The House of Dolls

by Hewson, David

  For the first time he looked shifty.

  ‘Besides what?’ Vos demanded.

  ‘I heard the whispers. Bad things. Young girls. I don’t think Mr Jansen knew, mind. He was dead regular about what went on. Then it closed down and the Thai lady running it got bought out by Jimmy Menzo. I wasn’t going anywhere near him. Not even when I was dead sick.’

  He balled his fist and thumped the desk. So hard the recorder jumped.

  ‘And I was sick. Not bad. Not evil like you lot said. I was sick and I got myself cured. What I’m telling you’s the truth. Don’t care what Mr Mulder says any more. How much he beats me round the head and threatens me with all them things I never did. Doesn’t—’

  ‘Where’s Katja?’ Vos asked again.

  The lean man in black pushed his seat back from the table. Said he’d like a coffee. Bakker went and fetched three plastic cups. Vos waited, thinking. Silent.

  Shushed Laura Bakker when she started to throw questions at Zeeger again.

  He wanted to be heard. That much was clear. Wanted to say something in his own time, his own way.

  ‘I wasn’t nothing to do with your daughter, Mr Vos,’ Zeeger said when he’d taken a swig of coffee. ‘You believe that, don’t you?’

  Vos nodded.

  ‘I don’t know who put that stuff in my place. I got home and found someone had left me a package. A doll. Them clothes. I was too out of it to notice things back then. Maybe it was someone else in Jansen’s lot. Menzo’s. Maybe . . .’ His eyes shot briefly to the door. ‘Maybe someone here. You think of that?’

  ‘We’re not interested in what happened back then. We need to find Katja,’ Bakker said.

  ‘Can’t help,’ he said, shaking his head, starting to look nervous. ‘Honestly. She was there when I left. She was good too. We went to the Yellow House that afternoon. Me and Kat had sorted ourselves. No more dope. No more booze.’ He raised a finger, as if trying to remember something he’d been taught. ‘We’re clear and clean. Clear and clean. That’s it.’

  Bakker swore mildly. This morning she wore a different kind of suit. Green trousers, a too-bright tartan jacket, green sweater with the crucifix on. The colours didn’t so much clash as argue vociferously. Nothing fitted terribly well. Auntie Maartje again, Vos guessed. Not that his own clothes – fresh pair of jeans, another dark sweater, a polo shirt underneath it – were much to write home about.

  ‘Where . . .?’ she asked.

  ‘I . . . don’t . . . know.’ He took out the gum, wrapped it inside a tissue, pocketed it. Bit into another piece. ‘I’ll tell you this though. Thinking back about it now I reckon she was scared.’

  Vos looked up.

  ‘Of what?’ he asked.

  ‘Of who you mean.’

  Nothing more.

  ‘We’ll sit here until you say something,’ Vos told him. ‘If it takes all day.’

  ‘There you go! Just like Mr Mulder, aren’t you?’ His voice was high and full of a sudden pain. ‘Don’t matter I fixed myself, does it? As far as you’re concerned I’m just another bit of street scum you can lean on any time. Blame the likes of me . . .’

  Laura Bakker put her head in her hands and groaned.

  Zeeger went quiet.

  Then she placed her elbows on the table, looked him in the eye.

  ‘This is really simple, Jaap. Katja’s missing. It looks as if she’s been kidnapped. The way Vos’s girl was three years ago. They knew each other . . .’

  His pale, foxy face crumpled.

  ‘They did?’

  ‘They knew each other,’ she went on. ‘And we don’t want Katja to disappear off the face of the earth like Anneliese. Do you?’

  Nothing for a while. Then he said, ‘Why ask me? I don’t count. Not against you lot. Not against all them big people . . .’ He nodded at the opaque window, bright sun beyond the glass. ‘Out there.’

  Vos folded his arms. Checked his watch.

  ‘She didn’t talk about it,’ Zeeger went on, looking as if he was giving away a secret. ‘Only the once and then we’re not supposed to say. What happens in session stays in session.’

  ‘Says who?’

  ‘Miss Jewell. At the Yellow House. You can’t become clear and clean unless you tell the truth, can you? And you can’t tell the truth if you know someone’s going to blab it out loud the moment you’ve left the room.’

  Bakker sighed, long and slow.

  ‘It’s all right for you!’ Zeeger yelled, and at that moment sounded like his old self. ‘They won’t be banging on your door, will they?’

  ‘Menzo’s dead,’ she said slowly. ‘Jansen’s on the run. If we find him he’s back in jail for years. If we don’t—’

  ‘It’s not them I’m worried about! Jesus. Kat didn’t mess with Mr Jansen or that Surinamese bastard. You lot . . .’ He shook his head. Ran his thin fingers through the black combed hair. ‘You don’t see much, do you? You think the only bad in the world’s us. Can’t see beyond the end of your stuck-up noses.’

  Vos looked interested. Bakker very.

  ‘Go on, Jaap,’ she said.

  ‘And end up dead too?’

  ‘I thought Kat was your friend,’ Bakker told him. ‘Didn’t she help you get . . . clear and clean? Don’t you owe—?’

  ‘Shut up,’ he barked at her. ‘Shut up both of you.’ He gulped at the coffee again. Cold. Zeeger screwed up his face at the taste. ‘She was frightened. I told you. Just blurted it out once when we were in session.’

  ‘With Miss Jewell?’ Bakker asked.

  Nothing.

  ‘Jaap,’ she said, trying to look patient. ‘I keep saying this and you keep ignoring it. No one’s seen Katja for a week. There’s a ransom note. Photos of her. A video . . .’

  He didn’t react.

  ‘Do you want to see them?’ Vos asked.

  No answer.

  ‘Fine,’ Bakker said, then pulled out her smartphone, put it on the table, pulled up the video that came with the doll on Rosie Jansen’s body.

  Dark room. Katja in a chair. Screaming. Looking as if she was being hit.

  Zeeger couldn’t take his eyes off the tiny screen.

  ‘Stop!’ he screeched after a few seconds. ‘For God’s sake turn that off.’

  Bakker hit pause. Katja’s face stayed on the screen, mouth downturned, frozen in a long, pained scream.

  ‘You know nothing, you lot,’ Jaap Zeeger whined.

  ‘That’s true,’ Vos agreed. ‘Enlighten us.’

  Zeeger’s head went from side to side.

  ‘We’ll look after you, Jaap,’ Bakker added. ‘Nothing’s going to happen.’

  He laughed at that. But after a while he started to talk. Bakker blinked, checked the recorder, made sure it was capturing every word.

  Twenty minutes later when he’d finished Vos stood up, shook his hand.

  ‘I need you to make a statement now, Jaap. Just repeat what you said, on the record. Then sign it.’

  ‘I just told you . . .’

  Vos smiled.

  ‘It’s how it works. You know that. You’re on the right side for once.’

  They left him in the interview room, called for two statement officers. Stood in silence for a moment.

  ‘What next?’ Bakker asked.

  He waited.

  ‘We bring in Wim Prins?’ she suggested.

  ‘No. First we look at the files on his wife. I was . . .’

  All that happened when he was on sick leave from the force, about to resign. He’d no idea who’d handled the death of Bea Prins. A supposed suicide.

  ‘I wasn’t here then.’

  He stood back and let two uniformed officers through, pads in hand, witness statement forms.

  ‘I’ve got to tell Frank. Until yesterday Wim Prins ran this city. If we’re going to accuse him of murder . . .’

  Vos gestured to the lift. De Groot’s office was on the fourth floor, next to the management suite and the technical area that handled computer intelligence and for
ensic work.

  ‘Point taken,’ Bakker agreed.

  Still Vos didn’t move.

  ‘What now?’ she asked.

  ‘You were good in there, Laura,’ he said. ‘Very.’

  Bakker blushed, mumbled something. And they got in the lift.

  2

  A silent breakfast. Liesbeth Prins finished her coffee and croissant, lit a cigarette knowing that annoyed him. Unshaven, dishevelled in a creased blue shirt and a pair of jeans he hadn’t worn for years, Prins hunched over a bowl of cereal, barely touching it. Her smoke rolled over him. He didn’t look at her.

  ‘What time did you get in?’ she asked.

  ‘You didn’t check?’

  ‘Eleven thirty.’

  He pushed the bowl aside, took a deep, pained breath.

  ‘Why ask a question if you know the answer?’

  ‘The papers were phoning here all night. I didn’t know what to say.’

  ‘That’s unusual,’ Prins replied with a sharp, sarcastic smile.

  She stabbed the half-smoked cigarette into the remains of the pastry.

  ‘Do you care, Wim? Does it touch you? Do you still think she’s screwing us around?’

  ‘Maybe,’ he answered with a shrug. ‘I don’t know anything any more.’

  ‘Where were you last night?’

  ‘I went for a walk. I had a few drinks . . .’

  ‘A few?’

  ‘Not enough.’

  He’d scanned the headlines already. Two stories. The murder of a city gangster and his girlfriend. And the shock resignation of the leader of the council. They all reported the official line: this was just temporary. Then went on to rubbish the idea.

  Someone had been briefing. He hada good idea who.

  ‘Are you fucking her? The Willemsen woman?’

  He laughed.

  ‘What makes you say that?’

  ‘You. The way you’ve been skulking around. The way you are around her. You’re a lousy liar.’

  That was amusing.

  ‘We managed to fool Bea and Vos for long enough.’

  ‘You didn’t answer the question.’

  A shrug.

  ‘For a while. It was stupid. Over now.’ This part still puzzled him. ‘Thing is . . . when you’re in that place it’s politics and I was never a politician really. You have to remember it’s not real. I didn’t—’

  The dregs of warm coffee flung in his face. Then she flew at him, nails scratching, cursing, shrieking.

  Sharp pain on the cheek, crockery on the floor. Crumbs and cereal spilling onto the geometric black and white kitchen tiles.

  He escaped her flailing fingers, held her wrists, waited until the spitting fury subsided a little.

  ‘There was just you and Bea up till then,’ Prins said. ‘I wasn’t cut out for it. That’s why I did it I guess. I always thought . . .’

  The pressure of her arms against him eased and so did the swearing.

  ‘I guess I missed the secrets. You didn’t object when it was the two of us.’

  ‘Bastard . . .’

  This was ridiculous and he said so. Theirs was a pact made between illicit sheets, stolen moments. Twice they took holidays in Aruba, Prins telling Bea it was to work on the villa, Liesbeth lying about going with a girlfriend.

  She dragged herself away. He picked a napkin off the table, wiped the coffee from his face. Felt his cheek. Pain and scraped skin. Prins ran a finger across it, held it out for her to see.

  Blood on his fingertip. He glanced at his reflection in the window, framed by the light-green lime trees in the courtyard. A stripe down the right of his face. One that would take a while to heal.

  ‘Don’t ever do that again,’ he said in a low, cold voice. ‘We’re not angels. Neither of us.’

  ‘I never pretended to be, did I?’

  The doorbell rang. She went downstairs. Prins watched her go. Hair a mess, clutching her dressing gown around her. It wasn’t like this when they were slipping away together in the early days, full of the heat of being young.

  ‘Post,’ she said coming back upstairs, ripping open a big brown envelope, special delivery.

  ‘You’re reading my letters now?’ he asked, looking at the name scrawled on the front in thick black felt tip.

  ‘No more secrets to hide. Are there?’

  Prins shook his head, walked to the coffee machine, set it up to make more. The morning routine. That was all life had become. A series of mechanical actions and gestures, leading nowhere, achieving nothing.

  Liesbeth had gone quiet. It was a silence he knew. One that demanded something of him.

  The coffee machine stopped grinding, started whirring.

  ‘What?’ he asked and walked over to the table.

  A single sheet of white paper. Thick black felt ink. The lettering looked juvenile. Like that of a clumsy school kid.

  It read: Zeedijk and Stormsteeg. 11.30 am. Tumi case. Money. Wait there.

  She didn’t say a word.

  Wim Prins went back to the coffee machine, poured a short black cup, sipped at it. Read the note again.

  Glanced at the clock. Almost nine.

  ‘The bank won’t be able to deal with this till ten. They don’t give me much time, do they?’

  ‘You mean you can’t get it?’

  Thinking.

  ‘I’m going to have to take a passport or something. You can’t get that kind of money out of a cash machine.’

  ‘Can you do it?’

  ‘Yes,’ he insisted. ‘But I need time. And I need space.’ He stared at her. ‘I don’t want you passing this on to Vos for an hour. OK?’

  A shake of her anxious head.

  ‘Don’t start screwing around now, Wim. This is about Katja. Not you . . .’

  He lost it then. Was on her. Shaking her slim bony shoulders. Face in hers, furious. Lost in the rage.

  Almost landed a blow. Which would have shocked him as much as her.

  Prins let go. Still mad. Fighting to control it.

  ‘I have to wash coffee off my face. Try to look half human. Try to work out how I can get more money than I’ve ever seen in my life, stick it in a stupid suitcase and stand out in Chinatown like a horny tourist hunting a hooker. Don’t make it harder. Don’t you dare.’

  He went after that. Into the bathroom. Then the bedroom. Came out with a plaster on his cheek, bright sweater, casual trousers, brown shoes. Like a man on holiday, or heading for one.

  Then into the study to pick up some things.

  She stayed in the kitchen, miserable at the table, smoking. Looking at the note.

  At ten past nine he got his jacket and coat, made her swear to keep quiet till ten, then left.

  Liesbeth Prins wondered why she listened to him. What good reason there was not to phone Pieter Vos at that moment. She wanted to see him anyway. She missed his easy, quiet, amiable company. What once was routine and dull now seemed affectionate and caring.

  None of that mattered back when she was slinking off to Wim Prins’s bed.

  One more glance at the note. She wouldn’t call. Not until the time he’d demanded.

  He’d been right about one thing. They weren’t angels. No use pretending.

  3

  Frank de Groot looked as if he hadn’t slept. He stood by the window of his office on the top floor of Marnixstraat, gazing out of the window. There was work being done on the bridge over the Lijnbaansgracht. Men with pneumatic drills hammering at the pavement, pedestrians struggling through the chaos. The noise leaked into De Groot’s office. It didn’t help the mood.

  He listened as Vos outlined what Jaap Zeeger had told them and said, straight away, ‘Forget it.’

  ‘Forget it?’ Bakker cried. ‘Zeeger told us—’

  ‘Zeeger’s a convicted criminal. A thief. A dope pedlar. You’re going to set his word against that of an elected politician? A lawyer for God’s sake?’

  Vos coughed into his fist and took a seat in front of the commissaris’s desk. De Gro
ot got the message, sat down opposite. Bakker folded her arms, leaned against the partition wall, sulky as a teenager in a foul mood.

  ‘We’ve got to look into it, Frank,’ Vos said. ‘He’s made a statement.’

  ‘Bea Prins shot herself in the Beursplein car park. She was an addict. Plenty of witnesses for that. I’m not reopening the case on the back of hearsay from a criminal.’

  A moment’s silence then Vos asked, ‘Did you handle it?’

  ‘Yes!’ De Groot bellowed. ‘Me. And no. I wasn’t the right officer for the job. If you’d been halfway sane I’d have let you look at it. But you weren’t.’ Then more quietly, ‘And I understand why. We were all in a mess then. We’d been chasing Anneliese for three months and getting nowhere.’ A hard look across the desk. ‘I know you suffered. You weren’t the only one.’

  ‘I need to see those files.’

  ‘Fine, fine. And if you spot something, tell me. But don’t pull Prins in just because Jaap Zeeger’s walked through the door looking all fine and dandy and decided to tell a few cock and bull stories. We put Theo Jansen in prison because of that little bastard and look where we are now. Why the hell we should believe him—’

  ‘Prins has been trying to walk away from this ever since it started,’ Bakker interrupted. ‘He’s never looked like a man who’s lost his daughter. According to Zeeger Katja went to pieces because she suspected Prins killed Bea – and he knew that. Doesn’t it fit with what we saw?’

  ‘You need more than the word of a lowlife crook. One who’s a self-confessed liar,’ the commissaris repeated. ‘Until I see that—’

  ‘Give me some people then,’ Vos demanded. ‘I’ve got Bakker here. Access to forensic. Van der Berg. I can’t . . .’

  Another angry flurry then De Groot threw a printout across the desk.

  ‘Seen this? Heard the latest?’

  Vos picked it up. Crime report. Timed at six thirty-four that morning. Body in the Oudezijds Voorburgwal canal in De Wallen near the Oude Kerk. Local woman aged twenty-eight. Single rising stab wound to the abdomen. Fished out of the water after a street-cleaning crew saw her at daybreak. The duty team thought it was a mugging gone wrong. She was a newspaper reporter from one of the big city titles. They’d got the ID from her phone, found in the alley where she was attacked.