Frank Hals had died aboard a blazing ship. Only, apparently he hadn’t.
It was no trick of the light. His head was there in full silhouette against the window. He’d gained weight but still he had that electric, battle-ready presence.
‘This is a blast from the past,’ I managed. ‘I thought you were dead…’
A long pause. ‘For a moment back there, I thought so, too.’
I eyed the front door of the houseboat; Petra could be back from the shop anytime. ‘Did you not think to knock, or call ahead?’
He shrugged. ‘The door was open.’
Hals was a local hood who’d grown tens of millions of euros’ worth of cannabis in the hull of a clipper ship moored at the far end of the harbour. He’d got into a spat with another hood – a spat facilitated by me – and his clipper had gone up in flames. At the time, I’d been more concerned with finding the ‘proof of life’ of a kidnapped bureaucrat in Brussels than seeking Hals’s ‘proof of death’; now the bureaucrat was presumed dead and Frank Hals’s face was a metre in front of me, very much alive. Things evolve.
‘Are you not going to offer me a drink?’ he asked.
We’d first met at demonstrations in the early 1980s, protesting the displacement of people around Amsterdam as businesses and city government took over. But as my life had found a fair current with Petra, so Hals’s had drifted off course. He’d built up a chain of coffee shops, becoming defensive about his investments…
I circled around him towards the galley – and my gun case.
‘What are you doing here?’
In 2008 he’d gone to court accused of cultivating marijuana for resale. A notoriously sharp defence attorney had argued that the entire crop had split from a single plant thirty years before, and that this one plant had originally been acquired for personal use. One of the witnesses at the trial was never seen or heard of again.
‘Are you looking for this?’
Hals held up my handgun and took a step closer to me. ‘People know people, who know people. And some of them are wondering what conclusions you’ve drawn from your time down in Driebergen.’
A thump resounded through my chest. How could Hals have known what I’d been doing there?
I needed to buy time.
‘Just back up there, would you Frank? And put that gun down.’
He was weighing the weapon in the palm of his hand. In the dim light, I couldn’t see whether the slide stop was off.
‘I suppose it wouldn’t do to have another accident aboard, would it?’
‘Why don’t I fix you that drink?’ I said hurriedly. ‘Jenever?’
‘For old times’ sake? I think not, on reflection.’
‘You haven’t told me where you’ve been,’ I said from the galley, fixing drinks anyway. My fingers trembled as I pulled a plastic tray of ice from the freezer. ‘I’d like to hear the full story.’
‘I’m sure you would.’
He wheeled me round by the shoulder. Ice skittered across the wooden floor. Next thing I knew, Hals had a hand between my legs and his vice-like fingers were squeezing, hard. I tried to reach round, but my upper body was pinned by his other arm. His strength was extraordinary.
‘Here it is in a nutshell, Henricus. I’ve come to like dry land… reclaimed land.’
Every nerve ending in my body screamed as the grip between my legs tightened. My breath sharpened, my vision blurred, and a dreadful, sick feeling engulfed me. I tasted it on my teeth.
‘There’s a lot of money tied up in the buildings around this harbour. More, even, than in those coffee shops I once ran.’
I tried to say something but had no breath.
‘There’s a system.’ His own breath was sour, putrid. ‘There are interests to respect.’ Heinrich Karremans? ‘People who you really shouldn’t mess with this time…’
Who’d tipped Hals off about my time in Driebergen? Someone inside the police – the security services, even? I couldn’t think. The pain was bright, like light, through my lower body, ribs, head.
‘Stop,’ I managed to wheeze at the point of passing out.
He did so. I collapsed onto the floor, registering the door handle turning…
‘Hoi!’ Petra called.
I tried to warn her, but my voice had gone completely. My eyes watered.
‘Henk?’ came my wife’s uncertain voice.
Hals’s rough-skinned face hovered above mine, peering up. The darkness of it contrasted with the light above. My thoughts reeled. The darkness of the Dutch Masters was owed to them starting off with a black canvas and adding back the light; the image blotting my vision was the Girl Dressed in Blue – a stolen version that had been harboured aboard Hals’s ship. Verspronck’s young girl in her Sunday best… the suspicions swirling around Hals and underage girls had been there for years…
‘Henk!’ my wife’s voice called out as she clattered down the steps.
There were too many pieces on the chessboard already, and I’d only just arrived back in Amsterdam.
‘Frank Hals!’ she cried, surprised.
‘Petra,’ Hals responded, standing up. ‘It’s been a while.’
‘Jesus!’ She knelt down.
‘I’m OK,’ I said hoarsely.
‘I came to visit and found him collapsed on the floor,’ he lied. ‘It was a good thing that I was passing.’
‘Water,’ I managed.
‘I’ll take it from here,’ my wife said. She went to get a glass, slipping on a cube of ice and regaining her balance just in time. ‘Christ!’
‘I should be going,’ Hals said calmly. ‘It was a good thing I managed to catch you, Henk. Wish I could have seen you in easier circumstances.’
‘All right Frank,’ Petra snapped. ‘I’ll take it from here!’
She raised my head and carefully poured cool liquid between my lips. Above us, the door opened and closed. I gasped.
‘What happened?’ she asked.
Where to begin?
‘I thought that man had died in the harbour during the big fire there?’ she said.
‘I thought so, too.’ My face screwed up as I got to my feet. I was aching in so many places that I could no longer distinguish the sources of pain.
It was only after she’d helped me to the sofa that I managed to say, ‘Do you remember that racket the authorities here were running, exchanging cheap energy from foreign countries for certain favours? Diamonds, high-class escorts and the like?’
‘Didn’t all that vanish with Lottman?’
The kidnapped bureaucrat had been the one orchestrating the scam from Brussels.
‘Not entirely. The Amsterdam police gifted a Verspronck painting to the Norwegians, but the deal went bad. The painting was stolen back by Frank Hals before his boat went up in smoke. Somehow Hals must have escaped, and laid low since.’
Petra did a double take. ‘Hals was in league with the Amsterdam police, to steal a priceless artwork?’
‘Yes, with Joost. I’m sure of it.’
I knew what I needed to do now.
‘An original Verspronck, harboured on Hals’s boat… burned?’ Her mouth was agape.
‘We thought so at first. But in fact, no – the painting itself later showed up in a locker at Schiphol, as a rolled-up canvas. Joost handled the recovery personally.’
She shook her head in disbelief. ‘Why did Hals come here?’
I didn’t want to get back into my time in Driebergen and the child abuse that I’d investigated. Everything was telescoping together, though. Had the range of favours offered to foreign diplomats included underage sex?
‘Hals is a mystery to me,’ I said, avoiding her question.
My wife sat on the sofa’s arm and placed a consoling hand on my outstretched leg. I was already planning ahead – who I needed to speak with, an
d what I needed to do.
15
RIJKSRECHERCHE
The justice ministry agreed to fast-track my application to the Rijksrecherche, as the National Police Internal Investigation Department is known. The idea of investigating fellow police personnel didn’t sit easily with me, but it was a role that I’d already played in Driebergen, and the justice minister himself had suggested it during our debrief.
Sometimes we don’t pick our place in the world – it picks us. What was it that my dad once said? God will put you in the right place, even if you don’t know it at the time. At least it would give me leverage over Joost, I determined. And more than anything, I needed a warrant card in order to carry on my enquiries.
Kelly Verhagen was a no-nonsense recruitment coordinator who received me at Amsterdam’s main police station early the next day. ‘Do you need help?’ she asked, collecting me at reception. I was limping.
‘I’ll let you know,’ I said. ‘What do you have in store for me?’
I put her in her late twenties. She barely looked old enough to be appraising an ageing horse like me, but I kept that thought to myself.
‘Just a couple of tests and an interview.’
She carried a translucent plastic folder, almost certainly containing my file, and led me up to the third floor and down a corridor.
‘Here.’ She gestured for me to enter a cramped meeting room.
I grimaced as I sat at the small table.
‘Can I get you anything? Water? Coffee?’
‘Black coffee would be great.’
‘Okey dokey,’ she said.
It was one of my stock phrases. I couldn’t help but smile.
‘While I get that, you may as well make a start on this.’ She pulled a sheet of paper out of her folder and placed it on the table in front of me.
I eyed the series of questions. ‘What’s this?’
‘Anyone being considered for Internal Investigations is required to sit a moral compass test now.’
‘A what?’
I read the first question:
1. Your dog is sick. The vet says he needs an operation that will completely cure him but costs 5,000 euros.
(a) Do you pay?
(b) What if it’s your cat?
‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’ I looked up at her. ‘Who wrote these? The multiple-homicide squad?’
Maltreatment of animals was a known indicator of psychopathy.
‘Whoever wrote them, it wasn’t me,’ she said breezily. ‘The sooner you start, the sooner you finish.’
2. Your best friend is driving; you’re in the passenger seat. He is careless going around a corner and hits a dog crossing the street. No one sees, and there are no marks on his car. He does not turn himself in – what do you do?
‘Need a pen?’ Kelly asked.
‘No,’ I replied, suddenly lost in thoughts about my friend Johan. He’d shot a Hungarian racketeer, and Joost strongly suspected as much. How would I go after Joost from within Internal Investigations if he could dredge that up at any time?
One step at a time, Henk…
‘You might as well take the other test.’ Kelly whipped out three pages stapled together.
A. What do you consider to be your greatest strengths?
I flipped to the other pages.
B. And your weaknesses?
C. What accomplishment are you most proud of during your lifetime?
The blank space on the third page stared back at me.
‘Is everything OK?’ she asked.
‘You’ve got to stop asking me that. You’re starting to make me feel infirm.’
‘I’ll bring you that coffee. There’s no time limit, by the way.’
Twenty minutes later, I put my pen down. I hadn’t written much, but hoped that it counted. Kelly collected up the pages, glancing at my final answer. ‘That reminds me,’ she said, writing something on a form of her own.
‘What?’
‘I forgot you had a daughter.’ She smiled approvingly.
‘So, what now?’ I asked.
‘You need to see the police psychologist.’
‘What psychologist?’
‘Sonja Brinkerhof.’
‘I don’t know her.’
‘She’s not available today, but I’m sure you’ll hear very soon. You should receive a letter –’
‘No, this is all supposed to be fast-tracked by the justice ministry. Where is she? How can I get hold of her?’
Kelly paused, and pursed her lips in an evaluative gesture. ‘Wait here. Let me see what I can do.’
*
Sonja Brinkerhof was a university professor who worked for the police part-time. I took a cab over to Willemspark, where she lived, and asked the driver to drop me two streets away. It gave me the chance to smoke a cigarette and reflect on the last time I’d been here. A stone’s throw away, a Norwegian diplomat had lived – and then died, when that Verspronck painting had been stolen back by Frank Hals’s crew. Crime and respectability have always been close neighbours in this city.
I ground my cigarette out on the pavement, opened a low iron gate, and walked up a stone path to the front door of a house that had been converted into apartments. It was an imposing address for a university professor.
I rang the bell and stood back, glancing up the facade at the glowing lead windows of her top-floor residence.
I was bang on time. Still, it surprised me when the door buzzed open without me needing to announce myself to the intercom. Thankfully there was a lift, albeit an old-fashioned and slow one.
Finally, I arrived on the fourth floor. Across the parquet floor of the hall was a door, ajar.
I knocked and pushed the door further open, revealing a high-ceilinged room with bright chandeliers and a Bechstein baby grand piano. A big-boned woman with grey-brown hair appeared. She was my age, maybe.
‘Sonja,’ she introduced herself. ‘And you are Henk? I’m short of time, as ever. Please.’ She gestured for me to follow her through to a living room, with leather sofas positioned around a stone fireplace. There was a distinctly old-money feel about the apartment.
‘I have to leave in half an hour,’ she said, ‘but let’s see how far we get. Willem asked me to make time.’
By ‘Willem’, I assumed she meant van der Steen. As she opened up a file in her lap, I experienced a vaguely uneasy feeling – that perhaps I’d underestimated both her and this interview.
‘I’m going to be open with you,’ she said. ‘The work of the Internal Investigations department is crucial, as I’m sure you’re aware. If the public loses confidence in our police men and women, then the state itself is in danger. So, we need to satisfy ourselves that those being considered for the Rijksrecherche are rock solid, morally. They must be held to a different standard. Do you want a drink, by the way? Glass of water? I read about your accident…’
‘No, I’m fine, thanks.’
She nodded appreciatively; clearly she was keen to get going. ‘Different people have different ways of going about this,’ she continued. ‘My background is in family psychology. I try to understand people through their key relationships, which are, I believe, a mirror to their personalities.’
Was that true? While I resisted the notion, I saw validity in it.
‘Let’s start with your wife,’ she said, pulling a cap off her fountain pen.
‘Petra?’
‘Yes. How long have you known each other?’
‘Over thirty years.’
‘And where did you meet?’
‘Here, in Amsterdam.’
I knew she was trying to get me talking.
She glanced at her folder. ‘This was after you left the army?’
‘Yes.’
‘You were doing what, at the time?’
&n
bsp; ‘I was… deciding what to do with my life.’
‘Before going into the police?’ Her downcast eyes narrowed. ‘That was quite a gap there – two years, if I understand correctly?’
I needed to be careful. I’d been rudderless for part of the early eighties.
‘Can I be honest?’ I said.
Her dark-brown eyes looked up. ‘Please.’
Quickly, I composed the response in my mind. ‘I decided that before I did anything else, I needed to meet someone. My wife, that is. I didn’t have the most stable upbringing. Other ex-servicemen were rushing into this and that. My feeling was that, without a real foundation in my personal life, I’d ultimately fail at whatever I tried.’
I wanted to keep the image of a young Petra in my mind’s eye, but my thoughts involuntarily went to Manfred Boomkamp – how he’d lain in the forest near Driebergen, shot up, baring his bloodstained teeth. He’d said, Sometimes it comes down to who we meet in life, Henk.
‘Go on,’ Sonja prompted.
‘That was the important thing,’ I said, composing myself. ‘As I look back on things, it was the people who didn’t do that who ended up struggling most. Friends who remained single… or worse, married to the wrong person.’
I seemed to have said the right thing, because she smiled as she wrote something down.
‘Johan Bakker?’
I blinked hard. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘Your army colleague. Weren’t you his best man?’
She’d certainly done some digging.
She prompted: ‘He’s divorced now, isn’t he?’
Shrugging nonchalantly, I said, ‘I just got lucky that I met Petra when I did. Of course, kids change everything.’
‘Yes,’ Sonja said neutrally as she looked again at my folder. As she perused a couple of loose pages, my gaze swept her calm apartment.
She turned another page and I glimpsed the answers to the test I’d sat that morning. My answers must have been scanned and emailed to her, then printed off; it was like I was looking down on myself from the chandeliers.
She eyed her watch. ‘So how would you characterise your relationship with your daughter?’
I thought about it. ‘It can be a challenge at times, I’ll admit. But could I imagine life without Nadia now? No, it doesn’t bear thinking about…’ I checked myself. Sonja Brinkerhof’s apartment was too calm; there were no photos, no evidence of young life. She didn’t have children – or young relatives – was my guess.
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