Once it’s passed I tune in to the fire investigator, a tall man with a neat grey moustache whose hands were freezing cold when we’d shaken earlier. Currently he’s crouched down where I calculate my sofa would have been. The whole top deck is gone, so the space which was below deck is now open to the sky. The hull, being made of some kind of metal, has stayed mostly intact, enough to keep it afloat at any rate.
‘It was the electrics,’ I tell him. ‘They’d just been fixed but something went wrong with one of the circuits yesterday.’
‘Where was the consumer unit?’
I take him there and let him get on with his work. And I walk back through where the bedroom wall once stood to the main space. The devastation is total. I don’t see how this can ever be repaired. I find myself over by the bathroom, where Kush would have been. The bath is still there, about a third full of ash. How long would he have lasted? I wonder. Maybe he’d already passed out from the smoke before the fire itself reached him. In many ways that would be the best option. A wave crashes down on me. It’s not canal water, it’s guilt. And sorrow. Possibly shame as well.
‘Not the electricity.’
I find I have to wipe my eyes before turning to look at the fire inspector, who has managed to walk up behind me without me hearing him.
‘What?’
‘The fire wasn’t started by electricity.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Yeah. And I’m also sure it wasn’t an accident either. Come and have a look.’
He takes me round and points out what he claims are four separate ignition points.
‘Four?’
‘At least. And that doesn’t happen by accident. No way.’
On land a van’s trying to parallel park, accompanied by a loud series of beeps and a recorded voice. Stand clear, vehicle reversing. Stand clear, vehicle reversing. Stand clear, vehicle …
‘Someone set it alight …’
‘Yeah,’ he says over the noise of the van, ‘and whoever started this wasn’t taking any chances. They wanted it to burn.’
He’s getting ready to leave, and says he’ll have his report written up by the end of the day. I find I’m still standing in the exact same spot.
‘You got any enemies?’ he asks as he steps ashore.
Sometimes I think the world is nothing but.
I step ashore myself and sit on the canal’s edge. Someone wanted my boat to burn. This is what Joel would call next-level shit, and I can feel the dark undertow swelling beneath me again. I pull out the tin of five pre-rolled joints I’d bought as a take-out after the dab and light one. Why would anyone want to burn down my houseboat? Just the random act of some lunatic? That’s bad enough, but what if it wasn’t?
What if it was something personal?
You got any enemies?
A shudder snakes down my spine.
Joint finished I get up, thinking I’d better drop in on Leah, when I spot Rashid’s place across the canal. Flashback to Kush chasing the man who’d been trying to get on board. A jumble of thoughts fall into place. I start running, my footsteps echoing off the houses over the canal like rapid gunshots. People turn and stare. I startle a seagull as I turn onto the bridge taking me over the canal. It dribbles a thin line of shit as it rises fast, flapping wings and screeching. As I’m nearing Rashid’s I glance up, and yes it’s there. I burst in, hoping against hope that he’d actually turned the thing on. I find I’m panting hard as I explain what I need to a startled Rashid.
Ten minutes later, with a coffee in hand – Rashid wasn’t doing anything until he’d plied me with a steaming mug – I’m hunched over a laptop in the back office. It’s tiny, more of a broom cupboard really with a flickering light I’d been forced to turn off for fear of an epileptic fit, and stacks of paper invoices in dire need of a bookkeeper. The focus of the CCTV is obviously the front door, the way the original thieves had got in, but given the angle, in the top right-hand corner of the screen the aft of my houseboat is just visible and the canal side beyond. I watch myself appear briefly. Kush is with me, though the camera only just caught the end of his tail. I pause it for a few moments before hitting play again.
Rashid’s head pokes round the door. ‘Anything?’
‘Not yet.’
He disappears again and I carry on until I see the first wisps of smoke and the flicker of flame initially reflected on the water. So whoever it was came from the other end. I’ll have to check if there are any other cameras along the canal, but somehow I doubt it. The blaze is getting bright fast and I watch it intensify. Suddenly there’s movement on the shore and I have to rewind. I inch the footage forward slowly until I catch a glimpse of an odd figure twisted out of shape, one arm trailing behind him. It takes me a moment or two to work it out, but once my brain’s locked on to it it’s clear as day. The figure is a man running away from my houseboat. He’s wearing a hoody. The man who’d been poking round the houseboat the other day. The one I thought was a simple druggy, trying to fund his habit with a bit of light burglary.
Only he came back, torched my houseboat, killed Kush.
I’m starting to think he wasn’t a simple druggy at all.
Familiar
‘Not you again. I’m pretty sure your clearance was revoked.’
The desk sergeant’s a charmer. No doubt about it. He scans a list with his finger, lips pursed, eyebrows furrowed like he’s pondering a difficult question.
‘Yup, there you are,’ he says finally, pointing out my name, then sliding his finger across to the next column, which is coloured red. All done with an air of supreme satisfaction. ‘Permission revoked. See?’
‘That’s not why I’m here.’
‘No?’
‘No. I’m here to report a crime.’
He dips his head and looks at me over the rim of his glasses, his eyebrows riding high.
‘Well, at least you left the mutt at home today.’
The rush is like a raging torrent. I grab the clipboard from him, toss it away and grab the guy’s shirt front, hauling him forward. His eyes shrink down with fear, his mouth open but no words coming out. My right fist is up in the air ready to strike. On the way down a hand grabs my wrist and just stops me making contact.
‘Steady on, sir,’ Jansen says.
‘You all right?’
Canteen, drink in front of me. I breathe out. The rage vanished as quickly as it came. Now I just feel like crying. Jesus.
‘I’ll be fine,’ I say, hoping that’s the truth. ‘Good catch.’
‘I was kind of torn to be honest. You’re not the first to feel the guy could use a bit of a slap.’
Once I’ve convinced Jansen I’m not going to try and hit anyone else I go off in search of Roemers. I find him at his desk, signature audiophile headphones on, colossal over-ear pieces which look pretty ridiculous, and so he doesn’t hear me as I walk up behind him and tap the back of his neck.
‘Fuck –’
I hold out the USB with the footage on and explain what I’m after.
‘Yeah, well. First off, I’m going to have to recover from the heart attack you just gave me, then I’ve got some other things I’m working on for various real police officers so I’ll get round to it when I’m ready. In an hour or three. When I can be arsed.’
‘Okay, I’m sorry. But if I was to tell you my houseboat burned down last night and there’s video of the man that did it?’
‘Really? That’s rough. What happened?’
‘Like I said, someone set it on fire. The man you’ll see on there. Killed my dog as well.’
He swivels round in his chair, his face hardening fast. ‘You’re fucking with me?’
‘Do I look like I am?’
He takes me in for a moment. Chews his lip, nods a few times.
‘Fuck man, a dog … I’m on it now.’
He’s been eyeing me up for a while, and suddenly sees his chance. I’m in the waiting area for Nellie’s clinic at the AMC and a trolley with soiled bedding m
oves between us, but the second it’s past he slips off his seat, one foot finding the floor tentatively, then the other. He moves quickly across the space, all the while his eyes staring at mine. He reaches me and I can hear his breathing, heavy and laboured. He has something in his hand and he raises it slowly and then stabs my leg over and over again. A grin cracks his face open and a long line of drool spills out of his mouth. Snot-crusts round each nostril.
‘Darling, darling, don’t do that,’ says a woman’s voice in English.
She hustles over and tries to stop any more crayon damage, though this kid’s got the kind of persistence that makes global CEOs. Or serial killers. And maybe it’s just my mood, but I don’t like the look in his eyes. It seems cold somehow, like there’s a dark intelligence in there, watching, waiting. The woman gives me a weak smile and an even weaker apology, which somehow seems to convey the message that it was actually all my fault anyway.
Perched on her hip is another child, who, from the way she’s cradling her, is the reason they’re here. She looks like a nice kid, a little shy maybe, and I feel bad for her, the situation she’s in, even though I know Nellie’s going to be able to help her quality of life no end. The woman eventually manages to drag her son across the waiting area and gets him to sit back on his chair, where he sits and stares at me, a colouring book open but untouched in his lap. He’s still holding the crayon aloft in an overhand grip. I look at the marks on my jeans and decide the crayon-slasher could do with some psychological screening for the good of society.
Suddenly the young girl makes a strange strangled gurgle. I watch as she shakes, before all her muscles go rigid. Her mother holds her, rocking slightly. Saliva bubbles into a foam at the girl’s mouth.
After a few moments, the seizure lessens and her muscles become less rigid. I’m no doctor, but I’ve been round Nellie long enough to know that she has Dravet syndrome, a severe form of epilepsy which occurs very early on in a child’s life. And one for which, up until now, there was no cure.
‘The doctor will see you now.’
I look up to see the same nurse who’d deposited me in this zoo twenty minutes ago. I’m relieved to see she’s talking to me. I follow her down a corridor painted in Faint Apricot Vomit and start to feel a little queasy myself. And I’m sure I can feel the kid’s gaze on the back of my head, boring into me all the way till we stop outside Dr Nellie de Vries’ office. The nurse knocks for me – maybe I don’t look capable? – then disappears back down the corridor.
Nellie’s at her desk, sitting in profile in front of a tall oblong window overlooking a courtyard. She types a few more sentences, then gets up and walks over and we hug. Maybe I hold on a little too tight because afterwards she holds me at arm’s length and asks me if I’m all right. I toy with telling her about the houseboat and Kush, but I’m not sure I can stand going over it again. And anyway, it’s the last thing Nellie needs. So I skip it, and lie.
‘Just a headache.’
‘What happened?’ she asks, pointing to my jeans as I take the seat she offers me.
‘There’s a kid out there who wanted to kill me. Luckily the only weapon he had available was a crayon.’
‘Let me guess, boy, five years old. Black hair. Snot running down his nose?’
I nod.
She shakes her head. ‘I saw them waiting out there earlier; they’re my next appointment. They’ve come over from the UK. Can’t get what they need there. She got into trouble with the law for helping her kid. Pretty barbaric really. Luckily I’ll be able to help, but only as long as they stay in the country.’
‘That’s gotta be tough.’
‘Hard to get a job unless you’ve got at least some Dutch, so really I don’t know how long they’ll be here. Anyway,’ she says, stretching her arms over her head and yawning. ‘Sorry, been a long one. But …’
She reaches over to her desk, sorts through a small pile of paper and locates what she’s after.
‘Here, this is all I could find. Not much to go on.’
I take the sheet. It’s A4, and has passport-sized photos of twelve people, each one assigned with a number.
‘Who are they?’
‘These are the people who took part in the trial, the volunteers. This was just for the staff on the ward at the time to keep track of who was given what.’
I look at the faces: twelve men. The photos aren’t great; it’s clearly a photocopy of a photocopy, the original of which had been fished out of a bin and unscrunched. But still, there’s something about one of them, a man, age hard to tell as his face is largely taken over with a thick beard, who is strangely familiar.
‘That’s not all. One of the nurses who was on the ward that night still works here.’
‘Can I speak to her?’
‘She’ll have had to sign a non-disclosure agreement, so I’m not sure what she’d be able to tell you. What’s this actually about?’
‘It’s probably nothing. Just something that came up in a case.’
‘Well, okay, be like that then. Anyway, I’ve got my next patient.’
‘The nurse, where would I find her?’
‘You’re so predictable. Luckily I already found out for you. She comes off shift in just over –’ She checks her watch. ‘– an hour’s time, in the radiology department. But I wouldn’t hang out there.’
‘No?’
‘No, they claim it’s safe and all, but really.’ She drops her voice. ‘Really it’s not. Trust me, I’m a doctor.’
‘I was thinking maybe I’ll go across and sit with Hank.’
‘I had lunch with him.’
I know she did. She does every day. We stand up and hug again.
‘Have you heard anything yet?’
‘Tomorrow. They’ll tell me tomorrow.’
Out in the waiting room the freaky kid stares at me as I go past. There’s actually something lizard-like about his eyes. He slowly sticks his tongue out. I check no one’s watching and do the I’m-watching-you-two-fingers-at-my-eyeballs-then-point thing. Take that, you little fucker. Then I turn to see the nurse who’d walked me up the corridor stepping out of a room just ahead. She’s watching me with a look of pure disgust on her face.
‘Talk to him,’ says the male nurse who’s brought me here as he opens the door. ‘It helps.’
I step into the room. A balloon inflates inside my throat. Truth is, seeing Hank has never been easy. I’d been there when it happened, and it just as easily could be me lying there with tubes to pump food in and tubes to pump shit out and a ventilator forcing air into my lungs and then releasing it. The machine measuring his heart rate beeps softly and I suddenly wonder if he can actually hear. Talk to him, the nurse said. But really, if he can hear people talking to him then he can hear the beep beep beep. And that has got to be driving him insane, each reiteration a reminder of the life he’s not living, the things he’s missing, the way it’s all turned out. The balloon in my throat’s getting bigger and I’m starting to have trouble breathing. There’s a window just beyond the bed, and I step over to open it up, taking a few gasps of air before pulling up a chair. When I’ve visited him in the past I’ve tended to just sit, hoping that somehow he can feel my presence.
But with the knowledge that Nellie’s decision to turn off life support has been approved and that all we’re waiting for is the date, I suddenly feel I need to talk to him.
‘Hank, it’s me.’
The words fall dead into the room. No resonance, no response.
I suddenly realize how much of our world is based on communicating with each other. So many ways to do it now as well that we’re almost constantly communicating, the barrier of space a barrier no longer. We can talk to people all over the world, send messages that arrive instantly, but there are some barriers we’ve yet to break. And Hank’s behind one of them.
I grasp his hand, as if that will make it easier for him to understand me, and start to talk, and soon I’m telling him about everything that’s happened to me since
he was injured. About Tanya and me, about how, unknown to her, unknown to anyone, I had to kill Station Chief Smit. He’d not only been guilty of some of the most disgusting crimes imaginable, he was also blackmailing me to keep quiet by threatening to reveal a secret about Tanya’s past which would have destroyed her. I tell him about how our relationship went south after that because every time I looked at her all I could see was Smit’s dying look. How I forced myself on, how seven months later the PTSD hit, how I’ve somehow come through it all and was on the cusp of getting out for good and yet here I am once again. I also tell him about my houseboat, how someone torched it and I don’t know if it was just an act by a random lunatic, or something more, something aimed at me.
When I’ve finished, drained, nothing left to say, I sit there with the beeping machine.
I’ve told him everything. But it doesn’t feel cathartic. I give his hand a final squeeze and then let go. I’m at the door when I realize there’s one thing I didn’t tell him.
I hesitate, then walk back, lean down and whisper in his ear.
I’ve missed her. I’d been with Hank longer than I’d thought, and by the time I get down to the radiology department and request to see her I’m told she’s just left. I race through the hospital hoping to catch her before she leaves. Someone at the main entrance who knew her said she’d walked out a few minutes before me. I’m panting as I rush outside, trying to guess which way she’d gone. I catch sight of a woman in a nurse’s uniform heading towards one of the many bike racks by the parking garage. By the time I get there she’s bending down, unlocking a fold-up bike.
‘Stephanie Dekker?’
The Copycat Page 21