by David Hewson
‘My girl,’ Schrijver said in the end. ‘She’s in trouble. He said she’s here somewhere. If he’s hurt her . . .’
Vos ordered the guard to open the gates then phoned Bakker and told her to come straight to Zorgvlied with six officers, all the blues flashing.
She was still at her desk, going through the reports on the case from four years before. There was a note for Vos in the log. Vincent de Graaf, the man jailed for the Sleeping Beauty Murders, was now in the prison hospital, undergoing tests for cancer. Seriously ill, perhaps dying. Marly Kloosterman, the prison medical officer, had called to tell Vos that De Graaf kept hinting he had something to say. As far as Bakker could see, Vos had never received the message.
‘There’s a girl here somewhere,’ Vos said. ‘Her name’s Annie Schrijver. I think . . .’
The father was staring at him, face wracked with fury and grief.
From somewhere in the vast dark of the graveyard came a sharp, high sound. A familiar one. The bark of a little dog.
‘Bring along a medical team too.’
Zorgvlied was a maze of winding paths and gardens, leafy bowers, ponds and fountains, seventeen hectares bordered by the Amstel to the south and the narrow canal called the Kleine Wetering around its land side. Sam – Vos was sure it was him – kept barking sporadically but from a distance; it was impossible to pinpoint where.
The messages, the chase across the city. This was all a kind of game. A challenge, a puzzle set for him alone. And puzzles came with clues.
‘A grave,’ Vos said. ‘How do I find out where someone’s buried?’
‘Easy,’ the man said and walked to the half-open door of the reception.
‘Where’s my girl?’ Schrijver cried and looked ready to dash off into the endless dark.
‘She’s wherever that dog’s barking,’ Vos answered. ‘Stay there.’
He followed the uniformed man inside. There was a computer just by the door. Already the guard was rolling the mouse to bring it to life.
‘You’ve got a name?’
‘Jonker. Ruud Jonker.’
‘They’re all here. Hundreds, old and new. It takes a few seconds. If . . .’
A map flashed up, footpaths straight and meandering, trees, monuments, statues, water features, numbers and names that meant nothing. It seemed more like a guide to a vast and busy theme park than the topography of a graveyard.
‘Paradiso,’ the guard said, placing a finger on the screen. ‘Where they put the funny ones.’ He sighed. ‘About as far away as you can get from here. The eastern corner, by the water.’
A page started to pop out of the printer. Then he moved into a different app. Colour CCTV screens came up. Ten of them covering all the roadside entrances, nothing in the cemetery itself. The only activity was their own.
‘This is crazy. I don’t see how anyone could get in. If—’
‘He’s here,’ Vos insisted.
The guard grabbed the printout, opened the drawer, pulled out two more torches, handed them over and said, ‘Stay close. It’s dark out there and you really don’t want to get lost.’
Along the gravel path they went, beneath trees, branches gently moving above them, owls hooting, creatures stirring unseen. Sam barked again. No human cry at all. Bert Schrijver kept marching like a man possessed. In a few minutes Bakker ought to be outside, with backup.
‘Annie,’ Schrijver called into the night. ‘Annie . . .’
The cry sounded like a plaintive howl.
Torch beams flashing in a radius ahead, trying to spot something that wasn’t grey stone or black marble, they walked on.
It was five minutes to the sector called Paradiso. Vos remembered now: this was where they buried the eccentrics and a few of the famous. Graves with photographs, tiny Buddhist temples, poems, mementoes, toys and plants, scattered flowers, fresh and old, casting the faintest perfume against the dank smell of nearby water.
The guard checked the sheet in his hand, shook his head, swore, stopped.
‘I nearly took you down the wrong path. This place . . . in the dark . . .’ He turned to his left. ‘Over there.’ The beams of their three torches swung round over headstones. Then stopped when together they caught sight of a pale shape, naked in the half light, lying across a grave at the very edge of the plot.
‘Annie . . .’
Schrijver was shrieking, running, arms outstretched.
Vos told the guard to go back to the gate and wait for the police teams to arrive. Then lead them here immediately.
‘Are you sure?’ the man asked, a frightened note in his voice. ‘This place is like a maze. In the dark—’
‘I’m sure.’
Vos strode to the Jonker grave, looked at the headstone and thought . . . tattoos.
That was another memory coming back from the grim events the papers called the Sleeping Beauty case.
Schrijver was on his knees on the gravel. The headstone had a photograph of a man, his face covered in scrolls and patterns like a Maori warrior. A name: Ruud Jonker. Born in De Pijp, died there thirty-seven years later. Across the middle of the low grave border there was a body, naked, muddy, face down, blood leaking onto gravel.
‘Schrijver,’ Vos said, kneeling next to the shaking, weeping man. He pulled a pair of latex gloves from his pocket and tried to edge the man back with one hand while checking for life with the other. Through the thin latex he could feel how cold the flesh was. The skin was wet and there was weed plastered everywhere. ‘You need to step away. We’ve help on the way. Your daughter—’
‘It’s not my daughter,’ Schrijver spat at him. ‘Are you blind?’
All the rules he’d learned over the years told him: you don’t move a corpse. You wait. He wondered why Sam wasn’t barking any more, felt guilty that he should even be thinking of the little dog at that moment.
Vos reached out and gently gripped the grimy, mud-stained hair, lifting the head so he could see. It was a man, thin-faced, neat hipster beard, perhaps thirty, long dark hair, glazed eyes that seemed frightened even in death. There was something on his naked shoulder: a tattoo, the ink so raw and new there was blood around the wound.
Three words.
Sleep Baby Sleep.
In the darkness beyond the fringe of bushes at the edge of the graveyard an engine stuttered into life, weak and uncertain, like an outboard on a dinghy. Vos was barely on his feet when the throttle opened up. Then came the sound of Sam, yapping furiously.
This time he could fix the direction. It was along the canal, back towards the heart of the cemetery, just outside the curious area called Paradiso. Vos edged the torch beam along the path. Between a row of low cypresses was one of the grander monuments, large enough to boast a rectangular lily pool surrounded on two sides by Doric columns, a broken pediment at the top. The silhouette of an angel with broad wings and a bowed head was just visible at the nearest point, something like a vine trailing from one of the wings.
Vos could smell fuel, close by. He pulled out his phone and got Bakker.
‘Where are you?’
‘On the little lane. Not far away. A minute maybe.’
‘Tell control we’ve one dead. Maybe two. Then . . .’
Ahead of them a ball of red and yellow flame appeared by the bank then a blazing brand dipping down to the grass. There was a soft roar of ignition and a line of fire began to run towards the rectangle of the pool tomb, outside the line of columns. The flickering yellow light revealed the little terrier tethered to one of the columns, struggling frantically to get free. Sam started to shriek and scream. Schrijver saw something too, dashed forward crying his daughter’s name over and over.
It took a moment for Vos to understand. There were two naked muddy arms just visible past the winged statue. Sam yelped again, straining, biting against the rope. Then the line broke and he was racing free into the dark night.
Vos ran too. The flames were confined to the low line of conifers some distance from the grave. They were for show, fo
r terror, nothing else.
Schrijver was by the body on the ground by the time Vos got there. It was a young woman, naked, muddy, unconscious in a huddle in the sight of the angel’s bowed gaze.
Annie . . .
Bert Schrijver carried her, weeping, muttering, away from the grave, back to the grassy path. There Vos placed his jacket on the cold gravel while Schrijver lowered her gently onto it, wrapping the fabric round her muddy form. Vos was on his knees by her face in a second, head down to her mouth, fingers feeling for a pulse. The girl coughed, rolled her eyes, turned to one side and puked on the dry late summer grass.
In the dark the boat engine revved more loudly.
He left Schrijver with his daughter, raced through the dying flames out towards the canal. Muddy tracks ran up from the bank to the raised edge of the cemetery. This was how the man had entered, avoiding the CCTV around the entrance gates. Delivering his cargo: a body, a semi-conscious woman, a dog.
Vos pushed through the undergrowth. His torch beam fell on a small dinghy manoeuvring in the water, heading along the channel. Straight away he tried to work out all the exit routes. It was impossible. This area was polder, reclaimed land criss-crossed by a skein of narrow waterways. The canal could lead anywhere, back to the Amstel, out into the complex network of ditches and canals that ran through the neighbouring Amstelpark all the way to the Zuidas. He could be back in the city or south in the suburbs under the cover of darkness and no one was going to follow him.
A figure in the back stood up. Sirens were rising close by, a harsh rattle in the quiet night. They’d chase this man but that, Vos knew, was a contest lost already. It had been from the start.
‘Another day, Vos,’ cried a cheery male voice, middle-aged, confident, amused. ‘You will hear from me again. That I promise.’
The engine surged into a soprano whine, the nose of the dinghy bucked up, the boat vanished into the darkness.
Figures ran through the shadows: Laura Bakker’s familiar tall form to the front as usual. Behind her, medics in white with a stretcher. Van der Berg struggling to keep up behind.
Vos jumped as something brushed against his leg. Sam was there, leaning against his shin, feet on Vos’s shoes, muddy, wide-eyed, trembling, a length of crude rope still attached to his neck, the end bitten through with those sharp terrier teeth.
‘It’s all right now, boy,’ he said then loosened the cord and placed it carefully on a nearby grave. After that he scooped up the shivering little dog, held him tight and close and walked back into the field of graves where a man was bent low over his daughter, uttering a frantic prayer. Torchlights were gathering round, police and medics swooping on the pair by the lily pond and the frozen angel that stood above them, arms open, dead eyes fixed upon the scene.
His phone beeped. A text there, from a new number, an international one.
A wise man learns more from pain than pleasure. And so our education begins.
TWO
The hospital was a sprawling network of buildings next to the busy A10 ring road, a medical city in miniature set on both sides of the tram tracks running from the centre to the Zuidas.
Bert Schrijver had sat in the ambulance that took his daughter there from Zorgvlied, trying to cling to her hand all the way. Nina had joined him in admissions, tearful and full of questions he couldn’t answer. The two of them had spent the next seven hours in the emergency wing, stuck in a corridor watching medical teams come and go. Around four they were allowed to move into the intensive care unit and watch their daughter through the window of the single room she’d been allocated. Now it was seven thirty on a bright September morning. They sat on the same hard chairs, stiff, tired heads aching, hungry, thirsty, watching the still figure in the gown behind the glass, unwilling to step away out of an irrational fear of what might happen.
A uniform police officer was with them, a kindly woman who kept offering to fetch coffee and something to eat. Vos, the brigadier who’d come to Zorgvlied for his own reasons, had appeared around two in the morning, checking on Annie’s condition, asking questions about the dead man found with her in the odd graveyard section called Paradiso. The Schrijvers had no idea who he was and neither, it seemed, did the police.
Three years before, Schrijver’s parents from the castle in the Albert Cuyp had died here, six months apart. He hated every corner, every ward, every room, the cloying antiseptic smell of the place, the sound of it, the steady whir of fans, the chirp of electronics, even the presence of the doctors and nurses whose practised smiles of sympathy were rarely followed by news that was welcome.
Somewhere in this endless maze of corridors, wards and theatres Rob Sanders worked, a nurse who might have made a son-in-law once. At thirty-three he was more than a decade older than Annie, an off-and-on lover. Until the day he hit her and it was only Nina who’d stopped Schrijver beating the living shit out of Sanders for that.
‘You should step away for a while,’ the policewoman said again. ‘Let me get you something. We could go to the cafe.’
‘She’s right,’ Nina said with a sharp glance in his direction. ‘We’re doing nothing here.’
Doing nothing.
The feeling of helplessness was the worst part. During the night, while Nina briefly slept, greying head on the hard hospital bench seat, he’d got down on his knees and prayed to a god he hadn’t spoken to for years, one that never listened before and doubtless wouldn’t now.
Take me, Bert Schrijver had whispered, tears filling his eyes behind lids squeezed tight. Not Annie. Not my little girl. Take me. A worthless, useless piece of shit who’s screwed up every opportunity he’s ever been given. And will screw up the next if it ever comes along. Because that is who I am. For pity’s sake, for the love of my daughter, take me.
‘Bert . . .’
He pulled himself out of this memory and said, ‘I don’t leave my girl when she needs me. You go.’
Nina sighed and shrugged her jacket more tightly around herself.
‘Annie doesn’t need you. She’s no idea we’re here.’
‘And if she wakes?’
She wore a gentle though condescending expression. One he hadn’t seen in a long time. He had got it a lot when they were married and he was struggling to maintain the business the way his father had. The look said: I know you’re doing your best. But you’re an ineffectual man at heart. You don’t see it. But we do. All of us. We forgive you. What else is there to do?
Nina reached out and touched the back of his hand. He looked at her fingers: wrinkled, thin, ever-wrestling. His own were fat and ugly, dirty with the previous night’s mud.
‘You’re filthy, Bert. You stink. You need a shower and a change of clothes. The doctors said . . .’
He’d heard all that. Had listened to every word. Annie had been given some kind of date rape drug. An overdose. Maybe she’d been drinking too. Maybe doing hard drugs, not that he was inclined to believe that. By the time they got her to the hospital her breathing had turned shallow. If she didn’t recover soon . . .
They never said it but he guessed what they were getting at. He and Nina might face a terrible decision. Life or death delivered through a simple switch on the wall. Their daughter gone for no good reason, just twenty-two years old.
A familiar harsh, cracked voice rang down the corridor, an old, tobacco-stained tone he’d been hearing around the market since the two of them were kids together. Jordi Hoogland, the one outside employee the business could still just about afford.
He was walking towards them, arms outstretched, the biker’s black leather jacket on him, jeans, greasy grey ponytail down his back.
‘Oh Christ,’ Nina muttered then picked up her bag and told the policewoman she was going to the hospital cafe.
Still, she watched as Hoogland stumbled up to Bert Schrijver and hugged him, choking on his words. The man smelled of stale beer, sweat and cigarettes.
‘What happened? I heard. In the market. Everyone’s talking.’
; ‘Don’t they have anything better to do?’ Schrijver grumbled.
Hoogland was staring at Annie through the glass. She lay on the bed, a still, slim shape in a hospital gown. No ring in her nose now. They must have taken that out when they put in the lines. There were wires everywhere, monitors rising and falling by her side. The blue streak in her hair looked dead already.
‘What kind of bastard would do something like this?’
‘I don’t know. If I did . . .’
‘Tell me what you want,’ Hoogland said, taking his arm. ‘A friend in need . . .’
‘A friend?’ Nina Schrijver echoed. ‘Out of money again, Jordi?’
Hoogland’s eyes narrowed.
‘Came to help. That’s all. Whatever you want. Just ask.’
‘Ask you?’ One last look at the still, sad shape beyond the window. ‘I need a break from this,’ she said then left.
Back in Paradiso, Vos was fighting to keep his eyes open among the outlandish graves and other-worldly tombstones. Three hours’ sleep was all he’d managed.
Laura Bakker was on the phone to Marnixstraat constantly, asking questions, getting few answers. Schuurman, the best pathologist Marnixstraat possessed, had led a team through the hours of darkness. Aisha Refai, the young and talented forensic officer, was by his side as they began the painstaking task of searching and scraping for material among the mud, the gravel and the eccentric graves. Two scientific officers in white bunny suits were going over the pool tomb with the stone angel. Zorgvlied’s director and security officer had turned up, baffled, full of impossible questions, offended by the intrusion into this peaceful corner of the city.
The steady glare of morning made the headstone of Ruud Jonker appear brighter, almost cheery. The colour portrait attached to it, a late picture of the man buried beneath the stone chips, seemed defiant, as if the tattoos and grin were trying to prevail against death itself.