Assignment in Amsterdam

by Carrie Bedford

  I let Sam do most of the talking while I caught my breath. He described the wiring closet downstairs and the tunnel that led to the commercial building.

  “We must have triggered an alarm,” I said. “Someone drove into the car park over there. It might have been the man who was following Eline, the one she made the sketch of.”

  “Do you know what they do in that building?” Sam asked. “What sort of business is it?”

  “No idea, but it’ll be simple enough to find out,” Karen said. “I’ll check it online. Come and sit down. You look as though you could do with a cup of tea.” She led the way to the kitchen.

  Karen did some research on her phone while Sam made tea. “I found that building,” she said. “It’s rented to a graphics design firm called Alpha Design.” She looked up at us. “What do you think is going on? The tunnel is a secret passageway between that office building and this house? But for what purpose?”

  “I’ve no idea,” Sam said. “But it can’t be anything good.”

  17

  The tea finally settled my nerves enough that I stopped shaking.

  “I think we should tell the police about the tunnel and the alarm system,” I said.

  “It could be nothing,” Sam said. He stood up and leaned against the counter. “But I agree. The tunnel doesn’t show up on the plans. None of the paperwork mentions an alarm system or any hint of a connection to the office building. All of that should have been detailed in the preliminary inspection reports.”

  “Eline mentioned once that the business must be doing well. There were always cars parked in front and people going in and out,” Karen said.

  I thought about that. Did those employees know about the secret tunnel? And what was the point of it if it only led to a wiring closet in the abandoned kitchen downstairs? I was wondering if there was another entrance into the house that we hadn’t seen when Sam waved his hand in front of my face.

  “Hello? Are you still with us?”

  “Yes. And thinking of strange items not shown on plans, we still don’t know what that concrete pillar is for,” I said.

  “What pillar?” Karen asked.

  Sam quickly described the mysterious concrete structure that he’d found behind the walls.

  “So maybe the next logical step would be to go up to the top floor and break in through the paneling there,” Karen said. “That might explain what it’s doing there.”

  Sam checked his watch. “We’ll do that first thing in the morning. It’s almost one, and I’m knackered.”

  “Perhaps we should just stay here for the night?” I suggested. I was worried about Sam’s leg. His limp had become more pronounced. Far from resting it as advised by the doctor, he’d been running around on it all evening. It seemed best to get him to sleep on one of the comfortable couches.

  “So, is it okay if I stay too?” Karen asked. “I’d really like to get to the bottom of all those papers and I want to be here when you investigate upstairs.”

  I felt uncomfortable about sleeping in a guest bedroom because I’d be separated from Sam, so I suggested we both camp in the living room. Karen said she’d work on the papers for an hour or so before taking a nap on Eline’s bed. Sam and I collected some blankets and pillows and settled on the cushy sofas. After making sure our phones were being charged up, we checked our messages. Sam said Alex had texted to say she was going straight to her aunt’s house after dinner and would see us first thing in the morning. Josh had texted me several times over the course of the evening, so I responded to all of his messages, wishing we were at home together. There was no point in worrying him with stories of secret tunnels and alarm systems, so I stuck to the basics and told him we were doing fine and that I’d be home on Friday.

  As I fidgeted on the sofa, adjusting my pillow and trying to stop the blanket from falling off, I thought wistfully about my own comfortable bed with Josh in it. About our Saturday morning routine of coffee at our favorite cafe, before wandering through the market to buy provisions for a nice dinner. Every week, Josh bought me flowers from the same stall. For a minute, the sweet fragrance of last weekend’s white roses floated around me. Then I breathed in again and smelled only dusty fabric and lemon-scented furniture polish.

  From where I lay, the sky filled the window, but it was overcast, tinged orange from the city’s streetlights. Occasionally, a sprinkling of stars twinkled for a moment before being blotted out by swollen purple clouds.

  Sam seemed to fall asleep quickly. His breathing was soft and regular. I remembered a camping trip we’d taken to the Brecon Beacons in Wales. There’d been six of us, looking forward to a weekend away from London, planning to roast chestnuts on blazing fires under a full moon. But we’d never even seen the moon or managed to light a fire. For two days, cold rain had inundated our campsite, filling the fire pit with grey, ashy water and washing away one of our tents. Determined to make the best of it, we’d huddled together inside the remaining tent, sipping tea made on a thermos stove and telling scary stories. At night, while the rest of us struggled to get any sleep at all, Sam had slumbered peacefully, as he did now.

  I moved my pillow around and willed myself to go to sleep. But the more I tried, the more awake I felt. A floorboard creaked, and I bolted upright, my heart pounding. It took a few seconds to recall that Karen was in the house. Maybe she couldn’t sleep either.

  I eased myself off the couch and, using the light from my phone screen, I tiptoed into the hall. All the doors were closed. Reluctant to disturb Karen if she was asleep, I turned back towards the living room.

  I’d only taken two steps when the sound of another creaking board froze me in place. My heart pounded so hard against my ribs that it hurt. Willing myself to calm down, I strained to listen. There it was again, another creak. It came from the staircase at the end of the corridor. Someone was in the house. Had they come through the tunnel? I couldn’t imagine how. I was sure that Sam had secured the entrance to the wiring closet with all that heavy shelving.

  Moving on legs made of cement, I walked towards the nearest light switch, near the kitchen.

  And then someone grabbed me from behind. A hand went over my mouth, muffling my scream. The smell of musty wool filled my nostrils while Dutch words whispered in my ear.

  I struggled, twisting my head to face my attacker.

  It was Henk.

  He let go of me and put a finger to his lips.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I kept my voice low although I wanted to scream at him. He whispered back in a torrent of Dutch that made me throw my hands up in frustration. I needed Karen to sort this out.

  Grasping his coat sleeve, I guided him along the hallway to Eline’s bedroom door. His eyes widened but he kept quiet as I knocked and then pushed the door open. Karen was still sorting through papers by the light of a table lamp.

  She jumped when she saw me. “What’s the matter?”

  I opened the door wider so she could see Henk. They seemed to recognize each other. Henk inclined his head in acknowledgment.

  “Can you ask him why he’s back in the house and wandering around in the dark and why he grabbed me and scared me half to death?” I asked Karen.

  Shivering with cold and the residual panic of being grabbed in the dark, I pulled my cardigan tighter around me while the two of them talked.

  “Henk says he came to warn us,” Karen said finally. “He says we should leave now and never come back, that the house is evil and will hurt us.”

  “Oh, not that again,” I said. “He told us that when the chandelier fell from the ceiling. Why now though? In the middle of the night?”

  Karen shrugged. “It’s hard to understand some of what he says. He speaks in riddles half the time. To be honest, I think he’s a little crazy. He says the house has ears, and that it’s watching us. And he seems to know about the broken panels on the second floor.”

  “So, he’s been walking around, checking up on us,” I said. “But maybe he knows something u
seful. Can you ask him about the concrete pillar? Does he have any idea why it’s there?”

  Karen talked to Henk. I watched for a reaction. Even though he shook his head, I didn’t believe he didn’t know something. He blinked several times and shuffled backwards a few inches.

  “Henk,” I begged. “Please tell us what you know.”

  When Karen repeated my words, he lifted his eyes to stare at me. In the lamplight, they were amber, like Vincent’s. I stared back, noticing that his aura was moving faster. Not a good sign.

  He spoke to Karen again and then turned away, shuffling along the hall towards the stairs.

  “Is that it? That’s all he’s going to say?” I asked Karen as we heard the front door open and close. I was wide awake now, adrenaline still pumping through my body. “I need a cup of tea.”

  “He’s a strange one,” Karen said, as we walked to the kitchen. “I never did understand why Tomas kept him around. Still, he was always kind to Eline.” She looked over at me as she filled the kettle. “Do you believe all that about the house being evil?”

  I thought about it. “I think this house has secrets.”

  My eyes drifted to the sledgehammer leaning against the wall. “You saw how Henk reacted to the question about the concrete pillar?” I asked. “It means something. I think we should find out what. We need to break into the top floor, to see if the damn thing goes all the way up. Or if it is a structural support for something up there.”

  “Like what?”

  I’d had an idea but decided to wait to see for myself. “Let’s do it. Now.”

  “I’ll go put my shoes on,” Karen said.

  “I’ll wake Sam.”

  It took a couple of firm shakes to awaken him. When his eyes opened, he bolted upright, looking panicked.

  “It’s all right,” I rushed to reassure him. When I explained the plan, he jumped up and followed me. We stopped to collect the hammer.

  Five minutes later, we stood facing a green wood panel in one of the two vast chambers on the top floor. The portable lamp threw hard white light against the faded paint.

  “Do you think it will be the same as the one below?” Karen asked. “With all the old pipes and cables?”

  That seemed the most likely, but I was still hoping for an answer to the question of the concrete pillar.

  “Alex will be gutted to miss out on all this,” Sam said. “But the time has come.” He lifted the sledgehammer, steadied himself, and banged it into the wall.

  Karen and I took a few paces back as splinters of wood flew from the paneling. With just three more blows, which were deafening in the echoing, empty room, he’d made a sizable hole. He put the hammer down and stood back to examine his handiwork. “We need a bigger hole,” he said with a grin. He seemed to be enjoying the destruction.

  After another few hits, the hole was big enough to walk through. We carefully peeled away jagged pieces of heavy wood, surprised to see that the back side of the paneling was lined with sound-deadening insulation and painted white.

  “That’s different,” Sam said, passing a piece to me. “The wall downstairs was just plain wood.”

  I turned on my phone light and pointed it through the shattered panel. Crowding together, we all peered in.

  “What the heck?” Sam asked. In the darkness beyond, a strip of blue and green lights flickered on and off. A soft hum emanated from the space. And there was warm air in there, far warmer than the chilly damp chamber we were standing in.

  “Shall we?” I asked, already stepping carefully through the opening Sam had created. He stopped to reposition the portable lamp so that it shone through the hole. The bright light illuminated the center of the room, leaving the edges in deep shadow.

  We were in an area roughly eight feet wide and twice as long, similar to the space we’d found behind the painted panels on the floor below. Above, a row of skylights offered glimpses of the night sky. Those windows were invisible from the garden, I realized.

  Four sleek black and chrome desks and office chairs were lined up along one wall. Each desk held a computer keyboard, a mouse, and three large monitors.

  “Good lord,” Sam said. “I didn’t expect to find an office in here.”

  “A functioning one,” I said, pointing to a six-foot tall glass cabinet housing what looked like a computer server, with its green and blue lights winking on an array of black boxes. At one desk, a coffee mug sat on a coaster, and a jacket lay draped over a chair, but there were no piles of papers, no photos in frames, no topical cartoons taped to the monitors as there were in our offices in London. I picked up the cup. A half-inch of coffee sloshed around in the bottom. It was cold but seemed fresh, not something that had been abandoned days ago.

  “What do you think they do up here?” Sam asked.

  “And who are ‘they’? This seems like a very high-spec technology set-up.”

  “Software development? Financial trading?” Sam suggested as I followed Karen towards a hefty steel door at one end of the room. It appeared to be the main entry into the office, and it was protected with a keypad. She pulled on the handle, but the door didn’t budge.

  “Interesting that you need a code to get out,” I said, inspecting the keypad.

  “Interesting and scary,” Karen said. “Why all the security?”

  We’d reached the end of the office, so we turned back to walk slowly past the desks and the server. We joined Sam at the other end of the room, where he was examining a fancy coffee maker in a small, neat kitchen space.

  He opened the fridge and pulled out a carton of cream, which he sniffed. “Still good,” he said. “It seems that people are currently working here.”

  Karen glanced around nervously. “We shouldn’t stay long then. What if someone comes back?”

  I lifted my phone to illuminate the space beyond the kitchen. There was nothing but a wall with a single door, with WC initialed on it.

  No sign of the concrete pillar, or anything to explain its presence on the floor below.

  Sam pushed open the door. Inside was a narrow landing and, to one side, was another door that opened, predictably, to a loo. But, ahead of us, the space widened. In unison, we shone our lights into the shadows, and my breath caught in my throat. My guess had been right.

  We were standing in front of a huge vault.

  Although the exterior steel door lay open, an inner iron gate with multiple locks protected the safe. I moved closer and looked in through the bars. Against the far wall, gold bricks were stacked from floor to ceiling. Grey metal boxes occupied a corner of the vault floor and a half dozen red cases sat on a long shelf that was otherwise empty.

  Tearing my eyes away from the glittering stash, I examined the complex system of locks and levers on the vault door. The safe was an antique, I thought, although not as old as the house, obviously. I remembered from an architecture class that it was only in the late 1800s that vaults of this kind had started to be installed. Several years ago, I’d worked on the design for a remodel of a historic building in London that contained an early-model safe like this one. All the new construction had to be done around it. The thing was practically indestructible.

  This explained the massive concrete pillar on the second floor. It and all the reinforcements below it were essential to support the tremendous weight of the steel vault.

  “What the heck is that doing here?” Sam murmured.

  A thousand questions milled around in my head as I gazed at the vault. Even though I’d conjectured that the pillar might support a heavy safe, I hadn’t imagined it would be in use. I’d thought it might be an artifact of the past life of the house. But here it was, guarding its treasures, alongside the very present-day computing array.

  It took a minute for me to realize that I was shivering. Ice water trickled down my spine. I grabbed Sam’s sleeve. “We need to go.”

  “Hang on.” Sam snapped some photos of the vault and the stacks of gold bars. As we hurried back into the office area, he took mor
e pictures.

  We scrambled back through the breach in the paneled wall and stood for a second, staring at the hole and the shards of wood lying on the floor.

  “I think someone will notice they had uninvited guests,” I said, with an attempt at humor. I had goose bumps all over. We’d thought we were breaking into an old and abandoned part of the house, something that had seemed perfectly reasonable in the context of drawing up anatomically correct plans. But we’d stumbled into something that was clearly supposed to be secret. Someone would be very unhappy.

  “I think we need to call the police and tell them what we found and how,” I said. “We can explain it before anyone else reports the break-in.”

  “But wait,” Karen said. “We didn’t do anything wrong. It seems to me that these people, whoever they are, are trespassing on the Janssens’ property. Eline had no idea this was here. I think we should contact her lawyer first thing in the morning and tell him what we’ve found. He can advise us on the best way to proceed from there.”

  Sam nodded. “Karen’s right.”

  “I suppose so. We were just doing our jobs,” I said. “But we should still get out of here. We don’t want to risk a confrontation with anyone. Let’s grab our things and go.”

  We hurried down the stairs to the kitchen and began gathering up our plans and laptops. Karen collected the documents she’d been reading in Eline’s room.

  “We should leave the keys on the table for Henk, as Mr. Bleeker instructed,” I said, taking one last look around to make sure we hadn’t left anything behind. Apart from a huge hole in a wall.

  “Done,” Sam said, putting a bunch of keys on the kitchen counter. “But I can’t find Vincent. I hate to leave him here alone.”

  “I’ll come back for him tomorrow.” Karen held up a keychain. The fob was a pretty silver heart and it held three keys. “These are Eline’s spare house keys,” she said. “She gave them to me so that I could help with picking up boxes and suitcases.”

  We hurried down the stairs and out into the night. At two in the morning, the streets were deserted. It was cold, made worse by a brisk wind that ruffled the surface of the canal.