The House of Dolls

by Hewson, David

  ‘You think she needs a reason?’

  In the bedroom his phone bleeped. An email from an address he didn’t recognize. A massive attachment, too big for the mobile connection.

  Prins sighed, went to the study next door, started the mail program, left it to work.

  Then went under the shower. The second in three hours. Lots of water. He wondered if it was enough.

  23

  It was a lie about the dog. Sam wasn’t picky about his food at all. And Sofia Albers had fed him often enough in the Drie Vaten. Sometimes, when Vos lost it and couldn’t function much for days on end, she kept Sam in the bar. He seemed to love it.

  Three stops along the way. Familiar brown bars in the Jordaan. Places he could sit and think. Or not think. Just sip at a beer, watch the faces, listen to the music. The singing sometimes. Old songs. Stupid songs. Refrains about the city and the neighbourhood. Community and family. Figures from the past.

  Dead people.

  Vos had seen too many already. As a cop he was supposed to prevent these tragedies. All too often he’d been nothing more than a prurient Peeping Tom. Even when he uncovered the truth the hurt didn’t go away. Vos could give them nothing. Could offer Liesbeth nothing, and so she went off the rails, fell into the waiting arms of Wim Prins. Left him to grieve and scream and rail in the shabby little boat beneath the lime trees where no one could hear, spending evening after evening in a haze of booze or dope.

  There were no answers inside that fog. But no questions either.

  By the time he got to the Drie Vaten it was gone eight. Laura Bakker was seated in the bar on her own, half a glass of Coke on the table, glaring at him as he went to the counter and asked for a beer. Grease from her bike chain had smeared the legs of her trousers. The grey suit seemed to hang on her even more clumsily.

  ‘Where the hell do you get those clothes?’ he asked.

  ‘Auntie Maartje makes them.’ She looked him up and down. ‘Where do you get those? A charity shop for ageing teenagers?’

  ‘Auntie Maartje’s in Dokkum?’

  ‘She’s got a sewing machine. Buys patterns. They’re cheap.’ She picked up a napkin, wiped at the bike grease, made everything worse. ‘Practical.’

  ‘Like the shoes,’ he said, staring at her heavy black boots. ‘I can hear you two streets away.’

  ‘You didn’t hear me when I came on your boat. Talking to De Groot.’

  Vos’s head felt a little fuzzy. He was wearing what he usually wore. Ribbed blue wool sweater. Navy donkey jacket. Jeans. Everything old. A little tatty maybe. But clean. Sofia Albers, who was watching them now, saw to that.

  ‘You’re one to talk, Vos. Those are odd socks. One’s grey. The other’s green. Didn’t you notice?’

  ‘They’re just socks, for God’s sake,’ he whined, reaching for the beer.

  ‘Sam’s eaten. I asked.’

  Behind the counter Sofia gave her a comradely salute at that.

  Vos joined her, raised his glass, shut up. The little terrier scampered out from behind the counter and settled beneath his feet. Bakker pointed to a poster on the wall: Casablanca. Bogart and a beautiful, sad Ingrid Bergman, a pianist smiling in the background.

  ‘You named him from a poster in a bar?’

  She folded her long arms.

  ‘So what if I did? He doesn’t mind.’

  ‘De Groot’s furious. You can’t just walk out like that.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Menzo’s still in Ostend. They found the kids. One of them anyway. They stole a car.’

  This was new. His head cleared a little, entirely of its own accord.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘It looks like one of them shot the other. Then drove into the canal.’ She shook her head. Her long red hair was down around her shoulders. ‘They’ve got one body. Still dredging for the second.’

  Vos nodded.

  ‘It’s terrible,’ she added. ‘They were children.’

  ‘Why don’t you say a prayer for them then go back to Dokkum?’ he asked.

  A sudden flare of anger.

  ‘Is that the best you’ve got?’

  He sipped his beer and wished he’d kept his mouth shut.

  ‘Say a prayer?’ Laura Bakker repeated. ‘Why? Because I’m the village idiot? Is that it?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’ Vos pushed the glass away. He didn’t want it in the first place. ‘This is the city, Laura. When it turns bad it turns . . . unforgiving. Doesn’t choose. Between children and adults. Between good and bad. Guilty and innocent . . .’

  ‘I’m here because I want to be. De Groot can fire me. You can’t. Why should those boys die like that?’

  ‘Culture,’ he said. ‘Jimmy Menzo. The Surinamese hoods take it on themselves. It’s a question of pride. Probably family too. And I doubt they had a choice. If they didn’t fall on their swords there’d be repercussions.’

  His answer seemed to make her angrier.

  ‘See. This is why De Groot needs you.’

  ‘What about Katja Prins?’ he asked, trying to shift the conversation. ‘Have they found Jaap Zeeger? This rehab place her father sent her. It needs checking—’

  ‘Why ask? You’re not a police officer. None of this touches you. I’m just an aspirant about to get fired. Why throw this at me?’

  Her voice was flat and furious. The dog was moving beneath the table.

  ‘This is not my doing,’ Vos broke in. ‘Not my responsibility.’

  ‘No. I can see that now.’

  She got her bag. The keys to her bike lock. Looked outside at the black night, the shape of Vos’s boat beyond the pavement.

  ‘Do you feel safe here?’ Bakker shot at him as she gathered her things. ‘Do you feel immune?’

  ‘I’m no damned good!’ Pieter Vos roared, half stumbling to his feet. ‘Don’t you get it? I couldn’t save my own daughter. Why the hell does Frank think I can help anyone else?’

  The dog was a hunched bundle of white fur beneath the table. That made Vos feel bad. Laura Bakker too from the way she knelt down, stroked his trembling back.

  ‘I can see why,’ she said. ‘Pity you can’t. Here . . . If you need it.’

  She scribbled a phone number on a beer mat, threw it at him, walked out of the bar, got her bike, pushed off into the darkness and the rain.

  Vos finished the beer, went to the counter and asked for an old jenever.

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ Sofia Albers said, arms folded, looking cross. ‘Shouting in my bar? Scaring your little dog? Home with you, Pieter Vos. You should be ashamed.’

  ‘It’s not been a good day. Another beer then.’

  He stood there until she relented. Then spent the best part of a miserable hour nursing it, sip by sip.

  What he told Sofia had been the truth. This wasn’t a good day. The outside world had seeped back into his life, nudged there by Laura Bakker’s sharp, insistent elbows.

  Seeing Liesbeth. Realizing she was as miserable, as depressed and introverted as when she left him. Dealing with the case, even briefly. That had brought back memories of the job. And the realization that in some ways he liked and missed it.

  Vos picked up the beermat with Laura Bakker’s phone number, put it in his pocket, hooked the little leather lead to the dog and walked to the door.

  Something he hadn’t noticed before. There was a light on in the houseboat. A dim one near the kitchen table.

  Bakker, he thought. She probably walked in before she came to the bar. It was easy enough to get inside.

  The rain was gentle and cold.

  Closer he heard music. ‘My Funny Valentine’ sung in the sad, broken voice of Chet Baker.

  More corpses.

  The frail American jazzman had died in the red-light street of Zeedijk in 1988, falling from a window of the Prins Hendrik Hotel. Vos had catholic musical tastes. Venerable hard rock, obscure modern jazz. Even a few more recent artists. But he adored the studied, resigned melancholy of Chet Baker too. Th
e singing and the trumpet playing. He had that CD. Been playing it recently. Top of the pile.

  In front of the boat the little dog started to bark. No movement inside that Vos could see. Not that the windows showed everything.

  He walked across the gangplank, pulled at the door. The lock lay on the ground, the broken clasp next to it.

  Vos pulled out his phone and the scrap of paper Laura Bakker had given him then called her.

  Swore when she was on voicemail.

  ‘You pay for any damage,’ he said after the message beep. ‘Don’t ever go into my boat without asking. Just don’t . . .’

  He pulled open the door, pocketed the phone and went down the steps into the cabin. Sam was yapping wildly. A high-pitched yowl. The sort of sound he made at the vet’s when a needle was brought out.

  The sort he made when he was scared.

  24

  Liesbeth wriggled over to Prins in bed, worked her hand beneath his pyjama top, stroked his chest.

  ‘Busy day,’ he said. ‘Tired.’

  Her fingers weren’t listening. Then they gave up.

  ‘Is it me?’ she asked.

  Eyes closed, head back in the pillow.

  ‘No. It’s just work. And all this . . . worry about Katja.’

  ‘You didn’t seem that worried.’

  ‘You want me to shout and scream? Do you think I do that? I’ve lived with Katja and her demons ever since Bea died. They wear you down in the end.’

  She retreated from him beneath the sheets.

  ‘Mulder’s coming round in the morning,’ Prins said. ‘We’ve got to meet anyway. About De Nachtwacht . . .’

  ‘I’m sick of hearing about that crap.’ She propped herself up on one arm, looked at him. ‘It won’t work, you know. People aren’t like that. You can’t just flip a switch and make things different.’

  He stretched, felt bad.

  ‘We’ve got to do something. If we’d flipped the switch a bit earlier maybe we could have saved your daughter—’

  ‘That’s not what Pieter said. Or De Groot. They said it was . . .’ She blinked, took on that mask of tragedy she’d worn all the time when she was splitting up with Vos. ‘They said it was someone crazy.’

  ‘They haven’t a clue who it was.’

  ‘Do you? Even the boss of Amsterdam doesn’t know everything, does he?’

  ‘No,’ he said with a grim laugh. ‘I know a lot less than most people. And every day what I do know gets smaller.’

  ‘Don’t leave me,’ she whispered, close to him again, hands in his greying hair. ‘Don’t let go.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sometimes I think . . .’

  The pain always worked on him. Prins kissed her. Then, before he thought about it much, she was taking off his pyjamas, all over him, desperate.

  It was short. Sad. Strange. They didn’t say a word after. He could feel her face against his chest, the tears running down onto his skin.

  ‘I need to check my email,’ Prins said and climbed out of the bed, walked into the study.

  It was an excuse. A poor one. But there’d been the odd message earlier, the attachment that wouldn’t download.

  In front of the PC he looked at it. The message came from someone calling himself Pop Meester. A nickname maybe. ‘Doll Master’. Same for the subject. No body, just an attachment, an eighty-meg video file.

  Prins walked to the door, closed it then returned to the computer.

  Somehow he knew what he’d see. There was even a time and a date to help him. This was three hours earlier. Grainy picture, no sound. Naked bodies in the half darkness. Margriet Willemsen arching over him in the bedroom of her little flat. Prins rolling back his head. A silent roar.

  He closed the video, shift-deleted the file. As if that would make it gone forever.

  Went back to bed and tried to sleep.

  25

  The houseboat was deserted. Vos walked over to the CD player, killed the music.

  The dog kept barking, sniffing, whining.

  He looked round once. Then again. Looked everywhere.

  It wasn’t that he was drunk. Not quite. In a way his head was clearer than it had been in months. He could see none of this was working. The boat would never get fixed. Nor would his life. Not this way.

  And there was Frank de Groot dangling a way back into the old nightmare. The familiar hell.

  He went to the window at the stern, opened it. Took out the ID card De Groot had given him. Was ready to throw it out into the water.

  ‘Sam . . .’ he pleaded. ‘For God’s sake.’

  The volume of the little dog’s barks had gone up a good few decibels the moment cold night air entered the room. Now it turned into a howl.

  Animals saw things before people. Could smell things too.

  The tarpaulin was half-off the sinking dinghy along the way.

  Vos felt his breath catch, his gorge rise. All the old familiar feelings. No way of avoiding them.

  He put the lead back on Sam, marched him over to the Drie Vaten, told Sofia Albers she’d have to look after him for the night. Something in his face stopped an argument.

  A good woman. One who was soft on him maybe.

  ‘Did you hear anything?’ he asked. ‘See someone near my boat?’

  She looked at the dark night.

  ‘Not a thing, Pieter. What’s the . . .?’

  He grabbed a couple of paper napkins from the counter, walked outside, went down the steps to the dinghy, looked. Took a napkin for each hand, moved the tarpaulin gingerly away.

  Then called Frank de Groot. Found he could talk much the way he used to when he was in the force. Logically, calmly, clearly, even if his head was spinning.

  De Groot listened and finally said, ‘Jesus, Pieter. Not the Prins girl?’

  Vos steeled himself to look again.

  A woman’s body side on against the dinghy’s planking. Gunshot wound to the head. A dark stain leaking down towards one breast. Cradled in the crook of her right arm a porcelain doll in an old-fashioned dress now soaked in blood. The kind Petronella Oortman might have owned.

  ‘Just get here, will you?’ Vos said then sat on the chilly stone bank and waited.

  PART TWO

  TUESDAY 18 APRIL

  1

  Morning. The road along the Prinsengracht was still closed. The bridge, the junction by the statues of Johnny Jordaan’s band too. Vos had watched a murder investigation slowly come together, the past rise from the cold dank waters of the canal.

  Officers in white forensic suits. Cameras and swabs in their hands. Low voices murmuring into phones, dialogue served in digital fractures by way of answer. Vehicles everywhere. The long black saloon of the commissaris. The cheaper marked squad cars of the uniformed officers there to keep back the sightseers and the press. A forest of bicycles. This was still Amsterdam.

  And a gurney. Lifted up beneath searing floodlights, raised from the half-sunk dinghy six hours after he found her there. A morgue shroud round the corpse now. Black plastic covering her dead eyes and bloody skin.

  A precise, painstaking ritual was coming to life and Vos couldn’t fail to be a part of it. Around five, when he could barely keep his eyes open, he’d spent a fitful hour in a spare room above the bar. Drank more coffee, ate a pastry when he woke around six thirty. Walked a downcast, puzzled Sam briefly along the canal then left him with Sofia Albers without so much as a word.

  It was seven now. De Groot was there with a team of forensic officers and detectives. Laura Bakker hung around at the edge of the crowd, not quite a part of them, shivering by the canal. Red hair tied back, eyes bright and alert. A new suit. Navy this time, almost the same colour as his own shabby jacket, trousers and sweater. She looked like a lanky schoolgirl who’d been up all night.

  De Groot caught Vos’s eye, clicked his fingers and pointed to a control van. Vos smiled at the young aspirant, lost and ignored. Told her to come too though that got a long sigh from De Groot. The three of them
went inside and sat on the cold seats. De Groot got Bakker flipping through reports on the laptop, making calls, checking queries.

  Vos felt clear-headed. Sharp almost. It had been two years since he’d found himself inside an investigation, trying to find light in the darkness. Something in him welcomed the challenge. An inner voice he couldn’t silence.

  ‘Have you told Theo Jansen yet?’ he asked when they’d gone through a summary of the overnight intelligence.

  Frank de Groot stared at the laptop and said, quietly, ‘No. We need to think that through. He’s supposed to get out today. What do I say? His daughter’s dead and we’ve no idea how? Jimmy Menzo never set foot outside Ostend. We can’t trace whoever he had outside the courthouse. Theo’s going to go crazy.’

  ‘Why does it have to be Menzo?’ Bakker asked, looking up from the computer.

  The commissaris gazed at her.

  ‘Who else could it be?’

  Vos wasn’t so sure.

  ‘Would he really go for the daughter just because the hit on her old man had failed? Those kids outside the courthouse were organized. It wasn’t spur of the moment. They were told what to do. It was crude, violent and public. He was trying to make a statement. Killing Rosie Jansen . . .’

  He looked at Bakker and asked, ‘What would that say?’

  ‘Nothing,’ she replied. ‘Kill her and it just makes things worse, doesn’t it?’

  Vos smiled, glanced at De Groot and nodded.

  ‘Quite,’ he said. ‘More war. A worse war. Not just bloodletting. A vendetta. Maybe it was Menzo. But I thought he was smarter than that.’

  ‘You’re starting to sound like one of us again,’ De Groot noted with a smile.

  Vos picked up the printouts from the computer, got Bakker to run things through the laptop again.

  Went over what they had.

  Two teenage Surinamese hoodlums had attempted to murder Theo Jansen. They’d failed and died, one shot, one seemingly committing suicide, not that the dive team had yet recovered the second body. Both had arrived legally through Schiphol the week before and stayed in a cheap city centre hostel. Nothing linked them to Menzo or any other known Amsterdam hood.