I reached for a rough-edged stone and hurled it into the forest. It crashed to the ground. At first… nothing.
Then – ‘Help’ – a ragged voice escaped the heaving form in the undergrowth. The voice was Boomkamp’s.
Quietly, I crept over to where he lay fallen.
His eyes widened. ‘Henk,’ he croaked.
‘Shh.’ I put my finger to my lips.
His face, neck and shoulders were dark with blood. He was shivering.
‘Did Franks do this?’ I whispered.
‘Someone… came out of nowhere. I thought it was you.’
I crouched. ‘Keep your voice down.’ I took my jacket off and wrapped it over him. It was damp, but all I had to offer. ‘What have you got on you?’
‘My gun…’
‘A phone?’
‘Yes.’ He grimaced with the effort of trying to reach down. ‘Hip pocket…’
I did it for him, finding something small and cylindrical.
‘Not that pocket,’ he said. ‘The other one.’
There I found his smartphone.
‘What’s the code?’
He told me.
I unlocked the phone and dimmed the screen. It had battery power but no signal. ‘I need to find coverage,’ I told him, ‘and get help.’
‘Go that way.’ He nodded in the direction I’d been travelling in. As he did so, he grimaced, baring his bloodstained teeth. The wound had caused blood to rise up inside him. I thought of trying to fashion a compression bandage but I couldn’t see where the wound was, and getting him to a nearby hospital was the clear priority.
‘What about Gunther?’ he said.
‘He’s gone.’
A small cry escaped Boomkamp’s mouth.
‘Shh,’ I urged. ‘Where’s Vermeulen?’
Boomkamp didn’t answer my question. Instead he said, ‘We did what we could. We knew each other from a young age, you know…’
I nodded. ‘At the boys’ home, in Ghent.’
‘Do you know what went on there?’
I hesitated, torn between finding a signal for the phone and hearing this.
‘They got us drunk on cider, passed us round like pieces of meat, Henk. Filmed us.’
‘You formed a pact,’ I said.
He stared directly up, through the treetops to the dark heavens above, not denying it. ‘We did what we could.’
‘Who were they? The people passing you round?’
‘Powerful people. Karremans wasn’t the only one.’
‘There were complaints, made by Paul Ruiter.’
‘Ruiter.’ His eyes closed.
‘You knew him?’
‘Knew… know.’ Boomkamp took a moment to breathe. ‘He went back to Belgium, would you believe it? To Liège… changed his name to Jan.’
‘Wait… not Jan Stamms?’
The paroled sex offender who begot Operation Guardian Angel…
‘Others are gone,’ Boomkamp said. ‘Wiped from the earth.’
‘By who?’
He didn’t answer. ‘It comes down to who you meet in life. I wish I’d met a man like you earlier, Henk. I had a guardian who took me away from Beau Soleil, only to abuse me himself. So, you see…’ His voice trailed off.
I looked up and around. Where was Franks? Why hadn’t he returned to kill?
‘Keep an eye on that Magnusson, by the way. Up in Norway.’
I looked sharply at him. ‘What did you say?’
‘He’s one of them.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘We looked into him, too.’ His voice had gone faint. ‘He’s a downloader.’
‘That’s impossible.’
Had they come to suspect everyone as abusers, outside of SVU X-19? ‘I need to get that phone signal,’ I said angrily.
‘Wait, Henk. In my hip pocket, there’s some medicine I must take.’
I reached in and found the small bottle.
‘What is it?’ I couldn’t see the label.
‘Please.’ He gestured for it.
He screwed the cap off and had thrown the liquid down his throat before I realised. Numbly I tried to scoop it out of his mouth with my hand, to turn him on his side, but he’d already gone limp.
‘Did what we could,’ he repeated, his voice a haunting whisper.
13
STANDING IN SILHOUETTE
At first, I thought that I was dead. Slowly, the white room came into focus and the bottom of the hospital bed outlined itself. So too did Wim Rijnsburger – standing at the far side of the room. He came over, his bloodshot eyes peering at me.
‘Where am I?’
‘Zoetermeer,’ he replied.
The AIVD head office?
‘Am I in hospital?’ I asked aloud.
‘Of a sort.’
‘What happened?’
‘You had a pneumothorax.’
‘Say again?’
‘Collapsed lung.’
He nodded at my right ribs.
‘Plus acute stress,’ he added. ‘A full physical and psychological breakdown, in fact.’
I moved my legs under the bedclothes. The pain throughout my upper body made me stop. ‘I’ve lost weight.’
‘Yes, three kilos. Are you able to talk about what happened?’
I looked up at the ceiling, recalling my last moments of consciousness in the forest. The phone call, the wait, the men arriving… I must have passed out once I knew I was safe. It’s funny what the physical body will endure in the name of survival, until it no longer needs to.
‘I was with Boomkamp before he committed suicide. He is dead?’ I looked at Rijnsburger.
The secret service man nodded. ‘We concluded that he poisoned himself after shooting the rest of his crew. We just need it confirmed – that you shot Boomkamp in self-defence.’
‘Only I didn’t,’ I said. ‘You mentioned the rest of his crew – Vermeulen as well, then?’
‘Yes.’
‘It was Franks who killed them all.’
Rijnsburger looked down at a clipboard in his hand. ‘You’ve mentioned this before, talking in your sleep here. The psychiatric nurse noted it.’ He set the clipboard aside. ‘Henk, Tommy Franks wasn’t in that forest.’
‘Yes, he was. I heard him speak.’
‘Did you, though?’
I sighed and sank my head back into the pillow. ‘It was him.’
Rijnsburger was silent for a second.
‘Rest,’ he said. ‘I’ll come by and see you in a day or so.’ He picked up the clipboard again and patted me on the shoulder with it. ‘We’ll talk.’
As he left, a nurse poked his head round the door and asked, ‘Are you able to see one more guest, Mr van der Pol?’
‘Who?’
‘Your wife.’
‘Please.’
Petra appeared in the doorway, her pained eyes meeting mine. ‘Can I hug him?’ she asked the nurse.
‘Better not to.’
She sat beside me, taking my hand and wrapping hers around it. And another kind of healing began.
*
I joined Petra at her cousin’s house in Delft, just fifteen minutes from the AIVD building in Zoetermeer. Cousin Cecilia was a lively, bright woman. My time there was mostly spent sitting in an armchair in the conservatory that she’d recently had built.
It called to mind Boomkamp’s wife Mariella, now widowed. She’d been visited more than once by the secret service about her own role in abetting illicit surveillance, the needs of the state coming before her grieving.
All this I learned upon returning to see Rijnsburger, who was eager to finish my own debrief. This time we sat in a battleship-grey meeting room. The blinds were drawn; the light was artificial.
&n
bsp; ‘We took DNA from Boomkamp.’
It was standard procedure with any suicide.
‘Any matches?’ I asked.
The DNA would have been run against a data bank. At least some of those who the police didn’t manage to catch alive were unable to live with their guilt…
‘One, yes. A crime scene in Norway.’
‘Heinrich Karremans’s cabin in Trondheim? The break-in there?’
Rijnsburger handed me a photo. It showed a starkly beautiful house set in a snowy wilderness; the fenestration was instantly familiar.
‘Did you find anything else up in Norway?’ I asked.
I was thinking of Magnusson, and Boomkamp’s final comment about him – which I couldn’t bring myself to believe.
Rijnsburger looked at me quizzically. ‘Such as?’
‘Never mind. So Karremans was exonerated?’
‘Karremans was not a suspect. Some of our friends in the fourth estate are eating humble pie.’
Perhaps he was referring to the online newspaper article I’d seen in Boomkamp’s office, when leaving it for the last time.
‘What about the other members of the team? Franks and Rahm?’
‘They’ve gone home. SVU X-19 is history. Your mission there is over.’
He paused, giving me a chance to say something. I remained silent.
‘Everything will be organised differently. It has to be so,’ he said. ‘There will be a new central child-exploitation team’ – he paused now for emphasis – ‘here in Zoetermeer. New structures for national and international coordination involving Europol and Interpol, joint centres of intelligence and expertise, new victim-identification task forces and cybercrime initiatives, even inroads to the big internet companies…’
He paused longer, again giving me a chance to speak.
I didn’t.
‘The question remaining is what happens to you, Henk. Where you fit in now. The minister is keen that we find you a home.’
It all sounded right, but I was left with the distinct impression that something was very wrong – some person, or group of persons, who’d gone unpunished.
‘Beau soleil,’ I murmured. I could still hear Boomkamp saying those words, lying there on the floor of the forest, baring his bloodstained teeth.
‘What?’ Rijnsburger asked.
I was about to offer an explanation, but changed my mind.
*
It was a short distance from Zoetermeer to the Ministry for Security and Justice. Van der Steen had time for me. As I was shown into his office, I wondered what his motives were in agreeing to meet now.
‘You’ve lost weight,’ he said.
‘Without any time spent in the police gym. A miracle.’
He chuckled. ‘Drink?’
‘Still or sparkling? No thanks.’
I grimaced as I lowered myself into the chair he offered. We were sitting once again at the round glass table strewn with papers. The work of government went on.
‘I’ve read Rijnsburger’s report,’ he said, his steely eyes fixing on mine. ‘It remains for me to add my thanks – and those of the ministry – for a job well done, in testing circumstances.’
‘I appreciate you saying that, but there’s something else we need to discuss.’
‘Your job?’
‘There’s that. There are four things I wanted to bring up, in fact.’
‘Oh?’
‘First, I don’t know how much Rijnsburger’s report went into the histories and motivations of SVU X-19’s core team members. For what it’s worth, my reading is that Boomkamp, Engelhart and Vermeulen sabotaged the Stamms case because Stamms himself was abused at the boys’ home that they’d all been put into – that’s where their anger and solidarity originated. You’re aware of this?’
‘A gift that kept giving.’ He corrected his answer: ‘Yes, it’s too bad.’
‘The question being, how many other suspects did Boomkamp and company release in their pursuit of the abusers at that foster home?’
‘Maybe we’ll never know,’ the minister replied meditatively. ‘After all, Boomkamp, Vermeulen and Engelhart are no longer with us.’
‘But other people are very much alive. Did Boomkamp’s widow have anything to say about the matter?’
He opened his mouth to speak but there came a rap at the door. His assistant’s head poked in: ‘The PM wants a brief chat with you in ten.’
It didn’t sound like an invitation. Van der Steen nodded his acknowledgement, then turned back to me. ‘You said you had several points. Let’s get them out on the table.’
‘OK… Ghent – the boy’s home in question: will the file be reopened?’
‘That’s a question for the Belgians.’
‘Is it, though? When we last sat around this table, you mentioned a suspect and kingpin in the Amsterdam area. Well, that kingpin is alleged to have abused boys at that care home in Ghent, and elsewhere, and he’s very much Dutch.’ There was no need to mention Heinrich Karremans by name. ‘Jan Stamms – one of his alleged victims – is Dutch, too. Stamms changed his name. You’re aware of all this?’
Van der Steen sighed impatiently. ‘We’re making a lot of organisational changes, Henk. Are you aware of that?’
‘Rijnsburger told me about working with Interpol, Europol and the rest.’
‘Well then. We’re adding new prosecutorial resources, too, here in The Hague,’ he went on, glancing at his watch. ‘We’re adding capacity, Henk. Look, I’d like to find a proper home for you now. Clearly you have a knack for getting to the heart of things, and our law enforcement agencies need that more than ever with said changes afoot. Have you considered the Rijksrecherche?’
‘Internal Investigations?’ I almost laughed.
He held up an appeasing hand.
‘I need to return to Amsterdam,’ I said more fiercely than I’d meant to. ‘I need to get well, and save my marriage.’
‘Fine, so tell me what job you do want. You mentioned four things. I’ve counted three: the SVU X-19 core team members, the Ghent boys’ home, Karremans…’
I leaned forward, even though it hurt my ribs to do so. ‘Tommy Franks,’ I wheezed. ‘You warned me that at least one member of that team was rotten. It turns out that they all were, only in different ways.’
‘Henk, I don’t have time for this. Where are you going with it? What are you implying?’
‘I’m not implying anything. I’m inferring that Tommy Franks may have been there in Driebergen to sabotage the saboteurs. Where is he, by the way?’
The minister sighed exasperatedly. ‘Back in the UK.’
‘Well, we know what’s been going on in the UK of late – the institutional child abuse cases coming to light… lots of important people must be worried over there. Are we dealing with something similar here? We also know that individual members of the Night Market paedophile ring were based in the UK –’
‘Henk! Rijnsburger’s report covers the salient points!’
‘Right,’ I said, ‘but keep in mind that Rijnsburger downplayed Franks’s role on at least two occasions. Once when I was recovering in hospital, and he suggested that I’d totally imagined Franks killing the other men in the forest – only I hadn’t. Then there was the other time, when we had a meeting in Rijnsburger’s van and he told me that Franks had lied about being in a British military regiment… Perhaps that last titbit was intended to make me question Franks’s credibility. Well, it had the opposite effect, in the end. Franks looks like an expert dissembler now.’
‘Are you calling into question the analytical abilities of the AIVD, even?’ van der Steen asked incredulously.
‘Not necessarily. But I’d be happy to help you with any ongoing enquiries, so to speak.’
He nodded curtly. ‘I’ll take that under advisement.’
; ‘Or talk to Rijnsburger’s boss?’
‘Don’t push it, Henk.’ He stood and gave me his tightest smile yet. His assistant was waiting at the door, signalling that the prime minister was about to come on the line.
‘You said the SVU X-19 case would change me,’ I concluded. ‘It did.’
He patted me tentatively on the shoulder. ‘Leave things with me. Expect to hear soon about a new police role in Amsterdam, and how you might remain… useful to the ministry.’
*
Two days later, I was opening up the houseboat on Entrepotdok. Nothing much had changed in the neighbourhood while I’d been away. The knick-knack designers and start-up kids were going about their usual business. The water around the boat looked perfectly calm.
I unlocked the cabin door and made my way down the steep wooden steps into the darkness. The air was sour. I opened the curtains and a couple of windows, letting cool air circulate.
It was good to be back in Amsterdam. Petra had popped over to the Albert Heijn supermarket on Sarphatistraat to pick up some milk and other essentials. I savoured the moment of familiar stillness, registering the reassuring creak in the boat’s timbers as other vessels passed by.
I padded through to the galley, turned the heating on and checked that everything was in its rightful place. A silver tankard that sat above the drinks cabinet; the gun case that was locked up, just as I’d left it. In the bedroom, Petra’s jewellery, all there. The hatch at the back, secure. My home computer in the aft space (you couldn’t exactly call it a room)… yes, it was all present and correct.
In the bathroom, I found paracetamol – the last strip from an old blister pack I’d forgotten about. I pushed the loosened pills into my mouth, washed them down with water from the tap, and then stared at myself in the mirror.
Another vessel passed by, rocking the boat more. I relieved my aching bladder, flushed the toilet and stepped back into the main space.
‘Jesus!’ I managed, my heart hammering against my ribs.
He was standing in silhouette, in my usual spot beside the porthole.
‘Hello, Henk.’
Part V:
Choke Point
14
THE RETURN
Night Market Page 10