Before the Dawn

by Jake Woodhouse

  He glances at it for a few moments.

  ‘You’re not in uniform.’

  ‘Undercover. We suspect one of the doctors who does the physical prostate examination of enjoying his job a little too much.’

  ‘How did you—?’ he says before catching himself.

  Got you, thinks Tanya, as she smiles the smile of the innocent.

  ‘I’ll move it,’ he finally says.

  ‘Don’t forget to rebook,’ she calls out after him, waggling a finger when he looks at her. ‘Next week should be safe.’

  Once inside the hospital Tanya makes her way up to the waiting room, and even though she’s a few minutes late the appointments are, thankfully, running even later. She’s checked in by a Filipina nurse who speaks better Dutch than she does, and is directed to a row of plastic seats pinned to a steel bar running along a wall.

  She sits – turns out the seats aren’t that well attached as they move disconcertingly – and, now the focus of arriving on time is gone, tries not to think about the reason she’s actually here.

  Which is of course, like resistance, futile.

  The pain started up a few hours ago, just a small tingle to begin with, but it had quickly grown into something which wasn’t possible to ignore. Even so, she’d tried her best, told herself it was indigestion, nothing more. But in the semi-light, just as the birds were staging a dawn riot outside the window of her rented apartment on Peppelweg, it’d kept getting worse, expanding, nagging, demanding attention until it was the only thing she could think of.

  Eventually, exhausted, she’d called the hospital.

  The nurse she’d spoken to hadn’t sounded concerned – though that was probably a result of her training – but had booked her in for an emergency scan, just in case.

  She’d wanted to call Jaap, had even picked up the phone and tapped his name, wanting to hear his voice, to be reassured by him. But she knew it was just going to worry him, so she left it, hitting red before it even connected.

  It’s hard being down in Rotterdam, being split geographically from Jaap, but her posting is, in theory, only temporary. Once completed in the next month or so she should be free to go back.

  That is unless Henk Smit, her boss, has other plans for her. She knows Smit and Jaap don’t get on, and wonders if her secondment down here has anything to do with that.

  ‘Tanya Vandermark?’

  The voice jolts her out of her thoughts, and she’s aware of the woman standing in front of her holding a medical chart and smiling an efficient smile.

  ‘I … sorry, I was just thinking,’ Tanya says as she gets up and follows the efficient smile down the corridor and into a room which smells of cleaning fluid and alcohol.

  There are no windows, the only illumination coming from a single lightbox in one corner of the room.

  They go through the usual questions then start the scan itself. She lies back and feels the ooze of cold gel and the sweep and slippery push of the ultrasound scanner.

  As she’s dressing the woman reviews the images, still efficient, but minus the smile.

  ‘All OK?’ she asks, noticing the slight pleading quality which her words have taken on as they expand out into the dead space of the room.

  She gets no answer from the woman, but finds her phone is buzzing in her pocket. She pulls it out and sees it’s Harry Borst. She answers, vaguely remembering something about not using mobiles in hospitals.

  ‘Tanya, I need you here now, we’ve got a break and we’re going to have to move fast.’

  ‘I’ll be there in twenty,’ she says and hangs up.

  ‘So?’ she prompts the nurse, who is still staring at the screen.

  ‘I’ll have to get Dr Bruggen to look at them and give you a call.’

  ‘Sure,’ says Tanya, trying to ignore the freezing hand which has just gripped her throat, the whole room malevolent suddenly, all the soulless equipment there to work against her, cold hard machines devoid of emotion. ‘When will I hear from him?

  ‘He’s not in until the late shift,’ the woman says. She turns to look at Tanya and the smile is back. It’s more efficient than ever. It’s now positively uber-efficient. ‘But I’m sure you’ll hear today.’

  10

  ‘Jesus,’ Arno says. ‘Really?’

  They’re in the car, heading to the address Arno found, and Jaap’s just filled him in on his case, the two murders and Kamp’s death yesterday.

  ‘Yeah, I know. Thing is, he admitted to the first death, but then baulked at the second one. It’s not like it would have made much difference to his sentence, so why deny it?’

  ‘Unless he didn’t do it, but then … fuck. There can’t be two people running around doing the same kind of killing, can there?’

  Something catches Jaap’s eye out to sea. At first he thinks it’s a bird but then he sees it’s another fighter plane heading landwards. He shakes his head.

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t decide what’s worse.’

  ‘Right,’ says Arno. ‘I mean, Jesus.’

  The cottage itself is easy to spot when they turn up; it’s the only one wrapped almost entirely in red-and-white crime-scene tape, round and round like the person doing it was trying to hide the house completely. It’s one of fifteen, all identical, all laid out on a grid, and sits in a row of three which look out over the dunes to the sea beyond. A loose tape end flaps inland, powered by the sea breeze. The lone flapping somehow makes it feel desolate.

  ‘Bit overkill, isn’t it?’ Jaap says as he turns off the ignition.

  ‘The guys don’t get to use this stuff much out here,’ Arno says with a lopsided grin that reveals a chipped canine. ‘Must’ve got carried away.’

  They’re at the front door when Jaap’s phone goes off.

  ‘Max, what’ve you got?’

  ‘A winning personality and a bright future.’

  ‘Besides that.’

  ‘Actually, it’s something you’re gonna have to see for yourself.’

  Jaap gets the address Max is at and hangs up.

  They snap on gloves and search the cottage quickly, the air inside stale like it’s been used too many times already. Jaap catches a trace of herbal-cheesy weed. For a moment he’s worried it’s on his own clothes.

  Turns out the bedroom’s where it’s all at, a black zip-up suitcase on the floor half-filled with women’s clothes, probably Heleen’s given the size and styles. At the bottom Jaap finds a phone, all glass and metal. He tries to turn it on. It’s dead. He bags it up, scans the rest of the room. The bed’s a double and looks like it’s been the scene of a pro-wrestling event, covers and pillows strewn all over.

  He picks up a hair he finds on the sheet, just below one of the pillows. It’s dark and curly. Kamp’s name pops into his head, makes his heart beat a little faster.

  ‘Pube?’ Arno asks from the wardrobe.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ Jaap says, bagging it up as well.

  They leave the house, next stop Max.

  Turns out the only refrigerated place to store a body is a private funeral firm in Oost-Vlieland, the main – pretty much only – town on the island. Just as Arno’s pulling into the car park Jaap’s phone goes off again. He sees the time just as he answers, knows what’s coming. He had genuinely forgotten.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Inspector Rykel, we’re ready for you now. Are you in the building?’

  ‘No.’

  In Amsterdam, Laura Vetter pauses. ‘We had agreed to meet to discuss the events surrounding Francesco Kamp’s death. I believe we’d said ten a.m.?’

  ‘Events have moved on, I’m going to have to give you a call.’

  ‘Inspector, I realize that you’re busy and this all seems to you like a pen-pushing exercise—’

  ‘If you can read my mind so well then can’t we just do this remotely, save me the time?’

  ‘—but it’s important that we get your story down, particularly given the accusations made against you by Station Chief Henk Smit. So I sugg
est—’

  ‘OK, I got it. I’m about to see a dead body so I’ll have to call you back later today to arrange a time.’

  Jaap hangs up, the word ‘accusations’ leaving a nasty imprint on his mind. He doesn’t know exactly what Smit’s been saying, but he can make a pretty good guess.

  Max is standing in the car park, just across from the drab building housing the funeral home. On the main road an old man creaks past on a bike, his straw hat held in place with a leather chin strap, eyes focused on the road even though it’s empty.

  They reach Max who seems lost in thought, staring out over the harbour below. The great evolutionary triumph of opposable thumbs is being put to good use, a cigarette clasped tight.

  ‘Need help?’

  ‘Hey,’ he says, turning to look at Jaap. ‘Didn’t get to chat last night, not seen you for a while.’

  ‘Missed you. Moved out here?’

  ‘Yeah, just over on the mainland. It was like I had to get out of Amsterdam, y’know?’

  ‘But the bodies seem to be following you anyway.’

  Max makes a pfff sound. ‘The bodies don’t bother me,’ he says. He brings the cigarette to his lips and tries to suck all the air left in the world through it.

  ‘Let me guess, the living do?’

  A large hearse noses its way into the car park like a dark and shiny predator.

  ‘Got it in one,’ Max replies, voice tight from holding in all the smoke. ‘And when you see what I’ve just seen, then I think you’ll agree I’m pretty justified.’

  As they head towards the building Arno, who, Jaap’s noticed, has started to appear nervous, clears his throat.

  ‘What’s …’ Arno says.

  ‘Awww … first time?’ Max says as if talking to a child. ‘Do you want to hold my hand?’

  ‘It’s never easy,’ Jaap replies, thumping Max on the arm. ‘But you get used to it. And if you think you’re going to throw up, don’t try and tough it out, just get outside. Fast.’

  As he’s stepping inside his phone goes. He can see it’s his station.

  ‘Go on, I’ll follow,’ he says.

  He answers and a desk sergeant tells him he’s got the surveillance logs he’d requested. Jaap asks him to read them out, then email him. Once he’s heard what he needs he hangs up, plays around with Google Maps on his phone and pulls up the ferry company’s website.

  Then he steps inside, knowing that in the time the surveillance team had lost sight of him, Kamp could conceivably have made it out to the island, killed Heleen, and got back home.

  11

  Kees steps out his front door, sits on the dusty step and takes a sip of the Coke he’s just found in his hand. It’s the real stuff, curved glass bottle with proper sugar in it, not the cans or plastic bottles junked up with high-something-or-other corn syrup. Yeah, sure, it’ll make him fat and give him diabetes and leprosy, cause his hair to fall out, his penis to shrivel and, quite possibly, eat away at his brain. But what the hell. For some reason sugar and caffeine help with the pain and generally how shit he feels in the mornings. And lately, with his disease going the way it is, he needs all the help he can get, all the positive energy the world can muster if he’s not to walk over to the road and throw himself in front of the next speeding vehicle.

  Talking of energy, there’s always the sun. But right now he’s not experiencing it anywhere near as positive enough for his liking. It’s bright, way too bright, and he’s squinting so hard he wonders if his eyeballs will implode.

  His hand forms the peak of a cap and his eyes relax a little. He glances across the patch of grass he’s not cut since, well, since he moved in over a year ago. Doesn’t even own a mower, in fact.

  But who’s complaining?

  Most of the properties along the road are the same, junk piled high in one, the carcass of a rusting, cannibalized van in another.

  He watches as the man opposite leaves his house and walks down the street in a full white gown. Kees knows there’s a specific name for that, but he can’t remember what it is. There’s a lot of stuff he can’t remember these days, though he does remember the specialist saying the drugs may cause some slight memory dysfunction.

  He’d also said that Kees shouldn’t worry.

  Which, as is pretty much universally acknowledged, is much easier to say than do.

  He doesn’t know what the man in the white gown does for a living, but he clearly does something, because he appears to bring in enough to feed a family of at least six children. Kees wonders if there are a couple of wives tucked away in there somewhere as well.

  His bike stands on the cracked concrete driveway, exactly where he’d left it last night. The custom paint job glitters in the sun. Faded patches of oil dot the concrete.

  No one’s going to steal one of these, the consequences would be too high, so he never needs to garage it or even chain it up.

  Hell, he could probably leave the keys in the ignition if he wanted to.

  The neighbourhood cat sits near the front wheel, tail curled round its front paws like a serene Buddha.

  He takes another sip of Coke and thinks. About the panic attack he’d had the night before.

  It had hit him the second he’d pulled up and turned the engine off, his hands shaking, his legs subjected to a private earthquake. He made it inside, but collapsed in the kitchen, the corner of the table having a go at his cheek on the way down.

  He’d been lucky. He remembers the night he found Tanya standing over the man’s body, in shock at what had happened, how he’d died from catching his head on a table corner too.

  He reaches up and feels it, the scab formed already. The urge to pick at an edge and pull it off nags at him.

  The panic attacks had started a few months ago, and he’d assumed it had something to do with his illness.

  Maybe not, he thinks now. Maybe it’s to do with my lifestyle.

  Always wondering, always looking over my shoulder.

  Because he’s feeling the pressure, like something’s trying to crush his head the whole time.

  It’s at its worst when he’s with Van der Pol. He’s started having nightmares that the man can see right through him, see what he really is. And the consequences of that are not worth thinking about. If Van der Pol had even an inkling that Kees was working undercover the retribution would be swift and brutal. Actually, he thinks, it probably wouldn’t be swift, it’d be drawn out, designed to cause maximum pain.

  A couple of kids cruise by on skateboards, one of them with a grazed arm, a rash of grit still embedded under the skin. He watches them head down the street, their youthful energy, the knowledge that all is right with the world and that they’ll never have to grow up positively reeking from them.

  Kees suddenly feels old. And he’s only just coming up to thirty-five.

  Maybe today’s the day, he thinks, taking a sip and, not finding it satisfying, switching over to gulps. Maybe this is it.

  He spends twenty minutes or so looking for his keys, only to discover that he had in fact left them in the ignition. Now riding out, the vibration of the motor tremoring through his body in an almost therapeutic way, he starts to feel a little better.

  He’s cruising past fields, a tiny dot in a flat landscape under a vast sky.

  White clouds billow in the blue and he’s the only one on the road. For a second he gets the weirdest out-of-body sensation, like he can see himself from above.

  He pulls into the petrol station, an old concrete block with a small shop inside and only two pumps, diesel or unleaded. It’s one of the few places left in the area which has a payphone, a box attached to the wall round the side of the building, right next to the toilet door. The machine guzzles the couple of euros he feeds it and he punches out a number. It goes straight to voicemail, as it always does. There’s no message, just a short beep telling Kees when to speak.

  ‘We need to talk,’ he says, his voice rising, speeding up till his lips trip over the words. ‘We need to talk righ
t now.’

  He slams the phone down, turns and leans against the wall, which appears to be the only thing in the world not currently spinning. He bends forward from the waist, tries to catch his breath. There seems to be air all around, he just can’t get any of it.

  The spinning gradually slows, and when he feels safe, he straightens up and fumbles out a cigarette. Finally he gets it lit. But the second the smoke hits his lungs he feels sick all over again and tosses it onto the ground. He watches it roll in a loose circle on the concrete, the tip smouldering.

  ‘Hey,’ a voice jabs at him, ‘are you trying to blow us all up?’

  Kees looks at the man who’d stepped out of the shop, presumably heading for the toilet. He’s from Bangladesh or somewhere, his face showing a kind of hurt anger. His green and yellow T-shirt has a round logo of a large oil corporation splattered on the fabric. Given its position it looks like a diseased nipple.

  The guy’s obviously new. No one talks like that to one of the crew.

  Because there’s such a thing as consequences.

  ‘Word of advice,’ Kees says. ‘You see that symbol on my bike over there?’ He points to the pair of wings flanking a human skull. ‘That means you shut the fuck up. For your own safety.’

  Van der Pol’s base is a legit business just outside of Eindhoven, a haulage company which he never uses for anything illegal at all. The books are all in order, the drivers never drive a second over whatever the EU regulations stipulate, and if you’re looking for a firm to transport your contraband around then you’d just better look elsewhere.

  Van der Pol often jokes that it’s the only logistics company in the country not moving stuff they shouldn’t be.

  In general, Kees doesn’t like it when Van der Pol jokes. It creeps him out. In fact, there’s something about the man Kees finds downright disturbing. Something aside from the fact he’s singly responsible for a gang which now operates a large part of the criminal enterprise in the Netherlands and beyond. That he imports women for the sex trade, and probably whole hosts of stuff Kees isn’t high up enough to know about, only adds to his unease.