The Harbour Master

by Daniel Pembrey

  The phone went dead.

  *

  I must have scraped my knuckles against the wall; they were bleeding. From down the corridor came music, the volume turned up, perhaps to drown out the verbal assaults of the drunk. He was ranting about Johan Cruijff and the glory days of Dutch football.

  Every half an hour the music on the radio stopped for news: Tilburg… the standoff at the stronghold reportedly containing Rem Lottman… less than two days to go. Something about difficulties within the joint investigation team… had Stefan mentioned this?

  It was coming from another world now.

  I didn’t have the right to make phone calls. This was standard practice, I knew; it prevented accomplices being tipped off, evidence being discarded. I sat on the hard, cold floor with my head in my hands, imagining my phone ringing in the glovebox of my car – Petra and Stefan trying to reach me in vain.

  Food trays appeared in the hatch and then vanished. I recalled hearing somewhere that Edouard Tailleur had refused food at Scheveningen, his lawyers complaining that it was impossible for his African palate.

  I squeezed my eyes shut until squiggles and stars exploded behind them.

  *

  Dreams and odd visitations came and went. At one point Sebastiaan Bergveld appeared, entering my cell like a ghost. Hadn’t Stefan confirmed that he’d left the force?

  ‘This has nothing to do with you,’ I said aloud.

  The observation hatch opened, two eyes fixed on me.

  Bergveld leaned against the wall, one foot casually crossed in front of the other.

  ‘But I’m invested,’ he said. ‘Involved.’

  It sounded like something I might have said.

  ‘I want to talk about the evening of the Energy Summit. Rem Lottman’s security team going to your home on Entrepotdok – why did you arrange for that to happen?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  The Ukrainian biker gang had, but I couldn’t reveal that or what I’d gone on to do to neutralise the threat. The double bind…

  ‘Didn’t you cause Rem Lottman to be kidnapped, van der Pol?’ Bergveld said point blank, pushing himself off the wall with the ball of his foot before vanishing into the cool, stale air.

  The observation hatch closed, the eyes vanishing into darkness.

  Radio reports continued to filter in between the drunk’s commentary on the 1974 World Cup final. The hut on De Flaes Lake in the Utrecht forest…

  The arrest team ready to storm it…

  Perhaps this was meant to be: perhaps I was supposed to know what it felt like to be held in captivity.

  Relief? Was that the dominant emotion I’d seen in the photo of Rem Lottman, holding up his copy of De Telegraaf?

  If I could just get rid of my sense of guilt, perhaps I could escape once and for all.

  The radio announced that the ransom was partly paid. Stupid, stupid woman. The proof of life had been doctored for sure.

  Tilburg, the radio announcer continues, a news helicopter has spotted smoke canisters being fired into the hut…

  ‘Penalty!’ the drunk shrieks.

  The hut on fire.

  … reports of shooting…

  The hut ablaze.

  Holland loses; the drunk wails.

  My head lolling and straightening sharply.

  Van Tongerloo’s distinctive Flemish voice crackling through: plausible intelligence… good reasons for the decisions taken…

  All occupants of the incinerated hut presumed dead.

  When I pressed my eyes shut again, flames appeared in the dark behind my eyelids.

  *

  A key turning woke me, the door’s heavy metal hinges groaning as it opened. ‘Meneer van der Pol,’ the arresting officer announced. ‘Het is voorbij.’

  It’s over.

  For that, I wanted to lay the bastard out cold.

  That was what ­­­­­the arrest team had said to Freddy Heineken in 1983, when they’d found him alive.

  38

  BRUSSELS PARK, AGAIN

  I walked out into the sunlight, squinting – dazed, like some night creature.

  My car was back in Noordwijk.

  I took a cab, the driver waiting for me while I retrieved his fare from the glovebox. My phone was there, too. As expected, the battery was dead. I plugged it into the car’s charging dock and paid the cabbie, who was loitering amongst the crowd outside the Lottmans’ gates.

  I drove away fast. My phone lit up with six missed calls: two were from Petra, three from Stefan. The last one was from Leonie, Lottman’s girlfriend in Brussels.

  I was just about to call my wife when Stefan’s name flashed up on the phone.

  ‘Hoi,’ I answered. I needed to clean my teeth.

  ‘I’m glad to hear from you,’ he said. ‘Where’ve you been?’

  ‘I needed to take a break.’

  ‘I thought you were already taking time off?’

  ‘So this was time off from time off. Hey, you’re answerable to me, not the other way around. What the hell went down in Tilburg?’

  ‘Things happened fast.’

  ‘That much is clear.’

  ‘Forensics are still working on the hut, but it doesn’t look promising. Everything inside it was incinerated.’

  ‘So now they’re searching for Lottman’s DNA?’

  ‘Yes, but they’re worried about co-mingling. The heat was intense. We’re talking about dust there now.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘At least we didn’t pay the full ransom,’ Stefan said.

  ‘How much was paid?’

  ‘A quarter of the fifteen. Almost four million.’

  If my week had been bad, spare a thought for Mrs Lottman. Carla Lottman, too.

  Something else occurred to me. ‘The kidnappers demanded the ransom in four currencies. Which one was paid?’

  ‘Rubles.’

  I pulled over by the side of the road, just ahead of the turn onto the E19.

  ‘The payment was tracked?’

  ‘To a point. It went to a bank in Russia. You can imagine how well that’s proceeding. I don’t expect there’ll be a joint investigation team there –’

  ‘Where in Russia?’

  I waited. Cars and lorries thundered past, the larger ones rocking my car.

  ‘A bank in St Petersburg.’

  *

  By the time Petra called me I was halfway back to Brussels. I’d wanted to hold off speaking with her; I needed to structure my suspicions about Sergei…

  ‘Henk, where in hell have you been?’

  ‘In hell is about the right description for it. On the Lottman trail. You’ve probably seen it on the news; I’m sorry I couldn’t update. Did you get my voicemail?’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Henk, that was three days ago!’

  ‘Yes. Have you heard from Nadia?’

  ‘No!’ Pause. ‘Why?’

  ‘Listen to me, this is confidential to the investigation: part of the ransom was paid to a bank in Russia.’

  ‘It’s not so confidential to my old employer. Het Parool are already researching a story about it.’

  ‘What about Sergei?’

  ‘What about Sergei?’

  ‘The timing of him meeting Nadia. Him being from St Petersburg, which is where the bank is and where the money went…’

  ‘So, is everyone in Russian a villain now? When did you become so xenophobic?’

  It was an absurd allegation.

  She said, ‘If you must know, that St Petersburg account belonged to a Lottman family trust, as the Het Parool journalist has discovered.’

  They’d paid the money to themselves.

  Perhaps the father had established an outpost there. Mrs Lottman hadn’t needed any advice from me after all.


  ‘Where are you?’ Petra demanded.

  ‘Returning to Brussels. The girlfriend, she’s not answering her phone –’

  ‘Christ,’ she said, exasperated. The line went dead.

  *

  There were uniformed police in front of Leonie’s apartment.

  I flashed my badge. ‘What happened?’

  ‘The woman on the second floor,’ an evidence technician said. ‘Gone.’

  ‘Where?’

  He shrugged.

  I recalled my last conversation with her after Tailleur’s death. While I’d been busy concluding that she was safe from Ghanaian warlords, she was searching for reasons behind Rem’s disappearance. I’d asked whether he had any weaknesses – gambling, drugs… He was a senior politician, she’d exclaimed before putting the phone down on me.

  I glanced up at the second floor. ‘What’s left up there?’ I asked the technician.

  His face mask was pulled down below his glistening stubble. Brussels was still baking hot. ‘What’s your interest in this?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve been working on the Dutch side of it.’ I realised that I hadn’t shaved in a while either. ‘Mind if I take a look inside the apartment?’

  ‘Yes,’ one of the uniformed officers said, stepping in front of me.

  *

  I sought shade near the cooling burble of the fountain in the centre of the park.

  There, I called Francine, Lottman’s assistant. I wanted to quiz her about any travel arrangements she might have been involved in making for either Rem or Leonie, but her phone number was no longer in service.

  I called Petra instead. She answered.

  ‘I’m sorry about going radio silent on you,’ I said. ‘Sorry too for suspecting Sergei. It was wrong of me –’

  ‘Henk,’ she cut in, ‘leave the case alone now. You’re not in a position to do any more. What is there to do, anyway? Rem Lottman is dead.’

  I swapped the phone to my left hand, running my right palm over my damp brow.

  ‘You’re right,’ I said.

  The water from the fountain in the centre of the park sparkled. I looked up the east–west gravel path, towards Lottman’s girlfriend’s apartment, and for one crazy second I imagined him standing there, staring down at me. My gaze lowered to the police activity at the ground-floor entrance.

  ‘Come back to Amsterdam,’ my wife said wearily.

  ‘OK.’

  She hung up.

  I glanced at my watch. It was 10 a.m. I’d be back in Amsterdam for lunch, traffic allowing.

  Only I couldn’t return to the car just yet. I stood there with my senses unnaturally alive. I could distinguish the sound of each distinct vehicle that made up the background traffic noise.

  There were too many oddities.

  How could Rem have been taken here, in Brussels Park?

  I glanced through the trees at the different flags flying. Listen to the buildings, Jan Schaefer had said.

  Practically every building around Brussels Park was high security; almost every one would have camera surveillance. How could Rem have been forcibly taken without the incident being caught somewhere?

  How could he have been bundled into a car, or a waiting van, without someone raising the alarm – someone other than Leonie? Why would the kidnappers have picked this, of all places?

  Walking around the perimeter pavements, I saw just how many cameras there were.

  ‘Stefan, where are you?’ I left a message. ‘Call me.’

  I got back in my car and drove.

  *

  I was making good progress towards Amsterdam and Petra. The news commentary on the radio was comparing Lottman’s death to the assassination of Pim Fortuyn.

  Fortuyn had been a rising star of Dutch politics when he was shot dead on a Hilversum street just ahead of the 2002 general elections. How had Rem felt about that pivotal event? It was just one of many questions I wanted to ask him now that he’d gone.

  ‘This is different,’ a pundit was saying. ‘However brilliant he was, Rem Lottman was a bureaucrat, not an elected official.’

  Like this was a consolation?

  ‘But it’s the same,’ another commentator contended. ‘The same aftermath, of confusion and unease. How could this happen in Holland, in this day and age?’

  ‘What about the funeral?’ a third voice asked.

  There’d already been a crematorium, I felt like calling in.

  ‘My understanding is that the family will handle it in private.’

  ‘Let’s turn to consider the upcoming elections,’ the first pundit intervened, steering the conversation away tactfully, ‘and how this turn of events might affect the narrowing election polls…’

  The temperature fell as I headed north. I checked my phone again and, as I did so, Stefan’s name flashed up.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ I answered, turning the radio down.

  ‘In the final debrief for the joint teams down here –’

  ‘Did anything new come up? How was it?’

  ‘Like a wake. Nothing new.’

  I paused out of some sense of respect.

  ‘What happened with the investigation of the kidnapping scene?’

  ‘What do you mean, what happened?’

  ‘Brussels Park – all the camera footage.’

  ‘We couldn’t get access to most of it,’ Stefan said.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Those buildings are mostly foreign embassies – overseas missions. Try asking for the US Embassy’s security footage. “Good luck”, was the comment doing the rounds.’

  I shifted position. ‘So what’s happening now?’

  ‘Enquiries are ongoing, as they say – though CCTV is often flawed in any case, as we saw in Tilburg.’

  ‘Saw what in Tilburg?’

  ‘The mailing of that Telegraaf photo there,’ he replied.

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘Don’t you know?’ He paused, surprised. ‘The enquiry started with CCTV images of the street where the mailbox was located, but those images proved hopeless. Then they got lucky and found a witness. That was just before I arrived in Tilburg.’

  ‘Who was the witness?’

  ‘A snitch, it turned out.’

  Not again.

  ‘Why did the CCTV images prove hopeless?’ I pressed.

  ‘The image was only a partial view, and…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It got recorded over.’

  Fuck. Due to incompetence, or a cover-up?

  ‘Did you see the image before it was lost?’

  ‘Briefly.’

  ‘Describe it.’

  ‘You couldn’t see her face anyway –’

  ‘Her?’

  ‘Yes, definitely a female.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Why not what – male?’

  ‘No, Stefan! Why couldn’t you see her face?’

  ‘She was wearing a cap.’

  I almost lost control of the car. ‘With a tinted visor, like a golfing cap?’

  Could Mrs Lottman have mailed the photo to herself, just like she’d sent the money to one of her own family’s accounts?

  ‘No, it was more like a baseball cap…’

  Or was it ridiculous to think that Mrs Lottman might be involved?

  No, not at all.

  Suddenly, things clicked into place.

  39

  REQUIEM FOR A DUTCHMAN

  There she was, with her black Labrador, far down the beach. There were no houses from here to the south of the Lottman residence – just a barely beaten path to Katwijk, the next town along the coast.

  ‘Mrs Lottman,’ I yelled.

  She was facing out to sea. The wind was blowing a fine sandstorm. The helm grass – p
lanted to hold the dunes together – hissed with resistance.

  I jogged over to her. The dog sat beside her, its head mimicking her orientation towards the waves. Flag attachments clanked distantly.

  ‘Mrs Lottman,’ I shouted, breathing heavily.

  She turned her head to look at me, and must have recognised me from before, in the lane outside her house, because her eyes were like steel.

  ‘Who are you?’ she said.

  ‘Police,’ I replied. ‘I knew Rem.’

  Her eyes remained on mine for a second longer before she turned back to the water, which was suddenly lit a golden-white.

  ‘That photo of him that appeared in De Telegraaf: it was taken right here in Noordwijk, wasn’t it? Through one of those picture windows.’ I nodded over my shoulder. The green-and-white awnings were only just visible on the rising ground. ‘There’s a play of light in that image. A very characteristic play, it turns out.’

  Those rippling reflections ran deep in my forebears’ consciousness. Or perhaps unconsciousness: maybe that was the reason why it had taken me this long to recognise the distinctive light patterns made by the North Sea.

  The Labrador’s tail thumped the sand.

  ‘Want one?’ I offered her a cigarette.

  She didn’t move a muscle.

  ‘No one could have kidnapped Rem in Brussels Park,’ I went on, cigarette waggling in my mouth. It took me three attempts to get it lit. ‘Not without help from some very well-connected people, that is.’

  We stood for a second in silence, the gulls wheeling above.

  ‘Where did he go?’ I asked, exhaling smoke. ‘Has the girlfriend already joined him?’

  Her eyes – just visible in profile – were glassy.

  ‘I can see now why he was so obsessed with the Heineken kidnapping. Freddy H came back alive.’ The lit end of my cigarette brightened; the smoke vanished upwards from my mouth. ‘Whereas Rem’s dad – your husband – didn’t.’

  Her clenched jaw quivered.

  ‘But why?’ I persevered.

  At some point, I was going to get a telling reaction.

  ‘Why all this trouble? The false trail to Tilburg, all that police time there wasted… why did Rem want to dissolve into –’