His desk has about ten sticky notes on it when he gets back, all callback requests from Berk, the reporter at De Telegraaf. Somehow he’s surprised it’s taken so long, but he hasn’t got time for this now and decides that the best way to dodge any more distractions would be to go down to the basement where Roemers runs the DCU.
It’s a series of interlocking rooms, each housing three techs. Jaap asks for a desk with a terminal and Roemers sets him up with one near him.
‘Only thing is, I’m listening to music now, you’re gonna have to put up with that.’
‘Haven’t you got headphones?’
‘Yeah, but the left one started giving me weird distortions. I’ll keep it low. Ish. And anyway, you’re gonna love it. Group called Can, they’re the—’
‘Roemers, I have to work.’
‘That relentlessly fun-loving nature of yours, you should give it a rest sometimes. Get serious, know what I mean?’
Jaap gives him the finger. Roemers smiles, cranks the music up.
So, accompanied by Can, Jaap starts trawling through everything he can on Kamp.
Francesco Kamp was thirty-four when he died. He’d worked for the NS, the national train service, since he’d left school, first as a ticket-seller before being accepted into the driver training programme. For every place in the programme about thirty people apply; Kamp was one of the lucky ones, getting through that first door.
Reading the reports from this time Jaap can see he did well, he was studious, diligent, polite, all the things the train company wanted, and he passed the course with the third highest marks in his group. That was only the beginning though, because then start the years of shift work, and you can bet the rookies get the jobs no one else wants. So Kamp put his head down – after all, he was getting a decent wage, and so what if the hours were irregular and he often found himself hauling freight up from Rotterdam at four in the morning, or being the man responsible for taking late-night revellers from the centre of Den Haag out to their suburban homes where they could sleep it off.
It was during this period he met Famke Reijn, a social worker from Haarlem who was pretty in a plain way, matching Kamp’s expectations. Their combined salaries were enough to get them on the property ladder, and they had been paying off the mortgage on their property in Amsterdam-Zuid ever since. Kamp steadily rose, his pay now at a level which most people would describe as comfortable, if not stellar.
The couple decided the time was right, they were finally secure enough to start a family. The pregnancy, from the medical records Jaap pulled, seemed to pass easily enough, no drama or hints of what was to come.
Because on a clear night in February, whilst Kamp was on a run down to Leiden, Famke was tidying up the kitchen, clearing away the remains of her meal, when a pain so sharp she caught her breath seared through the left-hand side of her stomach.
The transcript of the emergency call is a dry representation of what actually went on, the operator getting the details as quickly as possible, and goes nowhere near explaining the horror and fear that must have been going through Famke’s head. The ambulance crew were there in three minutes, having just finished a job nearby which didn’t require transporting anyone to the hospital, and within eighteen minutes of placing the call Famke was being wheeled into the AMC in Bijlmer.
Everything had worked as it was meant to. The system, designed to be as efficient as possible, proved itself. She was in the best possible place. But that’s when things started getting tricky. Assessments were made, tests done, she was prodded and measured and questioned, and then the decision was kicked up to the next level, a surgeon named Huisman. There was no hint of the surgeon’s drinking problem in his record at this stage, no colleague raising a flag about gin on the man’s breath as he worked, no complaints from anyone about punctuality or a shaking hand as incisions were made. All that came after. The official investigation which ended in him being disbarred didn’t mention the death of Famke Kamp, largely because what had happened wasn’t necessarily the surgeon’s fault. Going under the knife is always a risk, doubled up when the aim of the surgery is to extract a living being from the body of another.
The post-mortem explained that a cut in the bowel wall had bled, and a clot, forming quickly to stem the flow of blood, had broken loose and travelled through her veins until it reached the main artery leading to the left lung, blocking it fully. Pulmonary embolism was recorded as the reason for death.
Kamp clearly saw otherwise.
He saw medical malpractice, and driven by grief, anger and a sense of injustice that his carefully planned life had turned into a world of pain, Kamp pushed his case as far as it would go, all the while caring for his newborn, a girl named after her mother.
So he was angry, Jaap thinks, surfacing from his research, the room coming alive around him with the smell of coffee and stale air and printer dust, and Can still powering from Roemers’ speakers. And anger could be a trait useful to someone looking to force another person into killing for them.
Next he turns his attention to scopolamine. Given its rarity he’d originally thought it would be easy to find the source, but during the months after Dafne and then Nadine’s deaths, he’d not come up with much of anything. There were no mentions of it on the system anywhere in the Netherlands, no dealers arrested with it on them, no other reports of its use. Given he now has four dead bodies with it in their blood, finding out where the stuff is coming from is getting more and more critical.
‘Music finally got to you?’ Roemers asks as he gets up and heads for the door.
‘No, it’s beautiful.’
‘Really?’
‘Yeah, I could stay all day listening to it.’
‘But …?’
‘But I’ve got to go and meet a friend. One who likes drugs.’