The plan.
Like all the best is simple: walk in and talk to him.
But it’s foiled by one basic fact. Daan Brouwer’s not home. Or if he is he’s seen them coming and isn’t answering. Arno’s fingering the brass nipple but it’s not yielding much in the way of door-opening action.
Arno relaxes his finger, looks round.
‘Break it down?’ he asks.
‘Sure,’ Jaap says. ‘But let’s see if it’s open first.’ He tosses over a pair of gloves he’d taken from Max earlier.
Arno pulls them on and tries the door handle. It turns.
‘Experience, huh?’
‘I had a colleague once, good cop but he had some problems, one of which was he loved to smash things. He’d never check a door, he’d just knock it down. Got to the point that if he was assigned to a case, whoever was in charge budgeted some extra for breakages.’
‘Did he ever stop?’
Jaap thinks of Kees. He usually tries his best not to, a whole world of sadness there he doesn’t quite understand.
‘Last I heard he was in prison.’
‘For knocking doors down?’
‘No,’ Jaap says as he steps through the door and into the house. ‘Well, maybe. Just not the right ones.’
They check the house, moving from room to room, but it’s clear Brouwer’s not home. As they start going over the place several more things becoming apparent: Brouwer lives alone, likes boats – he has at least ten painstakingly built models, impressive in their detail, complicated rigging like spiderswebs – and doesn’t go in much for cleaning; the place is full of sand, blown in from the front door, which he must leave open on hot days.
In the kitchen, a large room to the back of the property, Jaap pokes around, finding in the sink a bowl, the bottom smeared with a milky residue. Dotted round the rim are what appear to be bloated flies, though when he gets closer he can see they’re individual grains of a chocolate-flavoured rice cereal.
A glass stands by the sink. Jaap probes the inside with a gloved finger. The orange juice residue is tacky, not fresh.
None of which goes any way to answering the questions they’ve come to have answered.
But as they step into the room tucked in the eaves on the first floor, Jaap’s hopeful that they might start getting somewhere. There’s a desk, dark walnut top, with a wireless track-pad and keyboard, and a real wireless. A mug with the red and white livery of Ajax football club sits next to it. Above the desk, attached to the wall and angled into a broken curve, are three screens.
Arno finds the tower under the desk and presses a button. The screens load fast, the computer way more powerful than anything Jaap gets to use at the station, and Arno starts nosing around, clicking through folders, delving deeper and deeper into the beast.
Jaap walks to the west-facing window. From this elevation he can see past the grasslands to the beach and sea beyond. Heleen’s body was found not far from here. He reckons about fifteen on a bike. Twenty tops.
‘He’s a trader,’ Arno says. ‘That’s why he doesn’t appear to have a job. Just sits here and plays the markets.’
Jaap walks over, peers at the screens, which now show some kind of trading platform but with an error message saying NO FEED.
‘Does he have WhatsApp?’
‘Can’t tell. Internet’s not working, that’s why I’m getting this No Feed bollocks,’ Arno says. ‘The router’s on, but the computer just isn’t picking it up. I kept getting the same thing at home, drove me crazy.’
‘How did you fix it?’
‘Honestly? I didn’t. Kim did.’
‘Get her on the phone,’ Jaap says.
Arno checks the time. ‘Might just catch her before she goes out.’
He gets Kim on the line and she starts talking him through whatever hoops he’s going to have to jump through just to make a bit of technology, which has been designed to make people’s lives easier, work.
Jaap leaves him to it. He wanders through the house, taking another look at the boats, realizing that Brouwer probably made them himself. One in particular catches his eyes, different from the rest, with three masts and red sails. The wood has been varnished to look old, and there is no dust on deck. Not a single speck.
Back in the kitchen he starts going through the drawers, thinking about Heleen, about the message she’d received. Skin on his arm goose pimples up.
He’s just closing the third drawer down when he stops and pulls it open again. Right at the back, hidden under a bunch of wooden spoons stained with use, is a handle made of dull metal, two bits of wood riveted on each side. He pulls his phone out, snaps photos from several angles.
Because he knows what he’s just found.
He takes it out carefully. It’s an old-fashioned cut-throat, the type you see in films when a director wants to add a touch of cheap tension, the blade scraping up a man’s neck, clearing off a frosting of white shaving foam. Will it, won’t it?
Jaap opens it up, the action heavy but smooth, like it’s been used regularly. He inspects the metal, holding it up into a jet of sunlight he finds near the window, tilting the blade back and forth so it winks on and off.
It’s clean to the eye, no blood residue.
Which doesn’t mean much.
The sheer amount of cuts on Heleen’s stomach had been staggering, and had been done over a period of time. The knife would have been cleaned off properly after each session. He bags it up, places it on the kitchen table, and puts a call into Stuppor, telling him to put out an alert to the ferry company.
It’s a long shot; Brouwer could have been gone for hours, right after breakfast, and there’d probably been three or four ferries since then, but Jaap’s not going to make the same mistakes Stuppor has.
‘Got it,’ calls Arno from upstairs just as he hangs up.
Jaap’s heart is racing when he reaches the top of the stairs and steps into the room.
They open WhatsApp.
Sure enough, the message is there.
Jaap leans forward, puts his hands on the desk, moving the mug out of the way.
It’s warm.
Warmer than ambient.
He reaches out and clicks on the radio. The name of a station scrolls across a small screen and a pounding beat fills the room.
‘Same one?’ Jaap points to the station name.
‘The only one,’ Arno says.
Jaap swears. Brouwer was at his desk listening to the radio, and heard the same newsflash they had.
They’ve missed him by a matter of minutes.