The Wrong Girl (22 page)

He didn’t answer. Bakker looked at her boots.

‘I need to know . . .’

‘It means we carry on looking,’ he said. ‘And tomorrow they come back with a demand. More money I guess. A different. . . strategy.’

‘Alamy’s going to make a statement,’ Bakker added. ‘I’ve talked to some of the reporters. They’re going to push him about Natalya. See if he’ll say something useful. It’s better coming from them than the police. Really.’

‘Do you think it’ll work?’ Renata Kuyper asked.

Vos couldn’t understand why she was there. How these two had got together.

‘I think it’s worth a try. I think . . .’

His words were drowned by the noise of the media mob spotting their prey.

Across the grey courtyard the high security gates opened. Alamy’s followers cheered wildly. The protesters on the other side howled with fury. Camera flashes seared the black night like brief snatches of lightning.

Shouted questions.

Mirjam Fransen came over, grabbed Vos’s arm, tugged him away from the rest of them.

‘This is our last chance,’ she begged. ‘I’m out of options. If you can’t think of a way to stop him we could lose years of work. There’s got to be . . .’

He broke in with something feeble, about the law and due process. Then ran out of words.

The reporters surged forward with such force part of the fence broke. A couple came through. Uniform men and women struggled to keep them back.

Ismail Alamy strode forward, a victory smile on his face. Smart suit, more businessman than preacher, ready to depart the country and lose himself in a distant hotbed of jihad, probably in the Horn of Africa.

The lawyers assembled behind as he pulled a prepared statement out of his pocket and began to read.

Bakker grimaced. Hanna tried to push through the mob. Alamy’s voice rang out, accented English, loud and defiant.

‘What about the girl?’ interrupted a woman reporter at the front, thrusting a microphone at Alamy’s face. ‘Natalya? What about her, Alamy?’

The broadest of grins. He opened his arms wide. Thom Geerts shuffled behind him, scanning the crowd.

‘I know nothing of this child. I’m a man of peace and justice. That is why they seek to imprison me. To stop the truth being known. To prevent—’

‘She’s my daughter!’

Hanna’s voice rang out as she fought to claw through the crowd.

An odd silence then. Even the hacks looked lost for a moment.

‘My daughter,’ she repeated, almost at the fractured fence, hands out, clutching for him.

The microphones and cameras hovered between the two: a woman in a cheap black jacket; a man in a smart grey suit, almost amused by the spectacle.

Alamy smiled. Shrugged. Then said, ‘I must leave this damaged country to its own sad devices. Goodbye.’

Geerts came up by his side. Vos watched the big AIVD man. Tried to work out what was going through his mind. Mirjam Fransen had vanished again. It wasn’t beyond the intelligence service to pull some last-minute trick at this stage of the game.

The crowd of Alamy’s supporters rushed forward to embrace him.

Then came the first shot.

Vos heard it and found his right hand patting his jacket for the handgun. Just like it used to.

Thom Geerts staggered back from the tall man in the grey suit, blood on his neck, spurting like a fountain.

Second shot.

Alamy was down. A shambling shape came and stood over him, screaming obscenities, free of the crowd for a brief moment.

The media crews hovered, cameras running, flashes sparking, scared but unable to turn away.

Third shot.

The wounded preacher’s body shook with another impact.

Uniform got there. Weapons out. Semicircle round the figure with the gun, calling on him to get on the ground, hands out. All the usual.

In the Drie Vaten later, watching the short and bloody drama replay itself on the TV, Vos came to accept that none of this mattered. Events sometimes possessed a momentum all of their own. Nothing would stop them. However hard one tried.

Ferdi Pijpers never meant to drop the weapon. This was the end of a long journey, one that started on the far side of the world, across a bleak, dry landscape he’d come to hate.

One more shot into the preacher on the ground. Then the uniforms opened fire and Pijpers was down, twitching, dying too.

Three corpses. Ismail Alamy. Thom Geerts. A lost military intelligence officer, breathing his last on the Schiphol asphalt.

Mirjam Fransen coming out of nowhere, shrieking for help. And Laura Bakker looking at the slaughter. Perhaps seeing for the first time a horror that would come to haunt her.

Sirens started. The cameras, the floodlights, the reporters with their mikes and notebooks recorded every moment.

Vos watched and thought.

Never look back. Never think yourself so small or insignificant nothing matters. More than anything . . . never give up.

He didn’t bother with the dead. Instead he found Hanna and Renata Kuyper and led them away from the carnage. Took them to the edge of the nightmare and tried to think of something to say.

The words weren’t there. Instead it was Natalya’s mother who found them.

‘What will they do now?’ she asked, face pale, hands shaking.

For the life of him Pieter Vos couldn’t think of any good answer.

4

The next morning Vos was woken just before six thirty. A damp nose on his cheek. A busy tongue licking at his ear. He put his arm round Sam, sighed, stroked his fur and said something about not getting up on the bed. Again.

The dog had that wet fur smell about him. He must have been out on the deck in the rain.

Vos got up, dragged on fresh jeans, fresh grey shirt and black sweater. Looked much as he did the day before when he peered through the ragged curtains. A damp morning. Drizzle and a gloomy sky.

Sam followed him everywhere as he made coffee and toast, checked his messages, turned on the TV, watched the running newscast about the previous night.

‘What is it?’ Vos asked as the little terrier pestered him even more than usual.

A small saucer of milk lapped up noisily. One corner of toast eaten at Vos’s feet. A dog’s breakfast. And still the flustered terrier kept whimpering and running around Vos’s ankles as he got ready to go to work.

One hand went down to pat him from time to time. The other dodged between coffee cup, toast and his phone. Renata Kuyper’s handset sat attached to a charger by the porthole. Nothing on it overnight. His inbox was full of messages. From De Groot. And Rijnder working through the small hours.

Nothing from Hanna Bublik. She’d stayed around with Renata Kuyper until it became obvious the mess at Schiphol was going nowhere. AIVD were running things by then, closing down the area, marshalling the media, uniform, passing spectators out into the terminal. Their night teams came in and handled the dead.

Around nine she’d finally agreed to let Bakker drive her and Renata back into the city. Vos wondered what happened then. No family. No friends as far as he knew. She needed money. Something to fill the hours. She wasn’t going to hang around Marnixstraat like a distraught victim. That wasn’t in her nature.

He passed another piece of toast to Sam hoping it would shut him up then called Marnixstraat. AIVD had retreated into its own shell of secrecy. The police night team had done a good job of chasing down background on Ferdi Pijpers, the man who’d come out of the crowd and shot Alamy and Thom Geerts. Former military intelligence officer. Discharged with post-traumatic stress two years before. To Vos’s dismay he’d come into the station the previous day and spoken to Koeman, making vague accusations about Alamy. Koeman had dismissed him as a nutcase. Probably with good reason. That didn’t mean the detective wouldn’t feel guilty.

‘Have you got an address for Pijpers?’ Vos asked the duty officer.

A bedsit in the Oud-West. The man had an estranged wife who’d moved to Turkey. No other family they could trace.

He told them to keep him up to date. De Groot had just texted in. An eight o’clock meeting with AIVD in his office.

Not one of the messages spoke about Natalya Bublik. It wasn’t that they didn’t care. The case had simply spiralled beyond them.

By the time Vos went through all his mail and tidied away breakfast it was close to seven. Sofia Albers would be up and ready to take Sam in for the day. There might just be time to walk him along the canal before that happened.

Bakker was waiting for him in the Drie Vaten, picking at a croissant, an empty coffee cup in front of her. She’d turned up in her old clothes, the ones her aunt made back in Dokkum. A pale-green suit, ill-fitting and ugly. It was as if she’d wanted to wrap something familiar and comforting around herself.

‘How are you?’ he asked.

‘Pissed off.’ She hesitated. ‘Puzzled.’

‘About what?’

‘About why we didn’t stop that lunatic for starters.’

‘It’s hard enough to stop the things we can predict, Laura. Something out of the blue . . .’

Silence. This wasn’t it.

‘What’s really bothering you?’

‘I don’t get it. They’re terrorists. They thought they were kidnapping the daughter of a minor Amsterdam aristocrat. A military man. A kid they could hold to ransom.’

‘That’s the way it looks,’ Vos agreed.

‘But they screwed up. They got the wrong girl. And when they knew Alamy was coming out they didn’t let Natalya go. They asked for money.’

‘You have to try to think the way they do,’ he suggested.

‘I told Van der Berg that last night. He gave me a nasty look and said he’d rather not.’

‘That’s Dirk. You’re you. What would you do?’

‘I’d get some money quick.’ There was a low curse over the coffee. ‘The mother gets bought and sold, doesn’t she? Why not her daughter?’

Vos looked out of the window then got his donkey jacket, the dog lead and a plastic bag. There was time for a walk. He needed it and so did Sam still fussing around his feet. He thought he knew why the dog was being so frantically affectionate now. He’d sensed something in the atmosphere. The depression, almost despair, that was starting to hang around the dilapidated houseboat that was their home on the Prinsengracht.

Maybe he feared where that might lead. Vos did if he thought about it too much.

‘Am I getting close?’ Bakker asked.

‘Quite. If you were smart you’d pass her on to someone in the extortion business in return for a cut. Selling things involves negotiation and a different kind of risk. They don’t have time or the talent for that.’

‘That must mean they’ve moved her again.’

‘Probably,’ Vos thought.

‘Or killed her. They gave me some kidnapping cases to study at college. Sometimes they’re haggling for money when the people they’ve taken are dead.’

‘Sometimes,’ he agreed.

‘Can I hold Sam’s lead?’

Bakker was stretching out her hand. She looked like a teenager at that moment. A hurt one.

‘No time for that. I’ve a meeting in Marnixstraat. I want you to join up with Dirk round the soldier’s place. Ferdi Pijpers. Call when you find something.’

The long pause then, a silence he had come to recognize.

‘You don’t want me there?’

‘I want you in Oud-West. Like I said.’

‘You never talk to people, Vos! It’s like we’re all supposed to stay in the dark until you’re ready.’

He groaned, found the dog, put on his lead and walked outside. The day smelled of coming winter: cold, damp, unforgiving.

She followed, wouldn’t leave this.

‘You still make me feel I’m still an outsider.’

‘Sorry. I don’t mean to.’

She walked to her bike and pedalled off into the grey morning, stiff and upright on the sturdy Batavus.

‘I’m coming, I’m coming,’ he grumbled as the manic bundle of fur started to yap. Sofia Albers was returning from the bakers, her arms full of loaves for that day’s customers. She smiled, waved. This corner of the Jordaan always seemed so normal, so mundane, whatever else was going on in the city.

Sam tugged so much the lead fell from Vos’s fingers. The little terrier raced to the prow of the boat. To the silver statue he usually ignored.

‘What is it now?’ Vos sighed.

Then looked and knew.

They’d had a visitor some time that morning. A plain white plastic bag dangled from the mannequin’s arm.

Vos walked over, took out a pair of latex gloves, unhooked it then looked inside.

One sheet of paper. Letters cut from something like a colour magazine then stuck to the page to make a message. And an ancient Samsung handset, fully charged.

This was the old way of doing things. The method of someone who didn’t want the risk of traceable mobile phones.

The paper said, ‘Two hundred thousand euros. Don’t make us shoot her.’

Beneath the snipped letters was an inkjet printout of a poor quality photo: Natalya on a low bed in the pink pony jacket, about to tuck into some food.

The Samsung rang.

He jumped. Looked around. They knew who he was. They had to be watching.

‘How do I know she’s alive?’ he asked straight away.

Laughter. Deep and confident.

‘You find two hundred thousand euros. I hope you have an intelligent question for me too.’

The voice had a practised cruelty to it.

‘How long do I have?’

‘Four o’clock this afternoon I’ll call on this phone. Not one minute before. Not one minute after. You answer. Have the money ready then. We do this tonight.’

He sat down hard on the damp, broken wooden seat on the deck.

‘You’re giving me eight hours to put together a small fortune? The mother’s got nothing.’

‘Eight hours is all you have. Four o’clock precisely.’

‘For God’s sake give us a chance. You want your money. I want Natalya. Make it possible.’

A low, unfeeling sigh.

‘It’s possible if you want it to be.’

‘Listen—’

‘No. There’s nothing else to say. Except . . .’

A brief silence. Vos tried to imagine what he was thinking.

‘Except what?’

‘Trust is everything. If I feel you betray that at any point . . . that your intentions are anything less than serious then the deal’s off. You’ll hear from me no more. You understand what I’m saying?’