Little Sister (2 page)

‘And you have to keep taking your medication,’ the director cut in. ‘That’s a condition. You understand what a condition is?’

Kim had to stop herself laughing. Even so she rolled her eyes.

‘It means doing what we’re told. We do that already, don’t we?’

The water seemed to stretch forever beyond the office window. The modest fishing town with its boats and houses and memories beckoned from across the lake. It was summer. Perhaps they’d
built a stage there, a platform made for singing.

‘You can’t go back to Volendam yet,’ Visser repeated, watching them. ‘There are too many bad memories there.’

Mia nodded. Then Kim.

Henk Veerman kept fiddling with his pen, turning it up and down, clicking the button nervously.

‘I want this absolutely clear,’ he said. ‘If I’m to agree to this request from your psychiatrist you must undertake to do everything you’re asked. No arguments. No
excursions outside the sheltered house without supervision.’

‘Sir,’ Mia replied with the sweetest smile she could manage. ‘We’ve tried to do our best here for years. Have we disappointed you lately?’

‘No,’ Visser answered. ‘Not in a very long time. You’ve been perfect.’ She glanced at Kim, the last to lose her stubbornness. ‘Both of you.’

The girls nodded. Mia withdrew her hand from her sister’s then ran her fingers through her long yellow hair. Sensing this, Kim did the same.

All eyes on them. As they usually were.

‘When do we leave?’ Mia asked.

‘We need to talk about this among ourselves,’ Veerman announced, glancing at the psychiatrist and the nurse. ‘Ladies . . .’

They hated being called that. It made them sound old and ugly.

‘Yes?’ Mia asked.

‘Wait outside, please,’ the director said. ‘We won’t be long.’

The sisters stared across the desk. Two men, one woman. Everything in their lives came in threes. Three sisters. Three adults responsible for their fate.

Three.

It was important Visser believed this obsession of theirs was now lost.

So they got up and walked steadily out of the room, hoping that no one would notice that their steps drummed across the wooden floor in triplets . . . one, two, three . . . one, two, three.

There were three chairs in the corridor when they got there and no one else in sight. The closed door of Veerman’s office was so far away they couldn’t hear the voices behind.

Kim tapped her fingers on the thick plate glass of the window. Three times.

Mia watched and tried to smile.

August in Amsterdam and the city dozed in the grip of sultry summer. Of an evening people dined on their outside steps above the street, sipping wine, picking lethargically at
takeaway pizza and plates of salad. During the day they went about their work with a genial listlessness. It was too hot, too sticky to get mad at anything. Even the bemused tourists who had the
temerity to wander in front of cyclists rarely got a curse.

Nowhere was this sleepy, sweaty lassitude more obvious than the serious crimes office of the Marnixstraat police headquarters where, bang on cue as the heatwave hit, the air conditioning had
groaned three times then failed completely.

Most of the windows were sealed shut so the place was stuffy, overheated and idle. Pieter Vos, the senior officer in charge, sat at his desk, long dark hair uncombed, a threadbare blue jacket
over the back of his chair. In his late thirties he still retained a boyish face and a ready smile that fooled people from time to time, especially if he was out with his diminutive wire fox
terrier Sam.

The two of them lived in a shambolic houseboat on the Prinsengracht canal just a short walk away. Sam usually stayed at the Drie Vaten bar opposite the boat when Vos was working. Today that was
impossible. Sofia Albers, the owner, had gone to the Rijksmuseum with a friend and couldn’t look after him. So now the green plastic dog basket from the main cabin sat next to the
brigadier’s desk. Not that there was much to do.

Laura Bakker was trying to catch up on paperwork while Dirk Van der Berg, twenty years her senior, the same rank, lobbed a rubber ball up and down the office for the dog.

Sam chased it into the area near the photocopier and sent the waste bin flying.

Bakker, a tall and striking woman in her mid-twenties, with long red hair, an awkward Friesland accent, and an occasional attitude looked up and complained, ‘I’m trying to
concentrate here.’

‘Why bother?’ Van der Berg replied. He was a hefty man with a pockmarked face and salt-and-pepper hair. Beer figured high on his list of personal priorities. He started picking up
the mess while Sam ran round the office, head turning madly, trying to shake the ball to death.

‘Because it has to be done?’

‘You could always finish it tomorrow,’ Vos suggested. He looked at his watch. The minutes were crawling by. Sofia wouldn’t be back in the bar for an hour or more. When she was
he’d walk Sam home and enjoy a beer. Van der Berg and Bakker would probably join him.

‘I hate procrastination,’ the young policewoman declared.

‘I love it,’ Van der Berg cried. ‘Well . . .if it means you don’t have to fill in a load of stupid forms.’

‘Without forms . . . without organization we’d be lost,’ she insisted.

The phone on Koeman’s empty desk rang. Vos looked at it and didn’t move. So did Van der Berg. Bakker sighed and marched over to take the call.

There was a bright and cheery woman on the other end.

‘I want to talk to Ollie,’ she said. ‘Tell him Vicky’s back in town. It’s his lucky day.’

‘Ollie who?’

‘Ollie Haas,’ the woman replied briskly. ‘Don’t you know your boss’s name?’

‘Yes. I do. Who’s Ollie Haas?’

‘Your brigadier!’

Van der Berg was at the desk already. His hand was the size of a goalkeeper’s glove, fingers like sausages, out and beckoning.

‘No,’ Bakker said. ‘I think you’ve got the wrong—’

She let Van der Berg retrieve the phone and listened. Vos was there now too. A brief conversation. Vicky was newly returned from a long stay in Turkey. Ollie Haas was an old friend. Lover maybe.
She wanted to get in touch.

‘He doesn’t work here any more,’ Van der Berg told her. ‘Hasn’t for . . . I don’t know . . . years.’

‘We had a falling-out. Lost touch. I went to live abroad. I really want to see him again.’

‘I’m sorry . . .’

‘Do you have his address? His phone number?’

Van der Berg put his hand over the speaker and relayed the questions to Vos. He shook his head and took the phone.

‘I’m brigadier here now. Vos. Officer Haas is retired.’

‘I’m an old friend! Surely you can tell me where he lives.’

‘Write me a letter,’ Vos suggested. ‘I’ll pass it on to human resources. They can try and—’

‘This is all to do with that shit you lot got yourselves in, isn’t it? Volendam? The Timmers kids? I thought you people had buried that once and for all.’

After that the line went dead.

‘What the hell was going on there?’ Van der Berg wondered. ‘No one wants to get in touch with Ollie Haas.’

‘Who?’ Bakker asked.

‘You won’t remember,’ Vos said. ‘You were a kid. It was . . . years ago.’

‘Ten years,’ Van der Berg said. ‘We watched that whole farce fall apart in front of our eyes. They wouldn’t let me and Pieter anywhere near it. And then—’

‘It was just an old girlfriend,’ Vos suggested.

Van der Berg was staring at Bakker.

‘You remember The Cupids, don’t you? The pop group?’

She tugged at her long red hair and wrinkled her nose.

‘Rings a bell. Didn’t they break up? There was a scandal or something?’

He snorted.

‘A scandal? One of them wound up dead. One went missing. As for Gert Brugman . . . well, you can still catch him singing for beer in the bars around here. Used to be a ladies’ man.
Looked a real mess the last time I saw him.’

‘There was a murder,’ Bakker remembered. ‘A family. It was in all the papers for a while. I was in Friesland. At school. Volendam . . .’

Van der Berg grunted at the name of the fishing town half an hour away from the city.

‘Have you ever been there?’ Vos asked.

She stretched out her long legs, yawned and said, ‘No. Everyone says it’s full of tourists.’

Vos checked his watch.

‘Not just tourists. Career development, Laura. You’re supposed to read up on old cases from time to time. Cold ones too.’

‘I am,’ she agreed.

‘Well there’s your assignment. Go down to records and pull out what you can on the Timmers murders. Read through the files. Tell me where Ollie Haas went wrong.’

‘Stop at twenty screw-ups,’ Van der Berg added. ‘After that you just might go crazy. At least it cost that idiot his job in the end. They should have snatched his pension
too.’

She brightened at that. The day had been long and boring.

‘So who’s going to take me through it all? Or do I get the pleasure of both of you?’

‘Sam’s going to need his supper in a while,’ Vos said. ‘I’ve got some washing to pick up.’

‘May I hold his lead, sir?’ Van der Berg asked meekly. ‘Along the way?’

‘It’s half past three!’ Bakker cried. ‘Even you two can’t bunk off work this early.’

Vos checked his watch again and wondered if there was something wrong with the battery. The minute hand had scarcely moved. They had another hour to kill at least. Time seemed to have got stuck
in this steamy, slow weather.

‘Expense forms!’ he said, raising a finger into the air. Van der Berg groaned then banged his head gently on the desk. ‘After that I’m buying.’

Bakker closed her eyes and made weeping noises.

‘This is all your fault,’ Van der Berg told her.

She got to her feet.

‘I’m going to look for those files. What was his name again?’

‘Ollie Haas,’ the two men replied in unison.

‘The Timmers case,’ Van der Berg added. ‘Don’t delve too deep, Laura. Not if you want to sleep tonight.’

Sisters, brought into the world thirty – ten times three – minutes apart, Kim and Mia stayed by the heavy window staring at Volendam across the placid water,
understanding each other’s thoughts the way they always did, knowing they both saw the same thing.

Three boats broke the bright horizon.

Three states of existence. Past. Present. Future.

Three parts to the world now visible. Earth. Water. Sky.

The seafront of Volendam seemed closer than usual. Without speaking a word each knew what the other was remembering. A warm summer evening ten years before. A backing band was starting up on a
platform near the landing stage.

Three days and three nights Jonah lingered in the belly of the whale.

Three days and three nights Jesus spent in the heart of the earth before he rose to glory.

Three girls in blue hot pants, sparkly scarlet shirts, patent red leather shoes, yellow hair tied back in buns, faces heavy with mascara and lipstick, walking up the stairs onto the stage.

Three men before them. Famous once upon a time. Revered. Lucky escapees from the round of fishing and drink and hard leisure that was the lot of many in the town by the water.

Applause then. Shouts from the audience. A few yelled phrases that eleven-year-old girls didn’t really understand.

They stood on the waterfront stage dancing slowly to the ballad their mother had taught them from the CD player in their living room.

Then the girls began to sing in perfect harmony with such delicacy, charm and precision they silenced the half-drunk audience and kept the rapt attention of the lone TV camera that had come out
from Amsterdam seeking cheery sequences to fill the empty minutes of local summer news.

The camera loved them, Freya said.

The audience too.

Everyone.

And those three men who mattered most, grinning figures in denim seated at the front of the stage on chairs placed like thrones, judging everyone the moment they rose to take the steps.

This was a talent contest, Freya said. One of those win-or-lose moments in life when everything might change for the better. A chance to be spotted. To rise from obscure poverty in Volendam to
something bigger, in the Netherlands, perhaps abroad one day.

The lovely singing sisters. The Golden Angels. Children now but teenagers soon. Freya had that transition mapped out all along. Cute then sultry. Adorable then desirable. An inch or two of that
line had to be crossed at the start.

‘You can save us,’ she told them, putting on their make-up at the back of the grubby bar where she waited tables. The place both tantalized and scared them. It was called the
Taveerne van de Zeven Duivels, the Inn of the Seven Devils. From the ceiling leering demons stared down at the customers, waving pitchforks. They met their mother there almost every day. ‘You
can take us out of this shitty backwater, darlings. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

The men who judged them were called The Cupids. They had been famous throughout Holland once. Then the years and changing fashion had taken hold.

Freya Timmers knew them well. She’d sung on a few of their records. The old songs from the Eighties. The later stuff when they moved awkwardly into trance and rock and anything else their
manager threw at them, trying to keep a grip on any audience they could find. Even now the girls could hear their mother’s voice on the last song she made with them, a slow, sad ballad that
was a return to form, going somewhere in the charts until that August night when three little sisters sang it and knew they would never forget the words again.

The lines remained burned in their memories, in English, the language The Cupids liked most of all.

In a soft, calm voice, almost a whisper, Kim stared out of the window and sang the first line.

Love is like a chain that binds me.

Mia followed with the second.

Love is like a last goodbye.

Together they sang the third.

Love is all I have to keep you.

Eyes closed, memories sweeping over them. Kim thinking the lower note, Mia the middle, they waited, listening, praying.