The Harbour Master

by Daniel Pembrey

  ‘Get away from my boy and I!’ she shrieked.

  I raised a pacifying hand.

  Then I raised the other, in a gesture of surrender, as two darkly clothed men approached quickly across the dunes. The cigarette dropped from my mouth. Both men had semi-automatics drawn in military, two-handed grips.

  I stepped away from Mrs Lottman and her dog, just in case one of the men got trigger-happy. The dog had done nothing wrong.

  ‘Don’t move!’ the man on the left shouted in Dutch. ‘Get down on your knees!’

  Was this Lottman’s security team, diverted by my wife on the night of the Energy Summit?

  Only, my wife hadn’t diverted them. Lottman himself had done that. I’ve asked our security people to send a car around to your houseboat, he’d told me.

  ‘Get down on your knees!’ the other man echoed, the bill of his black cap pulled down over his eyes, the gun’s muzzle trained on my torso. The dark dot lowered as I did what he said.

  No, these weren’t private-security individuals. They didn’t have the uniforms, the earpieces or the other giveaway gizmos that came with rent-a-cops.

  Once certain that I posed no immediate threat, they disarmed me and cuffed my hands roughly behind my back. Then they pulled me back upright and led me across the dunes, one walking behind me, the other leading the way.

  I considered the last time I’d been arrested, and the speed with which it had unfolded; I recalled the official-looking Mercedes that had driven away through the gates of the Lottman residence, just moments before. Had Rem been in that car, looking out at me from behind those tinted rear windows? Had he alerted security, while being spirited away once the investigative focus had moved south?

  A black van came bouncing over the sand, its white halogen lights dipping and rising; it slowed as the sand deepened and then it stopped, engine idling.

  What else had Rem Lottman engineered?

  We made our way towards the black vehicle in single file. From behind me came the determined footfall of the gunman following us, as well as the indifferent boom and hiss of the waves…

  The side door of the van rattled open.

  ‘Nice of you gentlemen to offer me a ride,’ I said, as my head was forced down and I was bundled into the back.

  There were grooved metal benches down both sides of the interior. Two big guys were sitting on one of them. They looked like secret service men.

  My hands were re-cuffed in front of me so that the men could see them, and then the door slid shut and someone thumped the side of the van. My eyes adjusted; it wasn’t total darkness – there was a smoked Perspex window in the roof, like a dim skylight.

  The men looked at one another silently as the wheels spun in the sand – would they need to get out and push?

  Finally, the van found purchase and we lurched forward.

  At all times, one of the men was looking at me. It impressed me how they knew to alternate, their eyes bright in the purple-grey gloom.

  ‘Where are we going?’ I asked vainly.

  Not back to Leiden, I grasped, after we’d been travelling for a while at speed. My inbuilt compass told me that we were heading south, though. The traffic sounds suggested a motorway.

  I had the sense of other vehicles joining us, forming a cavalcade; red and blue flickered through the crack in the side door panel. I stifled a belch, a nauseous taste rising up my throat. Had the Lottman family delivered me into longer-term captivity?

  Lottman would certainly know how to do that, and more besides. How to create investigative chaos between the Dutch and Belgian police… How to make his mother protective, complicit… How to manipulate his girlfriend, who’d temporarily engaged with me merely to ensure that the pistes truly were brouilléd?

  You artful bastard, I thought, as the flickering grew brighter; we were slowing through a short tunnel or an archway. The side door rattled open and in flooded light. We were in The Hague all right, but not at any prison.

  Rather, at the heart of government.

  Alighting from the Mercedes in front of us was Muriel Crutzen.

  *

  The energy minister’s office, on the top floor of 73 Bezuidenhoutseweg, was a light, modern space – open for business, it seemed to announce to visitors.

  ‘Nice digs,’ I said. Light reflected warmly off the wooden floors and bookcases. With us were one of the secret service agents and a tall young man in a suit who I took to be an adviser of hers.

  Crutzen was harder and more compact in person than on TV – like a tightly coiled spring, barely able to contain her energy and determination. Everything about her connoted ruthless competence.

  ‘I’ll get straight to the point,’ she said.

  ‘Please do.’

  She paused, surprised by my words. ‘Rem has gone, for reasons you appear to understand.’

  ‘Could we just test that hypothesis?’

  ‘Please, you know better than anyone about the scheme he was running.’

  ‘He?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said sharply. ‘Not us. He.’

  She paused again, letting that distinction sink in.

  ‘You’re the one who challenged him about it.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I conceded. ‘But why did he take off so suddenly? The last time I spoke with him, he was talking about an internal enquiry. Something changed. What?’

  Her features altered, turning reflective. ‘We’re still trying to piece together exactly what happened.’

  ‘You’re still saying in public that he was kidnapped?’

  ‘We’re still trying to piece together exactly what happened,’ she repeated.

  Perhaps if the adviser wasn’t in the room we’d be having a different conversation; I looked at him pointedly, but he didn’t take the hint.

  ‘Maarten,’ she said, ‘please could you check on that meeting.’

  I waited for Maarten to run along. There was only the secret service man, Crutzen and myself left now. Once the heavy doors closed I said, ‘What was the sequence of events here, minister? When I saw Rem at the Energy Summit, he asked me to lead an internal enquiry.’

  Same night as the battle in the harbour.

  I thought too about the painting – the Verspronck that had sent me up to Norway. It had been stolen and apparently lost aboard Hals’s burned-out ship, yet it was later discovered in a Schiphol storage locker. The connecting thread, I now saw, was no girl dressed in blue but rather…

  ‘Joost.’

  He’d jettisoned Bergveld and appointed a notorious defence attorney.

  You’re not privy to all the facts, he’d barked at me in the Holiday Inn, just a few hundred metres from where we now stood…

  What campaign had Joost been mounting against Lottman?

  Crutzen sighed, holding up a printed email. ‘The Amsterdam police commissioner has indeed been assiduous in his approaches to the various ministries: foreign affairs, security, justice… even interior and kingdom relations. Attempting to press forward with his own review concerning the unusual scheme set up with our oil-producing partners – a scheme that he claimed was Amsterdam-based.’

  I didn’t doubt that Joost had his own narrative worked out about the beaten-up Ukrainian escort and the painting and the Norwegian diplomat who’d died during its ‘recovery’ and… quite possibly many other things that I wasn’t even aware of.

  Crutzen pressed her lips firmly together before continuing.

  ‘The cabinet is united in its decision to treat this as a matter of national security. The Lottman file has been sealed.’

  I needed to think fast. Joost had made his move, and he’d misjudged it here in the big leagues.

  ‘Is Lottman alive?’ I sought confirmation.

  ‘We just don’t know. But if he is, there’s no way back for him. Rem’s prospectively up to his neck in scan
dal.’ She paused. ‘Perhaps it’s better now that the public believe him to be dead from a failed kidnapping.’

  I nodded. ‘You haven’t looked for him?’

  ‘Where would we start? Every country he dealt with could – in theory – have reason to offer him safe harbour.’

  It was true, I now saw. Freddy Brekhus’s contentedness up in Oslo. If there was one thing my Norway trip had shown me, it was that the Norwegians bore no grievances. The opposite, in fact. And then there was Captain NaTonga’s claims at the ICC about the payments to the Ghanaian government; Sheikh Yasan, too, flying off to Switzerland… None of the governments of these countries had reason to bear a grudge against Rem Lottman. Rather, each had been the beneficiary of his lavish generosity. A generosity that one of them was now repaying?

  ‘He could be anywhere,’ I acknowledged. A remote island off the Norwegian coast, a gated community in Abu Dhabi or some oil-rich African enclave…

  ‘There have been haphazard sightings from Lapland to Tanzania,’ Crutzen said, ‘but nothing concrete –’

  ‘Why Tanzania?’ I wondered aloud. ‘That’s the other side of Africa from Ghana.’

  She shrugged evasively. ‘Just intelligence chatter.’

  But nothing frivolous would ever come out of Muriel Crutzen’s mouth, I thought.

  ‘The fire down in Tilburg… are the teams there still looking for his DNA?’

  ‘Investigations are ongoing,’ she replied. ‘These things take time.’

  Especially with Dutch elections imminent and the polls narrowing. Lottman’s apparent death could only help the status quo. The shock of his passing would privilege the familiar. This was realpolitik all right.

  ‘Before disappearing, Lottman wrote me a classified memorandum.’ She picked up another sheet of paper. ‘He said that there was an ideal man to run any enquiry – a man who would understand things from all angles.’ She looked up at me.

  A warm sensation spread through my chest.

  ‘Rem’s judgement was clearly compromised in many respects,’ she went on, ‘but on this matter, I’m rather inclined to trust his views.’

  I shifted my weight from one foot to another. ‘Yet Lottman’s no longer with us.’

  ‘But Mrs Lottman very much is. And she happens to be persuaded of your investigative abilities as well, based on your rather… challenging conversation with her this morning.’

  So, Mrs Lottman was what Jan Hawinkels had claimed. Her fund-raising abilities shouldn’t be underestimated, the law professor had told me. Was she helping her son’s former party with their election efforts? I was starting to lose track of all the different arrangements and alliances.

  ‘That’s the deal we’ve worked out, anyway,’ Crutzen said.

  ‘What deal?’

  ‘For you to assume a role here in The Hague.’

  ‘What role?’

  ‘To be defined. No matter – we need you inside the tent, van der Pol.’

  I shook my head in disbelief. Was this really happening?

  ‘You’re central to the enquiry,’ she said. ‘Possibly you underestimate your power?’

  ‘Hardly, relative to yours.’ I laughed. ‘Do you use that line often?’

  She winked.

  The door swished open. Young Maarten stood there looking at her with eyebrows raised and a leather document wallet by his side.

  ‘Yes?’

  He walked over to her in his polished shoes and whispered something about the king.

  She nodded once.

  ‘Please wait here,’ she said, leaving me in the room.

  *

  With me was the secret service man, one of the two gunmen who’d accosted me on the beach. At least he’d taken his baseball cap off. He was smiling affably now, but stood beside the door, making it clear that I’d be staying put.

  I looked past him through the big windows at the treetops of the Haagsche Bos, fully in leaf. It reminded me of Brussels Park – the secrets that the famous square had refused to yield.

  Do things evolve?

  It’s funny: unlike some of my seafaring ancestors, I’ve never considered myself to be a mystical man, but sometimes I do wonder whether there is a certain karma at play in life, if I can call it that – a lesson that we’re intended to learn, at some point along the way. This was the second time a paternal figure had vanished on me.

  Dad was driven away in Cape Town, you see – his face hidden behind the smoked glass of a VW prison van. Manslaughter of someone on his boat in the merchant navy, the charges read. The details were never quite made clear to me.

  The charges were dropped, I learned, when I finally found the courage to enter the police station – only to be told that Dad had already left. ‘You must be young Henricus?’ the old custody sergeant had said in his Afrikaans accent. ‘Your dad’s somewhere else now, son. He’s someone else’s problem.’

  The sergeant had handed me a photo of him, from when Dad had been in his custody: my father holding a little tray of letters and numbers in front of his chest – his prison number. It was the last I ever saw of him. There was the occasional cryptic postcard, and then not even that.

  We’re all hostage to something.

  *

  Muriel Crutzen and young Maarten swept back into the room with fresh purpose. ‘I need to leave for an appointment with the prime minister, to brief His Majesty about the Lottman dossier. It’s one meeting I shouldn’t be late for.’

  ‘No,’ I agreed.

  ‘May I have your answer?’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘The role.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we define it a little?’

  ‘In time. Don’t worry, it will be acceptable in terms of rank and pay package.’

  ‘Could I at least run a move to The Hague by my wife?’

  Petra would be popping the champagne corks over this one. The Hague was a stone’s throw from her favourite cousin in Delft.

  ‘Briefly,’ Crutzen allowed.

  ‘I’d also like to take the family somewhere nice for a couple of weeks. Our holiday this week got interrupted…’

  Watching me intently, Crutzen nodded. ‘Perhaps it might help you to find the requisite’ – she sought the bon mot – ‘perspective.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said. ‘I’ve always wanted to go to Zanzibar, actually. It’s an interesting crossroads, that part of the world.’

  She shot me a quizzical look.

  Maarten was eying his watch anxiously. ‘We really need to go –’

  ‘Stay in touch,’ Muriel Crutzen instructed, hastily gathering up her papers.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I won’t disappear on you.’

  Night Market

  * * *

  Henk returns in Night Market, his toughest case yet. For updates about Daniel Pembrey’s next releases and other upcoming events, please sign up at www.danielpembrey.com or follow Daniel on Twitter @DPemb.

  And for the start of Night Market, read on…

  * * *

  1

  IF YOU GAZE INTO THE ABYSS…

  ‘Don’t go in there.’

  I was standing outside a set of double doors on the nineteenth floor of the Ministry for Security and Justice. The brown-carpeted anteroom was dim; much of it was in shadow. I’d been summoned for an after-hours meeting.

  ‘Not yet,’ the man added.

  He was the assistant to the justice minister.

  ‘What’s this about, anyway?’ I asked.

  ‘I’m unable to advise,’ he replied, his dark features dimly lit by his computer screen. The soft clacking of his keyboard resumed.

  I eyed my watch again. My wife was waiting back at our hotel to have dinner. Apparently, global security considerations no longer respected office hours.

  I paced over to the ta
ll windows. It was dark outside and The Hague’s skyline winked, orange and white. The westward panorama took in the twin white towers of the International Criminal Court and, far ahead, I could make out the inky darkness of the North Sea… landmarks in the case of Rem Lottman, the politician who’d been working for the energy minister, Muriel Crutzen. She’d encouraged me to consider a job here in The Hague. I still didn’t know exactly what it involved, but perhaps I was about to find out.

  I turned back to the assistant, about to say something, when the double doors to the ministerial office flew open and there he stood.

  ‘Henk,’ he said, appraising me. ‘Is it OK to call you Henk?’

  ‘Is it OK to call you Willem?’

  He smiled and stepped forward, shaking my hand firmly.

  Willem van der Steen was of medium height and a stocky build, with wiry grey hair. His white shirt was open at the neck; his sleeves were rolled up. He looked like he’d be a tough bastard in a fight.

  He was a vote winner, ‘strong on law and order in uncertain times’. ‘We Dutch remain liberal – within limits’ was another of his election slogans. He was known to be a copper’s friend. He’d started off in the force and gone on to run Southern Regions. In some ways he’d remained an old-fashioned bruiser – but now he was one with formidable powers.

  He released my hand and led me into his office. There was a pattern to the appearance of these ministers’ rooms, I was discovering: modern, workmanlike, unpretentious. In van der Steen’s case, I glimpsed an oil painting in the shadows: a marine vista, choppy seas. A ship sat in the centre, listing, valiantly holding its course.

  There was a circular glass table strewn with papers. A phone sat in the middle.

  ‘A conference call ran long. The Americans like to keep us late.’

  It begged questions that I couldn’t ask.

  ‘Drink?’ he asked, closing the door behind us.

  The offer surprised me.

  ‘Still or sparkling?’ he added, correcting my misapprehension.

  ‘Still.’

  He poured a glass for me, emptying a small bottle of water.

  ‘Please, take a seat.’