‘I already got them started. There are about seven different forums for bereaved people, I’d no idea there’d be so many. But we’re going through them now. I’ll call if we get anything.’
Harry’s on the phone himself, gives Jaap the one-minute finger.
They’re parked in an industrial estate south of the city; large trucks are driving in and out with alarming frequency. He’s thinking about Haanstra, ‘HelpingHandz’, tries to imagine him watching recordings of the killings.
Violence on screen was nothing new, you only had to flick on the TV or fire up a laptop to know that whatever they might say, even normal human beings were drawn to it. Despite knowing it’s acted it could still make you wince or cringe, sometimes even make you turn your eyes away in disgust.
Your mind knows it’s fake, but your body reacts as if it’s real.
But filming an actual death? Then watching it?
Maybe Haase’s right, Jaap thinks as Harry finishes his call.
‘So, who’re we going to see?’ Jaap asks.
Harry smiles. ‘Bram Tolhoek, nice guy. I think you’re gonna like him. He’s on parole now, so I’m sure he’s a reformed character.’
‘Reformed from what?’
Harry hands him a file. Jaap flicks through photos of a man severely beaten, face barely recognizable as such, lumps swelling out in all different directions.
‘He was in twice, once for battering someone half to death, and the second time … well, also for battering someone half to death. That’s the second one.’
‘Charming,’ Jaap says. ‘I can hardly wait.’
They locate the unit Harry’s looking for, cleverly named Amstel Bifolds. Like the rest, it’s clad with grey corrugated iron and has a loading-bay door and another for foot traffic.
A large bike’s parked outside, bodywork vinyl-wrapped to make it look like carbon fibre, the chrome exhaust pipes shining like a religious experience. By the fuel cap there’s a skull with two wings.
Harry points to it as if to say, told you.
The receptionist inside is bored, prefers her nails to both Jaap and Harry, and calls through to her boss in the slowest way possible. She listens for a moment, nods, then puts the phone back down and invites them to look around the collection of doors and windows. The showroom is devoid of customers. Insanely jaunty music pours from hidden tinny speakers.
‘Bet if you look at their books they’re turning over a fair bit of money, despite no customers being here,’ Harry says.
Jaap’s inclined to agree, he’s seen his fair share of money laundering operations over the years. And this one has all the signs of being another.
‘Can I help?’
Jaap turns from inspecting the latest in triple-glazed thermal-efficient bifold patio doors to see a short man standing in a doorway towards the back. Harry, who’s been turning a flyer on angled roof lights into a paper plane, looks up too. He makes a couple more folds, then launches the plane towards the man. It spins through the air and nosedives to the floor, skidding to rest at his feet.
‘Just as well you didn’t go for that engineering job,’ Jaap says as they convene on the man.
Who, from the visuals, is clearly on steroids.
He’s in jeans and a long-sleeve T-shirt so tight Jaap can make out the veins standing proud of his biceps like worms burrowing under his skin.
Jaap had once heard a theory that Neanderthals hadn’t died out completely, that they’d occasionally mated with modern humans, so some people still carried a few Neanderthal genes. The man’s face is probably all the proof required to turn that theory into fact.
Jaap walks into the man’s office. Harry follows and closes the door.
He pulls out the headshot of Haanstra from the hospital’s CCTV and holds it up for him to see.
Bram Tolhoek stares at it, shakes his head. ‘This supposed to mean something to me?’
‘Friend of yours?’ Harry asks.
‘Never seen him.’
‘Really?’ Jaap says.
‘Really.’
Sometimes it’s possible to draw people out, use their desire to cover what they’re trying to hide by letting them talk too much and eventually make a mistake.
Tolhoek’s not of that ilk.
‘The thing is,’ Harry says, ‘you’re on parole, right?’
Tolhoek gives him the stare.
‘And I’m pretty sure that the first time you went to prison you’d been spotted with someone else at the crime scene. Only he was never caught. And you didn’t give him up. That’s nice, isn’t it?’ Harry says to Jaap.
‘Yeah, I like that. Loyalty. Show’s character.’
‘Exactly. But the thing is, Bram, right now loyalty is going to fuck you. Because I want to know everything you know, or we’ll get you on a parole violation.’
‘What violation?’
‘I dunno,’ Jaap shrugs. ‘But I’m sure between me and him we can come up with something.’
He holds the photo up again.
Tolhoek stares at Jaap for a few moments.
Then he writes something on a piece of paper, hands it to Jaap. Jaap reads it, shows it to Harry.
‘If you’re not there in twenty minutes we’re coming back for you,’ Jaap says.
Tolhoek nods, scrunches up the bit of paper and slips it in his pocket.
‘Get the fuck out of my office!’ he yells.
66
He may be a Neanderthal but he’s true to his word. Because eighteen minutes after he’s made a show of throwing them out of his office, Tolhoek’s bike is pulling up at the exact spot he’d told them to wait. Which is under a flyover. Traffic’s rumbling overhead, freight trucks laden with shipping containers, but no traffic is on the road they’re next to.
‘The receptionist,’ he says once he’s killed the motor, ‘I think she reports on me.’
He hasn’t got off his bike, his feet only just touching the ground either side. It looks uncomfortable. And with his arms up on the high handles it also looks ridiculous.
‘Back to Van der Pol?’ Harry asks.
‘Yeah, thing is, second time I got out I wanted to go straight. But I was persuaded otherwise.’
‘Lucky we came along, this is your chance to do some good,’ Jaap says. ‘So tell me.’
‘About the guy?’
‘We’re not here for your life story, just the bit which coincides with the man in the photo.’
Tolhoek looks away, and for a moment Jaap thinks he’s about to gun the motor and ride off without saying anything.
‘I went down for that fucker, both times I was the fall guy for him. Van der Pol wanted to keep him out of jail so made me go instead. But I’ll tell you this, that guy is a nasty piece of shit. Like, seriously nasty.’
‘Name?’
‘I just knew him as Alex.’
‘Haanstra?’
‘Could be, I don’t really remember.’
Harry pulls out his phone. ‘Maybe a quick call to your parole officer will ease your memory?’
‘Jesus, you cops think you’re the good guys,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘You have any idea what it’s like to be trapped? Like really trapped so you have no choice? Of course you don’t, you—’
All of a sudden Harry’s a virtuoso violinist with a sad-clown face.
‘Fuck you,’ Tolhoek says when he notices.
‘You had something to say,’ Jaap says.
‘OK,’ Tolhoek says after a deep breath. ‘It was about six years ago, I was working in Eindhoven, enforcer for Van der Pol’s main drugs distributor there. It was a fairly new area and there was already an established dealer. But that never stopped Van der Pol, and we spent six months taking over. But the dealer wouldn’t give in, no matter how many of his people we persuaded to flip sides and join us.’
‘Nothing like loyalty, huh?’ Harry asks.
‘Van der Pol pays better than anyone else. You’re the guy on the street for some of these other dealers you’re not making a
minimum wage most of the time. So someone comes along and offers you a choice – more money for yourself or a bullet in the back of the head? It’s a no-brainer. But the main guy’s stubborn, wants to maintain control, so I’m told we need to persuade this guy to step aside. Van der Pol calls me to a meet just outside of town where he introduces this Alex guy. Tells me I’ve got to go with him, and that I’m to take orders from him. So I have to spend the day with him, and really he’s freaky.’
‘Freaky how?’
‘Like … I dunno. There’s something not right about him.’
‘This is coming from a two-time convict.’
Tolhoek gives him the finger. Harry smiles.
‘Freaky in that there’s this kind of stillness about him. Anyway, Alex seems to know where the dealer’s gonna be, we go to this shit-hole flat out in Haarlem. Turns out the dealer’s visiting some girl he’s got hidden from his other girl, and we walk in on them. He’s banging her up against the worktop, she’s bent forward over it taking a line up her nose and he’s got his tracksuit trousers down by his ankles. And he’s going at it like double speed, it looked like a cartoon, all blurred and stuff. There’s some loud music on so he’s not heard us, he was pretty into it, y’know? And Alex looks around, gets a wooden spoon from a container by the stove, and walks right up to him, jabs it up the guy’s ass.
‘My brother used to work at an abattoir down in Tilburg, he took me around it once, showed me the whole thing, and I tell you, the way that guy screamed reminded me of that. So, Alex makes him get dressed and we take him for a ride, out to these playing fields. The whole time Alex is kind of … I dunno. It’s like he’s really still, but wired at the same time. We drag this guy out, there’s no one around, and Alex tells me to have a go at him, just rough him up a little.’
‘Which you did,’ Harry says.
‘You want my help or not?’
‘Carry on,’ Jaap says.
‘I start, nothing serious, just a couple of hits, you know? But I kind of sensed something weird and I turn round and I find this guy is filming me on his phone. I mean, is he fucking stupid or what? That’s evidence. So I tell him to stop filming. He pulls out a gun and tells me to keep going. Tells me to make the guy bleed. So I give the guy a couple more hits, like this guy’s a piece of shit anyway, not like he’s some civilian, and then I stop. Alex is still filming, and he tells me to carry on. The thing is, as I’m doing it I see that he’s really filming me, like he has the phone aimed at my face.’
Another truck rumbles overhead. It seems to snap Tolhoek out of his story.
‘Then what?’
’Then he told me to kill him. He wanted me to strangle the guy. I told him to go fuck himself and he put the gun right up by my head. And the whole time he’s still filming. And he’s got this weird look on his face. Creepy, just really, really creepy.’
‘So did you do it?’ Harry says.
Tolhoek swallows, looks away. ‘Nah, I got lucky. A couple of cars turned up, turns out it was a well-known dogging site, so Alex had to put his gun away. But you know what? If they hadn’t, and I’d’ve refused to kill the guy, I’ve no doubt he would have pulled that trigger.’
Traffic overhead has slowed over the last minute or so; now there’s a truck stopped right above them. A waterfall of exhaust fumes starts to choke them. Jaap’s phone goes off, he sees it’s Arno. He takes it.
‘You need to get back here,’ Arno says. ‘We’ve found HelpingHandz was talking to someone else too.’
‘You know who?’
‘Not yet, Roemers is working on it.’
‘I’ll be there in fifteen. Right,’ Jaap says to Tolhoek, ‘how do we find this guy?’
Tolhoek shakes his head. ‘I don’t know, I’m not in the loop any more. I just front the window business. But one thing I heard was that Alex no longer works for Van der Pol.’
‘Where’d you hear that?’
Tolhoek shrugs. ‘I dunno, a rumour, I can’t remember where.’
‘That’s pretty unusual, isn’t it?’ Harry says. ‘Knowing how Van der Pol operates, not many people tend to leave. You being a good example.’
The traffic above starts to move, the truck lurches into gear and moves off.
‘I don’t know what to tell you,’ he says. ‘That’s what I heard.’
67
Arno was right.
Jaap’s staring at a reel of messages, the same pattern emerging, the gradual, sinuous befriending of the next man he believes will be forced to kill. The messages themselves are between HelpingHandz – Haanstra – and ‘TL1980’. Roemers is working on finding out who that is in real life – shouldn’t take long, given the rather obvious clues.
It’s skilfully done, Jaap thinks, following right from first contact up until the present. It’s taken over four months, the two gradually getting to know each other, sharing increasing confidences.
Haanstra claims to have two little ones who are at the centre of his life, even more so since his wife died of some long, drawn-out cancer three years previously. The medical team had basically messed up, although he’s purposefully fuzzy on the details. He writes of how he went through hell, hinting at some very dark thoughts, the anger that these people had taken his wife away; but someone he met online helped him through it, made him realize just how much he loved his kids, helped him see that he could carry on. Haanstra also claims that he’s doing that same thing now, paying back, willing to help anyone through the hell which he himself endured.
Jaap watches TL1980 walk right along with it, offering up more and more details about his life, using Haanstra as a sounding board on bad days, telling him excitedly about the good ones.
All the while Haanstra is there for him, playing the line between too forward, too keen, and not interested enough.
In short, Jaap can see why the men had fallen for it.
The messages continue, and it looks like they’d agreed to meet up yesterday, with the kids, just for an afternoon.
The same pattern as all the others.
Which means, Jaap thinks, Haanstra has probably already threatened him.
‘Got it,’ Roemers says from behind him. ‘Theo van Lagen. Lives out in Winterswijk.’
Jaap calls the team together, updates them on the latest. He tasks Lisa with leading the hunt for Theo van Lagen.
Back at his desk he’s just about to close his computer when he notices there’s been a message.
From HelpingHandz to TL1980.
It takes Jaap a moment to figure out they’re GPS coordinates and a time, 18:00, just over an hour away. He punches the coordinates into his phone.
‘Arno!’ he shouts across the room. ‘Get a car out. Now.’
68
Tanya’s getting this restlessness in her legs, like whatever angle she puts them her knees still feel uncomfortable. The houseboat’s too hot as well, the air evaporating off the canal making the whole thing like a Turkish steam bath.
Only without the massage. For a moment she misses her flat in Rotterdam.
And thinking of Rotterdam, since she’d spoken to Harry, her thoughts have been hovering around the night of the raid, and the face she’d seen. She’s not really had much time to think about it properly, so much has happened since, but it has been bugging her sporadically, like a tick which has lodged its head in the back of her brain.
Now, though, the tick has regurgitated its stomach contents, because all she can think about is the face.
Which, despite part of her mind telling her to let it go, she’s managing to convince herself was Kees.
She’d called the station a while ago and requested his file be sent to her, and she’s waiting for it to arrive. Finally a ping from her laptop tells her it’s there. She clicks on the attachment and finds the case which led to his prosecution.
She shivers, despite the heat.
Ruud Staal had been her foster father, and for years had sexually abused her. She’d finally escaped and had buried it deep, not wanting to fa
ce it, hoping that by ignoring it the whole thing could be made to go away, frozen out. But when she’d fallen for Jaap, in a period of her life when she should have been at her happiest, deep feelings started to stir, as if her new-found joy had awoken them, defrosted the emotion, which turned out to be as fresh and raw as ever.
She remembered the day she’d finally decided to track him down, confront him, make him see what he’d done to her. Why she’d hoped that might put an end to it she didn’t know, but the alternative had been to go official, get him arrested and charged. But then it would all have come out, everyone would know what had happened to her, and a feeling, which she later identified as shame, stopped her. No, she didn’t want everyone to know what had been done to her. Mostly she didn’t want Jaap to know. As if he might reject her.
So she’d tracked Staal down, and the same night Jaap’s baby daughter had been killed she’d gone to confront him.
She’d not meant to kill him. That had been an accident. He’d attacked her and she’d defended herself. Only he’d wound up dead. Kees had found her, sitting in his front room, staring at his body, and he’d cleaned the place up and got her out of there. She’d spent days expecting a knock at the door, convinced they’d come for her.
She should have handed herself in, but she had to be there for Jaap, see him through his grief, so she’d done what she’d done before, what she’d become good at doing. She buried it deep, kept it suppressed.
But reading Kees’ file now she finally sees the reason why no one ever came for her: Kees had gone down for Staal’s killing instead.
Kees had taken the rap for her.
Only, just over a year and a half later, she sees him, out, and working for the biggest criminal network in the country. Is that possible?
She reads the file again.
Her breathing’s all over the place.
She needs to get out. She closes down the laptop and gets ready.
As she’s leaving the houseboat, the gangplank swaying gently as she walks across it, she looks up to see a white van parked on the canal side right by the boat.
This despite the sign saying NO PARKING. It’s so close she barely has room to edge round it. Just as she’s reaching the corner, one of the rear doors opens and a man in overalls steps out.
Before the Dawn Page 24