The House of Dolls

by Hewson, David

  ‘Just passing,’ Vos said and walked past him into the room.

  Two sights there to take his breath away. A large porcelain doll on the table, twice the size of the one he’d received almost three years before. And Liesbeth Prins, pale, thinner than ever, standing in the corner, hand to her mouth, staring at him.

  ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘Where’s Wim?’

  ‘Busy.’ Her voice sounded fragile too. ‘He’ll come if we need him.’

  ‘This is about his daughter,’ Laura Bakker cut in. ‘He should be here now. What . . . ?’

  Vos smiled at her, put a finger to his lips, waited until she was quiet.

  He went over to a desk, took a pair of disposable gloves from the drawer, pulled them on.

  The doll was still inside a cardboard box shaped like a coffin. Left outside Prins’s home in one of the Jordaan’s more beautiful hofjes, a quiet sanctuary of houses set around a private garden near Noordermarkt. The security cameras had caught a hooded figure flitting into the entrance around seven in the evening. Nothing of use on the box. Nothing on the doll either except the hank of hair, the bloodstained pinafore dress and that curious note: Love’s expensive, Wim. Get ready for the bill.

  The box was plain and ordinary. No line drawing of the Oortman house.

  ‘Where’s the hair?’ Vos asked.

  ‘Forensic have got it,’ Mulder said. ‘They came back thirty minutes ago and confirmed it’s from the Prins girl. As is the blood.’ The tall detective stared at De Groot. ‘Am I working on this or not?’

  ‘We don’t even know if there’s a case yet,’ the commissaris replied. ‘Give it time.’

  The note was in a plastic evidence envelope. Vos looked at it and frowned.

  ‘What?’ Mulder asked.

  ‘I already said.’ He looked at Liesbeth. ‘Prins doesn’t love his daughter. Does he?’

  She came a step closer. He could smell her perfume. The same as it always was.

  ‘That’s not true,’ she said. ‘Katja’s been a nightmare for the last few years. Wim’s done his best. Paid for medical help. Paid to keep her out of trouble. It didn’t—’

  ‘Does he love her?’ he repeated.

  ‘In his own way,’ she replied, staring at him with the same sad, brown eyes. ‘You won’t understand. If there’s something here that needs to be done . . .’

  Nothing more.

  ‘They sell dolls like that in all the tourist shops in De Wallen,’ Mulder said. ‘Could have come from anywhere. The kid’s probably jerking him around.’

  Vos nodded, looked at the figure in the box. It wasn’t much like the one he’d received. He put both gloved hands underneath the back and lifted it. Heavier than he expected.

  ‘Torch,’ Vos said and held out a hand.

  Bakker was there straight away, pulling a long police Maglite out of the pockets of her grey trousers and placing it in his hands. Vos lifted the dress and shone the beam through the translucent plastic of the torso. A dim black shape was just visible.

  De Groot swore and glowered at Mulder.

  ‘Haven’t forensic been over this thing?’ he asked.

  ‘I got the DNA. You told me you were bringing in Vos and Prins! I was waiting . . .’

  ‘Good idea,’ Vos said and took the torch away.

  Carefully, piece by piece, he removed all the doll’s clothing. On the neck, by a mark saying ‘Made in China’, there was what looked like a small speaker and a hole next to it that could have been for a microphone. The thing could talk. And play back a customized recorded message.

  Vos gently pumped the doll’s stomach.

  Something crackled. There was an uncertain, electronic racket. After that came the shrieking.

  The doll.

  Liesbeth Prins.

  Both of them.

  Vos got his ear closer to the plastic head and tried to listen.

  ‘Daddy! Daddy! Christ . . .’

  A young girl’s voice in agony and pain. A scream. A bellow of anguish.

  A repeating refrain.

  ‘Help me! Help me! Help . . .’

  Liesbeth was on him, beating at his arm, shrieking, ‘Turn it off for God’s sake.’

  The thing was on a loop. It was back at the beginning already.

  Laura Bakker had her hands to her mouth, her face paler than ever. De Groot looked lost and helpless. Even Klaas Mulder didn’t have a thing to say.

  ‘It’s Katja?’ Vos asked.

  ‘It’s Katja,’ she said. ‘Christ, Pieter. Turn it off—’

  ‘I don’t know how.’

  He looked round the room, opened his arms. ‘Anyone?’

  The doll kept squawking.

  Mulder walked over, touched something by the ear. The screaming stopped.

  Vos looked at him.

  ‘There was a switch,’ Mulder said dryly. ‘You saw it too. Don’t pretend . . .’

  ‘No,’ Vos said with a slow nod. ‘I didn’t see it. I’m out of practice. Slow. Stupid. I don’t know why I’m here.’ He looked at Liesbeth Prins. ‘You need to ask your husband to come into the station. It doesn’t matter if this is Katja’s doing or someone else’s. He should be here.’

  He tore off the disposable gloves.

  ‘What next?’ Bakker asked.

  ‘I need to pick up my dog from the Drie Vaten. I’ve got a houseboat to fix. There’s a band at the Melkweg tonight I was thinking of seeing and . . .’

  A hand on his arm. Liesbeth’s sad eyes turned on him.

  ‘The doll’s bigger than the one I got,’ Vos said, exasperated. ‘This one has a message. Mine didn’t. Anyone who read about the case in the papers could have done this.’

  A sudden flash of anger on her face.

  ‘And left it on my doorstep? It’s the same man . . .’

  ‘You don’t know that. You can’t rush to—’

  ‘A young girl’s missing. Jesus. Can’t you hear her? Can’t you see her? Anneliese—’

  ‘Anneliese’s gone. I tried. So did all the police officers in Amsterdam. We couldn’t bring her back. I apologize. I did what I could. I failed.’

  There was a harsh tone to his voice and he regretted it immediately.

  The woman he’d lived with for most of his adult life, loved, never expected to leave him, put her bony fingers into her bag, pulled out a photo. Then another. Vos looked at them. Their daughter at her last birthday party. Bright eyes, long blonde hair, smile on her face. A future in front of her.

  The second, he knew, was Katja Prins, not that he’d ever met the girl except through a picture in the odd gossip piece in the city papers.

  Dead eyes, blank face. But the hair was much the same and the smile . . . was maybe the one Anneliese would have worn had she known. Fated, resigned, half-amused that life should amount to this and nothing more.

  ‘Walk away from Katja and you walk away from our daughter.’

  They were all watching.

  ‘If I couldn’t save Anneliese,’ Vos said and heard his own voice rising angrily, ‘what makes you think I can do it for someone else?’

  Frank de Groot intervened, thrust an ID card into Vos’s hand. An old picture. The same rank. And a piece of paper.

  ‘Let me be the judge of that,’ he said. ‘I’ll get Prins in here even if I have to drag him every inch of the way. This is Katja’s last known address. Some dump near Warmoesstraat. Tell me who you’d like assigned to work alongside you. We’re busy here but take your pick.’

  Laura Bakker stood stiff and nervous in her misshapen grey suit, sad green eyes staring at the floor.

  ‘I’ll take Aspirant Bakker,’ Vos said.

  De Groot blinked. Mulder was laughing.

  ‘This is serious, Pieter,’ the commissaris said in a gruff, annoyed tone.

  ‘Yes,’ Vos said. ‘It is.’

  Then put a hand to Bakker’s arm and led her from the room.

  10

  When Hendriks was gone, taking his papers and gadgets with him, Margriet Willemsen got up a
nd walked to the window.

  ‘What’s this about your daughter?’ she asked as Prins came to join her.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Don’t give me that, Wim.’

  So he told her. She looked worried.

  ‘What if Hendriks is right? If Menzo or Jansen or one of the other hoods is coming for us?’

  ‘Jansen goes free this afternoon. Those two will be at each other’s throats in a second. It gives us more ammunition to do what we want . . .’

  ‘What’s she like? Katja?’

  ‘She was fine until two, three years ago. Just another teenager.’ He shrugged. ‘Difficult. Not so bright. Never said where she was going. What she was doing. Then . . . It was her mother all over again. God knows I’ve tried. Just a while back there was this place . . .’

  The Yellow House. He’d paid through the nose for that, thought for a time it might be working. Then she was back to the squalid tenement off Warmoesstraat, living like a tramp.

  Willemsen picked up some papers Hendriks had left behind.

  ‘I don’t want this to get in the way. We’re on shaky ground already.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Hendriks is right. People are getting cold feet. We might have to trim things a little . . .’

  ‘No,’ Prins insisted. ‘I won’t allow it.’

  She smiled.

  ‘We’re tearing up the twentieth century. Putting something new in its place. You can’t expect everyone to leap on board from day one. Why should they?’

  ‘Because we’re right.’

  ‘Right doesn’t mean you get to win . . .’

  Prins closed his eyes. Headache coming on.

  ‘I want you to think about your daughter,’ she said. ‘That story’s going to break one way or another. When it does I don’t want to see you like this. You’ve got to look hurt. Concerned.’

  ‘I am hurt. I am concerned.’

  ‘Show it then. Katja going off the rails is proof we’re on the right track. When she turns up we can use that.’

  Margriet Willemsen came close, touched his chest very lightly for the briefest of moments.

  ‘They’ll find her. When they do get her out of Amsterdam. Put her in rehab in America or somewhere. No distractions. For her. For us.’

  He didn’t say anything.

  ‘Do you understand me?’

  His phone was ringing. He looked at the number: Liesbeth.

  ‘Past caring,’ he muttered and took the call.

  11

  Vos insisted they go to Warmoesstraat by bike. He wasn’t a cop yet, whatever Frank de Groot said. The ID card was in his jacket for convenience, nothing else. She seemed keen to avoid cars too. The previous week she’d been driving a station patrol car when it got into an argument with a tram.

  ‘The tram won,’ Bakker said wide-eyed, as if this was a surprise. ‘Commissaris De Groot wasn’t happy.’

  ‘You don’t have trams in Dokkum?’ Vos asked.

  ‘Dokkum’s the most northerly town in the Netherlands. Did you know that?’

  They found the dead-end turning down towards the canal.

  ‘Trams, Laura. I was asking about the trams.’

  ‘No trams.’ A shrug, the briefest of giggles as she put her long fingers to her lips. ‘Otherwise I wouldn’t have bashed that one here. He just came at me! I told De Groot. Wasn’t my fault.’

  Vos climbed off his old bike. The little basket on the front seemed empty without the dog. He wondered how far he could push Sofia Albers, the woman who ran the Drie Vaten. The odd beer and coffee seemed scant reward for dog care and laundry.

  ‘Why did you pick me?’ she asked. ‘You could have had one of the proper detectives?’

  ‘You seemed interested,’ Vos said. He smiled. ‘And I’m not a proper detective either.’

  The joke didn’t humour her.

  ‘I’m an aspirant, Vos. They’re going to fire me next week.’

  ‘In that case let’s make the best of things.’

  She seemed to like a straight answer. Bakker looked up at the street sign and said, ‘This is where it came from, isn’t it?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Your doll’s house. Petronella Oortman lived in Warmoesstraat.’

  She did, Vos thought. Not that anyone knew where. He’d tried to find out.

  ‘Is it important?’ Bakker asked.

  A drawing of an ancient doll’s house. A famous one. Stuck on a miniature coffin. After that nothing. Just a black and endless well of doubt and grief. Once, in a screaming match in the night, Liesbeth had yelled at him, ‘You want her dead, don’t you? You want to see her corpse?’

  Not at all. He wanted to watch her walk down their street in the Jordaan the way she used to, happy, free, smiling, occasionally mischievous. To vanish like that, after such dreadful, terrifying messages, was worse than a bereavement somehow. It left them both with a wound that refused to heal. A question that came with no possible answer.

  ‘I think it must be,’ Vos said, coming back to the present. ‘I just don’t . . .’

  Understand. It seemed the wrong word. Some things were beyond comprehension, and perhaps Anneliese’s disappearance was one of them.

  Bakker wheeled her bike round the corner into the narrow lane running down to the water, checking the numbers on the terraces. The buildings became more run-down. She found a battered red door. Posters in the cracked and dirty windows. Bands, movies and dope. The sound of music from inside.

  Recent rock. Which sounded like a pale copy of the originals he preferred.

  ‘The doll he sent you,’ she said chaining her bike on the railings. ‘Where did it come from?’

  ‘You mean you didn’t look in the files?’

  She folded her long arms.

  ‘I haven’t read everything.’

  This wasn’t going away. Not with Laura Bakker asking.

  ‘We never found out,’ he said. ‘It was expensive. Looked antique but it wasn’t. They’re made in Germany. No one sells them in Amsterdam. Not like that cheap thing you’ve got in Marnixstraat now. Someone spent real money on this. Maybe . . .’

  She waited then, when he said nothing, asked, ‘Maybe?’

  ‘Maybe he had it already. He was a collector. Crinoline dress. Not much different from the kind of thing Petronella might have put in her doll’s house.’

  ‘It had her hair?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And her blood?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, feeling cold and miserable, wishing he was back on the boat with the dog and some beer. Maybe a smoke if things got bad.

  ‘So you think she was dead already?’ Bakker asked. ‘He was torturing you? Not your daughter?’

  When the case was alive he’d rarely had conversations like this, even with Frank de Groot. They were too close and personal.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he admitted. ‘He wasn’t a lunatic like De Groot says. That’s too . . .’

  Words. Sometimes they wouldn’t come.

  ‘Simple?’ Bakker asked.

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said and stood there, sad-faced but pretty in an innocent, adolescent way.

  People joined the police for different reasons. He wanted to be a part of something that helped. That made the world better. Laura Bakker . . . he wondered. Frank de Groot was a clever, incisive man, as good a judge of character as anyone Vos had known. That remark about how she was trying to herd the flock . . .

  The police didn’t change things. He’d learned that early on. At best they offered comfort. Reined in the worst elements of a society so fractured it was incapable of healing itself. It was wise not to hold out too much hope, to set your sights too high. The cost of failure could be shattering.

  ‘I’m sorry I said those stupid things,’ Vos told her. ‘About drunk drivers. I don’t talk to people much these days. It’s hard.’

  For the first time she looked actively cross at something he’d said.

  ‘You weren’t to k
now,’ she replied, then pushed past him, tried the doorbell. Heard nothing, banged on the woodwork with her fist.

  12

  The girl who answered the door had short and greasy fair hair, a face so pale it seemed like parchment, a skinny, haggard frame. Long Indian cotton dress and a threadbare jumper which she clutched constantly, holding herself by the elbows where a grubby sweatshirt showed through.

  Four floors high the terraced house stank of dope and sweat and drains. A communal kitchen, no sign of food. In the front room two drowsy men passing round a bubble pipe.

  She was called Til and came from Limburg in the south. The source of De Groot’s cheese. Bakker asked for her ID. Mathilde Stamm. Nineteen. The age Anneliese would have been now. Same as the Prins girl too.

  They tried to talk to her about Katja. Gave up and went to the men smoking in the front room. Got nowhere. Back to the girl, pinned her in a corner, waited until she gave in.

  Didn’t take long once she understood Vos wasn’t leaving without answers. Katja had lived in the squat for a year off and on. Til didn’t know where she went when she wasn’t there. No boyfriends around. Girlfriends either.

  ‘No friends at all then?’ Bakker asked before Vos could say another word.

  The girl hugged herself more tightly.

  ‘What is this?’

  ‘She’s missing. We think she could be in trouble.’

  Til Stamm laughed.

  ‘Just ’cos you can’t find her doesn’t mean she’s missing. Katja gets up to stuff. Gets away with it too. Her old man’s loaded. He runs Amsterdam, doesn’t he?’

  ‘He thinks so,’ Vos said, looking around the house. It seemed as transient as Centraal station. A place people came and went. Not much more.

  ‘Her dad can fix things,’ the girl added. ‘He sent her off to rehab.’ She reached into the grubby jumper, pulled out a pack of cigarettes, lit one with shaking fingers. ‘As if Katja cared.’

  ‘Where?’ Vos asked.

  ‘The Yellow House. Behind the Flower Market. I don’t have that kind of money.’ She laughed again and it made her cough. ‘Or needs.’

  Laura Bakker looked her up and down and said, ‘You mean Katja was even worse than you?’