‘Ready?’
Jaap’s standing on a small mound swelling out of the grasslands behind Daan Brouwer’s house, the only place he could find strong enough reception. As a result his view is wide-screen, ultra HD. Turning in a circle he can see the whole sky, bruised by the sinking sun.
‘Hit me.’
‘Not really my kind of thing,’ says Roemers. ‘But anyway, I’ve looked pretty much everywhere and I couldn’t find any real connection between Kamp and Brouwer.’
Jaap breathes out. It must be audible because Roemers carries on.
‘But … one of my guys came across something.’
Jaap stops turning, finds himself facing the beach where Heleen was found.
‘What?’
‘Check your phone, I’m sending you a file right now.’
Only it gets stuck downloading, the wheel spinning tirelessly. He calls Roemers back. Roemers has gone AWOL. Probably plugged in headphones for his fix of late-sixties Krautrock.
Jaap decides to speak to the neighbours while the ones and zeros sort themselves out.
Of the two remaining houses the first has no one home, the other’s occupied by an old woman. She answers the door and Jaap notices the skin on her inner wrists, marbled with veins like mature blue cheese. He talks to her, she’s surprisingly lucid considering she’s just turned ninety-one – the number gives Jaap a passing touch of vertigo – and she tells him what little she knows about Brouwer: he’s quiet, keeps himself to himself, and she can’t remember when she last saw him.
Not revelatory. He thanks her and checks his phone again to find the file is finally there. He heads back to Brouwer’s house, reading it.
Up until now there was a slim chance the killings weren’t related. Granted the whole suffocation thing could be passed off as a coincidence, and maybe the scopolamine could as well at a massive pinch. Say some entrepreneur imported a load and put it on the market, telling clients exactly what it’s good for.
But given what’s on the screen in front of him, the chances that they’re not linked are slipping rapidly away. Because it looks like Francesco Kamp and Daan Brouwer had, briefly, lived on the same street in Haarlem back in the early nineties. It’s not proof of anything, nothing which could stand up in court, but for Jaap it means that there is something to dig at.
Back at Brouwer’s house Jaap finds Arno slamming his phone down on the desk.
‘I didn’t mean for you two to argue over it,’ he says.
‘Not Kim, Stuppor,’ Arno says. ‘On his way over, mumbling something about how we’re making a mess of it. Due here any minute now.’
The only surprise Jaap feels is that it’s taken so long. Sure, the man was insulted by having Jaap sent in, but if he’d been cooperative from the beginning …
Jaap brings Arno up to speed then asks, ‘The last ferry has gone, right? So even if Brouwer left right after the newsflash he’d not’ve had time to get there.’
Arno checks his watch. ‘There’s one more ferry due in about half an hour’s time. It’ll take another forty to turn it round.’
‘We can get there before then?’
‘Take us ten. We’ve got time. Look at this though, all sorts of stuff on his computer – ready?’
Arno clicks on a file, a new window opens on the screen, and he starts opening individual files.
Brouwer’s politics are based on what could loosely be called hate. There are articles about neo-Nazis, anti-Islam groups, a whole subfolder dedicated to the killer who’d gone on a shooting rampage in Norway, and another on Theo van Gogh, the filmmaker shot and stabbed to death by a Dutch-Moroccan Muslim now spending life in jail. A third is on Pim Fortuyn, the gay far-right anti-Islam politician who in the early 2000s was making such significant inroads that he was on the cusp of becoming a major political power. Pundits thought the post of prime minister was within reach, and the bookies’ odds reflected this.
That is, it was within reach until he was assassinated by, of all people, a militant vegan, whose beef with the politician was never quite clear. Jaap had been the arresting officer, the case a media spectacle only outdone by his current one.
He leans in and takes over the track-pad, clicking on a few more files. He finds what they are looking for: a video, taken from who knows where on the internet.
Jaap hits play.
A girl’s thigh is centre camera, already slashed by multiple cuts.
Like Heleen’s, some are healed over, just raised scar tissue, and some are fresh.
Particularly the one which is trailing behind a blade, blood dripping in its wake.
They watch the whole thing in a kind of suspended silence.
‘Money shot,’ Arno says.
He’s right. A head moves into view, face pixelated, tongue reaching out like a starving alien.
It licks a trickle of fresh blood off the knife’s edge.