A State Of Sin Amsterdam Occult Series Book Two

by Mark Hobson

  Some movement in his peripheral vision made Pieter look over to his left, and with a feeling of horror he saw a second stream of people pouring around the corner of the building where it jutted out towards the frozen boating lake. He could see them quite clearly in the moonlight, dashing over the edge of the water, their feet crunching through the thin ice near the shore. They must have found another way out on that side.

  As he ran, he watched the running figures switch direction and come charging up the grass embankment. They were trying to cut him off, to reach the car park before he had a chance to get to his car, and at the speed they were moving they would win the race. Again he was amazed and baffled at their speed, their uncanny ability to know where he was.

  Pieter raised his gun again, aiming in the general direction of this second group, and fired three rapid shots. All three missed their targets because of his unsteady arm, but it was enough to make them duck and cringe back for a few seconds, which was all he needed. Then Pieter was at his car, yanking open the door and diving into the driver’s seat, and then slamming it shut.

  Not a moment too soon. The two groups of patients reached his car together and threw themselves at the doors and windows, banging with their fists against the bodywork and glass. One man even jumped on the front of the car and pressed his pale face against the windscreen, gazing in with his eyeless face, his mouth stretched open wide.

  Pieter turned the ignition and gunned the engine, then throwing it into gear, he stamped down on the accelerator and the car screeched away, fish-tailing through the slippery snow.

  Most of those crowding around his car pulled clear or were pushed away by the car itself. All except the man on the bonnet, who clung stubbornly on even as Pieter skidded across the car park. Pieter looked at him through the glass and he could hear somebody shouting at the top of their voice, before he realized it was his own voice he could hear, yelling and babbling. He was on the point of losing all reasoning, had never felt such perfect fear in his life, and he wondered if the nightmare would ever end.

  The terror fuelled his anger and he snapped the steering wheel hard towards the exit leading on to the main road. The sudden jolt made the man outside lose his grip, and then he was sliding away over the front of the bonnet.

  Pieter had one last glimpse of his face as he disappeared from view. There was a double bump as the front and rear tyres ran right over the man. Then he was clear, the car shooting out of the car park, wheels spinning to gain a purchase on the snow.

  Pieter was still shouting, and tears were coursing down his face, and he was thumping the steering wheel in triumph.

  Chapter 14

  Mr Trinh

  You shouldn’t have come here,” Lotte told Julian Visser.

  He stood shivering in the hallway to her apartment, with small heaps of snow on the hood and shoulders of his overcoat, a puddle of water already forming around his feet. Through the open doorway behind him, thick white flakes came tumbling out of the black sky, covering the courtyard.

  “I had nowhere else to go,” Visser replied apologetically. “We had no choice but to abandon the clinic after the girl started poking around. The place will be swarming with police by now, the same with my home.”

  Lotte stared at him for a moment, letting him shiver in the cold blast of air blowing in.

  “But you were supposed to get out of the city after dumping the girl. Get on a flight out of Schiphol, any flight. That was the arrangement.”

  “The airport is shut because of the weather,” Visser mumbled weakly, shrugging and looking all wet and pathetic.

  Lotte sighed. “Very well. You’re here now, so you’d better come in.” She stood to one side and he went through into the passage, shrugging off his coat and hanging it on a rack as he went. She closed the front door with a thud.

  “Thank you. I’m sorry about this, but things happened so quickly that I didn’t know what to do for the best.”

  Lotte smiled warmly and shook her head.

  “Don’t worry about it. Look, why don’t you run yourself a hot bath while I find you a change of clothes and fix you a drink.”

  Visser smiled back, the tenseness visibly leaving him. His beady little eyes ran back and forth over her face, and then dipped quickly to the top of her shirt where it was unbuttoned. When he looked back up, her smile had gone, replaced by a blank expression and a straight little mouth.

  “Ah right, yes, of course.” Visser disappeared down the hallway.

  Once he had gone Lotte turned and went back into her study, where she had been talking with her uncle before the knock on the door had interrupted them.

  Johan Roost looked up as she entered. He was sitting at the table. He’d spread out some old newspapers and was cleaning the AX338 Sniper Rifle, rubbing the barrel with an oily rag.

  He saw from Lotte’s expression that something was wrong and he paused briefly with his task.

  “The idiot!” Lotte said harshly. “What the hell is he thinking coming here?”

  Johan grunted, and went back to his task.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. Just that I did warn you he was the weak link. That if things became difficult, then it wouldn’t take much for him to crack.”

  “But nothing bad has happened. Everything is going exactly as I anticipated… well mostly. And anyway, wasn’t it Tobias who you had concerns about?”

  She was venting her frustration on her Uncle, which was unfair she knew, but she did it nonetheless.

  “Him as well. The more people who are involved, the more chances there are for something to go wrong.”

  “A bit of gratitude from him wouldn’t go amiss. I provided him with the money for the clinic, and supplied him with his volunteers for his crazy experiments. All he had to do in return was give us Nina Bakker.”

  Johan raised one eyebrow, thinking to himself that his understanding of the word ‘volunteer’ must be different from hers. But he didn’t say this to her. Instead he asked: “Do you want me to tidy this mess up?”

  Lotte looked at him. “What? No, it’s too risky. If anybody linked you with Visser.” She didn’t finish the sentence.

  Somewhere, they heard the sound of a tap running, then splashing water.

  “I’ll deal with it,” she told him.

  She moved across the room and picked her mobile up off the coffee table. Quickly tapping in a number, she waited while the line rang at the other end. Somebody answered.

  “Mr Trinh? It’s me. I’m in need of your services.”

  Mr Trinh arrived thirty minutes later, looking all dapper as usual in his long, grey trench coat and black trilby hat, glasses perched on the end of his nose.

  Mr Trinh never spoke much. He wasn’t one for pleasantries or small talk. His line of work didn’t call for friendly chats over a coffee. He didn’t even like to use first names. If possible, he preferred to arrive, complete the required task, and leave with the merchandise as quickly as can be, uttering as few words as he could.

  Knowing how discreet Mr Trinh was, Lotte put up with his small oddities.

  She let him in and pointed to the bathroom door at the end of the long passageway.

  “He’s been taking a bath. He’s just getting dressed”

  “Still alive?” Mr Trinh enquired, the tiniest of inflections in his voice giving away his surprise.

  “Yes. I didn’t want to get my hands messy.”

  With a curt nod, he went down the passage. Lotte watched him pause briefly outside the bathroom and remove a tiny scalpel from his coat pocket, and then she went back into the study, shutting the door.

  A few minutes later, she and Johan heard the front door close.

  Mr Trinh and Julian Visser were gone.

  Amsterdam’s small Chinatown district was centred on Zeedijk, the narrow and busy road that followed the course of the old 16th century sea dyke. Originally part of the Nautical Quarter and lined with notorious taverns and brothels, during the 1960’
s it became the hangout for junkies and dealers, a district riddled with crime and a no-go area for locals and tourists alike. However during the ’90’s the city council made efforts to ‘trendify’ the place, pushing the lowlife back into the red light district to the west, and offering tax breaks to any individuals willing to set up legitimate businesses there. The result was a flourishing area crammed with Chinese, Indonesian and Vietnamese shops and restaurants. The place cleaned up its act and the tourists flocked back in.

  Yet like all such places, it could not quite escape its dark past.

  Just behind the Toko Dun Yong supermarket was a long and shadowy street snaking off Zeedijk. It led to a tiny little doorway with peeling green paint. Set in the wall at the side of the door was a discoloured sign: Loon Fung Meat Processing Plant.

  Mr Trinh reversed his small white van up the side-street until the rear door was almost flush with the green door, leaving just enough room for him to squeeze by but blocking off the view from any prying eyes. Taking a bunch of keys from the glove compartment he climbed out and unlocked the green door. Just inside was a wheeled sack cart. Taking it outside, he pushed up the rolling door at the rear of his van. Lying on the bed of the van, trussed up with cable ties, was the body of Julian Visser, with the gaping wound in its neck grinning at him like a second mouth.

  Manhandling the corpse out of the back of the van and onto the sack cart, he turned and wheeled it back inside the meat processing plant, and after locking the door behind him and flicking a light switch on the wall, pushed it down the short hallway and through the heavy plastic curtain at the end.

  On the other side was a square and windowless room. The floor was of bare concrete with several drainage gullies set in the centre, while over to the left was a large wooden cutting table normally used for butchering animal carcasses. A row of metal hooks hung from the ceiling on a racking system. Opposite the table were a pair of large stainless-steel machines with wide chutes on the top: one was for processing raw meat, the other was a bone grinder. In the corner was a door with a small wheel handle on the front – this was a walk-in refrigerator.

  Mr Trinh removed his hat and coat and hung them on a hook just beside the plastic curtain. Then he slipped off his expensive shoes. He reached for a heavy-duty butcher’s apron and a pair of plastic wellington boots and gloves and put them on, followed by a plastic face-screen. Thus attired, he wheeled the corpse over to the cutting table and dragged it up onto the wooden top. Then he removed Visser’s clothes, folding them neatly and placing them on a counter.

  Hanging on the wall within easy reach were a set of butcher’s tools, saws, bone cutters, meat cleavers, knives and so on, and he studied them for a moment, deciding which to use. Choosing one of the bigger cleavers he set to work, first removing the corpse’s hands and feet with single cuts. These he plopped into the meat processor.

  Next, he carefully sawed through the top of the head to remove a semi-circular section of the skull. Using a long knife from the set of tools he cut through the brain stem – an awkward task that required reaching deep into the skull and twisting the soft and squishy organ until it came free. He carried the brain over to the processor – lots of nourishment here, he thought in a rare moment of light-relief, as he dropped it into the chute.

  Back at the chopping block, he applied the same knife to slice through Visser’s chest. Using an electric sternal saw to cut through the sternum, and a pair of long-handled bone shears to cut through the ribs, he worked diligently until the torso was fully opened up, which allowed him access to the internal organs. These he removed one by one, applying his basic anatomical knowledge gained through practice. These too went into the meat processor.

  Going back to the corpse, which now had a fully-scooped out cavity in the torso, he methodically commenced to cut away the bones, snapping through the ribs and vertebrae with the shears, and moving on to the legs and arms and doing likewise, carefully dissecting the skeleton one piece at a time. The bones went into the second machine, the bone grinder, to be powdered up and turned into fertilizer for people’s gardens and allotments. The skull went in last.

  When he was done Mr Trinh switched on the machines. There was a loud hum, followed by the ratcheting sound of gears cutting and crunching through the meat and bones, the stainless-steel machinery shaking and grinding as they worked away, to reduce the butchered remains into tiny pieces of processed meat and ground-up bone meal.

  At the base of each machine a narrow rubber funnel fed the contents into a pair of steel tubs, and Mr Trinh watched them steadily fill to the brim. The machines kicked off automatically, and two lids were stamped and sealed into place over the tubs, and labels glued on the top with the barcodes marking the contents. One was labelled garden fertilizer, the other as pet food.

  Lifting them one at a time, he carried them over to the walk-in refrigerator, pushed them to the back amidst identical stacks of tubs, and shut the heavy door. They would eventually be repackaged and distributed throughout the city to end up on store shelves.

  All there was left to do was to steam clean the bench and floor and tools, wash down the apron and rubber gloves and boots, clean the visor with cleaning spray, and rinse out the machinery with water and filtered industrial-strength detergent.

  On his way out he gathered up the neatly folded clothes.

  Once laundered they would be as good as new. He would add them to his growing collection.

  Mr Trinh locked up and laughed gently to himself.

  “Hehehehehe.”

  ◆◆◆

  It was late evening by the time Pieter reached the hospital. He asked to be directed to where Officer Groot was being kept, and was told she was on the second floor on the assessment ward and under observation, but the male admitting clerk pointed out in strong terms that visiting was not permitted this late. Pieter ignored him, and headed for the bank of elevators.

  Kaatje was in her own private room with a police guard outside. She lay in the bed, her eyes heavily bandaged, but still awake. She turned her head as he pushed through the door, and he saw her flinch and tense.

  “It’s me,” he whispered gently, and she relaxed back into her pillow.

  After his hair-raising escape from the clinic, he had immediately called in some back-up, and within minutes a police ERT team had arrived on the scene, sealing off the car park and throwing up roadblocks to divert traffic away from the area. Shortly after, a well-armed assault squad had made a forced entry into the building. Led by the reassuring figure of squad leader Dyatlov – who had worked with Pieter on the Werewolf case back in the spring – they searched the place room-by-room and corridor-by-corridor, scouring every inch of the clinic for any sign of the patients or staff. But apart from the bodies of those that Pieter had shot during his escape, there had been no sign of anyone. They had all melted away into the night, either into the streets or across the frozen pond towards the nature park. It was a bitterly cold night, with temperatures set to plummet well below freezing, and everybody mostly agreed that they would not last long, dressed as they were in flimsy pyjamas.

  Pieter wasn’t convinced. With Lotte involved, he knew this would not be a normal investigation. There would be aspects of this case that many of his colleagues would find so unusual, so out of their comfort zone, that many would dismiss as ridiculous, maybe the ramblings of a fraught and stressed out cop fresh back from mandatory sick leave, someone who was still so badly affected and traumatized that he probably should never have been allowed back at all. That’s what they would say, and Pieter could hardly blame them.

  Yet equally he sensed a realization from them, during the few moments he had spoken to them and explained the situation, that they had been presented with an opportunity to get Charlotte Janssen once and for all, to settle scores after the nightmare that had gripped Amsterdam during the spring. They were determined that this time she would not get away.

  Yet they must not forget about Nina Bakker, Pieter told himself.


  They could not afford to be distracted and focused only on finding Lotte, not when there was a frightened twelve year old girl still being held captive somewhere.

  Putting these concerns to one side for the moment Pieter turned his attention to Kaatje.

  Her face was turned towards him still. She was on very strong pain relief, and an operation was planned to see if anything could be done to save her eyesight, but he knew the prognosis was poor. He’d seen for himself the damage done to her eyes, and the shock and distress and worry must be eating away at her, and so he reached out and took her hand in his, giving her fingers a reassuring squeeze.

  “I’m sorry,” she said quietly, her chin trembling with barely-controlled emotion.

  “No, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have hung you out to dry yesterday, after Huijber’s threw you off the case. I should have spoken up for you more.”

  Kaatje gave a little shake of her head. “It wouldn’t have made any difference. I’d have still done the same thing. It’s stupid I know, but I was excited to be involved, to be helping with the case. I wanted to impress everyone. The rookie cop making the big breakthrough on a big profile case. Ah, what was I thinking? Call me an idiot if you like.”

  “Idiot.”

  They both laughed quietly.

  “I also wanted to impress you,” she mumbled, sounding like she was talking to herself.

  She pulled her hand free, and turned her bandaged face away in embarrassment.

  Sitting at the bedside, Pieter felt an odd sensation pass through him, and he found himself temporarily floundering for a response. His eyes suddenly felt all hot and prickly and he quickly rubbed at them, glad that Kaatje couldn’t see, which made him feel even worse.

  Who’s the idiot now? he thought to himself. He shook his head, but the peculiar feeling remained.

  He rubbed her bare forearm gently. “You certainly made a big impression,” and his voice was all wobbly.

  Suddenly Kaatje turned back and threw herself into his arms, taking him by surprise, but he instinctively hugged her tight as she shook and trembled, and Pieter bent low and kissed her bandaged eyes ever so gently, whispering quiet words of comfort, and feeling tears on his face but not caring anymore.