‘What’s that? Is that a bar?’
‘I think it’s a boat museum,’ I said.
‘More water. I suppose we’ll have to cross that bridge.’
I got out the guidebook I had bought at Waterloo. ‘You’ll be pleased to hear we’re close to the Torture Museum.’
‘That’s all I need. What’s that over there? Surely that’s a bar.’
‘De Zothe,’ I read. ‘It seems to mean “the Sot” so it should be okay for a drink.’
‘Come on then.’
‘It’ll all be some sort of lager,’ Hildreth said when we had settled at a table. ‘Belgian’s better than German. I’m a bitter man myself though it’s hard to find now in London. I used to drink Newcastle brown but after a certain age it doesn’t taste the same.’
We ordered two large glasses of local brew that came with a deep head on it. ‘At one time we’d have sent that back saying it wasn’t a full glass,’ Hildreth said, wiping away a foam moustache with the back of his hand. ‘Still it’s better than nothing. I was going to tell you why this business upsets me. I grew up with it you see: religion, art of a sort and sex. You probably didn’t think it to look at me but I was once a pretty little altar boy, lighting the candles, swinging the censor and always overlooked by Jesus’s bleeding heart or Mary in the Lady Chapel, a pale girl in a blue dress with hands clasped waiting to be fucked by an angel. And after the service Father Brown, only that wasn’t his name, would take us back to the rectory, “the rectum” we called it among ourselves, for tea and cake and gropes. We were still in short trousers.’ He took a long pull at his beer. ‘We didn’t tell anyone: you didn’t in those days. We just joked about him among ourselves. I’d almost forgotten until all this stuff came up and I found I was getting angry. It can be a distraction, that kind of personal involvement. In theory, coppers shouldn’t feel it but sometimes we have to admit we’re only human. Any skeletons in your cupboard, Alex?’
‘Only an absent father,’ I said without thinking. I wasn’t sure that I wanted this level of intimacy with Hildreth. And then I thought: he’ll think I’m a mummy’s boy and we know what that means, and added, too hastily and brutally, so that my own words shocked me, ‘And a dead wife.’
There was a silence. Then Hildreth went on, ‘These boys – Beemsterboer seems pretty certain they’re smuggled illegals, certainly one at least for sure. It has to be part of a chain that starts maybe thousands of miles away in some foreign country with a kid desperate to get out. Are the smugglers the same people who put up the pictures? Who set up Stalbridge? How do we break into the chain? We can check missing persons through Interpol but if the parents think they’ve gone to find a new life they won’t even have notified the boys as missing.’
‘They must be very desperate to start out on such a journey not knowing where they’d end up.’
‘We’re a nomadic species. That’s how we populated the world with just a small group coming out of Africa.’
‘You believe that? What I really meant was: how do you know that, an ordinary copper risen through the ranks?’ He saw through me at once and laughed.
‘I told you I was an armchair archaeologist. Besides I feel it myself. I came south looking for something. Me Dad was a redundant miner, embittered by the loss of his world. But I hadn’t wanted, dared, to step out of my class, think of college and all that. There were no jobs in Blyth. After bumming around London for a bit I joined the police. In those days it was a bit like the army – you didn’t need any qualifications. What about your missing father?’
I had to answer. ‘He was Hungarian. Came over after the uprising. Met my mother at a language school where she was teaching. Disappeared when she got pregnant.’
‘See. There’s all sorts of reasons why people go on the run from wherever.’
‘What do we do now?’
‘We look around Amsterdam. Get the smell of the place. Unless you want to go and choose a girl in a window. You’re on your own there. My wife only lets me out because she knows I behave myself.’
‘Not my kind of scene,’ I said.
‘I have to go through some more stuff with Beemsterboer in the morning. Course you could just get on the train back.’
I thought of my empty neglected house. ‘No I’ll stick it out. What about something to eat?’
‘Right, supper. A walk and early bed in that order. Let’s have another beer.’ He waved at a passing waitress.
But the walk came first. ‘Our hotel’s up by the Amstel,’ Hildreth said. ‘I fancy the big park and some fresh air after being shut in all day.’
I took out my map. ‘Vondelpark’s not far. But it’s going in the wrong direction.’
‘We’ve got all night. As I remember Amsterdam’s quite small. More like Paris than London.’
‘We’ll have to cross a bridge.’
‘I’ll be brave and try not to look down.’
We strolled along beside a broad winding waterway. It was growing dark and the tall houses were black silhouettes against the paler sky while the water gleamed with highlights from its fringing of street lamps. And then the buildings around us began to change. The seventeenth century dropped away. The houses were huge with stained-glass windows and entwined vines rimming the art nouveau doorways. Next we were in a wide, brightly lit street of boutiques and diamond merchants.
Looking at the map I said. ‘This is the museum quarter.’
‘You’ll be in your element then.’
I thought how we’d once supported the Dutch against their Spanish overlords, then fought them, then married them and put their prince on our throne, and finally struggled with them for empire in a trade war across the world.
‘We’ve come too far,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to go back a bit. The park’s over there. This is only the Museumplein.’
‘It looks like a park of sorts. Still you’re the navigator.’
We turned right along Van Baerlestraat and suddenly there was the sound of music, and trees sketched in charcoal against the wash of sky. As we came through the edge of the park we could see a lit stage ahead with musicians and a crowd of people sitting on the grass or standing in front of them. The music was a waltz, Strauss I thought, though I couldn’t identify which one.
Hildreth paused on the fringes of the crowd. ‘Do you like music?’ I asked him.
‘I played in the colliery band as a boy though there wasn’t really a pit anymore. The band kept going for a bit though.’
I let my eyes wander over the audience as the band moved through the polka rhythm. The seated front rows seemed to be given over to young men with their arms round each other, swaying to the music. As it ended with a flourish of baton they clapped loudly, smiling into each other’s eyes and then turning back towards the rostrum, laughing with an easy pleasure that caused a wave of envy to run through me.
I looked back at the stage again where a new piece was beginning: Mozart’s clarinet concerto and a girl soloist caressing the reed with her lips, her hair falling in a blond half veil across her face and then back as she raised the shining instrument for a higher cadence. Suddenly I ached for Hilary. It wasn’t fair, right, to make the decision for her by excluding her, and cause the pain I had heard in her voice. I would ring her as soon as I got home.
‘There’s a café along there,’ Hildreth waved his arm towards a cluster of lights round an awning, above small tables, each with a flickering candle. ‘Let’s see if we can eat there.’ So we ate under the city’s starless night sky like any ordinary tourists, and then, with me anxiously trying to follow the map in the half-light, made our way back towards the central station.
‘Any more bloody canals?’ Hildreth asked as the road from the Riksmuseum crossed its fifth, making him hunch his shoulders and his breath come faster and thicken into almost a snort.
‘Just one more. But it’s the biggest: the Amstel itself.’ To divert him I went on, ‘I’m surprised you didn’t have a problem with the train when we went under the Ch
annel, all that water overhead.’
‘I’m used to tunnels, it’s in the blood. Anyway, what the eye doesn’t see… This stuff’s there underneath, waiting to catch you.’
‘Sailors used to worry about mermaids pulling them down.’
‘That might be worth it.’ His face set grimly as he marched out over the threatening waters.
The hotel when we reached it was clean and anonymous, part of an international chain with everything you could need but devoid of character or distinction, my room a coffin-sized box in pastel colours with a minimalist shower room.
‘What about a nightcap?’ Hildreth had said as we waited for the lift. ‘See you in the bar in fifteen minutes.’
‘Right,’ I said, though I had hoped to be alone for the first time that day, partly to take stock but also because I wasn’t used to the constant pressure of another presence, especially one as all-pervading as Hildreth. It made me realise how cocooned I was, alone in my office with only occasional interruptions from staff or the telephone and then home to my empty house, insulated from the noise of the world by my job and the way of life I had chosen.
The bar when I went down was dark with only pools of light here and there and above the long corridor, with its rack of high-lit bottles and glasses behind the white-coated barman. One or two small groups of men were dotted about, and a handful decorated the barstools, not speaking but gazing into their drinks or at newspapers in assorted languages.
Hildreth had already bagged a table and was sitting with a half-empty glass of blond beer in front of him. ‘What will you have, Alex?’ He lumbered to his feet.
‘I’ll get them. Another for you? What is it?’
He nodded, drained the glass and held it out. ‘You order and they’ll bring it. It’s the Jupiter, Belgian draught, not bad.’
The boy serving had the impeccable English, under an accent I couldn’t identify, that puts the British traveller to shame. I ordered Hildreth’s beer and a whisky and dry ginger for myself and sat down at the table. The walls where the meagre lighting fell on them, were the colour of old dried tomato ketchup.
‘Looks as if they’re trying to set the tired businessman up for a trip to the red-light district,’ Hildreth said, waving a hand at the décor. ‘Still we can’t say much. Our pubs aren’t what they were. They’re still better up home. When Julie and I go back for a family get-together the lads can still down ten pints of an evening.’ He picked up his new glass. ‘Cheers. I like the way they throw in the free nuts and crisps. That’s not something you get at home. So what’s next in your life, Alex?’
I told him about the summer exhibition only a few weeks away now. Even to me it sounded an irrelevance in a world of smuggled and desperate people and dead boys.
‘How do you plan it? You see I’m trying to understand the mindset of these people, whoever they are. These jobs took a lot of planning, across thousands of miles. We’re dealing with a global syndicate, maybe more than one. How does it start? How do you start?’
‘I can’t see that planning an exhibition in a local museum or gallery can have anything to do with this.’
‘Bear with me, Alex. Tell me what comes first.’
‘Well. I suppose it’s knowing I’ve got to come up with something. Then the concept, the theme if you like.’
‘So there’s a need that has to be fulfilled. Then the idea. Then what? The mechanics, the how?’
‘Budget, timing, feasibility. And all the time someone, usually in my case the chairman, snapping at your heels.’
‘You have to be driven? So what drives these guys? First money, money from parents or the boys to get them to a new life. The idea? That you can provide the service, the transport. Then the organisation, the nuts and bolts. But all this doesn’t get us to the end product, the equivalent of you opening the doors and the public coming in. The end product here is someone wanking over the picture of a dead boy, tastefully arranged. We’ve got two parts that don’t fit, except that we know that they do. I can’t help thinking it would be easier somehow if we were dealing with girls. Girls get lured away with the promise of a decent job. Then they get raped and put on the game. Girls you can track down. They’re on the street or a member of the public says a particular house is being used for funny goings on. Or the girls themselves run away and ask for help. Straightforward. This is different. One for the road. My turn to get them in.’ He drained his glass again and went over to re-order.
My whole body seemed to ache with weariness. Hildreth, for all he looked less fit than me and couldn’t, I reckoned, be any younger, had more stamina or more sheer will that kept him going.
‘Maybe,’ he said when he had settled himself down again, ‘I think girls are easier because we’ve got a daughter and we’ve been through some rough times with her. You never had kids I take it.’
I shook my head. ‘When she was fourteen,’ he went on, ‘she ran away from home, took off for Liverpool, and was found by the police passed out in a phone box. That’s how I realised what it was like to be on the receiving end so I put in for this job when it came up. By the way, I ordered their version of a double. Help you to sleep. You look as if you could do with a good night. Breakfast at eight. They start early here. Then we can be back by mid-afternoon. I don’t like to leave the shop too long.’
And I did sleep, as soundly as if Hildreth had spiked my drink. The telephone ringing beside the bed woke me. ‘I thought I’d better give you an early morning call, you looked so knackered last night. Can you be down in half an hour?’ He had put the phone down without waiting for an answer. It was an order not a question. I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed hoping that when I tried to stand up I wouldn’t simply fall over. Somehow I managed to shower and shave and make it downstairs in time. There was Hildreth of course with a piled plate in front of him, knife and fork at the ready.
A couple of cups of coffee and two slices of toast later I began to feel as if I might live. ‘I’ve paid the bill so we can be on our way as soon as you’re ready. Eight forty-five in the lobby?’ His hair was ruffled as if he’d run his fingers rather than a comb through it and his normally crumpled shirt now looked as if he might have slept in it.
As if reading my thoughts he said: ‘Julie keeps me tidy. I’m not much good on me own. I’ve ordered a taxi. We did enough walking yesterday.’
‘You are lucky,’ Beemsterboer said when we were shown into his room. ‘I asked for the DNA and blood group results on that boy and this morning they came through. They show he is from somewhere in East, the border between Europe and Asia, old Russia, Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan. Quite distinctive.’ He tapped the boy’s picture now lying face up on his desk and I remembered the oriental cast to the young features, even through the distorting mirror of the curved glass shell, the high cheekbones and slightly hooded eyes, above the smiling mouth.
I remembered too a school trip, a sixth form exchange with Russian students that took us first to Moscow and then on to Tashkent and Samarkand, the Tomb of Tamerlane and the necropolis of the royal princesses, at the end of the Silk Road. I had seen women in bright local dress bringing teenage daughters to the tombs to rub the dust that accumulated on the stones on the girl’s cheeks. For good luck in marriage? Fertility? I couldn’t ask but I remembered their faces, with flushed cheeks and dark, dark eyes framed by strong black hair, at that confluence of tribes and religions.
‘Thanks, Harry.’ Hildreth stood up and held out his hand. ‘We’ll keep in touch. Let me know if anything else turns up.’
‘I will. Good to see you, Pete. Let you keep me informed also. We don’t like children in our care to disappear, especially not to turn up dead even as an art work. You are going to Central Station? From here you can take the metro or the tram.’
I slept most of the way back to Brussels while Hildreth immersed himself in his Sudoku puzzlebook. Then we were speeding through Kent, the fields and orchards still a luminous spring-green after recent rain. A kind of numb silence
had settled on us. Hildreth finally broke it with a weary sigh.
‘We’ll have to try Interpol but their writ doesn’t really run that far east. Frankly, Alex, I don’t really know where to go next to push this forward. I don’t like admitting it but we seem to have come up against a brick wall. Expenses aren’t going to be pleased with what they’ll see as a wasted trip. They’ll say I could have got this much from an email. But I’m a bit old-fashioned. I like to meet people face to face. That way you get the feel of things.’
‘Did you get any “feel of things”?’
‘I could see the chain stretching right across so many different countries.’
And times, I thought – there’s another chain to this that isn’t geographical like the Silk Road, but somehow chronological. Somewhere I’d read that time was space or was it the other way round? Two lines, horizontal and vertical, converging at a point in the present, the two bits Hildreth had said didn’t fit together. A flush of excitement went through me as if I’d been out with a metal detector and turned up a horde of silver. Just like the Bateses, I thought. And look where that had led. Or Jack Linden, stumbling across his tomb in the desert and setting off a wave of envy and resentment. In any case, my idea smacked of New Ageism, ley lines, stuff I’d never had time for. Hildreth would think I’d lost the plot and maybe I had through being so out of my depth in this surreal world of international crime, caught up in what could be seen as a kind of sexual terrorism. As quickly as it had come my excitement drained away and I said nothing, feeling a sick hollow in my stomach.
Could I even discuss it with Hilary? She might think I had flipped completely. Pseudo-philosophical theorising hadn’t been part of our discourse. My decision to tell her everything weakened. After all, nothing had changed. She could still be at risk but I longed for the comfort of her voice. Hildreth was going back to his Julie who would send his suit to be cleaned and him out for a haircut. I both envied and despised their domesticity.
The journey seemed endless. At Waterloo I took the Tube to Embankment, changed for Liverpool Street and then on through Essex. Today I could only see the familiar fields with their painted signs advertising ‘Bonza spuds for sale’ as a featureless continuation of the European plain I had just crossed, and once part of it before the sea flowed in and cut us off.
The Orpheus Trail Page 17