The Wrong Girl

by David Hewson

Vos came up, introduced himself and Bakker. It was the Fransen woman from AIVD, the one De Groot had talked about. Somehow she already possessed combined footage from the cameras in the square. They watched as a Black Pete figure in a green costume extended his arm above the crowd and threw the first grenade. A puff of smoke from somewhere. Then two more.

  ‘Your job’s to keep order here,’ Mirjam Fransen told them. ‘Get people out of the square safely. See if you can match up some of these missing kids with their parents.’

  ‘If you need any help . . .’ Vos said.

  The giant phone rang. She took the call on an earpiece. It was short. Seemed to make her happy.

  ‘We don’t,’ the woman told him then marched straight into the crowd behind them, on towards Lijnbaansgracht.

  Running.

  He was never good at that, even before he changed his name.

  Sticky inside the green costume, aware his black make-up was starting to drip with sweat, he’d torn off the hot, uncomfortable wig then careered down the narrow street, back towards the place he’d picked up the hidden gear.

  The money was in his pocket. More than he’d ever known. But he’d no idea how to use it. How to spend his way out of Amsterdam. The man said he’d fix that. The man said he’d be there where the stuff was left. Should have been too. Bouali had done everything he’d asked. Thrown the grenades, though they seemed more like playthings than anything else. Snatched the girl just as they asked. Took her to the place they’d ringed on the map. Dealt with her there, trying not to ask himself what he was doing.

  But all there was in this grubby dark corner was rubbish and the odd rat. The hubbub from Leidseplein and the sporadic sound of a siren caterwauling around the square.

  Two minutes he waited. Then he stripped off the rest of the Black Pete outfit. Underneath he wore a white sweatshirt and jeans. The only possession left was the red bag meant for sweets. The money was in there. Incriminating evidence too. He took out the cash, the gun, the shells, walked to the water and threw the rest into the canal.

  For the last three nights they’d provided him with a room in a block for restaurant workers not far from Centraal station. Too dangerous to go back there now. He had his passport in the back of his jeans. His old English name. A photo from before.

  Maybe . . .

  The siren got closer. He couldn’t think straight.

  He put his head round the wall and looked back to Leidseplein.

  Then turned and started running again. A man with a shiny black face, the make-up dripping down onto his white T-shirt. Arms flailing. A gun tucked into his jeans. He fled uncertainly towards the narrow tangle of streets and lanes and canals that was the Jordaan.

  Henk Kuyper seemed content to do as the police asked. Stay near the theatre in Leidseplein watching the sullen, puzzled crowds disperse. Listen to the public address system calling for order. Promise his distraught wife everything would be fine. Everyone was safe.

  The assembly point for meeting lost family members was close by. After fifteen minutes there was still no sign of their daughter.

  His wife looked at him and said, ‘This isn’t my fault.’

  ‘Whose is it then?’ he wondered checking the square, eyes narrowed, scanning.

  ‘Why do you always blame me?’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘You could have come along, Henk. You could have been here. Maybe then . . .’

  The cold, sad stare silenced her. He always managed that when he wanted.

  She pulled out her phone. That morning, before she got worried about the Black Pete following them, she’d stopped the orange cargo trike on the canal near the open space by the Anne Frank house on the Prinsengracht. There she’d taken a picture of Saskia in the bucket seat at the front.

  Fair hair neatly combed. Eight years old in a pink jacket with ponies on it. Trying hard to smile against a crowd of bored tourists waiting to get into a museum dedicated to another lost child.

  But this wasn’t that dread world. Not an occupied Amsterdam, controlled by monsters. Thanks to Henk’s family money they were comfortable. Protected from the worst of the wrecked economy. His work brought him into conflict with his staid, patrician father. But Lucas Kuyper never staunched the flow of money. He was always there, a quiet, grey presence, ready to help when needed.

  The Kuyper name went back centuries, had its place in Amsterdam’s lists of minor nobility. It looked after its own and kept them close.

  ‘These things don’t happen to us,’ she told him, as if to convince herself.

  Then left him at the assembly point, clutching her phone in her hand. The picture of Saskia was still there: a tiny figure in a cargo bike. The pink jacket was too big for her. It wasn’t her style anyway. The only reason she wore it was because Henk came home with the thing saying it was a spur-of-the-moment purchase. A present for no good reason. He did that from time to time. He loved his daughter. More than he loved his wife.

  Hand out, phone in it, picture uppermost, Renata stumbled through the diminishing crowd, asking, pleading for someone to look at Saskia’s photo and tell her where her daughter might be.

  An image rose in her memory. Didn’t mothers around the world do this? In poorer places? The ones Henk thought he was helping? When a bomb exploded. Or snipers moved into nearby buildings.

  A mother. A lost child. Was there any difference between an upper-class Amsterdam wife and a refugee torn from her son or daughter?

  Henk would have something to say about that. A caustic comment that would tell her how stupid she was to think such a thing. Whatever she – they – believed society thought differently. The poor were poor. The rich were rich. And everyone in between seemed powerless to change a thing.

  He stayed with the other nervous parents. Waiting for this strange day to right itself. As if they’d pick up the cargo trike, put Saskia in the front and go home. Have supper together, make small talk as he opened the inevitable bottle of wine. Then he’d return to his little office in the gable roof to lose himself in the computer and all those people he knew around the world. Strangers to her yet closer to him than his own flesh and blood.

  She stumbled coming off the pavement into the square. A hand came out to steady her. She looked, recoiled. The Black Pete costume. Red this time. The same black face again.

  Renata pulled herself away from him, showed the phone. A shake of the comic head.

  Then she lurched on. Stopped everyone she could find. Aware that this was stupid. Irrational would be Henk’s word. Unthinking. Unproductive. But what else was there to do?

  After a couple of minutes she’d crossed the square. Looking back the crowds were working their way out in neat lines. The announcements over the loudspeakers seemed less frantic. Full of encouragement, words of comfort. Calling the lost to a single assembly point. Close to the place where Henk had stayed.

  Hand out, mind blank. No sight of Saskia anywhere. Then a shadow fell across the phone and a hand reached out for it.

  A woman about her age. Harder-faced. Lean in a cheap nylon jerkin and black jeans. A desperation in her eyes Renata thought she recognized.

  ‘You’ve seen her?’ she asked the woman.

  A stream of words. Foreign. Incomprehensible. The hand went out for the phone again and Renata thought: wrong time, wrong place for a mugging. Amsterdam in chaos and all this foreign bitch wants to do is steal a phone with a photo of a young girl on the screen. Smiling in a pink jacket.

  She jerked the handset away, stepped back, stared at her. As if she should have known.

  Not now. Not with a child missing.

  The woman grabbed her arm, the phone with it, put the screen close to her face, stared at the picture there.

  Then let go, what sounded like a foreign curse on her breath, looked at her, shook her head and shuffled away into the crowd, shoulders bent, tears in her eyes.

  The phone rang. Henk’s number.

  ‘I’ve got her,’ he said, nothing more.

  Vos
was the first to see them. A group of masked men in black, hooded, armed, racing to the corner of the square, back towards the Melkweg. AIVD officers, he assumed.

  He didn’t care De Groot had told them to stay put. This was his city. His people. Men in masks had no place in it.

  Koeman was wiping the last of the black make-up from his face, moaning as usual. About what a mess this whole thing was. How people – the police too – didn’t know what to do.

  ‘Dirk,’ Vos told Van der Berg. ‘You deal with things here.’ He glanced at Bakker and Koeman, told them to follow him, then pushed through the line of families queuing to get out of the square, kept on until they were clear, looking down the narrow alley that led to the music venue. The men were past the place already, running by the grey buildings in Raamplein, chasing a distant figure who kept looking back as he stumbled across the bridge ahead.

  A man in a white T-shirt and jeans. Black face like Koeman’s.

  Vos set up a jog. Best he could manage. Bakker was younger, fitter than the rest of them. As he watched she broke into a run, long legs, long arms pumping, red hair flying back behind her.

  ‘They’ve got weapons,’ Vos yelled, knowing it was pointless to tell her to keep back.

  ‘Me too,’ she cried, turning, patting her jacket. And then she was over the gentle rise of the bridge, heavy feet so loud on the cobbles the noise sent a small gaggle of coots on the water flying and flapping away in sudden fear.

  Vos had left his weapon in his locker as usual. It was the Sinterklaas parade. Why would he need it?

  Some four hundred metres ahead the fugitive figure dashed down a side street, black shapes closing in pursuit. Bakker was moving so quickly she was reducing the gap between them. Too far away for Vos to shout at her now. Even if it might work. Koeman was wheezing behind him.

  The AIVD men turned the corner, Bakker close on their heels.

  Back in Leidseplein Dirk Van der Berg waited, listening to the radio, watching the lines of people file patiently out of the square. He was forty-seven, unfit, liked his beer. He’d seen plenty of incidents in nearly thirty years with the Amsterdam police and something here didn’t make sense.

  Looking round at the odd Sinterklaas crowd he realized what it was.

  Terrorists wouldn’t lob flash grenades into an event like this. It wasn’t their style. They were either cowards or heroes. Planted devices covertly, set them on a timer, then fled to safety. Or carried them proudly on their person. Explosive vests or weapons held out for all to see, waiting for the martyrdom they expected.

  ‘This stinks,’ he muttered and cast his eyes around the square.

  The Kuyper woman was gone. So was her husband. He guessed they’d found their little girl. Why else would they leave the assembly point?

  A gap emerged in the crowds. Van der Berg peered through it. Lots of kids in festive clothes. Grown-ups too.

  There was a black delivery van parked in Leidsestraat, the street that led back to the centre, next to the Eichholtz delicatessen. Right on the tramlines, unused for once that day since all the public transport had been halted to make way for Sinterklaas.

  As he watched a Black Pete came up to the back doors. The man was dressed in green. He held the hand of a young girl with blonde hair. And a pink jacket. Held it very tightly, then opened the back doors and half-pushed her inside.

  People wanted to get their kids out of the way. That was understandable. Van der Berg thought. But civilian traffic was supposed to be barred from the city. He didn’t see how anyone could get through easily.

  Then the kid turned and he saw. She wasn’t with this man, she was being taken away against her will.

  The street was clear beyond the van. They could be gone in seconds.

  A quick and random fear, the kind a police officer had sometimes as all the many unwanted possibilities began to run through his head.

  Maybe this wasn’t much about harmless fireworks tossed into a crowd. Not directly anyway. It was about spreading fear and confusion, seizing a young girl amid the chaos, knowing the scores of people who witnessed the deed would fail to see it for what it was.

  He started to run, to yell. One of the grey secure people carriers the AIVD people used careered in front of him, windows covered in security screens, glass dark and opaque to the outside world. Two more followed.

  Van der Berg leapt back, cursing.

  By the time the way ahead was clear the black van had vanished.

  It was a long journey from the back streets of Lancashire, growing up in poverty with a mother who barely had time for him, through crime, through jail, through the discovery of a kind of home in a foreign faith. He was christened Martin Bowers. The radical preacher in the mosque back home gave him a new name: Mujahied Bouali. Twenty-four years old, fleeing down a narrow canal in Amsterdam, sweat running through the black make-up on his face.

  They’d never said what to do if you thought you might be caught. That was odd. The men who briefed him the day before, showed him the grenades he’d pick up later with the guns, told him everything else. What to do. How to do it. Where to run.

  To a safe house back in the red-light district. But that was a long way from here. Too far.

  He was on hard, rough cobbles now, struggling, money tumbling from his pockets as he fled. No time to look back. They were following. He tried to catch his breath, to run harder, faster.

  But the booze and the fags back when he was Martin Bowers had taken their toll.

  There was a narrow alley to the left. Shadows. Maybe somewhere to hide or lose them. He stumbled into it, caught his foot on a manhole cover, went down to the ground, whined as he grazed his knuckles trying to keep his face from hitting hard stone.

  When he looked up he knew this was over. The place was nothing more than a blind passageway, a high brick wall at the end. No windows. No people. Just rubbish bins and a stray cat streaking out of the corner as if fearing what was to come.

  ‘Bloody stupid,’ he muttered and heard his old voice, bitter Lancashire grit, all the hope and little love it had once possessed thieved from him over the years.

  Think for yourself.

  He hadn’t done that in a while. They did it for him.

  Footsteps behind. A metallic sound he didn’t want to think about.

  A woman there, severe face, black hair. The boss. He could see that.

  ‘Don’t do anything stupid,’ she ordered in English. ‘We’re taking you in.’ She smiled. ‘You’re going to talk.’

  ‘I don’t know nothing,’ he grumbled, half-hidden in the shadows, staring at her bland, hard face. ‘Even if I did . . .’

  The men around her had guns out.

  ‘We’ll see,’ she said with a nod to a man by her, hooded, big, strong. He had a weapon in one hand. Cuffs in the other. ‘Get him.’

  ‘Take orders from a woman, do you?’ Bouali yelled in his coarse, northern voice. ‘That’s what you call a man here?’

  Her eyes were on him. Cold and unfeeling.

  ‘Do as you’re told, boy,’ she said. ‘You . . .’

  Martin Bowers, Mujahied Bouali, scrabbled round on the ground, found the gun inside his belt, got his fingers round the grip. Sometimes things happened without him thinking. They just came into his head.

  He was turning the gun on them before he even realized.

  The phone in Vos’s jacket pocket rang. Just past the Melkweg. He cursed and paused, out-of-breath, glanced at the screen.

  Van der Berg. Not a man who wasted time or words.

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s something wrong here. I think I just saw a kid snatched. Pink jacket like they were talking about.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Off the square. A black van. It went back into the centre. I’d have got a number if it wasn’t for all these damned spooks driving around like idiots.’ A pause. ‘Where are you? Where’s Laura?’

  Keeping up with the AIVD men. Out of sight.

  ‘We’ll be back in a min
ute. I think they’ve got the man.’

  ‘What man?’ Van der Berg yelled. ‘I saw him here. Putting the kid in a van.’ That gap again and they were both thinking the same thing. ‘There’s more than one of them, isn’t there?’

  ‘Sounds like it . . .’

  The ducks and coots rose from the canal, filling the air with the sound of their wings and anxious, high-pitched cries. Then a staccato rattle of gunfire.

  Saskia.

  A pink jacket. A tall figure holding a young girl’s hand. Renata ran and ran, down the long lane, past the Melkweg, out to the canal by Marnixstraat.

  In the distance the grey modern building that was the police station. Fat use they’d been. It was Henk who’d found her. Bad Henk. Thoughtless Henk.

  He’d throw that at her. She knew it. But right at that moment she didn’t care.

  She ran, bent down, held her daughter, hugged her. Looked at her pale, puzzled face and didn’t dare to ask the obvious question . . . Where the hell have you been?

  ‘She’s fine,’ Henk said in a flat, bored voice. ‘She got lost. That’s all. Let’s go home.’

  He ruffled Saskia’s blonde hair.

  ‘I’ll buy ice cream. Whatever . . .’

  A scream from somewhere. A sound like gunfire.

  Three things then, simultaneous, no more than a few steps apart, separate yet connected.

  Laura Bakker reached the blind alley where the AIVD team had raced in pursuit of Black Pete. A bloodied body lay bent on the floor. Next to it a hard-faced woman in a business suit chanting into a radio.

  A wall of men formed ahead as soon as Bakker showed up. Her ID card meant nothing. They’d got machine pistols. Body armour. Balaclavas and riot gear. Pushed her back until she could see no more and left her fuming, cursing in the street. Stamping her big boots on the cobbles, all to no avail.

  As the Kuypers placed their arms around their daughter like a shield a tall blonde-haired woman raced up to them, yelling something in a foreign tongue. Bent down, stared at the girl. Shook her head. Furious. Lost.

  You tried to steal my phone.

  A random thought. Unwanted in the circumstances. Renata barely noticed her husband slide away, turning his back, muttering he had to call someone. Then vanishing across the bridge.