Before the Dawn

by Jake Woodhouse

  ‘Music finally got to you?’ Roemers asks as he gets up and heads for the door.

  ‘No, it’s beautiful.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah, I could stay all day listening to it.’

  ‘But …?’

  ‘But I’ve got to go and meet a friend. One who likes drugs.’

  48

  ‘You’ve got various levels. There’s your basic, just a new ID card. It’ll be enough to get you out of child support, but you can’t travel abroad.’

  ‘I may need to leave the country,’ Kees says.

  After burying Hof’s body last night, Kees made a decision. He’s getting out. Fuck Smit with his ‘just one more day’ attitude, and fuck Van der Pol and his tendency to extreme violence. He’d wanted to know who it was Bart had intimidated the day before he was killed, but now he’s seen that that man had ended up dead, shot by police whilst trying to escape arrest for the murder of two women, he feels the time has come.

  ‘Right, so you need the complete package. New ID, passport, financial history going back ten years. Takes forty-eight hours to get done. Ten thousand euros payable up front, twenty on delivery.’

  ‘Cash?’ Kees asks.

  His back is on fire, each vertebrae seemingly fused to the next, creating a solid spine of pain which resists all his attempts to move around in a normal fashion. His hands aren’t much better; the protective blisters which had formed against the spade’s green plastic handle had burst overnight, exposing soft, weepy skin.

  ‘Cash? You think I’m a fucking amateur? Thirty thousand euro equivalent in bitcoin. And you’ll need to tumble them first, I don’t want coins which can be traced back to you.’

  Ten grand might just be doable as a deposit. But twenty on delivery is definitely in the realms of fantasy.

  But the alternative is … what?

  ‘OK,’ he says. ‘I’ll sort out this bitcoin thing. Is it easy?’

  ‘Just Google it. Call me when you’re sorted. And I’ll need a set of passport photos.’

  ‘Can’t you do those for me?’

  ‘Sure. Costs extra though.’

  Kees hangs up.

  49

  When it comes to drugs, the authorities are not to be trusted.

  They claim all sorts of stuff to make you not take them, how you’ll become addicted, how the chemical hooks they contain will fuck with your brain, how they’ll bring on mental illness, that taking them is a shortcut to misery and ruin and destitution, all because they’re scared. Scared of what you might see, how in reality we’re nothing more than a resource which the elite feed off, how we spend our lives in toil and paying taxes and shitting and fucking and consuming, striving for more possessions, all so the few people at the top get to live their lives in extraordinary ease and luxury, when all we really need to do is just stop and listen, marvel at the beauty and wonder and intricacies of the world around us.

  At least that’s the view of Sander Nuis, an old friend of Jaap’s who decided early on to take a different path in life.

  Jaap’s not sure of Sander’s world views, especially as they can get quite long and complicated, dotted with words and phrases such as ‘Authoritarianism’, ‘Quantum Coherence’ and ‘Ontological Design’, and can stretch out into such a convoluted Theory of Everything that frankly you’d reach for the shrooms just to make your head stop hurting.

  But he is sure that if anyone knows anything about scopolamine, and it’s clear from his research that no one in law enforcement really does, then it’s going to be Sander. Because, being a connoisseur of altered states of consciousness, Sander has tried just about any method which might get him there, legal or not.

  He lives in a small flat tucked in the eaves of a building on the pedestrianized Koestraat, right in the heart of the red-light district. To get to it there’s a complicated series of doors and rickety stairs which Jaap finds hard enough to navigate, and his mind’s not under the influence of psychedelics. Trying to find your way whilst tripping on whatever exotics Sander’s into now would probably drive a man crazy.

  He hadn’t called ahead, partly because he’s not sure Sander has a phone, and partly because he is sure Sander doesn’t get out much. As in, not out of his flat, but definitely out of his head.

  Of course in Sander’s mind, Jaap’s the one stuck in a bad trip.

  On the door, painted black, someone’s written in white paint in a loose, flowing hand:

  Those who dance are considered insane by those who can’t hear the music.

  It makes him think of the silent video Heleen posted of herself dancing.

  Sander gets to the door on the fourth knock, and greets Jaap like a long-lost soul brother from another life with a lazy bear hug. He’s shorter than Jaap, and looks surprisingly healthy given his lifestyle. They spend a few minutes catching up, Jaap trying to ignore all the stuff lying around which, in his duty as a fully paid organ of the state, he really should be confiscating, before he gets on to the reason for his visit.

  ‘Drink?’ Sander suddenly asks.

  ‘Yeah, nothing psychoactive though.’

  Sander grins and heads through to the kitchen. Jaap hears a fridge door open and the clink of bottles.

  He looks around. The room is pretty much as he’d expect. Mismatching rugs on the floor, fractural wall art and, on a long wooden shelf, a world-record collection of bongs and vaporizers. In a corner, balanced on a low table with mid-century turned legs, an oblong glass box sits. The floor of the box is covered with twigs, and lying on them is a chameleon-like creature. Only it’s not like any chameleon Jaap’s seen before, because its scales are white, giving the creature a ghostly feel.

  ‘Friend of mine breeds these,’ Sander says, having appeared with two bottles of Coke, handing Jaap one. ‘It’s just an albino chameleon, but he sells them for a fortune, has a waiting list two years long last time I checked. It’s all to do with that TV series, the one where all the characters are always walking from one place to another. Either that or they’re fucking and fighting dragons, y’know it?’

  One of the benefits of living on a houseboat is that Jaap’s yet to get a fast enough internet connection to actually stream anything, and he’d thrown out his TV years ago. He shakes his head.

  ‘It’s crazy, this friend bred these things, then got a mutant which he rebred and now gets these all-white versions. At first he thought no one would want them, but he called them ghost dragons and put them on his website along with the normal ones, and within a day he’d had so many enquiries he knew he was onto something. Thing is, he doesn’t mention that they only seem to live half as long as normal, but so far no one’s complained. But I tell you, watching that thing when you’re tripping? Wild.’

  Behind the glass the ghost dragon moves an eye, taking Jaap in then going back to being still, as if to say, Watching that guy trip watching me? Really wild.

  Jaap turns away and starts telling Sander why he’s come.

  ‘Man, that stuff is nasty. I mean, really nasty,’ Sander says, shaking his head when Jaap finishes up.

  ‘You’ve tried it?’

  Sander’s relaxing in an old-fashioned deckchair which serves as the main seating in his flat, the fabric predictably a multicolour tie-dye. Above him on the wall a framed bit of paper proclaims:

  THE ONLY WAY TO DEAL WITH AN UNFREE

  WORLD IS TO BECOME

  SO ABSOLUTELY FREE THAT YOUR VERY EXISTENCE

  IS AN ACT OF REBELLION.

  Below it is a child’s picture of a flower.

  ‘Yeah, last year. And really, it’s funny for me to be saying this, but in the case of scopolamine then you really should Just Say No.’

  ‘So from what I’ve read, people given it tend to lose their free will, is that what happened to you?’

  ‘The whole free-will thing? Who’s to say we’re free?’

  ‘All right, but philosophy aside, when you took it did you feel anything like that?’

  ‘You know how they say y
ou can’t be hypnotized into doing something you wouldn’t normally do?’

  Jaap nods.

  ‘Well, scopolamine’s obviously different.’

  Sander rolls up a sleeve. On the inside of his left bicep is a tattoo which Jaap can’t quite make out. Sander sits forward, allowing Jaap a closer look. It seems to be some kind of alien, the elongated face and smooth features so beloved of Roswell fanatics. Only in this rendition it’s auto-fellating.

  ‘Jesus, what is that?’

  Sander shrugs, rolls his sleeve back down. ‘Fuck knows, I had it done when I was taking scopolamine. Didn’t even remember. Woke up and could feel something hurting my arm, then I found this. Took me months to work out where I had it done, but I eventually found the parlour, this place on Kinkerstraat, fuck knows what I was doing there. Anyway, I finally spoke to the guy that did it. He said I’d come in with someone and they’d told me to get a tattoo, and I agreed. Just like that.’

  ‘Who were you with? Was it the same person you got the scopolamine from?’

  ‘I … look, there are people you don’t really want to mess around with and—’

  ‘You’re forgetting I’m a cop. And I’m dealing with a case in which men may have been forced to kill young women. I think I can handle it.’

  Sander thinks for a bit, or else he’s just stuck in an acid flashback, because his eyes don’t really seem to be present. Then he snaps out of it.

  ‘All right, I’ll get his name for you, may have to make a couple of calls. But on one condition.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I won’t say you gave me their name.’

  ‘Nah, it’s not that. I was going to say, the one condition is that you give that fucker a real hard time.’ He rolls his sleeve up again, leans forward, deckchair creaking, and points to the alien, nearly stabbing himself in the arm with his finger, his face angry now, hippy bliss long gone. ‘For this. I have to live with this shit. And sometimes it really does my head in.’

  50

  The station’s got that heavy, somnolent mid-afternoon bloat. Jaap’s called the team together to see if they’ve managed to get anywhere. One by one each pair has gone through what they’d got, which so far isn’t much. He’s just about to break it up when Lisa puts her hand up.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I’ve been doing some digging on Kaaren. Found something interesting, though I’m not sure if it’s relevant to the case.’

  ‘Let’s hear it.’

  ‘Seems like she made money online, working as a fin-dom. Last year she cleared over thirty thousand euros.’

  ‘Back up – what’s a “fin-dom”?’

  She looks surprised that Jaap doesn’t know. ‘A financial dominatrix.’ She gets up and hands Jaap a few sheets, print-offs of various private conversations. He reads them quickly.

  ‘So she just says “Pay me five thousand euros, you dirty little man,” and they do?’

  ‘Bank records match up with those chats.’ She hands him another few sheets, transactions highlighted in pink. ‘She gets paid in bitcoins and transfers them to real money.’

  ‘Sounds like my ex-wife,’ says one of the men at the back. ‘She’s always demanding money.’

  ‘That’s called child support,’ Lisa says. ‘You know, when you ran off with that other woman and the court said you had to contribute to your children’s upkeep? Not the same thing at all.’

  A burst of edgy laughter before everything settles again.

  Jaap hands back all the sheets. Maybe it’s good that he can still be surprised.

  ‘Anyone else got anything, any link between any of these people?’ he asks, pointing to the board.

  But nobody has. Each time that happens Jaap knows it pushes the case closer to being the sort which never gets solved. If there’s really no link, no logic behind it, then there’s nothing to work out.

  And if there’s nothing to work out, Jaap thinks, how the hell am I supposed to work it out?

  ‘All right, back to it. Anything comes up let me know immediately.’

  He makes his way to the outer office and over to his desk, which is now covered in yellow sticky notes like some stupid viral video. He looks around but no one’s paying him any attention.

  ‘Hilarious,’ Jaap says to the room at large.

  ‘Look, if you called him back then we wouldn’t have to keep fielding calls from him,’ shouts Schuurmans, the oldest inspector in the department, and one whose aversion to hard work is legendary.

  Jaap clears them all, and sits down, feet on desk. He’s supposed to be going back in to see Vetter in twenty minutes, she’d said she wasn’t satisfied and wanted to drill down harder into his story. Jaap doesn’t want any harder drilling going on, but realistically he doesn’t have much choice. So he’s using the time he has now to let his mind go where it wants, not guiding, just seeing what trail it’ll follow if left to its own devices. Years of meditation help with this – even though he stopped the practice after Floortje’s death – he’s adept at detaching himself from his thoughts, becoming a bystander, seeing if anything good comes up …

  ‘Nice,’ says a voice. ‘Wish I could have a nap.’

  Jaap opens his eyes, sees it’s Arno.

  He gives him the finger, suddenly realizing he’s been doing that a lot recently. He makes a mental note to cut down.

  ‘Whilst you were out Roemers came up, said he had something. Here,’ Arno says, dropping a stack of paper on the desk.

  Jaap looks at it, then closes his eyes again. ‘Give me a recap.’

  ‘Well, he reckons he’s found your Psychonaut guy. The RV stands for Rogier Vink. And he has a record, prison for sexual assault of a minor back in ’91. Seems he got into self-harm whilst inside, but once he got out he turned his life around and started up a type of therapy to help people quit. But that’s not the interesting part. The interesting part is that Rogier Vink was on Vlieland, and left the island the day Heleen died.’

  Jaap’s feet hit the floor. ‘You know where he is?’

  ‘Got his address right here.’

  Jaap checks his watch. He’d promised Vetter he’d make an official statement right about now.

  Fuck it.

  ‘Let’s go.’

  51

  Arno’s at the wheel, getting his first taste of Amsterdam traffic.

  ‘Missing Vlieland yet?’ Jaap asks as he gets caught between a chaotic gaggle of cyclists and a thundering tram, ringing its bell like the country’s being invaded from the east.

  ‘Jesus,’ Arno says, achieving the double victory of not getting mangled by the tram and allowing the cyclists to live. ‘Is it always like this?’

  Jaap’s phone’s ringing. He’s realistic, this is the modern world, and the phone is damn useful, speeds up investigations no end and keeps him in touch with Tanya when they’re apart. But sometimes he just wishes his life wasn’t lived in thrall to an oblong bit of technology which is almost certainly, and against the feeble protestations of both phone companies and governments, right this minute giving him cancer.

  He answers, and listens to a request from the commissioner’s office.

  The commissioner would like to speak to him in person, at his earliest convenience. Turns out the commissioner feels that all the extra cash being thrown Jaap’s way entitles him to some face-time with the lead investigator.

  Jaap shakes his head whilst agreeing, then hangs up.

  ‘Bad news?’

  ‘It’s not bad, but I can’t run an investigation if I have to keep breaking off to brief people on the lack of progress,’ Jaap says. ‘Mind you, maybe he’s just got the bill for the helicopter. Right here.’

  Arno hangs a right as if he’s back on the island. Jaap can see a cyclist shaking a fist at them in the wing mirror.

  ‘Should be along here somewhere,’ Jaap says when they reach the street. It’s just west of Vondelpark, a war zone studded with SUVs larger than WWII tanks, the uniform of choice a Zegna suit. They park and walk up to the house.

&n
bsp; ‘Maybe I should give that therapy thing a go,’ Arno says. ‘Looks like it pays.’

  He has a point. Because the building is big, a large red-brick overlooking the park that would be so far out of Jaap’s bracket it’s not even worth thinking about.

  Jaap remembers he’s been on this street before, interviewing a man who’d been suspected of kidnapping a child and killing her parents. Turned out the guy was a serious asshole, but rather unfortunately innocent.

  The front door’s all studded wood with brass decorations, flanked by two long-stemmed bay trees.

  Jaap presses the bell, the sun strong on his back.

  As expected there’s no answer.

  It takes seven blows before there’s any movement, another two before the door finally gives way. Jaap toes it open and their shadows race ahead of them into the long hallway, the floor a mosaic of falafel delivery leaflets and religious circulars. There’s the odd one for mid-level call girls as well.

  If the place is impressive on the outside the inside’s less so. Sure the bones are there, but as they move through the building the whole feeling is one of neglect. The kitchen has had all the units ripped out, a microwave plugged into a socket and resting on a small table. Full, tied black bin bags line a wall. Mostly microwave empties, Arno discovers once he’s pulled on some gloves and done a bit of untying.

  Which probably accounts for the smell.

  And the flies.

  They go through floor by floor, the place pretty much empty. The general feel is that Rogier Vink’s not a man to keep up appearances.

  That or he has no guests to keep them up for.

  Seems he’s not been present for a while either, the leaflets downstairs and the air holding a dull stillness that only uninhabited spaces can muster.

  Jaap finds it in the bedroom, tucked away at the bottom of a cheap set of drawers, the handles mismatched.

  He pulls out the plastic bag, and holds it up to the deluge of light flooding in from a window overlooking the Vondelpark. Inside it is a sheet of blotting paper perforated into tiny squares. The whole sheet is printed with a kaleidoscopic background, and a black swan right in the centre.