Into the Night: Inspector Rykel Book 2 (Amsterdam Quartet)

by Jake Woodhouse

  The men’s toilets.

  And she didn’t know what it was about male homicide inspectors, but for the most part they didn’t appear to have the best digestive systems.

  Tanya dropped her eyes from the board and stared at her desk. She’d tried to argue with Smit earlier but he’d not been willing to listen, just told her to take leave another time. He’d told her not in so many words but the message had been clear, that he really didn’t care.

  A uniform walked into the room, looked around for a moment, lost.

  ‘You seen Kees?’ he finally asked Tanya when he couldn’t find anyone else important-looking enough.

  ‘Not recently. Actually I haven’t seen him all week,’ said Tanya, realizing how pleasant it had been.

  ‘Urgent package came for him, can you sign for it?’

  ‘What are you, a courier?’

  ‘I know, sucks, doesn’t it? Not what I signed up for.’

  Tanya signed for the parcel. ‘No, me neither,’ she said as she handed the pen back and took the parcel.

  She took it over to Kees’ desk, which was layered with rubbish. It looked to her the kind of place rats would breed. She balanced it on top of the smallest pile and walked back to her own desk, Zen in comparison. Or anal.

  It was bad enough that she’d been landed with the case, but the fact that she was now quite possibly going to have to start interviewing her colleagues made it even worse. She was the only woman in the department, and that made most of the men uncomfortable, not quite sure how to behave around her.

  This is going to make them even more uncomfortable, she thought.

  An idea struck her; she could check the attendance logs for everyone in the building – that way she might be able to narrow down who was present when the calls were made. Meaning she could at least narrow down the number of people she was going to piss off.

  She went down to the desk sergeant and requested the logs.

  ‘Not sure I can give them out,’ said the young officer, looking uncomfortable.

  ‘It’s just that I’ve been doing so much overtime, and I didn’t keep track, you know? I’d really love to be able to put in a claim …’

  She leaned forward, propped on her elbows, feeling her breasts squeeze together, and watched the guy’s eyes slide down her chest. It only took a few moments for her to know he was going to give in.

  She felt a wave of contempt.

  Only she wasn’t sure if it was for him, or herself.

  ‘Yeah, I could do with some of that,’ he said, suddenly more animated than he had been. ‘We’ve only got the last two weeks; anything older’s been archived already.’

  ‘Two weeks is fine,’ said Tanya.

  As she got back to her desk with the logs she realized she needed to do this elsewhere; she didn’t want anyone seeing what she was up to. She stuffed them into a plastic bag she had in a desk drawer, proof of a hurried lunch from Albert Heijn, and headed for the door, thinking she’d go to the bagel joint she and Jaap sometimes met at for lunch. It was the kind of place cops didn’t go, so although it was close to the station they’d figured they’d be safe. And in any case, they were just colleagues, and colleagues sometimes had lunch together.

  Jaap had questioned her desire to keep their relationship secret, but she’d been adamant. She didn’t want the sleeping-to-the-top jokes, or any of the other shit that would get thrown at her. Maybe one day, she’d told him.

  She got a table towards the back, ordered a bagel with Oude Kaas and a fresh orange juice, and started to look through the logs for the past two weeks.

  It was tedious work, making a list of all the people who were in the station at the times the calls were made, and wasn’t helped by the fact that it was all handwritten in various hard-to-read scripts. Legible writing wasn’t on the police’s list of key skill requirements. But after ten minutes or so a pattern started to emerge, a pattern she didn’t much like seeing.

  It can’t be, she thought.

  ‘Hey.’

  The voice startled her – she’d got engrossed – and she looked up to see Frits and his wandering eye.

  ‘Looks interesting,’ he said, nodding to the papers.

  ‘Not really,’ said Tanya wanting to put them away so he couldn’t see but knowing that would look like an invitation to sit. Frits peered over towards the papers. She sighed inside and slid them together into one pile, dumping the whole lot back in the bag.

  ‘Yeah, I mean it’s just paperwork, right?’ he said, pulling out the chair opposite and sitting down. ‘Way too much of that going on.’

  Tanya didn’t know how old he was, but she figured he must be well into his fifties. His face was open, too open, and that, combined with his eye, made him a non-contender for best-looking cop of the year.

  He was the station’s main dispatcher, and while in theory he didn’t actually assign crimes to specific people – that was Smit’s job – more often than not he was the one who decided on who to call. Jaap had warned her about him, saying that she didn’t want to get on his wrong side or she’d get all the shit jobs.

  Seems like I already have, she thought.

  ‘Mind if I join you?’ he asked, despite the fact he was sitting down already. He motioned to the waitress, who came over and took his order.

  ‘Be my guest,’ she said once the waitress had left. She got the feeling Frits didn’t get sarcasm.

  ‘So, you’ve been with us, what? Seven, eight months now?’ he asked, sitting back in the chair and looking at her.

  ‘Ten.’

  ‘You like it?’

  She wanted to get back to the logs. She didn’t want to sit here with Frits. ‘Yeah, it’s all right.’

  ‘So, bad luck about that case you got. The first officer on the scene swore it was a suicide or accident.’ He paused while the waitress deposited his coffee and stroopwafel on the table. He picked up the stroopwafel and put it on top of the coffee cup, like a lid. ‘If I’d known I’d’ve called someone else.’

  ‘You said there wasn’t anyone else available,’ said Tanya.

  ‘Yeah, well. I thought you could probably use a little boost in your clearance rate—’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  Frits caught the sharpness in her tone and looked momentarily startled.

  ‘Yeah, I’m kidding,’ he said eventually. ‘There really wasn’t anyone else. And Smit requested you specifically.’

  He became interested in his stroopwafel, checking to see if the heat from the coffee had made it more pliable.

  Tanya didn’t believe him, but knew there was no point in pursuing it.

  ‘Well, it’s totally messed up my leave. I was going away with some friends, and now I’m going to miss it.’

  He didn’t get sarcasm and he probably didn’t do guilt either. But she’d try it out anyway.

  ‘That’s bad,’ he said, taking a bite. A crumb stuck to his top lip, then dropped off when he spoke again. ‘I’d hate to miss leave. I’ve got a holiday booked myself. Next month. I’m going—’

  He stopped as Tanya suddenly reached her hand into her pocket.

  ‘I put it on silent, but it always makes me jump,’ she said as she pulled out her phone.

  She glanced at the screen.

  ‘I’ve got to take this,’ she said and answered, listening for a few moments.

  ‘What, now?’ she asked. ‘Okay, I’m on my way. Tell me what happened.’

  She got up, jamming the phone between her shoulder and ear, grabbed the bag with all the papers in, mouthed sorry to Frits and left.

  Outside she pocketed the phone, hoping Frits hadn’t noticed it wasn’t on, and wondered what to do now.

  A horde of tourists cycled past on a guided tour, following the lead bike marked out by a large yellow flag attached to a pole. One of the tourists near the back of the convoy clearly hadn’t got used to the fact that Dutch bikes didn’t have brakes.

  ‘You’ve got to backpedal,’ she told the woman in English, who lo
oked at her as if she’d just told her to jump in the canal. Tanya shrugged and started walking, her mind back on the attendance logs. What she’d found had shocked her. And she didn’t know what to do about it.

  Tanya stopped by a tree. The sun was just dropping behind the houses on the far side of the canal, dark shadows devouring their fronts.

  She pulled the sheet out again and looked at it. At the names she’d circled.

  I need the older logs, she thought. See if that’ll narrow it down.

  12

  Saturday, 8 May

  19.26

  Kees couldn’t believe what the voice on the phone had just told him.

  ‘You delivered it where? Are you fucking insane?’

  He was crawling back into Amsterdam – an endless stream of people with nothing better to do had decided to get into their cars and block his way.

  And there was a speck of dirt on the windscreen right in his field of vision. He’d tried to wipe it off earlier but it wouldn’t budge. Then he’d tried lowering the seat back to change his sight-line, but that hadn’t worked either.

  It was still there, blurring his view.

  After the old man had told Kees about the men disappearing out the back he’d searched the area, but it was clear they’d gone. Kees had then put a call in for Osman Krilic, but was still waiting for a hit off the central database. He couldn’t quite believe how long it was taking, it wasn’t like Krilic was a common name.

  As he’d left the house the landlord had asked him about claiming compensation for the glass from the police. Kees had told him it was like that when he arrived, putting the blame on the two men who’d run out the back as he’d walked up the front path.

  From the old man’s description, one of them was unquestionably Isovic.

  ‘You don’t want it?’ said the voice that Kees knew as Paul. He’d figured that wasn’t his real name. People practising the art of blackmail generally tended to prefer anonymity.

  ‘Course I fucking want it,’ said Kees, lurching the car forward and to the right, spinning the wheel one-handed to make the most of a gap which had opened up. ‘But not sent there. I was going to pick it up, like we agreed.’

  ‘Like we agreed,’ echoed the voice. ‘Is that the same way we agreed that you’d give us the information we need? Because I got a message passed back through our mutual friend that you wanted to stop.’

  ‘Look, it’s getting too risky. I think we just need to be a bit careful right now—’

  ‘You seem to forget that you owe us. Quite a lot. What I sent you today was just a little reward – I haven’t added it to the bill. But we don’t need to have the discussion about what will happen if you don’t honour our agreement, do we?’

  Kees was about to respond when he heard the click telling him he’d been disconnected.

  A V of birds, reflected in the rear window of the car in front, forged from left to right in the sky.

  Fuck, he thought. Fuckfuckfuck.

  They were right, he did owe them.

  And now he was screwed.

  By the time he made it back to the station garage, dropped the keys off and rushed up to the first floor, he felt like he could really use a line. Just medicinally, just to help put things in focus a bit, give him the clarity his brain needed to sort out what he was going to do next.

  At least the sniffer dogs aren’t kennelled here, he thought as he stepped into the main office and made his way over to his desk.

  There were at least six other inspectors milling around, finishing up paperwork, surfing the Internet, or just staring at the ceiling. Saturday night was usually big, but it was too early for anything really fun to have happened yet. They often took bets on the exact time the first murder got called in.

  His phone livened up his pocket with a buzz, and he pulled it out, noticing the number on the screen. It was the guy who ran the weekly meetings he’d told Jaap he was still going to. He let it ring. He’d been leaving messages almost every day, wanting to check when Kees was coming back and hoping that he was sticking to his pledge.

  Sanctimonious bastard, thought Kees as the phone buzzed again, signalling another voicemail. He deleted it without listening then turned his attention to what he had to do.

  The parcel was sitting there. In plain view of anyone who had two eyes in their head and a brain to process the information. Which made about three by Kees’ count.

  The whole thing’s getting out of control, he thought as he picked up the parcel.

  ‘Hey, Kees,’ said one of the men, an inspector whose name Kees had forgotten, just as he was turning round to head out the door. ‘What’s in there?’

  ‘Oh just some stuff,’ he said, suddenly unable to think of anything.

  ‘Yeah? Anything fun?’

  ‘Just stuff.’

  ‘Like porn stuff? A strap-on? That why it’s wrapped in plain brown paper?’

  ‘You tell me – seems like you know a lot about that,’ said Kees, turning away.

  ‘Or maybe it’s one of those rings you put round your—’

  ‘Terpstra.’

  Kees turned to see Smit storming into the room, his boss’s eyes zeroed in on him like he was prey.

  ‘Got him?’ demanded Smit as he came into range, his bulk imposing.

  ‘I’ve got a strong lead and—’

  ‘Really? What is it? Please tell me,’ said Smit as he stopped right in front of him. Kees could smell him, a smell like flowers. Powdery, delicate flowers.

  ‘He went to a friend’s place out in Zandvoort, and they left together.’

  The other inspectors hadn’t stopped what they were doing, but they were all fully tuned in now, Kees could feel it.

  He couldn’t blame them really. They spent their working lives rocking up to dead bodies, but they very rarely got to see a murder actually take place.

  ‘I see. And now? Where are they?’

  ‘That’s what I’m working on. I—’

  ‘It doesn’t look like it to me,’ said Smit, stepping even closer, right into Kees’ face. ‘What it looks like to me is you jerking yourself off when you should be out there finding this guy. I’ve had the big lawyer asshole who’s head of ICTY on the phone, and he wants you shipped down there and chucked in a cell with someone responsible for mass genocide, and—’

  One of the inspectors laughed. Smit glanced round to see who it was just as a uniform walked in and, unaware of the bollocking in progress, stepped over to Kees.

  ‘Got this for you,’ he said, handing over a file.

  Kees opened it. There’d been a hit on Osman Krilic.

  A brawl in a bar out by Centraal three weeks ago meant he was on the system. Though why it had taken over an hour to find that out was anybody’s guess.

  Kees slipped a photo and a few sheets out of the file and scanned them, noticing that the home address for Krilic was not in Zandvoort.

  It was in Amsterdam.

  Surely he’d not be so stupid as to go there now? thought Kees.

  But the alternative was to listen to more abuse from Smit.

  ‘Gotta go,’ he said. ‘This is important.’

  He made for the door, holding the parcel in one hand. It was making him nervous and it had made him realize something else; he was going to have to deal with Paul.

  ‘I want to be kept up to date on this, that clear?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Kees over his shoulder as stepped into the corridor. ‘Absolutely.’

  Back in the carpool he was told nothing was available.

  ‘I just brought one back, less than ten minutes ago.’

  The guy sitting at the window just shrugged.

  ‘Being cleaned,’ he said as he probed between his front two teeth with a key, then, having found whatever it was that was bothering him, started trying to loosen it.

  ‘Cleaned? I didn’t shit in it, did I?’

  ‘Look, best I can do,’ the guy said, sliding another set of keys over to him and going back to his dental grooming. ‘
Last on the right.’

  Kees scooped the keys up, walked to the end of the space and stopped dead.

  He’s got to be kidding, he thought.

  He pressed the button on the key fob. The lights flashed once, and a soft beep told him the guy really hadn’t been kidding.

  As Kees motored out he wondered just why the Amsterdam Police Force had a single-seater electric car.

  13

  Saturday, 8 May

  19.47

  Tanya shifted down the seat, a stud on the back of her jeans catching the worn fabric.

  The front door of the house she was watching opened, and a man stepped out, pulling the door closed behind him. He turned to fit the key in the lock, his shoulders hunched.

  This was the first time in over sixteen years that Tanya had seen Ruud Staal, and he was older, fatter, his posture worse. He turned back to the road and started off down the path. Tanya caught a glimpse of his face.

  It was then she felt like throwing up.

  This man who had ruined her life was walking down the street, free.

  Her hands gripped the steering wheel, which seemed to be vibrating. Then she realized it was her hands shaking, knuckles white from the pressure.

  She’d come to confront him, to get him to confess to what he’d done. After that she’d make a formal statement, get him arrested. And while in theory she’d be offered anonymity at a trial, she knew that somehow her name would get out.

  She realized that it was that more than anything which had held her back; she didn’t want anyone to know what had happened to her, couldn’t bear the thought that her life would be laid bare. All because of him. But she knew she had to do this, or the secret was going to kill her, suck all the life out of her, leave her living in black and white, just as she’d been doing all these years.

  Do it now.

  One of her hands moved from the wheel to the lever which opened the car door. She pulled it and the door opened with a click. He was on the opposite side of the road, his back to her, walking like he was normal, walking like he was innocent, walking like he’d never shoved his cock into a fifteen-year-old’s mouth then scared and manipulated them into staying silent.