The House of Dolls

by Hewson, David

  ‘I didn’t know what was happening then,’ Vos said. ‘I’d no idea if it was a madman. A crook like Theo Jansen sending me a warning . . .’

  ‘Jansen didn’t murder kids,’ De Groot said with a shake of his head.

  ‘I never found a body, Frank. I didn’t find anything.’

  De Groot closed his eyes, murmured, ‘True. Sorry.’

  It was a feeble hope, an empty dream. For three months they’d turned the city upside down, raided Menzo’s premises, Jansen’s, harried sex traffickers, anyone Vos could think of. Anneliese had disappeared without trace. Vos felt some inner biological sense ought to tell him whether she was dead or not. But that wasn’t there either. She was just . . . gone.

  ‘Menzo would do it,’ Vos suggested, with little conviction.

  ‘Jimmy Menzo wasn’t big enough to be in our sights back then,’ De Groot replied. ‘It must have been some . . . lunatic. Not your fault you couldn’t catch him. No one could.’

  Vos folded his arms and kept quiet.

  ‘OK,’ De Groot admitted. ‘I don’t know that either. We were just out of our depth. All of us.’

  That bleak time would never leave him. Liesbeth getting crazier by the day. Accusing him of bringing this on by chasing the city’s gangs. Spitting out secrets he never wanted to hear.

  Vos had asked her to marry him so many times. She always said: Why? Weren’t they happy already?

  When Anneliese vanished he got the answer. Liesbeth was never his, not really. Worse, he was never hers and that still hurt.

  No one got close to what happened. The two of them went down different roads, each to their own breed of madness. She rushed into marriage with Wim Prins. Vos entered a dull, penurious solitude in a run-down boat in the Jordaan, punctuated by trips to the Rijksmuseum to stare at Petronella Oortman’s doll’s house hour after pointless hour, the odd deafening concert in the Melkweg, evenings spent mostly alone in the Drie Vaten.

  And bleak nights stoned senseless in the houseboat, sucking in the dense, dark smoke of the harshest weed he could find. Trying to obliterate something he couldn’t put a name to.

  ‘Katja hates Liesbeth for marrying her father,’ he said, trying to convince himself. ‘Taking the place of her dead mother. From what I remember she’s a heroin user. This is one more trick to get more money out of him.’

  ‘Drugs,’ De Groot said dryly, looking round the place. ‘Terrible things. What if it’s not?’

  Vos frowned.

  ‘Then it doesn’t matter, does it? I’m off the payroll, remember? This is none of my business.’

  ‘Make it your business. Come into the station and we’ll talk about it. It’s just some paperwork to go through. You could be back in place by tomorrow. Let’s face it.’ His eyes ran round the shabby boat. ‘You could use the money. You’re pissing your life away here.’

  Vos fingered the packet of Limburger. It stank.

  ‘I was thinking of opening a cheese shop.’

  Frank de Groot roared with laughter.

  ‘You? A cheese shop? As if the Jordaan needs another one. Please—’

  ‘Frank.’ Vos’s hand went out to De Groot’s arm. ‘It nearly broke me. I didn’t know who I was for a while. If I hadn’t found some escape. This place . . .’

  A sudden look of anger on De Groot’s face.

  ‘Do you think I never noticed? That I’d ask for any of this lightly? We weren’t just colleagues. We were—’

  ‘If Liesbeth called you from the office of the vice-mayor of the city council you’d do whatever she wanted. No choice.’

  Frank de Groot swore. Then grinned.

  ‘Sharp as ever. And there was me thinking you might have smoked yourself stupid in this hole.’

  Nothing.

  ‘It’s no secret, Pieter. People have seen you in that coffee shop down the street.’

  ‘Amsterdam resident. Card carrier. Nothing illegal. But if you want the truth . . .’ Vos hated the lassitude, the idleness dope brought on. ‘It didn’t help.’

  ‘I don’t want you using that shit if you’re back with us. I want . . .’ He leaned forward, tapped Vos’s skull through the long brown hair. ‘All that’s in there.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m begging.’

  ‘One hour in Marnixstraat,’ Vos conceded. ‘That girl of yours. Bakker . . .’

  ‘What about her?’ De Groot asked.

  ‘She seems tense. Why?’

  ‘Weren’t you tense in your first job?’

  Vos shook his head.

  ‘No. Why would I be?’

  ‘She’s spent half the night reading up on Anneliese’s case in the station. Reading up on you. She’s a bit in awe I guess.’ He groaned. ‘Worried too. Her probation period’s nearly up. The service assessment’s coming.’ A shrug of his heavy shoulders. ‘She isn’t going to make it.’

  Vos waited.

  ‘Amsterdam’s no place for her,’ De Groot added. ‘A farmer’s kid from Friesland who turns up here with a suitcase of bad clothes and an attitude.’

  Something was missing.

  ‘Why did she come then?’

  De Groot groaned, a low, tired sound.

  ‘Horrible story. Last Christmas. On the way back from church. Mother and father dead in a car crash. She might have been with them but she was doing unpaid work experience at the Dokkum police station.’ De Groot shrugged. ‘Drunk driver. She was in the car that went out on the call. Saw them.’

  ‘Christ . . .’ Vos whispered.

  ‘After that she told Dokkum she wanted to join the force. Here, not there. I think the kid wants to tend the flock. Never a good idea.’

  Vos groaned and put a hand to his forehead.

  Heavy boots on the stairs that led down from the deck. He knew what he’d see. Laura Bakker there, Sam panting on the end of his lead. She’d stamped on the planks deliberately. He was sure of that. Had managed to slink onto the boat quietly without their noticing. Vos had no idea how long she’d been there, how much she’d heard.

  ‘I’m not a girl,’ she repeated in that flat sullen northern voice.

  ‘True,’ Vos said. ‘We’ll take Sam to the Drie Vaten. The bar on the corner. The woman there can look after him. And . . .’

  He got up, found a bag of washing.

  ‘. . . I can leave this with her.’

  ‘The bar does your washing?’ Bakker asked.

  ‘It’s just a temporary arrangement,’ Vos said. Got up, smiled, saw that this broke the ice a little. Shooed out De Groot with his hands, then her. ‘Don’t worry. I’m coming. I’ll take a look at your doll.’

  7

  Miriam Smith walked the two kids out of De Wallen into the quieter, more affluent streets of the Canal Rings, past imposing mansions, mostly apartments these days or hotels for the wealthier visitors. It was an ordinary Amsterdam spring morning. Chilly, the sky gently changing from weak sun to weak rain. Locals on bikes, heads down, pedalling hard for their destinations. Tourists wandering, on foot, on rented cycles, getting in the way.

  The smell of bread and pastries from the bakeries. Beer from the bars serving early, thirsty customers. From time to time the harsh organic tang of dope on the air.

  She made them carry the weapons in a black holdall, walking on and on, past Herengracht, past Keizersgracht and Prinsengracht, into the busy square of Leidseplein where the morning visitors were already out to play with their Heinekens and smokes.

  ‘We could’ve took a tram,’ red kid moaned.

  She kicked the big bag he was carrying.

  ‘Bright idea, sonny. The cops come and check this stuff from time to time. Do you two have names?’

  They didn’t answer and looking at them she knew why. They were strangers before Menzo brought them together that morning. An odd streak of machismo meant that neither wanted to be the first to ask.

  Down a narrow street there were Indonesian restaurants and sushi bars, cocktail joints and tiny coffee shops dressed with the Rastafarian flag
and pictures of cannabis leaves.

  They walked into the third one along. A tall West Indian behind the counter, Afro cut, woollen hat. Didn’t say a word. Just turned down the reggae. Led them out to the Prinsengracht, one of the city’s three great waterways encircling De Wallen, the last, an enclosing belt for Amsterdam that ran through everything the city had to offer, rich and poor, squalid and magnificent.

  Opposite stood tall terrace houses, winches on gable rooftops ready to haul in furniture. Pigeons flapped stupidly across the tiles. There were houseboats and tourist vessels. A few smaller craft too.

  The man walked them down some steps to a battered dinghy, took off the blue tarpaulin to reveal two bench seats, waved at them to climb in. Checked the outboard motor, showed them how to start it. Listened to the steady rattle of the little engine after he’d pulled the cord then shut it down.

  He took out an old Nokia and a tourist map with points marked along the canal.

  ‘When I call the first time you go here and wait. The boat’s small, the water’s low. No one will see you. When I call the second time you move.’ He gave them the phone and the map. ‘Here.’ Two pairs of cheap fake-leather gloves. ‘Wear these. Throw the weapons in the canal. Make your way to the place Jimmy told you about. Miriam’s going to wait for you there.’

  Blue kid pulled out the card with the picture of the doll’s house.

  ‘That’s the one, bright boy,’ Miriam Smith said. She grinned. ‘You’ll like Africa. It’s where we’re from.’

  Red kid grunted something.

  ‘Him.’ She tapped the West Indian on the chest. ‘Me. You too.’

  They didn’t like that. Surinamese toughs. From South America, not the Caribbean.

  ‘You don’t know shit about history,’ the man grunted. ‘Do you?’

  ‘I know I’m hungry,’ red kid said.

  ‘Wait there,’ Miriam Smith told him.

  A couple of minutes later she was back with two cones of fries dripping in mayonnaise, a couple of cans of Coke and a pair of cheap collapsible umbrellas.

  ‘Here,’ she said and handed them over. ‘I wouldn’t want you to get wet. Take a look at this too.’

  She gave them a photograph of a beefy, middle-aged man with a white beard.

  ‘Who’s this? Father Christmas?’ red kid asked.

  Miriam Smith laughed at that.

  ‘Yeah. But you’ve got a present for him.’

  8

  Wim Prins came up with the idea for De Nachtwacht a year before when he was thinking of running for the council, hunting for headline-grabbing ideas. He’d never expected to win a majority let alone seize the presidency. But the mood had changed. Austerity and a popular resentment for the old parties had given muscle to minority groups previously confined to shouting on the fringes.

  He was Mr Clean. A new broom sweeping the city. His own history – a wife lost to drugs, a daughter who’d wound up with the same affliction – helped his position more than hindered it.

  Here was someone who knew the cost of Amsterdam’s liberal legacy. Pushing an anti-crime, anti-drugs ticket, he found himself in the headlines immediately. The mix had touched a nerve. And now he was in power, kept there by a deal with Margriet Willemsen’s Independence Party.

  No, with her. Thirty-two years old, ready smile, short, black hair in a business-like Sassoon bob, alert cobalt-blue eyes, bright, attentive face, not beautiful but hard not to look at. She was made for office. To begin with Prins couldn’t understand why she’d never joined one of the major parties. That would have put her in Parliament already. Then they worked together to seal the coalition and he’d come to understand. Beneath the bland, politician’s exterior burned a steely, individual sense of ambition.

  Not that De Nachtwacht was without its obstacles. Alex Hendriks, head of the council’s general office, was one of them.

  He and Margriet Willemsen had spent an hour at the conference table in Prins’s office going through the initial phase of the plan.

  ‘We’ve got objections from the retailers, the restaurant association, some of the local community groups. A few of your own councillors are having second thoughts,’ Hendriks said.

  He was a short, furtive, anxious man, forever playing with his laptop or iPad or any one of the three phones he carried and checked constantly.

  ‘The less money people waste on dope and whores the more they’ve got to spend somewhere else,’ Margriet Willemsen said with a smile.

  Hendriks shook his head.

  ‘Not everyone’s here for the culture. They’re after—’

  ‘Those are people we can do without,’ Prins interrupted.

  ‘I’m not so sure of that,’ Hendriks continued. ‘The trade associations are worried they’re going to get hit on footfall by maybe twenty, thirty per cent. That’s big money. People not buying food, drink. Clothes. Souvenirs. They’re nagging their councillors. Your councillors.’

  ‘Think of all the ones who’ll come instead,’ Prins said. ‘Better people. Richer people.’

  Hendriks stood his ground.

  ‘They won’t go down De Wallen. Why? To see a bunch of closed coffee shops? Some empty cabin windows? This is the centre of the city we’re talking about. You could be killing it—’

  ‘If you won’t do it we’ll find someone who can,’ Margriet Willemsen broke in. ‘We won the election—’

  ‘You don’t have a mandate to piss off everyone,’ Hendriks snapped. ‘Do that and they’ll hang you. If Theo Jansen or that evil bastard Menzo don’t get there first.’

  The smile never left her face.

  ‘What are you saying? That we need to look out for the crooks now?’

  Hendriks didn’t take his eyes off Wim Prins.

  ‘You’re threatening their empires. What do you think? They’re not going to sit back and wait.’

  ‘They won’t have much choice,’ Prins said. ‘I talked to Marnixstraat this morning. Jansen’s due to be released this afternoon. He and Menzo are going to be at each other’s throats. We’re the last thing on their minds. They can fight it out between each other and we’ll clean up the corpses when it’s done. There’s never been a better time to throw out the rubbish . . .’

  ‘And what about your daughter?’ Hendriks asked.

  The civil servant’s pale face had colour for once.

  ‘You’re not the only one who talks to Marnixstraat,’ Hendriks added. ‘They’re worried as hell about what you’re asking for. They said—’

  ‘My daughter’s my concern. Not yours. Margriet was right. If you feel you can’t pursue the agreed policy of the council you should resign. We can talk severance if you like.’

  He was a coward at heart, Prins thought. Now was the time to test it.

  ‘I’m paid to offer you advice, whether you want to hear it or not.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Prins replied. ‘We’ve listened. Now will you kindly do what we’ve asked?’

  The first phase was almost ready. Within a month the city would start to turn to the civilian staff who usually dealt with traffic and minor street crime. They would be empowered to enter coffee shops and arrest on sight. Pick up pimps, hookers and dealers, call the police and hand them over.

  Hendriks kept tapping the table with his pen. But he hadn’t started to make notes yet and that meant something.

  ‘These are unarmed men and women we pay to hand out parking tickets. You’re asking them to harass criminals in the street.’

  ‘That’s their job now,’ Prins insisted.

  ‘And when one of them gets beaten up? Or killed?’

  ‘Then we crack down harder,’ Willemsen replied.

  ‘Is there really anything else to talk about?’ Prins asked, glancing at his watch.

  Margriet Willemsen shook her head.

  Alex Hendriks picked up his three phones, tucked his iPad beneath his arm and left.

  9

  Marnixstraat didn’t look any different. Office after open office. Then, finally, homicide
with its lines of desks, reports and photos on the wall, detectives, men mostly, working computers and phones.

  Faces that were familiar. Koeman with his droopy brown moustache, eyeing Laura Bakker as she walked, the way he did every female officer, looker or not. Thin, miserable Rijnder, trying to work up a smile. Van der Berg, the genial office drinker, raising an imaginary glass when he spotted Vos approaching.

  A brisk, brave man, little appreciated.

  ‘Welcome back, boss,’ he shouted as Vos got near. ‘It’s your round.’

  Vos smiled, lifted a pretend beer, said nothing.

  Then Klaas Mulder, hands on hips, leaning on the door of a meeting room.

  The carefully sculpted fine blonde hair was thinning. Rugged face lined, the cheekbones more prominent, the grey eyes more weary. When Vos was a brigadier Mulder shared the same rank. Always saw himself as competition. Not a man to pool resources or information. Then, after Vos’s departure, he was promoted to hoofdinspecteur, De Groot’s deputy, picked up the skimpy case against Theo Jansen and built it into something that could jail Amsterdam’s leading gang lord on obscure and perhaps dubious money-laundering charges.

  Vos was still half-crazy at the time. But one day, when he was feeling serious, he skipped the coffee shop and the bar and went to the library to read through all the newspaper reports. Any prosecution that put Jansen in jail was probably deemed a good thing by the city hierarchy. It still didn’t feel right to him. And now the evidence was unravelling. No wonder the man’s smile looked counterfeit.

  ‘Pieter. Good to see you back where you belong.’ Mulder reached out and felt Vos’s scruffy black jacket. ‘You’re wearing your old work clothes too.’

  Before he joined the police Mulder had almost become a professional footballer. Trialled for Ajax. Just a dodgy knee stopped him, or so he told everyone. That didn’t prevent him working out most days in a gym nearby. A tough, solitary, uncompromising man. He’d been lucky not to face a disciplinary hearing over some of his antics with suspects.