Built in the eighties, the AMC hospital is considered Amsterdam’s best. So stuffed full of specialists both practising medicine and doing cutting-edge research, it really is the place to be if you’re sick.
At least that was the perception, until three years ago a junior doctor had been caught emptying out the saline from the drip bags, filling them instead with a solution which contained a particularly nasty strain of gram-negative bacteria. The bacteria themselves were dead, but gradually released endotoxins, a nasty substance officially known as lipopolysaccharides. Patients who’d been admitted for simple procedures were dying and no one knew why. Until a young student pathologist noticed all the bodies showed a bunch of markers for endotoxin poisoning.
It’d taken months of work to find the culprit, and since then the hospital had incorporated a raft of new procedures and protocols to stop anything like that happening again. One of them had been the deployment of CCTV throughout the hospital, an expensive option but one deemed necessary by a governing board alarmed by their slide in the hospital rankings.
It’s the CCTV Jaap’s banking on.
Arno’s really stepped up and got them there in record time. Once inside Jaap sends Arno to work on Personnel whilst he tackles Security. The chances the man is actually a nurse here are low, but Jaap’s feeling like he’s been slack and wants to cover everything.
But before he goes to Security he finds his way to the corridor Pieter Groot’s room had been on. He checks the corridor, fifty metres or so long, Groot’s room almost exactly at the halfway mark. There are cameras at either end, blinking red lights showing they’re working.
Once at Security he explains who he is and what he wants and things move fast. Soon enough he’s sitting in front of a screen with a bald techie beside him manning the controls.
Down the corridor people move at double-quick time, trolleys – both empty and patient-laden – speed through until Jaap sees himself zoom up the corridor, the movements oddly stiff.
‘Now.’
The screen slows down, fluidity returns, and a man steps out of Groot’s room. Jaap watches as the collision happens, and the man carries on.
But instead of heading to the end of the corridor he turns left after about ten paces and heads through another door. The sign on the door is visible as it opens, the international stick man.
‘Cameras in there?’ Jaap asks.
‘Nah,’ the bald techie says. ‘They talked about it but I seem to remember there was a human-rights issue or something. Privacy. I mean, they got a point, who wants to be watched while you’re trying to heft out a big ’un?’
They keep watching. The door swings open and a surgeon steps out, full hospital gown and facemask hooked round both ears. The bald man’s clicking his thumb and first-finger nails together. Jaap’s not finding it therapeutic.
Time ticks on, but the nurse doesn’t appear.
Jaap watches himself burst out of Groot’s room and the subsequent flurry of activity once he’d roused a few nurses.
And still the man hasn’t left the toilet.
‘Back up to that surgeon.’
Once they’ve got him on screen and freeze-framed the best shot they can get, Jaap leans in.
But because of the way the man has angled his head as he’s walked towards the camera, only the right eye is properly visible.
‘Follow him,’ Jaap says.
They spend the next ten minutes tracking the man’s movements through the hospital. To Jaap it looks like he clearly knows where the cameras are, as he seems to keep ducking his head when in range.
They’re on the final stretch now, just heading towards the main exit, the suspect walking past a man on crutches. The man is obviously new to them, and a crutch suddenly slips away from him. He sprawls out, tripping the surgeon up. The surgeon recovers and makes it to the exit, not even checking on the man who’s still on the floor, clearly in pain.
‘Rewind.’
They play through the fall frame by frame, catching the surgeon’s face in full as it twists on the way down.
And although the man’s lower face is covered by the mask, and even though the image is black and white and blurred from the movement, Jaap can still just make out the eye. The left eye, the layered scar tissue giving it a half-closed look.
Jaap had bumped, quite literally, into the killer.
And I let him get away, he thinks.