Before the Dawn

by Jake Woodhouse

  The main offices, the official ones, are in a block at the back of the lot, but the shipping container, plonked on the tarmac along with a few others, is where the real business goes down. Kees steps up to the container. Cort is leaning against it mulling over a thorny problem in his self-funded PhD study on gravitational waves and their effects on dark energy. Either that or he’s working out just how he’ll eventually kick the living shit out of Kees.

  If Cort was a dog, it would almost be admirable. As Cort is a man, at least of sorts, Kees finds his devotion to Van der Pol bordering on the psychopathic.

  ‘You’re late,’ he says when Kees is close enough.

  ‘Yeah, your mum says hi.’

  Kees had found himself slipping into the speech patterns and predictable insults that abound in Van der Pol’s crew with alarming ease.

  Cort gives back some response which undoubtedly has to do with something shoved in an orifice of Kees’ non-existent sister, only Kees can’t be fucked to listen to it. Pleasantries over, Cort swings open the door and points him in.

  The door clangs shut behind him and Kees can see Van der Pol isn’t alone. He has Dirk Rutte with him. Dirk Rutte’s fairly high in Van der Pol’s pecking order. They’re sitting facing each other at a Formica-topped desk, and Kees steps closer. It’s only then that he realizes Dirk’s in trouble.

  Van der Pol is holding his hand and manoeuvring a pair of secateurs onto Dirk’s first finger. They’re nice secateurs, the type those freaks who are into roses have, carved wooden handles and steel blades which, though worn, have been looked after. Dirk’s trying to tough it out, but he’s starting to tremble. Two men are standing by, just in case Dirk decides he’d rather not comply.

  Van der Pol gets the blades round Dirk’s finger, his actions smooth, unhurried, as if he were arranging a flower display at the local church, mulling over the perfect cut angle.

  ‘Please, no,’ Dirk whispers.

  Van der Pol shushes him, then, with Dirk’s finger still caught between the blades, looks up at Kees, catches him studying him.

  Van der Pol’s shorter than Kees, and whilst many, if not most, of his crew indulge in all the illicit world has to offer, Van der Pol is lean and clean, his eyes never shrouded with alcohol or drugs.

  Which, considering some of the stuff Kees has heard about him, and seen him do first hand, means he has to be just about the most coldhearted motherfucker in Europe.

  ‘So what happened?’ Van der Pol says to Kees, ignoring Dirk for the moment.

  Van der Pol does what he does for two reasons that Kees can see. One is to keep the empire he’s built at the top. The other is because he flat-out enjoys it. Enjoys the beatings meted out by people like Kees and Bart. On more than one occasion Kees has been asked to film Bart going to work on someone so Van der Pol could watch it later.

  So Kees tells him what happened, not leaving out a single detail, knowing that Van der Pol will push him harder if he suspects he’s holding anything back.

  ‘Really?’ Van der Pol says, laughing when Kees has finished. ‘His head exploded?’

  His two goons are laughing as well, and eventually Dirk joins in.

  Kees is feeling that weird pressure again, his scalp tingling, shrinking. ‘Yeah, it was …’ Kees can’t think.

  ‘Wish I’d seen it,’ Van der Pol says, still laughing, though his eyes remain cold.

  The goons, of course, are finding this shit hilarious.

  ‘Right,’ Van der Pol says two seconds later, having killed his own laughter as if it’d never been there. ‘Bart was on a job tonight, so you’ll have to do it instead, seeing as he’s indisposed.’

  Deep in Kees’ brain Bart’s head explodes for the millionth time.

  ‘The thing is …’ Kees says, trying to shake the image and thinking of the message he’d left, wondering when he’ll get a response.

  ‘You’ll have to do it,’ Van der Pol says. ‘And it’s a big one, so don’t fuck up. Like Dirk here did.’

  Van der Pol stares at Dirk for a few more moments, then pulls back the secateurs, leaving Dirk’s finger free. He smiles at Dirk, who breathes out. The room mellows.

  Van der Pol takes a moment, then leans across the desk and stabs Dirk in the throat.

  As Kees leaves on his bike the scream is still ringing in his ears.

  12

  ‘Got a charger for this?’

  Jaap shows him the bagged phone he picked up at Heleen’s rental. Max takes a look.

  ‘Ancient. Luckily so’s mine.’

  He rifles through his kit bag, pulls out a lead and hands it over. Jaap hooks it up and plugs it in. The phone buzzes with pleasure as current surges through its innards.

  ‘Also this, can you get it to the mainland lab and DNA’d?’

  ‘Oh man, a pube?’

  He takes it anyway.

  ‘Ready?’ he says after he’s catalogued it.

  They’re in a small room at the back of the building, the air clinically cold and the lighting even worse. On a table lies Heleen’s body, and all three step up to it.

  Max leans forward, gloved fingers exploring Heleen’s head like scuttling albino spiders.

  The spiders find the edge of the tape and start unwrapping it. Max has to lift her head gently to assist them. The tape unspools, a soft noise just audible above the quiet hum of refrigeration, the lowest layer pulling the skin up before finally parting from it. Once it’s all off Jaap steps closer and looks at her face.

  The skin that was under the tape, across her nose and mouth, is wrinkled, like she’s spent too long in water, and it makes her look freakishly old. Or like one of those acid-attack victims who sometimes pop up on the news.

  ‘Nowhere for the perspiration to go,’ Max says, dropping the dangling tape into a waiting evidence bag.

  Then Max goes in for the tube, which is still in Heleen’s mouth. He works it loose, knocking it against one of her teeth on the way out, and holds it up for Jaap to see. It’s about fifteen centimetres long and made of white plastic.

  Max inspects it. ‘Hey, I was right. It’s a one-way valve, hospitals use them all the time.’

  ‘What for?’ Arno asks.

  Jaap wonders if he’s doing it just to prove he’s OK, because frankly his voice sounds a little shaky.

  ‘Anytime you want the patient to breathe into something you can use one of these. Air goes through but won’t come back out, means infections don’t spread.’

  ‘So whoever did this has a medical connection, or can you just buy these things?’ Jaap asks, peering at it, trying to make sense of the whole thing.

  ‘You can get anything on the internet, I’m sure you can buy these too. Wanna try?’

  Max puts down the valve, switches gloves, and then rummages around in his bag. He tosses a small pack right over Heleen’s body. Jaap catches it. It’s an identical-looking valve in a sterile wrapper.

  ‘Go on, it’s a blast,’ Max says.

  Jaap rips it open and inspects it. Then he puts it in his mouth and tries to breathe. Like Max says, breathing out is fine, but in is another matter. If he really tries he can suck a small amount of air in. He stops, his head already spinning.

  ‘So you can get a little bit through, but it’s not enough to keep you alive indefinitely. And if she’d been running, well, that would simply have jacked her need for oxygen up even higher.’

  ‘How long from insertion?’

  ‘You’d have to get someone to run some tests, but I’m guessing it’ll have been hard to survive with one of those strapped across your mouth for more than ten minutes or so.’

  Ten minutes. Not long at all in the greater scheme of things.

  But a hell of a long time to know you’re going to die.

  ‘So what did you want to show me?’ Jaap says, putting the valve down, suddenly not wanting it anywhere near him.

  ‘Yeah, there is something. But first the other stuff. Her wrists had been tied.’ He picks up an arm to show a thin line of bruising. �
�The usual plastic tie, given the diameter of the marks, so no useful bits of fibre to help you.’

  Jaap nods. Whilst it’s important to get these details, in his experience they are often overrated; the main way to find a killer is to find out why, not the minutiae of how. The whole CSI thing? thinks Jaap. Way overrated.

  ‘Also, there’s no sign of recent sexual activity.’

  ‘Anything else before you tell me about whatever got you all worked up?’ Jaap asks, knowing that none of this was really why Max had called him.

  ‘Man, you’re impatient, anyone ever tell you that?’

  ‘It’s been mentioned before. Just get on with it.’

  ‘I noticed this last night, it was hard to tell under torchlight but I had a look just before you got here and …’

  He eases up the victim’s pink T-shirt, the waving kitten bunching up until it’s unrecognizable.

  The whole room sucks in a breath.

  Jaap’s finding he can’t breathe now. He stares at the exposed midriff.

  Lines run across her belly, a criss-cross of old scars and one fresher cut. He tries to count but keeps losing track. There are so many.

  For a moment he feels like reaching out and running his finger over the scars, like it’s a kind of Braille which will reveal what he wants to know.

  ‘I’ve seen this before,’ Max says. ‘Self-mutilation. There are whole forums on the internet for people who do this, they even post photos to egg each other on.’

  Liquid suddenly gushes against a hard surface in the corner of the room.

  ‘I’m not clearing that up,’ Max says, eyes flicking over to where Arno’s bent double, still heaving.

  13

  Even before she gets to the conference room she can feel the buzz.

  Tanya checks her phone one last time. It seems she’s been checking it every minute or so, but there’s still nothing from the hospital. She keeps feeling it vibrate in her pocket but when she pulls it out there’s no call or message. Reluctantly she puts it away again and steps into the room.

  It’s on the fifth floor of a building overlooking a particularly industrial part of the Rotterdam ports. Out the window she can see numerous piers jutting off a central spine, each loaded with an ever-changing array of shipping containers; today for some reason they’re all Maersk. The room has been refurbished in the last six months. Tanya doesn’t know what it was like before, but now it’s all glass, stainless steel and white paint. There’s even wood-effect flooring, only given away by the fact you can see the pattern repeating, and the way it gives slightly underfoot.

  It’s standing room only. Tanya squeezes past several cops she doesn’t know and leans against the wall at the back. There isn’t just excitement in the air, there’s a heavy, woody aftershave, like someone’s bathed in the stuff. It’s so strong Tanya finds her eyes watering.

  At the far end of the room there’s a large map of Rotterdam and she looks at it, tracing her morning route in. Her place on Peppelweg looks out onto Meidoornweide Park, a flat area usually full of people jogging in the mistaken belief that strenuous, monotonous exercise is actually good for them. She’s sat on her balcony a few nights and watched them go round and round. But she’s enjoyed it, being up high on the third floor.

  Not that that’s really high, but back in Amsterdam she lives with Jaap on his houseboat, which has a permanent mooring on one of the city’s prettiest canals. And Amsterdam, at least the centre, is pretty. All those old houses nestled close, the sinuous whale-back bridges and the lime trees dappling the canal waters with shadow. The glories of the Golden Age, museums, small cafés and brick-lined streets … the whole place is almost too chocolate box.

  Rotterdam on the other hand is a city which commissioned a massive bronze statue of Santa Claus holding aloft an enormous butt plug, and what’s more is actually proud to display the thing in public.

  Which, thinks Tanya, tells you all you need to know.

  But she’s got used to it, and has grown slightly fond of the place. Rotterdam has no pretensions, and she admires that.

  A few more stragglers make their apologetic way in, and a man stands up.

  He’s Station Chief Derek Huisman, and he’s big. That’s to say he’s big physically – the Dutch hammer back so much dairy that they’re now officially the Tallest Nation in the World, not bad for a race which only a few generations back were, by all accounts, rather small swamp dwellers – and big in terms of reputation. Back in the day, Huisman was military, serving in Kosovo, and had come back after a lengthy tour to receive the Bronzen Leeuw medal. Unfortunately for him, the day it was presented was the same day that Dutch troops in Srebrenica looked the other way as Ratko Mladić started up his massacre, and for some reason the two news stories got entangled, one tabloid in particular holding him personally responsible. He’d got his lawyers to issue a statement, but then decided that suing for damages wasn’t fitting and retired from the military. Six months later he turned up in Rotterdam, and had been at the helm every since.

  He doesn’t look ex-military to Tanya. For one he has cheekbones a wannabe supermodel would claw someone’s eyes out for, but which on him look odd. His limbs don’t have that military pump either, but then he probably doesn’t see the need to work out these days. He is liked by his staff though, something which Tanya’s own boss, Henk Smit, mostly isn’t.

  ‘OK,’ he says once the room’s excitement has come down to a simmer. ‘Operation Leda.’

  This is the reason Tanya’s down in Rotterdam. When she’d been assigned she’d looked up what Leda meant and was surprised to find she was a Greek who’d been raped by a swan who then turned out to be Zeus. She’d no idea what that was supposed to mean, other than possibly that Greek civilization had pre-empted the Netherlands’ stance on drugs by many hundreds of years. Or it’s simply some sick wish-fulfilment of whoever came up with the story in the first place.

  ‘As most of you know, Borst and his team have been working on this for months and today we’ve got a bit of interesting news. Harry?’

  Harry, who’d been sitting close, takes over.

  Tanya’s been reporting directly to him, which has made her uncomfortable. She has to admit, she finds him attractive. What makes it worse is that she’s pretty sure Harry feels the same. As in, he finds her attractive, not himself. Though there is a touch of arrogance about him, so he probably does find himself just a teeny bit attractive as well.

  Harry pulls out a large photo and pins it up on the wall behind him.

  ‘Most of you know this man,’ he says, eyes roving the room. ‘Van der Pol, probably the biggest piece of shit in the country. For anyone who’s been living in a cave, Van der Pol controls a massive operation which goes from drugs, extortion, right up to the sex trade and more. Basically, if it’s illegal and nasty, he’s in it. He’s also got to be one of the most careful criminals we’ve ever dealt with, we’ve never had anything concrete enough on him to even bring him in for questioning. But all that’s about to change.’

  He does the whole dramatic-pause thing, stretching it out as much as he can.

  ‘Because three hours ago an informant gave us the time and place of a major transaction. If the info is correct then we’re talking the biggest drugs haul in the Netherlands’ history. And it’s all going down tomorrow night. Whatever plans you had are now cancelled. Parents’ evening, your flower-arranging class or your Monday-night bondage club …’ He pauses to make sure he’s got their attention. ‘It’s cancelled.’

  He walks to the map.

  ‘The whole thing is due to take place here—’ He points to a spot north-east of the city, necks crane to see ‘—and we think we’ve got a tactical advantage. So over the next twenty-four hours we’re going to be planning this out in detail. We’ll meet back here first thing tomorrow, but I’ll probably be speaking to many of you individually today as the plans progress. Questions?’

  Tanya’s starting to find the aftershave suffocating. The few questions raise
d are dealt with quickly, and Huisman takes over for a final word.

  He stands tall, sweeps his eyes around, and says: ‘Go get the fucker.’

  It’s a kind of ritual. At first Tanya had thought it silly, but it clearly works as Huisman runs a great station and Smit doesn’t. Smit would never think of having a running joke with anyone.

  ‘And for God’s sake,’ he adds, ‘whoever drowned themselves in aftershave needs to go clean themselves up.’

  Laughter breaks the meeting up, the energy high, everyone excited but trying to appear professional and jaded at the same time. Most of them don’t manage it.

  Tanya knows this will be big. If they pull it off. A few careers could get a major boost. She suspects there’ll be a fair amount of jockeying for position, everyone’s going to want to be on the ground crew tomorrow night.

  But for her the news is exciting for another reason: if this case gets done then she’ll be free to head back to Amsterdam.

  And Jaap.

  She checks her phone, only to see she has a voicemail.

  Her fingers tremble slightly as she hits play and holds the phone to her ear.

  A voice bursts into life.

  ‘Our records indicate you may be due compensation for your accident. Please call us now—’

  14

  Heleen’s dancing on a beach, her arms above her like she’s reaching for the stars, her whole body swaying in a fiercely loose rhythm. There are other people too, all moving, dancing, surrendering to the moment like there’s really nothing else, like the world’s an illusion so the only thing to do is go for pleasure.

  But the camera’s not interested in them, the camera stays on Heleen, a greedy lens which can’t get enough.

  ‘You recognize the beach?’

  Arno nods. After the funeral home they’d stopped off at a store and Arno had dashed in for a bottle of mouthwash. Jaap had watched whilst he’d swigged, swished and spat onto the sandy verge.

  ‘Yeah,’ Arno says, and Jaap can smell the minty alcohol. ‘It’s on the north-western coast, party central.’