The House of Dolls

by Hewson, David

  Bakker followed him in, looked around and said, ‘De Groot’s going to kill you.’

  ‘I’m not doing this for Frank. Didn’t you notice?’

  ‘And I get fired too.’

  ‘If you want to go back to Marnixstraat . . .’

  A wry smile. Nothing more.

  Another marked police car drew up. Van der Berg with the Jewell woman.

  ‘Send everyone back to the station,’ Vos said. ‘I just want Katja and the two women in here. And you.’

  Inside the place was cold and stank of bitter smoke. Charred wallpaper, barely pink, hanging down like peeling bark. Floorboards brittle and creaking under foot. Vos took the stairs slowly. He went into the first-floor room at the front, couldn’t force from his head the picture of the blue fluorescent tubes and the stains that emerged like magic.

  Lost in his own thoughts for a while. Someone coughed. When he turned they were there: Bakker to one side leaning against the wall, watching everything the way she liked. Liesbeth wild-eyed and baffled. The Jewell woman puzzled, suspicious. And the girl . . .

  Katja cut a skinny tense figure in a plain blue coat and jeans. Her hair was clean and tidy now. She seemed more sixteen than nineteen. Had that troublesome adolescent glint in her eye, the hard-set look of a surly teenager waiting for the inevitable reprimand.

  Liesbeth didn’t meet her darting eyes. Barbara Jewell did and looked distraught and concerned.

  Vos introduced the American to Liesbeth then walked over to the wall, brushed his fingers against the rings of forensic marks. Looked at the same thing on the floor. Pointed them out and said, ‘Here.’ Then, ‘Here.’

  ‘What is this, Pieter?’ Liesbeth asked. ‘We’re all exhausted. We want to go home.’

  He came back to them. Bakker kept quiet for once.

  ‘Anneliese was in this room,’ he said. ‘That was her blood. Someone attacked her. I think she fought back. She didn’t look her years. To me anyway. But she wouldn’t give in easily. I know that.’

  Another glance at the wall. The stains weren’t standard blood splatter. It couldn’t have been much of a fight.

  ‘That was three years ago and we never knew. Never would have done if a gangster hadn’t inherited this place because Theo Jansen’s daughter was too embarrassed to keep hold of it. Then sent his hoodlums here because he wanted them dead and his sorry little privehuis off the books.’

  He’d thought this through. There could be no other answer. Menzo and Jansen inhabited a small world. It was no great surprise the way the different parts hooked up.

  Vos tried to catch Liesbeth’s eye and it wasn’t easy.

  ‘Did you hear what I said? Anneliese was here. A brothel. Don’t you want to know—?’

  ‘Of course I do!’ she shrieked. ‘But not now. Katja’s sick. Give her some peace for God’s sake. You never took much interest in your own daughter. Do you have to put someone else’s through hell to make up for it?’

  Katja slammed her hands over her ears, walked over to the bed, sat down on the stained mattress, stared at the thick grubby carpet.

  This was the look she’d had the night before. Lost in herself. Mute and unresponsive to everything outside. Simple almost and he was sure it was an act.

  Vos sat next to her, peered into her face, stayed that way until she returned his gaze.

  ‘Why won’t you talk?’ he asked gently.

  ‘Stop this,’ Liesbeth snapped. ‘Do you want me to get the doctors here? She’s sick. Leave her alone.’

  ‘She was sick before,’ he said then glanced at Barbara Jewell. ‘But you cured her. You unlocked something and made her . . .’

  The words eluded him.

  ‘Clear and clean,’ Bakker butted in.

  ‘Clear and clean,’ Vos repeated. ‘Because something hidden, something stuck in the past came to the surface. And then—’

  ‘You can’t do this,’ the American woman said. ‘I won’t allow it.’

  ‘You tell me then,’ he said. ‘What was it you found?’

  ‘You know already!’ Jewell replied. ‘We’ve been there. Her father. What she believed. This isn’t the place to start repeating myself . . .’

  Vos pointed to the ghostly stains.

  ‘But it’s the only place. It began here.’ He looked at Katja again. ‘Didn’t it?’

  Nothing.

  Laura Bakker came and sat the other side of her on the bed.

  ‘This is dead simple,’ she said. ‘We don’t need to know what happened.’ A long, determined look. ‘Where . . . have . . . you . . . been?’

  Katja Prins folded her arms tightly around her skinny waist, kept looking at the floor.

  ‘I’m calling De Groot,’ Liesbeth said, taking out her phone.

  ‘I don’t believe for one minute he knows you’re torturing this poor kid . . .’

  Bakker was up in a moment, snatching the phone from her fingers.

  ‘Where were you . . . ?’ Vos asked more forcefully.

  The girl muttered something. He bent closer to her, said, ‘Can’t hear, Katja. I can’t hear.’

  Whatever words she said were lost.

  ‘We’re going,’ Liesbeth told him. ‘I’m going to crucify you for this, Pieter. How dare—?’

  ‘Anneliese was here,’ Vos said again, getting to his feet. ‘Something happened three years ago. It started everything. From the death of Bea Prins all the way to Rosie Jansen. Katja knows what that trigger was . . .’

  Back to her again, he said, ‘You’re not simple, Katja. Not an idiot. I don’t think that. You know—’

  ‘Don’t,’ the girl whispered in a low, hard voice.

  One word and it didn’t feel much like a breakthrough.

  ‘Where’ve you been, Katja?’ Bakker asked again. ‘At least tell us that. People have died because of this. Liese . . .’

  Slowly, with all the resentment of a trapped teenager, she spat out, ‘Don’t . . . know . . .’

  Face creased with pain and anger. Voice young and broken.

  Vos shrugged. Pulled something out of his pocket. Set it in front of her.

  A single sock. Black. Small.

  ‘I found that on the floor of my boat last night. After you turned up in a grubby nightdress.’

  The expression on her face changed. Went from anger to fear.

  ‘That’s not mine . . .’ the girl whispered.

  ‘Except you didn’t,’ Vos went on. ‘You arrived in a taxi. Someone in the bar saw you. Normal clothes. I guess you must have thrown them in the canal. Dirtied yourself up from the deck or something.’

  He picked up the sock.

  ‘And forgot this. The game’s over. Where were you?’

  Shaking, eyes straight ahead, expression blank. Back where she was the night before.

  ‘You can tell me here,’ he added. ‘Or Marnixstraat. You choose—’

  ‘She was with me!’ Barbara Jewell cried.

  The American came and sat next to her. Put an arm round her tense, hunched shoulders.

  ‘She was with me,’ she repeated. ‘I thought it was the safest place to be.’

  16

  Theo Jansen watched Van der Berg and the two uniformed women leave in their cars. Looked at the upstairs window. Saw Vos there. The young woman from the courthouse cell. They weren’t alone.

  He felt weighed down by two guns. Weighed down by something else he couldn’t name. Walked over to the nearest rubbish bin, dumped Maarten’s weapon and the shells in there. Just the one pistol. That was all he needed. The Beretta nine thousand. He still had a full magazine left over from the two the barber gave him.

  The way into the privehuis he once owned but never visited was half open. Jansen took out the Beretta, looked at it, stuffed the weapon into the right-hand pocket of his jacket, walked in, quietly went up the stairs.

  Heard voices. Listened. Looked around at the grimy, tasteless wallpaper, the lurid pictures on the walls. Hated this place. Hated himself.

  Took out the littl
e gun, didn’t snag the sight on his pocket along the way.

  17

  ‘What haunts us breaks us,’ Barbara Jewell said in a practised, hypnotic drawl.

  Next to her on the bed, young head bowed as if in prayer, Katja Prins listened, eyes half-closed. The woman’s low and mesmerizing voice might have been a drug itself.

  ‘We’re not really interested in your lectures, thank you,’ Laura Bakker interrupted. ‘Just tell us what happened.’

  ‘Lectures?’ the American asked. ‘We fix people. We don’t judge them. Good or bad. Or throw them in prison. We help—’

  ‘You let this genie out of the bottle,’ Vos said as gently as he could. ‘With the best of intentions I’m sure. But it didn’t quite work out, did it?’

  She looked at Katja. Downcast, lost on the bed. Started to speak. Vos listened, knowing somehow what he would hear.

  That session she’d talked about in the Yellow House. A pivotal, cathartic breakthrough. Katja’s admission that she believed her father killed Bea. And one more secret, spelled out slowly in Barbara Jewell’s steady, mesmeric words.

  She kept it short. When she was done he said, ‘So this was all a pretence? A game? You try to fool us Katja’s been kidnapped. You copy the way Anneliese vanished. And you think that’s going to tell us where she went?’

  ‘I know where she went! He took her!’ Katja Prins screeched, eyes on him now. ‘My dad. Don’t you get it?’

  By the wall Liesbeth Prins closed her eyes, swore under her breath.

  ‘Took her where?’ Vos asked.

  ‘I don’t know!’ A bitter, self-recriminating tone. ‘I don’t . . .’ Eyes closed. Remembering something again. ‘Mum brought us here. I don’t know why. She said Dad came too sometimes. They all did. The politicians. It was . . . their secret.’

  She looked at him, at Barbara Jewell.

  ‘Mum . . . did things sometimes. Stupid things. Bad things. But Liese . . .’ Her eyes were on Liesbeth. ‘She wanted to get back at you. You wouldn’t let her come to the beach with us. You wouldn’t let her stay out. Do anything she wanted—’

  ‘Not true,’ Liesbeth said. ‘Not—’

  ‘That’s what she said,’ the girl insisted. Her face was immobile, her voice a dull, sad drone. ‘Mum asked her first. She knew I wouldn’t want to come. But I wasn’t letting Liese here on her own. One time. That was all. Nothing happened. We laughed about it afterwards.’

  Face up, staring at Vos then.

  ‘She wasn’t supposed to come back. Not without me. But you couldn’t tell Liese anything . . .’

  Her finger pointed to the thick carpet.

  ‘The time I came we stayed down there. Tea and cake and dirty old men who wanted you to sit on their laps and let them tell you you’re beautiful. I knew I wanted none of that and I was the stupid one. Why she . . .’

  She unwrapped herself from Barbara Jewell’s arm.

  ‘When Liese went missing Mum wouldn’t talk about it. But she knew. I could tell. Then I met the Thai woman who ran the place. She was scared. She said someone had asked for her. Big and important. A lawyer. Someone nobody dared touch.’

  ‘It wasn’t Wim,’ Liesbeth murmured. ‘It couldn’t be—’

  ‘I’m telling you!’ Eyes wide, voice shrill. ‘After Mum died I could see it in his face. Don’t blame me. I never knew. I never wanted this—’

  ‘You didn’t,’ Barbara Jewell said. ‘It’s not your fault.’

  ‘Easy for you . . .’

  Then a guilty silence. Angry tears.

  The Jewell woman got up, stood next to Vos.

  ‘This was my idea from the start,’ she said. ‘Not Katja’s. She didn’t want to do it. I forced her.’

  ‘Don’t lie to them, Barbara,’ Katja mumbled. ‘Don’t—’

  ‘She needs to bury Bea. Your daughter too.’ A brief and apologetic shrug. ‘The details were all out there. In the newspapers. The dolls. What happened afterwards. You were public property, Vos. We wanted to make it seem the same. So you’d look again. Just harder this time. Make you people take notice and ask some questions he’d never faced. Without that . . .’ A glance at the girl on the bed. ‘You’d never have believed her. A junkie. Against the likes of him. She deserved better. She’s innocent. God knows the kid’s suffered enough . . .’

  A hand to Katja’s head. The girl stared at the grubby carpet, grim-faced, silent.

  ‘I made her stay with me. We sent those dolls, those messages. We got a friend to work in the council and see what trouble she could stir up there. I wanted to make that bastard’s life hell. Any way we could. Until he broke. Or someone talked. Until you people finally did something. We never . . .’

  The calm, the self-control seemed to desert her for a moment.

  ‘We never meant to harm anyone. We just wanted justice. For Bea. For your girl. For Katja too. But I guess . . .’ Her voice had fallen to a whisper. ‘I wanted to help. I didn’t want any of this . . .’

  Something stopped her.

  ‘And Rosie Jansen?’ Vos asked.

  ‘We just wanted to talk. Truly we never meant . . .’

  Barbara Jewell was looking right past him.

  ‘Pieter . . .’ Laura Bakker said quietly, starting to move.

  Too late. The gun slammed hard against Vos’s head. Sent him sprawling down to the floor, aware of nothing but Katja’s terrified screams.

  18

  Seconds, minutes. He wasn’t sure which. When he came to Jansen stood above him, his elbow pinning Barbara Jewell to the wall, the gun jabbed up against her neck.

  ‘Theo . . .’ Vos said, climbing back to his feet.

  Katja was screaming like a furious, scolded child.

  ‘You want to talk?’ Jansen yelled at the American woman. ‘Talk now. I lost a daughter. I’ve got a coffin waiting to be buried too.’

  Jewell, head back against the charred wallpaper, glared at him, unafraid.

  ‘You owned this place, didn’t you? You let this filth go on.’

  ‘I didn’t know . . .’

  ‘You owned this place!’ she yelled. ‘You flood this city with drugs and hookers and all the shit this kid’s been trying to drown herself in. Then plead innocent—’

  The gun went up. A blast into the ceiling. Pink plaster raining down and flakes of paint.

  ‘I didn’t know!’ Jansen shouted. ‘Rosie was my daughter.’

  Silence for a moment. Then Barbara Jewell’s calm, slow voice.

  ‘She ran the Doll’s House. She knew what went on here. That’s why we went to see her. To beg. To ask for her help. She knew—’

  ‘It’s business! Giving people what they want.’

  ‘They were children,’ she said quite calmly. ‘Innocent kids getting groomed by middle-aged men in suits. Who did what they wanted then went back to their offices and their wives . . .’

  Jansen brandished the weapon in her face.

  ‘That’s how it is here. How it’s always been. If you don’t like it . . .’

  Vos came closer. Bakker too. She had her phone in her hand. Fingers moving over the keys.

  ‘But you don’t like it either, Theo,’ Vos said. ‘We both know that.’

  The old hood glared at him.

  ‘My daughter’s dead and you did nothing. Just like your own kid—’

  ‘Backup on the way,’ Laura Bakker interrupted, thrusting the phone into Jansen’s line of vision. ‘Two minutes and they’re here.’

  The American scarcely heard her, just stared Jansen in the face.

  ‘We wanted to talk,’ she told him. ‘That’s all. To ask for her help. We didn’t know there’d been that shooting outside the courthouse. We just went round to see her. She went crazy. Started screaming. Pulled out a gun. I was scared she was going to use it—’

  ‘And then you shot her?’ Jansen said.

  A long moment. Barbara Jewell hesitated, started to say something. The frail slight figure on the bed flew at them, gripped Jansen’s arm, struggled to grip the
gun in his hand.

  Got her fingers round the weapon. Took Jansen by surprise so much her desperate clawing nails almost snatched it from him.

  Hands free, arms flailing, Jewell got loose.

  Just the big hood now in the centre of the room with the skinny, slight girl, hands round his, black pistol waving.

  ‘I shot her, mister . . .’ Katja hissed. ‘Me. Not Barbara. I did it—’

  ‘Katja,’ the American woman said.

  Sirens outside. The sound of tyres screeching.

  Tears and fury in a young hard face.

  ‘I shot her,’ Katja repeated. ‘She was yelling at us. Waving a gun. If you want to kill someone, kill me.’

  Jansen stood back, lifted the weapon, aimed it straight at her.

  Finger on the trigger. Eyes on a young and damaged face.

  Didn’t fire.

  Footsteps on the stairs. Van der Berg and Koeman leading the way, weapons out, ready.

  ‘What would you have said, Theo?’ Vos asked, still holding out his hand. ‘If you’d known about this place?’

  ‘If it wasn’t me, someone else . . .’ Jansen said with a sigh.

  ‘But it wasn’t you. It was Rosie. She knew you’d have hated this. That’s why she closed it down. She wasn’t worried about us. Mulder kept it off our books. We’d given up on Liese’s case. Rosie was terrified of you, no one else. What would happen if you found out.’

  ‘You sound desperate, Vos,’ Jansen muttered.

  ‘So you’ve got limits. Just like us. Just the same . . .’

  His hand, extended out for the weapon, didn’t shake. He caught Jansen’s eye, nodded.

  ‘I’m sorry we never had that beer. One day. We’ve got lots to talk about. Lots to share.’

  Jansen stared at him and the broken, frightened girl.

  ‘Just give me the damned gun, Theo,’ Vos said. ‘We’re done here.’

  ‘You talk too much,’ Theo Jansen grumbled then handed him the Beretta.

  ‘True,’ Vos agreed, then ordered the others to put their weapons away. Told them to take everyone to Marnixstraat, wait for him there.