As far as trading ports go, Oost-Vlieland had once been big time. Back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was part of the Hanseatic League, a confederation of merchant guilds who controlled trade in the Baltic and beyond. But since then its fortunes had been more mixed, the port eventually having to be bought out by the government’s Waterways and Public Works Department when the locals were struggling to keep their island from sinking into the sea. With the new ownership, sea defences were built and managed, and the island was able to look for new opportunities. They found one; the trade which now keeps the island afloat is tourists who own boats and need somewhere to dock them.
The marina is to the north, a forest of masts just visible, but when the ferry terminal was built they needed better access to open water. This is where Jaap is now, the town sloping gently up away behind him, the ferry terminal – basically a stretch of concrete with a booking office – below.
A deep horn rumbles out over the water; he feels the waves of it in his chest. He looks up to see the ferry he’s been waiting for heading towards the island.
Everything’s in place, all available officers – for which read five, including Jaap and Arno – are deployed in plain clothes round the ferry terminal, one of them actually in with the person selling tickets. Jaap’s across the road, sitting on a bench, trying not to look like a cop.
‘Caught anyone then let them go again?’ Smit asks when Jaap answers his phone.
‘Not quite,’ he replies. For a moment he wonders why it is he always seems to be working for assholes.
The phrase ‘problem with authority’ floats into his head.
He brushes it aside.
Henk Smit got to his exalted position by battling his way up from patrol and taking charge of a small crime-riddled district outside Rotterdam. The results he’d got in a few short years – a near eighteen per cent reduction in crime – meant he came to the attention of people higher up the chain. He was duly promoted to Amsterdam, getting his own station at the very early age of thirty-eight, a fact that endeared him to pretty much none of the people who had the pleasure of working for him. Jaap was one of those people, but they’d found a way to work together. After all, Smit likes good clearance rates, and Jaap’s are consistently high.
‘So,’ Smit asks, ‘putting aside yesterday, are the deaths linked?’
Jaap thinks of the cuts again. There’s something about it all, something disturbing beyond the usual. But also out of character with the two previous deaths.
‘I thought so at first. Tox test confirmed scopolamine in the victim’s blood, and she died like the other two by suffocation.’
‘Could it have been Kamp? Was there time for him to get over there and back?’
‘The timing works out, the surveillance crew lost him for long enough that he could have done, but I don’t know if he did. You remember when I showed him the photo of Dafne, and he admitted to that, but then denied killing Nadine?’
‘Not really—’
‘He did, and I’m starting to believe him.’
Smit ruminates. At least that’s what Jaap assumes his silence means.
’Multiple killers running around,’ Smit says eventually, ‘using the same basic method? Means they’ve gotta be in touch somehow, any evidence of that?’
Jaap fills him in on what he got from Roemers, and his current situation.
‘All right,’ Smit says, digesting it all. ‘Keep me updated. And Inspector Rykel?’
Somehow Jaap knows what’s coming.
‘Yeah?’
‘If you get the guy,’ Smit pauses for effect, ‘make sure you cuff him right.’
It’s childish, but Jaap gives his phone the finger. Arno, who’d walked up to the local supermarket to get a drink, reappears before he’s finished.
‘Having fun?’
‘Yeah,’ Jaap says. ‘Yeah, I am.’
The ferry’s made it into the harbour without crushing any smaller vessels, and is now inching in sideways towards the dock. A small blonde girl, dressed in shorts and bright orange T-shirt with the same waving kitten as Heleen’s, stares at him, a frown pulling her face down.
Jaap wonders what life has in store for her.
Then decides it’s best not thinking about.
Jaap’s been keeping an eye on the queue which has been forming outside the ticket office on the quay. They’d found a few photos of Brouwer on his computer – nothing dodgy – so know what he looks like: bald as an eel and a sharp face like, well, an eel.
‘Not so far.’
The ferry terminal is a one-storey building which to describe as functional would be to overstate its beauty. The queue outside is twenty strong now, and the flow of passengers disembarking is starting to dry up.
‘I’m not seeing him,’ Arno says.
Neither’s Jaap.
They watch as the last of the queue get on, an old couple wearing identical white panamas, shoulders hunched, steps shuffling but determined. Jaap finds he’s drumming his foot. If Brouwer’s not here then he’s going to have to call in a full search team to go over the island. Which isn’t going to happen by tonight. His phone goes off, he sees it’s Superintendent Laura Vetter back in Amsterdam. He leaves it.
‘Fuck, I thought he’d be here.’
He looks north, the masts in the main harbour suddenly sparking something in his head.
‘If he owned a boat himself—’ He’s thinking back to a moment of unease he’d had whilst updating Stuppor earlier ‘—it’d be moored there, right?’
He points just as another fighter jet – or maybe the same one which buzzed him yesterday – glints out to sea.
Arno nods. ‘Only place on the island.’
‘Any way to find out if he does?’
‘Harbourmaster has the logs, should be able to tell us.’
Jaap looks back at the ferry, a sailor now unleashing the moorings, the queue all aboard. Brouwer’s not coming. He suddenly remembers the model boats at Brouwer’s house.
‘Fucking idiot.’
‘What did I do?’
‘Not you,’ Jaap says. He should have thought of this earlier, shouldn’t have focused just on the ferry. He suddenly feels this case it getting to him, forcing him to make bad decisions. ‘Me.’