The House of Dolls (27 page)

Just after eleven now. The police would be flooding Chinatown. He looked at his phone. Messages from Liesbeth. She’d gone to Marnixstraat but didn’t say any more than that.

Where are you? Why don’t you call?

He thought about this, tapped out a reply.

Everything’s fine. Be patient. We’ll get through this.

She came straight back.

I need to talk to you, Wim.

But you don’t, he thought. You haven’t. Not for a long time. Since the marriage. That changed everything. Before, when it was an affair, illicit, secret, stolen, they were joined by an unspoken, interior passion. A frantic heat that a wedding ring extinguished almost overnight, rendering the magical mundane.

I’ll call when I can.

From Venezuela. Isla Margarita maybe. He’d been there once with Bea. She spent most of the time coked out of her skull.

Liesbeth wasn’t like that. Not yet. And he would call her. Sometime. But not soon.

He looked at the phone. They could trace him through that if they wanted. So he turned it off. Took out the battery. Sat on his own, feeling like a criminal, praying for the moment he could step on board.

Vos and Bakker found an office with a PC hooked up to Mulder’s CCTV circuit. It was just after eleven. Nothing much happening from the six cameras on the street. That didn’t seem wrong. Then he asked her to fetch Liesbeth,a couple of coffees and leave them alone.

Two minutes later she was back with a miserable-looking Liesbeth Prins and two cups of coffee from the best machine, one forensic owned and rarely allowed anyone else to use. Laura Bakker could be persuasive when she felt like it.

She left to find a hot desk somewhere else. Vos turned off the PC screen. Liesbeth sat down by the window, didn’t look him in the eye. Didn’t answer when he asked if she knew where her husband had been the previous night. Where he was now.

After a series of questions she barely acknowledged she said, ‘He’s got the money. Or so he said. What else do you expect?’

Gently, he asked again about Anneliese and Katja. How they might have known each other. Whether there was any suggestion they’d gone to a house on the Prinsen in their free time. He was used to awkward questions. But none so close and painful as those he knew he had to broach now.

‘She was sixteen years old,’ Liesbeth said wearily. ‘You were never there. I had a life of my own too. Do you think I knew what she did every minute of the day?’

‘The place she went on the Prinsen was a brothel,’ Vos said, not taking his eyes off her.

‘What?’

‘A privehuis. A kind of club. Probably one where the girls were . . . pretty young. Getting groomed.’

Nothing.

‘We found her blood there. Her bus pass. She was in that place. Maybe with Katja. God knows who else . . .’

She shut her eyes tightly fora second, mouth a taut grimace of fury and pain.

‘Liesbeth,’ he repeated. ‘We found Anneliese’s blood—’

‘Are you happy?’ she shrieked. ‘Can you sign off the death certificate now? Mark the case closed?’

‘No. I can’t. I don’t know what happened. I’m trying to find out.’

‘Why are you pushing this shit at me? I did my best. I was there when you weren’t. Not every minute. Every fucking second. But I was . . .’

‘This isn’t about blame,’ he said. ‘I don’t feel that. I don’t think you do either.’

She wouldn’t look at him. Gulped at the coffee.

‘What’s it about then?’

‘The truth. Honesty,’ Vos said with a shrug. ‘What else have we got?’

‘You sound like Wim. Begging for votes. Talking in easy riddles that mean nothing—’

‘There’s a procedure,’ he broke in.

‘What procedure?’ she hissed.

He folded his arms, kept his eyes on her.

‘Something we go through in every case. DNA. We’ve got Anneliese’s obviously. Now we’ve got Katja’s.’

Alongside the tears welling in her eyes there was anger and fear.

‘It doesn’t matter what a drop of blood says,’ Vos added. ‘She’s my daughter.
Our
daughter. I guess . . . I was out working a lot. At night. Pretty boring when I was around too. And Wim . . . with all that money . . . a wife who didn’t love him . . .’

Half hunched, clutching at the coffee cup, she glared at him.

‘I stayed with you because I couldn’t marry him,’ she said. ‘Is that what you want to hear?’

‘Not really.’

‘And you never suspected, Pieter? Not once. If you’d asked me . . . if you’d just noticed I wasn’t around when I should have been . . .’

‘Then you’d have left me,’ Vos said and had to ask himself: had he realized this all along? Had a part of him silenced that troubled, suspicious voice for fear of the consequences if he listened to it?

‘I guess.’

‘Did they know they were half-sisters?’ he asked. ‘Did Anneliese have any idea Wim was her real father? This could be important. I’m trying to understand . . .’

‘No.’

He waited and when she said nothing asked, ‘Are you sure of that?’

‘Yes.’ A pause. ‘I mean . . . I didn’t tell her. You couldn’t. Wim . . .’

‘He knew?’

The coffee cup went flying. Not at him. Just at the wall, at the world.

‘For Christ’s sake! Do you think this is easy? I never knew. I didn’t want to. She could have been yours. I wish to God she had been. Maybe things would have turned out differently. Maybe . . .’

‘Is it possible Bea knew?’ he asked. ‘Could Anneliese have found out from her?’

She shrugged, looked at him.

‘You don’t even want to face it now, do you? I don’t know what Bea thought. I wondered sometimes if she suspected. She looked at me in the law office and—’

‘This is important. If Anneliese knew—’

‘Liese,’ she said sharply. ‘That’s what she was called. She wasn’t a child any more.
Liese.
A teenager. Getting inquisitive. Getting . . . devious too.’

‘Liese.’

He’d no idea why he never shortened her name. It hadn’t seemed necessary somehow. And now that simple, easy omission seemed to condemn him. He wasn’t a bad parent. Just a neglectful, distracted one.

‘I didn’t think . . .’

‘No,’ she said. ‘You were too busy saving other people. You’re so good at seeing into the lives of strangers, aren’t you? But you couldn’t see what was happening in front of your own nose. In your own home.’

He didn’t answer.

‘Or if you could,’ she added, ‘you didn’t have the courage to mention it.’

Her frail hands touched his chest.

‘If you’d said something. If I’d seen I’d hurt you . . .’

Silence between them for a long moment. Then she said, ‘I hated the way you worked and worked. It made me feel small and unimportant. When you did come home you only paid attention to her. Never me.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he whispered. ‘I guess I don’t show things . . .’

‘You didn’t notice, Pieter. Don’t make excuses.’

‘Perhaps not. If I can find Katja . . . If that takes us to what happened with Anne . . . with Liese . . .’

‘She’s dead,’ Liesbeth Prins said in a flat, defeated voice. ‘Don’t you know it? Can’t you feel it?’

‘No. I can’t.’

‘Not until you see her corpse? You never left this place, did you? Not in your head. I stopped wishing for that long ago. I didn’t want to go mad. Not like you. That was too easy.’

He nodded.

‘If there’s something else I should know . . .’ Vos said.

‘I couldn’t control her that summer. You were hardly there. She wasn’t at school. I was working part-time in forensic here. You got me that, remember? I wanted something to do. I said we needed the money.’ She laughed. ‘That was a lie. I was just bored. Sick of nannying an ungrateful teenager and watching you come home exhausted every night, too tired to talk.’

Vos remembered now. She was on the payroll in Marnixstraat for just a few months that summer, filing, doing clerical work on the top floor for a while.

‘You never saw it,’ she said. ‘But she was running wild. Getting back late. Wouldn’t say where she’d been. Who with.’

‘You could have told me.’

Liesbeth Prins laughed, and it was so sudden, so unexpected the sound chilled his blood.

‘Why? You’d have given her some money and told her to go and buy some new clothes. Please . . .’ She reached out for his fingers. ‘You were a soft touch. Always were. For her. For me when I bothered to ask.’

She must have seen something in his face.

‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘Here I am shattering all your illusions again. How many times do I have to say this before you get it? We weren’t the perfect family, Pieter. Wouldn’t have been even if I hadn’t been screwing around with Wim. Life’s not like that. All neat and tidy . . .’

‘No,’ he said and took away his hands.

She bit her lip, thought over what she wanted to say.

‘One day I saw her with this girl. They looked so alike. I kind of recognized her. I didn’t know where from. Wim and I . . . we were always discreet. It was never that house of his. Of . . . ours now.’ She shrugged at that. ‘So I followed them. All the way to Vondelpark. Watched them buy ice cream. Sit down. Look . . . beautiful and happy.’

A bitter, sour look.

‘Then along came Bea. And she sat there too. Not like me. An outsider. The enemy. It was as if she was one of them. Another kid. Part of the deal. Whatever it was. I never knew . . .’ Her finger traced a circle in the spilled coffee on the table. ‘I never dared ask. And then a few days later Liese was gone.’

‘You could have told me . . .’ he repeated.

‘Don’t be stupid. I didn’t want to open that can of worms. Besides . . . You all said it was those gangsters getting their own back. Or some madman. I’d nothing to tell. Still don’t.’

‘Did Bea see you?’

A quick, grim laugh.

‘Oh yes. I went over there and introduced myself. Liese wouldn’t even look me in the eye. Bea did though. Crazy bitch.’

‘You could have told me.’

She stared at him, puzzled.

‘How? Why?’

Almost two decades together. And still a gulf between them. Invisible walls, dark secrets beneath.

‘The place we found her blood . . . the privehuis . . . was on the Prinsen. Opposite Amstelveld. You know it?’

She shook her head.

‘Her blood?’

‘Not much,’ he said. ‘I don’t think she was killed there. But this place . . .’

‘I didn’t follow her. I didn’t spy on her. She was a teenager. What good would that have done? I’m not like you. Always looking for something to put right. The world’s broken. You can’t put it back together. No one can.’

Vos didn’t know what to say. Then Laura Bakker saved him.

Walked in, didn’t knock, came straight to the computer, turned on the screen, started fiddling with the keyboard, said, ‘You’ve got to see this. Something’s happening. I don’t . . .’

‘Don’t what?’ he asked when she didn’t go on.

‘I don’t get it.’

She looked at Liesbeth Prins.

‘I think you should leave,’ Bakker said.

But by then the feed from the CCTV camera was up. Figures milling round the crossroads between Zeedijk and Stormsteeg. The occasional crackle of a police transmission over the radio channel.

‘Where’s Wim?’ Liesbeth Prins asked. ‘I can’t see him.’

Vos glanced at his watch. Twenty past eleven.

‘Ten minutes to go,’ he said.

‘He’s always early, never late,’ she whispered. Looked at him and said, ‘I’m sorry. All the things I did . . . just happened. I never asked for them. Never wanted them really.’

‘You should leave!’ Bakker said more loudly.

But Liesbeth Prins’s eyes were locked on the screen.

‘There’s that little man from the council,’ she said, placing a finger on a figure moving slowly across the cobblestones. ‘The one who works for Wim.’

Vos wasn’t watching. He scribbled a note, passed it to Bakker, told her to check it out with intelligence.

‘What the hell’s he doing here?’ Theo Jansen grumbled as he sat down in the back room of Maarten’s shop.

The place was still closed. The barber looked harried and tired. Nervous at the two men who’d joined him in the apartment, sipping at instant coffee, eyeing each other warily.

Michiel Lindeman had come willingly when Maarten went back to him. The reluctance of the previous day was gone. There were reasons. Jimmy Menzo was dead. Control of the entire city was in the balance.

‘He’s here because I invited him,’ Lindeman said without a blink. ‘Because he’s needed.’

Short, muscular, thirty-five or so, dark-skinned, shifty eyes, Max Robles smiled too much, laughed too much. Had been a go-between when Jansen was dealing with Menzo before. As trustworthy as any Surinamese hood could be.

‘I’m not sure I need you,’ Jansen told Lindeman. ‘The likes of him . . .’

‘Jesus, Theo. A touch of gratitude wouldn’t go amiss,’ the lawyer replied. ‘You’re a criminal on the run. A murderer. Any of us could go down just for being in this room with you.’ Jansen sniffed, didn’t have anything to say. ‘Do you think you can get choosy now?’

‘Gentlemen,’ Maarten intervened. ‘Let’s deal with this calmly. There’s business on the table. Some practical problems to solve. We need calm heads.’ He glanced at Jansen in a way he would never have done before. ‘From everyone. OK?’

‘Theo.’ Robles was beaming as usual. Big white teeth. Vast hand extended across the table. ‘Last night you popped my boss. I’m here like Mr Lindeman asked. Don’t that show goodwill?’

‘You tell me,’ Jansen answered. Then nodded at Maarten. ‘Did you shake him down for a gun when he turned up?’

Robles laughed. So did Maarten. Then the barber pulled a small pistol out of his trousers, showed it round the table.

‘Why am I here?’ Jansen wanted to know. Then listened.

It was Lindeman talking mainly. Of the need for a peace. Of pressing business decisions to do with money and supply lines. And how Theo Jansen could stay the titular king of Amsterdam from afar. In a day or two when the heat died down they could put him in a car south, down to Belgium. Fix a private plane from Ostend. The same place Jimmy Menzo had flown to the previous Monday.