Before the Dawn

by Jake Woodhouse

From the booking forms submitted to the cottage rental agency they’d got her surname, Elders, and they’ve spent the last hour or so digging furiously.

  Heleen Elders was twenty-three when she died, and was on holiday from her job as a check-out girl at the Albert Heijn supermarket chain. On the face of it she had no connection to either of the previous two victims. She rented a small flat in Hilversum, where she lived alone. Both her parents had died when she was fourteen in a senseless car accident. None of this told them much; they were still trying to find a next of kin, but it was her Facebook account which opened things up a bit. She’d posted the video there herself yesterday morning, with no comments, just a smiley.

  ‘You know what the question is, right?’

  ‘Who filmed her. I’ll get on it.’

  Jaap plays the video again. There’s no sound for some reason, and it’s weird seeing people dance without the music. But maybe that’s better, allows him to concentrate, search for any hint that the girl enjoying herself, enjoying the freedom of movement, of being outdoors with people engaged in the same activity as her, also enjoyed closing the bedroom door on the world and slicing open the skin on her belly with a sharp knife.

  Max had said he’d seen such things before, and had explained the possible routes to it. One is deep-set stress. The world’s a scary place, constantly changing, events outside of your control continually rushing at you, throwing you off balance, taking away your power. The only way to reclaim it is to be able to grab back some of that control, and by taking a blade and parting your own flesh, you regain some semblance of being the one in charge.

  Why? Because you decide when it happens, and when it stops.

  In this case, Max had said, the pain is incidental, though through repetition you can become classically conditioned so that the feeling of intense pain is linked with the relief of gaining back control; pretty soon you crave not just the sense of power, but the sting of the knife as well.

  The second route could be numbness, a lack of feeling which in extreme cases gets classed as anhedonia. For the person who doesn’t feel much, the pain can be a welcome reminder that you are, in fact, alive.

  Jaap had asked Max how he knew so much. Max had blustered a bit and muttered something about his medical training. Jaap left it at that.

  She doesn’t look like she’s the anhedonia type, at least from the video. There’s a grace and intensity to her movements which, to his eyes, make it look like she’s feeling the pleasure of dance. He presses pause and stares at the smiley, the last trace that she left of herself on social media, her parting shot to the world.

  Cyberspace is filled with the traces of dead people, he realizes. The internet is a vast network of the living and the dead. For some reason he finds the thought makes him uneasy.

  He switches view, going through Heleen’s friends, which on a quick estimate must run well into the hundreds. A small amount nowadays, but not really a sign that she was some kind of loner who stayed at home with sharp objects for company.

  But he’s not naive enough to think people don’t hide things.

  Francesco Kamp, for example.

  On the face of it he was just a normal guy going about his business. He had a wife, they were married six years ago in a ceremony in a church in Leiden and last year she gave birth to a baby boy. The birth had been difficult, his wife had died and the baby had spent the first eight weeks in an incubator, cut off from the world while the doctors waited to see if the complex systems of life would win through. Kamp had taken time off his work as a train driver, made the hospital his home, until it was clear their baby would be fine.

  So maybe he wasn’t just a regular guy, maybe losing his wife had reconfigured something, or maybe unleashed a latent sickness within.

  Jaap shakes his head at the unknowability of others.

  He’s just about to power the computer off when Heleen’s phone buzzes softly on his desk, Max’s charger having done its job.

  Jaap picks it up, takes a brief run through what’s there. All the usual apps, emails, several games. Then, swiping onto the third screen, he notices the WhatsApp icon showing an unread message. He opens it up, noting the time as yesterday morning. His eyes fall on the text of the message itself, held in a cartoon speech bubble:

  I CAN’T W8 2 CUT U

  15

  It’s like some Zen koan, Jaap thinks.

  If you’re asking someone else to do it, is it still self-mutilation?

  He’s in the Vlieland station car park, sitting on a low concrete wall, throwing stones at a crushed Coke can. So far he’s not hit it once.

  Seeing the message on WhatsApp had thrown him an unexpected line of enquiry, one which he’d turned over to Roemers, head of the Digital Crimes Unit in Amsterdam. Roemers, famous for his bad taste in music, had a redeeming feature, an almost supernatural understanding of, and skill with, technology. Jaap hopes that understanding and skill will bring him a name.

  The name of whoever likes cutting young women’s flesh.

  A patrol car turns into the car park. For a moment Jaap’s afraid it’s going to hit the can and deprive him of his target. But the driver, a uniform he’s not been introduced to, manages to avoid it.

  Jaap throws another stone; it bounces just to the left of the can, missing by a centimetre or so.

  Damn.

  Jaap’s somehow convinced himself that if he does manage to hit it everything will work out. He’s on his last stone, more a bit of grit really. He tries again. This time he’s out by more like ten centimetres.

  Fuck it, he thinks.

  He bends forward, gathers a load more stones. The sniper approach didn’t work, so now he’s going for the sawn-off strategy.

  ‘Your guy just called.’

  Jaap turns to see Arno walking towards him.

  ‘What he get?’

  ‘A name, and an address.’

  ‘Kamp?’

  ‘No. A Daan Brouwer. He owns a house on the island.’

  Jaap throws the full handful.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ he says once the stones have settled. ‘Did you see that?’

  ‘Weird, it’s like it’s got a force field around it or something.’

  Jaap shakes his head. ‘All right, let’s go.’

  A few minutes later Arno’s proving men can multitask, flooring it down the east-coast road and filling Jaap in on Daan Brouwer. Though there’s not much to tell.

  ‘Born 1971, moved here about ten years ago according to the land registry, and nobody I’ve asked about him knows much. Keeps himself to himself apparently.’

  ‘So you’re saying, mid-forties male, lives by himself?’

  ‘Looks that way. Classic weirdo material if you ask me.’

  The road dives into an oak wood, serrated leaves like a jumbled-up jigsaw you could never hope to finish.

  Arno reaches out and clicks the radio on.

  ‘Figured I’d see what the press are up to,’ he says.

  It’s a local station, broadcasting out of a building just north of the harbour in Oost-Vlieland. Guitars twang under a male voice which sounds like impending throat cancer. When the song ends the DJ switches up and spins on an English punk, singing about a girl called Amy who worked in a bar in Exeter.

  ‘Love this song.’

  Jaap doesn’t know what it is, but he’s finding being in different surroundings is changing his perception of things. The song wouldn’t normally even feature on his radar, but out here on the island, he sort of agrees with Arno.

  The song finishes and the news comes on. Arno cranks it up and they both listen to the reporter giving a brief overview of Heleen’s death.

  When it’s finished Jaap clicks the radio off.

  ‘They’ve not got any real details,’ Arno says. ‘They don’t seem to have linked it with the other killings.’

  ‘Won’t be long now,’ Jaap says. ‘Someone always leaks.’

  They leave the trees behind them and a few minutes later they reach the h
ouse.

  ‘So, what’s the plan?’ Arno asks as he parks.

  16

  The plan.

  Like all the best is simple: walk in and talk to him.

  But it’s foiled by one basic fact. Daan Brouwer’s not home. Or if he is he’s seen them coming and isn’t answering. Arno’s fingering the brass nipple but it’s not yielding much in the way of door-opening action.

  Arno relaxes his finger, looks round.

  ‘Break it down?’ he asks.

  ‘Sure,’ Jaap says. ‘But let’s see if it’s open first.’ He tosses over a pair of gloves he’d taken from Max earlier.

  Arno pulls them on and tries the door handle. It turns.

  ‘Experience, huh?’

  ‘I had a colleague once, good cop but he had some problems, one of which was he loved to smash things. He’d never check a door, he’d just knock it down. Got to the point that if he was assigned to a case, whoever was in charge budgeted some extra for breakages.’

  ‘Did he ever stop?’

  Jaap thinks of Kees. He usually tries his best not to, a whole world of sadness there he doesn’t quite understand.

  ‘Last I heard he was in prison.’

  ‘For knocking doors down?’

  ‘No,’ Jaap says as he steps through the door and into the house. ‘Well, maybe. Just not the right ones.’

  They check the house, moving from room to room, but it’s clear Brouwer’s not home. As they start going over the place several more things becoming apparent: Brouwer lives alone, likes boats – he has at least ten painstakingly built models, impressive in their detail, complicated rigging like spiderswebs – and doesn’t go in much for cleaning; the place is full of sand, blown in from the front door, which he must leave open on hot days.

  In the kitchen, a large room to the back of the property, Jaap pokes around, finding in the sink a bowl, the bottom smeared with a milky residue. Dotted round the rim are what appear to be bloated flies, though when he gets closer he can see they’re individual grains of a chocolate-flavoured rice cereal.

  A glass stands by the sink. Jaap probes the inside with a gloved finger. The orange juice residue is tacky, not fresh.

  None of which goes any way to answering the questions they’ve come to have answered.

  But as they step into the room tucked in the eaves on the first floor, Jaap’s hopeful that they might start getting somewhere. There’s a desk, dark walnut top, with a wireless track-pad and keyboard, and a real wireless. A mug with the red and white livery of Ajax football club sits next to it. Above the desk, attached to the wall and angled into a broken curve, are three screens.

  Arno finds the tower under the desk and presses a button. The screens load fast, the computer way more powerful than anything Jaap gets to use at the station, and Arno starts nosing around, clicking through folders, delving deeper and deeper into the beast.

  Jaap walks to the west-facing window. From this elevation he can see past the grasslands to the beach and sea beyond. Heleen’s body was found not far from here. He reckons about fifteen on a bike. Twenty tops.

  ‘He’s a trader,’ Arno says. ‘That’s why he doesn’t appear to have a job. Just sits here and plays the markets.’

  Jaap walks over, peers at the screens, which now show some kind of trading platform but with an error message saying NO FEED.

  ‘Does he have WhatsApp?’

  ‘Can’t tell. Internet’s not working, that’s why I’m getting this No Feed bollocks,’ Arno says. ‘The router’s on, but the computer just isn’t picking it up. I kept getting the same thing at home, drove me crazy.’

  ‘How did you fix it?’

  ‘Honestly? I didn’t. Kim did.’

  ‘Get her on the phone,’ Jaap says.

  Arno checks the time. ‘Might just catch her before she goes out.’

  He gets Kim on the line and she starts talking him through whatever hoops he’s going to have to jump through just to make a bit of technology, which has been designed to make people’s lives easier, work.

  Jaap leaves him to it. He wanders through the house, taking another look at the boats, realizing that Brouwer probably made them himself. One in particular catches his eyes, different from the rest, with three masts and red sails. The wood has been varnished to look old, and there is no dust on deck. Not a single speck.

  Back in the kitchen he starts going through the drawers, thinking about Heleen, about the message she’d received. Skin on his arm goose pimples up.

  He’s just closing the third drawer down when he stops and pulls it open again. Right at the back, hidden under a bunch of wooden spoons stained with use, is a handle made of dull metal, two bits of wood riveted on each side. He pulls his phone out, snaps photos from several angles.

  Because he knows what he’s just found.

  He takes it out carefully. It’s an old-fashioned cut-throat, the type you see in films when a director wants to add a touch of cheap tension, the blade scraping up a man’s neck, clearing off a frosting of white shaving foam. Will it, won’t it?

  Jaap opens it up, the action heavy but smooth, like it’s been used regularly. He inspects the metal, holding it up into a jet of sunlight he finds near the window, tilting the blade back and forth so it winks on and off.

  It’s clean to the eye, no blood residue.

  Which doesn’t mean much.

  The sheer amount of cuts on Heleen’s stomach had been staggering, and had been done over a period of time. The knife would have been cleaned off properly after each session. He bags it up, places it on the kitchen table, and puts a call into Stuppor, telling him to put out an alert to the ferry company.

  It’s a long shot; Brouwer could have been gone for hours, right after breakfast, and there’d probably been three or four ferries since then, but Jaap’s not going to make the same mistakes Stuppor has.

  ‘Got it,’ calls Arno from upstairs just as he hangs up.

  Jaap’s heart is racing when he reaches the top of the stairs and steps into the room.

  They open WhatsApp.

  Sure enough, the message is there.

  Jaap leans forward, puts his hands on the desk, moving the mug out of the way.

  It’s warm.

  Warmer than ambient.

  He reaches out and clicks on the radio. The name of a station scrolls across a small screen and a pounding beat fills the room.

  ‘Same one?’ Jaap points to the station name.

  ‘The only one,’ Arno says.

  Jaap swears. Brouwer was at his desk listening to the radio, and heard the same newsflash they had.

  They’ve missed him by a matter of minutes.

  17

  ‘So how long are you going to be there?’

  Tanya’s on the phone, and her retinas are burning up.

  Jaap called her whilst she was in the office, and, not wanting to have a conversation with a bunch of cops eavesdropping, she sought some privacy outside.

  Where the sun is, hence the retinal damage.

  ‘Not sure,’ Jaap replies. ‘Won’t be that long if the station chief here has anything to do with it.’

  ‘Doesn’t like you?’

  ‘Understatement, Station Chief Stuppor’s a solid gold—’

  ‘Stuppor? Wieland Stuppor?’

  ‘Uh … yeah. You know him?’

  ‘He was my boss at Leeuwarden. He’s … well, you obviously met him. I think he had a thing for me but didn’t know how to show it. You remember that first case we worked on together when he came down and tried to take me back up as he hadn’t given me permission?’

  ‘He’s the one you cuffed and left in the snow?’

  Tanya thinks back to that. Not her finest hour. But it had saved lives.

  ‘The very same. Send him my love.’

  ‘I’ll drop it into the conversation later. It’ll be fun.’

  Hearing that name again reminds her of her years spent up north, when she was trying to make inspector. Those years are like a dream to her
now, she was someone else back then, lost and scared. Scarred too.

  Because of what Ruud Staal had done to her.

  But she doesn’t want to think of the past now; she wants to think of the future.

  A pang in her stomach reminds her she’s still not heard back from the hospital.

  And that she’s not told Jaap about her visit earlier this morning.

  ‘You still there?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m here,’ she says.

  ‘I think we should come up to the islands sometime, once the baby’s born and settled in.’

  ‘I’d like that,’ she says, trying not to think of the hospital. ‘Yeah, let’s do that. Listen, I …’ she says before something chokes her voice off.

  Just tell him, she says to herself.

  ‘Yeah?’

  Do it. Do it.

  ‘Nothing, just I miss you.’

  ‘Miss you too.’

  I should have told him, she thinks a few minutes later as she’s walking away from the police building.

  Her phone buzzes and she checks the screen, thinking it’s Jaap calling her back. Like he’d been able to tell there was something wrong and he’s calling to find out what.

  But it’s Harry Borst.

  ‘Turn round,’ Harry says.

  Tanya turns.

  ‘Look up.’

  She looks up the police building, instinctively going to where Harry’s office is on the third floor.

  ‘Higher.’

  Then she sees him, standing right on the edge of the roof.

  ‘What’s up?’ she asks when she’s made it up there.

  The roof’s flat, and the view out over the harbour is impressive, if not exactly beautiful. She can just see the top of the butt plug, glinting merrily in the sun.

  ‘Real operation’s on tonight, and I need you in the team.’

  Tanya eyes him up. ‘So all that stuff about tomorrow?’

  ‘Bit of a diversion,’ he says. Something must have flown into his throat as he coughs a little.

  ‘You’ve got a leak,’ Tanya says.

  ‘Maybe,’ he shrugs. ‘Maybe not. Maybe fuck yourself.’

  ‘Good film,’ Tanya says. ‘I prefer the two it was based on though.’