Before the Dawn

by Jake Woodhouse

  He has a knife in his hand, Tanya doesn’t see where he got that from, and he turns the thing over, slitting its furry belly. He pulls out foam and the squeaker mechanism, and nothing else.

  ‘No,’ he says, ‘they’re not.’

  Tanya stares at the toy rat, one of its whiskers bent at an odd angle, the screens next to it distorted in its black beaded eyes.

  She thinks about the face she saw.

  Was it really him? she thinks. Could it be?

  It was dark and there was a security light shining right in her eyes so she couldn’t see that clearly.

  Harry picks up the rats and starts stuffing them back into the backpack and she suddenly realizes why the whole thing had seemed like an episode on a TV crime drama – it had been a set-up, a show put on just for them.

  Orchestrated to meet their expectations.

  Basically, to fuck with them.

  Harry speaks again. ‘So, you wanna tell me what’s really going on?’

  23

  Where is it?’ Jaap asks. He’s scanning the skies, ears primed for the thundery hum of the SAR chopper which is supposed to be heading his way.

  Stuppor’s co-operation factor went up by a multiple of ten once he realized that Jaap needed to get off his island. He checks his phone again.

  ‘Five minutes out.’

  The run from the ferry terminal turned out to be a waste of time because the harbourmaster was able to confirm that a boat, a forty-two-footer called Vrijheid, ‘Freedom’, registered to Daan Brouwer, sailed half an hour before.

  The light’s failing fast. Jaap needs to be in the air. Now.

  He’d expected the police to have their own launch, but Stuppor had explained that cutbacks meant they shared with the coastguard, and it was currently out, a fishing vessel had sent out a distress call from the North Sea. Jaap dialled the mainland, and two boats had already been launched, but they’re still, according to the dispatcher, at least half an hour away.

  Jaap’s also sent out an alert to all ports within a two-hour radius, but he doesn’t want to wait. And he’ll still need the chopper, because if Brouwer does put in somewhere and gets arrested by a local patrol then he wants to be there in as short a time as possible.

  Arno, who Jaap had sent to the local supermarket, turns up just as the chopper appears on the horizon.

  As it’s coming down Arno hands Jaap a bag. Jaap thanks him, delves inside and hands the single-wrapped syrupwaffel to Stuppor, who takes it suspiciously.

  ‘Fuck’s this?’ he shouts, the chopper just touching down, the sound beating at their ears.

  ‘A present,’ Jaap yells back. ‘From my partner. Inspector Tanya Vandermark. I believe you know each other?’

  Credit cards can buy you stuff, but the look on Stuppor’s face? Priceless.

  And from the look on Arno’s, he’s enjoying it as much as Jaap.

  As the chopper springs up into the air the sun seems to slide lower, making the sea a cauldron of gold. The pilot corkscrews, giving them three-sixty views, but neither manages to spot anything resembling the Vrijheid.

  Half an hour into it, the pilot gets a call. Jaap’s eyes are strained; he’s been scanning the water, hardly noticing the change from golden down to a much darker hue as the sun slips away. And still no boat. They’d headed north, hugging the coast of the next island in the chain, Terschelling. Three separate boats had spiked Jaap’s heart rate, but each time, on closer inspection, it was clear none of them were the Vrijheid.

  ‘For you,’ the pilot says, flipping a switch. ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Inspector Rykel,’ a new voice says. ‘This is Chief Inspector De Zoet of the Terschelling force. I hear you’re airborne.’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Jaap, suddenly spotting another vessel, way off to the right, only just visible in the failing light. He nudges the pilot and points. The chopper veers, then straightens up. ‘We’ve just spotted a possible boat, heading towards it now.’

  ‘Had a call from the harbourmaster here on Terschelling, he’s been in radio contact with a man piloting the Vrijheid. Apparently he wants to dock. What do you want us to do?’

  Jaap nods to the pilot who swings the helicopter round.

  ‘Just sit tight,’ Jaap says. ‘I’m coming.’

  24

  Kees is worried about dogs. Tracking dogs. And he knows he’s not going to get any forewarning as they don’t bay like the hounds chasing foxes. The dogs the police use are a different breed, Malinois, and they work silently like sharks in the night. Sniffing out spilt blood.

  Of which there’s plenty around. All of it Kees’.

  He’s pulling a strip off his T-shirt and wrapping it round his leg, tying it as tight as he can, trying to stop the flow. He’s in a ditch, the sides wet, the bottom even wetter.

  There’s no pain, though. Which is odd.

  The bullet seems to have gone straight through his calf. He could probably stick his finger through the hole if he felt so inclined. But, strangely enough, he doesn’t.

  He finishes off the knot, checks to see how he’s doing, if anything else needs any work. It’s hard in the dark, though the moon is giving him a bit of help.

  Looks OK, he thinks.

  He lies his head back, wondering what’s going to happen. The police will be trying to find him for sure. If he’s caught then he’ll direct them to Smit, and this whole nightmare will be over. But seeing as he’d shot one of their own then he was pretty much fair game. Meaning they’d probably shoot first, and not even bother to ask any questions after.

  And to top it all off, the cop he fired on wasn’t just any cop.

  When he’d seen who it was he’d thought he’d been hallucinating. It was only a glimpse, her hand held up to block the light shining right at her, covering a part of her face. And he was running on adrenaline.

  Plus, if he was honest, he’d not been feeling that stable since he’d watched Bart’s head explode into a thousand tiny fragments of gore. Or the secateurs plunge into Dirk’s neck.

  But still, he was sure it had been her.

  He shifts a little, a stone or something hard digging into his hip. A rush of emotions swirl up from nowhere and for a moment he wonders if he isn’t just going to vaporize from it all, from the conflict, from the sheer fucking irony of what’s going on.

  A bullet has ripped through his calf, shot by the woman he loves, the woman he’d gone to prison for.

  He thinks about the last time he’d seen her, walking off into a field of tulips at the crack of dawn, her hand bandaged from the gunshot she’d sustained. That night, within the space of a few short hours, Kees had discovered Jaap’s daughter had died, and had then found Tanya at her foster father’s house.

  When he got there it was obvious the foster father was no longer alive.

  This was the same foster father who, she’d confessed to him two days previously as they’d sat on a skate ramp smoking dope, had abused her over and over.

  The law didn’t make provision for private justice, they as cops both knew that, so Kees had tidied up the scene as best he could and got her the hell out of there. But no matter what he did, in the end she would be caught.

  Then Smit had turned up with his offer. Which wasn’t really an offer at all.

  Kees had agreed, he figured with his disease she had a life and he didn’t, so he took the fall.

  And thinking of Smit, something which has been bothering him, an annoying tingle at the back of his mind, grows more intense until it morphs into a question – he’d seen Smit earlier so why hadn’t he warned Kees about the raid? What the fuck was he playing at?

  An engine noise brings him back to the ditch. He turns his head to watch the double beams cutting through the darkness, heading his way. He puts a hand up, his head just above the ditch’s lip, but they’re dazzling. He can’t tell if it’s a cop car or not.

  Earlier he’d made a call, giving his exact GPS coordinates as displayed on his phone, so it had to be them, not the cops.

&nb
sp; A third possibility strikes him.

  Maybe it’s Tanya, he thinks. Maybe she’s come to get me, but not as a cop.

  There’d been times – both in prison and since he’d got out – when he’d wondered if he’d done the right thing taking the fall for her. He didn’t even know if she knew he had, until he’d finally asked Smit several months ago. At first Smit refused to answer, but then he’d given in. No, he said. She didn’t know what sacrifice he’d made for her.

  And with that simple answer Smit had blown open a fantasy which Kees knew was stupid but which had nevertheless sustained him through some tough times. Because it turned out Tanya wasn’t waking up every morning thanking Kees silently, awed at his amazing sacrifice.

  A car door opens and Kees holds his breath.

  He doesn’t know if he wants it to be someone from Van der Pol’s gang, or the cops, or Tanya.

  ‘What, you want me to carry you?’ says a voice from behind the headlights. ‘Get your sorry ass over here, we need to get moving now. Or you can just lie there and die in a ditch. Pretty much the same to me.’

  Kees thinks it over.

  Maybe that’s best, bleeding out, right here under the night sky, the end coming before the dawn.

  His disease is getting worse, and really what does he have left?

  ‘Seriously, are you coming or what?’

  As Kees struggles up and starts limping to the car, he can’t help feeling that somehow he’s just lost.

  25

  ‘Welcome to Terschelling.’

  Chief Inspector De Zoet’s a more skilled, and willing, host than Stuppor.

  They shake, then climb into the back of the waiting patrol car. Space restrictions mean the chopper wasn’t able to put down right by the harbour itself; the pilot had taken one look at it and said ‘No way.’

  ‘Food? Drink?’ De Zoet asks, having given the driver the go-ahead. He hands Jaap a paper bag, folded neatly across the top.

  Jaap takes it, suddenly aware he’s ravenous. He pulls out a bottle of chocolate milk and some kind of pastry which looks like it’s studded with rabbit droppings.

  ‘Cranberries,’ says De Zoet, noticing Jaap’s scrutiny. ‘You just can’t get away from them here. Every damn thing you eat has a fucking cranberry in it.’

  Terschelling, the pilot had told him earlier, was famous for very little, the exception being that in the mid-nineteenth century a barrel of cranberries had washed ashore from a nearby shipwreck. An enterprising local had decided to see if he could cultivate them and soon found that the tart berries liked the climate and soil. Now the island produces cranberry-everything in a desperate attempt to differentiate itself in the minds of tourists from its rival islands.

  ‘You’re not from here then?’

  ‘Rotterdam, born and bred. The old story, fell for an island girl. Only back then I didn’t mind the whole cranberry thing so much. Sixteen years in, I’m starting to mind. I’ve gotta say, though, I’ve never had a UTI, so maybe it’s not all bad.’

  Jaap takes a bite, decides it really isn’t so bad. Especially as he can’t remember the last time he’s eaten. The pastry disappears, the chocolate milk loosening the dry crumbs sticking in his throat.

  ‘So,’ Jaap says, dropping the empty bottle back into the paper bag, ‘tell me.’

  ‘The boat you’re after, the Vrijheid, called into the harbourmaster here about twenty minutes ago.’

  ‘Saying?’

  ‘Saying they wanted to dock. He gave them the OK, then got on the phone to me. I’ve got men there in case it comes in before we arrive.’

  Three minutes later they pull up by a red-brick building, the harbourmaster’s office. De Zoet turns off the engine and radios his crew. The message comes back that a boat is just now entering the harbour itself.

  ‘Tell everyone to stay out of sight,’ Jaap says, getting out of the car, feeling the strong offshore breeze.

  De Zoet gives the order and walks with Jaap over a rickety wooden bridge onto the floating jetty. It’s about 200 metres long, with shorter jetties running off at right angles. At the junction of each, a pair of ground lights stand guard, illuminating a small patch of boards and the odd hull.

  De Zoet nudges Jaap with his elbow, points out into the darkness. It takes a few seconds for his eyes to adjust. But then he catches it, the outline of a boat moving in, the mast bare, the sound of the engine hidden beneath the wind. They move quickly along the jetty, heading for the only free mooring spot, right up at the end.

  The boat beats them there, and they watch a figure leap ashore. He busies himself tying up, and is finishing by the stern, his back to them as they approach. Jaap can see the boat looks the same as the Vrijheid, though it’s too dark to read the name.

  ‘Daan Brouwer?’ he shouts into the wind.

  The figure stiffens, then straightens up and pivots round, rope coiled at his feet like a snake.

  His face matches the photo. It’s Brouwer.

  He takes in Jaap, and De Zoet next to him in full uniform, his eyes widening in shock.

  ‘Inspector Jaap Rykel, Amsterdam Police. We need to talk,’ Jaap says, moving forward.

  Brouwer takes a step back.

  His left foot slips off the edge of the wooden jetty. For a moment he’s impersonating a windmill with his arms, then he goes over backwards, a foot catching the rope he’d been tying the boat up with.

  A brief lull in the wind allows Jaap to hear a strangled cry cut short by a thudding impact.

  He rushes to the edge, De Zoet there with him, and grabs Brouwer’s foot which caught in the rope. Brouwer’s hanging upside down, his head against a vertical iron support, rough with rust and molluscs. There’s no movement as they drag him up and over the lip.

  They lay him face down, and De Zoet flicks on a torch.

  It’s clear why there’s no movement. The back of Brouwer’s head is partially crushed, bone splintering on impact with the hard edge of the iron. There’s blood everywhere.

  They flip him on three. De Zoet obliges with the torch, illuminating Brouwer’s face.

  Jaap presses two fingers into Brouwer’s throat whilst De Zoet calls in medical. There’s a distinct lack of pulse. Jaap looks up at De Zoet and shakes his head.

  ‘Dead,’ he says.

  The paramedics arrive quickly, and confirm the diagnosis. Jaap is standing a few feet away when he feels his phone going off; he sees it’s Arno.

  ‘Been doing a bit of digging,’ Arno says when he answers. ‘You know the video of Heleen dancing? I’ve been talking to a few people who were on the beach that night, and they remember the guy filming her.’

  ‘Brouwer.’

  ‘Uh … that’s the thing, I showed them a photo of him, and they said not. For a start the guy had hair. But there’s worse.’

  ‘Worse how?’ Jaap asks, wondering how it is he’s seen two suspects die in front of him in as many days.

  ‘I did some background on Brouwer. He’s guilty of the mutilation, it’s clear that he and Heleen were in contact. But he can’t have killed her.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘He was on the mainland when it happened; he didn’t step off the ferry back onto Vlieland until two hours after her death had been called in. I’ve got it all on camera.’

  It’s like his head’s been invaded by junk. None of this is making any sense.

  ‘I’m gonna call you back,’ he finally manages.

  ‘Bad news?’ De Zoet asks.

  He doesn’t know if it’s been minutes or hours when his phone goes off.

  De Zoet had got him a room in a small hotel just off the harbour, and he doesn’t even remember falling asleep.

  He reaches for his phone, noticing he’s still fully dressed, and squints at the screen, which is telling him two things: the first is that it’s past midnight, the second that the person calling him is doing so from the Police Commissioner of Amsterdam’s office number.

  ‘Sorry to call you so late,’ says Commissioner Bergsma whe
n Jaap’s answered.

  ‘Early,’ Jaap says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s early.’

  ‘OK then, early. Where are you currently?’

  ‘In bed.’

  ‘In bed where?’

  ‘Some island. I can’t remember what it’s called because I’ve been working straight for—’

  ‘Well, you’re going to need to get off that island and onto the mainland. If you tell me exactly where you are I’ll get a helicopter out to you.’

  Jaap sits upright.

  Tanya, he thinks.

  Maybe that’s why he’s not heard from her. Maybe something’s happened.

  ‘What’s this about?’ he says, his heart thudding, the pressure in his head immense.

  ‘A body of a young woman was discovered in Gelderland earlier this evening. Given the circumstances of her death the local inspector called it in to us.’

  Jaap sinks back onto the bed, the cheap springs squeaking in displeasure. His mind’s working. Gelderland is about as far east as you can go in the Netherlands without hitting Germany, which means …

  All of a sudden he knows what’s coming next, and is about to speak but the commissioner gets there first.

  ‘The girl died of suffocation. And they ran an urgent tox test, which came through ten minutes ago.’

  Jaap’s up, the weight of his body monumental but his mind cranking to life, already going back to what Arno had told him earlier, what this means, what …

  ‘Don’t tell me,’ Jaap says. ‘I don’t want to know.’

  DAY THREE

  * * *

  26

  Tanya can’t breathe.

  The panic’s sharp, intense, her heart pumping double time.

  She finds herself standing in the bathroom of her flat, the light on, her own face frightening her in the mirror.

  For some reason she can’t begin to fathom she has the strongest urge to touch her reflection, as if that’ll be key to allowing air to flow once more.

  And somehow it works, the cool touch of the glass on her fingers freeing up something and she’s gasping big lungfuls of sweet air. Her hands are trembling, in fact her whole body is trembling as she tries to fight it, retain control, claw back from whatever she’s just been on the edge of.