A State Of Sin Amsterdam Occult Series Book Two

by Mark Hobson

  They were in the middle of moving home, having finally had enough of Amsterdam and its noise and congestion and general madness. The horror of the Werewolf case in the spring had been the final straw for Prisha. The personal toll it had extracted had almost sent her spiralling over the edge, and so at Rowan’s suggestion, she had decided to throw in the towel and take up the offer of a post as a lecturer at the University of Humanistic Studies in the city of Utrecht.

  She was due to quit her current job in about a month to start her new career in the New Year. Pieter would miss working with her, for the wealth of knowledge and experience she had amassed in the time she’d held the position of the Amsterdam Police Chief Pathologist was second to none. Therefore, Prisha had told him that he was welcome to phone her at any time should he need advice or help with his caseload going forward.

  At times like this, he envied her, wondering whether he should try and get out of the rat race himself. But he knew that was just a pipedream. Being a cop was all he understood, and the city – nasty and cruel as it was, a place that sucked the life from people like a leach draining someone’s blood – well, Amsterdam, its streets and its people, defined who he was. There was a phrase for it that only Amsterdammers used: City Junkie. That’s what he was. Hooked on the drug of this place.

  He lingered outside the door to Prisha’s office, hearing her soft voice.

  “Probably another four or five should do, the ones with the blue plastic lids. We can take them down during the week,” she was saying to Rowan. “Oh, and don’t forget to pick up the spare set of keys. Yes, I’ll try, we still have time on our lease. Bye-bye.” She finished the call and noticed Pieter lingering outside in the passage. She waved him in.

  The office was a mess, with files and papers covering every square inch of her desk as well as both chairs and the small camp bed that she kept in the corner for when she worked late – yet another reason for getting out, Pieter surmised. She wanted her life back.

  “This looks a bit crazy. You busy destroying documents before your successor takes over?”

  “Would be easier if I were. These are all old cases and reports, going back over the last twelve years. I’m trying to scan as many as possible and save them on my flash drive. Can you imagine, a whole career stored onto this?” She held up the tiny memory stick.

  “Is there a metaphor there?”

  “It’s the story of the last few months for me.” Prisha shook her head, looking at the mess around her. She reached for a pile of papers on the edge of the desk and dumped them onto the windowsill. “You can sit there,” she told him, pointing to the tiny space she had cleared. “But don’t touch anything on pain of death, OK?”

  Pieter perched himself down, keeping his hands in his pockets.

  “So how’s your, erm, your colleague? Officer Groot?” She’d nearly said girlfriend, Pieter noted.

  He shrugged. “We won’t know for a while, probably a few days until they know for sure if the damage is permanent. But whatever the outcome, we’ll make sure she gets all the help she can.”

  “We? Or you?” Prisha looked over the top of her glasses at him.

  Pieter raised his eyebrows.

  “Perhaps it’s just office gossip, but the rumour is that you and she are…” She left the rest of the sentence unfinished.

  “What? An item? It would be against policy to form a relationship with a fellow officer at the same station, you know that.”

  “Oh shut up! What rubbish.”

  “And a male senior officer and a young female rookie at that.”

  Pieter felt his face flush, but he was already thinking about Kaatje hopefully leaving the hospital soon. They had made arrangements for her to come and stay with him for a while, which wasn’t ideal with his place being a four-story townhouse with lots of narrow connecting staircases. But he had reassured her that really, he spent most of his time in the living areas on the top two floors, and he would be there to help her find her feet and to deal with her – temporary, remember? he’d stressed to Kaatje – to help her cope with her temporary eyesight loss.

  “You men,” Prisha jabbed her finger at him playfully and shook her head, “you’re all the same.”

  This brought him around to the real reason for his visit this morning.

  Pieter asked her about the patients from the eye clinic, the ones he had shot and those that had subsequently been found later. The people with their eyes removed.

  “We have ten dead ones so far, which include the three that you shot plus the one you ran over with your car. The others were found dead in various parts of the city, some by the police and some by members of the public. They had all frozen to death, which considering that they were dressed just in their flimsy nightclothes isn’t surprising. Two of them were fished out of the frozen lake next to the clinic.”

  Prisha frowned and crossed her arms.

  “Four have been found alive. Two males and two females. They were all in a terrible state by all accounts, wandering the streets, suffering from hyperthermia and of course unable to see anything. It’s a miracle that they survived at all. But then, everything about this is surreal.”

  She moved away so that he couldn’t see her face, and Pieter sensed her confusion and anxiety. Following on from events of several months ago this was the last thing she needed, another case that defied all logic. He was reluctant to press her on this, but he knew he had to have a few answers.

  “What ages were they? The ones they found alive?”

  “We don’t know for sure. Nobody knows who they even are. They have been questioned by your colleagues, and also by psychiatrists, but without much success. They have very little recollection of events, in fact they have barely spoken to us at all. Mostly they’ve been communicating by drawing sketches as speaking seems difficult for some reason. Other than informing us that they went to sleep as patients in the clinic and then woke up hours or days later, walking around the city confused and scared, they have no memory of what happened to them, or even know what their own names are. A real mystery.”

  “But they are all adults I take it? Because when I was there, inside that place, there was a young child. A boy aged about six years old. I caught a quick look at his file, but there was no name, just a photo of him. Patient 27, that’s how they referred to him. He was hurt during a fight, but not too badly, a bust nose. I just wondered if he has turned up.”

  Prisha was shaking her head, a sad frown marring her forehead.

  “No. All the ones we have found, those who died and those we have who are alive, are all adults. No children. Are you sure there was a child?”

  “Yes,” Pieter replied quietly, then added under his breath: “he was in the ward, in one of the beds, and he attacked me. But when I escaped I lost track of him. I just wondered that’s all.”

  He rubbed at his shoulder where the boy had bitten him, and he shut his mind to the memory.

  Sighing, he stood and stretched, the tension cramping the muscles there.

  “Somebody must know who they are. If they were patients in that place, there to have routine operations, then there must be some records, paperwork, that kind of thing.”

  He thought of Elena Vinke and the operation that had gone wrong.

  And Kaatje.

  They must all be connected, be a part of Julian Visser’s crazy plan. Patients he picked at random on whom to carry out his sick experiments. But to what end? What was he hoping to achieve? Was he hoping to make some brilliant medical breakthrough, and these unwitting people were the unfortunate ones that had suffered from his failed operations? Or was it simply the work of an unbalanced, mad doctor? And how was it all connected to Lotte? Was he just another pawn in her game? A means to an end to orchestrate a scenario from which Tobias Vinke would exact revenge by kidnapping the child of the prominent doctor who he blamed for killing his own daughter? Was it even Christiaan Bakker who had carried out the operation on Elena, or his assistant, Julian Visser?

  And
ultimately, was all of this a part of Lotte’s twisted plot of revenge against himself?

  There were just too many questions and not enough answers.

  One thing of which he was certain: Vinke had taken Nina Bakker. To replace his dead daughter.

  To find where Nina was, he needed to find out more about Tobias Vinke.

  He needed to go back to the beginning.

  Chapter 18

  Nature Versus Nurture – The Making of a Monster

  Pieter drove from the hospital to Waterlooplein. The Christmas Market they held here was only open on Fridays and Saturdays, and when all of the stalls and wooden huts were packed away the flat, open concrete space was dreary and windswept. However, just around the corner on Sint Antoniesluis and across the road from Coffeeshop Reefer, and overlooking the wide canal, was the small Café No 1, which was always busy seven days a week even during a bleak mid-winter like this one.

  It was squashed in between a second-hand record shop selling old vinyl 70’s disco classics, and a sprawling bookstore popular with students from the nearby University, and so the café tended to attract a young, hip crowd who liked to lounge on the beanbags inside. Outside, on the pavement, a more sedate clientele preferred to sit under the large green awning, warmed by the overhead heaters.

  He’d decided to pop over unannounced to see Vinke’s ex-wife again, rather than phone ahead. He also thought that confronting her – if that was the right word – at work instead of in the safe environment of her own home might pay dividends. Sometimes it paid to catch people on the hop, to shake them out of their comfort zone. Not that she was a suspect or anything, it was just that this way could often have better results. It made people open up more.

  That was the theory anyway.

  He walked in through the main doors and instantly saw Saskia Vinke over near the counter loading up a tray with an order of Lattes and Café au Lait. She turned to walk across the wooden floor, and when she saw him she faltered slightly mid-stride. Quickly recovering, she gave him a weak smile, and then continued over to a corner table to deposit the drinks to her customers.

  She came back over, the tray held at her side, the other hand in the front pouch of her small apron.

  “Can we talk?”

  She gave another of her non-committal little shrugs.

  “In private would be best,” he persisted.

  “I’ll ask my boss if I can take my break.”

  Her boss, a tiny man with a head full of hair cream, said something in Greek, and she led Pieter through a bead-curtain to a tiny backroom, where they sat at a small table. A pile of boxes containing plastic takeout cups blocked the fire exit.

  “I saw it on the news about the shooting yesterday,” Saskia said quickly, before he could begin.

  “I was there.”

  “So it was definitely Tobias then? Who took the girl, Nina Bakker?”

  “It looks that way. There is a small chance it was somebody else, but everything is pointing towards it’s being him. His death seems to confirm it.”

  “Somebody wanted him dead, you mean?”

  Pieter nodded.

  “But doesn’t that imply that he didn’t do it alone? That he had an accomplice or something? That they had, I don’t know, a disagreement perhaps?”

  “It’s a theory we’re working on, sure.”

  “In which case maybe Tobias was having second thoughts about having abducted her. Perhaps he wanted to release her, or hand himself in, and the other person decided to prevent that.”

  Pieter could see where this was going, and he couldn’t blame her for wanting to think the best of Vinke, even though they were separated. They had, after all, been through a lot together with their daughter’s suicide.

  “It’s a complex case,” he told her, hoping to skirt the issue. “There are lots of possible scenarios as to what happened yesterday. We are still trying to unravel the exact sequence of events.” Which was only half-true, he reflected, thinking it wise not to mention the Charlotte Janssen connection, which as of yet had not been made public.

  “But whatever the case, the death of your ex-husband does leave us with a problem.”

  “Yes.”

  Saskia went over to the tiny sink in the corner and poured herself a small glass of water. She lifted a lace curtain covering a grimy window and peered outside at the grey sky while she sipped.

  “The address you gave us of his home in Warder, where you say he moved to after your separation, well we drew a blank there obviously. It seems he left some time in May. You wouldn’t have any idea at all where he might have gone from there, would you? I think when we spoke on Sunday you mentioned something about how he was brought up as a child in that area of Holland? This was presumably at his family home with his parents? Do you know anything about that? Names of relatives who still live around there maybe, where he lived when he was growing up - locations?”

  Saskia turned back to him, shaking her head. She looked tired, Pieter thought, pale and weary.

  “I’m sorry. I never knew his family, never met them. Tobias had it tough as a child and he never really spoke much about that time. He carried that around for most of his life, his memories were a burden to him and so he closed that part of his life off from everyone - including me.”

  Pieter looked at her closely, but she was hard to read. Her expressionless face revealed nothing. It could have been the grief of course, but he sensed there was something very cold about her.

  “There was one thing he told me though, about something that happened when he was just ten years old.”

  Pieter sat up.

  “Tobias had too much to drink one night, about three or four years ago, and he became very tearful, very maudlin. He started to talk, telling me things that I think afterwards he wished he’d never spoken of - horrible things.”

  “Go on,” Pieter urged.

  “It was the incident on the fishing boat.”

  ◆◆◆

  Tobias carefully climbed into the small motor-launch tied up at the end of the narrow, wooden jetty. It immediately began to rock from side to side, nearly unbalancing him, and so he quickly grabbed a hold of the sides. This made things even worse, and his heart skipped a beat: the water looked very cold and uninviting, even in the warm spring sunshine.

  “Keep still, you idiot!” his father’s gruff voice growled. “You’ll capsize the thing if you move about. Just sit down on the seat.”

  Tobias did as he was told, slowly lowering himself onto the wooden bench across the middle of the tiny fishing boat.

  He was ten years old, and his father was taking him out over the water again, even though he hated it. Tobias couldn’t swim, his parents deciding he was too young to learn, even though they lived by the sea, which even to his young mind seemed silly and dangerous. More likely they couldn’t afford to pay for the lessons.

  But his father insisted he come with him. He needed help to land the lobster pots that he’d placed two nights earlier. It was a two-man job: while he steadied the boat young Tobias would use the long fishing hook to snag the orange buoys marking their locations, and haul the pots up and over to the boat.

  So his father had dragged him out of bed very early, when it was still dark outside, and after a quick breakfast of lukewarm porridge, had told him to put on his waterproof coat and gloves, and off they had set, walking down the narrow pebble beach to where the boat was waiting.

  By the time his father clambered aboard and yanked the pull-cord to start the engine it was just growing light, and he aimed the prow of the motor-launch towards the purple clouds that shimmered above the eastern horizon.

  A cold and harsh wind was blowing across the Ijsselmeer but Tobias turned to face into the stiff breeze, preferring the numbing cold to looking at his father’s red and pock-marked features, the bloodshot eyes, the smell of whisky on his breath.

  Vaguely he listened to the sound of the spluttering engine and his father whistling some old sea shanty: Blow The Man Down,
Tobias thought it was. Drunken Sailor would have been better, he thought to himself, which brought a tiny smile to his face.

  “What you laughing at, you little kipper?” his father called out, the wind whipping away his words, and when Tobias turned towards him, his old man winked, which only made his face look even more grotesque. Nevertheless, Tobias felt himself relax a little. Perhaps, he hoped, his father would be in one of his rare good moods today.

  “We make a good team, you and I son. What do you say? The two of us together, up and out nice and early while the rest of the world sleeps - doing men’s work!”

  Tobias nodded.

  “It’ll put muscles on you, like Popeye. I’m strong to the finish, ‘cause I eats me spinach! I’m Popeye The Sailor Man!” He laughed heartily.

  Fifteen minutes later, after they had travelled perhaps a couple of miles from the small harbour where they lived, they arrived at the first line of buoys bobbing in the water. In the distance, Tobias could make out the flat landscape of the far shoreline and the white finger of Urk Lighthouse caught in the morning sunshine. Overhead a few seagulls hovered in the wind.

  While his father slowly manoeuvred the motor-launch from buoy to buoy, Tobias used the long pole to grab the nylon ropes. Then with his gloved hands pulling hard, he dragged each pot up from the seabed, and after lots of struggling and lifting, managed to bring them over the gunwale and onto the wooden bottom of the boat.

  There were four pots in this batch and two of them contained a lobster each. Not a bad start, Tobias thought.

  At his father’s instructions he dropped the empty ones back over the side and on they went.

  The next line of pots contained just one lobster, which his old man grumbled about, but there was nothing to be done but check the final bunch, the set which were furthest from shore.