He sees Smit outside the station, leaving for home.
Jaap doesn’t feel like preamble. He steps over.
‘The killers don’t want to kill,’ Jaap says. ‘They’re being forced into it.’
Smit stops. He stares at Jaap, the orange streetlight making his features look ghoulish.
‘What do you mean, forced?’
‘That’s why none of this has made sense,’ Jaap says. ‘Whoever it is is picking people and forcing them to kill for him. Groot said he had to do it to protect someone, and Stefan Wilders, who shot himself when Tanya tried to question him, said something similar. It’s their kids, someone’s threatened their kids, maybe even held them until they’ve done what they wanted—’
‘Hang on,’ says Smit, his face getting visibly paler. ‘Hang on a minute.’
Jaap hangs on, but Smit seems to be lost in thought. He’s massaging his jaw, eyes looking out over the car park.
‘Fuck. What else?’ Smit finally says.
‘I think he also tells them that if they’re caught and they say anything then he’ll still get their kids. They’re all single fathers, the kids will go into care, so it’d be easy to convince them you could get to their kids somehow, even from prison. That’s why they’re choosing the only way out they can see. They may even have been told to kill themselves rather than talk if they were ever caught.’
‘Fuck,’ Smit says, earning him a glance from an old man walking past, sucking on his vape. Smit turns his back on him, lowers his voice. ‘Why not come to the police when they’re first threatened? That would be the sensible thing to do.’
‘Someone threatens to kill your kids, you don’t think straight.’
Smit shouldn’t need to be told; he knows that Jaap’s own daughter had been kidnapped by a man desperate to get someone released from prison. He’d tasked Jaap with getting that man out, and told him if he spoke to any of his colleagues about it then he’d never see his daughter again. Jaap had done as he was told, busting the man out of the International Criminal Tribunal in Den Haag. Only things had gone wrong, his baby daughter paying the price, along with her mother. Jaap had never felt such fear, and knew that it had clouded his judgement in a way that no one could understand.
They stand for a few moments more, both men feeling like they’re on the edge of a cliff, like the next gust of wind will determine their future, whether they fall off it or move back. A tram clangs its bell, and a distant siren sounds once, dying mid-swoop.
‘Fuck,’ Smit says again. ‘I’m going to have to call the commissioner, we need more people on this.’