by Mark Hobson
After a few minutes they drew apart, both of them perhaps feeling better for the release of pent-up emotion. Kaatje held onto his hand. He sensed the act represented more than mere physical contact for her.
“Tell me. About everything. About what led you back there.”
Carefully, and leaving nothing out, Kaatje went over what had happened. She told him about her visit to the riding school off Vondelstraat, her talk with Madame Benoit and what she had discovered about Nina’s friend, the tragic accident involving the horse. The link with the clinic, where Elena had been treated, the surgery carried out by Doctor Bakker, and then Elena’s subsequent suicide. And finally of her return trip to Osdorp and the horror she had endured there.
“Did you find Visser?” she asked nervously when she was done.
Pieter thought it wise not to tell her about what he had discovered there, the files in Visser’s office, the ward full of patients with no eyes. She had been through enough already.
“We’re still looking for him,” he replied. “There’s a police officer right outside your room. No way will he come here.”
She nodded, and her nails dug into his hand.
“Elena’s the link, Pieter. Find the link and you’ll find Nina.”
Back out in the corridor, Pieter was surprised to find Commissaris Huijbers waiting for him at this hour on a Saturday night. Even more surprising, his superior was sitting in a chair and leaning forward with his forearms over his knees, staring at the floor and looking very subdued.
Further along the corridor, a uniformed officer stood with his back to the wall, his eyes fixed straight ahead, not quite sure what to make of the scene.
On spotting Pieter, Huijbers came wearily to his feet. His face was etched with lines, and he looked at Pieter searchingly.
“How’s she doing?” he asked quietly.
Pieter wanted to punch him in the face.
But he felt tired to the bone. His mind was still jumpy from the fight at the clinic, he couldn’t stop himself from seeing Kaatje lying in the snow outside his house with her eyes burned away, and the thought of Lotte being behind all of this sickened him. So he slumped against the wall and leaned his head back, looking up at the overhead lights. He blew out between his cheeks.
“She’s a strong one, that Groot,” Huijbers was saying, like he knew anything about her. “But we’ll be there for her every step of the way during her recovery. We’ll take care of her financially going forward, her medical bills will be paid even though technically she was off duty when it happened. I’m even thinking of recommending her for some kind of bravery award. Yes, she’s a fine example of Dutch Law Enforcement, someone for others to emulate. Perhaps, when she’s back on her feet, we could find a role for her in helping to recruit young volunteers, especially in the schools. Get the kids interested in joining up, that kind of thing.”
“We wouldn’t want to miss an opportunity like this would we?” Pieter mumbled.
Huijbers’ face went bright red, and he looked visibly uncomfortable.
“Of course that’s way into the future,” he stressed. “The immediate priority is to offer her as much support as we can.”
Huijbers took off his hat and dropped it onto his chair.
“Look Van Dijk,” he continued, “I know I can be a bastard at times. It comes with the job. I’m not here to be popular or anything, to chew the fat with the lads and lasses in the ranks, have a beer with them in a Brown Café. As the Police Chief, I have to build a wall between myself and you guys. I was a rookie once myself, just like she is, and I know how it works. The big chief has to act differently because he is different, and that’s how it’s always been. But…” and he softened his voice here… “this has come as a complete shock to us all. I’m not a heartless man, I have a daughter myself around about the same age as Officer Groot –“
“She’s called Kaatje.”
“What? Yes, Kaatje. Look, what I’m saying is that I want to catch these guys just as much as you. Especially that lunatic Visser and that crazy woman, Janssen. This is the opportunity we’ve been waiting for, to bring her in. Now that she has reared her ugly head we can’t let this chance go to waste. If only for Kaatje’s sake.”
Pieter pushed himself off the wall and rubbed his face, the skin on his hand scraping against his three-day stubble. Huijber’s words were like an annoying bee buzzing around, his voice going in one ear and out of the other.
“Has anything been seen of Visser yet? he asked. “He wasn’t at the clinic, just those loonies who attacked me. He must have gone somewhere after he left Kaatje outside my house.”
“Nothing yet. He’s gone to ground somewhere. But he’ll turn up, and the patients who he was carrying out his crazy fucking experiments on, which makes no sense to me. People with no eyes! I wouldn’t have believed it if I hadn’t seen those dead ones for myself. Yes, it’s only a matter of time until we find him. We’ve flooded the whole area with officers so he won’t get far.”
Huijbers paused just then, and Pieter glanced over. He was looking at the door to Kaatje’s room, his mouth working away silently, and when he turned to face Pieter again, a steely determination had hardened his eyes.
“We’ll get them, Pieter,” he whispered with real meaning. “We’ll get the fuckers who did that to her.”
On his way down in the elevator Pieter found a number for Madame Benoit, the Centre Manager at the Hollandsche Manege Riding School, and despite the late hour, he rang her.
He told her he wanted as much information as possible about the stable girl Elena.
Chapter 15
The Smell of the Sea
Elena Vinke.
That was the name Madame Benoit had given him. Pieter ran it through the system at work the following morning, even though it was a Sunday.
Elena was just two months short of her sixteenth birthday and working as one of the stable hands on the weekends and during the school holidays when the accident happened. Her parents were now separated and waiting for a divorce, the tragedy having driven an irreparable wedge between them. There wasn’t much on the father, but her mother was still living in the family home with her new boyfriend, and so Pieter had phoned to arrange a visit for later that morning.
Saskia Vinke was a very tall woman in her mid-thirties, with a blonde bob and ice-blue eyes, her glamorous features marred by a down-turned little mouth and worry lines radiating from her temples. She greeted Pieter pleasantly enough, but he could feel the grief was there just below the surface, a year after the death of her daughter.
She and her new man lived just around the corner from the Albert Cuyp Street Market in the De Pijp district of Amsterdam. She led him into the small kitchen and poured him a very strong coffee, telling him her boyfriend had popped out to allow them to talk freely. She sat opposite him across the narrow kitchen bar, holding her mug with both hands to warm them. It was cold, with the heating turned down, and there was a pile of dirty dishes in the sink, and from somewhere in the basement came the sound of a spin-dryer vibrating at full speed.
“You’ve caught me at a bad time, so please excuse the mess. Sundays are always a day for catching up on the housework.”
Pieter brushed away her concerns with a casual flick of his hand. He sipped at his coffee, his eyes glancing through the door to the living room and seeing the framed pictures on the wall of a young teenage girl, smiling and laughing and surrounded by autumnal trees.
“Do you mind if I smoke? I normally only do so outside, but your phone call this morning took me unawares, and I find it easier to talk if I can smoke. It settles my nerves.”
Pieter smiled and nodded and watched as she lit a cigarette, her hands visibly shaking.
Saskia blew smoke up at the ceiling and gave an exaggerated shudder of her shoulders. “That’s better,” she laughed nervously.
Crossing her legs, she put her elbow on the counter, holding the cigarette upright.
“I’m assuming you’re here because of
Elena?”
“Yes.”
“You’re one of the few people to have come around since it happened. We don’t get many visitors and those who do bother calling tend to want to talk about other things, anything other than about Elena. It’s understandable I suppose. It probably makes them feel uncomfortable, wondering if I’m going to break down and fling myself on the floor. But it is nice of you to come, even if it’s only for official reasons.”
Pieter looked at her and she cast her gaze away, and she drew hard on the cigarette.
“What is it you want to know?”
“Tell me about your daughter, about the accident.”
“Where do I begin? It was a day just like any other, a sunny morning just over a year ago. A sunny Saturday morning, cold and crisp and clear. The riders had taken the horses across to the park to ride along the track that they have there, they do that whenever the weather is good. It’s something they’ve done a hundred times before. Elena, with the other stable hands, waited back at the riding school as normal.
Sometimes the horses can be very frisky and excited when they come back from the park. That’s nothing out of the ordinary, and so it was that day. The girls came back, with Nina Bakker amongst them, and went into the stables, and Elena was helping to remove the saddle and so on when, out of the blue, the horse Nina had been riding suddenly kicked out with its hind leg. Elena just happened to be bending over at the time and the hoof caught her right in the eye, just here.”
Saskia tapped at her brow just above her right eye with the hand holding the cigarette.
“Pop, right into the socket apparently. There was a lot of blood, and the girls were screaming they say, the staff running around in a complete panic, and somebody called for an ambulance and then they called me. I was working at the time – I work part-time in a café on Waterlooplein – but I dashed straight over to the hospital and Tobias was just arriving at the same time-“
“Tobias?”
“My ex-husband. Anyway, we went in to see Elena and, thank-the-Lord, it didn’t seem too bad at first. She was sitting up in bed quite enjoying all of the attention, with her eye all bloodshot and her socket all swollen up, but the damage seemed fairly superficial. She had a detached retina and mild concussion, but considering how bad it first appeared, she seemed to have got off quite lightly. They kept her in for a few days and decided she should have a minor operation, a routine procedure. They suggested we have it done out at the new eye clinic in Osdorp, you know the one?”
Pieter nodded. “Yes, I’ve heard of it.”
Saskia went on.
“Anyway, they booked her in and they did the op later the following week. Doctor Bakker carried out the procedure and it should have been a very straightforward thing, no more than an hour and she’d be able to come home the next day. But they experienced some unexpected complications, and one hour became two or three, and me and Tobias were waiting in the reception area and the girl behind the desk would come over and give us updates from time to time. Five hours went by, and God knows what was going on, but finally Doctor Bakker himself appeared some eight hours after the operation began, and we knew straight away from the look on his face that something was wrong. He was very pale and he couldn’t stop wringing his hands.
‘How’s my Elena?’ I asked. ‘Is she alright, can we see her?’ I was a bit panicky because he looked so grave, but he quickly informed us that Elena was doing alright, she was just coming around from the anaesthetic, which I can tell you came as a huge relief. But then... well, then he explained that sadly they had not achieved the results they had hoped for.
He told us quite straightforwardly that Elena had permanently lost the sight in her right eye, the one which the horse had kicked, but in addition the sight in her left eye would be severely impaired as well, perhaps down to just twenty percent of normal vision. The damage, he told us, and he was quite distraught himself, the damage would be permanent.”
Saskia rose from her stool and went to lean against the door-jam leading to the living room, her gaze fixed on the photos of her daughter.
“We couldn’t understand it. What had gone wrong? She only had a detached retina, but she came back out virtually blind and with a life-long disability. We brought her straight home, but Tobias was furious. He stewed on it for weeks, brewing and getting himself all worked up, threatening lawsuits even though we had signed a consent form. He blamed Doctor Bakker, threatened to have his medical licence revoked, calling him at all hours and saying he had destroyed Elena’s life, all of our lives, which he had. It all became too much, all I wanted was to help Elena, but instead Tobias wouldn’t let it go.”
Pieter said nothing, thinking about the death threats the Bakkers had received, the handwritten message, which had suddenly ceased around about three months ago.
“I was sure he would eventually, over time, just come to accept it. But when Tobias gets worked up over something it’s hard to get through to him. Normally he is the sweetest person in the world, he was a kind husband and he loved Elena with every fibre in his body; a gentle soul. But he has had a few issues during his life, stemming from his childhood. Nothing major, but just sometimes he can have fits of temper, and he can fly off in one of his rages. I think he was very sad as a little boy, and he never really dealt with that.”
“Did he ever seek help? Both before Elena’s operation, and afterwards to help deal with it?”
“Tobias? God no! He was old-fashioned I’m afraid, he always thought people should sort out their problems themselves, keep things private.”
“Was he ever violent? When he lost his temper?”
Saskia emphatically shook her head. “Never. No, he could rant and rage and turn the air blue, but he never ever raised his hand to me or to Elena. As I say, he may have had a few issues, but he most definitely wasn’t a violent man. But his behaviour over Doctor Bakker – and, by the way, I think Doctor Bakker was genuinely remorseful, devastated over what happened to our Elena, and so too was Elena’s friend, Nina Bakker, she was inconsolable by all accounts – anyway, the way Tobias was over the whole thing started to have a serious effect on Elena. She was already at the lowest point in her life and having to deal with her new disability, but her father’s behaviour made her much much worse. She was at such a low ebb that she was prescribed anti-depressants. But none of us for one minute knew what was to happen next.”
Saskia slipped into a drawn-out silence, the cigarette in her hand going unsmoked. Pieter watched ash fall silently onto the floor.
“Pardon me for asking, Mrs Vinke, but the eye clinic out at Osdorp is quite an exclusive place. Certainly not cheap. I’m just wondering…”
“How we could have afforded it?” She smiled sadly.
Pieter waited.
“Tobias liked to tell everybody that he had really good medical insurance. Which was ridiculous. We weren’t exactly a well-off family, not from my part-time job and his intermittent work. But Tobias is a proud man, and so that’s what he told people. The truth is that we have Nina Bakker to thank – wrong word, probably – we have little Nina to thank for getting Elena into the clinic.”
“How so?”
“She felt so bad over the accident, she unfairly blamed herself for what had happened with the horse, that to make amends she persuaded her father Doctor Bakker to perform the surgery free of charge. And considering how that turned out, it left Nina shouldering even more guilt.”
“You say your ex-husband blamed Bakker for what happened? Did he ever blame Nina as well?”
Saskia swivelled her head and looked at him in surprise, as though the thought had never occurred to her before. She considered the possibility briefly, and then just shrugged her shoulders.
“I know what you’re thinking Inspector,” she told him quietly. “As soon as I heard about what happened to Doctor Bakker and his wife, and the announcement about Nina’s abduction, it crossed my mind too. Would Tobias do something like that? I asked myself. Is he capable, the ma
n I was married to for all of those years?”
Again, after a pause, she just shrugged.
Walking back over to the counter, she dropped the cigarette into her coffee mug. Pieter heard it sizzle.
“I’ll take you upstairs, to Elena’s bedroom. That’s where she killed herself.”
They were standing in the small bedroom, which had been cleared of all furniture and was spotlessly clean. No signs of the daughter remained anywhere up here.
Saskia had closed the door behind them, and she pointed up at a clothes hook on the back.
“That’s where we found her, two days after her sixteenth birthday,” she told him in a flat voice. “She’d hung herself with the cord from her dressing gown.”
Pieter felt his mouth go dry, and he stared at the hook because he didn’t know where else to look.
“It was just before breakfast. I came upstairs to help her as usual, and I came in, and there she was. She’d been dead for several hours so the assumption was that she took her own life shortly after we all went to bed the night before. The weird thing was that during the previous evening Elena had been feeling more positive, the best she’d been since the operation. She actually spent some time sitting with us downstairs, cuddled up on the couch with me and Tobias watching the TV. Which is stupid, as she could barely see anything, never mind the television – silly, right?”
Saskia went back outside and waited for him on the landing.
Pieter re-joined her.
“Me and Tobias separated a month or so later, just after the New Year.”
“Do you know if he continued to have any contact with Doctor Bakker? After you split up?”
“I’ve no idea. We hardly speak. I guess it’s possible.”
“What does he do for a living? You said downstairs that he worked intermittently.”