Before the Dawn

by Jake Woodhouse

  The man looks at him; Jaap sees he has green eyes. Which makes him think of Tanya, guilty about his earlier dream.

  ‘What am I doing?’ Jaap says, rubbing the slime away. He’s not sure if the question is directed at the man or himself.

  ‘The murder, that’s what you’re here about, isn’t it?’

  ‘Small island community, no secrets, right?’

  ‘Living here, the best thing is not to have any, then you don’t get caught out,’ he says, tossing the last two fish into a barrel. ‘Hey, that’s pretty profound, you think I should tweet it?’

  ‘Did you see anything?’

  A lone gull breaks away and makes a desperate dive.

  ‘No,’ he says, fending the bird off successfully. ‘I already spoke to one of your guys last night. I think the girl was a tourist, pretty sure I saw her a couple of days ago, hanging out with some of the surf crew up there.’ He points north along the beach.

  This goes along with the briefing notes Arno had taken him through earlier. The fisherman was also mentioned, but had been dismissed as he’d been over at a shop on the mainland picking up several new nets at the time of the killing.

  ‘Any trouble with them?’

  ‘The surfers? No. In my day it would have been all drugs and stuff. Now? They’re all clean-living types, into Paleo and meditation, and they worship their bodies just so they’re fitter for surfing. Youth—’ He shakes his head with a grin ‘— totally wasted on them.’

  ‘How far?’

  ‘Fifteen minutes or so, the beach curves round. There’s an underwater shelf out there, so they get better waves than here. You’ll see a shack up in the dunes where they keep all their boards, but I’m sure you’ll find some out in the water already. They live by the tides.’

  Jaap thanks him and starts walking, leaving behind the victorious crab.

  The sky’s massive overhead, a few clouds relaxing in the blue expanse, just happy to be floating there, gazing down on the craziness below. Waves stroke the sand and the sun warms the right side of his face, and he finds it working on his body and mind, a temporary sense of respite.

  A wave, not content with just working the sand, reaches for him with flecked foam, and he sidesteps further up the beach to avoid its touch. Disappointed, but no doubt willing to try for him again, the wave recedes, leaving dark sand behind it.

  He stops, takes his shoes and socks off, and carries on walking just as an F-16 fighter jet storms out of the sky, right over his head, surely no more than five or so metres above him. His hands are over his ears but it’s still deafening, the whole world suddenly vibrating. He turns to watch it head south, curving up and to the left in a fast, smooth arc.

  He knew there was a military training ground on the southernmost tip of the island, a vast expanse of beach which tourists were strictly forbidden from entering. What he didn’t know was that they flew the planes so goddamned low.

  Once it’s out of sight, his ears still ringing, he carries on walking and soon he can see them out on the water, sitting on their boards, rising and falling on the growing swell. Which is much bigger here, the fisherman was right on that.

  He pauses and wipes all the sand he can off his feet before slipping on his socks and shoes. Properly shod, he watches as one of the surfers lies down and starts paddling, head swivelling over their shoulder to check the incoming wave, arms windmilling the water. It grows behind, from slight bulge to yawning mouth, and the figure springs up just as the wave breaks, a flurry of foamy white as the water peels over and splits. The surfer rides it in, all the way to the shallows, finally stepping off their board as the wave loses momentum, melting back into the sea as if nothing had happened.

  Jaap calls out, but the wind stuffing the words back into his mouth, right down his throat. He thinks of the one-way valve.

  Miraculously the figure hears and turns, putting a flat hand across their brow to block out the sun, which is cresting over the dunes behind him. He sees it’s a woman, a girl really, and he waves her over.

  She hesitates for a moment, glancing back out to her fellow surfers, then pulls her board round and walks out of the sea, a loop of cord attaching her ankle to the board dragging behind her. Blue stripes run down the arms and legs of her black wetsuit, and her hair, plastered back on her head, is long and probably blonde when dry.

  ‘Heleen?’ she asks, once Jaap has introduced himself and she’s told him her name is Kitty Paumen.

  ‘You knew her?’

  ‘Hardly,’ Kitty says. ‘I’d met her a few times, seen her around here.’

  ‘Surfing lessons?’

  ‘I think Piet took her out a few days ago. He’s just finishing up a lesson, want me to get him?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Jaap says, his phone starting up.

  A male voice, thick with tar, introduces itself as Max’s assistant.

  ‘Tell me,’ Jaap says.

  ‘Yeah,’ says the voice, then falls silent. Jaap wonders if their connection has broken.

  ‘Yeah what?’

  ‘Scopolamine. Her blood was damn-near saturated with the stuff.’

  Boards lean up against the walls of the shack.

  Jaap’s on the wooden deck, the surface coarsened with sand, both wet and dry. An old brown dog lies wiry-haired by the door. It raises its head, decides Jaap’s not the food-carrying type, and rests back down again. Piet shrugs out of the top half of his wetsuit, leaving two arms dangling down to the ground whilst he towels off his very short hair. His face and neck are tanned hard, but below the line of his wetsuit his skin is like milk.

  ‘Seriously, she was a bit weird, you know?’

  Jaap doesn’t know. He asks for clarification.

  ‘Just … I dunno. Not quite right. Too quiet, like she was holding something in.’

  ‘Was she with anyone?’

  ‘At the lesson? No. Just her.’

  ‘Didn’t we see her yesterday? Wasn’t she with someone?’ Kitty says, stepping out of the hut having changed from her wetsuit into denim hot pants and bikini top. She obviously spends a bit of time trying to even out the discrepancy between neck and body colour that Piet has, but she’s still two-tone. She puts her head to one side and wrings out her hair, a thick gush of water hitting the deck. Jaap thinks of a horse peeing.

  ‘Someone?’

  ‘Yeah,’ Piet says, nodding his head slowly at first, then getting into it. ‘Yeah, you’re right. Just over there, she was walking with this guy I’d not seen before.’

  ‘This was when?’ Jaap asks.

  ‘Yesterday, would have been about twelve, twelve-thirty.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘The tides wait for no man,’ Piet says, though Jaap can’t tell if he’s being ironic, can’t tell if he’s just playing the part of a surfer dude or he really is a surfer dude. He decides it’s probably a combination of both, like some New Age mantra, you become what you think. ‘That’s when the tide turns, waves flatten out for a few hours. Someone was screwing around with one of those remote-control flying things, we could hear it buzzing but couldn’t see it.’

  ‘That’s when we saw her,’ the girl says. ‘When we were looking for the flying thing.’

  Jaap pulls out Francesco Kamp’s photo, the one he’d had pinned to the car’s dash yesterday.

  ‘This the guy?’

  They both lean in to peer at it.

  ‘Hard to tell, bit too far away,’ she says.

  ‘Any reasons it couldn’t have been him?’

  Piet and the girl confer with their eyes. The wind shifts direction.

  The old dog sleep-barks once, then stretches out all four legs with a soft groan.

  ‘No,’ she eventually says. ‘I guess not.’

  8

  ‘Here,’ Arno says, handing him a sandwich.

  Jaap decides Arno will go far. Assuming, that is, he keeps his horticultural hobby in check.

  He holds his hand out, still staring through the window which looks across the car park to th
e cell block where he’d been due to spend the night. ‘Thanks,’ he says, turning his swivel chair. ‘You know Piet, the surfer?’

  ‘Went to school together,’ Arno says. ‘Same class. Nice guy, we used to surf together a bit.’

  ‘Used?’

  Arno grins, and takes a bite of his own sandwich. ‘He had a thing for Kim.’

  Jaap remembers his dream. He has to admit that Kim is pretty. As in, pretty hot.

  Jaap thinks of Tanya, down in Rotterdam, with their baby growing inside her. He struggles to surf a personal wave of dizziness.

  ‘What about the mainland?’ he asks once it passes. ‘Any CCTV from the ferry terminal?’

  ‘It’s on its way, and a passenger list.’

  Jaap wants to see Kamp’s name on there.

  Then again, Jaap doesn’t want to see Kamp’s name on there.

  In truth, Jaap can’t figure out what he actually wants to see on that list because really there’s no good outcome. On the one hand, if it was Kamp then Heleen’s death is on him. He should have stopped him sooner. If on the other – and this one’s really not going down well either – if it wasn’t Kamp, then just who the fuck was it? Who has somehow come up with a remarkably similar way of killing young women, using suffocation and scopolamine?

  Not for the first time Jaap asks himself how that’s even possible.

  Kamp was a train driver, for fuck’s sake. He had a young child, everything to live for, and yet he somehow managed to procure one of the world’s most terrifying narcotics, and killed two, possibly three, women whilst they were under the influence of the same.

  He just doesn’t get it.

  This isn’t the kind of drug your local dealer gets you, not least because recreational use is anything but recreational. Jaap’s even checked out the dark web, logged onto the most popular marketplaces for drugs, and found not a single listing, not a single seller who was offering the stuff.

  And when he adds all that to Kamp’s denial of the second killing yesterday, he’s left with … well, Jaap doesn’t know what he’s left with.

  ‘Any update on where she was staying, who she is?’ Jaap asks Arno, suddenly aware he’s been zoned out.

  Somewhere behind him a phone tries to get some attention.

  ‘That might be it,’ Arno says as he goes to answer.

  Jaap turns back to the desk, stares at the scribbles he’d put down on paper earlier, but they look foreign to him, like he’d written in another language. Then he remembers he needs to check exactly how long the surveillance crew lost Kamp for yesterday. He needs to rule out that Kamp could have got to the island, killed Heleen, then got back to his house all in the time he’d been AWOL. He puts a call in to his station back in Amsterdam and requests the information. He’s promised a call back.

  Behind him he hears Arno asking questions, then listening to very long answers.

  He starts unconsciously opening the sandwich, his hands on automatic, finding the edge of the wrapper with his fingers without looking at it and peeling it off the soggy bread. Then he stops and looks down.

  It appears to be beef and mustard, but that’s not the problem. The problem is the cling film reminds him of Dafne Koster’s death, all those months ago.

  And the fact that yesterday he caught her killer. But now …

  ‘I didn’t get anyone to spit in it,’ says a voice Jaap recognizes as Stuppor’s. ‘Or maybe it’s not fancy enough. Filling not organic and grass-fed enough? Not like the kind of stuff a high-flyer like you is used to getting down in Amsterdam.’

  Jaap wraps the sandwich back up and places it on the desk. ‘I may have got something,’ he says, ignoring Stuppor’s jibes. ‘Want to hear it or not?’

  ‘Let’s talk in my office.’

  Jaap follows him across the room and regrets his earlier barefoot walk in the sand. He’d obviously not managed to get all of it off, grains now flaying skin between his toes.

  They enter Stuppor’s office and Jaap is immediately disappointed.

  Because the chair he’d dragged in yesterday is gone.

  ‘So, let’s have it,’ Stuppor says, sitting behind his desk.

  Jaap briefly explains what he’s found out so far, and finishes with a request to get someone to look for anyone flying a drone in the area yesterday. ‘They often film with those things, if so I’d like to see what’s on there.’

  ‘You think they got the murder happening?’ Stuppor sounds incredulous, eyebrows riding high.

  ‘I don’t think anything,’ Jaap says. He slips his right shoe and sock off and leans against the wall as he goes about emptying sand from them both, having to turn his sock inside out. He’s only slightly embarrassed by the socks, they’re actually a pair of Tanya’s he’d found at the back of a drawer when he’d been searching for some clean ones of his own. They looked like they’d never been worn; the colour’s not too bad, a kind of navy blue, but they have a little ring of pink and white flowers going round the top. Of course, when he’d pulled them on, he’d only had a vague notion of where Vlieland was, still less that he’d be on the island showing off his socks to a station chief. ‘I’m investigating, which means I look at everything I can, anything which may give us a chance at—’

  ‘Pretty slim chance,’ Stuppor says.

  ‘Well, if the ferries off the island had been stopped as soon as the murder was discovered then we might be having a different conversation,’ Jaap says, putting his sock and shoe back on, then doing the same with the other foot. ‘But they weren’t, so we aren’t.’

  ‘Listen, you have—’

  The door behind Jaap swings one-eighty and crashes into the wall.

  ‘Found it,’ Arno says, unable to hide the excitement in his voice. ‘The house where Heleen was staying.’

  ‘Take me there,’ Jaap says, scrambling to get his shoe back on. He walks out of Stuppor’s office without even glancing at him. Then he turns back.

  ‘Whilst we’re gone, get someone to put that chair back in here. Or better yet, do it yourself.’

  9

  Tanya Vandermark can’t find anywhere to park.

  And now her appointment’s in less then seven minutes. She’s been crawling round and round the car park for the last twenty at least, scanning for any sign that another car is leaving. And she’s not the only one, she’s part of a long line, a lazy snake of cars, each with a driver probably getting as worked up as her.

  She wonders how many people die out here.

  Maybe the hospital has a crew which runs through once a day, carting off those who don’t make it to the large incinerator whose chimney towers over the complex. For all she knows it might have been planned this way, maybe car park fatalities don’t count towards hospital statistics, so they can weed out the weakest ones before they even set foot in the hospital and mess with their numbers by dying inside.

  Well, maybe.

  The sun’s out in force and the temperature’s already hitting unbearable. Petrol fumes from the other cars aren’t helping, she can see their distorting haze all around, making solid objects wobble gently. And to cap it all off, the air con in her car’s not working.

  She’d taken it to the garage last week, and they’d charged a full seventy-five to re-gas the thing. She sees now that she might as well have kept the money and fanned herself with it instead.

  Checking the time on the dashboard she notices her appointment’s now in six minutes.

  When she’d first pulled in she’d been breezy about it, she’d find a space and she’d be on time, no problem. But now the digital display on her dashboard is gloating at her, each diminishing digit jacking up her stress levels, shallowing her breathing out. And her fingers – all except the two which don’t work so well any more after the bullet had torn through the ligaments – are gripping the wheel like they’re trying to snap it in two.

  She consciously releases them, tries to breathe deeper. The fumes bite, she goes back to shallow breaths.

  Five minutes now, which i
s just enough to get into the hospital and up to the third floor.

  But only if she parks. Right. Now.

  Four and a half minutes and she sees it. A car off to her left, reversing lights coming on. Even better, the red Lexus she’s been following has just gone past it. The space is hers. She has to reverse a bit to let the car out, but just as she does the Lexus slams into reverse, sneaking into the spot with the kind of practised ease which shouldn’t be allowed.

  Tanya slams her hand on the horn, holding it there whilst a guy gets out, pretending not to notice.

  She knows him.

  Or at least, she knows his type. Late-fifties businessman who wants everyone to know how successful he is: designer jeans, open shirt with sleeves rolled up, and a watch the size of a sundial on his wrist. For a split second reality fragments and she actually believes it’s her foster father, Ruud Staal, risen from the grave to punish her for his death.

  A sharp stab of fear in her gut reconfigures reality.

  And that just makes her angrier.

  ‘Hey!’ she yells, getting out of the car.

  He looks up as if surprised, as if he’s only just noticed her, as if he hadn’t just swung back and, against the convention which keeps the world from descending into an all-out bloodbath, swiped someone else’s parking space.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘That’s my space.’

  As the words are out of her mouth she can’t quite believe it’s come to this, standing here about to get into an argument over a rectangular piece of tarmac.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says, with a shrug which shows he’s anything but.

  For a moment she finds she’s wishing he’s ill. Terminally. Like in the next two minutes. After he’s moved the car.

  ‘Move it now,’ she says, reaching into her pocket.

  ‘Fiery redhead. I like that. So if I don’t move it, you gonna slap me?’

  His grin is pure cartoon, and he does look like her foster father. He really does. She has to fight down the panic as she pulls out her ID, steps forward and shoves it right in front of his face.