Little Sister (27 page)

This was bigger than her uncle’s boat. The Evinrude wasn’t a simple outboard. It sat at the back of the vessel, driven from a wheelhouse amidships where a big shiny throttle sat
begging for action. Toys for the boys, she thought. But which boys?

The phone came out again. Still no signal.

‘Dammit,’ Bakker snapped. Maybe she’d have to drive all the way back to Monnickendam to call in.

Then something buzzed in her pocket and she remembered. Simon Klerk’s phone. It ought to have some charge now. Maybe it was on a different network. She took out the handset and sighed as
she looked at the screen. The Sony was out of coverage too. The buzz was simply a reminder. A dead man’s appointment with the dentist.

Bakker was always interested in the way people organized their phones. In particular what they put on their home screen. You could tell a lot about their personality from that. Men . . . often
it was news, sports sites, email, messages, social media and games.

Not with Simon Klerk. Alongside the stock icons was one for video. That struck her as odd.

She opened up the app and clicked on the first file. It was home-made, from the phone. Bakker stared at it in fascinated horror. This was the girl she’d talked to, Kaatje Lammers,
laughing, bent down beneath someone who had to be Klerk. Playing with him, all fingers, lips and saliva.

There was a noise from somewhere up the stairs.

Then a woman’s voice in the shadows said, ‘I thought you might come sniffing after that phone call. Having fun?’

When Laura Bakker looked up all she saw was the wooden stock of a shotgun coming straight at her in a fast and vicious swipe. The thing connected hard with the side of her head. In an instant
she was falling, getting pushed down, into the hull of the cruiser below.

There she fell, legs crumpling beneath her, light fading. Flies rose all around and she knew now what they were feeding on. Blood, recent and sticky in the well of the boat.

The gun stock flew again. She rolled, avoided some of the pain. But then it was back, impossible to evade. Face down, half-conscious, unable to see anything except the gory, sticky deck, she was
aware of hands on her, tying her wrists together, taking the issue handgun from her belt.

Light then, and not long after the low rumble of an engine.

Evinrude
, she thought.

Aisha Refai shuffled her papers nervously.

‘This is for certain.’ More pictures. Now of Stefan Timmers, a bloody heap in the farmhouse, and on the morgue table. ‘He left the place, presumably with Klerk’s body. He
went to Marken. We’ve found pebbles from the beach in the soles of his shoes. You have Stefan in the frame without a shadow of doubt. Though given he’s dead—’

‘Point taken,’ Vos cut in. He stabbed a finger at the flabby corpse on the table, turned face down. ‘He was shot in the back.’

‘In the back. From close range.’

‘And Simon Klerk . . .’

‘Close up again. Straight in the face.’ She thought about it and jerked up her arm, firing a pretend shotgun, her dark features briefly full of fury. ‘Something angry about
that. Almost personal. You look someone straight in the eye and take their life. The uncle though . . .’

‘That was cowardly,’ Vos suggested. ‘The way you’d kill someone if you were scared of them.’

Plenty to be scared about, Van der Berg said. The man was a thug with a long criminal record. Prone to violence. Perhaps more than the local police knew.

Something was missing, Vos thought. And then he remembered. Irene Visser’s phone. The sisters had stolen that and left it – or lost it – at the farmhouse.

He asked her if there was anything new on that. She sifted through her reports.

‘Not much. Sorry. Oh. I know I said there were no prints on it. I was wrong. There were.’

She showed them a photo on her tablet. A bloody fingerprint on the back of the handset.

‘One of the girls?’ Van der Berg suggested.

‘No. It’s Simon Klerk. Maybe . . .’ She was struggling. ‘Maybe he stole it from her.’

They went quiet. Too many possibilities to handle. Then Vos said, ‘How about this? The girls left Klerk tied up to teach him a lesson. He was there for an hour or two on his own,
struggling against the ropes. He got free. He didn’t have his phone with him. Laura found that in Marken. Maybe he forgot it.’

Van der Berg and Aisha nodded.

‘So he finds Visser’s phone one way or another. Where’s he going to call first? Home. Maybe—’

‘And before he gets through Uncle Stefan gets there,’ Van der Berg chipped in. ‘With the girls or not. He shoots Klerk. He takes the body over to Marken . . .’

‘Wish we could find that boat,’ Aisha grumbled.

‘Then they all come back and they shoot Stefan.’ Van der Berg didn’t look convinced himself. ‘But why?’ A brief grim laugh. ‘I mean . . . it’s like
leaving a sign up, isn’t it? Look what we did. Here’s our dead uncle to prove it.’

Vos stared at him and said, ‘A sign?’

‘Did I say something?’ the detective asked.

The halfway house was nothing like Marken. The staff wore ordinary clothes. There were no locks on the doors, no obvious security.

No need, the man who introduced her to the place said. Did she understand why?

Oh yes, Kaatje Lammers told him earnestly. Very much so. It was all a question of trust.

They gave her new clothes and she put on the ones she liked best: blue jeans, black boots, a red patterned cotton shirt. Then she looked at herself in the mirror. All in a room of her own giving
out onto the tree-lined street. A single bed, a tiny shower and toilet. The TV worked though the channels were limited. The Internet was downstairs, a single PC in a study with strict rules on
where to roam and how much time to spend there.

The residents were all temporary, the man said. If things went well she’d be here a few weeks, no more.

‘And after that?’ she asked.

‘After that you go back to your family,’ he said too quickly. Then he apologized. He hadn’t read the file. In the reception office he pulled up something on his laptop and went
through it, murmuring to himself.

‘My family?’ she asked.

‘Still reading,’ he said and waved at her to be quiet.

She knew that look. Puzzlement. Something was wrong. It always turned out that way.

‘Family,’ she repeated.

‘I need to look into this, Kaatje,’ he said. ‘Did Marken tell you why you were being released?’

‘Should they?’ she asked, trying to sound sweet.

He typed away on the laptop. Sending an email she guessed. Veerman was a stiff old bastard. Someone who always wanted to play by the rules. Perhaps just once he’d tried to bend them and
discovered he didn’t quite know how.

She waited. His face had turned grim.

‘I will behave,’ she promised. ‘I’ll do anything you ask. I’m . . .’ It was a struggle not to laugh. ‘I’m better. The doctors said so. All those
things in the past. I was a kid—’

‘We’ll look into it,’ the man cut in. ‘Everything will be fine. Make yourself at home. Use the facilities. This is a liberal facility. We trust you to be responsible,
Kaatje. Trust is important. Once broken . . .’

A wan smile then.

‘Once broken?’ she asked.

‘Then things change,’ he answered.

‘Just the once?’

‘Just the once. We’ll know. You understand that?’

She nodded.

‘I’ll be on my very best behaviour then.’

A single small act of rebellion could bring this to an end. They’d said things like that in Marken. Did you clean your teeth? Did you muck out your room? Do you understand what privileges
are? And how easy it is to lose them?

Most of all . . .did you go where the men told you and submit to what they wanted?

Sometimes. But not always. If you gave in completely you lost yourself in their wishes. What they stole from you wasn’t just any precious innocence you still possessed. It was your
identity. The thing that lived inside.

Kaatje went to the window and stared out across the tree-lined street. She was there in the shadows of the alley. Purple-red hair and a fake black leather jacket. They weren’t allowed to
look like that in Marken. Everything cool was banned.

Kim was looking up at her. Kaatje did her subtle finger wave.

No locks. No obvious boundaries. Didn’t need them, did they? And out there were the Timmers sisters free as birds. Life, as always, was innately unfair.

She went downstairs. The man was in his office typing away. Finding something wrong the way they always did. Not that it was needed. Somewhere, somehow Kaatje knew she’d fail the system,
and when that happened the inevitable followed: incarceration, cruelty, despair.

He was right about one thing. The door was unlocked. She walked out into the quiet street. The girl across the way came and stood beneath a lime tree opposite, leaning against the trunk.

Kaatje wandered over, looked at her and felt her purple-red hair.

‘You’re beautiful,’ she said and kissed her quickly on the cheek then, just for fun, nibbled at Kim’s earlobe.

‘Don’t do that!’ Kim giggled. ‘We’re not in Marken now.’

‘No.’ Kaatje looked back at the red-brick house. ‘But I’m still in jail. They make me stay there.’ She stared at Kim. ‘Won’t be long before it starts
all over again.’

Breathless, excited, perhaps frightened, Kim took hold of her and whispered, ‘We have a house. A place. You can come. You can stay.’

‘For how long?’

‘Who knows?’ Kim answered. ‘It’s there now. It won’t be forever. What is?’

‘Nothing.’

She kissed Kim again, more gently this time. A lover’s kiss. Soft and intimate.

‘Don’t do that,’ Kim said and meant it.

‘What’ll Mia say? She hates me.’

‘She doesn’t hate you. Besides . . . she does as she’s told.’

‘’Kay,’ Kaatje said and off they walked, hand in hand, down the narrow street, across the busy canalside road, over the bridge to Leidseplein.

‘What if it wasn’t anything to do with the girls?’ Vos asked. ‘If they just left him there? Trussed up, naked. A kind of lesson. Then they went into the
city and that was it.’

Van der Berg groaned and thumped his fist on the table.

‘Because that’s not possible. He was their uncle. He had the car. The knowledge. The gun. And also . . .’ The detective waved his finger in the air as if he’d won the
argument. ‘How would someone else know? A naked man stuck out in the middle of nowhere?’

‘Visser’s phone—’ Vos started.

‘Made just the one call,’ Van der Berg broke in. ‘To the wife and he didn’t get through. Strange number so she didn’t twig. I’m sticking to my theory. He was
doing that when the sisters and Stefan marched in. Then . . . bang.’

Vos was rifling anxiously through the documents.

‘If you told me what you’re looking for, Pieter,’ Aisha said.

‘The call log.’

It took a while but eventually she found it. He ran through the lines. No one had got round to looking at this closely. There didn’t seem any good reason and they simply didn’t have
the time.

He found the entry, placed the sheet on the table, stamped his finger on it.

‘That’s the call. Made from Waterland at twenty-one minutes past eight in the evening.’

‘And?’ Van der Berg demanded.

‘Bereaved wife. Upset. Angry. We just took her word. We never checked the duration.’

The call had connected for two minutes and thirteen seconds.

‘Could that be wrong?’ he asked Aisha. ‘Or does it mean what I think it means? He found Visser’s phone and called home. He got through. He talked to her.’

‘He talked to her,’ she agreed.

Van der Berg nodded, a big light coming on.

‘If you wanted to kill your philandering husband and blame it on the Timmers girls what better way to do it than hire their uncle for the job? Then shoot him too.’

Vos was on the phone already.

‘Laura’s out there,’ he said, listening to it ring. ‘She was going to try and talk to Sara Klerk. I want her pulled back.’

They waited a moment then Van der Berg went to the computer and called up the location system. Vos gave up. There was no answer.

‘Where is she?’ he asked.

Van der Berg finished typing in Bakker’s details, looked at the screen and mumbled, ‘That can’t be right.’

There was a map of Waterland, then the Gouwzee running out between Marken and Volendam. Laura Bakker’s position showed up as a green dot moving slowly across the water, further and further
from land.

Vos grabbed his jacket and told Aisha to order out a police boat from Volendam.

‘Get a helicopter in the air too.’

‘What are they looking for?’ she asked.

Van der Berg was checking his gun, grabbing the car keys.

‘A boat,’ Vos said then ran for the stairs.

They were somewhere out on the water in the cruiser from the hideout called the Flamingo Club. Face down on the composite deck, hands tethered with nautical rope, feet still
free, Laura Bakker tried to think.

No point in yelling. The lake would be empty on a weekday morning. All she could do was argue. When her head cleared enough she rolled over, looked up. Sara Klerk was at the wheel of the boat,
hand on the shiny silver throttle, shotgun set against the cabin window to her side. The green jut of land on which the boathouse sat was receding faster than seemed possible. Soon they’d
surely be beyond the Gouwzee in the vast and empty Markermeer.

Bakker shuffled upright against the wheelhouse and tried to make herself heard over the sound of the engine.

‘Sara!’

The woman turned for a moment and shook her head.

‘Sara!’

Think this through, she told herself. Most of all . . .stall.

‘You can’t do this,’ Bakker shouted. ‘Marnixstraat know where I went. A team was following me out there.’

The Klerk woman glared at her.

‘You’re lying. Sticks out a mile.’

‘They’ll find me.’

She laughed.

‘Don’t kid yourself. You know how big this lake is?’