FOR EDDIE
CONTENTS
Map
PART ONE: MONDAY 17 APRIL
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PART TWO: TUESDAY 18 APRIL
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PART THREE: WEDNESDAY 19 APRIL
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PART FOUR: THURSDAY 20 APRIL
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PART FIVE: NINE DAYS LATER
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The Killing
The Killing II
Carnival for the Dead
PART ONE
MONDAY 17 APRIL
1
‘Vos?’
Laura Bakker walked through every room of the Rijksmuseum looking for him.
‘Pieter Vos?’
A slight man of medium height, hunched in a pale-green winter coat that had seen better days. Seated on a bench in front of the biggest doll’s house she’d ever seen, Vos seemed both young and old at the same time. His posture, his long brown hair, his creased and worn clothing spoke of middle age. Yet his face was unlined, interested, alert. That of a favourite teacher or a caring, patient priest. And his blue eyes, fixed entirely on the doll’s house opposite, had the bright, hard glint of a piece of pottery on the mantelpiece back home in Dokkum. Unwavering. Intelligent.
She’d read the file before De Groot dispatched her from the police station a short bike ride away in Marnixstraat. Pieter Vos, thirty-nine. Resigned from his position as Brigadier in that same station two years before after the failure of the investigation into the disappearance of his daughter Anneliese. Now living a downbeat bohemian existence on a houseboat in the Jordaan, struggling to survive on the paltry remains of his premature pension.
Bakker pulled out the folder she’d brought. Papers, photos scattered everywhere. She swore. Heads turned. Then she scooped up the strewn documents and pictures from the floor and crammed them back into place.
He was staring at her by then. A look she knew. It said . . . that was clumsy.
‘Vos?’ she asked, glancing at the ID photo to make sure this was the right man. In the force Vos was even more boyish in appearance. Events had aged him.
De Groot was his boss. A personal friend too from what she could gather. Heartbroken by Vos’s resignation and the loss of a famed Amsterdam police officer to . . . what?
Trying to repair his ramshackle houseboat on the Prinsengracht no more than a five-minute walk from the desk he once occupied. The early newspaper cuttings lauded Vos as a scourge of the city’s underworld, a languid, modest detective who’d torn the city’s gangs to shreds with a shrug and a smile. Not that there was much to read. He’d shunned the limelight when he was in post. Fled from it when his own daughter went missing, shattered, or so the papers said, that his own diligence as a police officer may have brought about her abduction. A fruitless search followed and then Vos was out of the force. Anneliese was one more name in the missing persons files. A case in the archives, gathering digital dust.
He had a lead coming out of his pocket, earphones on. She leaned down, gently pulled them out, was surprised to hear the loud jazz-rock of ‘Willie the Pimp’ coming out of them.
‘Pieter Vos?’ she said again and found herself reaching out to touch his arm, not quite knowing why. The long, uncombed hair and shabby clothes . . . there was something fragile about the man. It was hard to associate this quiet, absorbed figure with the Brigadier who put so many in jail. ‘You haven’t got time to listen to Zappa. Commissaris de Groot wants to see you in your office. Pick up your stuff. We’re off.’
‘What do you know about Zappa?’ he asked in a kindly, amused voice.
‘My dad liked him. Used to play that stuff all night long if he could get away with it. Get moving. We’re off.’
‘Why does Frank send me children?’ he asked then put the earphones on again.
She sat down next to him on the bench, folded her arms, thought for a moment then reached into his pocket and yanked out the lead for phones.
The look on his face was a mixture of surprise and outrage.
‘That’s quite a thing,’ Bakker said, pointing at the display case in front of them.
The doll’s house of Petronella Oortman was complex and a good head taller than Pieter Vos. An Amsterdam canal mansion in miniature. Three floors, each with three rooms and an adjoining staircase corridor. A kitchen, a parlour, a nursery, furniture and paintings, crockery and delicate, miniature draperies. He couldn’t stop staring at it and she knew why.
‘My name’s Laura Bakker. Twenty-four years old and no child, thank you.’
When his bright blue eyes fell on her she had nothing else to say.
‘Missing the green fields of Friesland, Laura?’
It was the accent that did it. Amsterdammers looked down on everything outside the capital. She came from the provinces. People there were simple, stupid even.
‘There’s more to Friesland than green fields,’ she said.
‘What does your father do when he’s not listening to Zappa?’
‘Farmer.’
She was tall. Lanky even. Her fine red hair was pulled back behind her head, a practical decision for work. Laura Bakker didn’t give much thought to how she looked. Her long face was pale and, she felt, unremarkable. Not much different from when she was seventeen.
‘Do you miss him?’ he asked.
‘Yes but he’s dead,’ she said. ‘Mum too. Not that this matters. Just get your stuff, will you?’
He didn’t move.
She took out another folder from her bag, almost spilled the contents of that on the floor. He looked at her, one dark eyebrow raised, then went back to gazing at the doll’s house.
‘That cost Petron
ella twenty, thirty thousand guilders. As much as her mansion on Warmoesstraat I guess. Which is probably a coffee shop now, selling bad marijuana to drunken Brits.’
‘You look like you were expecting me, Vos. How’s that?’
‘Magic. Didn’t you read the files?’
‘They don’t say anything about magic. Plenty else . . .’
‘Oortman was a wealthy widow. Her money came from the silk trade. Which kind of lived alongside slavery and spice. So maybe . . .’ He stroked his chin, trying to find the right word. ‘Maybe things aren’t that different.’
‘Warmoesstraat? Is that where you buy your dope?’
‘I said it was bad.’
‘It’s all bad, Vos.’
‘You’re young, Laura. What do you know?’
‘I know the daughter of the vice-mayor’s gone missing. Katja Prins. Not the first time apparently. But—’
‘Frank called me. He said he was sending their new aspirant. A simple country girl who thought she might catch drunk drivers in Dokkum. And when that didn’t happen felt she could make a difference in Amsterdam. He gave me your name.’
The blood rushed to her cheeks. Her fingers automatically clutched the simple, silver crucifix around her neck, over the plain black jumper.
‘By simple I’m sure he meant . . . unspoilt,’ Vos added in his quiet and diffident voice. ‘Nothing untoward. He said you crashed a squad car . . .’
She wasn’t going there.
‘Your daughter was snatched by a man obsessed with dolls. There’s something like that with the Prins girl . . .’
She placed the photo on his lap. An antique porcelain child’s doll in a white pinafore dress and a police evidence label next to it. There was a hank of blonde hair in its right hand. The pinafore had a large bloodstain covering most of the front.
Her long index finger jabbed at the gigantic model opposite.
‘Looks just like that one over there, in the Oortman house, doesn’t it? Just like the one he sent you? Except for the blood and the hair.’
Vos sighed.
‘The hair was in its left hand with me. The bloodstain was smaller.’
‘Katja was staying at a tenement in De Wallen . . .’
‘The daughter of the man who runs the city council living in the red-light district? Doesn’t that tell you something?’
‘She hasn’t been seen for a week. We’re testing to see if the blood and the hair are hers. The doll was left outside her father’s house last night. In a miniature cardboard coffin. Just like he did with you in Marnixstraat . . .’
No surprise. Just a sad, resigned smile. It seemed his natural expression.
‘Did Frank tell you Wim Prins’s wife was my partner for seventeen years? Anneliese’s mother?’
The heat fled her cheeks.
‘No.’
‘Amsterdam’s a small place. Not as small as Dokkum . . .’
Vos went back to looking at the little rooms, the furniture, the doll marooned in a tiny nursery four centuries before.
‘Katja’s a crazy little junkie,’ he said, almost to himself. ‘Her own mother was too. She killed herself. The girl hates her stepmother. What’s new there?’
‘Vos . . .’
‘She’s tried to extort money out of her father before. He always refuses to press a case. It seems she has a cruel imagination . . .’
‘And if you’re wrong? If this is the same man who took your daughter?’
A shrug.
‘Then I expect you to do a better job than I did. You must excuse me.’ He rose from the bench seat, stretched his arms, took out a set of keys. ‘I have to go . . .’
‘Do you think you’ll see him here, then? Is it as easy as that? He’ll walk in and you’ll know.’
Her words seemed to disappoint him.
‘No,’ Vos replied. ‘But I want him to see me. Good day, Aspirant Bakker. I wish you well in your career.’
Then he plugged the earphones back into the phone, put them in his ears, and left.
2
Jimmy Menzo sat in a cold basement by the grey-brown bulk of the Oude Kerk. The faint drone of a pipe organ made its weedy way through the high slatted window. Outside, in the shadow of the squat church, the first morning whores writhed behind the glass of their cabins, waving their come-on gestures to the tourists wandering wide-eyed down the street.
Some stopped. Some walked on into the coffee shops. Doped or screwed, he got into their wallets either way. The city was a money machine. His. Not going to change.
Menzo had fled the slums of Surinamese when he was nineteen, abandoning the squalor of South America for the Netherlands, a harsh new world he entered with nothing more than a handful of guilders in his pocket, two powerful scarred fists and a head full of envy and ambition.
Two decades on he lived in a mansion near the waterfront, not far from the red-light district with his coffee shops and brothels, his cabins for rent to the freelance hookers and, most profitable of all, his hands around the drug supply chains threading through the area the locals called De Wallen.
From Centraal station in the north to Spui, from Nieuwmarkt to Damrak, the heart of Amsterdam belonged to the man who’d left the hovels of Paramaribo with nothing but some ragged clothes and a few hundred US dollars ripped off a failed coke shipment.
He’d earned this prize. Fought for it. And good fortune had put his one last rival, Theo Jansen, in jail.
That was two years before. Twenty-four months had passed in which Menzo battled night and day to seize every last fragment of Jansen’s empire, changing loyalties through money, through persuasion, through hard fists or the barrel of a gun when needed.
It was war of a kind and, like most modern conflicts, this one would never end.
Now a couple of kids fidgeted across the table from him. About the age Menzo was when he first turned up in Holland touting a fake passport and a forged work permit. Ugly like him, brutal, looking for opportunity. From Surinamese, once a little piece of Holland on the edge of South America. Short, stocky wannabe thugs not long arrived in town, one dressed in a shiny blue tracksuit, the other in red.
Four weapons on the battered wooden table. Two machine pistols, a couple of semi-automatic Walther P5s, the same kind the police used. Which was no coincidence, not that he said.
The two hunched, scared figures opposite couldn’t stop looking at them.
‘We’d planned on staying longer.’ The blue one. The bravest.
Menzo threw a briefcase on the table, opened it. They went quiet, stared at the spread of green money.
‘Fifty thousand US dollars. A couple of Antilles passports. Two tickets to Cape Town. Business class.’
‘Business class,’ red kid repeated, reaching for the case.
A bronchial, smoker’s laugh. Menzo was about the same size, pug-like and thuggish, strong, not one to shirk a fight. Pockmarked surly face. Narrow eyes. Swarthy skin.
He passed over a sheet of paper with Miriam’s tidy, female handwriting on it. A Prinsengracht address.
‘Miriam can fill you in. Afterwards you go here. It’s a shop. There you get the money. And the tickets.’
They looked at the paper like dumb school kids given impenetrable homework.
‘When can we come back?’ blue kid asked.
‘You don’t. You take the money and do what I did. Make your own way. I’ve friends over there. They can get you started.’
The two kids looked at each another.
‘What kind of shop?’ the red one asked.
Menzo liked their idiot questions, rifled through the pockets of his jacket. Black silk suit, sharp, tapered, tight. Made for him by a tailor in Bangkok where he went for business and a little pleasure.
Two business cards, the same pretty picture on the front. A miniature Amsterdam canal mansion in wood. Tiny pink chairs with tinier figures on them.
Poppenhuis aan de Prinsengracht.
The Doll’s House on the Prinsengracht. He gave the kids a
card each.
‘Dolls?’ red kid asked.
‘Don’t worry,’ Menzo told him. ‘They’re not there any more. Someone got rid of all the pretty things a while back.’
‘I got a sister here,’ the blue one said. ‘She just came out. Working in one of your restaurants. She needs me. If I leave—’
‘I’ll look after your sister. Make her manager. Give her a bar. Or something.’
A big, friendly smile.
‘Ask anyone. You do what Jimmy Menzo asks and no one ever touches you. I look after my own. Even when they’re someplace else.’
‘We’ve got a choice?’ blue kid asked quickly and Menzo thought maybe he’d underestimated this Surinamese brat, new off the plane, two hits to his name, police chasing him up and down the mainland and the Caribbean.
‘Sure you’ve got a choice.’
He lit a cigarette, listened to the asthmatic tones of the distant church organ. It was spring outside. Still cold with squally rain between brief spells of sun.
He took away the briefcase, put it on the floor. Their eyes were on the weapons.
Menzo got up from his seat, smiled at them. Launched himself at the table, seized the nearest machine pistol in his right fist. Waved the barrel in red kid’s face, then the blue. Laughing all the while.
‘Miriam?’ he yelled.
The door opened. Taller than Menzo, physique of a basketball player. Just touching thirty. Long face, one quarter Chinese she said and he believed it. A Trinidad girl, she barely spoke Dutch. Just English.
‘What?’ she asked.
Brown fur coat. What kind he didn’t know or care. She got all the money she wanted. Gave plenty in return.
‘These boys aren’t up to it,’ Menzo said. ‘Drive ’em to the station. Put ’em on a train somewhere. They’re pissing me off.’
The Surinamese brats shuffled on their seats, dumb young eyes on each other.
The woman walked up, threw some filthy English insults in their direction, glared at them with her big white staring eyes.
‘Fifty thousand dollars? How much you punks make back in Paramaribo?’
Silence.
She leaned over them. There was a presence to her, both enticing and threatening. Menzo loved the way she could scare a man and make him want her at the same time.
The kids were shivering. More than they did for him.
‘How . . . much . . . ?’ Miriam wanted to know.
‘Money’s no good if you don’t get to stay alive,’ blue kid mumbled.
The House of Dolls Page 1