I’m looking into a large open-plan living space flooded with the warm late-afternoon light. An L-shaped sofa, which could probably seat twenty. Rugs on the polished concrete floor. But it’s not immaculate like the grounds. In fact, it’s kind of a mess: sofa cushions thrown all over, some ripped apart, foam oozing out of their innards; a painting, a massive canvas, which appears to have been painted just black, has three large cuts in it, revealing the white wall behind. First Marianne Kleine’s start-up offices, now her father’s house. What is going on? I start moving along the glass and see the kitchen section has suffered the same treatment: knives and forks scattered, shards of plates. A large tin on its side with spaghetti shooting out of the top looks like a quiver spilling arrows. And beyond that something on the floor I can’t quite make out. I edge to my left, trying to work it out, get a better view.
‘Rykel?’
She must’ve got bored of ringing the bell and come to find me.
‘Over here!’ I call out, unable to take my eyes off it. Because I can now see it’s a massive red stain seeping out from behind an enormous kitchen island. Worse, I’m pretty sure that slumped on the floor I can see a body.
Chateau Lafite 2000
We’ve got an ambulance on the way, the dispatcher had said eight minutes, and a scene of crime team scrambled from the local station in case we’re too late. Breaking one of the large glass sheets would be devastating, even if we managed it. The front door is similarly out; it’s wood but solid enough to withstand a tank. Which leaves us with one of the round windows on the first floor.
‘It’s too high. We need something to stand on,’ Vermeer says.
‘You can give me a leg up.’
She looks me up and down, then pulls out her gun.
‘How about you give me a leg up instead?’
I’m not about to start arguing with a woman holding a gun. I lean against the wall, position my hands and lock my fingers together. Vermeer flips the gun round so she’s holding the barrel then raises her boot.
‘Ready?’ she asks.
‘Go.’
The grip on her sole is chunky, and it bites my fingers as I take her weight. She launches up, puts her other foot on my shoulder. Soon she’s standing with one foot either side of my head, and I’m grasping her ankles to keep her steady. My leg muscles are already starting to shake.
‘Close your eyes,’ she says.
‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to up-skirt you.’
‘You’re not, mainly because I’m not wearing a skirt. Ready?’
‘Do it.’ I scrunch my eyes up.
I hear the impact. Glass tinkles down around me and I hope I’m not about to get another one stuck in my arm. When it’s safe I open my eyes to see a nasty-looking shard, the brother of the one I met the day before yesterday, sticking into the ground just by the toe of my shoe. Vermeer knocks a few more pieces out before declaring herself ready. Here comes the really hard part. I let go of her ankles and hold the palms of my hands flat. She steps onto the right hand first, then the left. I push upwards, my arms straining so hard they’re trembling. I can hear the ambulance in the distance. Just as I think I can’t push any further I feel the pressure ease off. Vermeer must’ve got hold of the sill. She hauls herself through and I’m free to drop my arms.
I’m by the front door well before Vermeer, and I’m starting to wonder if she’s got lost inside. The ambulance is closer now. The door swings open.
‘You okay?’ I ask Vermeer. ‘You’ve got blood on your face.’
‘Just my hand,’ she says, holding it up to show a swooping gash. ‘Must’ve wiped it.’
The ambulance has stopped, the siren cut out. We rush through the house and entranceway leading directly into the vast space. The kitchen area’s off to the left and we run over. There’s a strong smell of alcohol.
The body’s lying in a dark pool.
It’s not blood though. It’s red wine.
‘It’s him,’ Vermeer says.
I get close and reach over to feel the man’s throat. He groans when I push in for a pulse, and raises an arm to try and swat my hand away.
‘Fuck,’ Vermeer says, shaking her head.
‘We’re going to look like idiots,’ I confirm.
Running footsteps behind us on the tiled floor.
‘Well, this is embarrassing. For you two.’
I look up to see one of the two paramedics staring down at the scene. He’s got short ginger hair and black-rimmed glasses and I’m sure he spends his spare time conversing on conspiracy theory forums on the internet. He doesn’t look particularly amused.
‘The thing is …’ Vermeer says.
‘… it really looked like blood from outside,’ I finish. ‘With the sunlight and …’
He shakes his head like he’s never had to deal with such a sorry bunch of fuck-ups in his whole life, then moves closer to the body with a deep theatrical sigh.
‘You dead, sir?’ he asks, prodding him. ‘Dead, or just very, very pissed?’
Pieter-Jan Kleine groans.
‘Well, my work here is done,’ he says, standing up.
‘You could look at her hand before you go. Make the trip worthwhile.’
He glares at me, but then nods to Vermeer who shows him the cut.
‘Nice,’ he says. But he drops his kitbag and gets to work.
I get on the phone and cancel the scene of crime team. By the time Vermeer’s cleaned up and bandaged another call’s come in so the two paramedics have to run back to the ambulance, leaving us alone with Kleine.
I walk over to the bottle smashed on the tiles. Part of it is held together by the label.
‘Chateau Lafite 2000,’ I read as I pick it up. ‘Looks expensive.’
‘About a grand and a half a bottle,’ Vermeer says, adding, ‘My soon-to-be ex is a wine broker. Tosser.’
I’m stunned, both at the price, and that Vermeer has offered some personal information. But before I can follow up on the tosser wine broker soon-to-be ex she gives me a look that makes it clear nothing else is going to be forthcoming.
‘That was embarrassing.’
‘I know, but from outside it really did look like blood.’
‘Let’s get him sobered up.’
I haul him over to the sofa and wedge a large glass coffee table up against his legs to stop him moving, whilst Vermeer gets him a glass of water.
‘Two bottles of Jenever in the sink,’ she says. ‘He must be wasted.’
The wine had just been an afterthought it seems, a little tipple just to round things off after he’d downed the Jenever and tried to wreck his own home.
Vermeer walks over and Kleine holds his hand out unsteadily to reach for the glass. She throws the liquid in his face. He groans again. She gets another glass and this time hands it to him.
Whilst he’s sipping I take a quick look round. It’s even bigger once you’re inside it, the double-height ceilings reminding me of airports or warehouses more than somewhere you’d want to live. I roughly calculate I could fit four of my houseboats in here and still have enough left over for a small circus top.
Over the next few minutes he gradually comes round, to the point where he looks well enough to answer a few simple questions. He’s mid-fifties, lean, and if you gave him a black polo neck and some round glasses he could pass for a Steve Jobs lookalike. As it is he’s wearing jeans and a dirty orange sweat top, the arms of which are a little too short. His face is so pale he looks like someone’s siphoned off a few litres of blood. On the table are a variety of coffee-table books – a large volume on contemporary architecture in Chile, one on the steep-sloped vineyards of the Rhine – and a large conch shell, mainly white but with apricot tinges here and there.
I ask him about DH Biotech.
‘Why?’ he says, his voice croaky.
‘Just background really.’
He’s still feeling the effect of the alcohol, but is it just me or do his eyes narrow as he looks at me?
&nb
sp; ‘What do you want to know?’
What I really want to know is what his connection with Muller might be. But given his delicate state I decide I need to warm him up a little before getting to the important question.
‘Tell me about the company. It seems they’d been working on a cure for MS but it didn’t work?’
He winces and rubs his left temple as if it’s hurting bad. Which it probably is. He picks up the shell.
‘Marianne loved this,’ he says, turning it over in his hands. ‘She was only twelve and we’d gone on holiday to Zakynthos in Greece and she’d been so excited about diving in the sea that she’d talked of nothing else for weeks before we even got on the plane. We’d got her goggles, flippers and a snorkel, and the minute we arrived at the hotel she was itching to get in the water. Of course, she’d been imagining this rich underwater world for so long that the reality was a huge disappointment. There were no bright coloured fish, or beautiful shells. It was mostly sand and the odd bit of rubbish which had got stuck on the seabed. She was so upset that I found a tourist shop and bought this, and the next morning I went down to the beach before breakfast and hid it by some rocks so I could find it later. She was pretty reluctant to go into the water again, but I persuaded her and made sure we swam near the rocks. She saw it of course and dived for it. At first she seemed really happy, but by the next day she’d lost all interest in diving and didn’t go in the water again for the rest of the week. As we were leaving the hotel I was checking her room and saw she’d left it on the bed. I packed it, and when we got back here I showed it to her, saying she’d almost left it behind. I’ll never forget the look she gave me. “It’s not real, though, is it?” “Of course it’s real,” I told her. “You put it there, didn’t you?” she said. I said no. She got her phone out, typed something in and showed me a Wikipedia page on this type of shell, which it turns out is slightly different from any found in the Mediterranean.’
He holds it up for us to see, turning it slowly in his hands. There’s a shiny curled inner lip and a spiky outside.
‘Lobatus gigas it’s called, and it’s only found in the northwest Atlantic. I lied to her, and she knew I was lying. The same way I’d held her whilst she was growing up and told her everything would be okay, reassured her that life was wonderful and that she was going to do great things. And all I can think about is that whilst she was … was being killed she must have known I’d lied again. Do you know what that’s like, to lie to your own child?’
He’s still staring at the shell when I prompt him on my original question, why none of the compounds the company was studying worked.
‘You want a lecture on biochemistry?’ he asks, placing the shell back on the table. ‘They didn’t work. I’m not sure what else you need to know. At that stage none of the costs were recoverable.’
‘What sort of costs?’
‘Millions. Forty, fifty. Does it really matter? Marianne’s dead, and I don’t know why you’re here asking me questions about something so far in the past.’
He suddenly looks even paler than before, as if all this talk is painful. Which, of course, it is.
‘I know it seems odd,’ Vermeer says, ‘but we are doing everything we can, and we could really use your help in answering just a few more questions.’
He doesn’t take his eyes off the shell, but he finally nods.
‘The offices Marianne rented were broken into. Can you think of why that might be?’
‘When?’
‘Most likely last night; it was discovered this morning.’
‘I … no. Not anyone specifically.’
‘What about in general? Would your company be interested in the research she was doing? From what I hear it could be the start of a medical revolution.’
‘Not without Marianne it won’t. But anyway, no pharmaceutical company is going to raid their offices – that’s just crazy.’
Patrick Wust seemed to think otherwise.
I show him the same photo of Huisman I’d shown Wust.
He hesitates for a moment before shaking his head.
‘I don’t recognize him. Is he the one you think killed her?’
‘Just someone we want to talk to,’ Vermeer says.
‘Did you have any dealings with Koen Muller?’ I ask him, changing tack. ‘He was on the board of DH Biotech around about that time the trial failed.’
Do I imagine it, or does something in his posture stiffen at that name? I’m just about to push for an answer when he leans forward and vomits onto the glass table in front of him, hitting both the books and the shell. Vomit runs across the table surface, and then over the edge.
‘You see his reaction before he threw up?’
‘He’s lying,’ I say as we walk back to the car.
‘It could have been because he suddenly felt bad, but … I’m inclined to agree. Pretty sure he knows Koen Muller.’
‘When I spoke to Wust he said that Marianne’s discovery could obliterate more traditional forms of treatment. And her own father works for a company that could be seen as a competitor.’
‘What are you saying?’
I shake my head. ‘I just don’t know.’
‘So where does that leave us?’
A question to which I haven’t got an answer. I glance out over the water. The sun’s setting, fattening up as it slides towards the horizon. The silhouette of a bird streaks across it.
I haven’t got an answer.
But I am going to get one.
There’s a Man With a Gun
‘Move it!’ Vermeer’s leaning out of the window yelling at the white delivery van blocking our entrance onto Bloemgracht. Result, nothing of note. She slides back and flips on the siren and lights. Two seconds later the van starts with a jump, then gets moving.
We’re here because at the same time Kleine was hurling wine onto the table, Kush was testing out the seat fabric in the car, checking it met with his stringent durability tests. Unfortunately the fabric failed, as did the foam inside, the seat belts and even the faux leather on the gearstick handle. From about fifteen metres out the whole thing looked like a snow globe just after it’s been shaken.
Result: strained relations. After we’d cleared up the worst of it into a bunch of large evidence bags which had been in the boot, I’d floated the idea of dropping Kush off at the houseboat for a while. Vermeer concurred. We’re expecting the warrant to come through soon, and we can’t leave him in the car again whilst we’re searching the place. The journey hadn’t mellowed Vermeer’s mood, not least because, as she’d loudly proclaimed when we’d gone over a speed bump in Amsterdam-Zuid, ‘Great, now I’ve got a spring up my ass.’
‘We’ll get out here,’ I tell Vermeer.
‘See you back at the station,’ she says as I take the disgraced animal out of the back. ‘If the warrant’s issued in the meantime, I’m not waiting for you.’
As soon as I shut the door she reverses hard, the engine’s high whine drowned out by the bells of Westerkerk striking the hour. We turn into Bloemgracht and I let Kush off the leash. Which is when I see a figure wearing jeans and a hoody step off the shore and onto the gangplank which leads to my houseboat. There’ve been a couple of break-in attempts over the last few years, but they usually wait until the early hours. In both cases they were heroin addicts, looking for items that could be converted into cash. The first was unlucky. Whilst trying to prise open a porthole – a move that wouldn’t have got him anywhere because there was no way he’d’ve been able to squeeze through it even if he had got it open – he’d sliced open his wrist. I’d come back late from a case and found him slumped on deck, minutes from departing the world. If I’d been a few minutes later, or the ambulance hadn’t happened to be close by when I put the call in, he would have died there. The second attempt was when I was on board, and a man had crashed through the front door. I ran at him screaming and the thin weasel-faced addict legged it fast. And now another.
‘Hey!’
The
figure freezes, shoulders rising. Then he turns, his face difficult to make out as the hoody’s low over his eyes, his face in a dark pool of shadow. After a moment of indecision he legs it even faster than the last one. Kush is off after him before me, giving chase and catching up with the man just as he skids round a corner out of view. The last I see of them is Kush jumping up, a flash of white teeth clamping round his left arm.
I spend twenty minutes walking the streets searching for Kush or the man but don’t find either. Eventually I give up and head back to the houseboat.
The kitchen light flickers when I flip the switch and for a few seconds I think it’s going to blow. I try a few more lights and each one does the same. Something’s not right, I’m going to have to call that damn electrician again.
I’m just pulling out my phone when I spot movement outside. It’s Kush, I find when I’m back on deck, standing by the gangplank. I call him over and he trots across. He’s panting hard, but otherwise appears fine. I reach out to try and stroke his head but he flicks his snout up so it catches my fingers. It feels wet. I bring my hand up so I can see it better.
My fingers are slick with blood.
‘Fucking unbelievable,’ Vermeer’s saying as I step into the incident room. I raise an eyebrow, which sets her off, telling me the whole story that she’s clearly already told those present several times already. Not ten minutes earlier her warrant request had been turned down because of lack of evidence that it would ‘further the investigation’. After she’s vented, she decides to speak to Beving, and orders me along.
The Copycat Page 17