‘Here,’ Arno says, handing him a sandwich.
Jaap decides Arno will go far. Assuming, that is, he keeps his horticultural hobby in check.
He holds his hand out, still staring through the window which looks across the car park to the cell block where he’d been due to spend the night. ‘Thanks,’ he says, turning his swivel chair. ‘You know Piet, the surfer?’
‘Went to school together,’ Arno says. ‘Same class. Nice guy, we used to surf together a bit.’
‘Used?’
Arno grins, and takes a bite of his own sandwich. ‘He had a thing for Kim.’
Jaap remembers his dream. He has to admit that Kim is pretty. As in, pretty hot.
Jaap thinks of Tanya, down in Rotterdam, with their baby growing inside her. He struggles to surf a personal wave of dizziness.
‘What about the mainland?’ he asks once it passes. ‘Any CCTV from the ferry terminal?’
‘It’s on its way, and a passenger list.’
Jaap wants to see Kamp’s name on there.
Then again, Jaap doesn’t want to see Kamp’s name on there.
In truth, Jaap can’t figure out what he actually wants to see on that list because really there’s no good outcome. On the one hand, if it was Kamp then Heleen’s death is on him. He should have stopped him sooner. If on the other – and this one’s really not going down well either – if it wasn’t Kamp, then just who the fuck was it? Who has somehow come up with a remarkably similar way of killing young women, using suffocation and scopolamine?
Not for the first time Jaap asks himself how that’s even possible.
Kamp was a train driver, for fuck’s sake. He had a young child, everything to live for, and yet he somehow managed to procure one of the world’s most terrifying narcotics, and killed two, possibly three, women whilst they were under the influence of the same.
He just doesn’t get it.
This isn’t the kind of drug your local dealer gets you, not least because recreational use is anything but recreational. Jaap’s even checked out the dark web, logged onto the most popular marketplaces for drugs, and found not a single listing, not a single seller who was offering the stuff.
And when he adds all that to Kamp’s denial of the second killing yesterday, he’s left with … well, Jaap doesn’t know what he’s left with.
‘Any update on where she was staying, who she is?’ Jaap asks Arno, suddenly aware he’s been zoned out.
Somewhere behind him a phone tries to get some attention.
‘That might be it,’ Arno says as he goes to answer.
Jaap turns back to the desk, stares at the scribbles he’d put down on paper earlier, but they look foreign to him, like he’d written in another language. Then he remembers he needs to check exactly how long the surveillance crew lost Kamp for yesterday. He needs to rule out that Kamp could have got to the island, killed Heleen, then got back to his house all in the time he’d been AWOL. He puts a call in to his station back in Amsterdam and requests the information. He’s promised a call back.
Behind him he hears Arno asking questions, then listening to very long answers.
He starts unconsciously opening the sandwich, his hands on automatic, finding the edge of the wrapper with his fingers without looking at it and peeling it off the soggy bread. Then he stops and looks down.
It appears to be beef and mustard, but that’s not the problem. The problem is the cling film reminds him of Dafne Koster’s death, all those months ago.
And the fact that yesterday he caught her killer. But now …
‘I didn’t get anyone to spit in it,’ says a voice Jaap recognizes as Stuppor’s. ‘Or maybe it’s not fancy enough. Filling not organic and grass-fed enough? Not like the kind of stuff a high-flyer like you is used to getting down in Amsterdam.’
Jaap wraps the sandwich back up and places it on the desk. ‘I may have got something,’ he says, ignoring Stuppor’s jibes. ‘Want to hear it or not?’
‘Let’s talk in my office.’
Jaap follows him across the room and regrets his earlier barefoot walk in the sand. He’d obviously not managed to get all of it off, grains now flaying skin between his toes.
They enter Stuppor’s office and Jaap is immediately disappointed.
Because the chair he’d dragged in yesterday is gone.
‘So, let’s have it,’ Stuppor says, sitting behind his desk.
Jaap briefly explains what he’s found out so far, and finishes with a request to get someone to look for anyone flying a drone in the area yesterday. ‘They often film with those things, if so I’d like to see what’s on there.’
‘You think they got the murder happening?’ Stuppor sounds incredulous, eyebrows riding high.
‘I don’t think anything,’ Jaap says. He slips his right shoe and sock off and leans against the wall as he goes about emptying sand from them both, having to turn his sock inside out. He’s only slightly embarrassed by the socks, they’re actually a pair of Tanya’s he’d found at the back of a drawer when he’d been searching for some clean ones of his own. They looked like they’d never been worn; the colour’s not too bad, a kind of navy blue, but they have a little ring of pink and white flowers going round the top. Of course, when he’d pulled them on, he’d only had a vague notion of where Vlieland was, still less that he’d be on the island showing off his socks to a station chief. ‘I’m investigating, which means I look at everything I can, anything which may give us a chance at—’
‘Pretty slim chance,’ Stuppor says.
‘Well, if the ferries off the island had been stopped as soon as the murder was discovered then we might be having a different conversation,’ Jaap says, putting his sock and shoe back on, then doing the same with the other foot. ‘But they weren’t, so we aren’t.’
‘Listen, you have—’
The door behind Jaap swings one-eighty and crashes into the wall.
‘Found it,’ Arno says, unable to hide the excitement in his voice. ‘The house where Heleen was staying.’
‘Take me there,’ Jaap says, scrambling to get his shoe back on. He walks out of Stuppor’s office without even glancing at him. Then he turns back.
‘Whilst we’re gone, get someone to put that chair back in here. Or better yet, do it yourself.’