‘What exactly did she discover?’
‘That’s as much as I can disclose.’
‘I get that, but your founder has been murdered, and your office has just been turned over. Maybe that changes things?’
His phone buzzes twice. The shake of my head stops his hand.
‘Honestly? I don’t know. I’d have to talk to my lawyer. I’m pretty sure the agreement stays in place, not least as we’re most likely going to carry on.’
‘You can carry on without Kleine?’
‘The investors put a lot of money into this; they’re not going to want to see that disappear.’
‘So the break-in doesn’t worry you?’
‘All our computers and servers are safeguarded; the information on them would be overwritten even if someone tried to clone the hard drives, so I’m not worried.’
‘Whatever Kleine came up with, did it have the potential to upset more traditional lines of treatment?’
‘Disrupt? Obliterate more like.’
‘So anyone invested in the old way of doing things wouldn’t like to see this succeed?’
‘You tell me,’ Wust says.
Kush is bored, so he rolls over onto his back and squirms around, trying to reach his own tail. When he fails to catch it he stands up, shakes his whole body, then lies down again and rests his chin on my feet.
‘What about enemies, anyone she’d clashed with recently?’
‘She could be abrasive, but you have to be to get something like this going. And the pressure increased with the funding she’d got. All those investors were suddenly interested in what’s going on, and some of them would drop in unannounced. That really hacked Marianne off, but there wasn’t a lot she could do about it. I know she spoke to her father about them. I think he just advised grinning and bearing it for the moment. If anyone knows how to weather a shit-storm it’s him.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The company he worked for, DH Biotech, went through a rough patch years ago. Something went wrong, I think, and he’d been on the front line. Marianne mentioned it once. Something like that would normally put an end to a career, but Pieter-Jan Kleine’s a fighter and now he’s really high up in the same company. She looked up to him, wanted to have that kind of fighting spirit. And she did, until …’
I show him a photo of Huisman I’d pulled from the file.
‘Recognize him?’
Wust looks but shakes his head. ‘Don’t think so. Who is he?’
His phone’s buzzing again, a call this time. The noise sets Kush off.
‘Look, I really need to …’
‘Get it, but we may need to talk again.’
As he answers his phone I scribble down my number and hand it over. ‘In case you think of anything,’ I tell him. He takes it and nods, listening intently to whoever’s on the other end of the line.
There’s something in what Patrick’s said which has set off a small jolt somewhere in the back of my brain, but I can’t quite work out what. As I’m pondering this, walking back to the car, a man calls out to me. I turn to see the bearded barista taking a break, cigarette in hand.
‘What sort of dog is that?’ he asks, as if trying to make up for earlier. The cigarette hangs precariously from his lips whilst he lets a little bit of smoke escape like he thinks he’s Bogart or something.
‘Chihuahua,’ I tell him. ‘Pure-breed chihuahua.’
I step across to the offices, which have already been taped off, a lone junior officer standing guard. A quick glance around doesn’t reveal anything that looks significant, and I’m just about to leave when it hits me, that little jolt I’d felt when talking to Wust. Marianne Kleine’s father works for a pharma company called DH Biotech, and it strikes me that I have some distant memory of Lucie Muller’s father being on the board of a large pharma company as well.
I drive away with the question buzzing round my head: was it the same one?
Back at the station I find Vermeer in the incident room alone.
‘Lonely at the top.’
‘Hey, Kush,’ she says, ignoring me.
Kush rushes to her and she fusses over him for a minute. He laps it up, a big doggy grin on his face. It’s amazing how quickly he’s wormed his way into her affections; she’s gone from a strict no-dog policy to this in no time at all.
She finally acknowledges my presence. ‘So, what have you got?’
Well, two can play at that game.
‘In a minute.’
I locate a laptop, pull up a browser and launch into cyberspace. By the time I find what I’m looking for the room has a couple of extra people in, some I recognize, and Vermeer looks like she’s calling a meeting. I join them at the round table in the centre.
‘Any updates?’ Vermeer asks me.
‘How about this? A link between the two victims which –’
‘Who has my shoe?’ Jansen demands from the doorway.
Uh-oh. We all turn to look at him, standing there with one shoe in his hand and a bereaved look on his face.
‘What shoe?’ Vermeer fires back, visibly annoyed.
‘The other one of these. Someone’s gone into my desk and taken it and I want it back.’
For some reason he sounds just like a child on the verge of a screaming tantrum. Looks like it too.
‘I’m serious,’ Jansen says. ‘Who’s got it?’
For a moment I wonder if he’s going to burst into tears. I look around to find the man I’d tasked with buying another pair, but he’s not here.
‘Really, we’ve more important things to discuss than your shoe. Sit down and we’ll get on.’
Jansen sits, but it’s with considerable bad grace. He places the shoe on the table in front of him.
‘Rykel, carry on.’
‘Up until now the only thing the two victims had in common was their mode of death. But I’ve got another connection here. Marianne Kleine’s father was involved in a pharmaceutical company, DH Biotech. The thing is, I remembered that name from somewhere. Took me a little while to track it down, and, sure enough, Judge Muller was –’
‘Rykel!’ I look up to see Frank Beving’s at the doorway. ‘You’ve not been here a day and you’re already starting to piss me off.’
I have that effect on people. But in this case I’ve no idea why. Beving steps into the room and tosses a box onto the table we’re sitting round. His aim’s good, and it slides across, spinning as it does, and hits me in the chest with a sharp corner. It’s plain white with the black swoop logo.
‘You are not to get junior members of staff to run personal errands. You want to buy some running shoes you can damn well go and get them yourself. On your own time.’
Once he’s left I push the box across to Jansen, now glaring at me.
‘Sorry. From Kush.’
He takes the box and opens it up, checking them over with frank suspicion.
Vermeer clears her throat. ‘If everyone’s happy now, let’s hear what Rykel has to say.’
‘Yes, let’s,’ Jansen replies, glaring at me.
I don’t like the accusatory tone. Neither does Vermeer it seems.
‘About the case,’ she clarifies.
‘As I was saying –’ I avoid Jansen’s incendiary gaze. ‘– Marianne Kleine’s father was involved with DH Biotech. Now if you look at these company records you’ll see a familiar name, Koen Muller, also known as Judge Muller, Lucie’s father.’
I let that all sink in. Here I am, less than a day in, and I’ve found the link between the victims. Vermeer must be impressed.
‘Oooookay,’ Vermeer says. ‘And?’
Well, if so, she has a funny way of showing it.
‘There is no “and”. Yet. But here is a possible connection between the victims: they were both the daughters of people involved with DH Biotech. I think that warrants a little more excitement.’
‘All right, look into it. Jansen, I need a word. If you’ve got over the shoe thing?’
Heads
swivel. We all wait.
‘At least they’re the right size,’ he concedes, pulling one out and inspecting it from various angles. ‘But the colour’s different.’
‘What about the PO box?’ I ask him. ‘Any movement?’
‘I’ve got someone waiting there,’ he answers, still stroppy. ‘I told them to call me if anyone comes to collect.’
He puts the shoes back in the box, gets up and walks out.
Client Confidentiality
Despite Vermeer’s lack of excitement about my theory, I decide to tackle Judge Muller, but he takes some tracking down. First I try the courthouse on Parnassusweg, but I’m told he’d retired nine months ago. The address they give me out towards Amsterdamse Bos turns out to have been sold to a developer who’d taken the large double-fronted red-brick pile and turned it into a warren of tiny flats, presumably with an eye to housing midgets. A callback to the station and a helpful junior officer puts me right, working out that he’d bought a property in Purmerend, a half-hour north of the city.
I’m driving the police dog cruiser again and wish I was back in the Stang, though Kush is much quieter when travelling caged in the back. I start to think the Stang’s maybe not the best car to have if you own a dog. Thing is, I worked so hard on it there’s no way I’m giving it up now. Kush’ll have to adjust. The E22 is relatively quiet and as I drive I think about the best way to approach the judge.
Throughout the investigation into his daughter’s death Muller stepped well over the line multiple times, and yet, because of who he was, got away with it. The pressure had started off a light trickle, but as the days progressed it turned into a torrent, which made Hank and me feel like salmon swimming upstream. His daughter had been killed in an horrific way, so it was in many ways understandable, but the constant meddling with our investigation, the phone calls, the chance meetings, the outright interference got old, fast. At one point he’d even threatened to have us both removed from the case as he felt it wasn’t moving quick enough. I told him, to his face, to do it. Funnily enough he didn’t follow through.
I pull off the main road and within ten minutes I’m turning on to a private drive lined with trees. The house zoetropes in from my left through the trunks as I navigate the long curving driveway deep with gravel. Reaching the house I park and wonder how he’s going to react when I walk back into his life.
The house itself is impressive. Big bay windows, ornate stonework and a Virginia creeper creeping over large sections of the brickwork, the cooler evenings having turned the leaves bright red. As I get out of the car I accidentally knock the siren and lights on, startling several crows which explode into the air from a large beech tree. It takes me half a minute to work out how to turn them off again. Not that I try that quickly. Petty, I know. I get Kush out of the crate and clip his leash on.
After the sirens the doorbell seems distant, ringing somewhere in the depths of what is an enormous property. Kush decides to mark one of the box balls planted either side of the entrance. He lifts his leg and squirts out a long jet of pee, most of it missing the bush and hitting the wall behind just as someone who clearly isn’t ex-Judge Muller opens the door.
‘Yes?’ she says in an accent heavy with decades of Soviet repression.
I tell her I have to see Judge Muller. She eyes me suspiciously, then throws a look over my shoulder to the car. Finally she looks at Kush, who for some reason is being well behaved for once, sitting by my side like a fully trained dog.
‘Judge Muller doesn’t like dogs.’
I tell her that Kush isn’t a dog – he’s an officer of the law.
She gives me a hard look, then shrugs. ‘Follow.’
We do, through a hallway with chessboard tiles, a large living room with Dutch masters hanging on the walls and a musty air, another hallway smelling of wax, and finally a wooden door at what must be, by now, the back of the house. She knocks, then goes in, closing it behind her. A minute later I’m ushered into the room.
At the far end a figure sits in a wheelchair, silhouetted against one of the three large windows looking onto a formal Italianate garden beyond. Bookcases line the walls, right up to ornate plasterwork, and a Persian carpet lies on wooden floorboards, dark and shiny with age. In the space above a gaudy chandelier hangs, and a clock on one of the shelves ticks a dry metronomic beat. I notice on a separate set of shelves a series of framed photos of Lucie Muller, starting with her as a baby and sequencing right up to her early twenties.
The figure in the wheelchair turns laboriously, inching one wheel forward and one back, and I see he’s hooked up to a grey metal canister, the clear tube snaking up to his thin nostrils held in place by straps stretching behind his ears. He’s dressed in mustard cords, a checked shirt, and has some kind of tweed jacket complete with elbow patches. To go with that he’s also wearing a blank expression, making me think he doesn’t recognize me. Maybe something to do with the clothing. And thinking about it my hair’s a bit longer than it was when we last spoke. His own hair’s cut the same as I remember, but the blond has lightened to almost complete white now.
‘Was that you making all that racket?’
‘The dog knocked the siren on when he was getting out of the car.’
Muller peers over his glasses at Kush but doesn’t say anything.
‘You are? The stupid maid didn’t catch your name.’
‘Inspector Rykel. Amsterdam Police.’
‘Undercover division I see. Right, take a seat.’
He clearly runs his house like he ran his courtroom. I find a leather armchair and once I’m in it he wheels closer, bringing his canister with him. At one point it nearly tips over and Kush lunges for it. Luckily I have the leash held tight so I just about manage to stop a major incident. I go to help right the canister but Muller waves me off and I’m forced to watch his slow and laborious progress.
What a change grief can make. Before, he was a powerful man, the type who have a density about them capable of pulling together whole rooms of people. Now he’s shrivelled down, whatever illness landing him in his wheelchair undoubtedly induced by the stress of his daughter’s murder. I’ve seen it happen before, the death of a loved one like the first domino to fall.
‘So why are you here?’ he says once he’s finally finished.
I sit forward in the chair and tell him about Marianne Kleine’s murder, how the particulars match exactly that of his daughter’s death. He listens with an intense stare which makes me think his eyesight’s deteriorated.
‘I know you, don’t I?’ he says when I’ve finished.
For a moment I wonder about brazening it out, but decide it’s probably not worth it.
‘I was the investigating officer in the case of your daughter’s murder, yes.’
There’s a long pause whilst he nods his head ever so slightly, eyes fixed on me.
‘Yes, I remember now. I didn’t think you were doing a very good job at the time. You and that other one.’
‘Hank de Vries –’
‘Yes, that’s the one –’
‘– is in a coma, injured in the line of duty.’
‘Well, sorry to hear that,’ Muller finally says with a distinct lack of real feeling, at least to my ears. ‘But I still don’t understand why you’re here.’
Before coming I’d done a little digging on DH Biotech. The main thing I’d discovered was that the man in front of me and Marianne Kleine’s father had both been there during a two-year period before Muller left. What my digging didn’t tell me is what contact they may have had during that time. So I start by asking him about the company.
‘What about it?’
Am I imagining it, or has he just sharpened up? I tell him about Kleine’s father, Pieter-Jan.
‘Never heard of him,’ he says. ‘I was on the board. The only people I dealt with were the COO and the CFO.’
‘He was head of research; he never presented anything to the board?’
‘Maybe, I can’t remember. It was years
ago after all, and a lot has happened since.’
‘Tell me about the company.’
‘Why? It has nothing to do with anything.’
‘Just indulge me.’
We have a little staring game, which I obviously win, as he draws a breath in and starts talking.
‘DH Biotech was formed by Didier Hoffman with the intention of finding a cure for MS. Over the years they did a lot of research and got several drugs into stage-three clinical trials. Unfortunately none of them passed. It’s a rigorous process and the fail rate is high across the board. It can take years to get a drug to market; the amount of testing that has to go into any drug is phenomenal, and costs considerable amounts of money. Each new compound you’re testing is a lottery, because it can fail at any stage during the process. Obviously the further through the process you are the more has been invested. Failure can therefore be very costly.’
A brief look at their accounts had shown they were a very profitable business, with the exception of one financial year where they posted a loss of several million euros. Which was presumably linked to the shit-storm Patrick Wust had mentioned.
‘And that’s what happened?’
Muller looks out of the window, though I can’t see what it is that’s suddenly caught his eye. On one of the shelves I spot a series of photos of him. One in particular strikes me. In it Muller stands wearing an expensively cut pinstripe suit, his hair blond and cut short. He’s shaking another man’s hand whilst accepting a small trophy. The other man is the old mayor, Sven Nuis. Both of them have politicians’ smiles plastered all over their faces.
‘I don’t know. If you’d done your homework, then you’d know I left the board a year or so before that.’
‘You left one year after.’
Yeah, I have done my homework. A silence settles into the room. I’m comfortable with it, but I think Muller’s less so. Because by lying to me he’s opened up a crack which is now impossible to close.
The Copycat Page 15