The Copycat

by Jake Woodhouse

The whiskey started off rich and full and peaty. A whole world to dive into after the long day. Now, at the bottom of the second glass, it just tastes harsh, tastes like alcohol and little else. He knows he should be going to bed; he has to be back in the office first thing, but with all that’s going on he’s not been able to sleep. The whiskey had seemed like a good compromise. He’s just considering popping a couple of painkillers, the ones he swallowed earlier to stave off the migraine not enough to see him through the night or fend off the assault the single malt is going to mount in a few hours, when his phone lights up.

  ‘Bad news. My source there says he’s actually on the team now, officially.’

  ‘Where is he now?’

  The words feel a little off in his mouth, not exactly slurred but just … off. He hopes it’s not obvious.

  ‘He’s been out all evening with a woman, but he’s back at his houseboat now.’

  ‘I’m beginning to wonder if we shouldn’t act pre-emptively. I’ve been told we can send a little message.’

  ‘Thing is, the woman’s still with him. At this stage it’s fair to assume she’s staying the night, which kind of complicates things.’

  ‘Keep watching. There’ll be an opportunity; you just need to be ready to take it.’

  He washes a couple of pills down with the last of the liquid and goes to bed, where he finally drifts off right before the alarm sounds, bright and jangling and painful.

  TWO DAYS BEFORE

  * * *

  Sorry

  Morning. Consciousness unfurling like a sticky tentacle. It takes in my body, the smooth warmth of the sheets; it takes in sound, the hum of the fridge, the cry of seagulls; it takes in that Sabine is no longer here, though I can still smell her perfume on the pillow. It also takes in the fact that I only had one dream where I heard footsteps on the roof and the wail of sirens.

  Which overall is a massive improvement. There was a time when I barely slept for weeks on end, days merging into night and back again until I thought it would never end. Those were the months after I’d been put on medical leave, months of emptiness which somehow still managed to be full of angst. Some days I paced round the houseboat for hours on end, unable to leave, unable to make a decision on anything. I thought I was going crazy. And whenever I did finally manage to drift off through sheer exhaustion I’d be treated to a Technicolor mash-up of every dead body and every crime scene I’d ever attended. I remembered details I didn’t even know I knew with startling clarity, and when I checked old crime-scene photos I’d find that, sure enough, my mind wasn’t making this stuff up. I felt the cumulative shock of each murder like sickening body blows, my heart rate constantly high. I lost track of the times I woke up sweating and screaming and shuddering.

  It’s ironic that the only thing that helped lessen the frequency and intensity of those episodes is a plant that is only semi-legal. What the tourists don’t realize is that although the selling of cannabis in coffeeshops is tolerated, the supply chain behind it all is still a criminal enterprise. Growing it, curing it and transporting it poses a real risk of prosecution, and it’s only once the package is dropped off at the coffeeshop itself that you’re in the clear. The whole thing is beyond insane. I’d busted enough grow rooms in my time before making inspector on the homicide squad, and it’d been done with a sense of righteousness which now makes me cringe. Many times the grower had claimed it was medicine, believing that their drug was actually helping, not hindering them, a claim I’d dismissed as addicts in denial. Now I wonder how many of them were like me. I marvel at the fact that life has a startling tendency to switch up on you. Or a tendency to be just plain perverse.

  I get up and open the bathroom door. Kush clambers out of the bath and follows me through to the kitchen where he stretches, front paws out, back concave and head down as if he’s praying to some kind of doggy deity. Which he kind of is, because I Am the God of Food. I dispense some in a suitably grand manner and leave him to it. I check my phone, and there’s a text from Sabine saying she had to leave early, and that she’d had a great night.

  It’s misty outside, and the thick black paint coating the deck is slippery with moisture. Silver with it too. Tram bells clang over on Rozengracht and cyclists glide in and out of the mist. There’s a strong smell of tar which I think must be coming from Leah’s boat. I lean against the side rail as I take my first pull of the day.

  Contrast with the station. Bustle, noise, chaos and stress.

  Turns out the sirens of my dream might have been real. A man had sprayed a liquid into a crowd of revellers at Rembrandtplein at just past two in the morning. The liquid has yet to be fully identified, though clearly from its effects it was a strong acid, and the whole incident has been declared terror-related. Which means Vermeer’s team has been pruned back to the bone, the bone in this case being Vermeer, Jansen, myself and just two junior officers. And Kush. Because I can’t leave him on board all day, and don’t know what else to do with him.

  Vermeer raised an eyebrow when I walked in, but I notice that just ten minutes later he’s positioned himself next to her and she’s absent-mindedly stroking him whilst she works on something on her computer. Jansen has joined us in the meantime; he’d been out for a run and had walked into the office in socks, carrying a pair of expensive running shoes and huffing and puffing like he’d just completed a twenty-four-hour Iron Man. A wedge of sweat darkened his T-shirt. Vermeer took one look at it and told him to clean up, and quick.

  With the numbers so low the project of tracking the two victims’ movements over the last couple of years has ground to a halt, though I note that they’d got a few points up on a map before they’d been reassigned last night. I stare at it, trying to see something, a pattern that’s so far been missed. But nothing leaps out at me.

  I remember my resolve from last night, and access the system, intending to search for Sabine’s ex. But I don’t have his surname, and the incident report from the bar the other night makes no mention of it either. I debate texting her and asking for it but decide against it. Then I dial down to Roemers; I want to see if he’s got anywhere with the charity Huisman had donated to.

  ‘What charity?’ he asks when I speak to him.

  ‘The money Huisman sent to the charity. We talked about you finding out more about it? Remember?’

  ‘Yeah, I remember now. Got sidetracked. You still want me to look into it?’

  I tell him I do want him to look into it. Preferably right now. I put the phone down to find Vermeer looking at me.

  ‘You okay?’ she asks.

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘You’ll tell me if you’re not, right?’

  ‘I will.’

  She takes a few moments as if to assess whether she can trust me or not, then seems to come to a decision.

  ‘All right, got something for you. We’ve not yet spoken to the chief operating officer at Marianne Kleine’s start-up, but given how stuck we are I think it’s probably worth doing. You up for it?’

  ‘Sure, when are we going?’

  ‘We’re not, you are. I’ve got a few things to do. Here are the details.’ She hands across a sheet of paper. She pauses at the door, looks on the verge of saying something, but then leaves.

  With the meeting set up in half an hour I’m quickly going through what I can find on Kleine’s start-up when Roemers calls back.

  ‘Not much to report. Whoever set up the charity did it in such a way that it’s hard to find out anything about it. The only concrete thing I’ve got so far is their correspondence address, which is a PO box. Anything else is gonna take quite a while to unpick.’

  ‘There’s no phone number? No way to contact them?’

  ‘Only thing I can find is the PO box.’

  We seem further than ever from finding Huisman, and this is pretty much all we’ve got. I tell him to do it. He sighs and tells me there’s no way he has the time or resources.

  ‘Where’s the PO box?’

  ‘Why, you gonna stake
it out?’

  ‘No. I’m not.’

  But Jansen is. At least that’s my plan. He doesn’t sound thrilled when I swing the idea past him. He suggests a uniform instead. I tell him to do whatever he needs to do. He agrees, and leaves to sort it out.

  Before leaving, I speed-read what I’d managed to find on Kleine’s start-up, the main point of note being that two months earlier she’d raised 1.5 million euros in VC funding. From all the press releases it was quite hard to work out what the business was actually for, and the website didn’t help much either. It did have lots of cool sliding animations and pictures of impossibly happy people doing everyday things: a large wristwatched man plays golf, an old couple hand in hand are caught mid-skip on a tropical beach, a woman with arms raised hits the finishing-line tape whilst a blurred crowd go wild. None of which really tells me anything. The only constant between all the images that I can make out is their dazzling white teeth. Maybe it’s a dental start-up? Jansen had said microbiome, maybe oral microbiome?

  ‘Right, let’s go and find out what they’re all grinning about.’

  I’m expecting Kush to leap up at my words, maybe even bark, but all I get is silence. I look around; I can’t see him anywhere. Where’s he got to? There aren’t any females in the room, just one guy plugging away at something on his laptop in the corner.

  ‘Have you seen my dog?’

  ‘Err … no, sir. What’s he look like?’

  ‘Albino, three legs, no tail. Teeth like a walrus.’

  ‘Sorry, sir.’

  I’m starting to wonder about the hiring policy. A quick search in the outer office reveals I may have a problem. I’m standing by a desk, the bottom drawer of which is open. Inside is a very expensive-looking running shoe. Just the one.

  I eventually find Kush in the far corner, tucked behind a trolley of water-cooler bottles, doing his best to utterly destroy the missing shoe. He’s actually got his front paws pinning it to the ground whilst he tugs at the fabric with his teeth. I have to say he’s doing a pretty good job. I take it off him and make threatening gestures but he seems completely unconcerned, simply jumping up and trying to reclaim his caught prey. Back in the incident room I drop the ruined shoe on the table in front of laptop man.

  ‘I’m going out to chase down a lead. I need you to get another pair of these. Identical size and colour.’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand, sir.’

  ‘Just Do It.’

  He looks at me blankly. Christ, does nobody know their corporate slogans any more?

  ‘Just Do It. Nike.’

  Blank stare.

  ‘Never mind. Just make sure they’re identical.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Be quick.’

  As I’ve not yet signed the papers Vermeer gave me I don’t have any ID which would ordinarily be required to sign out a car. I’d rather take the Stang, but it’s back at the houseboat and I don’t really fancy the walk. So I try going down to the car pool anyway and am rewarded for my positive thinking, because who should I meet but Mark Sattler. We go through the long-time-no-see routine, then he asks me about the car.

  ‘Yeah, I bought it.’

  ‘Let me guess, still in pieces.’

  ‘You’re such a downer, you know that? I actually got it working just yesterday. Been driving it quite a bit since then.’

  ‘Really? Good on you.’ He slaps me on the arm. I think the wound opens up again. ‘Like to see it sometime.’

  I tell him any time, but that I need something from the pool just now. He sorts it out, overriding the sergeant’s objections and signing for it himself, then tossing me the keys. I press the button and the car that beeps turns out to be a cruiser with POLICE DOGS written on the side and a cage in the boot space. Kush is hesitant, but I finally get him in. The look he gives me as I lock it shut is the worst kind of emotional blackmail, but as there’s been little in the way of contrition over the Eating of the Shoe I ignore it.

  Amsterdam’s Silicon Valley is what the press call it. Which says something about the standard of journalism these days, because when I pull up in the valley I find it’s nothing more than a fairly average street where a few old houses have been converted into spaces with blondwood floors, glass walls and huge whiteboards, and then rented out to a range of hopefuls, none of whom look like they’ve even left school yet.

  I’m here to meet the chief operating officer, Patrick Wust. But he doesn’t appear to be anywhere around when I reach the front of the building. A young intern, dressed in what I guess is geek chic, is working his phone hard, eyes glued to the screen, thumbs a blur. I look up at the building: typical merchant house, five storeys of red brick with a stepped gable and pulley system jutting out of it. I was once called to an address on Herengracht where a naked man had been found hanging from one almost identical. I met Tanya for the first time during that case, an investigation which ended up with both of us kneeling on the deck of a container ship with a bent cop called De Waart about to blow our brains out. No wonder I got sick.

  ‘You okay?’

  I look up to find the geek has momentarily suspended his thumbs and is looking across at me, concerned or puzzled it’s hard to say.

  ‘Yeah. Just waiting for someone. Patrick Wust, you know him?’

  ‘I do,’ the geek says. ‘Are you the police?’

  I see him looking at my Baja hoody with frank scepticism. Though it is the predominantly grey one, I suddenly realize I look like one of those painfully obvious undercover narcotics officers. Jesus. All I need is some dreads and some out-of-date street slang and I’ll be good to go.

  ‘Yeah, I am.’

  ‘Oh, riiiiiiiight. Undercover.’ He nods like he’s digging it. ‘I’m Patrick.’

  Chief operating officer. Unbelievable. At his age I’d just finished at the academy and still had to wear a uniform.

  He leads me into the building and up the stairs to the top floor.

  ‘We closed down when we heard … the news,’ he says as he fishes out a key chain. ‘But we’re planning on reopening the office tomorrow. I … oh.’

  He’s seen what I’ve just spotted, that the door is open a crack.

  ‘That’s odd.’

  I motion for him to step back. Whoever opened the door did so without a key. They used a well-aimed kick. I suddenly wish I hadn’t left Kush in the car. I toe the door open. No gunshots ring out. I step into the room and my heart’s pounding but it’s soon pretty clear that there’s no one hidden inside. The place has been trashed, though. Tables overturned, chairs jumbled up, a water cooler on its side, a large puddle darkening the floorboards. There’s also a ping-pong table which has been split in half, and a series of beanbags have been slit open, tiny white polystyrene balls dancing in the draught I’ve created.

  ‘Don’t think you’re going to be reopening tomorrow,’ I call out to Patrick who appears in the door frame. ‘You’ve had visitors.’

  The coffee place has a mix of Patrick-lookalikes and serves a range of rare coffee from minuscule plantations in far-away and, I’m sure in some cases, made-up countries. The walls are plastered in sepia maps, the current bean menu is chalked up on a large blackboard behind the baristas, and filling the air there’s that jaunty anonymous jazz usually reserved for when you’re stuck in a lift with someone you don’t know who has clearly just farted.

  Compared to Rashid’s, this place feels like it’s trying too hard. Especially when the relaxed vibe is shattered by a bearded barista telling me that no dogs are allowed inside, but we’re more than welcome to sit outside. Normally I’d take that to mean I’m more than welcome to spend my money elsewhere, but this is work so I let it slide. We grab a table and order our drinks from a waitress who’s bright and bubbly and probably cries herself to sleep at night, whilst Kush sniffs the ground and ruminates on the inequality still present in twenty-first century Holland.

  Across the street there’s a dirty white
delivery van, the driver of which looks familiar but I can’t place him. Was he someone I’d arrested back out on the streets? Or was he just questioned in relation to a crime? Or … maybe I’m just being paranoid.

  After seeing the state of his offices Patrick had got jumpy, making several calls in quick succession, and talking to me didn’t seem top of his list. I’d had to insist, just after I’d made my own call. I had to go through Jansen to get uniform out to secure the offices. Now, here in the cafe, I turn to Wust and spend a few minutes getting his background, before asking how long he’d known Marianne Kleine.

  ‘Just over two years. I met her at one of those networking events they put on for start-ups and we got talking. Next morning I get a call offering me a job.’

  ‘And what was the business doing, something to do with the dental industry?’

  ‘Dental?’

  ‘Your website … It’s full of smiling people with very white teeth.’

  ‘Oh, yeah. It’s just a holding page; we’re getting ours developed, should be ready soon. But to answer your question it’s not dental. We’re doing microbiome research.’

  Which doesn’t really answer my question at all.

  His phone is on the table face up and he keeps checking the screen. I reach out and flip it over. The look on his face says he can’t believe I’ve just done that and for a moment I think he’s about to react. But it passes. I’m starting to see glimpses of the future COO he’s going to become. Most people are intimidated in a situation like this, but he seems to be holding his own. Mind you, maybe if I’d dressed up a bit things might have been different. Tomorrow I’ll definitely pull out something a tad smarter.

  ‘Which is?’ I ask him.

  ‘The thing is, I can’t really go into details. We’ve all had to sign a pretty strict confidentiality agreement so that nothing leaks before we’re ready to launch. But essentially, we’ve got more bacteria in and on our bodies than we have cells. Traditionally medicine has viewed them as nothing more than a nuisance, unless they get out of balance and an infection occurs, in which case you kill them with antibiotics. Thing is, that model was so overly simplistic it looks barbaric now, because it’s caused almost as many problems as it solved. Kleine saw this and started to think of ways to manipulate the microbiome in far more subtle and precise ways. A few years later here we are.’