‘Move it!’ Vermeer’s leaning out of the window yelling at the white delivery van blocking our entrance onto Bloemgracht. Result, nothing of note. She slides back and flips on the siren and lights. Two seconds later the van starts with a jump, then gets moving.
We’re here because at the same time Kleine was hurling wine onto the table, Kush was testing out the seat fabric in the car, checking it met with his stringent durability tests. Unfortunately the fabric failed, as did the foam inside, the seat belts and even the faux leather on the gearstick handle. From about fifteen metres out the whole thing looked like a snow globe just after it’s been shaken.
Result: strained relations. After we’d cleared up the worst of it into a bunch of large evidence bags which had been in the boot, I’d floated the idea of dropping Kush off at the houseboat for a while. Vermeer concurred. We’re expecting the warrant to come through soon, and we can’t leave him in the car again whilst we’re searching the place. The journey hadn’t mellowed Vermeer’s mood, not least because, as she’d loudly proclaimed when we’d gone over a speed bump in Amsterdam-Zuid, ‘Great, now I’ve got a spring up my ass.’
‘We’ll get out here,’ I tell Vermeer.
‘See you back at the station,’ she says as I take the disgraced animal out of the back. ‘If the warrant’s issued in the meantime, I’m not waiting for you.’
As soon as I shut the door she reverses hard, the engine’s high whine drowned out by the bells of Westerkerk striking the hour. We turn into Bloemgracht and I let Kush off the leash. Which is when I see a figure wearing jeans and a hoody step off the shore and onto the gangplank which leads to my houseboat. There’ve been a couple of break-in attempts over the last few years, but they usually wait until the early hours. In both cases they were heroin addicts, looking for items that could be converted into cash. The first was unlucky. Whilst trying to prise open a porthole – a move that wouldn’t have got him anywhere because there was no way he’d’ve been able to squeeze through it even if he had got it open – he’d sliced open his wrist. I’d come back late from a case and found him slumped on deck, minutes from departing the world. If I’d been a few minutes later, or the ambulance hadn’t happened to be close by when I put the call in, he would have died there. The second attempt was when I was on board, and a man had crashed through the front door. I ran at him screaming and the thin weasel-faced addict legged it fast. And now another.
‘Hey!’
The figure freezes, shoulders rising. Then he turns, his face difficult to make out as the hoody’s low over his eyes, his face in a dark pool of shadow. After a moment of indecision he legs it even faster than the last one. Kush is off after him before me, giving chase and catching up with the man just as he skids round a corner out of view. The last I see of them is Kush jumping up, a flash of white teeth clamping round his left arm.
I spend twenty minutes walking the streets searching for Kush or the man but don’t find either. Eventually I give up and head back to the houseboat.
The kitchen light flickers when I flip the switch and for a few seconds I think it’s going to blow. I try a few more lights and each one does the same. Something’s not right, I’m going to have to call that damn electrician again.
I’m just pulling out my phone when I spot movement outside. It’s Kush, I find when I’m back on deck, standing by the gangplank. I call him over and he trots across. He’s panting hard, but otherwise appears fine. I reach out to try and stroke his head but he flicks his snout up so it catches my fingers. It feels wet. I bring my hand up so I can see it better.
My fingers are slick with blood.
‘Fucking unbelievable,’ Vermeer’s saying as I step into the incident room. I raise an eyebrow, which sets her off, telling me the whole story that she’s clearly already told those present several times already. Not ten minutes earlier her warrant request had been turned down because of lack of evidence that it would ‘further the investigation’. After she’s vented, she decides to speak to Beving, and orders me along.
‘And so you agree that Huisman is potentially a person of interest?’ she asks him after barging into his office.
I like her style. Beving does not. But he seems oddly subdued. Anyone else entering his office unbidden would be instantly reassigned to a community liaison support role deep in the countryside on a permanent basis. But Vermeer seems to hold some sway over him.
‘Possibly,’ Beving concedes.
‘Then I’m not sure what else we need? This was a simple, routine request, and it’s been rejected for no reason that I can see. Sir.’
Beving takes a moment before speaking.
‘Rykel, wait outside.’
‘Rykel, don’t wait outside.’
I like Vermeer even more. Beving throws me a death stare before turning his attention to Vermeer.
‘Look …’ he starts before trailing off. He’s flicking the corner of a bit of paper with his thumb. He tries again. ‘The place you want to search has … Well, it’s possible they have friends in all walks of life, all professions and –’
‘You’re telling me they have someone in the police?’
‘I’m not telling you anything. I’m merely thinking out loud, wondering about possibilities. Maybe it’s all a coincidence.’
I don’t like coincidences like this. Neither, it seems, does Vermeer. She’s opening her mouth when Beving cuts her off.
‘But for the moment this discussion is over.’
‘Who is it?’
‘Like I said, I was just speculating. But I don’t think there’s anything I can –’
‘You mean you won’t do anything.’
‘If you’ll let me finish. What you need to do is go out there and find enough evidence that the warrant can’t be turned down. And you, Rykel, where’s that paperwork you were supposed to sign?’
I feign puzzlement.
‘I handed it to the desk sergeant, told him to get it to you straight away. Are you saying you haven’t had it?’
The incident room is winding down, the acid attack still a drain on staff numbers. I keep thinking of Kush, the blood on his muzzle from the man he’d chased and bitten.
‘So what do you suggest we do?’ Vermeer asks me.
I don’t have an answer for that. Not yet, anyway. Jansen’s taken over the map showing Muller and Kleine’s movements and I step up to it. He’s been hard at work. Last time I’d looked there’d been only a few dots, black for Kleine, red for Muller. Now there are many more, but surprisingly none where they overlap. It looks like that was a waste of time, nothing in this case adding up. And yet, I think of the two dead women, two fathers who, despite their grief, are hiding something.
And a man we need to talk to hiding out in a cult-run rehab who have just used some of their power to stop us from getting to him. And then there’s Klaasen. Could he actually have been telling the truth? Could he be innocent?
‘We haven’t really talked about Marianne’s start-up offices being trashed,’ Vermeer says. ‘Could there be a link with the company her father works for?’
‘From what I can gather there’s no link at all,’ Jansen says. ‘Marianne Kleine owns fifty-one per cent and the investors she brought on board own the remaining forty-nine per cent. I’ve checked the investors out; none of them have any obvious connection to DH Biotech.’
Vermeer shakes her head. Jansen looks apprehensive. Vermeer asks him something else, but I don’t hear it, a sudden thought crowding out all the space in my head. It’s about Judge Muller. Has Muller still got enough power left? Could it be that this is his doing? I share it with them.
‘He threatened you?’ Vermeer asks when I’ve finished.
‘He was worked up but managed to stop himself. Seems reasonable to expect that as a judge and a father he’d want to find the truth, but I don’t think he has much time left. He didn’t look that well and he has nothing to live for. I reckon he wants to go to the grave with the knowledge that his daughter’s killer was punished. He doesn’t want that messed with.’
‘Surely if there’s a chance the earlier conviction wasn’t right then he’d want to find the real killer?’
‘I don’t think he’s thinking straight; you could see it in his eyes. He wants to die knowing someone was punished for his daughter’s death. Say we were to find out that, in fact, Klaasen didn’t kill her and it was Huisman, then a trial’s still going to be a year, eighteen months away. I don’t think he has that long.’
‘That’s crazy,’ she says, shaking her head. ‘Fuck!’
She sweeps a whole load of paper and a laptop off a nearby table. The laptop crunches against the wall. Paper flutters wildly like a flock of disturbed birds. She storms out of the room.
I wonder about picking it all up, but decide I can’t be bothered. I nip outside, round the corner, and take a few pulls instead.
‘Is that …?’
I turn to see the officer who’d bought the wrong colour shoes, eyes squinting with suspicion. He’s holding a large coffee in one hand and an even larger bagel in the other, two bites breaking the perimeter.
‘Yes. It is.’
‘I don’t think you should be –’
‘Fuck off.’
He does, and I finish up and go back to the incident room where a calmer Vermeer is present.
‘So, what do we do?’ she asks.
‘Give me ten minutes, then I’m taking you for a drink.’
I track Jansen down and tell him what I need.
‘But what exactly?’ he asks.
‘Everything about DH Biotech: company accounts, people involved with it, everything.’
‘Right,’ he says, shaking his head like I’ve just asked him for the impossible. ‘Anything else, sir?’
There is actually. The first step of the plan I’ve been concocting.
‘Is there a phone shop around here?’
He tells me where the closest is. Just as I’m out the door he calls out to me.
‘Oh, thought you’d like to know. Patrol picked up someone breaking into a building right next door to Kleine’s offices. Turns out it was the same guy.’
‘How do you know?’
‘He confessed to it and they got some CCTV footage of him.’
‘Do we need to talk to him?’
‘From what patrol says he’s just a low-grade criminal, bad one at that. Doubt he has anything to do with anything.’
I’m at the wheel this time and we move off into the night. I don’t know if it’s because Amsterdam’s special, or that I’ve lived here so long that I’m just somehow tuned in to it, but there’s a definite change in the vibration of the city as it shifts gear, from the grind of the working day towards the promise of evening play. You can feel it in the air, a crackle of energy that feeds your imagination. Though I get the sense that Vermeer’s not tuned in to it. She’s pensive, an echo of her earlier outburst hanging around her like a shroud.
Turning on to Eerste van der Helststraat a street light’s flickering, like we’re celebretards and it’s a paparazzo. She breathes out and suddenly clocks our general direction, surfacing from whatever deep place she was in.
‘What, we’re going to stake the place out?’
‘Such a bad idea?’
‘Maybe not.’
But I turn onto Gerard Doustraat, past the tattoo parlour I’d once had to arrest someone in. They were eventually convicted of murder, but at the moment I’d burst in he was having a swastika inked onto his left arm. Only I didn’t let him finish, so now he’s in prison with a nonsensical tat and probably about fifteen years before he can do anything about it.
At the far end of the street there’s a little bar Tanya and I used to go to when we first started seeing each other, those deliciously expansive days when we were falling in love. Days I try not to revisit too often.
The bar itself is a rabbit warren of a drinking hole, started by an old American lesbian who decided there weren’t enough bars in Amsterdam that celebrated 1920s swimsuit porn, and so decorated the place with blown-up scratchy black and white images of women in less-than-revealing one-piece swimsuits. Luckily for her a young crowd had decided the whole thing was unbelievably cool, and the place had rapidly acquired a steady stream of clientele. Then the inevitable, some hack working for a travel guide stumbled across it and within a year the place was filled with tourists congratulating themselves on being just so goddamned hip. The old lesbian died, and the place has been preserved like a museum piece; it’s all there, but something’s missing.
But for my purposes now it’s almost perfectly located. Jansen had directed me to the phone shop and I bought one, all ready to go in my pocket. The bar takes up all four floors of a late nineteenth-century house, and tonight we’re in the basement, which has all of twenty seats in various little alcoves. The light’s low, the music’s soft, and the atmosphere is … I suddenly wonder if Vermeer thinks I’m trying to hit on her. Which reminds me I’m supposed to be meeting Sabine tonight, but that’s looking like it might be unlikely. I debate texting her to put it off, but decide that, as we’re not due to meet for another couple of hours, I might as well keep my options open for a little longer.
A Latin-type waitress in a strappy top which shows off her tattoos and two thick bushes of underarm hair arrives to take our order. I plump for a Coke whilst Vermeer’s going through the cocktail menu. Because I don’t drink it hadn’t occurred to me that Vermeer might. Which is a problem because I really need her not to have had a drink for what I’ve got planned.
‘The cocktails aren’t that great,’ I tell her, earning me a pretty feisty look from the waitress. ‘How about a Coke?’
‘Hey, you invited me out for a drink, and a drink is what I’m going to have. In fact, now I’m going to have two. And you can drive me back.’
She’s really not that different from me. Taste of my own medicine.
Once the waitress has gone and Vermeer’s off finding the toilets I look around and realize I’m unprepared for the rush of memories this place is bringing back, like they’d been stored here rather than in my head, and I’m only accessing them now through proximity to the source.
Tanya and I had met when a case of hers had crossed over with one I was working on, and she’d travelled down from Friesland to Amsterdam. I remember seeing her the first time we’d met and the feeling I’d got. There was something there right from the start, something that felt light and weighty at the same time. And that was pretty much our relationship summed up. There were light times, times when we felt giddy with it all, with each other, with the world we’d fashioned around us. There were the weighty times too, moments when I suspected there was something Tanya was keeping from me.
Of course I eventually discovered what she’d been carrying round with her, the years of abuse she’d suffered at the hands of a man who’d been tasked with protecting her, her foster father. It was a discovery that led me on a path to doing something I’d never have believed I was capable of. But I’ve heard it said love can be like a kind of sickness, one which can take over your mind, make you do things you’d never otherwise have thought of. In a way I can believe that now. It was like a fever, my efforts to do what was best for Tanya, trying to protect her from further harm, made me neutralize a threat who turned out to be Station Chief Smit.
Fevers break, though, and the very moment when I pulled the trigger to protect Tanya it was like I’d not only killed Henk Smit, I’d killed hope as well. Everything we’d had shattered into so many pieces it wasn’t even worth trying to fix.
And all the while the black wolf ate in the shadows gathering strength.
‘Cliché I know, but you look like you’ve seen a ghost.’
Man, how long have I been gone?
‘I … yeah. Something like that.’
‘You’re not about to have one of those PTSD fits, are you?’ she says, sitting down.
‘They’re not fits.’
‘No? I saw you when you lost it after that guy didn’t turn up. Looked like some kind of fit to me.’
The waitress brings our drinks. She puts down the bottle for me, and in front of Vermeer places a clear cocktail in a martini glass with rose petals scattered on the surface, and one in a shot glass which is virtually black. Vermeer chooses the martini glass and raises it.
‘Proost.’
‘Proost.’
I take a sip, Vermeer takes a couple. Her shoulders drop a little and she sighs as she puts the glass on the table.
‘So?’
‘So … I actually don’t know what they are, but they’re not fits. And I’m not just about to have one.’
‘Your face said otherwise.’
My face. That traitor. Always the same.
‘Just thinking,’ I tell her, taking a sip of Coke to help me along.
‘About?’
‘The past, what else?’
‘The past? I thought you were supposed to live each day like it’s your last. Isn’t that what they say?’
‘Yeah, and it’s terrible advice. You do that and you’re constantly under pressure, to get things done, get more, squeeze it all in.’
‘So what do you suggest?’
‘Live each day like you’re going to live forever. That way you can just relax into whatever you’re doing, without worrying that you should be doing something else, like you’re missing out on something.’
‘That’s what you do?’
‘Well, turns out it’s easier said than done …’
‘You’re not trying to hit on me, are you?’ she asks. That breaks it, and we both laugh, relaxing a little, getting us off the awkward track of conversation we’d somehow got on to. We talk about the case, but when we get on to the topic of the warrant Vermeer gets angry again, more animated. For a split second she turns into Tanya before reality flickers back in.
‘We’re supposed to be servants of the law, but do you ever get the feeling we’re actually just servants of the powerful?’ she asks, accompanying the word ‘powerful’ with a wide sweep of her arm.
‘It’s taken you this long to work that out? Maybe you’re not as smart as I thought.’
‘All right, Mr fucking-know-it-all, so why are you still here?’
Yeah, that’s really the question. Vermeer has a knack for asking difficult questions. Sadly, though, for this one I have an answer.
‘Same as you. We’re still here because we can’t help ourselves. We’re addicted to it.’
‘Maybe,’ she says. The music’s turned up a notch, the evening’s softening. I notice the first cocktail is gone. We really should get going before she moves on to the second one.
‘Maybe we should call it a night?’
She gives me the sweetest smile and a middle finger, then reaches for the next, the liquid blacker than night.
‘Smoking gun,’ she says. ‘Six parts gin, one part vodka, smoked chilli syrup, squeezed lime and charcoal. That’s the colour.’
‘Sounds deadly.’
She offers me a sip. I decline. She shrugs and downs it in one.
‘Now let’s call it a night. You’re driving, remember?’
I pay at the bar and we’re just reaching the car when I stop and pat my pockets.
‘Damn, I left my wallet.’
Vermeer rolls her eyes. ‘I’ll wait in the car then.’
She heads off and I duck back inside, make for the toilets and pull out the pre-pay mobile I’d bought earlier. It turns on. Though it has trouble finding reception. The one part of the plan I hadn’t really thought of was that I was going to have to make this call from a basement. There are four cubicles and I notice one of them has a street-level window. I close the door and step up onto the porcelain rim, a dinosaur spine of shit riding down the back of the pan into the water. I hold the phone up … no bars … no bars … yes! Three bars. I place the call, my thumbnail ready against the phone’s speaker.
When the call’s answered I talk in a breathy whisper, scratching at the phone’s mic with my thumbnail. I manage to get the message across, though, and hang up when he asks for my details. SIM down the toilet, battery out of the phone. I’ll dispose of that later.
‘Got it?’
Vermeer’s sitting on the car’s bonnet, legs crossed.
‘Yeah, left it by the bar. So where do you want me to drop you?’
But before she can answer the police radio crackles into life, and we listen to dispatch: reports of a man with a gun, possible hostage situation. He gives the address. Vermeer and I look at each other like What the fuck?
Vermeer picks up the radio and signs in. Five seconds later we’re accelerating hard away from the kerb, blue lights flashing on, the sirens screaming into the night.
‘Looks like we may have just got lucky,’ she says.
I don’t say anything. Because sometimes you just have to make your own luck.