‘Who was she working for?’ asked Tanya.
‘Some guy, she wouldn’t say who. He had some stupid nickname, like Wheels or something. To be honest I thought she was making it all up until I saw the money.’
‘And who was she spying on?’
‘Filthy bitch.’
Both women ignored him.
‘She wouldn’t tell me that either, but I saw her one day, so I know where she was spying.’
‘Where?’ said Tanya, keeping her voice level, not wanting to give away her eagerness.
‘You know, I like this place,’ said Katja, looking around. ‘But there would be a great way to make it better.’
’How do you mean?’ asked Tanya, not liking where this was going.
‘They give us food, which is great. But you know what I’d really like?’
Tanya could guess, but had to play the game.
‘What?’
‘A drink,’ said Katja, scratching an ear and grinning. ‘I’d really like a drink. Then maybe we can talk.’
16
Saturday, 8 May
20.54
The electric car turned out to have its advantages.
Kees managed to squeeze it into a tiny space with only minor damage to the cars parked in front and behind. It hadn’t helped that he’d been on the phone to Smit at the same time, his boss finishing off what he’d left unsaid back at the station. Kees figured the odd paintwork scratch wasn’t, therefore, his fault.
As he hung up, killed the almost-silent motor, got out and slammed the door – which wasn’t satisfying as there was no real weight to it – he could see something was wrong. The address didn’t look residential in the least, a huge former industrial block, monolithic concrete painted black, which housed a bar and nightclub. Large smoked-glass doors had 57 sandblasted on to them.
A stray black and white dog ambled across the road, stopping to nose something flattened on the surface.
Kees flicked through the arrest report, double-checking the address. He could see what had happened; whoever filled out the form had put down the address of the incident, and Krilic’s, as the same.
Some dumb patrol fuck, thought Kees, checking to see who’d written the report. Turned out to be Piet. Kees was surprised; Piet was all right, he wouldn’t normally have screwed up like this. He called the station, trying to get hold of him, but after a few minutes’ wait he was told Piet wasn’t answering his phone. Kees told them to keep trying.
Smit had been livid, and Kees could see that if he didn’t get Isovic soon then there were going to be some pretty hefty consequences. And now his only lead had pretty much crashed out as Piet hadn’t filled in a form properly.
The dog was now sniffing around the pavement by the side of the club. It kept turning in ever tighter circles, nose to the ground like it was hoovering something up, then it stopped, its back legs stiffening as it raised its tail and squeezed out a long one. Kees watched as it turned round again, sniffed at the glistening turd, then gobbled the whole lot down.
You and me both, he thought as he crossed the road, making his way towards the smoked-glass doors.
To Kees, the bouncer looked like the small mean type who’d only gone into bouncing as they’d got some kind of complex. His black leather jacket was a size too large, and his face, or the aggressive expression on it, confirmed the diagnosis. As did the pathetic fake diamond stud in his ear. He looked Kees up and down before jerking his head towards the doors.
As if you were going to stop me, thought Kees as he stepped past.
Inside the space was large, with a huge wall of glass at the far end looking out over the water. Kees could see lights from the far shore of the IJ, streaking down on the black surface of the lake.
The place was stuffed with people. Kees made a quick survey of the women around him and approved. He figured he should check this place out some time. Strictly off duty.
He started with the long bar off to his left, one of the barmen asking what he wanted over the pulse of music, and it took two attempts for the goateed guy to work out what he was saying. And still Kees had to flash his badge before he got any action. Then he was ushered through a door along a poorly lit corridor by another cliché of a bouncer, Big with No Brains.
It’s like being in a B movie, he thought as they stopped outside the door at the far end of the corridor. No Brains knocked and waited for the word.
When it came No Brains stepped aside and let Kees through, following him and closing the door, muffling the music’s relentless beat.
The room was better than the corridor. Like the main area of the club it looked out over the water, and was spacious with two neon-pink sofas in one corner angled round a massive flatscreen TV showing a rolling news programme complete with a hot young blonde to make it watchable and a middle-aged guy to add gravitas. They were discussing the beheadings.
A large desk was positioned in the other corner. The air was filled with some kind of aromatic, sweet scent. Sprawled on one of the sofas was the source of the smell, half a thin cigar and a man holding it with ring-encrusted fingers.
‘What’s it this time? A fight? Drugs?’ he asked, standing up and walking towards the desk, not even looking at Kees. ‘I can’t be held responsible for my customers, you know?’
He slid into the swivel chair behind the desk, muted the TV using a remote and turned to face Kees. He was broad, with a face to match. The scar running across his left cheek hinted at his climb to the top. His hair was lead-grey, cut short apart from a rat’s tail, which didn’t quite reach down his neck.
‘You own this place, right?’ asked Kees. The man nodded, taking a draw on his cigar, making a show of tasting the smoke like it was a fine wine. Then he put his head back and blew it out, trying for smoke rings. He failed.
He pointed to a nameplate on the desk, a ridiculously shiny steel strip with THE BOSS engraved on it.
‘You have a name?’ asked Kees.
‘I’d have thought it would be on your records, the amount of times you guys have been round here. But you don’t look like the type to read much,’ he said with a muscle contraction in his face which would normally be termed a smile. Kees couldn’t believe it. But the evidence was there in front of him; the guy actually had a gold tooth. ‘I’m Feico.’
‘Have you ever seen either of these men?’ said Kees dropping two photos on to the desk.
Feico bent forward and peered at them without picking them up. He tried to draw on his cigar again and found it had gone out.
‘No. Where would I have seen them?’ he asked, rummaging around in his trouser pocket. He finally extracted a silver lighter.
‘Here. I think one of them may have been involved in an incident a few weeks ago.’
‘We get over eight hundred people in here on a good night, and I’m increasingly weighed down with paperwork, so I don’t get out on to the floor much.’
Kees looked at the desk. Apart from the nameplate and a rectangular block made of perspex with something embedded in the middle, there didn’t seem to be an abundance of paper. Feico saw him looking at the block and turned it side on. Kees could see it was a bullet.
‘A souvenir from a colleague of yours. She was in here over a year ago, decided to beat up one of my customers and started spraying bullets around. Broke that massive slab of glass you’ll have seen out there.’ He pointed back to the main room. ‘Mind you, she was pretty hot. Fiery, if you know what I mean?’
‘Did she have long red hair?’
‘That’s the one, you know her?’
‘Kind of,’ said Kees.
He did know Tanya. And since she’d moved down and joined the office he’d been reminded almost daily of their time back at the academy. His face must have betrayed something, as Feico spoke again.
‘Didn’t put out for you?’ Feico laughed. ‘Seriously though, she can come and cuff me any time. Just tell her to leave her gun at home.’
‘Is there anyone here who might recognize thes
e,’ said Kees, ignoring Feico’s grin and pointing to the photos.
Feico shrugged.
‘Maybe.’
He nodded to No Brains, who left the room and returned a few minutes later with the goateed barman.
‘Mark heads up the bar team,’ said Feico. He pointed to the photos. ‘Have you seen either of these uglies?’
Mark stepped over to the desk. He looked at them for a few moments and started nodding slowly.
‘You know, I think I have. This one’s been here a few times.’
Kees looked at the photo Mark was pointing out. It was Krilic.
‘When was this?’
‘I don’t know, couple of weeks back?’
‘You must see thousands of people, how come you remember him?’
‘He got into a fight, with this guy. And the thing is they were shouting in some foreign language.’
‘What language?’
‘Fuck knows, I’m not a linguist. But something kind of rough, you know? Like Russian or some shit.’
Bosniak? thought Kees. Is that even a language?
‘And this other guy, the one he fought with. You know who he was?’
‘Nah, just some random guy. I think he may have had a beard, can’t really remember.’
‘And you called us?’
‘No. There was a cop here. Off duty, he said, but he broke it up, then arrested them both. Called his colleagues in and everything.’
So that’ll be why Piet fucked up the report, he thought. He was probably drunk.
‘What about him?’ said Kees, showing the photo of Isovic he’d taken from the file he’d received a week ago.
‘You know,’ Mark said, scratching his beard. ‘I think I do recognize him too. A couple of days after that fight I’m pretty sure he was in here with the first guy.’
So Krilic had tried to beat up someone, and then had come back with Isovic. He already knew that they were linked though, so what did this prove?
‘No way,’ said Mark, breaking into Kees’ thoughts.
They all turned to look at him.
He was pointing to the TV screen, where a blurred image of two heads was being shown. The scrolling tape at the bottom said, ‘Two victims identified – Jan Koopman and Martin Teeven’.
‘I’ve seen him as well,’ he said. ‘The one on the left. He was here just the other night.’
‘You sure?’
‘I’m sure,’ said Mark, stroking his goatee. ‘He was here, I remember because he ordered a bunch of drinks then spilt them when he went to pick them up. Fucker tried to blame it on me.’
‘Which night?’
‘Thursday or Friday, I think. Pretty sure it was Friday.’
‘You’ll have CCTV of then?’
Mark looked at Feico, who nodded.
‘I want to see it. Now.’
Mark led Kees back into the club, then off into a smaller room marked PRIVATE. There were no windows, and a bare bulb hung from the ceiling. A computer squatted on a cheap-looking plastic desk, marked with so many coffee mug rings they looked like scales on a large dirty fish.
It took Mark twenty minutes of skimming through video before he got what he was after.
‘There,’ he said, touching the screen.
Kees leaned in. The camera was obviously hidden among the spirit bottles behind the bar, and gave an eye-level view of customers’ faces, one of which Mark’s finger was right by.
‘You got Internet on this thing?’ asked Kees.
‘Sure, what do you want?’
‘Compare his picture – check on one of the news sites.’
Once Mark had brought up a news site they could see it was the same man, Koopman.
Kees went back to the video. He saw Koopman buy drinks, four shots in total, and watched as he tried to pick them all up at once, knocking two of them over.
‘Clumsy fucker, tried to get replacements for free.’
Kees watched as the scene played out, ending with Koopman buying two replacements and finally turning away, getting lost in the crowd of people pressing towards the bar.
‘Any idea where he was headed? I want to see who he was with.’
It took a few more minutes, but finally they had an image of one of the booths at the back. This camera was in the ceiling, so the angle wasn’t as good, but it was still possible to make out the three faces of Koopman’s companions.
‘Bring that web page back up.’
Kees looked at the two victims and then back at the men in the booth.
There was no doubt.
Koopman was there, and the second victim too.
‘I need a copy of this,’ he said as he pulled out his phone and dialled Jaap.
17
Saturday, 8 May
21.19
When Jaap returned to his desk with the file corresponding to the case number the ballistics team had given him, he saw he had a missed call, and a message, from Kees. The message didn’t say much other than Kees had something which might be linked to Jaap’s case. He called him back but his phone was off.
Then he turned to the file and started reading. The case was over nine years old. A man had been shot execution-style and his body dumped in a field of sheep just south of Amsterdam. It turned out, much to the attending inspector’s disgust, that sheep weren’t always strictly herbivorous.
The victim was ID’d as a small-time crook, and the investigation eventually led to a man called Bart Rutte.
Jaap stared at the name. It seemed familiar, but he couldn’t place from where.
Rutte had been interviewed several times in connection with the killing, but in the end not enough evidence had been uncovered. The gun had never been found.
Jaap turned to his laptop and searched for Rutte.
The file was big, Jaap saw as the page count appeared, multiple mentions stretching back to the turn of the millennium.
But Bart Rutte had no convictions; he was always on the periphery of things, a sort of phantom who nobody could quite pin down. He was suspected of at least seven murders, but in each case the investigating officer had been unable to pull together enough evidence to make anything stick.
Behind Jaap one of the inspectors in the office cranked the radio up, a talk show making light of the murders, encouraging listeners to call in with their best headless jokes. It seemed the phone lines were jammed with people heeding the request.
‘Hey, can you turn that down?’ he shouted across the room after the fifth joke.
The sound eased, allowing Jaap back into his thoughts.
Reading on, Jaap could see why Rutte was still at large; witnesses either vanished or suddenly got a bad case of selective amnesia, and in one case evidence, a gun which supposedly could be linked with Rutte, disappeared somewhere between the police evidence room and the lab it had been sent to for testing.
The most striking failure had been just over three years ago. A woman had been dumped out the back of a van in the middle of a road in the Nieuw-West. Witnesses had seen it skid round a corner, the back doors had flown open, and a woman had tumbled out as if pushed.
She survived, but when the ambulance crew got there, the woman unconscious on the tarmac, they found horrific injuries, knife marks all over her body.
It surprised no one that she’d also been sexually assaulted.
A few days later in hospital she was conscious again, and the story she told was detailed and believable. The description she gave of her main assailant fitted Rutte.
The investigating officer had enough to build a strong case, but when he and his colleague returned the next morning they found she was dead.
She’d been strangled with something thin.
Which turned out to have been the IV tube, ripped out of her arm.
I know his name, thought Jaap. But where from?
Jaap leaned back and closed his eyes, running possibilities through his head.
That Koopman had the gun wasn’t in itself that surprising; there was a black market,
and if you wanted a gun and were willing to pay, there was always someone ready to supply the goods. On the other hand, if a gun was used to commit a murder it was usually ditched; criminals were all too aware of how easy it was to match a gun to a bullet. But then they were criminals, and if they decided to sell the weapon on to someone else, as long as it couldn’t be traced back to them, what was there to stop them?
It was a seller’s market; if you wanted a gun, you paid your money and hoped that the guy selling it to you wasn’t lying when he said it was clean.
Bottom line is, thought Jaap as he opened his eyes and checked the time, I haven’t got a clue what’s going on here.
He had an appointment, and he was now late. He closed down his laptop and left, noticing the headless jokes were still pouring out of the radio.
She was about fifty, Jaap decided when he sat down inside the estate agent’s office ten minutes later, and her name was Doutzen de Kok. Her short hair was just starting to show streaks of grey, and she had the eyes of a predator. Jaap thought he recognized her from somewhere.
‘Sorry to have kept you so late,’ said Jaap.
‘Don’t worry,’ she motioned to a pile of paper on her desk. ‘The husband’s away on some sad boys-only fishing trip so I figured I’d do some catch up here.’
‘You own the business?’
She laughed as she nodded, picked up a cup and took a big sip.
‘Oh yes. Don’t think I’d be doing this if I was just an employee.’
She put the cup down, and settled back in her chair, as if she was appraising Jaap.
‘So, he said. ‘This tenant of yours, can you tell me anything about him?’
‘I pulled his file when you called, but there’s not much in there,’ she handed over a few sheets of paper.
Jaap took them and skimmed though. He could see Koopman had started renting the property a year and half ago.
‘Problems with payment?’
‘No, money came in every month right on time.’
‘And you never met him?’
‘I don’t meet the clients anymore, that’s what I have a team for. But there is one strange thing, there’s a key missing. We have three for each property, one goes to the tenant, one for use in case we need to get in and one spare.’
Into the Night: Inspector Rykel Book 2 (Amsterdam Quartet) Page 8