‘Harry, I’m with someone.’
‘Hey, just a drink, nothing serious.’
He’s hiding it well, but she can tell he’s feeling the burn.
‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘Just a drink. That’d be good.’
Harry nods, looks around for something to distract from the moment. ‘Better get back,’ he says. ‘Transport will be arriving soon.’
‘Harry?’
He turns to look at her. ‘What is it?’
‘I’m waiting for a really important call, and I was wondering if I could just check my phone …?’
He’s still all of a sudden, eyes oriental. ‘I can’t make any exceptions, everyone will be asking if I let you.’
‘I know, it’s just …’ she says, a wave of fear rushing up from nowhere. She’s suddenly worried she’s about to cry.
Harry clearly is as well. He takes her by the elbow, walking her a few steps. ‘OK, what’s going on. I’m sorry if the drink thing—’
Before she can stop herself she finds she’s telling him about the scan, and how she’s waiting for a callback.
‘Whoa,’ he says when she’s finished. ‘If you’re pregnant there’s no way I can let you do the operation tonight. It’s way too dangerous. You should have told me before. It’s too late to get someone else in now.’
She feels miserable, like she’s really screwing things up. Everything she does, every decision she makes is a bad one. The thought that it all goes back to Staal shudders through her. Like what he’d done to her had somehow made her less able to cope, less herself.
He stole from me, she suddenly realizes. He stole something from me and I don’t know how to get it back.
She’s about to tell him to forget it, forget it all, ready to just walk away, when he speaks again.
‘OK,’ he says, giving her arm a quick squeeze, ‘here’s what we’re going to do.’
21
As far as trading ports go, Oost-Vlieland had once been big time. Back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it was part of the Hanseatic League, a confederation of merchant guilds who controlled trade in the Baltic and beyond. But since then its fortunes had been more mixed, the port eventually having to be bought out by the government’s Waterways and Public Works Department when the locals were struggling to keep their island from sinking into the sea. With the new ownership, sea defences were built and managed, and the island was able to look for new opportunities. They found one; the trade which now keeps the island afloat is tourists who own boats and need somewhere to dock them.
The marina is to the north, a forest of masts just visible, but when the ferry terminal was built they needed better access to open water. This is where Jaap is now, the town sloping gently up away behind him, the ferry terminal – basically a stretch of concrete with a booking office – below.
A deep horn rumbles out over the water; he feels the waves of it in his chest. He looks up to see the ferry he’s been waiting for heading towards the island.
Everything’s in place, all available officers – for which read five, including Jaap and Arno – are deployed in plain clothes round the ferry terminal, one of them actually in with the person selling tickets. Jaap’s across the road, sitting on a bench, trying not to look like a cop.
‘Caught anyone then let them go again?’ Smit asks when Jaap answers his phone.
‘Not quite,’ he replies. For a moment he wonders why it is he always seems to be working for assholes.
The phrase ‘problem with authority’ floats into his head.
He brushes it aside.
Henk Smit got to his exalted position by battling his way up from patrol and taking charge of a small crime-riddled district outside Rotterdam. The results he’d got in a few short years – a near eighteen per cent reduction in crime – meant he came to the attention of people higher up the chain. He was duly promoted to Amsterdam, getting his own station at the very early age of thirty-eight, a fact that endeared him to pretty much none of the people who had the pleasure of working for him. Jaap was one of those people, but they’d found a way to work together. After all, Smit likes good clearance rates, and Jaap’s are consistently high.
‘So,’ Smit asks, ‘putting aside yesterday, are the deaths linked?’
Jaap thinks of the cuts again. There’s something about it all, something disturbing beyond the usual. But also out of character with the two previous deaths.
‘I thought so at first. Tox test confirmed scopolamine in the victim’s blood, and she died like the other two by suffocation.’
‘Could it have been Kamp? Was there time for him to get over there and back?’
‘The timing works out, the surveillance crew lost him for long enough that he could have done, but I don’t know if he did. You remember when I showed him the photo of Dafne, and he admitted to that, but then denied killing Nadine?’
‘Not really—’
‘He did, and I’m starting to believe him.’
Smit ruminates. At least that’s what Jaap assumes his silence means.
’Multiple killers running around,’ Smit says eventually, ‘using the same basic method? Means they’ve gotta be in touch somehow, any evidence of that?’
Jaap fills him in on what he got from Roemers, and his current situation.
‘All right,’ Smit says, digesting it all. ‘Keep me updated. And Inspector Rykel?’
Somehow Jaap knows what’s coming.
‘Yeah?’
‘If you get the guy,’ Smit pauses for effect, ‘make sure you cuff him right.’
It’s childish, but Jaap gives his phone the finger. Arno, who’d walked up to the local supermarket to get a drink, reappears before he’s finished.
‘Having fun?’
‘Yeah,’ Jaap says. ‘Yeah, I am.’
The ferry’s made it into the harbour without crushing any smaller vessels, and is now inching in sideways towards the dock. A small blonde girl, dressed in shorts and bright orange T-shirt with the same waving kitten as Heleen’s, stares at him, a frown pulling her face down.
Jaap wonders what life has in store for her.
Then decides it’s best not thinking about.
‘Anything?’
Jaap’s been keeping an eye on the queue which has been forming outside the ticket office on the quay. They’d found a few photos of Brouwer on his computer – nothing dodgy – so know what he looks like: bald as an eel and a sharp face like, well, an eel.
‘Not so far.’
The ferry terminal is a one-storey building which to describe as functional would be to overstate its beauty. The queue outside is twenty strong now, and the flow of passengers disembarking is starting to dry up.
‘I’m not seeing him,’ Arno says.
Neither’s Jaap.
They watch as the last of the queue get on, an old couple wearing identical white panamas, shoulders hunched, steps shuffling but determined. Jaap finds he’s drumming his foot. If Brouwer’s not here then he’s going to have to call in a full search team to go over the island. Which isn’t going to happen by tonight. His phone goes off, he sees it’s Superintendent Laura Vetter back in Amsterdam. He leaves it.
‘Fuck, I thought he’d be here.’
He looks north, the masts in the main harbour suddenly sparking something in his head.
‘If he owned a boat himself—’ He’s thinking back to a moment of unease he’d had whilst updating Stuppor earlier ‘—it’d be moored there, right?’
He points just as another fighter jet – or maybe the same one which buzzed him yesterday – glints out to sea.
Arno nods. ‘Only place on the island.’
‘Any way to find out if he does?’
‘Harbourmaster has the logs, should be able to tell us.’
Jaap looks back at the ferry, a sailor now unleashing the moorings, the queue all aboard. Brouwer’s not coming. He suddenly remembers the model boats at Brouwer’s house.
‘Fucking idiot.’
‘What di
d I do?’
‘Not you,’ Jaap says. He should have thought of this earlier, shouldn’t have focused just on the ferry. He suddenly feels this case it getting to him, forcing him to make bad decisions. ‘Me.’
22
The inside of the van is cramped and hot.
Tanya can feel the heat forming a layer between her skin and her clothes. She’s in jeans and has already stripped down to just a T-shirt. She has no more moves left. Though the guy next to her probably wouldn’t complain; she’s found that, in general, men never tire of tits. The internet, she’s pretty sure, is founded on that very principle.
In front of her is a whole bank of monitors, the computers running them presumably only adding to the heat, and beside her the surveillance expert whose name she’s been told but has instantly forgotten.
Harry adapted the plan when he’d heard her story, dumping her in the surveillance van out of harm’s way. She wishes she’d not said anything now. Especially as it hasn’t even gained her access to her phone.
Voices crackle in her earpiece and she adjusts the frequency, twisting the dial till they come into focus. The building complex is just that, complex, and so they’re having a few signalling issues.
Which is bad, because if the informant is right, the whole deal is due to go down any minute now. An advance crew inserted cameras at key locations, though given the size of the place they’d not been able to get eyes on everything. They had managed to hack into the site’s own CCTV though, so of the twenty screens in front of her, seventeen are showing live feeds.
‘Confirm positions,’ says Harry’s voice in her ear.
One by one the teams sign in with their codes.
‘Listen to them,’ the man next to her says. ‘It’s like they’re all acting in a movie or something.’
Tanya hears the excitement in their voices too, some hiding it better than others. But why not? So much of a cop’s life was mundane, and she feels the anticipation herself, even if she’d prefer to be out there, taking part.
For a long moment the question of what she’s going to do when the baby is born looms in her head, demanding answers. Will she have to give up being an inspector? Will she stay at home whilst Jaap goes out to work?
‘Mind you—’ the man next to her saves her from the questions which are starting to take on a menacing tone ‘—I’ve heard about Van der Pol. Some of the shit he’s rumoured to be into …’ He shakes his head. ‘There’s one rumour that used to do the rounds, said he was into having people killed, and filmed it happening.’
‘Urban myth,’ Tanya says. ‘The whole snuff thing.’
‘You reckon?’
Tanya shrugs. Now that she thinks about it she’s not so sure. What her foster father had done to her hadn’t been so far off. In terms of suffering it was probably more; she was still living with it. She thinks back to the last time she saw him, the light disappearing from his eyes as he died.
‘Nine,’ he says, letting Tanya back into the present.
She doesn’t want to relive that night. Not now, not ever.
But the images stab at her just the same: his body lying, blood leaking from his head where it’d hit the table corner as he fell, the expanding moment when she saw that it was final, that he wasn’t coming back.
‘You OK?’
‘Sure, I was just thinking of something,’ Tanya says, alarmed that she’d clearly zoned out long enough for him to notice.
She fights it off and checks screen nine, and sure enough a small convoy of vehicles, two cars and at least eight bikes, are entering the compound.
‘Subtle, huh?’ the man says.
He’s right, thinks Tanya. It is like something out of a movie. It never ceases to amaze her just how many criminals go out of their way to look like criminals. She’s seen this scene countless times before, and knows what’s going to happen; the convoy will pull up, suited dark-glassed men will get out of the cars and spread out, before a smaller man, usually in more casual clothing, emerges.
They follow the progress from screen to screen, the convoy stopping in a small square between four buildings.
Tanya sees with disappointment that it’s one of the spaces the crew had not managed to get a camera in. Harry had noted this and put the man with the moustache on the roof. He’d complained a bit. But when he got there and saw the roof was pitched and that he’d have to be hanging off the spine, he’d complained some more.
Now it looks like it’s going to pay off.
‘I’ve got a visual,’ he whispers through the comms.
‘Good,’ Harry replies. ‘Just hang in there.’
Because to do a deal you need two parties, and so far only one’s come to the table.
Two minutes later they get some movement, this time three SUVs, all approaching with their lights off.
‘The eagle has landed,’ says the man next to Tanya.
‘Are you kidding?’ Harry comes back, clearly annoyed.
‘Sorry, couldn’t resist. They’re here, roof guy should be able to see three SUVs right about … now.’
‘Got them.’
‘Exit teams in position, everyone else standby,’ Harry says.
Now it’s a waiting game. Moustache on the roof has to give them the signal that goods have exchanged hands, or at the very least that he has a visual on the goods themselves. Moments pass.
‘We pull this off then we’re going to be moving up,’ whispers the surveillance guy.
Suddenly noise bursts through their earpieces, a kind of leathery scrabbling, like someone stroking a microphone. Two seconds later there’s the unmistakable pop pop pop of gunfire.
‘Hold positions,’ yells Harry.
Tanya watches the screen closest. Muzzle flashes light up walls, creating mad shadows. She can see a biker using his Harley as cover, popping up to release a hail of bullets then ducking back down again.
An SUV skids round the corner, back into full view of the screen, two more following close behind.
‘Exit teams, you’re up!’ Harry shouts.
The third SUV breaks away from the others, skidding round a tight corner into a narrow alley between two buildings. It stops, the back doors fly open, and a figure jumps out.
He starts running hard.
Tanya watches him, calculating that soon he’ll be passing just one building away from the van. She should try and alert someone, but the gunfire and noise of engines and shouting means their comms system isn’t holding up too well.
He’s going to be passing in less than a minute.
If she’s going to do something she needs to do it now.
She’s frozen in place, at war with herself.
Then she rips the earpiece out, grabs her gun, and jumps out the back of the van.
The movement feels good, a release, and she makes it round the edge of the building just in time to see she was right, the figure with a rucksack rushes past, no more then twenty metres ahead of her.
She’s already going flat out.
But she pushes herself harder.
A thought flashes through her mind, the baby being starved of oxygen.
She’s now at the corner the figure ducked round moments before. She goes round it and immediately sees he has a problem. He’s reached the perimeter of the complex, a chain-link fence reaching up to the stars, topped by a curl of razor wire picked out by a security light.
‘Police!’ she yells, slowing down, pulling her weapon up into position.
The figure freezes for a second, not looking back, then dives off to his left, doubled over and running like an ape, swinging one arm up to fire blind behind him.
She slams into the wall next to her, giving her some cover, then looses off a single shot as he’s making it to a row of vertical columns, made up of chaotically stacked tyres.
From the scream she knows she’s hit him.
Her breathing’s ratcheting through her chest now, and she takes a second to try and slow it down. She listens out for movement, but th
e ringing in her ears from the shots means she can’t rely on audio.
One last breath and she sprints forward, swinging round the first column of tyres, gun out ahead of her.
The security light is dazzling and her hand shoots up to protect her eyes.
As they adjust she can just make out the figure, moving to the right. For one fraction of a millisecond she thinks she catches a glimpse of his face.
It’s like a bullet’s hit her full in the chest.
They lock eyes, he gestures to the backpack which she now sees he’s ditched, and he disappears, limping round the corner of the next building.
Once the crew has been rounded up, two casualties being attended to by the ambulance on standby in the local village, Harry asks to see her in the van.
She clambers in, and he tells her to pull the doors closed.
His face is hard, anger tightening muscles under his skin, and she wonders how she was ever attracted to him.
‘You sure you’re OK?’ he asks without much concern in his voice. At least, not to Tanya’s ear.
She nods and Harry stares at her for a few moments, just long enough for her to feel uncomfortable, then turns to the bank of screens.
He stabs a few keys and points to a screen which has started playing.
They watch in silence, and when it’s done he hits pause and turns back to her. ‘As I’ve been alerted to this by your colleague it will have be admitted into evidence. I can’t just get rid of it.’
Evidence? thinks Tanya. What? ‘I’m not sure I—’
‘The trouble is, it looks bad. He was limping, so you could have caught him easily. Or taken another shot – he had fired at you so that would have been justified. But you let him go.’
‘But I got the backpack, and you got the rest of the crew. Why’s he so important?’
Harry reaches down beside him and pulls up the backpack itself. He unzips it, and empties the contents on the narrow desk below the screens.
Small furry things tumble out, spilling onto the surface and beyond.
He picks one up and shows it to her. Then he squeezes it and the rat squeaks.
‘They’re stuffed, right?’ she asks.
Before the Dawn Page 10