Before the Dawn

by Jake Woodhouse

  Fucking idiot, he thinks as he grabs a set of keys from the officer manning the car-pool desk, ignoring his requests to sign, and jumps in a car, firing up the engine and slamming it into reverse.

  He scrunches the car beside it as he swings round and lines it up for the exit ramp.

  Sirens scream, blue lights strobe the concrete walls, and his foot stomps the pedal.

  The cell door closes with a clang as the man steps out.

  Pieter Groot’s not really aware of him leaving.

  He’s not really been aware of much the last few days.

  He remembers the feeling he’d had as a teenager when a dentist had pulled two teeth out, the strange numbness of his lips, which were there, but didn’t really feel like they were.

  He’s got the same feeling now, or similar at any rate, all over his body. And his mind too. He feels like he’s detached from himself somehow, just a passenger in his own body.

  He forces himself to think. Because he knows he has to do it now, he may not get another chance. And he has no choice, that much is clear.

  The T-shirt slides off his back and over his head.

  He twists it up, as if he’s wringing out a towel, tightening with each turn.

  He knows the reflex is going to be his enemy, and he takes a moment, seeing if he can override it in advance.

  As he feels the fabric settle into position, the gagging start to kick in, he thinks of his son.

  He pushes harder, twisting the T-shirt more to help it screw further down his throat, until it blocks it totally. He can feel the lack of air start to build.

  Again he thinks of his son.

  And as things start to darken, he asks for his forgiveness.

  Ceiling tiles are coming and going, each one a dull square sliding from above Tanya’s head to well past her feet.

  Shoes squeak, rubber wheels purr, and a distinct metal rattling adds to the whole. It’s starting to feel like a piece by Steve Reich, simple but complex at the same time.

  Her ribs are aching, and she keeps having this weird sensation which is both hearing and feeling at the same time. The crack when Stefan landed on top of her. Though it’s now getting confused in her mind with the sound of the gunshot. And somehow it’s only adding to all the other sounds, building the piece up into something relentless.

  Breathing’s difficult as well, painful, an effort to keep it going.

  She knows she’s in shock, but that doesn’t stop her mind jumping around, getting stuck on something repeatedly – crack crack crack – before veering off onto something else.

  Now it’s the lights, thin strips two panels long. She tries to see a pattern, but just as she thinks she’s got a handle on it, broken the code, it changes.

  She keeps on watching them, until they slip away.

  The traffic is there purely to stop him.

  There is no other reason for all these people to be out on the road, driving slowly, obeying speed limits, getting in his way as if it was their goddamned right.

  Jaap’s got the full whack going – lights, sirens, and he’s hitting the horn too. And yes, cars are moving out of the way. Just nowhere near quick enough.

  All he can think about is how he’s put Tanya in danger.

  As he’s skidding into the AMC’s car park in Bijlmer he’s offering up prayers to a god he knows doesn’t exist, offering anything at all in return for Tanya’s safety.

  He spots Arno down a corridor and runs towards him, dodging round a bed carrying a man with so many tubes coming out of him he looks like a science experiment. The nurse pushing the bed calls out in protest but Jaap ignores him.

  ‘Where is she?’

  Arno’s nose is broken. He’s got tape across it like a young Jack Nicholson in Chinatown. Minus the hat.

  ‘They’ve just taken her away, she’s unconscious. I think they’re going to do an X-ray on her chest—’

  ‘Which way?’

  Arno points along the corridor.

  Jaap takes off. He can see Radiology signs. He follows them down three corridors before reaching a reception area. His body’s all over the place, he feels like he has more limbs than he should, and he’s not fully in control of them all.

  The nurse on duty listens to what he has to say and quickly checks her computer. The air con hums. A strident voice calls for a Dr Vos in Cardiology. Down a distant corridor a child is crying.

  ‘Room three,’ she finally says, pointing the way.

  Jaap can’t breathe, he reaches the door. A warning light is on: DANGER RADIATION DO NOT ENTER.

  He throws it open.

  She’s there on the bed, a mechanical arm holding a bulbous form hovering above her body.

  He runs forward, hits it out of the way.

  ‘What the fuck—’

  ‘She’s pregnant!’ yells Jaap at the tech who’d emerged from a separate room. ‘Tell me you didn’t do it.’

  37

  There’s some international conspiracy whose tentacles reach into every hospital in the western world, one which decrees that the walls have to be painted in strange pastel colours which, if you weren’t sick already, are certainly going to push you that way through a creeping osmosis. The corridor in which Jaap’s talking to the surgeon, who hasn’t even bothered to remove his face mask, is such a colour. Jaap finds himself wondering what the name on the paint tin would be. Faint Apricot Vomit is about the closest he can come up with.

  ‘Bottom line,’ the surgeon’s saying as Jaap pushes away his weird thoughts, ‘there’s a chance one or more of her ribs have snapped and are interfering with the lung. I’ll have to get in there to have a look.’

  Jaap’s standing stock still. His legs feel like glass, one movement and they’ll shatter. ‘But the anaesthetic—’

  ‘Not ideal, agreed. But neither’s a collapsed lung or internal bleeding.’

  Jaap’s phone is going off in his pocket. It’s like something from another world. He ignores it.

  People are moving around them, beds being wheeled, nurses hurrying from one place to another, relatives fearing the worst in plastic chairs.

  ‘Yeah, OK,’ Jaap says. ‘Can I see her before—’

  ‘No time,’ the surgeon says before disappearing through a set of double doors. Jaap watches them swing back and forth, his eyes on the ever diminishing glimpses of the corridor beyond.

  Tanya’s going under the knife. They’re going to open her up, slice flesh with a scalpel. And he’s standing here doing nothing.

  Because there’s nothing he can do.

  And it’s all his fault. He put her in this position. He’d not been paying attention, too wrapped up in the case to spot the danger.

  His phone buzzes again. Again he ignores it.

  He turns and walks away down a corridor, not knowing where he’s heading, trying to control the blaze of anger inside.

  As he passes through a doorway a nurse points out the hand-gel dispenser.

  Jaap glances at it. Then reaches out and rips the box off the wall.

  Somewhere close by a man’s screaming.

  As he smashes the small box against the floor he realizes it’s him.

  38

  ‘He knows about me, you fuck.’

  Which is no way to talk to a superior officer.

  But right now Kees isn’t up for a whole lot of decorum.

  The only thing Kees is up for is making sure he stays alive.

  ‘Impossible,’ Smit says, voice breaking in and out thanks to low reception. ‘No one knows about you.’

  ‘He does, he fucking does know!’ Kees yells, unable to keep his voice down. ‘And he says he has someone in the police who is checking up.’

  He’s standing in the middle of a field with a burner he’d bought less than an hour ago. Thin strips of cloud, so pink they look artificial, drift in the fading sky.

  The heat’s easing off, but Kees’ body feels like it’s cooking from the inside out, his heart doing its best to crack a few ribs.

  H
e’d dialled into Amsterdam and demanded to speak to Smit. All of which was a total break in protocol.

  ‘Kees, I’ll be honest here. No one can know about you because I kept you off the books. Completely. There’s not a single shred of evidence that you’re anything but a piece-of-shit biker along with the rest of them.’

  The sky darkens exactly one notch. Kees feels the vast space around him.

  He’s not sure if what Smit’s just told him is true.

  He’s not sure Smit actually just said what he thought he said.

  ‘I just watched one of his long-term men get carved up right in front of me. You get that? Van der Pol sat there and fucking joked about it. You think if he finds out about me he’s going to go any easier? The man is a fucking psycho and I’ve given you enough to put him away. Why can’t you just fucking do it?’

  Silence.

  The light notches down again, the landscape and sky merging into a colourless gloom, pink clouds now drained of colour.

  ‘Listen,’ Smit says finally, ‘here’s what you’re going to do.’

  Kees is listening, expecting a plan, a carefully crafted exit strategy, preferably one which involves him leaving right now.

  ‘Stick at your job and wait till I tell you it’s over.’

  39

  ‘He said what?’

  Jaap has just listened to Arno’s account of what happened. Smashing the gel dispenser had been stupid, but had released some of the tension. Now he’s starting to feel guilty about it.

  ‘It was hard to hear, but it was something like I had to protect her, I had to do it.’

  They’re standing outside the hospital entrance where a bunch of in-patients have given up on the wonders of modern medical care and have chosen to self-medicate with nicotine. A cab pulls up. They watch the driver take a wheelchair out of the boot and try to unfold it – he’s not having much luck, you’d think the thing was a Rubik’s Cube – and a backseat window rides down. The passenger, a man with Einstein hair, gives him instructions through the window.

  The sun’s aiming for the horizon, dropping into a patch of clouds, rays poking through the odd gap. It looks like the cover of a cheap Christian prayer book.

  Jaap’s mind’s been on Tanya, but what Arno’s just told him raises questions.

  I had to protect her, I had to do it, he thinks. But from what? And who is she? Heleen?

  Was the killer so sick in the head that he thought there was something so bad she needed protecting from that death was preferable? Or was ‘she’ someone else?

  The cab driver now has the wheelchair assembled, and he’s helping the passenger into it.

  I can’t do this, thinks Jaap.

  He watches Einstein wheel himself away from the cab, manoeuvring with a kind of technical grace.

  He feels his responsibility is with Tanya. He suddenly realizes there’s no way he can carry on with the case. Not now.

  ‘Listen, I’m stepping off this case. But I can put a word in for you, would you be up for carrying on? Not as lead, but working with whoever gets it?’

  Arno looks at him, excitement under the surface. He seems so young, Jaap thinks. Which makes him feel old.

  ‘Yeah, I’d like to do that.’

  Jaap slaps him on the shoulder. ‘Thought you’d say that. Bit of advice?’

  ‘You’re not old and grizzled enough to be handing out advice.’

  ‘Maybe. But … oh, for fuck’s sake.’

  He reaches for his phone, which has been going off constantly for the last ten minutes, part of his thigh massaged into a painful numbness. He doesn’t know why he’d not just turned it off.

  The number on the screen is Smit’s.

  Do it now, the quitting voice says.

  An ambulance pulls up, the crew rushing a gurney out the back.

  The gurney’s moving fast, flanked by three paramedics. Jaap tries to catch a glimpse of the person lying on it.

  He hits green and is about to speak, but Smit’s already talking.

  ‘Pieter Groot tried to kill himself, he should be arriving at the AMC any moment now.’

  Jaap turns and watches the hospital doors slide closed behind the gurney.

  It takes ten minutes to find the room where Groot is being treated. He’s just stepping up to it, reaching out for the door handle, when it swings open and he nearly collides with a nurse bustling out. The nurse glares at him – he has something wrong with one of his eyes, a kind of scar or birthmark which gives one eye a half-closed look – but he carries on past Jaap down the corridor without saying anything.

  Inside, the room looks out over a central courtyard, the windows opposite slicked golden with the last of the day’s light.

  Groot’s lying in the bed, hooked up to an IV.

  Jaap thinks of Tanya in surgery, and wonders why his world has suddenly narrowed to one building.

  Groot’s eyes open, recognition flaring there for a second.

  Jaap grabs a chair and sits beside him. He’s sent Arno to the surgery waiting area so he can call him the second there’s news on Tanya. He figures he might as well try and take his mind off it by talking to Pieter Groot.

  He pulls out his phone and starts recording.

  ‘Ready?’

  Pieter doesn’t respond.

  Jaap reaches out, shakes his shoulder, his grip maybe firmer than he’d intended.

  ‘I had to,’ Groot croaks. ‘I had no choice. He made me do it or he said he’d …’

  ‘Who? Who’s he?’ Jaap says, leaning in closer.

  Groot’s eyes have closed again. Jaap shakes him.

  He notices something on the floor, a dark shadow creeping out from the bed, already touching his toes.

  He leans over Groot’s body, finds the drip tube stuck in his arm. It’s hanging down the far side of the bed so he’d not noticed it. The end trails to the floor, spilling Groot’s blood, a whole lake of it expanding quietly outwards, the surface a dark sheen reflecting the fluorescent lights from the ceiling.

  His life literally draining away.

  Groot had tried to kill himself at the station but had been stopped.

  Now he’s tried again by reversing the IV.

  Jaap rips the tube out and presses down on Groot’s arm, a fluttery panic taking over his body.

  But he already knows it’s too late.

  40

  The sheet whooshes like a sail catching the wind, then sinks gently down, the shape of a person gradually emerging as it settles.

  They tried their best but Groot didn’t make it.

  The staff seem subdued but philosophical. You win some, you lose some.

  Jaap steps away from the room, and finds his way out of the hospital. It’s all too much to deal with, especially as half his mind’s on Tanya, still in surgery.

  He walks fast, not aware of his surroundings, running through all the bad possible outcomes. A few minutes later, he stops dead.

  He’s on a main road. It’s dark, cars rushing past him, the people inside them caught up in their own lives, unaware of what he’s going through.

  When he’d been driving to the hospital he’d found himself offering prayers up to God, saying he’d do anything if only Tanya was allowed to live, unharmed. This was ridiculous because he’d never been religious, but in those moments of fear his rational mind seemed to dissolve, and he knows that right now he’d do anything to protect her, save her. Anything at all.

  He stops dead.

  Kamp had no wife and a young baby to look after.

  Pieter Groot’s wife had run out on him, leaving him with a child.

  He can feel the rush starting, he knows this is it, what he’s been looking for. His fingers are trembling as he gets his phone out and dials Arno.

  ‘The guy who shot himself, Stefan Wilders, did he have a child but no wife?’ Jaap asks when Arno picks up.

  ‘How’d you know that?’ Arno says.

  ‘So no wife?’

  ‘No, she died.’

  J
aap hangs up and takes a few more seconds, the whole thing zooming into focus.

  He suddenly sees what it is he’s missed all along, why he’s been doing nothing but chasing his tail, why this whole case has been a rapid-fire series of events which have been way out of his control.

  He imagines someone handing him a gun, telling him the only way that Tanya is going to live is if he shoots someone in her place.

  A deep shiver surfs down his spine.

  He’d assumed the crimes were based on hate. But now he knows that’s not true.

  The key to this is something far stronger.

  The key to it is love.

  41

  The spade hits a stone, sending a judder right up Kees’ arm into his neck and shoulders.

  It’s not the first.

  There’ve been countless stones already, and, if he knows anything about life, there will be many more.

  Because even though he’s been working on this for over an hour – his back pouring with sweat and aching only slightly less than his leg, the blisters on his hands surely going to burst soon – he still hasn’t managed to dig a hole big enough to bury a large dog, let alone Hof’s body.

  Which right now is crumpled up in the boot of the car parked twenty metres or so outside the woods he’s digging in. Also in the car, though sadly still alive, is the Lumberjack. He’s the one who’s driven him out here and ordered him to get digging whilst he sits and smokes a joint and watches porn on a smudged iPad.

  Kees reaches down into the hole and tries to work loose the stone with his fingers, dirt already packed tight under his fingernails.

  The moon’s up; it has a yellowish tinge which makes Kees think of pus, and he can just see the stone has a sharp edge running along one side. It also seems to be much longer than the others he’s pulled out so far, widening out where it disappears into the soil at the edge of the hole.

  He scrapes earth away from underneath it, scooping it out in handfuls, then works the spade underneath, trying to prise it up. He applies pressure. Nothing.

  He tosses the spade aside, gets back down and scrabbles at it with his hands like a mad burrowing animal, like evolution hasn’t happened.