The House of Dolls (18 page)

‘What about this? How do you rate that one?’

He picked up the little black gadget, turned it round in his hands.

Alex Hendriks hesitated for a moment. Looked at her. Grinned.

‘Pretty good actually,’ he said. ‘What do you think?’

Outside the Poppenhuis in white forensic bunny suits. Eating frites and sauce out of paper cones.

Van der Berg kept eyeing the bar across the canal. He glanced at Vos who said, ‘Not a chance.’

So when they finished the detective took their cones and napkins, deposited them in a bin, then lit a cigarette. He didn’t take much notice of Bakker as she waved away the smoke.

‘Good frites, Vos,’ she said.

He shrugged.

‘There are better. Now Vleminckx Sausmeesters if you can be bothered to queue . . .’

‘I don’t really want to talk about chips. What are we waiting for?’

‘Waiting,’ Van der Berg said. ‘What would life be without it?’

‘More interesting?’ she asked.

He laughed.

‘Anticipation, kid. Learn to appreciate it.’

‘I’m waiting for the crack about cows,’ she added.

‘Cows?’ Van der Berg asked, puzzled.

‘Never mind . . .’

A forensic officer came outside and told them it was time.

‘Stay back,’ Vos ordered. ‘Watch. Do as they say.’

They returned to the first-floor room. A couple of officers held heavy plastic sheeting close to the curtain to keep out all the light. Three more held fluorescent tubes, turned off. The head man had a camera in each hand, one still, one video. He nodded. The sheeting went up. The tubes came on.

‘Thirty seconds,’ Van der Berg said. ‘A minute. That’s all if there’s something here.’

The tubes turned to the floorboards at the back. Nothing.

Then the centre. Nothing.

By the front, beneath the small window a small patch of blue became visible. The cameras pounced on it.

‘Boss,’ someone said.

‘Working,’ the camera man answered.

‘You need to see this.’

Vos walked towards them. On the wall was a bigger splash of blue.

‘Good,’ the one with the cameras said as he got there, firing with both lenses.

Bright blue. Livid blue. Almost alive underneath the fluorescent tubes.

Vos stood by them as they worked.

‘Not much,’ the head forensic officer said. ‘Could just be a fight. Someone getting beaten up. An accident even.’

Kept filming, snapping. The men with the fluorescents in their hands padded round it, held out the tubes like weapons.

No more blue stains and the ones they had were fading.

The head forensic man turned to Vos and said, ‘I told you we should have done this my way. It’s all out of order.’

He handed the cameras over to one of his minions then asked for the plastic sheeting to be taken down from the window.

A long silence. Then he added, ‘This is old. It can’t be the Prins girl. Can’t be anyone recent. I don’t think this room’s been used in a few years.’

‘A few months short of three,’ Vos said. ‘The Thai woman told us that. She was on holiday. When she came back the place was closed and she didn’t even think about reopening it.’ A pause. ‘That was August. When . . .’

He didn’t need to say it.

‘We can get DNA,’ the man insisted. ‘I’ll make it a priority. As soon as I can run it through the lab you’ll know.’

‘DNA,’ Vos murmured. ‘Fine.’

He went downstairs, walked outside, looked at his phone, checked for messages. Found none.

Van der Berg followed. A couple of pigeons eyed them from the pavement as Bakker turned up, scribbling in her notepad.

‘You should pull out of this, Pieter,’ Van der Berg said. ‘It’s getting too close. There. I said it.’

‘Katja Prins is missing.’

‘Is that all you’re looking for?’

Bakker watched him, waiting for an answer.

‘She’s out there somewhere,’ Vos said.

‘Can’t see anything that ties her to this place,’ Van der Berg pointed out. ‘Can you?’

‘No,’ Vos agreed. He looked at Bakker. ‘So what do we do?’

‘We go back to Warmoesstraat,’ she suggested. ‘That’s the last place anyone saw her. And that kid. Til Stamm.’

‘Why?’ Vos asked.

‘There was something wrong there,’ she said. ‘I told you. She was lying to us.’

Vos’s phone rang. They went quiet as he listened to De Groot’s voice booming out of the earpiece.

‘Warmoesstraat can wait,’ he said when he was finished.

Margriet Willemsen laughed and realized Hendriks was enjoying this. So maybe she should too.

‘I think you should put your toys away now, Alex. We’ve better things to do.’

Hendriks shrugged, scooped up his phones and tablet, put them in his case.

‘How long was it there?’

‘Does that matter?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Long enough. Look . . .’

He got up, went to the window. She came and joined him.

‘What Prins wanted was crazy,’ he said. ‘People were going to get hurt. For no good reason. You can’t wind back the clock. I just wanted some ammunition. I don’t intend to use it.’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘What matters is . . .’ He nodded at the grey city beyond the glass. ‘What’s out there. People. Our people. Clean up a little. I’ll help you. But we’re not the Taliban. Let’s not get too judgemental.’ A weak smile. ‘That wouldn’t fit either of us.’

She raised a finger to his calm, bloodless face.

‘There’s a video out there already,’ she said. ‘That reporter’s got a copy of him and me from yesterday.’

Hendriks screwed up his eyes and said, ‘That’s not possible.’

‘She’s got it. Wim saw it.’

He went white.

‘I never sent anything to anyone. If Wim kept on with this nonsense . . . if he tried to fire me . . . I was going to let him know then. I didn’t—’

‘No, no,’ she cut in. ‘Don’t screw around. I want the truth. The reporter . . .’

‘What reporter?’ he asked.

She was getting cross.

‘Anna de Vries. The woman was in here earlier. She had the video. Wim saw it on her iPad.’

Hendriks seemed astonished.

‘It didn’t come from me. I don’t want that out there.’

Willemsen went back to the big leather chair, sat down, told him to take the seat opposite. Picked up the little spy camera, threw it in his lap.

‘I want you to delete everything you’ve got.’

‘Sure, sure. But . . .’ Hendriks looked scared. ‘Truthfully, Margriet. I don’t understand this. How can it have got out? Are they going to run something?’

‘There’s a blackout, isn’t there? Because of the daughter. Once that’s over . . .’ She scribbled something on the notepad in front of her. ‘I’ll deal with it. Just do what I ask.’

Hendriks was getting nervy.

‘I can testify he came onto you if you like. Make you look a victim.’

Willemsen’s eyes narrowed.

‘Does a victim deserve to run this city?’

No answer.

‘I told you,’ she said. ‘I’ll deal with it. Just . . .’ Her hand cut the air. ‘. . . get rid of everything you have.’

Hendriks went down the hall to his office, checked with his PA, got the reporter’s name, returned to his desk, looked her up on the Web.

Anna de Vries. Twenty-eight. Crime hack with one of the Amsterdam dailies. No contacts with city hall that he could see. No interest in local politics at all.

He kept all his private material in a cloud account, accessible from anywhere. Music, documents, photos. There were just two worthwhile video files he’d got from Margriet Willemsen’s bedroom. One clearly Prins from the day before. The other, the previous week . . . he didn’t know. That time it was later and they came in with the lights off. No easy way to tell in the dark. It didn’t look like Prins but he wasn’t sure.

Hendriks could work computers. The cloud account kept an access log. A text file in the root folder. He looked round the office. Just the PA. There’d been a temp, a scruffy young girl sent along by the work placement people. But she wasn’t around.

He found the log, opened it.

There should have been just three IP addresses, his work PC, his home iMac and the mobile account used for his iPad and phone. Hendriks was looking at a fourth. He copied the number, pasted it into an IP look-up site. One of the big telecoms outfits. A company millions of households used for phone and Internet access.

But not him.

He’d been hacked.

With shaking fingers Hendriks deleted everything in the account then went into the trash and removed it all permanently.

Tried to get this straight in his head.

No one had been inside his apartment recently. He hadn’t lost a phone in years. Logic dictated that the only insecure place anyone could steal his password was here, in the office. From the desk of the head of the council’s general office, a place he regarded – perhaps stupidly – as secure, private, safe.

Sometimes he didn’t log off the city hall system at all. Even though it offered, for someone who knew it, a way into that private store of information.

The PA had been there for years. A dull, loyal, obedient servant of the council.

Then there was the scruffy temp. She’d come into the office two weeks before, sent by a charity looking to give her work experience. Turned up sporadically. He’d have sent her packing if it wouldn’t have looked bad.

Hendriks got up and walked over to the PA.

‘What happened to that girl we had in as a favour?’

She laughed.

‘Oh, you mean Til?’

‘That was her name?’

‘Til Stamm. She came from Limburg. Couldn’t you tell?’

Hendriks shook his head.

‘I didn’t talk to her much. Where is she?’

The woman smiled, shrugged.

‘Who knows? She never came back from lunch.’

‘Do we have an address for her?’

She tapped the keyboard, found something, printed it out.

‘I’m going out for a while,’ Hendriks told her. ‘Probably the rest of the day.’

‘The press office say they’re putting out that release about Prins,’ she said.

He got his coat and his case.

‘The statement’s all they get,’ he said. ‘No interviews. Not another word.’

The barber lived in a tiny ground-floor apartment behind his shop. There was a door out into the alley at the back. Jansen was able to leave Suzi’s tall timber house in the Begijnhof, walk out of one of the side gates and scuttle to Maarten’s mostly in shadow.

Not that he was worried too much about his appearance. Without the white beard and the long hair no one would recognize him easily. He’d gained weight in prison. A bigger paunch, the muscles softened because he didn’t feel confident enough to use the exercise facilities. Jail had been a solitary, deadening experience. He didn’t want to go back.

And anyway there was work to do. You’re not a new man. Suzi had said that, and as usual she was right.

It was closing on six when he knocked on the back door of Maarten’s block. The barber turned up smoking a cigarette. He’d put a notice on the front window:
Closed Due to Illness
. Had spent the rest of the afternoon making quiet calls, assembling the things Jansen had asked for: phones, money, a weapon. And a passport. Belgian with a blank space for the photograph.

The first thing he did when Jansen arrived was offer him a beer. The second was take his picture with a small digital camera.

‘I’ll get that back tonight,’ he said, taking out the memory card, putting it in an envelope with the passport. ‘You just have to say when you want to go.’

Jansen slapped him on the arm.

‘I’ll see you right on all this.’

The barber shook his head.

‘You don’t need to do a damned thing. What happened to Rosie . . . Jesus. I still can’t believe it. You’re sure it was Menzo?’

‘Who else? Who’d dare?’ He looked at the stubby handgun on the table, two boxes of shells next to it. ‘What’s this? A kid’s toy?’

Maarten chuckled.

‘Yeah. I wondered about that too. First thing that came to hand. Beretta nine thousand.’ He took out the magazine, loaded it with bullets. ‘Twelve shots.’ Retrieved two spare magazines from his pocket. ‘The guy said to watch for the sight catching on your pocket when you take it out. Apart from that it’s a good weapon.’

Jansen picked up the handgun, felt the weight.

‘It’s a really long time since you did street stuff, Theo. Why not leave it to someone else?’

‘Not for this,’ Jansen said. ‘What do we know?’

Maarten had been under strict instructions. Talk only to people he could trust. That applied to everyone. Especially those they paid within the police.

‘Menzo flew down to Ostend yesterday. Setting up an alibi.’

‘Who with?’

‘That black woman of his. The girlfriend. Miriam Smith. One among many. But he seems sweet on her. She runs things when he’s out of town.’

‘And?’

‘The cops are chasing Wim Prins’s kid. They’re not sure whether she’s jerking Prins around or not. Word is he’s got a ransom note. Half a million euros. Vos is handling it. Mulder’s still on Rosie’s case.’ A pause. ‘And yours now.’

‘Mulder,’ Jansen grunted. He could picture the tall cop, grinning slyly in court as all the lies he’d fed Jaap Zeeger got rolled out as truth.

‘They’re waiting on Menzo getting back. They don’t have enough to arrest him in Ostend.’

‘Lindeman . . .’

‘He says . . .’

The barber licked his lips. Nervous.

‘He says what?’ Jansen asked.

‘He says you screwed up. They were going to let you out anyway if you’d just waited a day or two. This De Nachtwacht crap Prins was trying to bring in won’t happen. It’s on the news. Prins has stood down from the council. Personal reasons. He thinks he’s coming back. He’s wrong. Lindeman seemed to know a lot about that. Not that he was going to tell me.’

The barber went to the fridge for more beer. Jansen shook his head and got up to make himself a coffee instead.

‘See if you can get me a number for Vos,’ Jansen said. ‘We may need to talk.’