Jaap’s deep underwater, the shimmering surface far above him. He kicks hard, his legs working against the water which seems to frustratingly absorb their force, his lungs burning with the desire for air, fear lighting up his reptilian brain. He knows he’s dreaming, and he knows the surface is the idea which is going to tie this whole case together, knows it’s purely symbolic, knows that once he can break through he’ll find the answer. Just a few metres more and his head breaks through, air filling his lungs. And—
He jolts, like his whole body’s been shot, just before the idea disappears. He tries to chase it, dive back down to the watery depths of sleep, but as he lies there on the hospital floor next to Tanya’s bed, a towel rolled up into a makeshift pillow, he knows that full consciousness has just obliterated whatever it was.
He gets up, feeling heavy and stiff, and checks on Tanya. She’s still asleep, her red hair splayed out on the pillow as if she’s the one underwater, and he reaches out to touch her. She murmurs, seems to be saying something. He leans closer and catches a name, Ruud somebody? Staal, maybe. It means nothing to him, and Tanya’s never talked of anyone called Ruud. Maybe it’s someone she’d met down in Rotterdam. For a second he feels an insane pang of jealousy.
Jaap leaves the houseboat, where he’s pit-stopped for a shower and quick change of clothes, and walks down Bloemgracht, turning left at the bottom. On the Lijnbaansgracht bridge he spots the homeless man out begging for money. He’d first appeared years ago and initially Jaap had ignored him, avoiding eye contact, each pass more guilt-ridden than the previous. Finally, on a thick foggy morning in November, water condensing on the bare branches and dripping into the canal like an insane symphony, Jaap had ducked into a shop and bought the man a couple of pastries and a cup of soup. He’d handed it all to him, a feeling he couldn’t quite categorize, a kind of noble upswelling expanding in his chest.
The man took the goods offered, inspected them one by one and then looked back up at Jaap.
‘What, ain’t you got any bloody money then?’ he’d said.
This morning he’s actually asleep, his accumulated clothes bunched around him like the shell of a snail, and Jaap drops him a couple of euros as he goes past. It’ll probably go on drugs, but if it gives him a few moments of pleasure then Jaap’s not sure he really cares.
By the time he gets to the office the nightshift inspectors are bleary-eyed and clock-watching, willing the phones they’d wanted to ring all night to stay silent long enough for them to get out of there and head home for sleep. They’ve got another hour to go before the sun comes up and their relief arrives, so Jaap doesn’t fancy their chances.
After an intense bout of caffeination Jaap starts scribbling notes, trying to let them flow freely, not to self-censor, hoping that somehow whatever he’d glimpsed in his dream was still there, buried in his unconscious mind, and might emerge on paper. But after a while he has to admit defeat. Whatever it was has gone.
The room’s humming as he steps in.
Smit’s call yesterday to the commissioner had yielded results. Purse strings have been loosened, money has flowed down the chain, and now Jaap has a team of six waiting to be briefed.
He recognizes a couple of them: there’s Lisa Oosterhuis, the youngest in the department and the chain-smoking champion of the whole station, and Erik Verbaan, who’s arrogant but capable of good work. The other four are new to him, he’ll have to learn their names, but right now he doesn’t have the mental capacity for it.
Also in the room are Arno – his clearance had come through earlier from a begrudging Stuppor – Smit and Thomas Haase, the force’s main criminal profiler, who’d once spent a few months with the FBI at Quantico and has built a career on the back of it ever since. It’s never been clear to Jaap what Haase actually did during those months – for all he knows he could’ve been there sweeping the floor or scrubbing the toilets till they shone, ready for some big-dick real agent to swing in and sully the thing all over again. Jaap’s had the benefit of Haase’s expertise on a couple of cases, though none of the man’s insights has, so far, led to an arrest.
None of which stops Haase from frequently appearing on TV, exposing complex aetiologies for crimes which made the headlines, a service he undoubtedly gets well paid for. He’d even brought out a book which for a brief, heady moment had hit the bestseller lists, but though the public seemed to love him the running joke in the station is that you don’t need a highly paid specialist to tell you a sadistic killer is a sick fuck.
Smit’s sitting at the back, arms folded across his chest, and Haase’s managed to get a space slightly apart from the group as if to emphasize his rarity and importance.
‘Right,’ Jaap says. ‘Let’s do it. Two murders in the last three days and two older killings.’
He starts with Dafne and Nadine, takes them through the investigation which led them to Francesco Kamp. After a five-minute break, coffee for all except Lisa who hurries outside for a cigarette, he ploughs on, hoping the team can keep up with all the detail he’s throwing at them. When he gets to the arrest and subsequent shooting he can feel Smit’s eyes on him, but he glosses over it, powers on to Heleen and Kaaren. He pins photos of each on the board and goes through the circumstances of their deaths.
‘From this it all looks like a classic serial killer, but—’ He pulls out photos of Kamp, Groot and Wilders and pins them up as well ‘—meet the killers. Stefan Wilders was seen filming Heleen on Vlieland, and Pieter Groot killed Kaaren the next day. Logically these two must have known each other somehow, or have some kind of link, but we can’t ask them. This guy—’ He points to Stefan’s photo ‘—well, he introduced his brain to a bullet, and Groot, after nearly choking himself with his own T-shirt in our cells downstairs, had a second go at the hospital. He somehow reversed his IV and bled to death.’
He whips out a crime-scene photo showing the mass of blood staining the floor and pins it up too.
‘But before both of them died they each said something. Arno, can you tell us what Wilders said?’
‘ “I had to protect her,” ’ Arno says. ‘ “I had to do it.” ’
‘And then Groot said something similar.’
He pulls out his phone and plays the recording he’d made in the hospital room.
When it’s done the room falls silent.
‘So now we’re getting down to it.’ Jaap points to Wilders’ photo. ‘He had a daughter, just over a year old. Mother died in childbirth. Kamp also had a daughter and Groot had a young son.’
Jaap lets all that settle in.
‘Thoughts, anyone?’
He’s asking because he knows he doesn’t want to be the one to say it out loud, but he feels the time has come to let loose what he, Smit and Arno already know. He’d once heard the most infectious agent of all is a thought, so he stares at the people he’s about to infect.
‘Right, so here’s the theory. Someone is effectively blackmailing these people into killing for them. And I reckon he’s using their children’s lives as the bargaining chip.’
The room sucks the news dry.
Most of the people in here should be pretty much unshakeable, having seen enough stuff in their careers to keep a shrink in business for life, but he can see this is new to them. The infection has taken hold.
‘So—’ He draws a question mark in the centre of the board, lines radiating out to the photos ‘—there is someone out there, a serial killer, who is getting other people to kill for them. And it’s now our job to find who they are.’
‘What about their spouses?’ Lisa asks. ‘I mean, apart from Wilders. What do they say?’
‘That’s where it gets interesting. I think this is going to be our way in. The three killers actually have two things in common: they each have a young child, and their wives are dead or, in the case of Groot, AWOL. So these men are on their own, and whoever is forcing them into killing is targeting them specifically because of this. They’re clearly vulnerable, and angry, and I think the killer is using that to his advantage. But the question is, how is the killer finding them? How is he finding men who have a young child and a dead or absent spouse? Is he looking at death records and screening from there, does he have access to hospital data, how else could he be finding them? Have they been on dating sites looking for new partners? We need to find out how he knows, how he picks them.’
‘And what about the women, is the killer choosing them as well, what’s the link there?’ asks one of the men Jaap has yet to put a name to.
‘So far there’s nothing which links the women, or the women to the men who killed them, apart from physical proximity. So we need to dig on that front too. Is the killer choosing the women to be killed, or are they leaving that part of it up to the men themselves? There are a ton of questions here, and we need to get some answers. Quickly.’
Jaap breaks the room into three teams of two, assigning Arno to work with him as the fourth. The first team, headed up by Erik, is to work on Heleen and Stefan Wilders, the second, led by Lisa, has Kaaren and Pieter Groot, and the third is to focus on Nadine. They take their assignments and get to it, leaving Jaap with Arno, Smit and Thomas.
‘I want to be kept in the loop every step of the way,’ Smit says, standing up and fiddling with his cuffs. ‘The commissioner’s all over this one, he’s watching us and we need to get it right.’
Jaap waits till Smit’s gone before turning to Haase.
‘I know you’ve only just seen all this, but anything strike you so far?’
Haase, the personification of minimalism from the way he dresses, the trimness of his nails, and his air of detachment, clears his throat delicately.
‘The suffocation is interesting,’ he says adjusting his rimless glasses, the lenses hexagonal – or something with lots of edges on because really, who’s counting? – and clearing his throat again. ‘If the mystery man is forcing the men into killing for him and giving specific instructions as to how to do it, then …’
Jaap and Arno wait, watching him tap a finger gently against his lips.
‘Then?’ prompts Jaap when the tapping gets annoying.
‘Then I’m going to have to think about it. It’ll be more useful to you than if I give an off-the-cuff first impression now which might not be right.’
‘Live a little,’ Jaap says. ‘Sometimes a first impression is the best thing.’
Haase looks at him and nods slowly.
‘OK, my first impression is Smit doesn’t like you very much.’
‘Give the man a prize. Now tell me what you think about the case.’
‘Oh the case,’ he says, allowing himself a little minimalist smile. ‘Well, my first impression of the case is that whoever is forcing people to kill for him in such a specific way is a total sick fuck.’