Turns out Sander Nuis does have a phone.
Jaap’s walking along Elandsgracht, two minutes away from the station, when he gets the call and Sander gives him the name of the man who’d sold him scopolamine.
And had suggested the tattoo.
‘Thanks,’ Jaap says. ‘Have you thought about laser treatment?’
‘Pricey. Might have to though, it’s really starting to fuck with my head. I wake up at night in a cold sweat thinking about it. Then I was tripping the other day and all I could see were thousands of them, all … all doing the same thing. That’s not good.’
Once in the office, a good forty minutes before the team’s due to meet for his morning brief, Jaap gets on the database.
And there’s a hit, proving that Sander hadn’t merely hallucinated the name.
Jaap clicks on ‘Bernard Kooy’, waiting for the mugshot to appear on screen. He wills it to be a face he recognizes, the man from the hospital. But as the image comes into focus it’s clear it’s not the same man. He scrolls down a long list of his interactions with the police over the last fifteen years. Of which there are ten pages.
The office is virtually empty; a rash of calls had come in, cleaning out most of the inspectors currently on duty. The only one left is on the phone right in the middle of a domestic, which, from what Jaap’s heard over the last ten minutes, sounds like it’s on a fast track straight to the divorce courts. He tries to tune it out and dig down into Kooy’s past.
Kooy was brought up in Den Haag, and before he’d even left school he’d been known to the local force. The trajectory of his criminal career is one Jaap has seen before. First it’s a warning or two, possession of narcotics, supply of the same, before the first full arrest at the age of eighteen. And from there things go downhill: drugs, violence, the same old story, his run-ins with the cops and justice system almost as regular as clockwork. Arrested, jailed, let loose. Then repeat it all again like some criminal groundhog.
Until three years ago when it all suddenly stops.
No more mentions of him on his file. Which might lead someone to think he’d either gone straight, or was dead. But given that Sander claims to have bought scopolamine from him well after the last arrest date, neither of those can be true.
Seems like he got smarter, Jaap thinks.
In the corner of the room a water cooler gurgles. He looks up to see the inspector he’d heard arguing on the phone sitting at his desk, head in hands. For a split second Jaap feels he should say something. But what is there to say? He leaves it.
The last mention for Kooy on the system is a driving offence, logged by two uniforms in Maastricht. A vehicle, a two-tone XKR, had been spotted driving erratically and reported by a member of the public. A patrol car was dispatched. They found a vehicle matching the description on a side road just off the A79. It was easy to spot, the report stated, because the car had somehow nosedived into a ditch. The driver, clearly not in the best state of mind, was still sitting in the vehicle, tipped well past forty-five degrees, revving the engine, the back wheels spinning uselessly in mid-air. When one of the uniforms stepped down into the ditch and knocked on the window, Kooy had apparently wound it down and asked him if he could see what was stopping his car from moving.
‘Yeah, I remember him,’ the officer says when Jaap gets him on the phone. ‘He was out of it that day. But like you said, he seems to have cleaned up his act, we’ve not heard from him for a few years now at least. I figured he’d probably killed himself somehow, but there was a rumour going round he’d got a job.’
‘Gone clean?’
‘Not really, I think one of my colleagues saw him with some people … hang on.’
Jaap hears a conversation going on at the other end, but can’t make out the words.
‘You still there?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I’m passing my colleague over, he knows more.’
Jaap listens to what the new voice – a woman with the smokiest, most alluring voice he’s ever heard – has to say.
‘So who’s he been seen with?’
‘Guy called Van der Pol, big player. Covers pretty much the whole country. Drugs, sex-slaves, extortion, he does it all, he’s like the Amazon of the criminal world.’
Ten minutes later Jaap walks into the room where his team’s assembled. He brings them up to speed on Kooy.
‘This is the guy supplying people with scopolamine; the chances are high that if we find him we can get to this man.’ He points to the CCTV images of the man with the scar, pulled from the hospital yesterday. ‘All right, that’s me. Anyone else got something?’
Jaap looks around the room. Tired faces stare back at him. He suddenly realizes that some of them probably didn’t go home last night, given the lack of shaving on a couple of the male team members.
The child-support dodger puts his hand up.
‘I’ve been going through Pieter Groot’s stuff, found a couple of things. First is that although his wife did leave him and go to India she’s actually dead, died in a coach crash. Which leads to this.’ He gets up and hands round some screen-grabbed sheets.
‘These are private messages between Pieter Groot and an unknown person, username “HelpingHand”. The messages were pulled from his account on a forum for bereaved parents. There was an email in Groot’s inbox giving a weekly digest of the most popular posts, that’s how I came across it. HelpingHand claims his partner died several years ago, and that he’s spent much time since helping other people come to terms with the same tragedy. As you can see, there’s quite a lot of back and forth between them, and eventually they agree to meet up. I spent some time in Vice, and the way HelpingHand gradually earns Groot’s trust is pretty much the exact same way paedophiles groom their victims. So HelpingHand knows what he’s doing, knows how to manipulate someone’s feelings, right up until he suggests they meet.’
Jaap scans to the end. The date of Groot’s message arranging to meet is three days prior to Kaaren’s death. Then there’s only one more message from HelpingHand, the day before Kaaren’s death.
The previous messages had been friendly, personal. This one is different. It simply gives the next day’s date, a time and a location. The Hoge Veluwe National Park.
The very place Kaaren wound up dead.