Before the Dawn

by Jake Woodhouse

  Movement in the corner of Jaap’s eye. He risks a quick sideways glance, and sure enough they’re filming, edging closer to the action, the man supposed to be keeping them back focused on Kamp, his own weapon drawn.

  In journalistic terms this is like winning multiple lotteries all at once. In police terms, it’s the exact opposite.

  ‘Go away,’ Kamp yells, the first time he’s said anything, his voice tight, ratcheting in his throat. ‘Go away or I’ll do it.’

  He pushes the screwdriver harder, Jaap can see the dent it’s making in the creamy skin of the woman’s neck.

  A drop of blood swells up as the tip punctures.

  He tries to catch her eye, tell her with just a look that it’s going to be all right. She squints slightly, either telling him she’s understood, or in reaction to the pain, Jaap can’t tell.

  He doesn’t want to take the shot, but his options are rapidly depleting. He’s close enough, Kamp’s head appearing over the woman’s shoulder, face unreadable.

  His finger, flat against the body of his Glock, curls down to the trigger, testing the resistance gently.

  So much can happen in a simple millimetre.

  ‘This is your last warning,’ Jaap says. ‘Put it down.’

  Kamp’s agitated, his eyes jerking around, a cornered animal searching for escape.

  Jaap takes a step closer, just to let him know escape’s not an option.

  Kamp holds out for a few seconds more, then starts to lower the screwdriver. He releases his fingers, the tool clattering against the doorstep tiles. He shoves the woman hard, she stumbles and it takes her a second to realize that she’s actually free, that it’s not a trick. Then she rushes forward, into the arms of one of the surveillance team, who whisks her quickly away.

  ‘On your knees, hands on your head,’ Jaap yells as he starts moving forward. He steps up the path, past flowers and a fibreglass water feature desperately imitating rock, and reaches Kamp, waiting on his knees. Stepping behind him, Jaap goes for his cuffs, finds they’re not on his belt.

  Fuck.

  Smit whistles; when Jaap looks up he tosses over a pair. Jaap catches them one-handed and cuffs one wrist then the other. He hauls Kamp up. There’s a kind of damp heat coming off him, his whole body vibrating.

  As they move down the path a baby starts crying from the house behind them. One of the surveillance crew heads towards the door.

  Smit, now the danger’s passed, steps up and bear-mauls Jaap’s shoulder.

  ‘Good job,’ he says.

  Jaap can see the camera crew moving closer. He glances at them, only they’re not playing the game, they don’t stop coming.

  ‘I’ll handle this,’ Smit says.

  He turns and intercepts them before they get too close. Jaap knows it’s because Smit wants his face on the news, announcing they’ve finally got the killer, taking the glory.

  But somehow he doesn’t care, he’ll leave the politics and media relations to Smit. All he feels, now he finally has Kamp, is a rising anger, surfing the wave of his adrenaline rush. He grabs Kamp by the upper arm and guides him towards the surveillance van.

  They reach the back, out of sight of the camera, and Jaap opens a door and shoves Kamp into a sitting position.

  He pulls out photos of each victim and holds them in front of him.

  His phone’s going off in his pocket; he ignores it.

  ‘Why did you do it?’

  It’s like his head is the same polarity as the photos – wherever Jaap places them Kamp’s face moves away.

  A shadow precedes Smit appearing round the corner of the van.

  ‘Don’t do this here, we’ll take him back to the station. We need everything to be official.’

  Jaap ignores him, his focus fully on Kamp.

  ‘Why did you kill Dafne Koster and Nadine Adelaars?’

  The second name pings Kamp’s central nervous system; he jerks like he’s just been stung. His eyes swing round and catch the photos. From the house the baby cries out again, a long, high-pitched wail. Jaap’s phone stops ringing, then immediately starts again.

  ‘No … nononono … I only … not that one … not her.’

  ‘You killed both these women, you drugged them and then—’

  ‘Inspector Rykel, urgent call for you.’

  One of the surveillance crew’s moved into his peripheral vision, tentative because he can see this isn’t the time.

  ‘Kinda busy here,’ Jaap says, eyes still on Kamp.

  ‘I know, but I’ve been told to tell you it’s really urgent. Like, drop-everything kind of urgent.’

  ‘Get it,’ Smit says. ‘I’ll take him back to the station, question him there, and the surveillance crew can seal off the house till patrol get here. Also, get Protective Services in for the baby.’

  Jaap stares at Kamp, his face pale with shock, before pulling his phone out, the station dispatcher’s number on the screen.

  ‘I’m in the middle of something,’ he says, ‘so this had better be good.’

  The reply’s a triumph of modern technology, Daleked beyond recognition. He starts walking away from the van, searching for better reception. He finds it and asks for a rerun. He can see a uniform walking out with the screaming baby in his arms.

  ‘Case came in, raised a flag.’

  ‘What flag?’ Jaap says, a cold sickness seeping through him. He only has one on the system. One which shouldn’t now be raised again.

  ‘Young woman found dead on a remote beach up on Vlieland. Died of suffocation, had been chased beforehand. Looks the same as your other two.’

  ‘Time of death?’ Jaap asks. For a split second he hears Kamp’s denial.

  Not her.

  ‘Not official yet, but sometime round lunchtime today and—’

  A gunshot explodes into the air. The world crystallizes for a fraction of a second. Jaap can feel the hard edges of his phone against his fingers. Everything’s still.

  A second shot joins the first.

  He spins round, races back towards the van. When he gets there Smit’s about a metre away, half-standing, half-crouching, his weapon held out in front of him. He can’t disguise the wobble in his arms, the loose panic in his eyes.

  Jaap stops dead, his mind a kaleidoscope of conflicting thoughts.

  Kamp’s body is sprawled on the road just behind the van, one arm above his head, the other stretched out like he’s directing traffic, cuffs dangling from his left wrist, one section undone.

  Just out of reach of his hand, on the blistering tarmac, lies a gun.

  Not a model used by the police.

  As he gets closer Jaap can hear Kamp trying to say something, his breathing in overdrive.

  ‘I … I didn’t kill them both …’

  Kamp’s whole body judders, he bites the air once with a strangled grunt. Then he’s still.

  A wound on his chest blossoms like a time-lapse flower.

  Something moves in Jaap’s peripheral vision. He turns to see his own face reflected in the cameraman’s lens, a red dot flashing just beside it.

  2

  ‘Jaap, that’s awful, are you OK?’

  He’s in a car, being driven by someone else for once, and after all the chaos of the last few hours he’d suddenly realized that what he really wanted to do was talk to Tanya.

  She’s down in Rotterdam, on secondment to a large and seemingly never-ending drugs case, and he’s been missing her more and more.

  ‘Yeah, I think so,’ he says, still not really sure. ‘The whole thing’s a bit of a mess though, I—’

  A thought hits him, stopping up his mouth like a ball-gag. He glances up front, the driver a random uniform simply doing an assigned job. Though he had been assigned it by Smit. Jaap wonders if he’s being paranoid.

  ‘Look, it’ll be easier if we talk later, I’m due to land there in about an hour, I’ll try and call you then?’

  ‘Sure, I’m just heading out to get some food, I seem to be craving bacon.’


  Tanya loves bacon, always has, always will.

  ‘Yeah, yeah. Let me guess, pregnant craving?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘And you’re not just using that to legitimize your bacon fetish?’

  ‘Inspector Rykel, your cynicism is very disappointing.’

  Quarter of an hour later the car pulls into a helipad in Harlingen, where a search and rescue chopper is due to take him over the water to Vlieland.

  Only the place is deserted.

  He steps out of the car, walks the short distance to the centre of the large H and scans the skies. Nothing. The sun’s dipping towards the horizon where he knows the island of Vlieland lies, and beyond that the North Sea.

  ‘You want me to wait?’ calls the uniform.

  Jaap ignores him, is about to pull out his phone, when he spots something high up, off to the north. He watches for a moment, decides it is heading his way.

  ‘No,’ Jaap says. ‘You can go.’

  As the car pulls off he finds a rusty oil drum slightly away from the helipad and sits down. His presence startles something in the long grass behind, whatever it is rustling away without being seen.

  The scene he’d left behind in Amsterdam was a mess, no question, and he still doesn’t understand how it had gone so wrong. He’s been wracking his brain, trying to work out if it was all his fault, if he’d somehow, in the anger which he’d not reeled in enough, made mistakes.

  After the shooting Smit had been in shock. Turns out that unlike Jaap, who has been forced to kill in the line of duty, he’d never shot and killed anyone before.

  And that’s not something to be taken lightly. Doesn’t matter if the guy deserved it, even if in the dark hours of the case you end up fantasizing about doing it to whoever preyed on the young, extinguishing their fragile potential as if it was nothing. Ultimately it’s still killing another human being.

  Smit, of course, has the law on his side. There’s no question of that. But just because it’s the law, doesn’t make it right, doesn’t make it any easier when you close your eyes and see the person you shot dying again and again, the actual moment when consciousness disappears into an infinity of nothing.

  So the fight they’d had afterwards, after Smit’s initial shock wore off, wasn’t a surprise. Neither was the news that there will be an investigation.

  And Jaap knows that he’s going to be on his own when that all kicks off.

  There’s more rustling in the grass behind him, maybe whatever it was he’d scared off earlier has come back with reinforcements.

  He plays the scene again, every moment from when he stepped up to Kamp and cuffed him. Can he be sure that both cuffs clicked together? Could he have missed one? And, worryingly, no matter how hard he tries, he can’t seem to dredge up a memory of checking Kamp for weapons.

  Fuck, he thinks. Fuckfuckfuck.

  All of which is bad. But it’s only a distraction from the thing which is pulsing inside his head, his whole body, tearing at his mind.

  Kamp denied killing the second victim, Nadine Adelaar.

  The rhythmic thud of the chopper saves him from his thoughts, and he soon has to clamp his hands over his ears as the fluorescent yellow machine comes in to land, the downdraft buffeting him, making his progress towards it difficult.

  The door slides open and the pilot, little more than headphones, flight goggles and an arm, motions him inside.

  They lift off, the lurch in Jaap’s stomach reminding him he’s not eaten for hours, and the chopper circles round till they’re heading out over the water separating the mainland from the string of islands which follow the north Netherlands’ coast. Of which his destination, Vlieland, is the second one up.

  Jaap tries to clear his mind and just enjoy the sensation of flying above the water, but no matter what he does it keeps going back to the case.

  Specifically Kamp’s denial. He didn’t deny both murders, which Jaap could understand, but only one. And yet both bodies, despite the minor differences in their deaths, had something in common which was incontrovertible: large amounts of scopolamine in their blood.

  When it had come up in the extended tox report, Jaap had not even heard of the stuff. After some fruitless research, calling round the various labs the police used for their forensics, Google filled him in.

  ‘Dragon’s breath’ they call it in Columbia, where the drug originates, processed from the seeds of a genus of flowering shrub called Brugmansia. They’re primarily grown for their flowers, which hang like somnolent trumpets from the branches, giving off an intense, some say intoxicating, fragrance. But the beauty is all surface; scopolamine, once refined from the seed, has been used for years there to rob people, to rape them, to do any manner of things a sick mind does when confronted with the opportunity.

  Victims of scopolamine – those that are lucky enough just to be robbed when under its narcotic influence – describe the same thing: they all just did what they were told. A man might be slipped some in a drink by a prostitute and before he know’s what’s happening it’s the next morning and he finds his bank accounts have been emptied, and quite possibly everything in his flat or house as well. In fact, the only thing the victims usually have left at this stage is no recollection of what happened, and the mother of all hangovers which pounds their heads for days. Though it turns out not knowing what happened to you in that gap in memory is far worse, and far more persistant. The not knowing is what haunts the victims.

  And if it was administered to a woman, well, that’s just going to be worse. Much worse.

  Despite this, the only time the drug usually surfaces outside of Columbia is in minute doses in a prescription patch for extreme travel sickness, where it’s listed as Hyoscine hydrobromide. But when Jaap had asked the question the response came through that a body would have to have been covered head to toe in the things for months to get the kind of blood levels seen in both victims.

  The rarity of scopolamine was in itself enough to link the two deaths; add the suffocation and it was reasonable to assume the killer was the same. Jaap had enough on Kamp for the first death, Dafne Koster, but it was really the scopolamine which clinched it, linking him to the second.

  But maybe that was wrong, he thinks now. Maybe I should have dug deeper.

  They’re heading into the sun, and soon he can see a slip of land rising from the water up ahead.

  His phone buzzes in his pocket, he fishes it out and reads the message confirming that a patrol car is waiting for him on Vlieland.

  In the water below he spots a yacht, tilted at an angle, the taut sail turned golden by the sun. He snaps a few quick photos, selects the best one and sends it to Tanya.

  As the flight continues he starts to feel his breathing slow down, and as they get closer, with the sky turning red and the land darkening, Jaap is surprised to find himself humming Ride of the Valkyries.

  3

  The dune path is flanked with swaying grasses, seed heads desperate to reach out and touch Jaap as he moves past. The ocean’s briny tang pushes against his face as he starts out across the beach.

  In front of him the dying sun bleeds into a vast sea.

  Hours earlier he’d been on the cusp of cracking what was thought to be the Netherlands’ first serial-killer case of the twenty-first century, a case which had exploded into the headlines, the after-shock reverberating there for months.

  I didn’t kill them both.

  Kamp’s last words, unease pricking Jaap’s brain.

  He sees him lying on the road, dying in front of him, he feels Smit’s quiet panic, the fear of what could have happened, the fear of what did happen.

  And the loose cuff, evidence that he’d fucked up.

  Now he may never burrow down deep enough to know what really happened.

  Because Jaap can’t figure out why Kamp would admit to one killing, but not the other.

  Unless Kamp was speaking the truth.

  Which could, given he’s about to walk up to a possible thir
d body, rip open the guts of his near-finished case.

  Thirty or forty metres ahead, dark figures silhouette against the vibrant red. They’re at the water’s edge, standing by the body like a guard of honour.

  Right now he expects to hear the whirling cry of gulls above him, but it seems eerily quiet, as if the water, earth and sky are all watching him, waiting to see what he will do. Judging him on his actions.

  Beneath his feet the sand is a tricksy lover, yielding unpredictably to his shoes. As he walks, unusual muscles in his calves and ankles are forced into an intricate choreography just to keep him upright.

  Ahead the muted thump and hiss of the waves, behind him darkness sucks away at his back.

  One of the uniforms turns as he approaches the group, revealing a sheet lying on the sand. Small waves the colour of blood and fire wet the fabric’s seaward edge with exploratory laps. The unmistakable configuration of peaks and troughs tells him that under the sheet is a body lying on its back.

  He glances out to sea, something catching his eye, and for a second he thinks he sees a gull, flying low, a wing tip skimming the waves on a turn, a dark mark streaming across the bloody sun.

  He blinks and it’s gone.

  ‘What have we got?’ he asks as he comes to a stop, wanting to search for the bird but tearing his eyes away, back to the figures. He now sees one of them is a forensic, Max Bakker, who he’s worked with before.

  A case just over two years ago. The same case which led to his daughter Floortje’s kidnapping, and ultimately her death.

  The memory stings hard, lighting up the wound all over again. But, he notices with a kind of amazed detachment, it’s not as intense as it used to be, as if the voltage has lowered over time.

  And there’s a kind of guilt implied in that. Something inside urges him to feel it more.

  The last slip of sun bleeds away, and the sky darkens, as if mourning its passing.

  ‘Hang on,’ Max says, peeling off a glove and thumb-typing something on his phone. He holds it out from his chin, as if he were long-sighted. Elongated shadows streak up his face from the sickly light.

  It reminds Jaap of a camping trip he’d been on as a kid; buckled down in their tent, he and several others had taken it in turns to hold the torch and try and frighten each other. It hadn’t worked.