Into the Night: Inspector Rykel Book 2 (Amsterdam Quartet) (23 page)

Monday, 10 May
21.32

Tanya held on to him, held him tight.

As if that would help.

She still couldn’t take in what Jaap had just told her.

Jaap shifted his weight and she let him go.

‘So tell me about these men,’ he said, his voice unable to hide the fear coursing through him.

‘They all come from Bosnia, with the exception of Teeven obviously. It seems during the conflict there they were a small terrorist group which specialized in ethnic cleansing. They were part of the Serbian army involved in the Sebrenica massacre but broke away when the UN troops moved in. They probably thought they were safer as a small group.’

‘And Matkovic was their leader?’

‘Yeah. He got caught, but these guys managed to escape. And they must have come here using false IDs. Easy enough to get.’

Jaap slapped his neck and inspected his hand.

Tanya had been going through their files, and the fact that one of these people was holding Floortje was terrifying; all of their records were littered with deaths, rapes, torture. Europol had a list of crimes they were accused of running into pages. But the one who had Floortje was, apart from Matkovic, the worst.

‘And while they were here they needed money so started ripping off the cannabis growers?’

‘Looks that way,’ said Tanya. ‘They needed money to live off, I guess. And it’s not like they were going to come here and get normal jobs.’

‘So the photos on their phones – that wasn’t about us, they were just scoping out Floortje? They needed to know where she would be?’

‘Must’ve been.’

‘So who’s left?’

Tanya pulled two sheets of A4 from her pocket, unfolded them and handed them to Jaap, training her torch on the paper so he could read. Tanya knew what they said. Goran Nikolic was second-in-command of the Black Hands, answering to Matkovic. And by the look of things he was as vicious as they came.

Jaap scanned down then turned to the second sheet, read that in silence.

When he was done he looked out over the lake.

‘This is who has Floortje,’ he said.

Tanya noticed the sheets of paper trembled in Jaap’s hand, the edges shivering in the torch beam. She wanted to reach out to him again, but he seemed coiled tight, like he might explode if touched.

Not that she could blame him.

From what she’d read in the files, if Nikolic had Floortje the chances were he’d follow through with his threat. Meaning Jaap would never see her again.

Or not alive.

‘So what now?’ she said. ‘How are we going to get him?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Jaap, turning his face towards her. ‘But we’ve only got about twenty-two hours left.’

‘I ran his name,’ she said. ‘Nothing came up. As far as anyone is concerned he’s not in the country.’

For a while neither said anything, then Tanya spoke.

‘All I can think of is 57. That’s the only place we’ve had a confirmed sighting of him. How about we go there now, flash his photo around?’

Jaap was looking out towards the lake and didn’t respond, didn’t give any indication he’d even heard.

‘I know it’s a long shot,’ she said, watching his profile, ‘but right now I’m not sure what else we’ve got.’

Monday, 10 May
23.45

Music pounded, each beat hammering Jaap’s head, pressurizing his eardrums, squeezing his brain.

It was nearly midnight, but at 57 things were only just getting going.

He leaned forward to yet another group – stupid, spoilt people out on the town, shrieking, giggling, acting like the celebretards who were everywhere in the media these days – and shouted out the phrase he’d been using for the last twenty minutes. When he’d got their attention he showed the photo.

Faces peered forward, three woman who weren’t as young as their dresses would have you believe, and two much younger men, one with a stud in his left ear. Jaap had heard about them – granny snatchers, they were called – who for whatever reason preferred women more mature.

One of the women reached out for the photo, dark roots showing on her blonde middle-parted hair, and Jaap let her take it. She studied it for a few seconds before handing it back.

‘I’ve seen him before,’ she said, leaning forward so Jaap could hear her. ‘He was trying to rent a building from us.’

Her friends were all looking at her, hopeful that their evening was now going to be considerably more exciting than the fumble round the back of the club they’d been anticipating.

‘I think we’re going to need to talk in private,’ said Jaap. She nodded, got up and followed Jaap and Tanya outside, leaving her friends ablaze with excitement.

‘Where do you work?’ asked Jaap as they left the building, walking in the opposite direction to the queue which hugged one side of the club. Jaap could see she was older than he’d first thought, maybe late fifties, maybe more. They stopped at the corner of the building.

‘De Kok,’ she said, pulling her jacket round her and shivering. ‘It’s on Rozengracht.’

Jaap felt a jolt of energy pulse in his gut.

It was the same place where the girl who’d given the first victim the keys to Koopman’s flat worked. The girl who disappeared.

‘And what building did he try to rent?’

‘It wasn’t him, actually; it was a friend of his who I dealt with. But the man in the photo waited in the car the whole time. He was wearing dark glasses, and I kind of got the impression he didn’t want to be seen.’

‘And the one you dealt with, who was he?’

‘Some guy, I don’t really remember that much about him. Esther was supposed to be showing them around – she’d made the initial appointment – but my boss wanted me to do it as she didn’t think Esther was experienced enough.’

‘The man, was he a foreigner?’

‘No, I don’t think so. He sounded Dutch to me.’

Must have been Teeven, but Jaap didn’t have a photo of him to show. Not that it really mattered. They’d got a lead on Nikolic, that was the important point.

‘What building were they interested in?’

‘Several actually. I took them to probably about five or six, all old farm buildings or industrial units.’

‘Did this guy say why they were looking?’ asked Tanya.

‘He said it was for some project, like a studio or something. To do some kind of metalwork. He wanted somewhere far away from any other building so no one would get disturbed by the noise.’

Jaap’s pulse, which had been high since the phone call, notched up again.

That’s it
, he thought.
That’s got to be where they’re holding her.

He tried not to let the excitement show in his voice. He could feel Tanya also trying not to let anything slip.

All he could think about was Floortje.

Being held by Nikolic.

‘Which one did they take?’

Shouts broke out from near the entrance. Jaap looked across to see two bouncers piling on top of a man waving a bottle. The bottle left his hand and smashed on the ground, spraying a group of woman at the head of the queue. They squealed, screamed and moved back.

‘I don’t think they took any in the end,’ she said, shivering. ‘All too expensive, they said. At least that’s what they told me.’

Tuesday, 11 May
07.58

Jaap’s eyes followed the blazing swan, each feather a flickering lick of flame in the dark sky.

There were no stars, no planets, nothing against which to gauge depth or distance.

There was just the flying swan.

The swan turned its neck – it was missing an eye – and beat its wings, dislodging a tail feather.

Jaap watched the feather as it dropped, fire flaring towards him, tumbling through space. And he was falling too, he could feel air rushing past him. The feather was close now, and he tried to reach out and touch it, but there was no warmth even as his hand got near. And then he accelerated, or the feather slowed down, and he watched it shrink away from him, watched it until he could no longer see it and there was only darkness.

Something was pounding his skull, arrhythmic, jarring.

He woke with all his muscles firing at once, eyes flipping open, arms and legs jerking, his head lifting off the desk, the world righting from sideways. The pounding he recognized as his heartbeat, the pulse too big, too strong, for his veins to cope with.

He expected to be covered in sweat – that was the cliché – but he found he was stone cold, dry, and his limbs stiff and sore.

Floortje.

He rubbed the side of his face he’d fallen asleep on, the side with the cigarette burn. The plaster was still attached to his skin, but he could feel the edges peeling up, catching and rolling on his fingers as they passed. He found an edge and tore it off, inspecting the pad.

There was blood there, dried and fresh.

He dropped it into the bin by his desk and looked around the office, clocking the lack of people. It was just him.

He checked his watch.

Only thirteen hours left
, he thought.
And I’m no closer.

He dragged himself off the chair, shook his legs out. He needed to be doing something, anything, but he felt weighed down.

And the truth was he didn’t know what to do. Nikolic had Floortje and was going to kill her if Saskia didn’t get Matkovic acquitted today.

Which, given that Saskia’s actual job was to prosecute him, was not going to be easy.

The one shred of hope was the fact that Saskia’s main witness had gone missing. That alone gave her a chance of managing to lose the case.

But he couldn’t rely on that, couldn’t sit around and wait for a verdict which could cause the death of his daughter.

When he and Saskia split up, he’d never imagined that she’d end up getting together with his work partner, Andreas Houten. But they had got together, and they’d made it work, and Jaap had been happy for both of them.

The problem had hit when Andreas, out of town on some training course, had asked Jaap to drop in on Saskia as she was feeling down.

Jaap had reluctantly dropped in. And then spent the night.

When Andreas told him the news a few months later that Saskia was pregnant Jaap didn’t think anything of it. Or maybe he had, maybe there’d been a moment of disquiet which he’d quickly quelled?

Then, later on, Andreas had been killed and five days later Saskia gave birth.

Jaap still remembered the beeping of machines in the hospital room as Saskia told him the truth, and the feeling he’d had, like the floor had just dropped away into nothingness.

Now Jaap’s insides felt like they were being shredded by something razor sharp.

In the first days of Floortje’s life, when he was adjusting to the fact that he was now a father, he’d been forced to confront his thoughts about having a child. Was it the shooting – the one which had propelled him to Kyoto – which caused them?

The woman he’d shot had been pregnant, so maybe it was some kind of internal justice he was trying to impose on himself?

Or was it fear?
he wondered.
Fear of something like this happening? Every parent’s worst nightmare?

Meditating was all very well, but when you were responsible for another living human being, detachment from suffering, seeing the true nature of reality, obliteration of the ego – that all seemed impossible. Maybe all he’d been doing in those years was hiding from life under a cloak of spirituality and cheap philosophy?

Maybe
, he thought,
I just need to fucking get on with it.

In the toilets he inspected the burn on his cheek. The blister had burst and was bleeding. He cleaned it up and slapped on another plaster. He noticed he was avoiding his own eyes in the mirror, like the person there was a stranger, looking for a fight.

After leaving 57 he’d told Tanya to go get some sleep and had headed back to the station and tried to force his mind to find a solution. But it was like trying to sift sand with a fork – nothing he came up with led anywhere. He’d eventually fallen asleep some time past five in the morning, despair dragging him down.

Back in the office he started where he’d left off, rereading the files Tanya had found on Nikolic.

It was clear that Nikolic had been Matkovic’s right-hand man during the conflict and that they were responsible for a whole host of atrocities.

But what wasn’t clear to Jaap was why Nikolic would go to such lengths to free his old boss. It seemed a kind of loyalty way beyond what was normal, and the risk for Nikolic was so high. If he was caught then he’d end up on trial at ICTY as well. And from what Jaap had read about him in the file, Nikolic would go down for several lifetimes with no chance of parole.

Was Matkovic really worth it?

Was he worth killing Floortje over? An innocent child?

The razor in his stomach stepped its shredding up a notch.

How has this happened?
he thought.
How have I ended up here like this?

‘Rykel.’

Jaap turned to see Smit’s frame in the doorway, the light from behind him meaning his face was in shadow.

Since the cover-up of Andreas’ death Jaap had avoided Smit as much as possible, anger flaring in him every time he saw his boss.

Anger which had been compounded as the only reason he’d had to go along with it was for Floortje’s sake.

If Floortje hadn’t been my child
, thought Jaap,
I’d’ve gone straight to the press.

Blowing the whistle would have ended his career in the police, and he’d decided to keep quiet as he knew he had to support Floortje. But maybe that had been the wrong move, maybe he should have gone through with it, exposed the cover-up and then got some boring, normal job where he’d have been a better father, better able to look after her.

‘Five minutes, upstairs,’ said Smit.

Jaap nodded and turned back to his desk, wondering what he was going to say.

Nikolic had given the standard kidnapper’s threat not to tell anyone, and it was highly unlikely he had a network in place which would give him access to internal police communications.

But maybe he does
, thought Jaap.

He’d been getting the information about the grow sites, attacking them just before the drug squad did.

Jaap realized he’d missed something.

Who was passing that info on?
he thought,
Could they still be in touch?

Jaap could take this to Smit, ask him to tell no one else,
but then what would he be able to do? Give him more manpower? He already had Tanya, and he could probably enlist Kees as well. He trusted them both. Bringing anyone else in at this stage would just complicate things, make it more dangerous.

And from what the estate agent had told him last night, he had an avenue to explore. He’d have to set Tanya and Kees trawling around other agents, seeing if they could find any trace of Nikolic.

He cleared the file from his desk, burying it in a drawer, and made his way upstairs.