Little Sister

by David Hewson

  ‘What do you know?’ Mia asked. ‘About us?’

  ‘Enough,’ Vera said with a hard look on her craggy face. ‘You’re not the only ones it’s happened to, you know. Not by a long shot.’

  That was all she said but it was enough. When she finished her smoke she walked them round the corner to an ice-cream stall by the canal. Her footsteps weren’t quite as steady as they had been before. She sat on the wall over the water while the two of them licked their cornets, discussing whether they’d picked the right flavours.

  ‘Done?’ she asked, watching them demolish the last of the cones.

  Then she pulled out a clean tissue and wiped the traces of liquid ice cream from their mouths. They didn’t know whether to laugh or not.

  ‘Bloody hellfire,’ Vera moaned with a grim laugh, chucking the tissue into the grey canal. ‘What have I taken on here?’

  ‘Didn’t ask for this,’ Kim grumbled. ‘None of it.’

  ‘No.’ The Englishwoman seemed upset for some reason. ‘You didn’t. Life’s like that, girls. You don’t get what you ask for. You get what you’re given. Or what you take. If you’ve got the guts for it.’

  They wanted to ask her a question. Several. This seemed the right moment but before they had the chance she shooed them on. Close to the Flower Market, smelling the tulips from the stalls by the water, they stopped and listened to a tuneless, automatic carillon from the belfry of Munt Tower.

  The city was quite unlike the fairy-tale place they half-recalled from childhood. The noise was deafening, the crowds relentless. So many foreign voices and strange faces. Trams and cars and bikes coming from all directions.

  They didn’t know where they were going. What was expected of them. Where any of this led. After a while Kim stopped walking and went and sat on a wall amid a sea of bikes outside an imposing hotel overlooking the Keizersgracht canal. She was close to tears. Her sister joined her, leaned close, black hair against purple-red.

  The Englishwoman came and sat next to them. Mia and Kim were holding hands. She added hers. Old skin, leathery and wrinkled, against young, pale, unblemished. They could hear her asthmatic, wheezy breathing, the rattle of her lungs as if something was moving inside.

  ‘Not very good at this, am I?’ Vera said in a quiet, sad voice. ‘Sorry, loves. I am so sorry. I mean that. Like I said. We don’t get to choose what comes our way. Life’s what you make it. And if you don’t make it for yourself some other bugger comes along and makes it for you.’

  Mia took a deep breath and said, ‘Maybe we should go to the police. We don’t belong out here. They can put us somewhere . . .’

  Vera’s bright eyes flared with fury.

  ‘Don’t you dare say that! No one’s going to tell you where you do and don’t belong. Not me. Not anyone. I’m just helping you two get back on your feet. You’ll be there one day.’

  ‘But—’

  ‘You decide. When you’re ready. I’ll make sure of that.’ Her hands gripped both of theirs tightly. ‘I promise. I’m not a woman who breaks her word. God knows you can . . .’ Her foreign, smoke-stained voice was wavering. ‘You can say a lot about me but not that. Girls . . .’

  Tears then and they were hers. The sisters stared in amazement.

  ‘Just a couple of days. A couple of favours. That’s all that’s needed of you. Then we’re done. You can set things right. About your mum and dad. That’s what you want, isn’t it? That’s what Little Jo wants too.’

  ‘Little Jo’s dead,’ Mia whispered. ‘You said so.’

  Vera reached over and tapped her head gently, then did the same with Kim.

  ‘Not dead in there, is she? You hear her. As long you can do that a bit of her’s still alive.’

  They nodded then and didn’t say another word.

  A bus went past. A tram clanging its bell as if it were trying to warn the world about something coming round the corner. Finally a noisy dredger chugged up the canal then stopped to drop its claw-like bucket into the greasy water so unlike the fresh green channels back home. No one seemed to notice the three of them. That was one positive aspect of the city. They were invisible.

  The dredger came up with a black mangled bicycle in its jaws.

  ‘There,’ Vera said, pointing at the odd sight. ‘I’ll buy you a couple of bikes too. From that bloke on the boat. About as much as the likes of us can afford, eh?’

  Kim laughed out loud and so did Mia.

  ‘Good.’ Vera withdrew her hands and patted their knees. ‘Have you ever been to the pictures?’

  ‘The pictures?’ Kim asked.

  ‘The cinema. The movies.’

  Not since they were tiny, Mia told her. But they’d watched videos in Marken. The ones they were allowed, all seated together with the other inmates in the communal room.

  ‘That’s not going to the pictures,’ Vera said. ‘Look.’

  She pulled three tickets from her pocket. They were for a new animated movie about a family of meerkats. A kids’ movie, she said, but one that adults liked too. And since they were a bit of both she reckoned they’d love it.

  ‘The picture house is just down the road. We’ll watch a film. We’ll have a . . . a nice time together. After that . . .’

  Vera didn’t go on.

  ‘After that?’ Mia asked.

  The Englishwoman pulled out her phone, checked the message then showed it to them.

  A name: Gert Brugman. A mobile phone number. And an address.

  They couldn’t take their eyes off the text. The message said it was from Jo.

  ‘Some things we never get to understand,’ Vera said. ‘It’s best that way. You just do your duty and go about your business. OK?’

  ‘OK,’ they said in unison.

  18

  Three hours later, as the light began to fade over the Markermeer, Pieter Vos was watching the opening of a piece of theatre he knew only too well: the scene-shifting and preliminary stage directions of a murder investigation. Teams of white-suited technicians had assembled around Simon Klerk’s naked corpse, half-buried in the shingle and sand. The bite marks of Rex, the German shepherd, were dismissed as irrelevant. Even the most cursory of examinations revealed that. The nurse’s head was a bloody mess, so bad no one but the forensic people wanted to look at it. All the same there was a ritual dance to be had here, one he had to follow even though he hated every mesmerizing moment.

  A dead man, shot somewhere else, then taken to the remote shore in Marken. That process in itself remained a tantalizing mystery. The drive to the institution was secure. CCTV cameras covered the entrance and the area around the building. They had seemingly detected nothing suspicious since the Timmers sisters had been driven out of the place by Klerk twenty-four hours before.

  He watched the forensic team get ready to lift the bruised and blood-streaked corpse from the strand then walked off to the low green dyke that projected out into the lake towards Volendam. There’d be another two hours of work here before he could return to the city.

  By a spiky tussock of marram grass he stopped and called the Drie Vaten. The place didn’t sound busy. He heard a lively bark behind Sofia Albers’ voice. Sam, making a new friend. Playing a game. The dog lived in a heavenly world of his own, innocently unaware that within the next day, beyond the next corner, might lie something black and evil and shocking. Vos sometimes felt guilty about keeping him after going back to work in Marnixstraat. He loved Sam’s company. In a way it had helped him stay sane when he was alone, lost, out of the police, hiding from the world in his houseboat, amused by nothing but the terrier’s wild antics and fiery appetite for life. That was then. Now he was a brigadier with the police again and all too often it was Sofia who looked after Sam while running the busy cafe.

  ‘Work?’ she asked without the slightest side to her voice.

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You don’t need to apologize, Pieter. It’s the job you do. And this is mine.’

  The dog barked again. She called out to him t
o be quiet and got another bark in return.

  Vos heard her laughing and didn’t feel so guilty.

  ‘I should be back in a few hours. Still time to pick up Sam.’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I think . . . I think I may be busy over the next few days. I may have to lean on you more than usual. Even more . . .’

  ‘Oh for pity’s sake, Pieter! I ought to pay you for having Sam here. The customers love him. Everyone does. He almost makes up for the lousy beer.’

  ‘Your beer’s not lousy,’ he said, and meant it. ‘Nothing is. That’s why people come.’

  ‘Later,’ she said happily and then the line went dead.

  Van der Berg emerged from the trees with Bakker at his side. More forensic people were bringing in floodlights to deal with the scene after nightfall. The investigation was going the way of the technicians. Vos would leave that side of things to them. It took time. There was no rushing the process. He’d briefed the night team, asking them to look for somewhere Klerk might have been shot and to try to work out how his body got to the shoreline behind a well-guarded penal institution. Vos had his own ideas on that already.

  ‘Anything?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve been talking to the wife,’ Van der Berg said.

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘I’ve seen worse,’ the detective said with a shrug. ‘It’s not as if it’s just happened. She’s been going frantic all day. There’s nothing else I’ve got to ask there, Pieter. No point now.’

  Bakker was marching up and down the shingle, impatient. Vos watched her, wondering what was on her mind.

  ‘Let’s pick this up with the forensic reports in the morning,’ he said. ‘Eight thirty. We’ll see what the night team have come up with. There’s an alert out for the Timmers sisters. In the city. In Volendam and Waterland too. Maybe they came back after the bus. Who knows?’

  ‘I don’t see it,’ Bakker said in her flat northern tone.

  ‘Don’t see what?’ Van der Berg asked, interested as always.

  ‘Two kids who grew up in this place.’

  She nodded at the flat grey buildings behind. Lights on now. Veerman and Visser had taken the news of Klerk’s death badly. They knew the man and seemed to like him. The killing would throw a light on Marken too, one they wouldn’t welcome, Vos thought. They liked to keep their work and their patients out of sight.

  ‘I mean . . . it’s like a prison. How on earth could they get out of here and kill a man like that? With a gun? How?’

  Someone from the forensic team shouted. The body was coming out of the beach, lifted gently by six caring arms towards a black body bag next to a gurney. Vos closed his eyes. He could see this process in his head. The van. The morgue. The cabinet. The shining silver table for the pathologist. And somewhere down the line the paperwork for release to a grieving wife. Then a belated and unsatisfactory funeral.

  ‘Pieter . . .’ Laura Bakker said gently. ‘How can—’

  He was back with them in an instant.

  ‘The only way Simon Klerk could have been dumped here is by boat. I asked the uniform people to check the harbour here. It’s just half a kilometre away. Nothing moved there last night. So . . .’

  He pointed along the green dyke, across the lake.

  ‘I’m guessing someone took a small boat from over there. Near Volendam.’ There was a harbour in the town, a marina nearby. Any number of access points where someone could have launched a dinghy and taken it across the lake. ‘The night team are checking.’

  ‘Those girls couldn’t handle a boat,’ Bakker said.

  ‘I doubt it,’ he agreed. ‘We’ll pick this up in the morning.’

  Van der Berg mumbled something inaudible.

  ‘Speak up, Dirk,’ Bakker encouraged him.

  ‘I said . . . there’s more than one story here.’

  ‘That’s deep,’ she noted.

  ‘No it isn’t.’ He gave Vos a familiar look. ‘If we’re knocking off maybe there’s time for a glass or two?’

  ‘You two go off on your own,’ Vos said with a wan smile. ‘I’ll clear up here. See you in the morning.’

  She tried to argue. Van der Berg stopped her. Then they left.

  In the car Bakker said, ‘We could always go for a quick one in the Drie Vaten anyway. He looks like he needs company.’

  Van der Berg started the engine.

  ‘No he doesn’t.’

  She folded her long arms and stared at him. They all knew that look by now.

  ‘He worries me. When he’s like this.’

  Van der Berg turned and wagged a finger in her face.

  ‘We’ve been here before, Laura. That’s how he is. If you push him . . . if you get too close . . . it only gets worse. You know that. I know it too.’

  She stayed silent.

  ‘And the reason it pisses us both off,’ he added, ‘is we understand there’s absolutely nothing we can do about it. Now. I found this new place. They do Kwak on draught. Do you think you can manage to drink it this time without breaking anything?’

  Kwak was Belgian. They served it in a glass that was round at the bottom and had to be placed in a wooden stand to stay upright. She loved the beer, hated the way it was served. There’d been too many accidents with it before.

  ‘I don’t want Kwak,’ she said.

  ‘Then drink something else.’

  ‘Is there a bar in Amsterdam you haven’t taken me to?’

  ‘Yes,’ he insisted, starting the engine. ‘There is. There always will be.’

  19

  There was a picture on the wall of Gert Brugman’s living room. The Cupids twenty years before. He played bass with the band and sang, a tall smiling man in the photo, muscular bordering on corpulent with a friendly fisherman’s face and a mane of well-combed black hair.

  He didn’t look like that any more.

  Brugman lived in a first-floor apartment above a smart shop selling mushrooms, dope seed and other highs. It was a street behind the bustling tourist nexus of Muntplein. Not squalid. Not elegant either. He’d bought the place with the money they made from the last two albums. Brugman was born in Volendam and had once worked as a fisherman, something the publicists loved to push. Even before everything fell apart he was starting to grow weary of the place. Adulation was fine but in the town by the sea it could all get too close. Locals he hated patted him on the back and said, with a grin, the latest record was shit. Then he had to deal with the women. One-night stands were there aplenty but they weren’t so much fun when you kept seeing the discards every time you set foot out of the door.

  Not that women were a problem now. In the aftermath of the Timmers case he’d fled to the city – one bedroom, a window overlooking an alley. Six months later he’d had a stroke. Time had helped but he still walked with a noticeable limp. Beer and bad food had made him fat. His hair remained long but rarely combed, grey and thin. Brugman didn’t change clothes much unless he got a gig singing old songs in one of the Jordaan bars. The old bastard who ran the smart shop underneath owned the freehold to the building. And hated him. Like most of his neighbours who scuttled away the moment Brugman appeared.

  Lately he’d started to get letters from the building management promising the smart shop bastard would take legal action if he didn’t pay all his back maintenance fees. They could go hang. He didn’t have money to waste on that crap. The royalties from The Cupids had been locked up in legal disputes ever since Rogier Glas died and Frans Lambert vanished. They’d written the songs between them. He was just the singer so they took the lion’s share. Eight years before he’d nagged the lawyers and discovered something like three million euros in royalties was locked up in a legal thicket so complex Brugman couldn’t begin to understand it.

  That was when Jaap Blom, their manager, had pulled himself out of politics for an afternoon, turned up smiling, got Brugman stinking drunk and offered to buy him out of The Cupids entirely for a quarter of a million.

  It was a rip
-off. Everything to do with Blom was. But Gert Brugman needed money so he signed, took the cheque, banked some, invested the rest and hoped to live as best he could on the proceeds. Not long after the financial crisis hit. Most of the investments plummeted or vanished altogether. The interest on the remainder wasn’t enough to pay his bar bills. Brugman did what came naturally, dipped into the capital month after month. And now . . .

  Most of the memorabilia was gone already . . . the golden discs, the original outfits from the Eighties, the stupid glitzy crap Blom had forced on them in the Nineties when their popularity began to fade. All that was left was his instrument, a 1960 Fender Precision Bass he’d bought in New York when they were wealthy enough to record there.

  The thing had sat in its case for the last three years. He wasn’t sure he could remember any of the bass lines any more. They didn’t want that when he sang in the Jordaan. They just wanted to look at the last of The Cupids, Gert Brugman, a wreck of a man, reduced to singing cheesy folk songs for small change, strumming a cheap Korean electric guitar run through a puny battery-powered amp.

  He hadn’t let go of the bass out of pride. It was the last thing he had that connected him to the past. To the time when the three of them had been kings of Waterland. Of the Netherlands too for a while.

  Brugman rolled himself a cigarette, lit it, closed his eyes. Then he swore, walked over to the black flight case and lifted the lid.

  He blew the dust off the cherry red Fender, cradled it on his lap and felt his fingers struggle for the places they’d once found so easily. The strings were old and worn. He didn’t have a bass amp any more. So he just hugged the thing and tried to play a few notes with his fat, aching fingers.

  ‘This is shit,’ Brugman said, listening to the feeble rattle of the dead and dirty Ernie Ball strings.

  The sound was gone. The action was too low. Nothing worked. And he needed beer.

  He picked up his shopping bag and went downstairs.

  The narrow lane outside his house was deserted. Just two odd-looking kids, a girl with purple hair, another in black, fidgeting in ill-fitting clothes across from his front door.