Little Sister (8 page)

‘So you knew?’

‘Course we knew,’ Tonny said. ‘We saw Mr Mallard swim in through that broken back window and come out with a pair of underpants. Got to take a look after that, haven’t
you?’

‘And you didn’t say?’ Vos asked.

‘You didn’t ask,’ Willy told him. ‘Not you.’ A nod at the uniform. ‘Specially not him. He just came along here and started yelling at us. Couldn’t get a
word in edgeways.’

He went to the back of the tractor and came back with a pair of yellow underpants, wet and stained with weed, then threw them on the pile of clothes on the grass.

‘There you are. Full set.’

The uniform climbed out of the ruined bunny suit. Tonny looked in a box on the back of the tractor and found a towel.

‘The airbag didn’t blow,’ the officer said. ‘The doors were closed. No sign someone was inside when it went in. I’d guess they got out and pushed the car into the
ditch. Empty.’

‘So where on earth is Simon Klerk?’ Vos asked.

‘Simon Klerk?’ Willy asked. ‘Who’s he?’

‘The man who owns the car,’ Bakker replied.

The Kok brothers shrugged.

‘Running stark naked across Waterland?’ Tonny flicked a thumb at the young officer in uniform. ‘Though if that were the case I suspect Boy Genius here might have spotted the
chap. Him and his sort are dead good at picking up a spot of immorality here and there. A man with a bit of beer in him can’t even take a leak down an alley late one night . . .’

Vos called Marnixstraat. No one had seen the Timmers sisters. CCTV had lost them after they left the station. There’d been no word of Simon Klerk but his wife had been screaming at
headquarters demanding action.

‘We can take the car out if you like,’ Willy said when he came off the call. ‘By rights we ought to. It’s blocking the channel. That’s our job. Clearing up crap
after people.’

‘Leave it there for the moment,’ Vos ordered, scanning the low horizon. Blue sky, green fields. Nothing much else. ‘We may need a forensic team out here. Laura?’

She was picking through the clothes with a pen.

‘Yes?’

‘Where do we start?’ Vos wondered.

For once she looked lost too.

‘Not here, I’d venture,’ Willy Kok said. ‘I don’t understand a thing about policing and don’t want to. But us two know these fields. These dykes. We grew up
with them. Fished every last one of them.’

‘Illegally,’ the uniform moaned.

‘Who owns the water?’ Tonny asked. ‘Who gave you the rights over what creatures live there?’

‘Enough—’ Vos began.

‘We’re telling you, mister,’ Willy continued. ‘There’s nobody here. Not in that car. Not anywhere we’ve passed along the road. You’re looking in the
wrong place.’

‘Wrong place,’ his brother repeated.

Vos called Van der Berg.

‘Dirk,’ he said. ‘You can tell Mrs Klerk we’re still looking for her husband. We’ve got his car. He’s not here.’

Van der Berg’s breathing wasn’t so great. Cigarettes. Beer. Lack of exercise. He sounded rougher than usual.

‘OK,’ the detective replied. ‘She won’t like it.’

Vos shut his eyes, recalling the desperate, angry shrieks of Sara Klerk as she followed them down the corridor in Marken.

‘Be gentle with her.’

‘I always am. Thing is, Pieter . . .’

‘What?’

‘There’s something very odd about this place. I can’t quite put my finger on it.’

‘You will,’ Vos told him and wondered where they might look next.

Three.

That was the number, the holy number. The only one that mattered.

Three little girls on the waterfront in Volendam.

Three, the magic symbol of family: mummy, daddy, children.

Three for The Cupids too. A drummer, a bass player who sang more than the others, a guitarist who wrote their tunes.

Listening to them now in the narrow house in Amsterdam the sisters agreed this was a cheat. There were only three of them but they played tricks when it came to music. They had their own studio
not far from the museum by the lake. It was upstairs, above a cafe owned by their manager, the big man who smiled a lot and never really looked as if he meant it. Jaap. Jaap Blom.

He didn’t push himself but The Cupids did. Their fame was on the wane nationally but in Volendam a touch of tacky stardust remained. For some reason they had still had glitzy friends too,
celebrities who visited, foreign musicians looking for somewhere interesting to record. Show business people and other rich strangers, from the city and beyond. In the small, insular lakeside town
that upstairs studio was a special place. When their mother finally took them there – she’d been hired to sing backing vocals for a demo – she’d dressed the three of them
carefully in their school uniforms. It was important to make an impression.

Did they? This was a lifetime ago, part of a childhood they remembered only dimly and with difficulty. It was hard to divorce what was real from the dream. They were eleven when the bloody
evening fell upon them. Its details remained elusive, as much the fiction of others as themselves.

Some things seemed certain. The Cupids were big men, forceful and full of themselves. They laughed too loudly. They sang off-key. And somehow, in the studio above the cafe that other, quiet,
unsmiling man Jaap fixed all their errors with a subtle brand of magic. A wrong note was corrected. A thin vocal got duplicated until it sounded fuller than the three of them could ever achieve in
real life. When the girls listened to the tune that came out of the session – technically perfect but lacking in emotion and spirit – it was hard to associate it with the shambling,
middle-aged men who sat around the studio drinking beer and smoking dope.

Freya Timmers and her daughters could sing. Loud and clear and true. The men in The Cupids were charlatans. Not that it stopped them getting rich and famous for a while.

After a few minutes Kim announced she was bored with the music and made coffee. They didn’t talk much. Since the phones were lost there was no way anyone could get a message to them.

Especially Jo.

Cute Jo.

Clever Jo.

Lost Jo.

Kim closed her eyes and sang the first line of an old hymn.

I will bless the Lord.

Mia waited for her moment and sang the middle harmony.

They waited.

Jo was the soprano.

Jo completed their harmony. Without her nothing worked.

Back in Marken they heard her. But that place was familiar. It was
theirs.

Here in the strange cold city she was missing from their lives.

Kim sang the lower line again. Mia came in on cue.

Outside pigeons cooed as if they wanted to join in. Someone walked past laughing. A car horn tapped out an angry shriek. A dog barked. Then another.

They waited for the third voice, so reliable in Marken, but it never came. Instead there was the sound of a key in the front door. The Englishwoman bustled in carrying two blue-and-white Albert
Heijn carrier bags, full to the brim judging by the way she struggled with them.

‘All set up for the duration now,’ she announced. Then she put them on the table and added, ‘I’ll let you two unpack. You want to earn your keep here, don’t
you?’

Cheese and eggs, bread and milk, ham and packs of ready-to-eat fruit. She watched them carry everything into the kitchen and put the food in the fridge, telling them what went where.
They’d never done this in years, not since their mother asked for it.

When the shopping was put away she asked them what they wanted. Then she told the sisters to take the food out again, cook it and serve it out on plates.

An hour they spent preparing the meal, eating it, washing the dishes afterwards and cleaning up the kitchen.

‘Your Auntie Vera wants to help you back into the world,’ the Englishwoman said when they were done.

‘You’re not our auntie,’ Kim pointed out. ‘We don’t have an auntie. Only an uncle.’

‘Just a way of speaking. You remember your uncle’s name?’

‘Stefan,’ Mia told her.

‘Never came to see you in that place, did he?’

‘No,’ she agreed.

Lots of other people did though.

‘Do you know why that was?’

Kim raised her hands, waved her fingers like claws, pulled a wicked face and hissed, ‘Because we’re
monsters
.’

Vera laughed.

‘That’s right, girls. Monsters.’ She got up and patted them on the shoulder, one after the other, not noticing they didn’t like this. ‘My monsters now.’

‘What do we do next?’ Mia asked.

‘You do as you’re told. What your Auntie Vera asks.’

‘We want to see things. On our own.’

The woman reached into the pocket of her denim jacket and pulled out two plastic cards then threw them on the table.

‘Know what they are?’

The sisters didn’t speak.

‘They’re your passports to freedom. Anonymous chip cards. Weren’t even around when they locked you two up. I’ve put a bit of money on them. You can use them on buses. On
trams. On trains if you know how.’ The smile grew more cold. ‘But you don’t, do you? Two little songbirds stuck in a cage. Haven’t got a clue what it’s like . .
.’ She nodded at the front door. ‘Out there.’

‘We can’t stay here all the time,’ Mia complained, shocked when she heard the whining tone in her own voice. ‘We’ll go mad.’

Vera laughed and when she did her shoulders shook up and down.

‘Go mad? Well we can’t allow that to happen. All hell breaks loose, don’t it? Go mad again and they’ll only lock you up somewhere worse than Marken. For good.
Forever.’ She leaned down and looked into their faces, serious now. ‘Apart probably.’

‘Apart?’ Kim whispered.

‘You heard me. They’ve spent ten years trying to fix the two of you. If they think it didn’t work . . . you reckon they’ll bother a second time?’

Mia’s fingers clutched her sister’s underneath the kitchen table.

‘Don’t need to happen,’ the woman insisted. ‘Won’t either. Not so long as you do as your Auntie Vera says. Everything. Every last thing.’

She lit a cigarette, had the briefest of coughing fits, then blew the smoke out of her mouth in a curious way, turning her lips into an awkward O, closing her eyes as fumes rose to the
ceiling.

‘You will do that now, won’t you?’

‘Yes,’ Mia replied.

Vera stared at Kim.

‘Yes. We will.’

‘Good. I’m having a lie-down. All this walking tires me out. After that I’ll show you how to use them cards. I’ll tell you where to go. What to do. We’ll have a
nice time. I’ve got a treat in store.’

Another drag on the cigarette.

‘Don’t ever think your Auntie Vera’s not watching, will you? ’Cos I am.’

Dirk Van der Berg soon got bored with taking statements and listening to Simon Klerk’s wife moaning about nothing getting done. He’d made notes, nodded, tried to
seem sympathetic and interested. But largely failed. She wanted her husband back and he couldn’t deliver that.

The Marken institution puzzled him too. The place had the antiseptic, dead feel of a half-deserted hospital. A few patients wandered around the garden close to the trees near the shoreline. They
looked like ordinary kids. Cheap clothes. Glum faces. All female. When he returned to Veerman’s office he asked if he could talk to them. The director asked why.

‘No particular reason,’ he answered.

‘I don’t think that would be appropriate.’

Van der Berg didn’t push it. He just wanted to know what the answer would be.

He wandered back into the corridor overlooking the rear of the building. The administrative wing was attached to a two-storey residential annexe by the wood. Through the branches he could just
make out the shoreline of the lake. There were a few boats on the water. A few faces at the window of the adjoining block. As he watched the male nurse out in the garden with four or five patients
got called on his phone. The man looked up at Veerman’s office and nodded. Then he walked the girls with him over the neatly tended lawns back into the building.

Van der Berg returned to Veerman’s office. The director was bent over papers on his desk, the psychiatrist Visser by his side.

‘How many inmates do you have here?’ he asked.

‘Patients,’ Visser corrected him. ‘They’re not convicts. Not prisoners. They’re patients. This isn’t a jail. We’re here to help people.’

‘How many patients?’ he asked.

‘Twelve now the Timmers girls have gone.’

‘Knock before you come in again,’ Veerman added.

He got the impression Visser wanted to say something, but not while Veerman was around.

‘How many do you cure?’ he asked.

She winced and said, ‘Not as many as I’d like. It’s hard. Some of these kids have been screwed up almost since birth. Putting them in a place like this isn’t
always—’

‘It’s what the law demands,’ Veerman broke in.

‘I know that! All I’m saying is it doesn’t make the task any easier, locking them up somewhere that cuts them off from the outside world.’

‘Your job makes mine look easy,’ Van der Berg told her.

‘Very funny.’

‘No. I mean it. Can we . . . can we talk in your office?’

Veerman was onto that straight away.

‘There’s nothing you can ask Irene that I can’t deal with. Ask it here. We’ve got work to do.’

‘True,’ Van der Berg agreed.

Big place to keep a handful of young girls out of sight from the public, he thought. Remote too. He wondered who from outside kept an eye on the institution. Whether Veerman and the Visser woman
answered much to anyone at all.

‘I need to take a break,’ he said and walked down the stairs, out into the car park then round the back of the residential block. There were cooking smells from what must have been a
canteen. A dog was barking somewhere. Big dog from the sound of it.

A light breeze was blowing in from the lake, rustling the leaves of the trees in the spinney. The sound mingled with the squawks of gulls in the blue sky. He wandered towards the pebbly
shoreline and lit a cigarette. If this were a hotel it would be a fine place, he thought. They could clear up the area around the wood and have weddings and parties there. The wild scrubland that
ran from the car park all the way to the trees then onto the shoreline could easily be removed. The location was peaceful, a good half a kilometre from the pretty wooden houses of the island
village. Someone could make a go of it. Instead it was a kind of jail. Quite unlike any he’d ever seen.