We’ve got an ambulance on the way, the dispatcher had said eight minutes, and a scene of crime team scrambled from the local station in case we’re too late. Breaking one of the large glass sheets would be devastating, even if we managed it. The front door is similarly out; it’s wood but solid enough to withstand a tank. Which leaves us with one of the round windows on the first floor.
‘It’s too high. We need something to stand on,’ Vermeer says.
‘You can give me a leg up.’
She looks me up and down, then pulls out her gun.
‘How about you give me a leg up instead?’
I’m not about to start arguing with a woman holding a gun. I lean against the wall, position my hands and lock my fingers together. Vermeer flips the gun round so she’s holding the barrel then raises her boot.
‘Ready?’ she asks.
‘Go.’
The grip on her sole is chunky, and it bites my fingers as I take her weight. She launches up, puts her other foot on my shoulder. Soon she’s standing with one foot either side of my head, and I’m grasping her ankles to keep her steady. My leg muscles are already starting to shake.
‘Close your eyes,’ she says.
‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to up-skirt you.’
‘You’re not, mainly because I’m not wearing a skirt. Ready?’
‘Do it.’ I scrunch my eyes up.
I hear the impact. Glass tinkles down around me and I hope I’m not about to get another one stuck in my arm. When it’s safe I open my eyes to see a nasty-looking shard, the brother of the one I met the day before yesterday, sticking into the ground just by the toe of my shoe. Vermeer knocks a few more pieces out before declaring herself ready. Here comes the really hard part. I let go of her ankles and hold the palms of my hands flat. She steps onto the right hand first, then the left. I push upwards, my arms straining so hard they’re trembling. I can hear the ambulance in the distance. Just as I think I can’t push any further I feel the pressure ease off. Vermeer must’ve got hold of the sill. She hauls herself through and I’m free to drop my arms.
I’m by the front door well before Vermeer, and I’m starting to wonder if she’s got lost inside. The ambulance is closer now. The door swings open.
‘You okay?’ I ask Vermeer. ‘You’ve got blood on your face.’
‘Just my hand,’ she says, holding it up to show a swooping gash. ‘Must’ve wiped it.’
The ambulance has stopped, the siren cut out. We rush through the house and entranceway leading directly into the vast space. The kitchen area’s off to the left and we run over. There’s a strong smell of alcohol.
The body’s lying in a dark pool.
It’s not blood though. It’s red wine.
‘It’s him,’ Vermeer says.
I get close and reach over to feel the man’s throat. He groans when I push in for a pulse, and raises an arm to try and swat my hand away.
‘Fuck,’ Vermeer says, shaking her head.
‘We’re going to look like idiots,’ I confirm.
Running footsteps behind us on the tiled floor.
‘Well, this is embarrassing. For you two.’
I look up to see one of the two paramedics staring down at the scene. He’s got short ginger hair and black-rimmed glasses and I’m sure he spends his spare time conversing on conspiracy theory forums on the internet. He doesn’t look particularly amused.
‘The thing is …’ Vermeer says.
‘… it really looked like blood from outside,’ I finish. ‘With the sunlight and …’
He shakes his head like he’s never had to deal with such a sorry bunch of fuck-ups in his whole life, then moves closer to the body with a deep theatrical sigh.
‘You dead, sir?’ he asks, prodding him. ‘Dead, or just very, very pissed?’
Pieter-Jan Kleine groans.
‘Well, my work here is done,’ he says, standing up.
‘You could look at her hand before you go. Make the trip worthwhile.’
He glares at me, but then nods to Vermeer who shows him the cut.
‘Nice,’ he says. But he drops his kitbag and gets to work.
I get on the phone and cancel the scene of crime team. By the time Vermeer’s cleaned up and bandaged another call’s come in so the two paramedics have to run back to the ambulance, leaving us alone with Kleine.
I walk over to the bottle smashed on the tiles. Part of it is held together by the label.
‘Chateau Lafite 2000,’ I read as I pick it up. ‘Looks expensive.’
‘About a grand and a half a bottle,’ Vermeer says, adding, ‘My soon-to-be ex is a wine broker. Tosser.’
I’m stunned, both at the price, and that Vermeer has offered some personal information. But before I can follow up on the tosser wine broker soon-to-be ex she gives me a look that makes it clear nothing else is going to be forthcoming.
‘That was embarrassing.’
‘I know, but from outside it really did look like blood.’
‘Let’s get him sobered up.’
I haul him over to the sofa and wedge a large glass coffee table up against his legs to stop him moving, whilst Vermeer gets him a glass of water.
‘Two bottles of Jenever in the sink,’ she says. ‘He must be wasted.’
The wine had just been an afterthought it seems, a little tipple just to round things off after he’d downed the Jenever and tried to wreck his own home.
Vermeer walks over and Kleine holds his hand out unsteadily to reach for the glass. She throws the liquid in his face. He groans again. She gets another glass and this time hands it to him.
Whilst he’s sipping I take a quick look round. It’s even bigger once you’re inside it, the double-height ceilings reminding me of airports or warehouses more than somewhere you’d want to live. I roughly calculate I could fit four of my houseboats in here and still have enough left over for a small circus top.
Over the next few minutes he gradually comes round, to the point where he looks well enough to answer a few simple questions. He’s mid-fifties, lean, and if you gave him a black polo neck and some round glasses he could pass for a Steve Jobs lookalike. As it is he’s wearing jeans and a dirty orange sweat top, the arms of which are a little too short. His face is so pale he looks like someone’s siphoned off a few litres of blood. On the table are a variety of coffee-table books – a large volume on contemporary architecture in Chile, one on the steep-sloped vineyards of the Rhine – and a large conch shell, mainly white but with apricot tinges here and there.
I ask him about DH Biotech.
‘Why?’ he says, his voice croaky.
‘Just background really.’
He’s still feeling the effect of the alcohol, but is it just me or do his eyes narrow as he looks at me?
‘What do you want to know?’
What I really want to know is what his connection with Muller might be. But given his delicate state I decide I need to warm him up a little before getting to the important question.
‘Tell me about the company. It seems they’d been working on a cure for MS but it didn’t work?’
He winces and rubs his left temple as if it’s hurting bad. Which it probably is. He picks up the shell.
‘Marianne loved this,’ he says, turning it over in his hands. ‘She was only twelve and we’d gone on holiday to Zakynthos in Greece and she’d been so excited about diving in the sea that she’d talked of nothing else for weeks before we even got on the plane. We’d got her goggles, flippers and a snorkel, and the minute we arrived at the hotel she was itching to get in the water. Of course, she’d been imagining this rich underwater world for so long that the reality was a huge disappointment. There were no bright coloured fish, or beautiful shells. It was mostly sand and the odd bit of rubbish which had got stuck on the seabed. She was so upset that I found a tourist shop and bought this, and the next morning I went down to the beach before breakfast and hid it by some rocks so I could find it later. She was pretty reluctant to go into the water again, but I persuaded her and made sure we swam near the rocks. She saw it of course and dived for it. At first she seemed really happy, but by the next day she’d lost all interest in diving and didn’t go in the water again for the rest of the week. As we were leaving the hotel I was checking her room and saw she’d left it on the bed. I packed it, and when we got back here I showed it to her, saying she’d almost left it behind. I’ll never forget the look she gave me. “It’s not real, though, is it?” “Of course it’s real,” I told her. “You put it there, didn’t you?” she said. I said no. She got her phone out, typed something in and showed me a Wikipedia page on this type of shell, which it turns out is slightly different from any found in the Mediterranean.’
He holds it up for us to see, turning it slowly in his hands. There’s a shiny curled inner lip and a spiky outside.
‘Lobatus gigas it’s called, and it’s only found in the northwest Atlantic. I lied to her, and she knew I was lying. The same way I’d held her whilst she was growing up and told her everything would be okay, reassured her that life was wonderful and that she was going to do great things. And all I can think about is that whilst she was … was being killed she must have known I’d lied again. Do you know what that’s like, to lie to your own child?’
He’s still staring at the shell when I prompt him on my original question, why none of the compounds the company was studying worked.
‘You want a lecture on biochemistry?’ he asks, placing the shell back on the table. ‘They didn’t work. I’m not sure what else you need to know. At that stage none of the costs were recoverable.’
‘What sort of costs?’
‘Millions. Forty, fifty. Does it really matter? Marianne’s dead, and I don’t know why you’re here asking me questions about something so far in the past.’
He suddenly looks even paler than before, as if all this talk is painful. Which, of course, it is.
‘I know it seems odd,’ Vermeer says, ‘but we are doing everything we can, and we could really use your help in answering just a few more questions.’
He doesn’t take his eyes off the shell, but he finally nods.
‘The offices Marianne rented were broken into. Can you think of why that might be?’
‘When?’
‘Most likely last night; it was discovered this morning.’
‘I … no. Not anyone specifically.’
‘What about in general? Would your company be interested in the research she was doing? From what I hear it could be the start of a medical revolution.’
‘Not without Marianne it won’t. But anyway, no pharmaceutical company is going to raid their offices – that’s just crazy.’
Patrick Wust seemed to think otherwise.
I show him the same photo of Huisman I’d shown Wust.
He hesitates for a moment before shaking his head.
‘I don’t recognize him. Is he the one you think killed her?’
‘Just someone we want to talk to,’ Vermeer says.
‘Did you have any dealings with Koen Muller?’ I ask him, changing tack. ‘He was on the board of DH Biotech around about that time the trial failed.’
Do I imagine it, or does something in his posture stiffen at that name? I’m just about to push for an answer when he leans forward and vomits onto the glass table in front of him, hitting both the books and the shell. Vomit runs across the table surface, and then over the edge.
‘You see his reaction before he threw up?’
‘He’s lying,’ I say as we walk back to the car.
‘It could have been because he suddenly felt bad, but … I’m inclined to agree. Pretty sure he knows Koen Muller.’
‘When I spoke to Wust he said that Marianne’s discovery could obliterate more traditional forms of treatment. And her own father works for a company that could be seen as a competitor.’
‘What are you saying?’
I shake my head. ‘I just don’t know.’
‘So where does that leave us?’
A question to which I haven’t got an answer. I glance out over the water. The sun’s setting, fattening up as it slides towards the horizon. The silhouette of a bird streaks across it.
I haven’t got an answer.
But I am going to get one.