs. We’re at Kleine’s property in Vinkeveense Plassen, a massive lake turned into a water sports complex just off the A2. Sporadic plots of land on the shore have been built on with the kind of properties only affordable to those living off the interest of their interest of their interest. To get to it we’d had to abandon the car and walk across a vast flat lawn dotted with large specimen trees, their leaves yellow against a grey sky. Eventually the house itself appeared, a two-storey oblong much like a gigantic shoebox, clad with wood silvered by the weather.
‘I’ll walk round,’ I tell Vermeer.
She nods and keeps her finger on the bell.
I skirt the building. The path is laid with woodchips and lined with grasses and clusters of late-flowering plants. The place is immaculate, nothing is out of place, not even a leaf or petal. He must have a team of gardeners to keep it like this. But it also seems empty somehow, lacking. I turn the corner and reach the long section facing the water. The side of the structure we’d approached had the odd window and an imposing front door, but this side is pretty much just glass, massive panels two storeys high giving Kleine views over another lawn which stretches away until it reaches the water itself. A flagpole stands naked right at the water’s edge, and a wooden jetty juts out over the water, which today is as steel-grey as the sky. At the end of the jetty the two curved metal poles of a ladder arch off the wood and into the water below. They’re like smooth slinkies caught in motion.
Turning back to the building it strikes me that with the lights on inside at night you could sit out on the water in a little boat and see pretty much everything that went on inside. As I walk round I wonder if that ever bothers him. Or did, before his daughter was killed. I can’t imagine this overt luxury is bringing Kleine much pleasure now. I step closer to the glass to take a look inside and see a moving head. My heart goes into overdrive until I realize it’s just my reflection. Stupid, I tell myself as I try to slow my heart back down. I can faintly hear the bell still ringing inside, an on–off rhythm which tells me Vermeer is a) stubborn, and b) still round the other side. I take the opportunity and reach for my vape, wandering across the lawn down towards the water’s edge.
A breeze flutters my face. When I look down the water’s surface is choppy. Further out I can see a lone windsurfer standing on his board, hauling the sail out of the water. I hit the button on the vape and wait for it to warm up, watching as he gets the sail upright. It bulges with the wind and he’s off, leaning further away from the board as his speed increases. I check my vape. It’s not hot. I hit the button again; the LED telling me it’s heating up comes on, then turns off. Battery dead. At this rate I’m going to have to go back to smoking joints, but not only would that mean burning through roughly four times the amount of cannabis, because combustion is so wasteful, I really hate walking around with my mouth tasting like an ashtray. I pocket the damn thing, noticing the windsurfer’s nowhere to be seen now, and head back to the building, the sun choosing this exact moment to break out from the cloud and light the glass up. I reach the window and cup my hand to kill the reflection when I’m right by it.
I’m looking into a large open-plan living space flooded with the warm late-afternoon light. An L-shaped sofa, which could probably seat twenty. Rugs on the polished concrete floor. But it’s not immaculate like the grounds. In fact, it’s kind of a mess: sofa cushions thrown all over, some ripped apart, foam oozing out of their innards; a painting, a massive canvas, which appears to have been painted just black, has three large cuts in it, revealing the white wall behind. First Marianne Kleine’s start-up offices, now her father’s house. What is going on? I start moving along the glass and see the kitchen section has suffered the same treatment: knives and forks scattered, shards of plates. A large tin on its side with spaghetti shooting out of the top looks like a quiver spilling arrows. And beyond that something on the floor I can’t quite make out. I edge to my left, trying to work it out, get a better view.
‘Rykel?’
She must’ve got bored of ringing the bell and come to find me.
‘Over here!’ I call out, unable to take my eyes off it. Because I can now see it’s a massive red stain seeping out from behind an enormous kitchen island. Worse, I’m pretty sure that slumped on the floor I can see a body.