Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned…

Someone is killing and mutilating young men in Amsterdam – the murders are brutal, sexual, and ritualized. For detective Joyce Pino, after a succession of failures, this is the perfect case to get her back on track.

But as it becomes clear the murderer is a middle-aged woman, the case shifts uncomfortably close to home. Some of the victims are associates, and a criminal profiler and external agencies are beginning to point the finger at Joyce herself. Added to this, she has a new rookie partner who’s far too handsome and clever for his own good.

Detective Pino needs to keep a grip on the investigation long enough to find the killer.

Black Widow

Isadora Bryan

Copyright

HQ

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2015

Copyright © Isadora Bryan 2015

Isadora Bryan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

E-book Edition © April 2015 ISBN: 9781474032810

Version date: 2018-07-02

ISADORA BRYAN

worked as a teacher in several European countries before settling in Spain with her partner.

Contents

Cover

Blurb

Title Page

Copyright

Author Bio

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Epilogue

Excerpt

Endpages

About the Publisher

Prologue

Wednesday Evening

She’d been watching him since he entered five minutes before. He was a youngish man, maybe late twenties. Perfect.

At the bar, he put a cigarette to his mouth, then made a show of looking for his lighter. She missed nothing; she’d already seen him put a Zippo in his top pocket, but didn’t pass comment as he strode over to her table.

She offered him her lighter. He lit his cigarette without a word of thanks, then sat down beside her. His cheekbones were sharp beneath a layer of stubble. She wondered if this was a stylistic affectation, or just a consequence of laziness. She didn’t pay it much heed; she was more taken with his eyes, which were unequivocally blue.

‘My name is Mikael,’ he said.

‘Hester.’

‘You have been watching me.’

‘Have I?’

‘You know it.’

‘Maybe it was more that I was staring into space,’ she suggested languidly, ‘and you just happened to be occupying the space I was staring into.’

Mikael took a deeper drag on his cigarette. He made as if to stand. ‘Hey, you know what? I don’t much like playing games.’

The woman placed a gentle hand on his shoulder. She felt the strength in him, that uniquely masculine hardness. He was no different to his hunter-gatherer forefathers, genetically speaking: built to kill, and impregnate, and not much else. It made her feel sick.

She refocused. ‘I love playing games.’

Her fingers traced the line of his arm, to his belt, then his thigh. ‘How old are you, Mikael?’

‘Twenty-seven.’

The woman who called herself Hester was twenty years older, roughly. But that was all right; that was what they came here for, the young ones.

She could feel the thump of blood in her temple, which desperately needed letting. ‘So where’s your girlfriend this evening?’

He shrugged and, to his credit, made no attempt to deny that such a person existed. ‘On stage, would you believe. A Doll’s House, I think it’s called. You heard of it?’

‘Yes,’ the woman answered. ‘The first feminist play, as it is sometimes known. Of course, Ibsen always denied it.’

‘Well, aren’t you the clever one!’

The woman looked at him for a long moment, and in that moment, they both understood there was no need for further manoeuvring. She swept a strand of blonde hair from her brow and leant closer. Her heart was racing, but she was in control.

‘Then perhaps we should find a room,’ she said. ‘And I will show you just how clever I am.’

He thought this was an excellent idea, particularly when she revealed that she already had a place in mind. And so it was they climbed the wrought iron stairs to a semi-secret door, which in turn opened onto the smoky prospect of a gedoogbeleid coffee shop. The woman saw the usual mix of tourists, the drop-outs and the off-duty whores, looking for something to take the edge off their self-loathing.

She held her breath until they were safely outside on the Enge Lombardsteeg, hoping that her companion would do likewise. Pot, even the second-hand variety, robbed a man of his vitality, his virility. That wouldn’t do at all.

It was dark, but the September night was unseasonably warm, and the narrow street was a mass of shirt-sleeves and summer dresses. It hadn’t rained in a fortnight, and everywhere in the city that wasn’t a canal was coated in a fine layer of dust, as if Amsterdam were slowly being scoured of life.

The Enge Lombardsteeg soon gave way to the grand thoroughfare of Rokin, which they followed, in silence, to its terminus at Dam Square. Mikael, impatient, suggested that they might take one of the white and blue trams to wherever it was they were going, but the woman said no. Drawing the moment out, torturing herself a little, was part of the process. A necessary part.

Dam could be pretty, but seldom at night, when the uglier mutants came out of their sewers. She saw a kid busking a Beatles medley on a sitar. Another offering the hand of friendship, or maybe it was drugs, to a black kid with gold teeth and big feet. And a girl of indeterminate age, her face a mass of splotches and scars, staring vacantly into the afterglow of light pollution that gently cooked the sky. She saw all this and more, and each encounter left her feeling a little sicker, a little more in need of Mikael’s attention.

She turned on her heel, her face pinched. Someone was watching –

No, she was being silly. There was no one there. At least, no one who mattered. She saw a tramp pissing himself in a gutter. That was all.

‘All right?’ Mikael enquired. ‘Not having second thoughts?’

‘I never do,’ the woman answered.

From the square it was no more than a five minute walk to Sint Luciensteeg, named for an eponymous sixteenth-century convent-turned-orphanage, now home to the Amsterdams Historisch Museum.

There were hotels, too, if a person knew where to look.

‘We could have got here a lot quicker, you know,’ Mikael said. ‘We could have taken the Duifjessteeg from Rokin. We’d have been here in half the time!’

‘Oh, I have a terrible sense of direction,’ she answered. ‘You know what women are like.’

‘Maybe I do!’

They signed it at the desk, brightly lit in relation to the dark atrium, so that the attendant had to squint in order to pick out their faces from the gloom. A flickering uplighter illuminated nothing more decorative than an assemblage of spiders’ webs, thickened with dust. Rubber plants perished in undersized pots, and earthy stains streaked the carpet. There was a photograph of Queen Beatrix, looking serene and regal yet somehow exactly like the sort of woman who worked in a laundrette.

It was, she considered, absolutely perfect.

Mikael insisted on paying. The woman didn’t object. Men should pay for the gifts they were about to receive. And if that was a contradiction in terms, then so be it.

There was a lift, an old-fashioned caged job, all gears and cables, dried oil and rust. Where metal met metal, there was a screech of bitter protest. As the door shut behind them, Mikael shook his head and looked at the woman bemusedly. His hand reached out, as if to touch her hair, but at the last moment she grabbed it, to reposition it against her breast.

‘I don’t want tenderness,’ she said. She squeezed her fingers over his until the sickness rose in her throat.

He led the way along the corridor to the room, the key fob swinging confidently in his hand.

And then they were in a despondent space of brown and beige, all hangdog drapes of curtain and cigarette burns on the carpet.

Again, it was perfect.

Because Mikael shone against this backdrop. Mikael, glistening, already naked. Mikael, cock-hard and blue-eyed and everything else she needed him to be.

She drew closer, circling him all the while with her arm outstretched, her palm pressed to his heart. She felt a pulse.

Still alive.

She pushed him backwards onto the bed. He didn’t resist. She placed her bag carefully on the bedside table. The room was hot, but she didn’t want to take off her clothes. Not for him. Instead, she hoisted her dress to her waist, climbed over his thighs, and lowered herself onto him.

He grinned, chuckling to himself all the while. Perhaps he hadn’t expected it to be this easy. She echoed the sound, but it was mimicry.

At least her fingers still had sense. She reached down, taking a set of handcuffs from her bag. She had them around his wrists, and the bedpost, before he could object. But there was no fear in him; and when she trailed her stocking across his chest (barbed wire would have been better), she only felt him grow harder.

She wrapped the stocking around the back of his neck, then crossed the two ends in front, beneath his chin. She tightened the knot a little. Still his lips, his eyes, were moist with excitement.

His ignorance was starting to grate.

She pulled the ends tighter. She saw the pulses of blood gather in his jugular, growing plump and sluggish as they drew closer to the silken barrier.

Tighter. She felt him start to struggle. At last! He tried to speak, perhaps to call out, but the words were throttled in his throat before they’d even been given a chance at life.

‘Shush,’ she murmured. ‘I will make it better. I promise. I have a gift for you.’

From that moment on there was nothing but pleasure. The world stopped spinning, and the only orbit was the movement of her hips about his thrashing. And then there were stars, actually stars.

Minutes passed. When her vision cleared, she saw that Mikael’s tongue was fat through his lips and there was blood around his eyes. The semen that leaked out from their junction had already gone cold.

She climbed off him. She took a shower. Then, pausing only to disentangle and tear a suitable keepsake from the body – a last second impulse – she headed out into the night.

Chapter 1

Thursday

The Jordaan district of Amsterdam was first developed in the seventeenth century, to house a growing population of artisans and labourers. The name was said to derive from the French word, jardin, in reference to the numerous gardens that were to be found between the canals and tight-packed rows of colourful buildings. The working classes had long since departed, but the gardens remained, layered in a late summer scent of rose, clematis and honeysuckle.

But the area wasn’t uniformly pretty. Detective Inspector Tanja Pino exited her car, eyes shaded against the sun, frowning up at her place of work as if seeing its ugliness for the first time. The modernist police headquarters on Elandsgracht was built in a stubborn, functional style, each of its five storeys defined by the absolute absence of whatever it was that made the wider Jordaan such a joy to behold.

Tanja smoothed her skirt, and strode over to the Politie building.

She showed her badge at the front desk, as if it were needed.

Inside, she could feel her colleagues watching her: the uniformed officers and the sharp-suited detectives. The pale-faced IT bods. Each was aware of what had happened, how the great – their word, not hers – Tanja Pino had finally, catastrophically and publicly, failed; how, at the last, she’d allowed the distractions of her private life to get in the way.

She climbed the stairs to the fourth floor, where the various serious crimes departments were to be found. More faces, disparate expressions united in degrees of speculation. Tanja nodded a collective greeting. She lowered herself into her chair, her eyes hooded as she reached out to switch on the desk fan. It didn’t do any good. Hot sticky air slurped at her face.

Bloody heat. Amsterdam was supposed to have a cool, maritime climate. Yet here they were, in the middle of September, and summer had yet to realise that the game was up. Tanja looked at her desk calendar and realised it was Ophelie’s birthday. Her daughter would have been twenty-three years old today.

A phone rang, and Tanja felt a tingle of electricity on her skin. But as one of her colleagues began talking with her friend about plans for an upcoming visit, it dissipated. Three months had passed since the last body was discovered, and while the sick, selfish part of her almost wished that the phone would ring for her, with a fresh lead, she knew it would not.

She rubbed her temples.

Wine. There was the problem. She couldn’t quite remember what had provoked the binge. She seldom needed a reason nowadays. Save for the obvious, of course.

‘Detective Inspector?’

Tanja looked up, to see that she was being watched by a young man, who was standing beside her old partner’s desk. Alex’s desk. She still thought of it as Alex’s, even though he’d long since moved to the Diemen station.

The intruder was quite tall, maybe six-one, broad in the shoulder, and slim in the hip, so that every part of him seemed to fall in a straight line. His sandy hair was close-cropped, whilst his eyes were very dark against his pale Dutch skin. His smile was broad, and easy, which immediately set Tanja’s teeth on edge. Nothing in life was that easy.

‘Who the fuck are you?’ she demanded.

The smile slipped, and he offered his hand. ‘Detective Pieter Kissin.’

She ignored the hand.

There followed an awkward moment. Kissin attempted to fill it by peering up at the ceiling. Christ he looked young!

‘Ah, I see you’ve met your new partner!’

Tanja turned to see Chief Inspector Anders Wever. He was smiling.

Tanja closed her eyes. When she opened them again, the kid was still there, and Anders was still smiling, and she was still in danger of losing her temper.

Her voice remained steady. ‘Can I have a word with you, sir? In private.’

‘Of course, Tanja.’

‘I don’t need a new partner,’ she said when they were alone in Wever’s office. ‘Certainly not a teenager.’

‘He’s twenty-four,’ Wever advised as he set about pouring coffee from a thermos. His wife packed him a lunch every day.

‘Even so.’

Wever looked at her over the plastic rim of his thermos mug. His eyes betrayed a familiar mischief. She knew what he was thinking and what he was about to say. She lowered her gaze, hoping that would be enough for him, but no, it seemed he would have his fun.

‘But look,’ he said, ‘I thought you liked them young. How old’s Alex? Twenty-five?’

Tanja’s head snapped up. ‘With respect, sir, piss off.’

He considered this response for a moment, then shrugged. ‘Fair enough.’

She bit her lip. ‘And he’s twenty-seven. As you well know. You must have seen his personnel file, when you arranged his transfer.’

Wever sighed. ‘Don’t start that again, Tanja. You know I had no choice.’

‘As you say.’

‘And haven’t things been, you know, better, since he moved to Diemen?’

Tanja had to concede this was true. She and Alex had even come to a tentative agreement, that they would give their relationship a second chance. They were due to meet up on Saturday.

But Wever was doubtless referring to Tanja’s professional situation, too. And in that regard she was less convinced. Wever had gone out of his way to feed her a succession of easy cases, in recent months, the investigative equivalent of low-fat meals-for-one. All part of the rehabilitation program, as he put it – which only served to remind Tanja of the extent to which she’d been crippled.

Everything was linked; she wondered what Alex was doing.

‘Tanja?’

‘Hmm?’

‘Don’t get sidetracked, eh?’

Wever set about arranging his features into a more conciliatory expression. He had a solid face, undermined a little by the subsidence of fifty-odd years. His beard was dark, tinged with ginger; his hair was veined with silver. There was something of autumn in the way he looked, a sense that every colour was on the turn. It was a fairly melancholy state of affairs, to Tanja’s way of thinking, but Wever seemed happy enough. He had his wife, and he had his kids. He had an Ajax season ticket. He had a dog named Denise, and a classic VW. If he were to die tomorrow, those who knew him would doubtless claim that he’d lived a rich life.

Wever took a slurp of coffee. ‘Kissin graduated top of his class at the Academy, you know. Sailed through level five; waltzed through level six.’

‘He’s got his Masters, then?’

‘Yep,’ Wever confirmed.

‘Has he done any actual police work yet?’

‘He worked the beat for a while. In the Vechtstreek.’

Tanja massaged her throbbing forehead with a weary hand. ‘The Vechtstreek? I bet there hasn’t been a murder in the Vecht since the Germans last invaded. There’s nothing there but theehuisjes and cows. And I hear the cows lead fairly exemplary lives.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with a nice tea house, though,’ Wever argued. ‘There’s a place I know near the river, on the outskirts of Loenen. The tea’s fine, but you really go for the spiced cheese. The secret’s in the proportion of cumin to cloves, you see – —’

‘Now who’s getting sidetracked?’ Tanja interrupted.

‘What? Oh, of course. Well, I’m afraid the decision has been taken.’ He pointed a finger skywards. ‘They have spoken. It’s not up for discussion.’

‘Great.’

‘Now, you will be nice to him, eh?’

‘Oh, sure.’

‘I mean it, Tanja.’ Wever’s expression was a little pained. ‘And try and play it by the book, will you? At least for the first few weeks. If he picks up any of your more questionable habits now, he’ll be stuck with them for life. He’s at an impressionable age.’

‘Aren’t we all,’ Tanja muttered.

The conversation went nowhere after this. Tanja headed back towards her desk, just about resisting the temptation to slam the door. As she pulled out her chair, she felt a tap on the shoulder. Harald Janssen, a fellow detective in Homicide and Violent Crime. To everyone else he went by the name ‘Lucky’, owing to the remarkable frequency of kindergarten cases that fell onto his desk. If there was a stabbed corpse floating in the canal, with no discernible forensics and no leads, it would be just Lucky Janssen’s good fortune that the perpetrator walked into the Elandsgracht front office and gave himself up along with the murder weapon.

Harald’s grey eyes were alive with a rare mirth, which sat incongruously with the crusty residue of his usual grouchiness. A few strands of white hair were standing on end, as if party to secret currents; others were lank and greasy against his scalp, beyond the reach of all but the most overt breeze. At forty-six, he was a couple of years younger than Tanja, but seemed a good deal older. Breath rattled noisily in his chest, and there was only so much that could be explained away by childhood asthma.

‘See they’ve finally found you a fresh canvas on which to work your dark art, Tanja.’

‘What?’ she said irritably.

‘The new lad. Christ, you’d think they’d have learned by now. You’re going to mould him in your own tortured image?’

‘Shut up, Harald.’

Janssen coughed into the back of his hand. There was an unpleasant sense of things being dislodged. Yet still the grin. ‘Did the old man tell you all of it? Did he tell you who Kissin’s dad is?’

‘No.’

‘He only heads the Vecht police department. Which means our Pieter is practically royalty!’

‘Jesus,’ Tanja muttered, as Harald wheezed away, perhaps to take a nap.

She returned to her seat, glaring at Pieter all the while. Three years on patrol, four on volume crime, five more in Vice, and God knows how many in Homicide – everything she had, she’d earned. And now here she was, saddled with a daddy’s-boy partner, who was doubtless already being groomed for an unmerited promotion.

There were surely better, less frustrating jobs. Not for the first time in recent weeks, Tanja wondered how her life might have turned out, if she’d followed a different path. She had a degree, in history. And a good one at that, from the University of Amsterdam. If she’d listened to her mother, she might have become a teacher. And the sum total of her troubles would have been bound up in the misdemeanours of a few disruptive kids.

Pieter reached out across Alex’s desk and plucked a sheet of paper from the back board. His lips pursed as he took in the image on the front, then he turned to Tanja. ‘Is this – ?’ he began.

But Tanja was out of her chair in a second, to snatch the paper from his hand. She didn’t even look at the photofit; she didn’t need to. The face – middle-aged, lean, calculating – was always with her: from the first shudder of morning, to the final drink of night.

One less familiar with the face might have guessed him a schoolteacher too, or some respectable civil servant. Perhaps he was. But this face without a name also liked to kidnap little girls, rape them repeatedly, then strangle them.

And, because of her, he was still out there.

Tanja stuffed the paper in a drawer of her own desk.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s him.

‘The Butcher of the Bos’, as he’d come to be known, after the area of woodland where the first body was found. A lovely spot. Families used to go there for picnics.

Pieter returned her gaze with a level look of his own. His eyes expressed sympathy, but what could he know? He hadn’t found the bodies of Lisa Fröm, of Hilaire Klimst, of Greta Paulsen. He hadn’t seen the look of betrayal frozen into their eyes; the sense of bewilderment. He hadn’t seen the twisted set of their limbs, the blood on their thighs. Ophelie had been roughly the same age when she’d died, but at least that was quick. And she’d had her daddy with her.

Tanja stared at Pieter until he had to look away. It was important to make this stand now, if they were really going to work together. The fact that her colleagues often seemed scared of her brought no satisfaction, but at the same time she’d come to depend upon it.

She looked through the window, towards Jordaan. The air was shimmering in the heat, the pastel colours blurred into one, so that it looked more like some Middle Eastern enclave than the most fashionable district in Amsterdam. Closer in, more clearly defined in a black leather coat, a man was carrying a placard which proclaimed the imminent end of the world. Not through global warming, or anything so mundane; it was the coming of the devil he feared.

The old Tanja would probably have rolled her eyes at this. But maybe it was true that the devil took many forms.

Her phone rang. She jumped, causing everyone else to look up and stare at her.

‘Want me to get it?’ Pieter offered.

Tanja ignored him, snatching the phone from the receiver. She listened intently, every part of her tensed, until the pertinent details seeped through.

Male, approx. thirty years old…

She put the phone down, relieved, disappointed. All the usual contradictions. ‘You ever seen a dead body before, Kissin?’

He shook his head. His eyes were wide, and his expression faintly idiotic. ‘No, not really. Well, not unless you count my grandfather, of course. I was there when…’

But Tanja was already on her way out the door.

*

Gus de Groot’s editor was shouting at him again. She did this a lot. Sometimes he deserved it, but mostly he was sure that he did not. He had an idea, in fact, that he’d become the focus of some deeper frustration on Miriam’s part. He considered a number of explanations as to why she might be picking on him, before settling on the sexual angle. Her marriage had gone sour (if his sources in HR were to be believed), and she clearly wasn’t getting any. And it was a fact that middle-aged women with personality issues tended to get cranky if not regularly attended to.

Gus nodded, satisfied that he’d gotten to the heart of the matter. Or the vagina, or whichever organ made for the most appropriate metaphor when dealing with menopausal bitches. Was the vagina an organ, technically speaking? He was unsure. What he did know was that he was thirty years old, good looking in a lopsided kind of way, and somewhat dangerous to be around. No wonder Miriam should vent her frustrations on him. He was all the desirable men she couldn’t have, in one intriguing package.

‘Gus?’

‘Hmm?’

‘Are you even listening?’

‘Of course, Miriam. We were discussing the fact that the Mayor has been illicitly diverting civil engineering funds into a housing development, which just happens to be run by his cousin. Quite a story.’

She banged her fist on the desk. ‘It would be, if it were true!’

Gus leaned away. ‘My source is very reliable.’

‘Your source has just been fired – by the Mayor himself – for making a series of improper remarks to a colleague.’

‘Ah. He never mentioned that.’

‘And maybe – just maybe – he’s holding a grudge?

‘It’s a possibility,’ Gus conceded.

‘Which hardly makes him a credible informant!’

‘No,’ said Gus.

Miriam tossed a folder at him. ‘It’s all in the open. As you would surely have discovered for yourself if you’d adopted a more diligent approach. There’s nothing illicit about it. The funds were reallocated on the authority of a sub-committee.’

‘But the Mayor has influence, surely?’

‘Look, the housing development is canal-side. The canal was found to have sprung a leak. They do that, from time to time. It’s the Authority’s responsibility to make repairs. There’s no mystery to it.’

‘The Mayor must be up to something, though,’ Gus countered, seizing what he considered to be the nub of moral high ground. ‘Isn’t it in the nature of politicians to abuse their power?’

‘Maybe so,’ Miriam said coolly. ‘But then again, he might just be the most honest man in Amsterdam.’

‘Hah!’

Miriam made a visible effort to rein in her temper. ‘This time you’ve gone too far, Gus. What would have happened, do you think, if we had run this story?’

‘We’d have found a few more readers?’

Miriam was clearly between hot flushes, and was as cold as yesterday’s obituaries. ‘You’re off Crime,’ she said. ‘You’re on Tourism. And try not to screw up this time. The subs are already demanding danger money.’

‘But –’

‘Get out, Gus.’

Gus didn’t protest further. He had his dignity to consider. Besides, he was positive this would only be a temporary setback. Miriam needed reporters like him. Truth was one thing, and of course it was easier when a story was supported with hard evidence, rather than the sort which gave a little under close scrutiny. But the fact of it was that journalists were increasingly a part of the entertainment industry. And Gus understood what his readers wanted to hear.

Shit, though. Tourism? He hated tourists.

There was a buzzing in his pocket. A text message. Elizabeth. One of his informants at the station. Left tit substantially bigger than the right, which offered a useful reference point in the dark, should he lose track of which way was up. She thought she had a chance of marrying him. Charming, really.

Gus was a firm believer in Providence. And a kind of inverse journalistic karma, which no one else seemed to understand. Whatever the truth of it, it seemed there had been a murder out on the Sint Luciensteeg. In a hotel. Well, well.

Hotels, Gus reasoned, were often frequented by tourists.

Chapter 2

‘We could cycle,’ Pieter Kissin suggested as he followed his new partner down to the station car park.

‘Exercise is bad for you,’ Tanja countered. ‘Look at joggers – always dropping dead of heart attacks. Or footballers, always rupturing their cruciates or whatever.’

Pieter smiled his easy smile. ‘So why do you spend every other night in the station gym?’

‘Who told you that?’

‘Harald Janssen.’

Jesus, Lucky loved to gossip.

‘And what else did he tell you?’

Pieter shrugged, but didn’t see fit to answer the question. ‘Do you want me to drive, then?’

Tanja fixed him with a dangerous look. ‘What, because I am a woman, and you think women can’t drive? Let’s get one thing straight –’

Pieter offered an apologetic shrug. ‘Actually, Detective Inspector, it’s more that I think you might still be a little intoxicated.’

Tanja stopped and tightened her grip on the car keys. ‘What?’

‘I am sorry. I don’t know how else to say it. But alcohol leaves a certain residue on the breath.’ He sniffed delicately. ‘Wine, I should say. Probably white. I’d hesitate to specify the grape, though.’

There was no dignified response to this allegation. And, now that she’d been caught out, Tanja saw no alternative but to capitulate. She threw him the keys to her battered old Opel, and, dammit, there she was, blushing.

‘Did you perfect your nose at the Academy?’ she enquired, if only to hide her embarrassment.

‘No. We used to holiday in France when I was a child. The Médoc. We always seemed to end up at a vineyard.’

‘Oh.’

He started the car. It fired first time, which to Tanja’s way of thinking was a little disloyal, when in her case it was never better than fifty-fifty if it would start at all.

‘So where to?’ he asked.

‘Sint Luciensteeg.’

‘And which way is that?’ he queried.

‘Turn right out the gates. Oh, and be careful. This isn’t a tractor, or whatever counts as a runabout in the country. You can’t simply drive over things. You have to go around them.’

‘I’ve driven a few tractors in my time,’ Pieter noted mildly as he steered the car onto Elandsgracht. ‘My parents own a farm, near Vreeland. It borders the river. Very pretty. You’d like it.’

‘I doubt that. But I thought your father was Chief of Police?’

Pieter’s tongue played thoughtfully inside his cheek. ‘I asked the boss to keep that a secret.’

‘It wasn’t him. But you’ll learn as you go on that police stations are riddled with snitches. Most of whom are on the payroll.’

‘Ah.’ He flashed her an anxious look. ‘I hope it won’t put a strain on our relationship?’

‘Why would it?’ Tanja answered blandly. ‘You could be our dear Prince of Orange himself, and you’d still have to fetch your own coffee.’

‘I get it.’

‘Anything else I should be aware of? Any other secrets?’

‘Secrets?’ Pieter mused. ‘Oh, I’m allergic to penicillin. Does that count?’

‘Not really.’ The Opel forged a spluttering and environmentally suspect path through a swarm of cyclists, simply belching out those hydrocarbons it lacked the stomach to digest. ‘So how did your dad come by the farm?’ she asked.

‘He inherited it. It’s been in the family three hundred years. He employs a manager to run it, of course.’

‘Oh, of course. And it will be yours, one day?’

‘I’ve never really thought about it. But I suppose it will, yes. I have a sister – an elder sister, actually – but you know how these things work.’

Tanja knew.

‘You married, Kissin?’ she asked.

‘No ma’am,’ he said with a sideways glance. ‘You?’

She looked out of the window to hide her face. Lucky hadn’t told him everything, then. ‘Not any more.’

They soon pulled up outside the hotel, the Royal William, a typically narrow, four-storey building of pale red brick and white window frames, strangled in a creep of wilting ivy. A uniformed officer, an agent, was standing outside, his arms folded, his eyes fixed on a chattering crowd of onlookers. A Walther P5 pistol was holstered at his waist. The pistol had been in service since the late seventies, and there was talk of replacing it, but for now its compact dimensions and reliability made it a favourite. He had a baton, too, and a can of pepper spray, all standard equipment. He offered careful greeting to Tanja as she approached the cordon, and a look of what might almost have been commiseration to Pieter. Tanja pretended that she hadn’t noticed.

Inside, she was immediately struck by a sense of decay, evidenced by a greasy bloom of nicotine on the walls, and streaks of fossilised sweat on the wooden reception desk. The air smelt variously stale, or oily, depending on which way the hotel’s internal currents were shifting. A draft crept in beneath a door, marked salle à manger, as if in homage to the old French domination of the city; or else blew more brazenly through the margins of a revolving door, which offered a distorted view out onto the street beyond. A newspaper sat on a table, dated to three days before.

‘Been here before?’ Pieter asked.

‘No,’ Tanja answered. ‘But I recognise the type. Not every man wants to take his kicks in a privehuis.’

Another officer was in conversation with two women, one of oriental extraction, the other dressed in the uniform of a desk clerk. Witnesses, hopefully.

The uniformed hoofdagent briefly detached himself from the women. ‘Ma’am.’

‘What can you tell me?’ Tanja asked, as, despite everything, she felt her heart start to beat that little bit faster.

‘Only a little,’ the sergeant replied. ‘We’ve sent a car to pick up the night clerk for questioning. But I can tell you that the murdered man and his, ah, lady friend, signed in under the names Mikael Ruben and Hester Goldberg.’

Pieter made a note of this information on a pad. ‘And where are the other guests?’ he asked.

‘In the dining room, awaiting interview.’

‘Right,’ Tanja acknowledged. ‘Bag the register and keep me informed.’

They took the stairs. Tanja had a mild fear of lifts, particularly when their innards were on full display. But more than that, she’d learned the benefits of drawing such moments out. First impressions were never more important than when dealing with a murder scene: with her heart racing, and her mind awhirl, there was a danger she might miss something. So, she took a series of deep, if surreptitious breaths, focusing on the stairs before her, and no more than that.

Fifty-two steps in total to the top floor. Kissin barely seemed to notice, but she was breathing a little heavily by the time they reached the top. Not through any lack of fitness – it was just that she’d had her nose broken a few years back, and sometimes she couldn’t seem to get enough air into her lungs. She’d even visited a plastic surgeon, to see if there was anything that could be done. There was, apparently. And it needn’t cost her anything: her police medical insurance would take care of it, seeing how the injury had been sustained during the course of her work.

Still, her brother officers could be merciless about such things. They would inevitably find out, and there was no way she was going to let herself become the butt of their jokes. Times changed, but not much, and the one thing a female police officer could not afford was accusations of vanity. It was hard enough to be taken seriously as it was.

She moved along the landing, her nostrils flaring to the faint aroma of rust. Or blood. The principal component was the same in each case.

The room was located at the end of a gloomy corridor, which was lined with a selection of Rembrandt prints. Pieter called out the title in each case: Bathsheba At Her Bath; followed by Belshazzar’s Feast; and finally The Jewish Bride.

‘So you are an art lover, as well as a wine expert, Kissin?’

‘I didn’t always want to be a policeman,’ he answered with a shrug.

He seemed cool enough. Yet Tanja suspected that it was an act. She remembered a similar occasion, just a few short years before, when Alex had accompanied her to his first crime scene. His aura of toughness had dissipated rather quickly, as she recalled.

So much had happened since then. Tanja closed her eyes, just for a second –

‘Are you all right, Detective Inspector?’

Tanja blinked. ‘Of course.’ She brushed an imaginary speck of dust from her blouse, and took the final few steps along the corridor.

The diminutive Scene of Crime Officer, Nelleke van Wyk, was her usual fastidious self, making a point of asking their identity, and various other self-evident details, and recording them on her clipboard. Whereas Tanja thought nothing of circumventing an unnecessary formality, it was the process itself that van Wyk seemed to live for. She made no secret of the fact that she loathed Tanja’s methods; Tanja made no secret of the fact that she didn’t care.

‘You’ll need to suit up,’ van Wyk instructed.

‘Are we talking the full ensemble?’ Tanja enquired.

‘Can’t be too careful, Detective Inspector.’

‘Fine,’ said Tanja, as she set about shrugging herself into the proffered coverall. There were also gloves, boots and a mask to deal with. It was never a quick business.

‘Keep to the walls as much as possible,’ van Wyk added.

‘Of course,’ Tanja acknowledged.

She moved inside, Pieter a step behind. The first thing she noticed was that the room was L-shaped; that the bed, and its contents – apart from one pale foot – were neatly hidden from view by a wall. The forensics team, looking more comfortable in their white suits and blue booties than she felt in hers, were already moving through this space. One or two nodded greeting; others seemed to look straight through her. They were a curious bunch, not easily understood. Chief amongst them was Karl Visser, so laconic she wondered if he had a pulse. She waved a greeting across the floor. He shrugged.

Pieter edged ahead of her, but she blocked him with an arm.

‘What’s the rush, detective?’ She handed over a pencil. ‘How about you draw me a nice picture instead?’

‘So what are we going to do?’ he protested. ‘Wait for our friend to fossilise before taking our hammers to him?’

‘Don’t forget you are on probation. I can have you transferred at any time.’

‘You can?’

Tanja tapped a finger to her head. ‘I’ve made a mental note, to investigate how I might get rid of you.’

‘How about an acid bath?’ Karl Visser suggested as he held up a microscope slide to the window.

‘Funny,’ said Pieter.

‘Hey, relax,’ Visser said. ‘He’s not going anywhere. Not without his guide dog, at any rate.’

‘What does that mean?’ Pieter said.

‘You tell me. You’re the detective. Or so I’m led to believe.’

Tanja held up a hand to forestall further bickering. ‘How’s that picture coming along?’ she asked Pieter. ‘I’m expecting something in the Rembrandt envelope, at least.’

‘Or perhaps we could simply wait for the photographer?’

‘I want both. Do it.’

Tanja moved slowly around the wall, Pieter beside her, sketching all the while. Tanja noticed that he was working in 3D, rather than the usual plan. So, he was either being facetious, or stupid. On balance, she hoped it was the former. A stupid cop had nothing to fall back on save luck. And Harald Janssen had already cornered that market.

The room was fairly grubby, and gave the impression that it hadn’t been decorated in thirty years or more. The walls were magnolia, whilst the carpet was beige. There was an interior door, closed, which presumably led into the bathroom.

The floor was covered in a loose pile of male clothing, suggesting that the dead man had been in a hurry to get naked. Well, no mystery there; men were like children in that regard.

A low-def TV sat in one corner, a coat-hanger aerial arranged above it. The plug was missing. Tanja didn’t suppose that most guests had cause to notice. There was a kettle and accompanying tea service. The cups were face down.

Kissin’s impatience aside, there was value to be had in dealing with the mundane details first. But only to a point.

‘Let’s have a look at him then, shall we,’ Tanja said.

She stepped around the corner of the L, Pieter right beside her.

There was a sound. It seemed to come from somewhere deep within Pieter’s throat.

‘Oh, shit,’ he groaned.

He staggered away – sticking to the safe route, Tanja noted – and dropped to his knees over the cleaner’s bucket in the hall outside. One or two of the forensics boys cheered as he hurled up his breakfast; van Wyk cursed. Tanja was better able to control herself, but her stomach still gave a queasy lurch. A person never got entirely used to it.

She gazed down at the body, letting her sense of outrage run its brief, if heated course. As ever, she fought against the feelings of sympathy, of empathy; as ever, she lost. Her old boss had told her that a sense of detachment was vital to a cop, but it was a skill she’d never been able to master. All she could do was fake it.

Her practised eye took in the significant details in an instant. The victim was a youngish man, maybe thirty years old. There was blood on his wrists, and ligature marks about his neck, suggesting that he’d been tied up, and strangled. He was still semi-hard: funny the way that happened, sometimes.

There was a little blood on his bloated face, too. One of the eyes had been pressed back into its socket. The other was missing, the optic nerve dangling free like some parasitical worm. She got down on her knees, to see if the eyeball had fallen beneath the bed, but there was nothing there save dust.

There was a knock at the door. An oversized head appeared, followed soon after by a less imposing body. ‘Ah, if it isn’t my second or third favourite detective inspector. Looking good, Tanja!’

It was Erik Polderhuis, the medical examiner. He was pushing sixty, but didn’t look, or act, it. Outside of work, he was known for his determination to form romantic attachments with girls who were precisely half his age. But the maths never held true for long, and so it was that he’d never been able to settle down. His hair was blonde, whilst his blue-grey eyes, so cold, might have been scooped directly from the North Sea. Somewhat paradoxically, there was a great warmth in his smile. He had various faults, most of them founded in a sense of mischief, but it was also true that he had an eye for detail. Tanja was actually rather fond of him, although she would never admit to it.

‘Erik,’ she acknowledged. And then, as a green-faced Pieter reappeared, ‘This is Detective Kissin. He’s from the Vecht.’

‘Shit,’ Erik sympathised. ‘Tough break.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Was that you I saw just now, losing your breakfast?’

Pieter nodded unhappily. ‘Yes. But it won’t happen again.’

Erik didn’t seem to hear this promise. ‘Well, try not to throw up on the victim, please. Or fart unnecessarily.’ He knelt down beside the bed. ‘So what’s going on with this poor bastard?’

Whilst Erik went to work, Tanja carefully picked her way through the pile of clothes. The trousers were grey, skinny-fit Girbaud; whilst the shirt was from Turnbull & Asser. Not necessarily an indication of wealth in themselves (maybe these were his pulling clothes; maybe he wore supermarket fashions, mostly), but the contrast with the cheap surroundings was marked.

She went through his pockets, finding a packet of cigarettes (Marlboro Lights – the equivalent of shooting yourself in the head with a low calibre bullet, she supposed), a packet of condoms (Cardinals, a Dutch brand, rumoured to be the best available), a Zippo lighter, and a wallet (croc skin?).

She opened the wallet. She found an ID card, complete with a photo: Mikael Ruben, North Holland IT Solutions. It matched the name on a selection of bank cards. The colour was gold in each case, but again, that was hardly an indication of superior status nowadays. Tanja had a gold card herself, and she was far from rich.

There was also a receipt, from a bar, timed and dated to the night before. The Den on Enge Lombardsteeg. It didn’t ring any bells, which was odd, as she was sure she’d visited all the places on that street, at one time or another. Anyway, Ruben had ordered two lagers, by the look of things. Hardly a skinful; he would have known what he was doing.

‘Well, I think it’s safe to say he was tied up,’ Erik declaimed. ‘Cuffed, in all probability. See? Around the back of the bedpost? The wood is a little splintered, doubtless where he struggled to free himself. It would take metal, or something similarly hard, to do that.’

‘If it weren’t for the business with his eyes,’ Tanja noted, ‘I might be tempted to suggest that he was caught up in a sex game, that his death was an accident.’ She shrugged. ‘But as it is –’

Erik nodded. ‘Yes, you’re probably right. Throttling a man to within a centimetre of his life in pursuit of the ultimate ejaculatory high is not in itself indicative of murderous intent. But running off with his eyeball probably is.’

‘Christ,’ Pieter groaned.

‘Would you rather wait outside?’ Tanja asked, her impatience rising.

Pieter shook his head determinedly, and dropped down on his haunches, that he might further examine the pile of clothing.

‘This sort of excision,’ Tanja asked Erik. ‘Is it a tricky procedure?’

‘Not really,’ Polderhuis answered. ‘The rectus muscles which surround the eye aren’t noted for their tenacity. And it’s fairly obvious which bits need to be cut. It certainly wouldn’t require any specialist knowledge.’

‘Any idea as to time of death then? I presume the rigor indicates that it’s been at least three hours?’

‘Indeed,’ Polderhuis confirmed. ‘We have some nice hypostasis, too. Very neat.’ He pointed at the darker patches of blood that had gathered in the victim’s back and buttocks. ‘He’s been dead at least ten hours, I’d say. From the lack of gouging and the relatively small blood loss, I’d venture that the eyes were done post mortem.’

‘Right,’ Tanja said. ‘So that would take us back to sometime before midnight.’

‘Sounds reasonable.’ Polderhuis took a thermometer from his top pocket. ‘Anyway, best get it over with. Thirty years in the job, and it still upsets me that I can’t just put it in their mouths.’

Tanja smiled to herself and headed into the bathroom. She saw that one of the towels was wet, that the shower head was still dripping. There was also the faintest trace of red about the plug hole, which might just have been blood.

She would ask Visser to have a look at that. The towel, too. Human beings, even the saintly sort, shed their skins as readily as snakes.

Pieter stuck his head round the bathroom door. ‘I think I might have something.’

‘That remains to be seen,’ Tanja responded absently, as she checked her reflection in the mirror. God, she was looking old.

‘With regards to the case.’

‘Go on, then,’ Tanja invited.

‘I’ve looked everywhere, and Ruben seems to be missing something.’

‘Apart from his eyeball, you mean?’

‘His mobile phone.’

Tanja shrugged. ‘Maybe he forgot to bring it with him.’

Pieter looked sceptical. Of course, he belonged to a generation which would no more forget its phone than its shoes.

‘Make a note of it, then,’ Tanja instructed. ‘I doubt it’s important, but you never know.’

Pieter scribbled on his pad. ‘Do you think the killer took it?’

‘I don’t know.’

Pieter tapped his pencil against the pad. ‘Hester Goldberg,’ he mused. ‘Want me to run a check?’

‘In due course.’

‘You think it’s her real name?’

‘We rule nothing out, at this stage. Just as we rule nothing in. Maybe she is innocent. Maybe she left early, and Mikael had some other visitor.’

‘Is that likely?’ he asked.

‘Not likely. But not impossible.’

Tanja left the bathroom, Pieter just behind her. He seemed to have recovered a little, and had lost that green tinge. Tanja supposed she was slightly impressed by this; it had taken Alex the better part of a year to come up with an effective way of controlling his gag reflex.

Karl Visser came over to join them. ‘Will you be wanting anything in particular?’ he asked. ‘We’ll dust all the usual contact points for prints, of course.’

‘There’s a towel in the bathroom which needs your attention,’ she said. ‘And maybe you should look underneath his fingernails.’

‘What about the other DNA sources?’ Pieter queried. ‘Hair and so on.’

Erik frowned. ‘You’ve heard of DNA? I thought everyone in the Vecht believed in Creationism.’

‘I could draw you a nice diagram of the double-helical structure, if you’d like,’ Pieter offered. ‘I have the anti-parallel thing down pretty well.’

Erik turned to Tanja. ‘Do you like this kid?’

‘No.’

‘Well, that’s all right, then. I thought it was just me.’

‘Hmm,’ said Tanja. ‘But we might as well get everything we can. Hair, semen, the works.’

Visser nodded. ‘Right.’

There was a commotion outside. Tanja heard the sound of voices raised in disagreement. Irritated, she strode out onto the corridor, only to draw to a sudden halt.

Gus de Groot tipped his head in greeting. If he’d had a hat, she was sure he would have doffed it.

This fresh murder had provided a distraction, of sorts – and Christ, how messed up was her mind that it should be like that? – but de Groot’s arrival immediately dragged her back to that other place.

Of all the people she’d ever met, the wife-beaters and the arsonists, the rapists and the murderers, de Groot was the only person that Tanja had ever dreamed of killing.

It was de Groot who had relentlessly pursued the only survivor of the Butcher’s attacks, Debre, a little girl who had already been broken beyond repair. But that hadn’t stopped him ruining her further, as a witness.

But now wasn’t the time for this type of thinking. Save it for later, when she opened the wine. ‘How the hell did you get up here?’ she demanded.

Gus shrugged. ‘Trade secret, Detective Inspector.’

‘Get out,’ Tanja instructed.

‘A few questions first?’

Tanja turned to Pieter. ‘If Meneer de Groot is not outside these premises in thirty seconds, arrest him.’

‘On what grounds?’ de Groot spluttered, as he tried, and failed, to poke his head round the door. He was stopped by Pieter, who effortlessly blocked his path with a well-judged dip of his shoulder. And also a glare, which seemed to take even the unflappable journalist by surprise.

‘Interfering with a crime scene, perhaps?’ Tanja answered. ‘I will doubtless think of something, if necessary.’

Muttering and dragging his heels all the while, Gus was steered away. Tanja looked up at Pieter. Maybe he would prove to have the odd use.

Chapter 3

The Binnengasthuis complex was largely comprised of old hospital buildings, interspersed with remnants of medieval monastic gardens, and cute little houses. For all that the city’s bustle was all around, pools of near pastoral liquid, serenity were to be found within its walls, lapping at the brick built monoliths as if intent on coaxing a smile. At the lower level there were flea markets, and loose ensembles of street musicians, churning out a mixture of jazz, and traditional Dutch levenslied, which loosely translated as ‘songs of life’. Every third person was a tourist or an organ-grinder; the remainder were mostly students. The whole thing was overseen by the Universiteit van Amsterdam. It was a fine place to study.

Not that Ursula Huisman really cared about such things. She listened, absently, as her professor droned on about some interminable detail of the Cartesian Principle (I think therefore I am? A lie, when applied to men; men didn’t think at all), but most of her attention was given over to her flatmate. Maria was anxious. And Ursula knew why.

Mikael Ruben hadn’t called. And now she was terrified that he’d abandoned her. It would be better if he had, Ursula considered.

Maria wound a finger into her long auburn hair, which to Ursula’s mind wouldn’t have looked out of place on an old-fashioned gypsy. One of the many Dutch travellers who had been sent to Auschwitz, perhaps, never to return. To complete the effect, Maria wore a long, peasant-style skirt of deepest burgundy, decorated with flower designs of white lace; and boots of dark patent leather, which caught the light of a hundred reflections, even though the lecture theatre was mostly cast in darkness. Her eyes were green, the pupils set wide against the gloom like jungle clearings; whilst her cheekbones rose high and glossy above the low arc of onyx earrings. She was soft and resolutely trusting, feminine without being too sugary. She was the most beautiful person that Ursula had ever seen, or even dreamed about.

‘Why hasn’t he called?’ Maria whispered, for the fifth time that hour.

‘I don’t know,’ Ursula answered. ‘But I’m sure he must have a good reason.’

Maria nodded. ‘Yeah, you’re right. I’m being silly. Maybe he’s out in the country somewhere. Maybe he can’t get a signal.’

Ursula kept her silence for a moment. ‘It’s a shame he couldn’t have found the time to be there for your opening night, though.’

Maria slumped in her chair. ‘He’s very busy. You don’t have any time, when you run your own company.’

‘I suppose,’ said Ursula.

Maria forced a smile. ‘At least you were there, Ursula.’

‘I was,’ Ursula affirmed, even though this wasn’t actually true. The thought of Maria parading about for the benefit of a hundred strangers had maddened her. She knew the lines as well as Maria, from the precious, late-night rehearsals in their room. Why share that with so many others?

So, on the occasion of last night’s premiere, she’d found something else to do. Something constructive. And her efforts had borne fruit. Overripe, treacherous fruit, swinging black and fermented on a man-tree of withered limbs.

‘And you’re sure I was okay?’ Maria fretted. ‘Only I was a little worried that my timing was off, and you know, I’m really a bit too young to be playing Nora, but there was no one else willing to take her on, and, well –’

Ursula wanted to take Maria by the shoulders, and shake some sense into her; to say, It’s only a fucking play. Why don’t you devote your energies to real life. To me?

‘You were great,’ she said.

‘Thanks!’ Maria gave her a grateful pat on the arm. ‘So where did you go afterwards?’

‘Oh, I went out for a walk. I ended up in a bar.’

‘On your own?’

‘God, Maria, this is the twenty-first century. We don’t need to be escorted everywhere.’

‘Well, I don’t think I could do it,’ Maria stated.

‘Well, you and I are a quite different, aren’t we? It’s why we work so well together.’

The lecture finally drew to a close, and Ursula shepherded her friend outside. She’d recently discovered a pretty little arbour, set in the cleft of the old hospital kitchen, which would be a perfect spot to spend time together. The butterflies flitted about her stomach at the thought of it.

‘Maria.’

It was their tutor, Dr Bleeker. A paternalistic fool. The last thing she needed was the interference of a self-appointed father figure. Especially now.

‘You need to come with me, Maria,’ he said, wringing his hands all the while. ‘It’s the police. They want to speak with you.’

The blood drained completely from Maria’s face. ‘Mikael?’ she stammered. ‘Is it Mikael?’

‘Please, Maria, follow me,’ was all Bleeker would say.

Maria did so, Ursula a pace behind. They moved along hitherto secret corridors, through a portion of the Binnengasthuis which, in darker days, had resounded to the cries of the mentally ill.

Two faces drifted into view. She saw a middle-aged woman, of somewhat less than medium height. She was soberly dressed in a dark skirt and light blouse, but there was a sense that a fit body lurked beneath. There was a haunted quality to her expression, whilst the lines on her face told the tale of some past trauma, albeit in a language which eluded Ursula’s powers of translation. Her eyes were the colour of burnt terracotta, or Tuscan sunsets. Such heat, when everything else about her was set cold.

Her hair was short, and dark, and all in all it was a look which might have conveyed some other connotation, if not for the aura of obvious and pained heterosexuality which surrounded her. Ursula was skilled at spotting the signs; she knew a slave to that hateful convention when she saw one.

There was a man, too.

‘This is Maria,’ Dr Bleeker said. ‘And her friend, Ursula.’

‘I am Detective Inspector Pino,’ the woman introduced herself as Bleeker left. ‘And this is Detective Kissin. I’d like to ask you a few questions, Ms Berger, if I may. Concerning Mikael Ruben.’

‘Can Ursula stay?’ Maria asked tremulously.

Detective Pino nodded, her expression conveying what might almost have been compassion. ‘For the moment. So, the first question concerns your whereabouts yesterday evening.’

‘I was at the theatre,’ Maria replied. ‘I’m a member of the Theatrical Society. It was our opening night of our play.’

‘What time did the play finish?’ Pino asked.

Maria placed her head in her hands. She was starting to shake. ‘About ten o’clock, I think.’

‘And where did you go afterwards?’

‘To a party. At the director’s house, on Linden Straat. He gave me a lift.’ She looked to Ursula for support. But Ursula could only stare.

And squeeze her friend’s hand. Maria flashed her a grateful look. Ursula nodded, and battled to keep her happiness to herself.

‘Mikael said that he was going to try to get there,’ Maria continued. ‘But he never came.’

‘Did you try to phone him?’ Kissin asked.

‘Yes,’ Maria replied. ‘Of course.’

‘But there was no answer?’

‘No. It just kept ringing until it went through to his answering service.’

‘And after the party, Ms. Berger?’ Pino pressed. ‘What then?’

‘I stayed for a few hours. And then I went home.’ She shook her head. ‘But please, what’s happened?’

Pino sighed. ‘I’m sorry Maria. There’s been a murder. Mikael is dead.’

What followed was mostly a blur. Pino put her arm around Maria’s shoulders – Ursula could have punched her for it, the bitch – then shepherded the sobbing girl away to a car. Ursula tried to follow, of course she did, but the brutish man stayed her with a shake of his head.

So she retreated to her secret arbour, alone. She sat with her hands folded in her lap, placid, girl-like.

But only for a moment. She felt an itching at her wrist, which soon spread up her arm. She knew what it was. She rolled up her sleeve, nodding in satisfaction at the network of old scars, the most recent wound still covered in a scab.

She fished her scalpel out of her bag, and took off the plastic guard. With delightful, excruciating slowness, she carved an M in the fleshy part below her elbow.

She followed the streak of crimson at it intertwined with her fingers. It provided confirmation, of sorts, of what was happening inside. Maybe that was the most important thing.

There was a black space inside her. It forged blood, thick black blood, congealed before its time. And it was beautiful, because the alternative was to be a husk. Like her mother, perhaps.

She took a few moments to compose her thoughts, then dabbed the blood away with a tissue and dropped the scalpel back into her bag.

There was a camera in there. And a phone. And an apple. A set of keys. Her purse. The usual stuff.

There was also a pocket, a secret pocket, built into the base. She unzipped it, removing her prize with trembling fingers.

It was another phone. With twenty-three missed calls.

Mikael Ruben’s.

*

In an oak-panelled room of antique books, the air musty with a dander of old glue and parchment, Mikael Ruben’s killer sat down to take tea.

A map of Amsterdam was laid out before her. It had been adulterated with a succession of red crosses, marking the recent movements of her new friend. Of course, Jasper Endqvist didn’t know that they were friends, just yet.

There were photographs of Jasper, too, depicting a successful, handsome man. He worked for an insurance company, but not out of desperation, or a lack of viable alternatives; he rather seemed to enjoy his work immensely. He was a creature of ordered, regular habit. She was sure that she might turn this to their mutual advantage.

She sipped at her drink, her eyes downcast as she peered through the window to the outside world. The sky, as reflected in the canal, had turned a pale, milky white, as if all the other colours had been scorched away. She stepped outside of herself for a moment; the heavens seemed curdled with portent.

She drew the curtains. Her hand was shaking, and that was odd; she had never felt so in control.

It was all relative, she supposed. She was pleased at the progress she was making.

She treated herself to a biscuit, and afterwards retired to a somewhat smaller room. Save for a set of apothecary’s jars, purchased that very morning from a local antique dealer, it was completely devoid of furnishings.

Three of the jars were quite empty. The fourth was less so.

Chapter 4

On the simplest, most instinctive level, Pieter was fairly sure that Maria Berger was telling the truth, that she’d had nothing to do with Mikael Ruben’s death. The catch in her voice, the slow unfurling of her limbs, the sense that her body’s internal rhythms had been halted, that they might never start up again – each spoke of her shock, and therefore innocence.

The interview had dragged on for two hours, and they didn’t seem to be making any progress. Maria had sunk back into her grief, her eyes glazed over, her arms hanging loosely at her sides. More often than not she didn’t seem to hear Tanja’s questions; or if she did, her typical response was to start crying again, albeit it in a quiet, low-key fashion. True, Pieter knew that she had a theatrical side, that she might conceivably be putting on a show – but the thing about acting, as he saw it, was that it was necessarily exaggerated.

‘Must we carry on?’ the other occupant of the room said. ‘Maria obviously had nothing to do with this.’

Tanja turned her unblinking gaze towards Maria’s mother. ‘No one said that she did, Mrs Berger.’

‘Then what is she doing here? She should be at home.’

‘And soon she will be,’ said Tanja. ‘But she may have some piece of information that helps with the apprehension of the culprit.’

‘You don’t have children, do you detective?’ said Anita.

Tanja paused a moment. ‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t.’

Anita Berger leant back in her chair. The air-conditioning was broken again, and the sweat leaked from the margin of her blonde hair, to merge in unsympathetic fashion with distinct layers of makeup. She might once have been very pretty, perhaps even a match for her daughter, but whereas there was a delicacy to Maria’s appearance, Anita had abandoned all notion of subtlety. Her skirt was cut on the well-ventilated side of daring, whilst her breasts seemed to be considering an escape for freedom. A crucifix jiggled provocatively on a chain of silver links, as if intent on humping her cleavage. Her skin was tanned, but more in the sense of leather than anything. When Pieter looked at her, one word came into his mind: melanoma.

There was a knock at the door. Pieter came to with a little start. He hadn’t realised, but he’d been slouching. He eased himself aloft, recalling a seminar on bio-mechanics at the Academy. The way a person sat could alter blood flow to the brain, impeding mental capacity by anything up to five per cent. He took a few sips of water: dehydration could be even more disruptive.

‘Come in,’ said Tanja.

Harald Janssen appeared, and handed Tanja a note. She studied it for a moment, then passed it to Pieter.

It seemed that Maria’s story checked out. She’d been at the Universiteitstheater on Nieuwe Doelenstraat from four in the afternoon, and had been in the company of at least one witness from that point until three the following morning, when she’d left the party at the director’s house in Jordaan. Pieter was pleased that his initial judgment had been corroborated. They already knew that Mikael Ruben and Hester Goldberg had booked into the hotel at nine-thirty; whilst Erik Polderhuis had estimated the time of death as between eight-thirty and midnight. It couldn’t have been Maria.

Then Pieter noticed that Tanja was looking at him. And not with any great enthusiasm. She frowned, and blinked once, slowly. Maybe Pieter was reading too much into her expression, but there seemed to be a warning there. He looked away, wondering what he might have done now.

And then he saw that Anita Berger was looking at him closely, too, and licking her lips whilst she did so. Christ! What was that about?

Maria wiped her nose with the back of her hand. ‘I want to go,’ she said.

‘To your flat?’ Tanja asked.

‘No,’ her mother answered for her. ‘Home. My home. Our home.’

Tanja nodded. ‘Of course. I think we are done here.’ She checked her watch. ‘Interview concluded at three-fifteen pm.’ There was a snap, as she switched off the tape recorder.

‘You will look after Maria, Mrs Berger?’ Tanja asked.

Anita nodded, gently at first, then with greater vigour. ‘Of course. Always.’

‘Well, I will make a call to the Bureau Slachtofferhulp, anyway.’

Anita shook her head a fraction. ‘Victim Support? No, really, there’s no need. Maria has me. She doesn’t need anyone else.’

*

Outside in the car park, Pieter watched as Tanja tugged open the Opel’s door and thumped down into the driver’s seat – only to yelp as the bare skin of her legs came into contact with hot black plastic. She did a funny little buttock dance, which reminded him a little of mothers trying to get funky at wedding discos.

‘Maybe you should leave the window open a bit,’ Pieter suggested. ‘Or wear trousers.’

‘Shut up, boy.’

‘Boy?’

‘Sorry, did I get the gender wrong?’

Tanja jammed the key into the ignition, rattling it this way and that to disengage the steering lock. Pieter tactfully looked elsewhere as she struggled to get the car running. Her curses were delivered in some southern dialect, he noted with interest; Limburgish, maybe?

The car fired up with a cough of blue smoke. Pieter barely had time to drop into his seat – still hot – before Tanja was off along Elandsgracht.

‘Where are we going?’ Pieter asked. ‘Ruben’s place?’

Tanja grunted. ‘You think he might have left us a little black book of names and addresses?’

‘Well, it doesn’t have to be black, I suppose.’

‘It’s possible,’ Tanja conceded. ‘But a detective would need to be spectacularly lucky to unearth something like that.’

‘So –?’

‘I’ve already asked Harald Janssen to take a look at it.’

Pieter nodded. ‘So what about us?’

‘Well, we’re off to that bar. The Den, on Enge Lombardsteeg.’

‘Ruben had a receipt for there,’ Pieter recalled.

‘So, if the time on the receipt is anything to go by, it seems quite likely that he went straight from there to the hotel. Perhaps our friend Hester was with him.’

‘He might have arranged to meet her at the hotel, though,’ Pieter pointed out.

Tanja didn’t answer and Pieter could tell by the set of his partner’s jaw that she was in no mood for idle speculation. And maybe he’d gone a bit far, teasing her like that. But it had always been his way: whenever he was nervous, something in his unconscious mind determined that the best course of action was to laugh at the source of his fear. He would have to keep a check on it.

So instead he looked through the window, taking in the sights and sounds of his new home. He knew a little of Jordaan’s history, of the incendiary class riots which had flared amidst its gentle gardens during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; of the February Strike of 1941, when the locals had bravely protested against Nazi treatment of the Jews. There was a statue, somewhere, commemorating the fact. But it all seemed very quiet now. Very safe.

‘The Prinsengracht,’ Tanja noted, as they steered a path beside a canal, its bronzed surface silvered here and there with the frothy wake of pleasure cruisers. ‘Part of the Grachtengordel. So, we have the Prinsengracht, the Herengracht, and the Keizersgracht. Each forms what you might term a concentric ring around the city. Except they aren’t really rings. They’re more like decagons or something.’

Pieter looked at her suspiciously, but she seemed quite serene. Was this an attempt at amiability? He gazed up at the row of three and four storey buildings that flanked the canal, and the avenue of trees which added a verdant streak to the slabs of mottled brickwork. ‘It’s very pretty,’ he said carefully.

Tanja nodded. ‘All this was built during our so-called Golden Age. The seventeenth century! When our navy was the finest in the world, and we even gave the English a fright or two. Hard to think it, now! We might as well be Belgians, for all the influence we have.’

‘Don’t say that,’ Pieter protested earnestly.

Tanja shifted gears with a forceful clunk. ‘But there’s no sense in looking back, I suppose.’

It wasn’t far to Enge Lombardsteeg, but the traffic was tightly packed into the one-way system, and the tourists seemed to have no compunction about further clogging the roads. What might have been a comfortable twenty minute walk turned out to be a fractious twenty minute crawl, Tanja’s language growing more Limburgish all the while.

‘So where are you from, originally?’ Pieter asked.

‘Maastricht. We moved to Amsterdam when I was thirteen. But I learnt to swear properly before we left, if that’s what you are getting at.’

They arrived at another roadblock, this time in the form of a broken-down tram. Pieter winced, expecting a further eruption, but to his surprise, Tanja started to hum. He thought he recognised the melody. ‘To Love Somebody?’ he asked. ‘The Bee Gees?’

‘Right song, wrong band,’ Tanja answered. ‘I prefer the Janis Joplin cover.’

‘Are you a fan?’

‘Yeah, I suppose.’

Snippets of civilised conversation aside, being alone with Tanja in her little car wasn’t a comfortable feeling. It was to Pieter’s considerable relief that they finally pulled to a halt outside a coffee shop, Incan Gold, and he was able to take a shot of fresh air.

Actually, it wasn’t that fresh: waves of sweet smoke were oscillating through the open door.

‘Are you sure this is the place?’ he asked as he peered up at the gold-leaf sign. Incan Gold? A hash reference, presumably.

‘It’s the right address,’ Tanja answered as she stepped inside. ‘The Den must be downstairs.’

Sure enough there was a spiral staircase in the furthest corner of the café, leading down into a yet dingier depth, where clumps of second-hand smoke gathered like ghostly muggers.

‘It’s not exactly signposted,’ Pieter observed.

‘No.’

A rope was drawn across the stairs. Tanja unhooked it, and stepped through.

There was a door at the bottom, labelled simply, Private. Tanja tried the handle. Unlocked.

The decor was much classier on the other side of the door, if still imbued with an appreciably seedy aspect. Classical music swelled gently in the background; whilst flickering electrical candles seemed to serve no other purpose than to define the limit of strategically placed shadows. There was a bar, well stocked, flanked with a row of stools. There were paintings on the wall, prints, most likely, of what appeared to be English landscape scenes. Some exotic variety of vine twined itself around a brass pole, twisting hungrily towards a shaft of natural sunlight, which somehow penetrated below ground. Mirrors, Pieter suspected, if not actually smoke.

A woman appeared from the shadows. ‘Welcome to the Cougar Club!’ she said, smiling. She wore an evening gown of palest jade. It didn’t seem to matter that it was still a little early for that sort of attire; she had the look of a woman who tended to draw evening out as far as was possible. She was rather striking, tall, with longish, blondish hair. Her bare arms were thin, whilst her breasts were larger than they needed to be. She was roughly fifty years old, Pieter guessed.

Tanja looked at Pieter confusedly, before turning her attention back to the woman. ‘I’m sorry – we were looking for The Den.’

‘Well, some people might call it that. But not you two, surely?’

‘I’m not sure I follow,’ Tanja admitted.

‘Look, as far as my accountant is concerned, this is indeed The Den. But most of my customers refer to it by its unofficial name.’

‘I see,’ said Tanja.

The woman nodded happily, and took a step towards them. ‘My name is Sophia Faruk. I’m the owner here.’

‘Hi,’ said Tanja, more reservedly.

Sophia diverted her attention to Pieter, slowly, languorously, yet with a great weight of irresistible determination, like a canal bridge swinging open. ‘He’s beautiful,’ she said. ‘Can I touch?’

She didn’t wait for an answer. She reached out a hand, to brush fingers to Pieter’s chest. He was so taken aback, he didn’t move. Sophia sighed wistfully, then returned her attention to Tanja. ‘You know it’s our strictest rule – no hogging the pretty ones!’

Tanja showed her badge. ‘I’m Detective Inspector Pino. And this is Detective Kissin.’

His partner’s scorched-earth gaze met Sophia’s eyes of polder-grey. For a moment an unspoken challenge seemed to rise between them. Pieter wasn’t surprised that Sophia should be the one to break the contact. There was a fire to his partner’s eye that burnt without thinking.

Sophia’s expression flickered, then grew impassive. ‘How may I help you, Detective Inspector?’

Tanja reached into her pocket, to remove a colour photocopy of Mikael Ruben’s security pass. ‘Do you recognise him?’ she asked, tapping the image in the corner.

Sophia looked at the picture. ‘Maybe.’

‘Only maybe?’ Tanja pressed. ‘One of the “pretty ones”, no?’

Sophia shrugged. ‘I never focus on the faces for long.’ She chuckled, but the sound seemed to sit awkwardly.

Tanja shook her head impatiently. ‘Please, this is important.’

Sophia looked at the image again. ‘All right. Now that I think about it, I do recognise him. He comes in a couple of times a month.’

‘And when did you last see him?’ Pieter asked.

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Last night, perhaps?’

Sophia shook her head. ‘No, I don’t think so.’

Tanja showed her a copy of the receipt. ‘This would suggest otherwise. You see the date?’

Sophia studied the receipt. ‘Yes. But really, I’ve said too much. My customers expect a certain discretion on my part.’

‘Trust me,’ said Tanja, ‘Mikael Ruben will not care.’

Sophia licked her lips. Pale lipstick glistened, briefly. ‘Why not?’

‘Because he’s dead.’

Sophia put her hand to her mouth. She groped blindly behind her, and settled back into a chair. She started to say something, then seemed to think better of it. ‘Poor Mikael,’ she finally stammered.

Tanja took a step closer to Sophia. ‘So, you will forgive me if I ask you again, Ms Faruk: did you see Mikael Ruben last night?’

‘I have already said that I didn’t,’ Sophia said. She composed herself with a visible effort. ‘But then, I wasn’t here all evening. I left early.’

‘What time did you leave?’

‘I couldn’t say for sure. I never wear a watch. The passing of time – well, I’d rather not know.’

‘Do you have security cameras?’ Pieter asked. ‘A tape we can study?’

‘No,’ Sophia answered. ‘The last thing my customers want is to be filmed. At least not here.’

Pieter found that he was starting to enjoy the process. This was much more like it. ‘So tell me, Ms Faruk, what exactly is the Cougar Club?’

‘Isn’t it obvious?’

‘Let’s assume it isn’t.’

That laugh again. ‘You aren’t from round here, are you, Detective? It’s very simple. Some women prefer the company of younger men, just as some men prefer the company of older women. This is where they like to meet.’

‘Was anyone else working last night?’ Tanja asked. ‘A bartender, perhaps?’

‘Just Frank,’ Sophia answered, quite sullen now.

‘Do you have a doorman?’

‘Jacobus, yes. He won’t be around for another hour, though. We aren’t officially open yet.’

‘And Frank?’

‘He’s in the cellar, doing a stock check.’

Frank was duly summoned. There was a pale sheen of sweat on his skin, and his eyes bulged from deep-set sockets. He had the look of a man who had spent his life in a dark cave. He glanced at the receipt, and the photograph, then screwed his eyes shut as he struggled to remember. Sophia looked at him for a moment, then drifted away, ostensibly to study her mobile. But it was obvious that she was listening intently.

‘Yeah, he was definitely here,’ the barman said. ‘We talked about the game on Saturday – did you see it? What the hell was Jol doing? Honestly, we’d have been better off sticking with van Basten. You don’t counterattack against Feyenoord – you pound em, you understand, like the scum they are. It’s the only way –’

‘What time did he leave?’ Tanja interrupted.

‘Oh, not late. Ten, maybe? No, that’s not right. Earlier. Because I remember talking to another customer about De Klassieker later, and he asked me the time, and it was nine-thirty. So, it would have been, oh, twenty minutes before that?’

‘And did he leave on his own?’ Pieter asked.

‘No,’ the bartender answered, drawing the syllable out as he pondered the question. ‘Don’t think so. I think I saw him talking to a woman, if only for a minute or so. I’ve an idea they went out together. They usually do!’

Pieter was making notes. ‘What did this woman look like?’

‘Sorry,’ Frank replied, ‘I really couldn’t say. Blonde hair, maybe? But it gets real smoky as the evening wears on. And of course Ms. Faruk turns the lights down low. Sometimes it’s hard to keep a track of who’s who.’ He winked. ‘Besides, I’m told not to stare.’

‘She didn’t order a drink?’ Tanja enquired.

‘I don’t think so. It’s mostly the men who buy the drinks round here.’ He lowered his voice a little. ‘Although there are some ladies who prefer a more hands on approach, if you know what I mean.’

‘Where do you keep your copies of the bar receipts?’ Tanja asked.

‘In here,’ Frank answered. He opened a manila folder, leafing through in dextrous fashion. ‘Ah, here we are,’ he said. ‘I believe this is Mr Ruben’s. He ordered, yes, two Grolsch.’

‘May I?’ Pieter asked.

Frank handed Pieter the folder. He flicked through, noting that the bartender was right: perhaps four-fifths of the names on the receipts were male. All part of the ritual, he supposed. There was certainly no record of a Hester Goldman.

‘Do you have a membership roster, something like that?’ Tanja asked. ‘We’ll need to speak to your patrons. Someone must have got a decent view of this woman.’

‘There’s nothing like that.’ Sophia said quickly as she moved back over to join them. ‘As I say, we are very discreet. We rely on word-of-mouth. No one has to sign in. There are no membership fees. My only recompense is whatever passes through my till. That and the satisfaction of knowing that I am providing a valuable service, of course.’

‘Good for you,’ Tanja said shortly. ‘So you’ve nothing else to tell us?’

‘No. I don’t think so. Though obviously I will call you if anything occurs.

Tanja handed Sophia a card. ‘Thank you, then. Oh, and if you could ask your doorman to call me as soon as he gets in. Jacobus, was it?’

‘Yes. I’ll tell him.’

Tanja strode away, climbing the spiral stairs in a vibration of ringing iron. She hurried through the coffee shop, Pieter struggling to keep up.

‘What I can’t understand,’ Tanja suddenly blurted, ‘is the promiscuity.’

‘Oh?’ said Pieter carefully.

Tanja dragged her foot across the dusty pavement. ‘I’ve only had, oh, eight boyfriends in my life. And never more than one at the same time.’

‘You think these women sleep around, then?’

‘I reckon!’

They shared a look. Pieter nodded, to express his understanding. Tanja wasn’t like the women who came to the Cougar Club; fine, he got it. But he supposed he could understand her sensitivity, under the circumstances. Janssen had told him all about Tanja and Alex Hoekstra, his similarly youthful predecessor. It really didn’t bother him, though, and even if it had, he would have kept his mouth shut. Tanja’s private life was none of his business.

They rode in silence back to the station. Pieter was left to reflect that it had actually turned out to be an unsatisfactory interview. They hadn’t really learned anything new. Ruben had probably left with another woman, but they’d suspected that anyway.

All in all he felt that he’d learned more about Tanja in the last few hours, than Mikael Ruben’s killer.

*

Harald Janssen had never really understood his sobriquet. Lucky? It was an insult, really. Professionally speaking, everything he’d achieved had been a product of hard work. And expertise. He was clued-up. He took his statutory two days’ study leave each year, and remembered almost everything he’d learned.

And in a private sense, well, he’d had no luck at all. Three messy wives, and three messy divorces, and three messy kids who would rather stay with their grisly mothers than hop on a tram and visit him occasionally. And the alimony! He was getting poorer each year.

He stretched, yawned, and decided that he would take a nap as soon as the opportunity presented itself. The murder had messed up his sleep patterns. He was supposed to have switched over to nights, yet seemed to have been awake for at least a day and a half.

He was at Mikael Ruben’s apartment on Vossiusstraat, overlooking the pleasant expanse of the Vondelpark. This was Tanja’s case, of course, but she could not be everywhere at once, and he’d been happy to help out with the preliminary legwork. She would want to come here herself soon enough, but someone needed to check it out right away, just in case. Someone trustworthy, with an eye for detail.

The apartment was impressively large, but Ruben clearly hadn’t been one for furnishings, either soft or hard. Tellingly, there was nothing in the way of cushions, nor candles, nor any of that other crap that women tended to like. If Maria (or whoever) had ever spent the night here, then she certainly hadn’t been allowed to linger. There were no extra toothbrushes in the bathroom, no hidden stash of tampons, no secret hordes of emergency shoes.

Harald approved of the minimalist approach. The place must be a joy to clean, he considered as he pulled on a pair of sterile gloves. His own house was a mess. Too much clutter. Too much correspondence from his wives’ lawyers.

So, there was very little sign of recent habitation. Just a pile of laundry, and a plate of pork chops resting by the cooker.

Harald instinctively sniffed at the chops, his thoughts momentarily drifting towards dinner, or supper, or whichever was next on the agenda. God, he was disorientated! Breakfast felt like lunch; lunch felt like second supper. And Christ knows where mid-morning crepes fitted in.

There was no sign of the proverbial black book. Nor, with the exception of a few bills, any written documents of any kind. Of course, Ruben had been an IT specialist; he’d doubtless kept all his contact details on his laptop, or maybe even his phone. Harald believed that you could do anything with a phone nowadays, if you had small enough fingers.

His own fingers were meaty, and so inflexible that he sometimes wondered if he might be missing a joint or two. It was symptomatic of his body all over, really. He had no illusions as to his physical appeal; his first wife had said he was arranged like an ink-blot test.

He looked in the few cupboards, and beneath the bed, all the usual places. Sure enough he found a laptop, a new Macbook. He didn’t try to turn it on himself; he would suggest to Tanja that she should have the IT bods take a look at it. Just in case. Maybe there was a thingy, a spreadsheet.

Harald had embraced the technological age, though only in the sense that a child might embrace a senile old grandmother, with hairy warts, and a bladder problem. The last computer he’d owned – the only computer – had broken the day after the warranty expired, presumably in protest at all the emails it had been receiving from the bloodsuckers at Swartout, Schoonhoven and Rosenthal. Lucky? Hah!

He checked his watch. The day wore on. Handing the key back to the building superintendent, he headed out to his car, and braved the traffic back to the station. He hoped to catch Tanja before she left for home. He had no real news to report, but he liked to be near her.

Chapter 5

It was gone six by the time Tanja dropped Pieter back at his flat at the edge of the Binnengasthuis. The heart of student land, she considered wryly. The kid might have been better served doing another degree. Or going to work on Daddy’s farm. She could see him on a tractor, a gold-plated tractor, slow-ploughing neat lines into his inheritance.

It hadn’t been a long day by any means, but she could tell he was tired. He invited her in for a coffee, but she declined. She had something else in mind.

Something foolish. She knew it was that, even as she steered her car towards the south-east, towards Diemen. Towards Alex. Dumb, dumb, dumb!

She made a beat of it: Dum-dum-dum, tapping it out on her steering wheel.

It was a pointless trip, in so many ways. And the A1 was a bitch at this time of day. But she couldn’t seem to help herself. Saturday still felt like a lifetime away.

Besides, she had some of her most inspirational moments in her car.

She temporarily forgot about Alex, and thought instead about Mikael Ruben. To die like that, to go to the afterlife, or oblivion, without being able to see where he was heading! And his parents! A couple of agents had been dispatched to Den Haag to speak to them, and by all accounts the mother’s grief, in particular, had been hard to bear.

It was always the parents who suffered most, Tanja considered bleakly. Perhaps the worst aspect of the Butcher case had been speaking with the little girls’ families. There had been times when she’d found it close to unbearable. She still did.

Detachment, Tanja!

Anyway, the officers hadn’t learned anything from the trip. As far as the Rubens were concerned, their son had been an angel; no one could have taken a dislike to him.

She didn’t think that inspiration going to come to her tonight. At least not in that sense. So she turned on the stereo. It hadn’t worked in ages, but Pieter had surprised her by fixing it whilst she was filling up with petrol.

‘Just a broken fuse,’ he’d shrugged. ‘You didn’t seem to have any spares, so I took one from the ABS circuit. Just try not to slam on your brakes in the wet, okay?’

‘What?’ Tanja protested.

‘Only kidding, Detective Inspector. There was a spare, actually.’

It was weird, that he dared to tease her. Yet stranger still was that she found it hard to take issue with it. Not properly, at any rate.

She reached into the glove box, withdrawing a CD at random. It was one of her homemade compilations by the look of it. Good; she liked variety in her music. Her moods changed all the while; it was fitting that her tunes should do likewise.

The opening bars of Lithium worried at the speakers. She was immediately transported back to ‘91, when she’d seen Nirvana play at the Paradiso. A year or so after Anton and Ophelie had been killed, the denial turning to anger. She’d been shocked by the volume, and the sweat dripping from the ceiling into the gob-smacked, demented mouths of the fans.

But Nirvana was angry young person’s music, not angry old person’s music. She skipped forward a track. Modulated guitar. Jimi. Little Wing.

Skip. Me and Bobby McGee. Perfect!

No, not perfect. Janis and Bobby’s love affair is doomed to end, way too soon, somewhere near Salinas, wherever that might be. Hardly a positive message.

Tanja stabbed at the button. The End, by the Doors. Christ.

She chewed on her lip. Never mind that they had an agreement in place for dinner Saturday night; she had to see him now. She was like a girl, albeit without the saving grace of innocence: save for the small chance that they might end up in bed together (and how she longed for that; it had been ages), no good could come of it.

The music swelled; the music died. Ah, of course, it was that old classic: artists who had died at the age of twenty-seven!

Mikael Ruben was twenty-seven, she considered.

Alex, too.

She put her foot down, feeling anxious again.

Diemen had been a separate town, once, but it had effectively been subsumed into the sprawl of Greater Amsterdam. It was divided into three parts. Old Diemen was pretty enough – though that prettiness hadn’t extended to the station building on Den Hartoglaan, which, in conceptual terms, was the mirror of the gloomy Elandsgracht headquarters.

‘I’m looking for Detective Sergeant Hoekstra,’ she said to the uniformed girl on the desk.

The young woman looked up from the document she’d been studying. ‘Is it a police matter, madam?’

‘No. He’s a friend of mine.’

The desk officer’s eyes widened, but she didn’t pass comment as she reached for a phone. She was a good-looking girl, Tanja supposed, her hair lustrous, her skin smooth. The usual superficial nonsense.

Tanja sniffed, the air catching awkwardly in her offset nose. It was just a small thing, really, hardly noticeable. Just one of many battle scars. It didn’t bother her at all.

Character, she thought; her body had that lived-in look. But it was all right; Alex liked that sort of thing. He’d told her so, more or less, on a windswept beach two years ago. The North Sea beating around the Frisian island of Texel, the October sky streaked with all the colours of a forge, the few trees likewise turned gold and bronze. And Alex, his arm around her shoulders, saying, in his typically roundabout fashion, that he would rather live in an older house than a new one; that autumn was his favourite season. She remembered thinking that he was an idiot, but a charming one.

The girl replaced the phone, blowing a strand of long hair from her eyes as she did so. Perhaps Tanja would call the clinic again, at some point. Just to satisfy her curiosity.

The desk manikin worried at a finger. ‘I’m afraid he’s already left for the day.’

‘Where’s he gone?’

‘I can’t say.’

Tanja showed her badge. ‘I need to speak to him.’

The girl straightened up. She was quite tall; gravity had yet to drag her down. It would, of course. This thing she had now – it would pass quickly. And then she would have to perfect some other trick, as all women did. Tanja didn’t envy her at all, because the trick was hard to master.

‘You’ll find him across the street, ma’am,’ the desk officer said after a brief pause. ‘There’s a bar –’

‘I know it,’ Tanja said, and she was already on her way out the door.

She ducked behind one of the ugly brick sculptures which fronted the building, to check her reflection in her compact. She didn’t wear much in the way of makeup, but maybe a little more lipstick would be advisable. That done, she adjusted the line of her skirt, undid a button, tweaked the cleft of her cleavage, felt a bit tarty but who cared, then jogged across the road.

It wasn’t much of a bar, but it was convenient. The majority of customers had the look of police officers. Some were still in uniform.

She saw Alex across the bar. He was part of a small group. Two other men, and a woman, gathered around him in a snug alcove.

He saw her, gave a little start, then crossed the floor to join her. She felt his lips brush her cheek.

‘Hi,’ she said coolly, employing all the self-control at her disposal. God, she wanted to kiss him! ‘I hope you don’t mind? I know we are getting together on Saturday – we’re still okay for that, right? – but I was just passing, and thought, well, you know.’

Alex’s smile was gentle. ‘Well, it’s certainly a surprise seeing you here. But a good one!’

‘Yeah?’

‘Of course it is!’

Alex looked at her for a long moment. His grey eyes had that familiar, lighthouse glint which came with each slow blink.

She steeled herself; it needn’t be this complicated.

‘This is Detective Inspector Pino!’ Alex informed the others as he steered her back to the alcove. ‘A good friend of mine! Tanja, say hello to Ricky, Wim and Margarete.’

‘Hi,’ said Tanja. Her tone was light, but her thoughts were heavy. She knew what they were thinking, particularly with Alex in attendance: that she was little more than a middle-aged nympho, who was so obsessed with the notion of energetic sex that she found it impossible to form relationships with men her own age.

But the sad thing was, she would rather they think of her in those terms than as the woman who had let the Butcher of the Bos escape.

A space was made for her, opposite Alex. She lowered herself into it. She rested her hands on the table, and listened as the others continued with a story about a local blind man, who had got himself into trouble with a length of cheese wire.

‘Anyway,’ Ricky elaborated, ‘he’d just wrapped the wire about his cock –’

‘Why would he do that?’ asked Margarete.

‘You’d have to ask him that,’ Ricky answered with a shrug. ‘So, there he is, happily exploring the limits of his pain threshold, or whatever, when – boom! – he has a fit. Yeah, he’s an epileptic, too. Did I mention that part?’

‘Ouch,’ Alex winced. ‘I think we can guess the rest!’

‘That’s not the worst bit,’ Ricky drawled. ‘No, the worst bit is – get this – his guide dog ate it.’

‘Christ!’ Margarete exclaimed. ‘Really?’

‘Honest,’ Ricky affirmed. ‘I know the paramedic. Seems that not only is the poor guy blind, and epileptic – and into weird forms of self-abuse – but he’s also a strict veggie. Won’t allow meat in his house. Not even for his dog. So when the mutt sees the treat on the floor, she can’t help herself.’

And so it continued. The conversation alternated between the ridiculous, and the deadly serious, the tone hardly changing from one topic to the next. This was how police officers dealt with the pressures of work, generally. You either made light of it, or you went mad. Or joined Interpol.

Tanja listened without contributing, just happy to be a part of Alex’s circle. This was the sort of thing that couples did.

‘So how’s your day been?’ Alex asked her suddenly.

‘Oh, busy,’ Tanja answered haltingly, aware that the others had broken off their conversation; that they were waiting for her to say something contentious. ‘They’ve given me a new partner.’

‘It was bound to happen eventually,’ Alex said. ‘Is he any good?’

‘He’s not awful,’ she answered, as she struggled to divine a note of jealousy in Alex’s voice. But there was nothing there; his expression was quite neutral.

‘High praise indeed!’ he said.

Tanja nodded, but she suddenly felt drained. Disconcertingly so. She stood. ‘I should probably be off,’ she said.

‘So soon?’ Ricky protested.

‘I’m sure we’ll meet again,’ Tanja responded.

Alex had stood with her. She motioned him apart a little. ‘I’ll see you in a couple of days, then?’

Alex nodded. ‘Looking forward to it! Do you want me to see you to your car?’

‘No, I’ll be fine.’

She waited for a few moments outside, but it seemed he’d taken her at her word.

She drove back to her flat, going over each aspect of the evening in her head. She didn’t think she had made any progress. But neither, to be fair, had she lost any ground.

She was greeted at the door by an old ginger cat. Gember peered up at her, his tail twitching to express his irritation at her late arrival.

He made no attempt to head outside, as another cat might. He’d been run over twice in his youth, and seemed to have decided that no mouse was worth the ignominy of spending another week at the vet’s. Either that or he was agoraphobic. It was possible: Tanja had heard that, human beings aside, cats were more prone to mental instability than any other animal.

She was hungry now. Padding into the kitchen, she tugged open the fridge, hoping that something edible might have appeared. But no, there was nothing save a portion of pickled nieuwe haring, which she kept as a treat for Gember. She mashed the herring onto a plate (he had sore gums, nowadays, and struggled to chew), then sat back to watch him eat. She’d had him nearly fifteen years. He’d been in her life longer than anyone save her mother. She loved him, and just between the two of them, had no problem admitting it.

Tanja took the photo from the dresser. Ophelie sitting on her shoulders, the Eiffel Tower perfectly to scale in the background. Anton had taken it on the final day of their holiday in 1990, and his thumb was slightly obscuring the corner of the picture. It hardly mattered.

The first time Alex had come to hers, she’d taken down all the photos of her former husband, but not the ones of her daughter. And Alex seemed interested in her past, his questions sensitive rather than prying. He knew instinctively just where to tread.

‘Happy birthday, sweetheart,’ she said, placing the photo back.

Afterwards, she sipped a glass of wine while Gember sat on her lap, purring imperiously as she stroked his soft little head. He claimed this affection by right. And Tanja gave it willingly, because she knew that he would never throw it back at her.

‘So what do you reckon, Gember?’ she asked. ‘With regards to Alex, I mean? You remember Alex? Of course you do. You like him. He feeds you spiced cheese when he thinks I’m not watching. So, am I being foolish, wanting him back? After all, it got pretty tricky, before!’

Gember yawned, and scratched at his chin, grunting at the effort this required. He wasn’t as flexible as he might once have been.

Tanja chuckled at his indifference. Cats had no concept of loneliness.

*

Gus de Groot looked around the inside of the subterranean bar, struggling to make sense of what he was seeing.

On the one hand there were the women. God, the women! All in their forties or fifties, smartly, if thinly dressed. All sipping delicately at their drinks, giving the impression that it was merely a warm-up for some other act of swallowing.

And then there were the men, the oldest of whom was perhaps Gus’ age. Thirty. Or twenty-seven, in real terms. Gus had recently worked out his own system, a sliding scale, determined by such factors as looks, vigour, and general underground coolness.

Whatever, it seemed an unlikely demographic, statistically speaking. Ten middle-aged women, in a room with a similar number of men who weren’t much more than half their age? The only other place you might see that sort of mix would be at a Take That reunion concert. And in that case all the men would be gay.

He made a mental note to send Elizabeth a bunch of flowers. She might only have been an admin monkey, but she came into contact with some juicy documents. He’d primed her to the sort of stuff he was interested in, and now she could hardly fire the texts off fast enough. The last was a beaut: Gus – just photocopying bar receipt for case file: dead guy was drinking in Den on Enge Lombardsteeg before getting killed. Love you!

It was clear that there was something going on here. Gus had been safely stowed in the shadows of the upstairs coffee shop when Pino and her sidekick arrived. Luck really, that he’d decided to purchase a few loose joints before pressing on – if the crazy-eyed bitch had arrived ten minutes later, she’d have caught him mid-snoop. And then there would have been trouble.

He’d seen the thunderous look on her face when she’d left. She was clearly unhappy about something, which could only be good news as far as his story was concerned. And in a personal sense, too. Gus didn’t like Pino, the sanctimonious old witch. Those little girls – of course it was sad. But the public had a right to expect that journalists would perform their duties to the limit of their abilities, however gruesome the case. And if the girl who’d escaped the killer had afterwards gone a little mad, well that was hardly his fault. Debre’s parents had been with her when he’d asked the questions. They’d been happy to take the money. If there was any blame to be apportioned, it didn’t lie with him.

Uh-oh. A woman was drawing near, her hand tracing the line of a velvet cushion, a wall hanging, and now the bar. So, she was either blind, or else she was in that tactile mode that women tended to employ when drunk or horny. They were like kids, when their juices were flowing; they had to touch.

Gus understood, now: the place was some sort of brothel, only in reverse.

Which kind of made him a prostitute. A weird feeling, but not altogether an unfamiliar one.

‘My name is Sophia,’ the woman breathed. ‘I own this place.’

‘Gus,’ he grunted. He didn’t bother with pseudonyms, generally; he always tended to get them muddled up.

‘You’re new here, Gus.’

‘Hmmn!’ He turned to the bartender and ordered a drink. ‘Chivas Regal,’ he grunted out of habit, not for one moment expecting that the place would stock anything so prestigious. Or expensive. ‘Double.’ The whisky had been the favourite drink of Hunter S Thompson. Gus was quite devoted to it, at least in public.

‘We have a twelve year vintage, or an eighteen,’ the barman said. ‘Alas, I’m afraid we’re just out of the twenty-five.’

Shit. Gus winced, aware that he was here on his own imitative, without the safety net of an expenses form. ‘I’ll go for the twelve,’ he said. ‘I prefer that mellow taste.’

‘Ah,’ said Sophia, ‘but the eighteen is far more sophisticated. Things get better with age, Gus, don’t you think?’

‘I’ll take your word for it,’ Gus said. He hesitated a moment, then gestured at the barman. ‘And one for the lady!’ he added.

Sophia inclined her head graciously. ‘Thank you. I’ll have a small glass of Rioja.’

Sophia moved closer, lowering herself onto the barstool beside him. Gus reached into his jacket, ostensibly to remove a packet of cigarettes, but in reality to switch on his dictaphone.

Well, that was what the uninitiated might term it. More accurately, it was a professional grade digital voice-recorder with 24-bit pulse code modulation recording capability. Which meant that it could pick up a mouse’s fart at a range of a hundred metres. Gus liked his gadgets.

‘So how did you hear about us?’ Sophia asked. ‘We don’t exactly advertise.’

‘Oh, I’ve got contacts!’

‘That’s a bit secretive, isn’t it?’

‘Maybe,’ Gus answered, grinning his lopsided grin. He was gratified that Sophia responded with a more measured smile of her own.

She looked at him in quizzical fashion, then briefly brushed her fingers to his arm. It was clearly a test of some sort. Gus concentrated on seeming to enjoy her touch. But it was hard. Whatever the nature of her business, the idea that she might have a chance with him was clearly outrageous. He would no more sleep with a geriatric than a wolf would feast on rotten meat.

He tapped his fingers on the dark mahogany of the bar. Maybe it was just the weed in his system, but it occurred to him that he’d felt the same way about sushi, until he’d tried it.

‘So how’s your day been?’ he asked.

She scowled. ‘Oh, difficult.’

Gus took a deeper drag on his Gitanes, before belatedly offering her the packet. She shook her head.

‘How so?’ he enquired.

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Hey, now who’s being secretive?’

Sophia fixed him with a strange look. ‘You really want to know?’

‘I’m a good listener, Sophia.’

Sophia leant closer. ‘You know, Gus, it might be good to talk to someone about it. But not here.’

‘Where, then?’

‘Oh, I know a place. It isn’t far. A hotel.’

Jesus fucking Christ! thought Gus.

‘Well, in a minute then,’ he said.

He polished off the remainder of his whisky, then ordered another. And another. By the time he’d finished his third double, Sophia’s thinly veiled proposition no longer filled him with absolute loathing.

It had been a while, he supposed. And his dick had needs. And he was a professional; there was literally nothing that he wouldn’t do to get his story.

Chapter 6

Friday

Jasper Endqvist had his routines. Every Friday he would buy his lunch at Jan’s Poffertjeskraam on the west bank of the Singelgracht. It was a tiny little place, not much more than a market stall, which nevertheless served up the best soft pancakes in the city.

True, the kraam was an awkward walk from the insurance office in which he worked, but it was worth it. He’d even made a few calculations, – the journey burned off a good hundred calories, which was worth half a pancake in itself. And it wasn’t as if he was fat; his calorific intake was mostly offset by regular doses of squash and jogging.

Jan was just turning the cinnamon coated treats as Jasper appeared. ‘You’re thirty seconds late,’ he grinned.

Jasper pushed his glasses up his nose. ‘Sorry!’

A minute later, a brown paper bag of poffertjes in one hand, a Styrofoam cup of frothy coffee in the other, he made his way outside –

There was a thud, and a yelp, as a woman walked straight into him. Jasper cursed, and feared for his lunch, and might well have remonstrated further if not for the pained look on the woman’s face.

She was a good twenty years older than him, in her fifties, maybe, but certainly fit enough, if you liked that sort of thing. Which Jasper did, albeit in a very low-key way.

‘Oh, I’m sorry!’ she apologised. ‘My fault entirely.’

‘No,’ Jasper responded automatically. ‘It’s my fault. As soon as it’s lunchtime I get my blinkers on.’

‘I wasn’t looking where I was going. I’m new to the city. I was looking at the canal –’

‘It’s a very nice canal,’ Jasper noted. ‘The Singelgracht has always been a favourite of mine.’

‘Oh?’

‘It’s got character,’ Jasper explained. He pointed at an unusually shaped houseboat, bobbing on the water just a few metres away. ‘See that, for instance? That’s the Poezenboot. It’s a sanctuary for stray cats. See what I mean? Only on the Singel!’

‘I love cats!’ the woman said, as she plucked at her blouse. Jasper’s coffee had spilled all over it, to interesting effect.

‘That’ll need dry cleaning,’ he said. ‘I feel bad – I’ll pay for it, yes?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Why should you pay for my clumsiness?’

But Jasper was fully committed to his chivalrous course, now. He fished about in his pocket, to hand her his card. ‘Really, I insist. Let me know how much it costs to put right, and I’ll send you a cheque.’

The woman – she really was quite striking – bowed her blonde head, and murmured her thanks. Jasper watched her leave, all thoughts of his ruined lunch forgotten.

*

Chief Inspector Wever worried at another biscuit, knowing that he would regret it later. His metabolism was no longer the worker of miracles it had once been; his gut no longer performed that dance of osmotic alchemy (as Erik Polderhuis had once described it) that had kept him thin right until his late forties. Meals tended to lurk in his body, nowadays, with all the grubby determination of squatters.

He was getting podgy, frankly. His wife had told him so that very morning. He frowned, as he considered a visit to the station gym. It really was the most god-awful place, populated by the most god-awful people. The smell of sweat and guilt always stuck in the throat. He didn’t know any man who exercised out of choice. It was always a consequence of a doctor issuing a health warning, or a woman intimating that she would rather sleep with herself than a fatty. The pervasive atmosphere of any gymnasium was one of resentment and desperation.

He looked disconsolately at the biscuits, wondering if there might be anything in this anti-fat pill he’d heard so much about.

Or maybe he could simply send for Tanja. Ten minutes in her strenuous company was the equivalent of going for a ten mile run, Harald Janssen argued. Not that he would know anything about that sort of thing.

Well, slimming aid or otherwise, Anders needed to speak to Tanja. He was still feeling a little dazed from the fallout of her recent meltdown. He couldn’t let it happen again.

He opened his door. ‘Tanja!’ he called out, half hoping that she was out of the office.

A hard little shape detached itself from the softer fuzz of rubber plants and monitors. She seemed as trim as ever, Wever noted sourly.

He’d known Tanja, what, twenty-two years? Through her husband first, but later they’d stayed close. And in that time she’d always frustrated him intensely. Surprised and occasionally delighted him with some unexpected act of kindness, yes, but frustration was the main thing. She could be rude, snappy, and dismissive of the chain of command. She doubtless had a persecution complex. And yet he still worried about her. It was the main reason, in fact, he’d invested so much time in selecting her new partner. Young Kissin had many qualities, not the least of which was an imposing physical presence. He also had one of the highest recorded clean-kill percentages at the Academy firing range. He would keep Tanja safe if anyone could.

Wever was unashamedly old-fashioned in that regard. Pulling a trigger required no special skill, but aiming did, and the simple truth was that women weren’t very good at it. Take their gun away, and things were even worse. He remembered the first time Tanja had been hurt in the course of her work, when she’d been set upon by the suspected arsonist she’d been trailing. It was soon after she’d lost Anton and her daughter, and her mind was probably elsewhere. He’d ripped the gun from her hand before she could get off a shot, then proceeded to beat her senseless. He’d left her for dead.

Wever smiled grimly, as he considered the arsonist’s fate. Being burnt alive in one of his own fires was too good for him.

Tanja entered his office, coffee in hand. She still had that commemorative Janis Joplin mug, chipped and faded now, yet she wouldn’t drink out of anything else. And they said he was set in his ways! She was smiling, probably for his benefit. She wanted him to think that everything was going smoothly. He really hoped it was.

‘Any luck?’ he asked.

‘Well, not as such,’ she answered. ‘We think Ruben left the bar with an older, blonde-haired woman, but we’ve yet to confirm it.’

‘Oh?’

‘The barman was a bit vague,’ Tanja explained.

‘No doorman?’

‘Yes,’ Tanja replied. ‘I’ve left a message for him to call me. But he hasn’t done so yet. I’ve tried ringing the bar owner to find out why, but no answer. It’s still a bit early for people like that, I suppose.’

Wever grunted, and glanced at the brief summary of the witness statements which sat on his desk. No one save the Asian night clerk had seen Ruben and Hester Goldberg arrive. And the girl had no recollection of seeing the woman leave. But her statement, tenuous as it was, tended to confirm that Tanja was on the right track. The main details of the woman being middle-aged, and blonde, were the same in each case.

‘This club sounds like a fascinating place,’ Wever said. ‘I must visit.’

‘Trust me, Anders, you wouldn’t be welcome. Not unless Ms Faruk has a few octogenarians stashed away in the cellar.’

‘This Sophia, then. Tell me about her.’

Tanja shrugged. ‘Blonde-haired. Fifty-ish, maybe. A little bit guarded.’

‘You think we should run a check?’

‘Probably,’ Tanja replied. ‘Although she claims she was elsewhere when Ruben left with the mystery woman.’

‘Have we confirmed that, yet?’

‘I thought it was a little soon to be asking for alibis. And really, she would have to be a bit mad, to pick up a man in her own bar and then kill him.’

Wever reached for his biscuits. ‘You know, it occurs to me that we really don’t know enough about this woman.’

‘We’re at a very early stage in the investigation,’ Tanja responded, perhaps a little defensively.

‘Even so. We need an advantage, I think.’

Tanja’s face was quite expressionless. ‘You’re thinking of calling in a profiler?’

‘Well, it’s a thought.’

‘Antje Scholten? Is that who you have in mind?’

‘She’s very good, Tanja. Her help was invaluable during the Butcher case.’

‘Was it? I never noticed.’ Tanja moved closer to Wever’s desk, her hands resting on its edge. ‘It’s way too early to be calling Scholten in. Let me see what I can dig up, first.’

Wever held her gaze for a moment, then looked away. ‘Right. You’d best get on with it, then.’

*

Tanja and Pieter had already visited two of the five Hester Goldbergs who were to be found in the local area. It was a largely pointless task, Tanja reasoned, as she rang the door buzzer of their latest target. Setting aside for one moment the possibility that the killer might easily have come from further afield, it seemed highly unlikely that she would have been so careless as to use her real name. The more Tanja cast her mind back to the crime scene, the more she believed that there was something preternaturally cold and premeditated about it. The fact that the killer had afterwards lingered to take a shower, for instance: it didn’t speak of panic; quite the opposite.

This Hester Goldberg lived in a flat above Dag En Nacht, one of the numerous gay bars which were to be found along Kerkstraat, which, in typical Amsterdam fashion, was equally famous for its beautiful churches. For all that it was only just after lunch, the bar leaked a noisy throb of sickly sounds and colours onto the street, the plate glass wobbling to the mellow bass of a trance anthem.

‘You’d have to be a fairly party-orientated person to live here,’ Pieter observed, as he peered up at the upstairs flat.

As it happened, his assessment was completely wide of the mark. As Hester buzzed them in, and they stepped inside her mean, one-room apartment, it was immediately apparent that the last thing on her mind was partying.

The room was almost entirely bereft of furniture. A black-and-white television sat in one corner, a coat-hanger aerial arranged above it. There was a bed, of sorts, which was really little more than a mattress on the floor. There was a sink, a tap dripping constantly into a stained bowl. And a cooker, the oven door dented, the enamel chipped. The walls were of bare white plaster, which had flaked here and there, perhaps in response to the constant pounding from below. The sound was felt, more than heard.

And in the centre of this empty space sat a woman who gave the distinct impression of being even emptier. Her blue eyes – the only spot of colour that Tanja could discern in the room – were wide and staring. Her hair was of a pale, lank blonde, and rested flat, lifeless, against her head.

She was a little older than Tanja, but still within the compass of the Cougar Club’s typical age range.

Tanja exchanged a look with Pieter. Had they got lucky?

‘What do you want?’ the woman asked.

Tanja introduced herself and Pieter. Hester glanced at the proffered badges, without seeming to see them.

‘We are sorry to disturb you,’ Tanja began.

The woman nodded. ‘Yes, and you should be. I am very busy, as you can tell.’

Tanja had seen a great deal, but there was something in Hester’s patently self-mocking bitterness which disconcerted her. She stiffened, thinking that yes, they might have got lucky. If this woman were ever to direct her self-loathing outwards –

‘We are investigating a crime,’ Tanja said. ‘A murder.’

‘And you think I did it?’ Hester laughed, a creaking, grinding sound.

‘We are not saying that at all,’ Pieter interjected smoothly. ‘But it would certainly help us if you could answer a few questions.’

Hester nodded. ‘All right.’

Pieter smiled gratefully. To Tanja’s surprise, Hester offered a little smile of her own. The kid had that way about him. People seemed to like him, as a matter of principle. She couldn’t condone it, but she did recognise that it might prove useful.

‘So,’ Pieter continued, ‘perhaps you could start by telling us where you were on Wednesday night, between, say, eight-thirty and midnight?’

‘I was having dinner,’ Hester answered. ‘With my friend.’

Pieter nodded, and took out his notebook. ‘And your friend’s name?’

‘Heidi Brinkerhoff.’

‘Do you have an address for her?’

‘She lives in Eindhoven, somewhere. I can never remember the name of her street. All I know is I turn left at the Philips Stadion, and then I’m there.’ She turned away, chin in hand, seemingly bored with everything. ‘Anyway, she put me up for the night.’

‘Do you have a phone number for her?’ Pieter pressed.

Hester stared at him for an instant, her lifeless blue eyes momentarily teeming with flecks of shoaling silver. But then she sighed, and grew still again. ‘There’s an address book by the cooker,’ she said.

Tanja moved to retrieve it. She flicked through, noting that it contained just the four names: Hans, Laura, Cornelius, Heidi.

And I thought I was lonely, Tanja mused.

Pieter seemed to be doing all right, so Tanja stepped out onto the landing, so she could ring the number herself. Heidi answered, and soon confirmed what Hester had said. Tanja sighed, knowing that the chance of making a quick arrest had passed her by. Of course, there was always the possibility of collusion; that was a given.

‘Is Hester all right?’ Heidi asked. ‘She’s not in any trouble?’

‘None at all,’ Tanja answered.

‘Only I’m very worried about her. I’m really the only person she has, now that Cornelius – her brother, I mean – is dead.’

‘Ah,’ Tanja sympathised. ‘A recent loss?’

‘A few months back. But Hester can’t let it go.’

‘Well, thank you for your help!’

Tanja hung up, and made her way back into the room. She caught Pieter’s eye. He shrugged, and shook his head a fraction.

They left the grieving woman to her misery. It was a relief, in truth, to get away from her.

*

Hana Huisman and Anita Berger had only met through their student daughters, but they’d quickly developed a quirky friendship of their own. It was an odd mix on the face of it: Anita was brash, and seemed to think of nothing but having as much fun as she could; whilst Hana liked nothing more than to revel in her own downtrodden misery.

At least that was how it seemed to her daughter. Ursula poked her head round the sitting room door, wondering if her mother’s boyfriend – the root of Hana’s unhappiness – was in residence.

No, of course he wasn’t. Lander Brill never came round when her mum had a friend over; he seemed to have a sixth sense in that regard. Anita Berger probably had no idea that he even existed. Hana would certainly never have mentioned him. She was ashamed, and with good reason.

Lander Brill! The sweat-stinking, woman-beating, oath-breaking Lander Brill, for whom Ursula had dreamed up a perfect end – involving a wooden box, and a hungry rat. She’d got the idea from a recent trip to Amsterdam’s Museum of Torture. The idea was that the box was fixed tight to the victim’s stomach, the rat inside: the only way the rodent could escape was to eat its way through the man’s guts.

Anyway, Lander was elsewhere, presumably in a bar. Ursula stepped into the room, nodding greeting. Anita, she saw, was dressed in the fashion of an eighties prostitute; her mother looked like some fifties hausfrau.

So, Anita and Hana were quite different. But then, so were Ursula and Maria. And the girls could hardly have been closer, in Ursula’s mind.

‘Anyone want a coffee?’ Ursula asked as she moved into the kitchen.

‘No thanks,’ Hana answered, without looking up. Her gaze was fixed on Anita.

The sitting room was within earshot of the kitchen and Ursula could easily hear what they were saying. She didn’t pay their conversation much heed, at first – but as the kettle came to the boil she heard a name filter through the whistling.

Mikael Ruben.

‘Of course,’ Anita said, ‘I always thought he was a bad sort. And my Maria, so sweet and trusting! I warned her about him, you know.’

‘It must be awful for her,’ Hana murmured.

‘She’ll get over it,’ Anita responded, somewhat brutally. And then, ‘I was shocked to hear of his death, though. It’s always sad when someone dies.’

‘Do we know how he died, though?’

‘Well, not exactly,’ Anita admitted. ‘The police were quite circumspect. But I can guess, given the kind of man he was!’

‘You think he kept other women?’

‘Well, as I understand it, yes.’

Ursula’s eavesdropping was disturbed by a familiar snuffling. A scruffy mongrel, half Labrador, half something unidentifiable, pottered into the kitchen, his nose twitching and his tail wagging.

‘Go away,’ Ursula instructed.

Benny sat down on his haunches, his tongue lolling in response to the heat. Ursula frowned, but gave him a quick pat on the head. She was actually quite fond of the dumb creature. They’d bought him a few years back, at the suggestion of Hana’s doctor. Ursula’s mother had always suffered from withering bouts of depression; the doctor argued that having a dog around might help to keep her cheerful. It hadn’t actually; she’d simply developed an allergy to go with her other problems. But Hana would rather put up with a permanently runny nose than countenance giving Benny away.

Or a bloody nose, if the alternative were to risk losing Lander Brill.

Stupid, stupid woman.

Ursula took her coffee through into the sitting room. Benny followed her, his lead clasped optimistically in his mouth.

‘He wants you to take him for a walk,’ her mother said, stating, as ever, the completely fucking obvious.

‘Can’t you do it?’ Ursula retorted. ‘I’ve got some college stuff to take care of.’

‘I’m entertaining, Ursula!’

That and the fact that she was scared to leave the house. The only time the poor dog ever got walked nowadays was when Ursula came round.

Or so she’d thought. ‘I’ll take him,’ Anita offered. ‘We had a fine old time when we went to the park before. Didn’t we, boy?’

Benny whined, and gave the impression that he really didn’t give a shit who took him.

‘Thanks,’ Ursula mumbled. And then, ‘I’m sorry for your trouble, Mrs Berger. Poor Maria.’

Anita sighed, and shook her head sadly. ‘Yes. Poor Maria. She will be relying on her friends to get her through this, you know.’

Ursula nodded. ‘Well, I’m her best friend. I’ll see to it.’

Ursula smiled. Anita smiled. A simple enough exchange, which nevertheless seemed to follow some deeper course. It was good; they had an understanding: neither would hog Maria during her time of need.

Ursula closed the sitting room door behind her, and, pausing only to snatch the Amsterdam Post from the doormat, flew up the stairs two at a time. It was good to be back home, if only for a few hours!

There was a brief write up of the murder, by a certain Gus de Groot. It didn’t amount to much, just a name and a location. Ursula pursed her lips, irritated at the reporter’s lack of daring. He must know more than that.

Still, she had a ritual to perform. She took out a pair of surgical scissors from her sewing kit beneath the bed, and proceeded to cut the article from the paper. Her mother would never notice: Hana never read the paper, for fear of upsetting herself; the limit of her interest was to have it delivered. Lander Brill for his part was probably illiterate, and had his own place besides. He only came round for sex, and to punch Hana in the face.

Ursula cringed at her mother’s weakness, but for once didn’t fixate on it. She rather took out her scrapbook from the locked attaché case, and proceeded to glue the article in place.

The scrapbook was almost full, now, crammed with five years’ worth of newspaper cuttings. Each related to an act of female violence. Where that violence served as vehicle for revenge, the cutting was framed in a red border.

The scrapbook was Ursula’s most prized possession. What had started out as a hobby had, in recent months, become the focus of her academic studies. It would form the basis of her dissertation soon enough. This was her final year; her year of triumph.

She spent a few minutes leafing through the scrapbook, feeling cheered by what she read there. She wasn’t alone; there were other women, just like her, who recognised men for what they were. And some of those women were living in this very city! Here, amongst the flower markets and canals, the museums and the parks, there lived a woman who seemed determined to change everything!

Let her kill again, Ursula thought.

Feeling a little more relaxed now, she opened her bag and removed her laptop. She drummed her fingers impatiently whilst waiting for it to power up, then navigated her way through the tortuous branches of an old-fashioned file tree, until she found a folder labelled Coursework. She entered her password, then opened a sub-folder, Research.

Fifty-six icons, photos-in-miniature, peeked out at her. Closing her eyes and letting the mouse move where it would, she double-clicked, opening her eyes slowly to see what she might have unearthed.

It was Maria, a ten-pin bowling ball in hand, pointing at her feet, and laughing. Yes, those shoes were funny. And Maria, delicate thing that she was, seemed to be struggling to lift even the lightest ball.

Click. Maria standing on the steps of the Stadsschouwburg theatre, wearing a gown, looking like the most beautiful gypsy princess who ever lived.

Click. Maria asleep in bed, the duvet resting about her waist, her breasts bared. They were large enough, and perfectly symmetrical, in a way that breasts mostly weren’t. But that was Maria all over – each part of her body seemed to exist in perfect harmony with its neighbours, and itself.

Ursula scowled as she considered how all this might look to a casual observer. To her mother – no, even worse, a man. Hideous men, with their objectification of women and pornography and mindless arousal. Where was the beauty in that?

Click. Two dark bands, and a bright line between, and in the centre of that brightness Maria, showering away the dirt of the filthy world that men had built.

Fuck it, even language itself was a male invention, if Ursula remembered her literary theory. There were no words in the corrupted lexicon of men to describe what she felt for Maria.

Ursula powered down her computer and sat very still on the edge of the bed. She could hear the other women downstairs, their voices a drone, and they might as well have been ghosts.

She took out her phone, opening the picture library. She’d taken a number of shots, during the course of her surveillance.

Mikael had fascinated her, as a virologist might be fascinated by a deadly virus. She’d wanted him destroyed, clearly, but at the same time there was a great satisfaction to be had in hunting him down. So, she’d tracked him all the way to Enge Lombardsteeg.

Something had prevented her from following him downstairs into that strange underground bar. So she’d remained upstairs. She smoked a joint; marijuana was a feminine pleasure, born of the fertile earth.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.