Bite (17 page)

‘It
is
my business if you could have slipped out unnoticed, while your sweet little friend was asleep in the bedroom.'

‘Except I didn't.' Max folded his arms.

‘You got no alibi,' Stokenbrand said, pointing the roll-up at Max. ‘Just tread careful.' The policemen reached under the settee. ‘Speaking of which, are these your shoes?'

‘Yes.'

Stokenbrand looked inside the scuffed brown loafers and inspected the soles, then he showed them to Van der Moolen who nodded and said something to Henk in Dutch.

‘What's going on?' Max asked.

‘They want me to identify all your shoes. I don't know why.' Henk said.

Max lifted his polished brogues from his travel bag. ‘These, those and a pair of old sneakers are all I got.'

‘Try 'em on Cinderella, all of them.' Stokenbrand laughed, as he examined each pair, checking the soles and writing something in his notebook.

Max slipped them on. ‘Okay, you know my shoe size, big deal. Tell me what you have on Erica. I'm not in the mood for shoe shop games.'

Stokenbrand took the brogues and the loafers and placed them carefully in separate plastic bags. When he had tied the top securely he pulled out a small plastic evidence bag from his pocket. He looked at it himself then held it up towards Max. ‘We found this in the burned apartment. What do you think?'

Inside the evidence bag was a warped and blackened Visa card. It was in Erica's name, but it was no longer possible to read the signature. Max turned the bag round and round in trembling fingers, reading and re-reading the name on the card as if by some chance he might have got it wrong first time.

‘I'm so sorry, Max.' Stokenbrand reached out a tattooed arm as if to pat Max on the arm. Instead the cop grabbed a slice of cheese and folded it into his smirking mouth.

Lies and truth share a narrow bed, like birth and death, pain and pleasure. Max tossed and turned in his mind between the two, unable to accept what Stokenbrand had told him. After the cops had gone, Max took a long walk, unwilling as yet to sink back into grieving or the condolences offered by Henk. Stokenbrand had mentioned melted jewellery. Max knew Erica wore silver, but had never seen her wear gold. Stokenbrand had definitely said it was gold. It wasn't much of a straw to clutch at, but anything to postpone an awful truth.

He borrowed Henk's dictionary, bought some Dutch papers and sat in a café, flicking through for news of the fire. In one there was a brief story and a photograph which showed a blackened apartment block. Max drained his black coffee and threw back his shot of
Vieux
. Time to check this out himself.

Across the street was a taxi rank. Max showed the article to a driver. He nodded, started the meter and gestured to the back seat. They drove out of the centre of Amsterdam, weaving in and out of the humming multicoloured trams, and along the edge of the Amstel River, past swarms of hunched cyclists pedalling into the city. The driver was a man of few words and no questions. That suited Max fine. Soon the crowded streets and upmarket stores of the Old South gave way to a more open landscape, dominated by grey tower blocks and highways, where every inch that an adolescent could reach with a spray can was swathed in repetitive, black, white and silver graffiti. The silver Mercedes wove its way through side streets where kids of every ethnic hue played street soccer or sat on low brick walls kicking their trainers and comparing mobile phones. The driver stopped by a sloping pathway. He pointed up towards an apartment block set among young broadleaf trees. A black scorch mark had scarred the outside of the building from a ground floor window up as far as the third floor.

The window was just a burned frame and had been sealed over with clear plastic sheeting. A lanky uniformed cop of perhaps twenty years kept back a small group of onlookers behind a tape barrier. Max walked up to him and lied about an appointment with Detective Inspector Voos. The cop had a wispy blonde moustache and nervous grey eyes. He looked Max up and down, told him to wait right there and headed into the building. As soon as the cop had gone inside, Max ducked under the tape and followed.

Inside the entrance of the block a section of the lobby was screened off with translucent plastic sheeting, behind which figures in white overalls moved like ghosts. Behind the staircase to the upper floors was the entrance to the apartment. The blue wooden door had been torn from its splintered frame, and bore the wounds of repeated axe blows. More overalled figures in blue baseball caps and white plastic boots crouched inside, wielding plastic bags, brushes and tweezers.

Voos was standing with her back to Max, listening to an explanation of something from a middle aged figure in overalls and plastic gloves who was holding a blackened kitchen-type fire extinguisher. The young policeman was trying to attract her attention, but he was shushed away. Max couldn't understand the words but the speaker's tone and grim demeanour conveyed a sombre importance, jabbing with his finger towards the extinguisher.

Max edged along the lobby wall until he could see across directly into the apartment. The fire seemed to have been mainly confined to one room. Around its doorframe was a sooty halo. Inside it was pure charcoal, ankle deep in cinders, exhaling a crematorium stink. A V-shaped aerial stuck out of a glassy carbonised blob that may once have been a television. The only truly recognisable artefacts were the springs of a mattress, among which two technicians were crouched. A third was taking photographs from above. Max couldn't see what it was that they were looking at until one stood aside.

Underneath, amid a pile of ashes was a matt black skull, its jaw stuck wide, posing ambiguously between laughter and agony for the camera's merciless flash. Max felt bile rising, and turned away.

The young cop spotted him, and yelled. It was the kind of inarticulate fury that signals a lack of confident authority. Voos turned around, and when she saw Max her face turned as grey and hard as the building she stood in. ‘Out! You are not supposed to be here,' she said.

‘I'll go when I know who died in there.'

The young cop unsheathed his nightstick, shiny and new as a child's Christmas toy. He advanced, gleeful at the first chance of using it.

‘Hold it like that, kid, and you'll get your wrist broken,' said Max. ‘Try it and see.'

Voos reached for the officer's arm. ‘Reemers. You're needed back at the tape. I can deal with this.' Reemers shot a poisonous glance at Max as he slunk out.

‘Accident or arson?' Max asked.

Voos did not reply as she shepherded Max through the back door of the lobby, down a short tunnel built from timber and polythene sheeting. The tunnel led to a square marquee in which a group of policemen sat on plastic chairs drinking coffee. Around the open sides of the tent were a few police vans, a long caravan, and a big mobile office. Once they were away from the apartment, she began to relax.

‘Carver, I know you're upset, but coming here was crazy. Contaminate a crime scene and you can forget bail. You get locked up until we're finished, no question about it. Forensics need to know that any fingerprints or hairs, including yours, that we find in there were left last night, not just a moment ago.'

‘Come
on
. You can't suspect me. I wouldn't do anything like this.'

‘Maybe you wouldn't. But an innocent person would stay a mile away. Only the perpetrator would want to see forensic findings barred from evidence, which is what would have happened if you had gone in there.'

‘Stokenbrand showed me Erica's credit card which he says was found here. I don't trust him to tell it me straight, but I would trust you. Are you sure it is Erica?'

‘No, not yet. Erica's card was the only identification in the apartment. Even without it, we would have checked Erica. You always start by matching dead bodies against missing persons.'

‘Did they find anything else? Stokenbrand said something about melted jewellery.'

Voos led him into a police caravan. ‘This is all we can show you at the moment.' On a table were two clear plastic evidence bags. One contained a ladies' silver wristwatch, the other a tasselled suede handbag. ‘Are these Erica's?'

‘The suede bag definitely not, the watch I'd have to look at.' Max held out his hand for the bag.

Voos held it to herself. ‘Not yet. We're waiting for fingerprints.'

‘What about the melted stuff? Stokenbrand said it was gold. Erica never wore gold.'

‘It looks like gold, but it's melted into the floor, so getting it analysed will take a while. All we know is that the metal blobs are in amongst the bones of the right hand, probably from rings.'

‘Erica doesn't usually wear rings,' Max said.

A lot of other items were arranged in bags along the wall. There was a scorched bedside lamp with melted shade, an undamaged series of impressionist prints in clipframes, three pairs of women's shoes and an electric bass guitar. A new fear began to curdle in Max. He had last seen a metallic red Gibson just like this at Purple Haze, slung around Lisbeth's slender neck.

‘Could this be Lisbeth de Laan's apartment? It looks like her guitar.'

Voos pouted at the plausibility of the idea. ‘She's not the official tenant, but who knows? The apartment is owned by Amsterdam council and the registered tenant is named Gerrit Hoorn. Neighbours say he left months ago, and a woman moved in. She gave them the name Karen, though it could be false.'

‘What did she look like?'

‘We haven't got statements yet. All we know is that she was native Dutch. This Karen could not be Erica because she speaks the language and she moved in before Erica went missing.'

‘But Karen could be Lisbeth de Laan.'

‘Maybe. Or maybe Karen really is a Karen,' Voos said. ‘We just have to wait for the identification.'

The Detective Inspector knew that nothing could be taken for granted in Bijlmermeer. The sprawling estates to the south east of Amsterdam marked the point where Dutch social cohesion finally expires in a jumble of crime and poverty. The huge gull-winged apartment blocks boasted the broadest ethnic mix in the city, transit points for illegal immigrants, runaways, asylum seekers and the criminals who prey on them.

In 1992 an El-Al 747 cargo plane crashed into an apartment block in Bijlmermeer, turning it into a kerosene fireball and burning at least forty people to death. Investigators spent a year trying to put an exact figure on the death toll, and eventually put out a number because it was expected of them. No-one will ever know for sure if it was right.

Voos displayed more evidence bags. A pair of spike-heeled PVC boots. A pair of leather dungarees.

‘Those are definitely Lisbeth's,' Max said. Instead of pure relief for Erica, he now felt soiled by guilt for Lisbeth, and a burning anger too. Lisbeth was a thief, sure, but she didn't deserve this. No-one deserved this. Lisbeth had courted death by offering Max what he wanted. One name. Without that one generous act Lisbeth would be alive and happy; her lovely face unscarred, playing bass for Gradgrind Spine on a Saturday night and conducting a little small-time theft on the side.

‘Detective Inspector, I know who did this,' Max said. If Lisbeth was dead, it couldn't do any harm now to tell the cops about Anvil.

Voos stopped replacing evidence bags. She didn't look at Max, but she was listening sure enough.

‘Someone called Anvil. Lisbeth knew him. She was terrified of him. I think he is holding Erica too.'

When she looked up, Voos's grey eyes were sharp with concentration. ‘Tell me more.'

‘It is what Lisbeth told me. I don't know any more. He sounds like a big league crook, and he isn't shy about killing.'

‘That's pretty slim evidence. However, I'll tell you something. I never did think this kind of premeditated evil was your work,' Voos said.

‘Oh, which kind of premeditated evil
is
my type?'

Sarcasm seemed lost on Voos. ‘Someone came here at four in the morning and scouted the place front and back. Footprints in the flower beds match dirt marks in the lobby. That's why we wanted your shoes. I'm happy to say they don't match, so my hunch was right.'

‘I'm happy about your hunches,' Max said.

‘We believe this person found the bedroom's open casement window, and put his arm in to find a gap in the curtains. Perhaps the victim woke up screaming at that point, or maybe later as the home made incendiary he threw began to burn her. In any case she might have panicked too much to get out.'

Max felt a wave of nausea as he saw an image of Lisbeth, a writhing human torch because she gave him a phone number.

‘What about that extinguisher. Doesn't that prove she got out of the room to start fighting the fire?'

‘That was the same mistake we made. Until one of the Fire Service technicians noticed that it had a modified valve. The residues inside should have been foam. We believe they were in fact a mixture of naphtha and a sticky cooking oil, perhaps palm oil. It was used by the assailant, not by the victim.'

‘Home-made napalm in a home-made flamethrower.' Max shivered at the thought. Commercial napalm is cheap and deadly, the modern army's weapon of choice for taking out tanks. Dropped in canisters from aircraft, it is an adhesive jelly that burns with such intense heat that even a near-miss boils the crew alive through the vehicle's armour. Of the many ghastly deaths on the modern battlefield, none are worse than this. That someone chose to recreate this horror in a woman's bedroom was even more evil.

‘The assailant was clever,' Voos said. ‘Most weapons dropped at the crime scene stand out a mile. But a fire extinguisher does not look out of place at a fire. You don't expect that an arsonist used it.'

‘Was there anyone else in the apartment when it happened?'

Voos pursed her lips. ‘Possibly. There is only one body in the bedroom, and nowhere else was significantly burned. We did find a window lock undone in the lounge, though there are no second set of footprints we can find.'

‘So what about Anvil?'

‘I don't know that name. We'll look into it. But please, leave the investigating to us from now on. Stay away from witnesses, crime scenes and keep your nose clean.'

Max shrugged. ‘If you do your job, nothing would make me happier. One final tip, and I'll leave it all to you.'

The way Voos looked at him it was clear she didn't want to hear it.

‘There's a guy who runs some company called Xenix Molecular in Rotterdam. He's mixed up in all this, and he might want what Erica had found. His name is de Wit, initial L. He may or may not be Anvil. My hunch is that he is.'

Voos offered Max a ride back to the city in a patrol car. It was a way to make sure he was doing what he was told, but there was nothing more he could do until the body had been identified. There was quite a crowd gathered around the building by the time Max left the caravan. Mostly they were just gawkers, but right at the front by the tape was a multi-ethnic knot of teenagers, shouting at the cops and congratulating each other on whatever it was they were saying. Among them was a rangy tattooed youth, crew-cut except for a single blade of orange hair, gelled over his forehead like a beak. Max recognised him as the one who offered the gun to Janus at Purple Haze, and their eyes met. The boy had barely learned how to shave, but he thought he was a gangster. The curled lip, narrowed eyes and stiff jaw were his ABC of intimidation.