The House of Dolls (20 page)

‘You never told me!’

A white Ford van had appeared behind, came so close to his back bumper he couldn’t even see who was behind the wheel.

‘Who the fuck are you, Miriam? A jumped-up hooker who does what she’s told. Cut the mouth or I’ll stick you back running a privehuis in Utrecht. If you’re lucky.’

She stretched out in the seat, shook her head.

He didn’t find it easy driving and thinking at the same time.

‘You mean you didn’t fix Rosie?’ Menzo asked. ‘A little present on the side or something?’

‘I don’t go around killing women. Not without a reason.’

Menzo wound down the window, threw the cigarette out into the busy street. Popped open the glove compartment on his side. Walther PPS in there, brand new, plenty of shells.

‘Then who the hell did?’ he wondered.

And another thought.

‘And why are they trying to bring Vos back into this shit? I don’t want him around. Not again.’

Miriam Smith didn’t answer. She looked scared and it had been a long time since he’d seen that.

Menzo thought for a moment. Hit the right indicator.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

‘Back to Lelystad,’ he said. ‘Time for a holiday. Croatia maybe. Cyprus.’

The road had opened up. Four lanes, two in each direction. They weren’t supposed to turn. But there were no traffic cops nearby.

Menzo edged the Mercedes out ready to swing round.

That was when the white van hit, hard and loud, sending them bouncing out of their seats, the safety belts seizing with the impact.

Another sound. One he knew too well. The glass shattered around them. Something hurtled past his ear.

Jimmy Menzo punched through the broken windscreen until he could see clearly, floored the pedal, brought the Mercedes screaming round a hundred and eighty degrees, fighting to get clear of the van behind.

Far enough away he could see the front. Two men there, one driving, one, bald, with a ruddy face, angry and determined, hanging out of the window, gun in hand.

The saloon spun on the greasy road, back end wheeling round, smashing hard into a motorbike coming the other way. Menzo dampened the sideways roll, got back some control. Saw the road back out to Lelystad, middling night traffic, few gaps.

The white van was making a U-turn too, trying to follow them.

It was Theo Jansen in the passenger seat. Different looking. Madder than he’d ever seen.

Menzo pulled into the outside lane and floored the pedal again.

Six streets from the office to her little apartment near Spui square. Anna de Vries walked through the busy city, distracted. The meeting with Prins hadn’t gone well. Now he was standing down from office. That was a political tale. She didn’t stand a chance of getting near it.

Waiting wasn’t supposed to be part of the job. A story landed. A story got written. Then you moved on to the next. But what she’d told Prins that afternoon was true: her options were limited. Every newspaper, radio and TV station, every news website in Holland had been contacted by Marnixstraat and offered a simple choice: agree to a news blackout on the Prins girl’s kidnapping or face the consequences. With a gang war breaking out in the city no one wanted to catch the blame for an innocent death. Not that Katja Prins wore the label ‘innocent’ easily. De Vries had gone through enough of the cuttings in the digital library to understand she’d had plenty of contact with the police over the last two years, and never wound up in court.

Influence. Wim Prins possessed it when he was a leading criminal lawyer. As vice-mayor of the council . . .

The time would come. It was a question of being patient. However she worked the Prins story when it broke – whether Katja was found alive or not – Wim Prins was going to be destroyed. He could play the repentant father and husband as much as he liked. The video of him in bed with Margriet Willemsen told its own story, one that needed no script.

De Vries stopped in a quiet bar, ordered a sandwich. She lived alone. There was no food in the place. No time to shop. It didn’t matter, not with the story she had on her hands, the biggest in years.

As for Margriet Willemsen . . .

The ice queen of the right-wing EU-haters. Aloof, unsmiling, judgemental. Taking her down would be a pleasure. De Vries could hear the applause ringing in her ears already. Maybe there’d be a prize. Even without it . . .

She ordered a small beer and laughed to herself. The man next to her, tall, middle-aged, serious-looking, smiled and offered to buy it.

‘I can pay for my own drinks,’ she said and looked at him so hard he shrugged and wandered off.

No time for distractions. She’d fought hard to get a job on the paper. Fought even harder to work the crime beat. And the battles were only just beginning.

Halfway through the beer the phone rattled in the pocket of her coat.

De Vries took it out and looked at the screen. One message. Name:
Wim Prins
. It said,
We need to meet. Cafe Singel. 30 minutes
.

A tiny brown bar, just a couple of minutes away, not far from her studio apartment.

It seemed odd that Prins wanted to see her there. Somewhere so public.

This had better be worth it
, she texted back.

No answer. Anna de Vries checked in her bag. The iPad was there. She patted it, smiled then set off into the night.

The Mercedes was careering down the main road out to Lelystad, dodging between traffic. Jimmy Menzo kept glancing in the mirror. He’d punched through most of the windscreen in front of him. Cold April air surged through the vehicle, icy rain stabbing at their eyes.

Miriam Smith looked back. The white van was dogging them, swerving through the cars behind, mimicking their movements two, three, four seconds later.

It didn’t look as if it was going to give up.

‘Gimme the gun,’ she said.

Menzo threw the wheel round, slid past a single-decker bus.

On the left a field came up splashed with colour as if a gigantic painter had swept at it from the sky.

Tulips. Red, yellow and purple, growing in bands a quarter of a kilometre wide. They were out of the city, on the way to the airfield. She tried to picture what might happen at Lelystad. There’d be security again. A flight plan for any international journey.

This couldn’t go on.

‘Gimme the damned gun, Jimmy!’ she screamed again.

He scrabbled down, reached into the glove compartment, found the weapon, threw it over, then a box of shells.

She checked the magazine: full. Unhooked her seatbelt. The warning beep went off. She swore, released the catch on her seat, rolled it as near horizontal as she could manage, scrambled towards the back, heels catching on the leather and the belt, legs flying. After a few seconds her knees found purchase, she got into a crouch behind the rear window, looked up.

Found herself clutching for the door handles to stay upright. The gun fell. Shells scattered everywhere, across the leather, into the footwell. The Mercedes was slewing sideways again. Tyres shrieking. Jimmy Menzo swearing and shouting at the wheel.

Her head slammed against the left door. Then Menzo flung the car from side to side again and she banged up against the right.

A brief moment of dizziness. The feeling that none of this could be real. Her skirt had hitched up around her thighs. Her mouth was sore, salt taste of blood leaking behind her lips.

Head down, hands flailing furiously on the floor. Finally her fingers gripped the gun.

She worked her way up, looked through the back window.

The white van seemed stuck to them, the length of two cars behind. A couple of men behind the windscreen. The one with the gun was Theo Jansen transformed, without the beard and the long white hair. Santa Claus look gone for good. And he wouldn’t take his eyes off her.

‘Fuck it,’ Miriam Smith said then shot straight through the back window.

Shook off her jacket, wrapped her fist in the fabric, tried to punch a gap in the crazed glass.

After a couple of seconds of hard, screaming motion she could just see through.

The white van was still there. Unmarked. Relentless. Charging down at them, past the fields of red and yellow and purple.

‘We didn’t do it!’ she shrieked and knew they couldn’t hear.

Another wild shot through the fractured glass. Still they came on.

‘We didn’t do it,’ she whispered and tried to calm herself. Leaned onto the leather of the bench seat very carefully. Took aim. Not Jansen. That wasn’t enough.

The driver, she thought, then slowly started to squeeze the trigger, aware from the motion beneath her feet that something was starting to change.

There was no one in the house off Warmoesstraat except the dull and drowsy dope-heads crowded round the bubble pipe in the front room.

Laura Bakker glowered at them and said, ‘They call that high?’

Til Stamm was out, Jaap Zeeger still missing.

They poked around anyway, went upstairs, took a closer look at the rooms. De Groot called from Marnixstraat. Every avenue they’d tried with Theo Jansen had failed. Not one of their current informants had a clue where he might be.

‘Maybe he’s left the city,’ the commissaris suggested.

‘Do you believe that?’ Vos asked, looking round a grimy bathroom, checking the products on the shelves. What looked like enough for one woman only. This was a place run and occupied by men.

‘I can hope,’ De Groot answered. ‘Are you going to see our friend from Surinamese?’

For what it’s worth, Vos agreed. They’d got nothing concrete to connect Menzo to Rosie Jansen’s death. Nothing to link him to the attempt on her father’s life. Or Katja Prins.

‘So why do you want to talk to him?’ De Groot asked.

‘I want to see his face,’ Vos answered and that was the end of the conversation.

They were on the first floor when they heard a voice at the door. A man. Asking for Til Stamm.

Bakker was there first, grabbed hold of him as he turned to leave. Stood in front to block any hope of escape.

Vos came out into the weak sunlight. These April evenings seemed to fade slowly, as if the city didn’t want to give up on the day.

‘I know you,’ he said.

Middle-aged, slight, smart, intellectual. The last person to be sniffing round a drug house in De Wallen.

‘Do you?’ the man said.

Bakker showed him some ID then asked for his. The card came out slowly.

Alex Hendriks.

‘You work for Wim Prins,’ Vos said. ‘You run the council.’

‘I’m an employee. That’s all. Prins runs it. Or he did. And will, when he comes back.’ Hendriks didn’t look in the least worried by their presence. ‘What’s this about?’

‘We’re looking for some people. Til Stamm for one. Like you,’ Bakker said.

Hendriks came out with the story. The Stamm girl was a temp in city hall, working for his office as part of a rehab scheme. She hadn’t come back from lunch that day.

They waited. That was it.

‘Does a big wheel from the city council usually chase people who take a day off ?’ Bakker asked.

He shook his head at the question.

‘This is part of a social programme. We care about these kids. We want them off drugs and into work.’ He looked at her, then Vos. ‘Don’t you?’

Alex Hendriks waited for an answer. Vos’s phone rang.

It was De Groot again. Something was happening east of the city. Jimmy Menzo’s Mercedes had been reported driving erratically along with a stolen white van. The two vehicles were headed back towards Lelystad.

‘Send me a car,’ Vos said.

The city hall man was still waiting when he came off the phone.

‘If you hear from Til Stamm,’ Vos said, ‘you’ll tell us, won’t you?’

‘Why do you want to know?’ he asked.

Vos thought for a moment then nodded back at the grimy tenement.

‘This is the last place anybody saw Katja Prins. Til Stamm knew her.’

It wasn’t easy to read the expression on Alex Hendriks’s face.

‘But you knew that, didn’t you?’ Vos asked.

‘Of course I didn’t,’ Hendriks said. ‘Is that all?’

Two minutes later a white BMW, orange and blue stripes and
Politie
on the side, turned up lights flashing around the corner. Vos and Bakker climbed in the back.

Jimmy Menzo didn’t know why he picked this one narrow lane off the highway. Had no idea where it went. It was a farmers’ track he realized once he’d careered half a kilometre down and could see the way the tarmac gave way to gravel and then to slippery mud. Nothing more than a passage into the fields and fields of tulips all around them, blooms for the flower market and export, colours that, this close, were just visible in the slow-fading evening light.

It was an idiotic idea. Like going to Ostend when he should have been home taking care of the fallout from what was supposed to be the killer blow, the last death that gave him an iron grip on the criminal heart of Amsterdam.

Everything came to a close. Careers and kingdoms. Lives and little country lanes.

Looming up was a gate that marked the end of the track. A lone tractor in front of it. Too narrow to turn easily, even if there was time. They were heading down a narrow, remote cul-de-sac with no way back.

‘Shoot him,’ he ordered and didn’t look behind.

‘Shoot him!’ Menzo screamed.

‘I’m trying . . .’

Miriam Smith loosed a round through the broken rear window. Metal buckled on the grille of the white van. Steam emerged from somewhere. And still it came on.

‘Just . . .’ Menzo said to nothing but the remains of the windscreen.

Just what?

Take me out of here, he thought.

Another shot from behind. Another curse. He didn’t even remember her using a gun much. Taking aim through a fast-moving window, trying to target the bouncing cab of a van, however close . . .

Not going to happen, Menzo thought, and slung the wheel round hard, slammed his foot on the brake, felt the ABS pump back in protest.