The Wrong Girl

by David Hewson

  ‘Go and get ready for school, sweetheart,’ he said. ‘Mummy and Daddy need to talk.’

  Straight away the girl got up from the table and went into the bathroom, closed the door.

  ‘She’s not going to school,’ Renata said. ‘It’s not safe.’

  He laughed.

  ‘There’s nothing to worry about. If there was we wouldn’t be able to move for police.’

  ‘Your father . . .’

  He leaned over the table and took her hands. The way he did when he wanted something.

  ‘Do you think I’d let her out of the front door if I thought there was the slightest chance she’d come to harm?’

  Put the onus on her. Always. She recognized this gambit so well.

  ‘No. But if Lucas is willing to pay for some security . . .’

  ‘I’m not taking any more from him than we need. He’s the reason they targeted her in the first place.’

  ‘All the same . . .’

  ‘He said he’d hold the Georgian kid instead. You heard that, didn’t you? You told me.’

  That bugged her too.

  ‘Where did you go? Why weren’t you there?’

  His face fell.

  ‘I had to take a call. This is getting tedious.’

  ‘From work? On a Sunday?’

  ‘From work. It was international. Couldn’t miss it.’

  The police had taken the Georgian woman to Marnixstraat after her daughter was snatched while she and Saskia got interviewed in a van near the Melkweg. Henk had joined her there part way through.

  ‘I needed you . . .’

  His hand left her.

  ‘I found Saskia. I walked that square until I spotted her jacket. She was alone, hiding near the stores. While you—’

  ‘I didn’t know what to do!’ she shrieked.

  ‘You’re upset,’ he said. ‘It’s understandable. I’ll take her to school today. I’ll talk to the teachers. Make sure they keep an eye on her.’

  ‘Why can’t we be normal?’ she murmured.

  ‘I don’t know what you mean. How exactly have I failed you now?’

  ‘I still don’t understand how she got away from that man.’

  He stared at her and shook his head.

  ‘She told us. She ran away when he wasn’t looking.’

  ‘When he wasn’t looking?’ she echoed, voice high and cracked. ‘Just like that?’

  ‘You sound as if you wished she hadn’t.’

  She dashed her knife on the table. From somewhere a church bell sounded. Pigeons cooed out in the street. A car honked its horn. The city went about its business, unaware that somewhere tragedy was hiding in the shadows, waiting for its moment.

  ‘Don’t say that, Henk! Don’t you dare say that.’

  ‘I’ll get her ready for school . . .’

  ‘I want to take Saskia away for a few days.’

  His head went to one side.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Spain. Italy. Just for a week.’

  ‘Who’s going to book the tickets? Organize the hotel? How will you cope?’

  ‘I can cope . . .’

  He laughed off the idea. She watched him check his watch, pick up his tablet computer, flick through the messages there as if this strained conversation was of no consequence.

  ‘You want me to leave, don’t you?’ she asked and waited for the sudden storm to break.

  Yet that rarely happened. Even when he was arguing with his father.

  ‘Not again,’ he said with a sigh. ‘You’re upset. If you want to go away for a while. That’s fine. On your own. Saskia stays here. We can manage.’

  He tapped at the screen.

  ‘Say where. I can book it. Rome? Might be warmer in Morocco.’ He kept his eyes on her. ‘If you meet someone I really don’t mind.’

  She closed her eyes and muttered an obscenity.

  ‘Have we come to this?’ Renata whispered.

  When she opened them Saskia was back, ready for school. Henk had his arms round her.

  ‘I really think Mummy should take a break,’ he said looking down at their daughter. ‘Don’t you?’

  Daddy’s girl. Always.

  ‘Yes,’ Saskia said.

  Renata rushed to the door and grabbed her coat. ‘Time for school,’ she said. ‘Get your things.’

  Saskia stayed at the table, head down. Pretty fair hair combed and straight and clean. Only came the third time her mother demanded.

  He watched them go. Checked his watch. Made a call. Then went out himself.

  De Groot cleared Vos’s visit to the Schiphol detention centre straight away. Bakker went back to her office and found Van der Berg. He was hunched over a computer screen watching CCTV from the night before.

  ‘I should have known something would happen,’ he said. ‘As soon as Pieter said we were going to have dinner.’

  ‘Beer. A tosti. A boiled egg.’ She pulled up a chair and sat next to him. ‘I’m used to it by now.’

  It was almost six months since De Groot took her on full time after the doll’s house case. The brittle, naive young woman she’d been back then had matured a little. Marnixstraat had come to accept her. Laura Bakker had brought Vos back into the fold after his breakdown and fall from grace. No one else had managed that.

  ‘Is Pieter OK?’ Van der Berg asked.

  He was a curious man. Heavyset, bumbling, almost feckless on the surface. Rarely went straight home to his wife. There was always a bar to visit along the way. But Vos had told her he was one of the most able detectives in the building. The best when it came to a murder investigation.

  ‘He looks OK to me. I wish he’d fix up his boat. It’s still a mess.’

  ‘Agreed.’ Van der Berg smiled pleasantly. ‘But he’s happy. He’s got his little dog. That nice woman in the bar to do his washing . . .’

  Was he fishing? She wasn’t sure.

  ‘He can’t go on like that.’

  ‘Why not?’ Van der Berg asked.

  ‘Because . . . at some point you have to grow up.’

  He snorted then jabbed his finger directly on the computer screen the way some men did.

  ‘There’s footage from an awful lot of cameras here. We need to hand it over to forensic to sort out. Too much for us to deal with right now.’

  ‘What else do we have?’

  Koeman was trying to pick up more from the British man’s associates. That was going nowhere.

  ‘Have you seen a pink jacket?’ she asked, pointing at the monitor.

  ‘A couple.’ He rolled through some footage and came on the frame. It had to be the Bublik girl after she was snatched. She was on the city side of the square, with a Black Pete figure in a green costume. Bakker looked at the time: just two minutes after the first grenade.

  ‘That doesn’t work,’ she said.

  He looked interested.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Not enough time. Saskia told us she’d wandered away from her mother because she was arguing with the woman from uniform. She wanted to see Sinterklaas. As soon as the grenades went off Bouali . . . Bowers . . . whatever we call him grabbed her.’

  ‘Correct,’ he agreed.

  Bakker pulled up a map of the area.

  ‘Then he took her out of the square somewhere close to the casino. He got distracted. She ran away.’

  Van der Berg nodded.

  ‘That’s got to take two minutes at least,’ Bakker went on. ‘Probably more.’

  They had to assume there were at least two Black Petes in the abduction attempt. How else could Saskia’s phone have changed hands? Then, in the confusion, the second went on to snatch Natalya by mistake when he saw the pink jacket, after Saskia had got free.

  ‘Maybe the timer on the camera’s wrong,’ he suggested.

  She didn’t say anything, just looked at him.

  ‘Unless you have another idea?’ Van der Berg added.

  Bakker pulled up a transcript of the witness statements taken from Renata Kuyper and h
er daughter the previous day.

  ‘How did the first Black Pete know she was wearing a pink jacket?’

  Van der Berg frowned.

  ‘Because he followed her all the way from their house in the Herenmarkt. Not hard to work out Lucas Kuyper’s granddaughter lived there. He saw what the girl was wearing and told his friend.’

  She waited.

  Van der Berg scanned the other pictures of the square.

  ‘So you lose the kid you want,’ he said. ‘You meet your accomplice. Pass on the phone you took from her. And he picks up the nearest one with the same jacket by mistake. Could happen. Not sure why.’

  ‘Timing,’ Bakker said, pointing at the clock on the screen. ‘From what we know it looks as if Black Pete Two’s snatching Natalya just around when Saskia makes a break for it. Before maybe.’

  Van der Berg screwed up his nose.

  ‘We need to get that girl and her mother back in here.’

  ‘And the father,’ she added.

  He went back to the screen.

  ‘I can’t see him anywhere. Where the hell did he get to? What . . . ?’

  She went quiet. Koeman had turned up, dyed moustache more droopy than ever. Thom Geerts, the cheerless AIVD officer, was with him, looking inquisitive.

  ‘Our spooky friends want to know if we’ve found anything,’ Koeman told them.

  ‘Still looking,’ Van der Berg replied, eyeing the big, smartly dressed man. ‘How are you doing this morning?’

  Koeman grumbled something and walked off.

  ‘I want a rundown on where you are,’ Geerts said. ‘Where’s Vos?’

  ‘He got called away,’ Bakker told him. ‘Not sure why.’

  ‘You don’t know where your investigating officer is?’

  ‘I saw him with his dog,’ Van der Berg said with a grin. ‘Maybe Sam needed a walk.’

  The AIVD man scowled at them.

  ‘Isn’t there a dress code round here? Give me an update by email. I’ve got things to do.’

  ‘I’m sure you have,’ Van der Berg murmured watching him leave, phone in hand.

  Bakker rolled back her chair and whispered a mild curse. Van der Berg had turned up in his usual scruffy brown sports jacket and black trousers, tan shoes. With Vos forever in a donkey jacket, black sweater and old jeans they weren’t a great sartorial advertisement for the force, knew it and didn’t mind in the least.

  ‘Are they always like that?’ Bakker asked.

  ‘Not always,’ Van der Berg said.

  ‘If he’d asked nicely we’d have told him. Wouldn’t we?’

  ‘Possibly,’ he replied and nodded at her black suit. ‘You look smart. Did your auntie make it?’

  ‘C&A. They had a sale.’

  He grinned. Pulled on the lapel of his brown jacket.

  ‘Me too!’

  She looked distracted. Bakker could do this sometimes. Drift off into a little reverie of her own.

  ‘When?’ she asked.

  He let go of the jacket.

  ‘A while back. A year or two . . .’

  ‘No, Dirk. I meant . . . when’s he going to call? The man who’s got Natalya?’

  A wan smile.

  ‘When he feels like it. Nothing we can do is going to change that. You have to learn to wait.’

  ‘But I hate waiting. And that nice man from AIVD isn’t throwing anything our way’ A pause. ‘What do we do?’

  He pointed at the PC monitor and the CCTV footage.

  ‘How about we try to make sense of that?’

  Vos had clearance by the time they got to Schiphol. Two duty officers accompanied him and Hanna Bublik into the secure unit next to the sprawling airport terminal. Parts of it seemed relatively normal: holding areas for people detained at immigration, due for deportation. There was an outside space for exercise. Some men were lazily kicking a football around as they walked past. Then they went down a long passageway protected by high fencing and the mood changed. A body scanner, a pat down. More ID checks. The officers didn’t like the look of Hanna Bublik at all and got quite short with her.

  When they went away to check with Marnixstraat one last time Vos said, by way of apology, ‘They don’t know. If they did . . .’

  She stared at him then asked why there was nothing in the papers. He told her about the blackout.

  ‘And if this had been that other girl? The Dutch girl? With her rich parents?’

  ‘It would have been exactly the same,’ Vos said though he wasn’t sure she believed him.

  After a couple of minutes they were led through an electronic security door into a narrow, closed-off corridor. Grey metal floor, grey metal walls. Doors at regular intervals. Nothing on them except a small surveillance window with bars and a smart lock.

  ‘Two people with you inside,’ the guard said. ‘Those are the rules.’

  Vos had read the file the night before. Ismail Alamy styled himself a preacher. There was evidence to suggest he’d radicalized a good number of young men, sent some of them to madrassas in Pakistan which had links with extremist groups, among them the network led by the shadowy figure Barbone. But he’d never been found with weapons or accused of violence himself.

  ‘Fine,’ he said and they walked into the cell. A single bed, neatly made. A tiny window looking out onto the recreational area. Seated cross-legged on the sheets was a small, unremarkable man in a bright orange boiler suit. In spite of the overlong beard he seemed younger than fifty-one, the age the reports gave, with a quick and mobile face and brown eyes that watched and judged them as they entered.

  ‘Where’s my lawyer?’ Alamy asked in good English.

  ‘You don’t need one,’ Vos said, showing his ID. There was a small TV set in the opposite wall. ‘Do you know what happened yesterday? The attack? In the city?’

  The Moroccan laughed and gestured at the cell.

  ‘In case you didn’t notice . . . I have an alibi.’

  Hanna stared at him.

  ‘Who is this woman?’ Alamy asked. ‘She doesn’t look like one of you.’

  ‘She isn’t,’ Vos said and started to tell him the story that wasn’t on the TV.

  Natalya Bublik had slept somehow. When she woke she could just make out daylight leaking through the cracks in the deck above her. The girl was no stranger to confined spaces. In Oude Nieuwstraat she’d shared the tiny gable room with her mother. Before that they’d moved around Georgia, never staying anywhere long. Skipping overnight sometimes. To avoid men who wanted money. She was old enough to understand that.

  Tall for her age, smart, observant. There’d been a game she’d played for as long as she could remember. One that took her out of the world when it was bad.

  Now seemed a good time to recover it. So she used the portable toilet in the corner of the tiny cabin, washed her hands and face in the bowl using the small lump of soap they’d left. Ate the bread she found on a plate, drank the orange juice. Then went back to the bed, lay on the hard mattress and closed her eyes.

  Imagine.

  Ducks. She could hear them quacking close by, bickering like the younger kids in the playground at the school her mother found for her. Sometimes she thought she even heard their tiny webbed feet strike against the hull.

  Boats moving. Small engines, ripples through waves. The smell of diesel and dank water. This wasn’t a busy place, she thought.

  A railway line. Lots of trains moving to and fro. Not near but not so far she couldn’t identify the sound. And in her head imagine the people on them, going to work, to school, into the city for all the reasons she knew too well and never mentioned. It wasn’t just the black monster that followed them everywhere, lumbering through the night. Sometimes it was men. Embarrassed, awkward men shuffling up to the red-light windows along the street. There was a connection there, one that left her mother both happy and sad.

  It involved money. A present for her once. The pink jacket with the ponies. Expensive her mother said. All the more reason to sell it, Natalya thought.
They needed the money and she hated pink, had no idea what use a pony might be.

  The thing was the warmest clothing she had. And didn’t much keep out the cold.

  Outside she heard footsteps. A sudden angry flash of guilt hit her. All the time she’d been listening for things that might comfort her. The birds. The distant sounds of the city. Not taking note of the fact there was a man in the next room. Had been all along.

  Just one at that moment. She felt sure of that. He spoke on the phone sometimes, too softly for her to hear. And once, she thought, he’d gone outside. There’d been the sound of steps on stairs, on a deck above, then a walkway. Then he came back.

  Or another one did. She’d no idea and that was maddening.

  Some time later he started moving things around.

  Another one. That was what her imagination told her. They took turns. Like teachers at lessons. Or guards in a prison.

  Natalya looked around and thought she had a good idea where she was. In the bow of a boat rocking lazily on the water. A space so small it might have been meant for storage, not to live in. Only a child could manage that. For how long?

  As she watched the small, black painted door that must lead back to the main cabin opened with a creak. She sat on the bed and waited. As curious as she was scared. Would he still be in the odd green outfit? Curly wig? Black make-up? Red lips? White eyes and teeth?

  A large shadow filled the door and then he walked in, so tall he had to crouch in the limited space.

  A man in jeans, a black jacket, black balaclava.

  She wanted to laugh, to throw an insult at him.

  You’re scared of me? An eight-year-old girl? A foreigner whose mother has to deal with strangers just so we can eat?

  But she knew that wouldn’t be wise.

  ‘I want to go home,’ she said instead.

  There was a supermarket bag in his hands. Marqt. The organic place her mother wanted to shop but never could afford. He pulled out a packet of crisps, some tiny cheeses. Bread and bottles of soft drinks. A couple of toilet rolls. A toothbrush and toothpaste. A few packets of brightly coloured sweets. A box of crayons, a colouring book, and a cheap games console.

  ‘I want a shower. I want to wash my hair.’

  The balaclava nodded. He seemed surprised by that.

  ‘You can’t,’ he said. ‘Not yet.’