It’s definitely Huisman, the man we’ve been chasing all this time.
We step towards the bed and he lets out a low groan before his head jerks up suddenly, as if an electrical current’s passing through him. He’s held there for a few seconds before his muscles go slack and his head drops back down. He groans again and I realize he’s strapped down with thick fabric bands.
‘He looks like shit,’ Vermeer says. ‘Not sure he’s faking it.’
Heroin withdrawal’s no joke. I once sat with an ex-colleague who’d had to shoot up undercover and just couldn’t seem to kick the habit once he returned to desk work. The withdrawal itself broadly fits into three stages. In the first eight hours after the final dose the craving starts to take hold, and people often seem to get irritable at even the smallest things. Then it starts to go downhill in stage two. The stomach cramps, the profuse sweating, the desperate desire to move increasing in intensity over the next day or so, the unbearable knowledge that there’s a simple remedy to stop all this just a needle prick away. The third and final stage can last for days: muscles spasms, diarrhoea, vomiting, your body alternating between a high fever and a death-like chill till you’d claw your own eyes out in despair. Some veterans add in a fourth phase: relapse.
From the looks of it, though, Huisman’s in the second. I step closer and see his T-shirt and tracksuit bottoms are dark with sweat. He also smells like he’s been sweating for some time. He turns his head and opens his eyes slowly like it’s a struggle. The whites of his eyes are heavily bloodshot and have the manic quality of a person seeing things.
‘No …’ he says, his voice like paper sliding off paper. ‘No more.’
You can see from his eyes we’re not getting anything out of him for a while. Maybe even days. Days he’s going to have to spend in the drunk tank, which is a far cry from here. In any other situation, if we weren’t here to arrest a man we suspect of brutally killing two young women, I might even feel sorry for him.
‘You want to do the honours?’ I ask Vermeer.
She reads him his rights, though it’s clear he’s not really taking it in. Once done we loosen the straps, and help him upright. He’s groaning, but compliant. But as Vermeer pulls the cuffs out a change comes over him.
‘No!’ he screams and lunges at me. I sidestep, only my foot lands on something and shoots out from under me. He takes advantage of my loss of balance, coming at me hard, the impact knocking me down. Vermeer reacts fast, grabbing him from behind in a chokehold. He reverses direction, slamming her back into the far wall and then elbows her in the stomach. She gasps and loosens her grip, and he slips out of her grasp and turns to her. I’m scrambling up from the floor as he throws the first punch right at her face. But Vermeer ducks, his fist hits the concrete with a sickening crunch, and she’s already grabbed his wrist and is twisting it down behind his back. It’s swift and clinical. She has him cuffed and on his knees in seconds.
‘You all right?’ I ask.
She shrugs, like it was nothing. ‘More worried about you.’
‘Yeah, just …’ I look round to see what I’d slipped on. It’s a clipboard, the type that hang on the ends of beds in hospitals. I pick it up just as Vermeer’s manoeuvring Huisman to the door.
‘Let’s get this fucker booked in,’ she’s saying just as my heart detonates hard in my chest. The room starts to spiral very, very slowly.
‘Oh shit …’ It can’t be true.
Vermeer stops. ‘What?’
I hand her the clipboard over a vast distance.
‘What am I looking at?’
I point to the date of admission.
It’s two full days before Marianne Kleine was killed.
It takes less than ten minutes to confirm that Huisman checked in when the clipboard said he did, and hasn’t left the property since. In fact, he’d not even left the room, and the CCTV footage the woman in charge had shown me, since Vermeer had decided not to be seen by her again, confirmed that. Huisman is categorically off the hook.
I walk out of there and feel like the world’s dropping away from me. All this work to get to Huisman, only to find he can’t have killed Marianne Kleine. Which in turn means he most likely wasn’t Lucie Muller’s killer either. I feel a deep cold creeping through me. Because we’ve now got two murders, two young women whose lives were taken from them, and no idea of who or why.
Vermeer lets me drive, and we don’t talk. Because what is there to say?
A few minutes out from the station Vermeer finally speaks.
‘You covered yourself, right?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I mean, they’re not going to be able to trace that call to you, are they?’
I needn’t have worried about her being able to handle the situation after two cocktails. Seems it takes far more than that to reduce her performance. I wonder just how experienced a drinker she is. Then I think of my voice, converted to a series of 1s and 0s, there for anyone to listen to, analyse. The scratching and whispering should be enough. Should. But there’s always a chance some hotshot audio engineer has developed a new technique for clearing up recordings. But I can’t think of that now.
‘No,’ I tell her. ‘Because that would make literally no sense.’
‘It would literally make a lot of sense.’
‘Something I’ve learnt over the years is that the odds are so stacked against you most of the time –’
‘You make your own odds?’
‘– that when you do get a break, sheer good luck, you have to grasp it.’
She stares at me as if by doing so she can reveal the truth.
‘I hope so,’ she finally says. ‘I really, really hope so.’
My phone goes off. I check the screen. Leah. Kush must be barking again. She’ll have to cope. I’ll be back there soon. I let it ring out and it starts again. Again I let it ring, again it finally cuts off then starts afresh.
‘Oh for fuck’s sake.’ Vermeer grabs the phone off me as I’m taking the third exit of a tricky roundabout.
‘Who’s Leah?’
‘My neighbour. She doesn’t like it when Kush barks.’
‘Rykel’s phone,’ she says, imitating a bored secretary. ‘How may I help?’
She listens for a few moments then, ‘What? Say that again.’ She listens then hangs up.
‘What is it?’
‘She said …’
‘What? What did she say?’
‘Your houseboat,’ she says, turning to look at me, her face flicking on and off in the passing street lights. ‘Your houseboat’s on fire.’